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c3ab99c6-5460-11e8-b38c-2f7f626334fd | SYSK Selects: The 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980s | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-the-satanic-panic-of-the-1980s | In the late 1980s, the United States experienced a "Satanic Panic," leading parents to fear for the safety of their children. But were there any real examples of Satanic ritual abuse? Find out this and more in this classic episode. | In the late 1980s, the United States experienced a "Satanic Panic," leading parents to fear for the safety of their children. But were there any real examples of Satanic ritual abuse? Find out this and more in this classic episode. | Sat, 19 Oct 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=292, tm_isdst=0) | 54512424 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, everyone. It is Saturday. And that means it's time for a Saturday stuff you should know. Select episode. As you know, Josh and I curate these each week. We take turns going back through the archives and picking out some of our favorite episodes. And boy, oh boy, did I love this one from January 5, 2016. The satanic panic of the 1980s. We lived through it, we talked about it. It's pretty amazing stuff. Check it out right now. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles to be Chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know. Hail Satan. Man, that would have gotten you locked up a few years ago. Yeah. So I want to go ahead and say that I would like to do one on Satanism. Yeah, for sure. The religion misunderstood. It may include the church of Satan. Or maybe those are two separate things. And the PMRC. Is that the Tipper Court organization? Yeah. This brought back a lot of memories because we lived through the Satanic Panic for sure. And I remember it very distinctly. I can imagine a young Baptist. I was afraid. I can imagine. I was very scared. I remember growing up thinking, some of the big kids are sacrificing things in the woods. Yeah. That was just part of your normal everyday thing, like walking around thinking that was happening. But it turns out, in retrospect, it was all almost entirely made up. Yeah. And I imagine every neighborhood or town had this. It was off Memorial Drive. That was Satan house, where supposedly devil worshippers. Oh, yes. Did you have one in your town? Sure. Yeah. It's so funny to me to think about that now. They were probably just nice, normal people. It was probably some old shut ins. Some old folks, elderly folks who just couldn't get out of the house much. Right. They had murdered anybody for a year. You ever noticed you never see anyone yeah. Or old, kind of dilapidated or run down. Yeah. Because they're old. And we want to issue a big COA here. Parents, this has got some pretty grisly stuff in it. You probably don't want your kids listening to this even though it's all made up. Yeah, but there's some detail in some of this. I found myself even going, OOH, we have to say that. Yeah. It's rated R, maybe even X for content. I'm thinking, Chuck. We should put together the times. America lost its mind. Sweet. That include this? Associative Identity Disorder, deep program and cold. Deep Program. Sure. Salem Witchcraft Trials. McCarthyism. McCarthyism, that's right. Yeah. We're going to do it one of these days. I'll actually put some of these suites together. They exist. They're mental suites. Right. Okay. Thanks, man, for letting me off the hook. But I don't know if you guys have picked up on it or not, but I keep saying like they never really existed. It wasn't actually true. It wasn't real. This whole idea that we're talking about, from roughly the mid 80s till about the mid 90s, about a ten year period, america as a whole was gripped by, again, there's no other way to put it, satanic panic. This idea that there were cults of satan worshippers who were very widespread, more than you would think, who were abducting, killing, raping, molesting our children, mutilating animals, and who had been doing it for a very long time in America, was just now waking up to this reality. Yeah, it's your teachers, it's the cops, the mayor of your town. There's a battle between good and evil very much going on right now, and somehow, some way, and people are still studying this, america clamped onto this idea and ran with it like it was for real. The idea that there were murderous, child molesting, satanic cults operating almost openly in the United States was a very deep and widespread belief, not just among religious people, although they were at the forefront of this, but among people who were writing academic papers and creating television shows in the news. People in the courts were subscribed to this. It was what's called a moral panic. Yeah. And when I was reading this, even though I lived through it, I kept thinking, how in the world did this happen in the 1980s? 1980s? Not the 1640s, not the 13 hundreds. Sure. And it turns out there's a lot of reasons why. And we got to go back in time a little bit to touch on the early reasons. Got to go back in time. That should be our way back. Machine Theme Song that was just too darn loud. What was? I was continuing with the Back of the Future references. What was too darn loud? Remember Hughie Lewis when he auditioned, he said, I'm sorry, this is too darn lounge. Right. Thank you for that. And by the way, this is not just the United States. Apparently it was in the UK. Australia, Canada, South Africa. And South Africa still has a cult crimes division. Yeah, I believe it. So Robert Lam wrote this article of stuff to blow your mind, and we're going to be drawing from other articles as well, which will name drop along the way, I guess one from Slate. That was good. Boom. There's some name dropping. I've got one for you. I'll hit it up later. All right. So part of the groundwork was laid for this in ancient history, and Robert does a good job in pointing out that there has long, especially when it comes to Christian theology, long been a divide between us and them. Heaven and hell, two sides. Good and evil. Good and evil, light and dark. I was going to repeat that too. What else? Yin and Yang is super Christian. No, actually, I think yin and Yang work together. Right, sure. Yeah. We should do it on yin yang. But a lot of people, it's not just Christians, Chuck. There's humans subscribe to an in group, out group mentality. Yeah, absolutely. Like I took an anthropology class once and the professor was like try to go a day without using words like us, them, we. Yeah, it's impossible. Virtually impossible. Politics. That's just the way our minds go. In group, out group. And our group is safe and good. Their group is potentially threatening and possibly bad. We don't know. Absolutely. So throughout history this has come up again and again and again and innocent people have been persecuted for doing nothing at all. One good example are the Jewish people. Christians accused Jews in 1475 of using blood for kidnapped Christian children in rituals. Which is pretty ironic because the Romans just a few hundred years before had accused the Christians of bathing and dining and feasting on baby's blood. US and them. Once again, baby's blood. It's a go to thing for vilifying and out group. Oh, yeah. You'll see babies blood in a lot of these cases. Yeah, because that's, I guess, the hardest blood to get a hold of. Yeah, it's expensive blood and the most grizzly witchcraft. Everyone, of course. Did we do it on the sale of witch trials or just McCarthy is we did one, I believe. Yeah, let's say we have. And if we haven't, we will remember them being high on ergot. Yeah, we did something like that. Okay. Alright, so 15 century you had witchcraft persecutions all over Europe. Innocent women being killed, drowned, burned, you name it. And of course none of this was true in all cases when it comes to art, they laid the groundwork in the 19th century, the French romantic artist loved painting stuff about Satan and witchcraft. And by the 1920s and the west we had pretty firm established groundwork for believing in things like demons and Satan and a fiery hell and people who worship this Satan. Yeah. And the weird thing is, Chuck, is there's still to this day there's this idea that at some point back in antiquity at least, there were devil worshippers who like killed for Satan. And all of this is born out of whole cloth fabricated from people who were doing the religious persecution along the way and the people who are being tortured to confess into this kind of stuff, it was all just fabricated. But the fact that it was old, the fact that it was sensational, and the fact that it had been repeated so many times, it gained traction to gain this idea that it is historical fact. At some point, yes, people just take it as fact. But it's not true. No, it's not true. There's never been Satanic death cults in the United States or anywhere else. Right. These people have never existed. Now that is not to say that people haven't killed in the name of Satan or anything like that, but there's never been any kind of Satanic death cult ever in the history of the world. As far as we can ever tell, it's all made up. Right. And we want to go further by saying that these people who have killed in the name of Satan are actually an example of life imitating art. They're inspired by the fictitious myth because they're gullible and buy into it just as much as the people who think that this stuff is out there, too. Like Richard Ramirez. Sure. And he was driven by Satan or something like that. There was a girl in the 80s in Georgia who supposedly killed a friend and then performed a satanic ritual. It's like this stuff did happen, but it happened as a result of the hysteria movie. It is a positive feedback. Yeah, absolutely. So now we're in the 20th century and the roots of Satanic panic can be found all throughout the entertainment industry books. There was one in 27 by Herbert Gorman called The Place Called Dagon, which was very influential and radical at the time. Complete fiction, of course. But that doesn't stop it from establishing firmer roots that this could be a thing. Right. That's something that kind of keeps coming up again and again. A movie or work of fiction will establish some storyline and then somebody will have read it and told a friend about it or something like that. And then it becomes a game of telephone. Along the way, somebody stopped saying, I read in this work of fiction, or I saw in this movie, this happened. Instead it becomes this happened to a friend of mine's. Sister. Yeah. Which we'll get to. Urban legends is one theory, of course. And I know we did a podcast on that. We did a couple of movies came out. One horror film called The Devil Rides Out with the great Christopher Lee because he was in every weird movie. He was great, man. He was the tall man in Fat Tasman, right? No. Who's that, then? Christopher Lee was sure. Was he? Oh, no. That's Angus somebody. You're right. Christopher Lee was the guy from The Wicker Man. I mean, dozens and dozens of horror movies. Played Dracula a lot. Rosemary's Baby also came out that year, which was way more mainstream. Big, big hit. Great movie. Yeah, really good. Still. Very creepy movie with Mia Farrow and Casa Vettes and Charles Crowden. Weirdly, I guess. It's not weird, but I just associate him with comedy. Yeah. But he always plays a straight man, so he could go back and forth. Yeah. He could straddle worlds. Yeah. So those movies were huge as far as planning and of course, other things like The Omen and The Exorcist. And it was just a big time for talking about Satan and movies. Yeah, it's very popular. What's interesting is you can trace it back to initially that book, The Place Called Dagon, which inspired HP. Lovecraft. Yeah. That started it all, basically. Music of course, which if we ever do one on the PMRC, we'll get to that and back masking more heavily. But satanic imagery and everything from, like, Iron Maiden to King Diamond and who else? Judas Priest. Yeah, Judas Priest. Remember they got hauled in the court for back masking? Yeah, man. People I know. And then you have some real life things, real life occult like Alistair Crowley and Anton LeVay who really didn't help quell Satanic panic. Fierce. If anything that helps set the stage. No. Dressing up like with candles and being naked with cloaks and pentagrams right. Isn't going to make people feel any better. No, but that's what they're doing. Like I said, we'll do it in Satanism. If you look at Satanism, it's not let's sacrifice animals and throw blood on each other. It's more like, hey, we're on this earth for a short time, let's party and just live for ourselves. Right. It's more about hedonism and being an atheist than some weird dark occult. Alistair Crowley was darker and more occult. Sure. And Anton LeVay definitely dressed his brand of Satanism up in that kind of like dark theatrics. Sure. But the really ironic thing about both of those guys, the cult stuff, is that again, it was life imitating art or life imitating fiction. Their ideas of the Black mask or the witch's Sabbath or wearing pentagrams, all that stuff came out of those witch persecutions from before. They were fabricated from whole cloth. So these guys were tapping into what was already part of the popular culture in the way of what people thought of Satanism and Satanic rituals and we're just basically playing it up to the degree is what it was. Very much so. But to people who are scared to death of the idea that Satan is real and his worshipers are here on Earth and are ready to kill you, those guys scared those people and just proved that this is very real. See, look at those two. Anton LeVay, Alistair Crowley proved that they're a satanic cult. Exactly. And who knows what's going on behind that big huge iron wooden door. All right, well, let's take a break here and we're going to come back and talk a little bit about the 1970s stranger danger panic, which factors in big time. All right? It's the sudden all you can hear about on the news is our stories about child pornography, rings, child murders, kidnappings, crimes involving children in general. And not just that, Chuck. At that time America was really waking up to just how widespread child abuse was. Yes, the 1970, which is crazy that it took that long. Yeah, it really was because apparently it took just a couple of doctors to really stand up and be like, I'm not looking the other way again on these unexplained breaks to a child's arm. Yeah, it's the parents. You're breaking your kid's arm. It's abuse. That's wrong. Stop doing that. And as a result, the government stood up and was like, okay, we need some laws here. One of the things that they enacted were mandatory reporting laws. If you're a doctor and you notice signs of child abuse, you have to report it. And as a result, in 1974, child abuse cases went from 60,000 nationwide to the year 2020, 3 million reported. Right. And it was because of public education, a lot more visibility and then mandatory reporting laws. But it had this cumulative effect of saying, america, your children are being they're in danger and you need to do something about it. And this child protection movement grew out of it. Yeah. And I also get the sense that for the late seventy s, I think the media, it was unsavory to report on this kind of stuff. That's the family's business. Yeah. And just period it's like no one wants to hear about this stuff. It's awful. Right. And somehow it got transferred to probably to drive ratings. Like this is sensational, is what it is. Sure. Yeah. Anytime America is scared, all you have to do is poke and prod it and you will get people to watch your TV show. That's right. And it's done very frequently. It's sad and despicable, but it happens a lot. Still does. There's another aspect to this too, Chuck, with the child protection idea. This is also a time, the 70s especially, is when women started to go back to work after they had kids, before they made work. And then they would have kids and that was it for their professional career. They would just stay home. They were mums'for the rest of their time, if they ever worked at all. Originally, right, right now in the women were having kids going back to work, and as a result, they were having to leave their kids in more and more daycare workers care. Oh, yeah. And so this idea that their children were being abused or potentially abused really resonated with families where their kids are in daycare and weren't constantly under their supervision all the time. How well do you know the people watching your kids? How much do you trust them? Are they Satanists? And this fear took root because of that collective anxiety at the time, with more and more families putting their kids in daycare. Right. Or they're just latchkey kids a little older, who I remember during the Atlanta Child murders do you know where your children are? Tenants. Do you know where your children are? It was just a time of in a good way, people were more aware than ever of potential dangers for their children. Yeah. So it's not like it was all bad, but when it goes into panic and well, we'll just see what happened. Yeah. It went from like zero to 120 in just a couple of seconds, basically. So what happened was during the Satanic panic, largely it is based around court cases where largely daycare centers and people who cared for children were now being accused of some of the craziest things you could ever imagine in your entire life. And like you said, one of the reasons this was fueled was very much because parents could relate to it. Should we go ahead and talk about a couple of these cases? Yes. The whole thing sounds crazy and weird and everything, but just innocuous, I guess, until you come across the court cases. Yes. And then you're like, oh, real people lost decades of their lives because of this. Because gullible people were in position of power and locked them up. Yeah. Let's talk about the killers. What was the actual this is one in Texas. Yeah, in Austin. In Austin, Texas, francis and Dan Keller ran a day care center out of their home and were accused of the following things, among others drowning and dismembering babies in front of other children. Killing animals, dogs and cats in front of children, and baby tigers. Baby tigers, that's right. Taking the kids to Mexico to be abused sexually by Mexican army soldiers and then brought back in time for their parents to pick them up. That's right. Dressing is pumpkin is my favorite. And shooting children in the arms and legs. Putting children into a pool with sharks that ate babies. Putting blood in their Koolaid, forcing children to carry the bones of bodies that they had dug up. Sure. And this is just a few, and I'm getting most of this from this great Slate article. The Real Victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse S-R-A by Linda Rodriguez Mcrabbie So the killers were accused of all this stuff, and here's generally what happens. Robert points out, a lot of times it starts with one perhaps credible case of child abuse, sexual or otherwise. Right. And then that snowballs. They tell the parents, maybe this is going on. So they tell the parents, hey, your child may be abused. The parents start looking. They start talking to other parents in that same daycare center. They start looking, they start asking their kids, right. And it all snowballs into these little preschoolers, basically making stuff up. And not only that, it's like, yeah, I've heard about that. Not just abuse, it's some Satanists that are, like, molesting children and murdering them. And the parents are like, what? Or that plays into something they'd already heard on TV, which will talk about the media's role in this. And like you said, it's snowballs and snowballs. And all of a sudden, once concerned parents get involved and start talking to one another panicked concerned parents. Exactly. Yeah. Then people can end up falsely accused of some pretty horrendous stuff. People stop thinking critically, and you've got problems if you're on the receiving end of finger being pointed at you. Oh, yeah. Because if you're a parent and your child goes to this daycare center, another parent and the cops come and say, hey, this parents kid was sexually abused. What parent is going to be like, oh, I'm sure it's fine. Yeah, you're fine. Quit complaining. I'm not going to check out my kids. Take a salt tablet. With the McMarton case, which happened in Southern California. Yeah. And actually ended up helping turn the tide against this. But the McMarton case and then the Keller case in Texas, both of those were bolstered, actually, by bad medical testimony, by inexperienced doctors who didn't know what they were looking at, who in their defense, a little bit at the time, no one knew. No one was looking at little kids like three year olds vaginas in describing what normal ones look like. Right. So since you didn't know what to look for, but thought you were looking for evidence of sexual abuse, anything could conceivably look like evidence of, say, vaginal trauma or something like that. And in the case of the Keller's in particular, the little girl who was basically, I guess, accuser zero of this, was examined and found that her vagina showed some evidence of trauma later on, the doctor, after gaining decades of experience, saw that. No, that was totally normal, what I saw. And I basically gave false testimony unwittingly. And I'm sorry. Yeah. And that was a huge thing because these people were locked away because of medical testimony. And again, the case against the McMartin's was also bolstered by bad medical advice as well. Or bad medical testimony. Yeah. So with the Keller case, patient or not patient, victim. Christie cheviers Chevy, I don't know how you'd say it she was three years old, didn't go to the daycare center much, and in 1091, told her mom that Dan Keller had spanked her. That's what started this whole thing. Yeah. So all of a sudden, the mom says, and here's a key factor. The mom goes to her therapist. Kids therapist. Yeah. Donna David Campbell, the little girl was seeing because she had been acting out. She's like a central figure in this whole thing, this whole snafu who the doctor? Yeah. So they go to her and say, listen, something's going on here. Can you talk to her about it? And all of a sudden, Donna David Campbell starts coaxing out all these really bizarre allegations about what's going on there. They made us take off our clothes and had apparent Pecas and the peepee. That was the earliest accusation that formed the foundation of this whole case. The basis of the snowball. Yeah. So this is what begins the snowball. This is when the mom goes to the other parents. You hear what's going on here? Look at what's happened to my daughter. And what's really happening here is something called it was part of the recovered memory therapy movement, which was very big at the time in psychology, basically, the idea that we have these repressed memories that of abuse many people do that they have no idea of. And it's up to the therapist to bring these out of us. Yeah. That's almost like a separate intertwined thread to this whole Satanic panic thing. The satanic ritual abuse is the recovered memory therapy movement. Right. So the Satanic panic can actually trace its roots directly to a book from 1072 by a guy named Mike Warren Key. He was a Christian stand up comedian. He also was totally full of it. He wrote a book called The Satan Seller where he talked about his life as a former satanic cult priest, I believe, and drug dealer, and he was eventually exposed far too late by the Christian magazine. Cornerstone is almost entirely fraudulent and made up and just a liar, but his book just sold like wildfire through the Christian fundamentalist community and basically really establish the groundwork the idea that they were satanic cults operating in the United States, right? Yes. For the thread of the recovered memory movement that formed part of the Satanic Panic, you can trace that back to a book from 1980 called, I think Michelle Remembers. Yeah. By the way, I was on the cover of a Christian magazine in the 1980s. Cornerstone magazine, I thought it was, but it wasn't. Guide Posts. I've heard of that. That's a big time Christian magazine. Man, that was a cover boy, one month. Nice. What were you doing on the cover? I was at a church camp one summer, and that was just like it was like a four panel cover of just kids having fun at church camp. And I was one of them. The May 82 issue. Man, I wish I could track that thing down. That'd be great. If anyone out there has the issue of Chuck on the cover of Guide Post magazine, do you remember the year roughly? It would have been probably between 1985 and 1987. Okay, we need that, everyone. I want to post that cover. That would be awesome. So this book, Michelle Remembers, it was just like dropping a bomb in the midst of this, everybody. So everyone was transitioning from who can we start pointing at and persecuting now that we've decided the cults are okay and we're going to stop the programming them? What can we do next? And this book comes in the midst of that in 1980, and it's a book about a woman named Michelle and her therapist, Lawrence Pazder. Yeah, he wrote it, and he helped her uncover repressed memories of being richly satanically abused or satanic ritually abused in the 1950s in Vancouver. Yeah. He actually ended up marrying her, and he coined the term ritual abuse that lies directly at his feet. And this thing had a lot of traction. I mean, this lady was on Oprah. She did the talk show circuit for years. The guy was used as an expert witness in court cases. He founded a whole movement in psychology. It was completely debunked. Yeah. And the whole idea is it's based on this premise that if you undergo a traumatic experience, your mind is going to try to repress that memory, but it's going to have all sorts of horrible effects in your life. You're going to be an alcoholic and a drug addict and maybe a child abuser, and you won't know why, but it's because you were abused as a child, probably by Satanists, and you covered it up and you need to go to therapy to have it unlocked. That's right. And a lot of people went to therapy and had these memories unlocked, which only proved Pastor's point even further. Right. The problem is, when they were re examamen, they were pseudo memories. Through the power of suggestion and over zealous therapists, a lot of people form memories of stuff that never happened. Yeah. The problem is recovered memory therapy. There's little to no scientific evidence that it's a thing at all that people unconsciously repressed these memories. The Royal College of Psychiatrists in Britain, they have officially banned its members from using it altogether. The British Psychological Society says you can use it, but you can't draw any premature conclusions. You have to have evidence, not just, well, this is what they said in therapy. Right. So that's a repressed memory that came to the surface. Right. And the APA and the United States, their official stance was issued. There is a consensus among memory researchers and clinicians that most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them, although they may not fully understand or disclose it. So a competent psychotherapist is likely to acknowledge that current knowledge does not allow the definite conclusion without corroborating evidence. So, again, the general consensus is that people don't completely unconsciously forget everything that happened. Right. It's virtually impossible. Yeah. And so this idea that during therapy, while you're coaxing these memories out, you're actually forming pseudotherapy is backed up by a lot of follow up research. Pseudo memory? Pseudo memory, sorry. Is backed up by research. There's a famous memory researcher named Elizabeth Loftus. She found that 90% of participants in the study came to believe that they had done something they hadn't when confronted with witnesses who said that they had done it. That's the real danger in all this sure. Is that these memories become just as valid as real memories and do damage because they aren't real. And there's actually a real life case that came out of all this. This one was crazy. Paul Ingram. Yeah. Paul Ingram was a sheriff's deputy and he was accused by his young daughter of satanic ritually abusing her, and that he was a member of a satanic cult and that she had been raped by this cult 600 to 800 times. They had been involved in the murder of 25 babies, at least. And Paul Ingram said, I don't remember any of this, but you must be right. So I'm going to confess. He was a preacher too, wouldn't he? Yeah. He was a fundamentalist Christian, so he was very much primed. To believe that there is a very real Satan roaming the earth. And if his daughter is telling him that he did this, what reason does she have to lie? He bought into it and took the rap for this even though it never happened. No one ever showed that any of this stuff happened. Yeah, he served his full prison sentence of 20 years. 20 years and maybe didn't even do it, anything. Yeah, but he himself said, well, I don't know, maybe I did. Yeah. And I think he fully bought into it over time. Such a weird reversal in that case. It is. Should we take another break? Maybe so. All right, we'll take another break here and talk about the media and then some other theories in cases and Satanic panic. All right, if you were alive during the 1980s and early 90s, which I was, then you remember Oprah, Geraldo, Bubble, yum. Sally, Jesse, Raphael. Yeah, you name it, every single talk show. Donahue. Yeah. Doing lots and lots of shows on Satanic death cult. If it's 02:00 P.m. On Wednesday afternoon and you want to figure out how to get America to turn their TV to your station, you would have a choice of different shows to watch. Probably totally covering Satanist. Yeah. On the same day. Right? And yeah, everybody did. Satanist. And Geraldo was the king of this. He actually had a two hour primetime special in 1988 called Exposing Satan's Underground. And it is on YouTube, and I think about ten parts. I watched one of them where he had Ozzy on, and Ozzy is like, poor Ozzy. Ozzy looks like a pregolen girls dorothy is. The way he's dressed and done up, it's awesome. But he's like, I don't mean to freak anybody out with my music. He doesn't know what to make of this. But I was like, Ozzy, just sit there. We'll get back to you later. But there's this classic line in this, right? They're talking about a murder that was carried out by this boy. And Heraldo says to this copy goes, detective, you're a cop, not a theologian. But let me ask you, was this boy possessed? Dead serious. And the cop was like, he hedges a little bit. He's like, I think that's a state of mind. But yeah, in that sense, yes, I think he was. Haroldo doesn't get what he's looking for out of the guy, so he goes to an actual theologian, a priest. Yeah. You're charged with investigating these cases for the Catholic Church. Do you think that this is a case of possession? He's like, Absolutely. And Harold is like, yeah, that's what I was looking for. But that's the level of journalism that people were tuning into on NBC at 08:00 for 2 hours in the highest rated two hour TV documentary ever. And a third or a half of America is like, what idiot believes this is the most entertaining thing I've ever seen. The other half is scared to death and thinks that all of this is totally real. Yeah. You know, it's easy to laugh about now, but shame on all of them. Well, Geraldo came out and said, I want to apologize for that bit of journalism that was really bad and I'm sorry for it. But I mean, that's how he made his name, with stuff like that. Well, he was caught up in the moral panic. Everyone was doing it. There was a book in a children's picture book called don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy. A child's book about satanic ritual abuse. Yeah. To read to your children or if you were a therapist to use in therapy. Yeah, right. They also had, in many of the court cases, little anatomically correct rag dolls that they would use in court to show me where you were touched and things like this. Right. Which I'm sure that has valid use as well in sex abuse cases, for sure. But you're not like completely poopooing that you have to you have to use that. I would imagine you're training in how to do that correctly without inadvertently or advertly leading the child on into creating some sort of pseudo memory. It should be extensive, I would guess. Yes. So the media was definitely complicit in all this, really saw that there is a lot of ratings to be had and just fanning the flames of the satanic panic. And I think a lot of people bought into it as well. And then so too were things like the field of psychiatry and psychology very much complicit in this by allowing repressed memory therapy to really spread as much as it did without any kind of real, verified research into whether it was real or not. Yes. And to defend them a little bit, robert also makes a point. They're probably well meaning, probably thinking they were doing this great work, like helping these kids. Well, sure, but with no scientific basis whatsoever. Right. And lacking a lot of critical thinking, too. And they dressed as pumpkins and shot the kids in the arms and the legs. Where are the bullet wounds? How exactly did they get the kids to Mexico and then back to Austin in the average daycare day? Secret tunnels. Secret tunnels. That was an explanation. There wasn't enough critical thinking. So you can definitely take the media, psychology, psychiatry, and a lot of law enforcement investigators to task for this. But really there were a lot of hucksters and fraudsters making a lot of money as satanic experts at the time, both as legal representatives, expert witnesses, expert witnesses, authors going on shows like Geraldo and Sally, Jesse Raphael. And those people really should bear the brunt of this because they were just lying, lying, lying their faces off and scaring people to death and making a lot of money out of it. So we said it was widespread. There was a Redbook magazine survey in 1994, and this is at the end of the whole thing. Yeah, true. That. Found that 70% of Americans believed in satanic ritual abuse. And in 1093 this is the really scary one a survey by the American Bar Association Center on Children and the law found that 26% a quarter, more than a quarter of prosecutors said they handled at least one case involving satanic ritual abuse during that time period. 25%. So within that time too, there was a very famous case in 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas, the West Memphis Three, who were very famously exonerated thanks to crackdlinnary filmmaking on HBO's half, as a matter of fact. HBO really led the vanguard against this whole satanic panic. They released a 1995 documentary, or I think it was a biopic on the McMarton trial. It wasn't a documentary. I think it was like dramatized. Oh, really? And that really started to change the tide of how academics, intellectuals and the media itself saw satanic ritual abuse, started to expose it as this is not real. Yes. And this is after the McMarton trial had been the longest and most expensive trial in the history of the United States. That's right. $16 million spent with zero convictions because it didn't happen. Right. And that case actually was started with a woman who believed her child had been sexually abused. And the woman actually, sadly, went on to die from alcohol poisoning a couple of years later and was schizophrenic. She was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in that time, and yet nobody stopped and said, oh, wait a minute, she was the center of the accusers of all this. Should we take another look at all this? It was like, no, let's spend $15 million of taxpayer money trying to prosecute these people and get zero convictions out of it. The West Memphis three were successfully prosecuted in Arkansas. I mean, railroaded. Yeah. There is no other way to put this, thanks to something like a false confession by Jesse Ms. Kelly, which is mind blowing until you should go listen to our episode on false confessions, which I believe you did that one right? Either that or it was a part of another one. But yeah, we covered that topic for sure. And all of that was based on the satanic panic thing as well. But you should definitely watch those again. HBO documentaries paradise Lost, One, Two and Three. Yeah. And they made the original In Paradise Lost the Child Murders of Robin Hood Hills. And I think they thought it was the same guy. Did you see Brother's Keeper, the other documentary? Yeah. About the older I love that one, man. That's the same guy. The Brothers Keepers would put them on the map. So I think he thought that Paradise Lost One was just the documentary. And to his credit, joe Biden, Berlinger. Sure. I think he really championed this case and followed it to its conclusion over the course of two more documentaries over the years. Yeah. And from what I understand, he changed his mind about the content or the crime midstream, I think. Didn't he go there thinking he was just covering the crime and then actually saw what was going on? It was like, whoa. Yes. Because of him, they were exonerated, ultimately, yeah. Like, he got three people out of prison, one off death row, hats off. But again, this is part of the Satanic panic scare. And not that one. That kind of came at the end of it, but the McMarton movie on HBO started to change the tide, and so too did the exoneration of a woman named Margaret Kelly Michaels in New Jersey in 1993. She was let out of prison after it was revealed how coercive the questioning was of the children who ended up accusing her of this. And that was true in every case. It seems like it was. It shed a lot of light onto this. And people started going like, wait, this is coercive. Let's look at these other cases. And you go back and look at the transcripts and see, like, okay, these people were basically telling the kids what they wanted to hear. Yeah. They were using approval whenever the kids said something that pointed the finger. They were using disapproval when the kids refused to talk or whatever or implicate anyone. And if you go back and really listen to what the kids are saying, a lot of the times they're like, no, nothing happened. Well, and then they would follow that with, are you sure this didn't happen? Right. Are you sure this didn't happen? And you're not supposed to do that. And you're certainly not supposed to put people in prison for half of their lives. Well, and you're especially not supposed to do that to a kid who's highly suggestible and wants to please, because most kids want to please, right? And when you look at some of these allegations, it sounds like if you ask the three year old to make up what they think ritual abuse would be, here's what a kid would say. Yeah, they locked us in a closet with spiders and snakes. Yeah, they put us in a pool with sharks that ate babies and they fed us baby parts. Right? So the real deathnel of the satanic ritual abuse scare came in 1994 with a meta survey for the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. And this study, it contacted prosecutors, regular lawyers, social workers, psychologists. I think that was it. Thousands and tens of thousands of them across the country ended up whittling it down to a sizeable sample and found all sorts of things. Specifically, what they found is there was no evidence whatsoever of any satanic cults operating anywhere in the US. Or a single crime carried out by a satanic cult. They said that they found a couple of crimes that were carried out by people allegedly in the name of Satan, but that these were most likely inspired by the Satanic Panic itself and solo affairs. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. But it wasn't a satanic cult by any means. No. They also found in the study that children of the ages where they would go to daycare weren't capable of forming the type of accusations against satanic ritual abuse that people have been convicted of that clearly the adults were the ones who were channeling themselves through their children to accuse these people. The kids were saying things like, they locked us in a closet with spiders and snakes. They weren't saying like, they carved open a baby and sexually abused it and then we all drank its blood while everyone's wearing black ropes. They're not sophisticated enough to think that kind of thing. So the study also proves that too. And then ironically, the same survey found plenty of evidence of religious based crimes, including murders, carried out things like exorcisms that went too far. That kind of stuff. They're like, that actually is real. And ironically, we have a lot of laws protecting people who do that, but we have laws that step up the punishment for Satanic abuse even though that doesn't exist. And that one really changed the tide of how people saw the Satanic panic. Well, yeah. And then experts later came out and said as far as the physical abuse and the doctors who testified at trial, like the type of physical abuse these kids were enduring, they were like a layman could look at a child, right, and say, wow, what happened to this kid? But you will obviously never be able to reproduce because you're totally mangled. Not this like ambiguous, like well, yeah, I think it seems like they had some marks where they could have been molested or something. It would have been so obvious because these allegations were so far out there. And of course, years later they say this at the time, everyone was drinking the Flavor Aid. Nice. The blood drenched Flavor Aid and insult to injury. That same media. All of a sudden the hot story became the outrage that was Satanic Panic. And what a bunch of crap that it was. So now let's cover that story in full. Yes. Even though he had a lot to do with it, right? Yeah. So, Chuck, why did people drink the flavor aid? What was the immediate reason for the Satanic panic? Well, you found this great article. Which one? I found a lot of great articles. The three satanic ritual abuse as oh, yeah, the sociological article. Yeah. That was good. They have a few reasons as subversion ideology, as Rumor Panic, and as contemporary legend. And the subversion ideology I thought was super interesting. I didn't even know what that was. I hadn't heard of it before either. They define it as a culturally constructed myth that gives shape and form the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty about the future that are experienced between periods of rapid, unpredictable social change. Right. So we're anxious. We're not even necessarily conscious of our anxiety, but we don't feel quite right. Everything's changing. We don't know what's going on. What exactly is making us nervous? Oh, how about that group over there? Satanists, jews. And before that it was Christians. Exactly. It puts a face to this underlying sense of dread we feel, because the times are a change. Exactly. And it gives us an outlet at the expense of other people. But with the subversion ideology, the hallmark characteristic of it is that the other group takes everything we hold dear and values the opposite of it. So Satanists use upside down crosses and evil is what's really good. It's a classic example of subversion ideology. Well, and one thing I thought was really interesting in here is they contend, and I'm sure it's true, that subversion ideology actually ends up having a stabilizing effect because people then go, okay, well, that's why I'm so upset and worried and anxious is because of these Satanists, not what's really going on. Which is the end of the millennium, apparently. Oh, really? Yeah, whatever that was. Another explanation I ran across was that it was millennial anxiety. There is also another one you said moral rumor panic, which we touched on before, but basically that is this idea that it's just buying into a rumor and like really buying into it. And the way you buy into it is because all of a sudden professional psychiatrists and psychologists and law enforcement people and people in the newspaper are talking about this stuff like it's fact. And with that, because we trust these people as being smart, intelligent people, it becomes fact in the eyes and the minds of just normal people. And that gives it veracity in and of itself. Once people start believing something as fact without any proof, a rumor panic is just set in. Well, and ironically too, it seems like the more out there the panic is, the more readily it's believed, because the old like, who would make something like that up? Right? Well, a three year old might being coaxed by police and her parents and her shrink. Yeah. And then the last one is an urban legend, which we talked about before, but this sociological article pointed something out that I hadn't thought of, that urban legends deal in metaphors, even though we don't think of them as metaphors. So in this case, the children that are being abused by Satanists were a metaphor for our future and children our future. Just go ask Whitney Houston. Yes, it's true. And then as people start to buy into it, it becomes a rumor panic and you can dress it up with some version ideology. So in the end, the Mcmarton's, I don't think they ever well, I think they were never prosecuted. I think they were in jail here and there while the trial was going on. Yeah, but they were never prosecuted. But never successfully prosecuted. The killers were eventually exonerated, but they spent 21 years in prison and their life was ruined. 21 years in prison. Each based on these false accusations. I have to say, if you want to read one of the better articles I've ever read, it's called The Innocent and the Damned. It's from Texas Monthly. It's written in 1994 while this satanic panic is going on. But somehow Texas Monthly took a critical eye to this stuff. It's really good article. I thought. This is so fascinating because it's crazy as it seems now. And like I was saying at the very beginning, like, how in the world in the 1980s did we buy into this? Like it was salem, Massachusetts. Yeah. When you look at the reasons behind it, it was like the perfect storm coalescing. It sort of makes perfect sense when you look at everything behind it. It does, but doesn't it also, it's still not even if you take into account that you're using hindsight and the perspective that's afforded by that yeah. The gullibility I know that is involved in a moral panic is saddening. I bet Edward Bernays would have been all over this. Oh, yeah. Well, he Fomented those kinds of things. Yeah, it's sad. Also, if you want some yucks, go look up law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults on YouTube. It's a video series. Yeah. So weird. I'm glad to know that you had a satan house in your neighborhood, too. I think everybody did. Or rumors that somebody found a cat with its head cut off in a pentagram and he's like, oh, that happened. Yeah. Because I'm ten. Which is okay if you're ten, but if you're 50, it's not okay. Especially if you're the local prosecutor. Yes. And also one last thing, Chuck. It makes you wonder, what moral panics are we working on right now? Yeah, what's, the brewery? It's not like this is ancient history. No. If you want to know more about moral panics and specifically the satanic panic, you can type those words into the search bar at how. Stealthforks.com. So I said, search bar. It's time for listener mail. Here's what I predicted, that some people are going to write in and say, dude, we're in the middle of another moral panic right now, and it is blank vocal fry. Perhaps? The lady called me the fry master in an email. Do you see that? No, I didn't. She was like, Chuck always uses vocal fry. And then when I listen to my voice, I'm like, I totally do. Yeah. But I've noticed it a lot more since we did that episode. Yeah, whatever. Being me. Yeah, man, you should in the trendsetter. I'm going to call this guy sitting straight on these grocery store donations. Okay. Hey, guys. Long time listener. Love you guys. Never thought this would be the reason I have to reach out to you. At the end of the podcast on Tuesday, you said, I don't know which podcast. It was at the end of the recent podcast, actually, I had to stop and say no because my friends Josh and Chuck didn't just do that. He told people not to donate a dollar to buy the little hot air balloons at the grocery store because the company then uses those donations to get tax credits. This is absolutely not true. That is not true what that guy said. He says, I have actually been working with Children's Miracle Network Hospitals in Connecticut for about 20 years. And by the way, when I said the balloons, I forgot that was Children's Miracle Network specifically. I used to do a lot of work with them in La. So you weren't singling them on video shoots? No, of course not. They're amazing. You're like it's? The shamrock. I have a problem. I know. I just felt terrible after that. So he says, Our corporate partners do not get tax credits for donations made by their customers. In fact, many of our corporate partners ring these donations through their registers so the donation shows on the customer's receipt, allowing them to use that for their taxes. What a quick, fun fact about the Miracle Balloon that I referenced is that the first one ever sold in the entire world was at a small diner in downtown Middletown, Connecticut. I thought he was going to say like 19 four. Yeah. Soon after that, the Miracle Balloon became a multinational program that raises money for more than 170 local children's hospitals across the US. And Canada. And its creator became very rich. As I mentioned, I've been doing this job for about 20 years and I have to tell that I always say I have the best job in the world. I get to work with amazing people like my coworkers and all of our partners, and I get to work for the most inspiring people, our patient families. Please help me get this corrected. The stuff you should know. Legion. Don't worry, I still love you guys. That is from Scott Organek, the director of Children's Miracle Network hospitals. Wow. From the horse's mouth or a director. Yes. We're going to have to look into this a little further. I think we got other people that said that's not true and other people said it is true for Children's Numerical Network. I'm sure he knows who he's talking about. Oh, yeah. But there are all kinds of things to donate to and he's also probably not a liar. I don't know. He seems like a regular guy, not a satanic ritual abuser. No, not at all in any way. Right. So we'll look into it. I certainly did not mean to disparage the no, I didn't. And I mean, if that's the way it works, I reflect that, but I need to look into it a little more first. All right, the jury is out. Thank you very much. What's his name? David. Yes. David. You're awesome. Thank you for the work you're doing, too. If you want to get in touch with us to set us straight, we love that. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@housestepworks.com. And, as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyoustknow.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, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music my Favorite Murder from exactly right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarra and Georgia 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. 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How hard is it to steal a work of art? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-hard-is-it-to-steal-a-work-of-art | In general, stealing valuable items tends to be difficult and dangerous, but stealing works of art can be surprisingly easy. In this episode, Josh and Chuck cite recent art heists as they discuss why stealing art is relatively easy. | In general, stealing valuable items tends to be difficult and dangerous, but stealing works of art can be surprisingly easy. In this episode, Josh and Chuck cite recent art heists as they discuss why stealing art is relatively easy. | Thu, 06 May 2010 16:33:04 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=16, tm_min=33, tm_sec=4, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=126, tm_isdst=0) | 16895747 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. To my left, Charles, is W Bryant. To my right. Jerry the Killer Roland. Yes. Thank you, Chuck. To your immediate right. Yeah. Within two inches, it looks like within sniffing distance, as she's pointed out. There's enough of that. Okay. Yeah. Hey, how are you doing? Great, sir. Chuck. Josh, have you ever seen art? I hate art. Chuck. Let's do something different. Yeah. That was nice, though, actually. Thank you. Chuck knows a guy who hates art. I want a guy who knows a guy who hates art. One of my friends, Redneck Cousins, said that one time. I hate art. Just art. Whatever makes a lot of sense. Movies, poetry, film. Yeah. Sculpture. Sure. I hate art. Yes. Go ahead. Guys, name art. It's like that old joke about a guy hanging on the wall. Yeah. So go ahead. No, I'm not going to. Okay. Actually, Chuck, we have, I think, come and gone on the 20th anniversary of the largest art heist in US. History. It happened in 10 00 19 90. In Boston. Yes. Men. What was the name of the museum? Isabella Rosalini Art Museum. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. And some dudes made out with $250,000,000 in paintings, rim branch de Gas sketches, and a Monet. Yeah, and they actually did it in high style. They dressed up in Boston police uniforms, dropped by the museum after hours. There were two security guards on duty, both of them college students, and they went to the door and waved at the security guards, who buzzed them in, and then, I guess, use some employee to get them away from their desk, which held the alarm buzzer right overpowered them, duct taped them, and then spent 81 minutes in this museum pilfering it. But they think that these guys were local boys who didn't know what they were doing because they passed by, probably southeast, they passed by some very expensive works of art and took those de Gas sketches instead. But they still pulled it off. They pulled off the heist of the century. I was reading an article in, I think, the Boston Globe with an FBI guy who was talking about they, I guess, reignited the case or something now. Right. They're using new DNA techniques on the duct tape. Yeah. And billboards, digital billboards in Boston going up asking for information. But you know what? The statute of limitations of being involved in that crime ran out in 1995. So what does that mean? They want that artwork back. Right? Sure. Yeah. Bad. So that was an example of a very low fi theft operation. No, that's actually high fi as far as art theft goes. Well, that was my point, though, is that art theft is very low fi. Yeah. Across the board. A guy very famously made off with the Mona Lisa in 1911. Can I say how he did that one? Yeah, he's a worker there at the and he hid somewhere in the museum. Waited till the museum closed, came out, cracked it out of its frame, put it under his shirt and walked out. That's how he stole the Mona Lisa. Have you ever seen the Mona Lisa? Yeah, it's very small. It is surprisingly small. Jerry just nodded like yes. A woman was actually recently arrested for throwing a mug at the Mona Lisa because she was rejected for French citizenship. Yeah, I remember that. She was taking it out on Almona, although it's like, behind all kinds of protection now. A bulletproof class. Yeah. But back then, the funny thing is it sat empty for a few days, a couple of days without the museum doing anything, because everyone just kind of assumed that someone knew that it was being cleaned or something, and someone knew about its whereabouts. And then finally somebody eventually went, oh, wait a minute, you don't have it, you don't have it. So then they alerted the cops, of course, which actually when we were doing research in this article, and this is, by the way, part two in the series of how Easy is It to Steal blank. Sure. Right. We started with nuclear weapons. Right. Now, art. And what I found from researching this article is it's extremely easy to steal art. Yes. Compared to, like, a bank or like a diamond jeweler or something like that. It's not like the movies. They don't have the laser beams with Catherine Zeta Jones shimming and sliding around under the laser beams. Right. Yeah. I'm not entirely certain that was Katherine Zeta Jones body double. Yeah. But you can very easily walk into a museum with a gun, as was done in 2004 in Oslo, Norway, when somebody walked in with a gun and stole The Scream. Yes. EDBAR Monks the Scream. Yes. And that is the second time that that's been stolen in the past 15 years alone. Right. And in the past 20 years, there have been dozens and dozens of major paintings, including 20 works by Vincent van Gogh from a single heist in Amsterdam in 1091. And as we're going to tell you, there's a weird law in 2000. Next year, those very paintings may be available legitimately on the open market. No, it'll be ten years from next year. Oh, is it 20 years? It's 20 years for any art in the Netherlands is the only country that has this law. Right, chuck I thought it was ten years. Yeah. No, it's 20 years for any work of art. 30 years if it's stolen from a public collection, like a museum. Okay. Or if it's registered as a national heritage item. Right. But in the Netherlands, after the 20 or 30 years passes, transfer of rightful ownership goes to the thief. So these guys, if they're smart, they're just going to hopefully they're young, and they're just going to hang onto them and then sell them for boatloads of cash, right? That's Dutch. Wacky wacky dutch. But there are ways around this. The Dutch just recently busted a group of art thieves who had stolen some works of art from a private gallery. And after 20 years, we're coming forward with the art. And they were set up by this private detective. It was like a movie, right? They were set up by this private detective in the Dutch National Police, and he was going to help them blackmail the gallery owner's family or whatever. Right. But he actually handed them over to the police who caught them, and the statute of limitations had run out, but the works of art were still listed as stolen. So they got him for handling stolen goods and laundering money. A Dutch gum shoe and a Dutch loophole. Yeah. Love it. Can I tell you about one of my favorites? In 2000. The Swedish National Museum. These dudes came in with a machine gun, stole a Renoir and a Rim brand. But this is where it gets smart. They didn't just walk in with a gun and leave before the robbery. They laid out spikes on the roads so the cops would get flat tires. Toot sweet. And right before the robbery, they had accomplices in other parts of the city, two other parts that set off bombs to just instill a bunch of chaos going on. Not a bad idea. No, it's really not. Although if your bomb blow somebody up, you got murder wrap tacked on as well. Well, yeah, true. Very true. And can I tell the one about Zurich, too? This just two years ago, this was another gun deal. Three dudes broke into the I'm sorry, they didn't broke in. They waltzed in to the E. G. BR Foundation Museum in Zurich, and they basically walked in when it was wide open, full of people, and pulled their guns and said, everybody freeze. Everybody get down on the floor. Nobody move, nobody gets hurt. Right? Yes. That was my Raising Arizona reference of the show. Nice. Remember the old guy? But which is it? You want I should freeze or drop? So they basically just got the four paintings closest to the door, all on one wall. Still, in their protective cases, they walked out, included a Cezanne, a Monet, a Degas, and a Van Gogh. And they found two of these in the back of a car nearby a few days later. And they just figured that they were too heavy, so they just kind of dropped two of them. But they were smart enough to keep the most expensive one, right? Yeah. Well, lucky they think that they grabbed it, because I think they just grabbed the foreclosures one. That was the Cezan, the boy in the red waistcoat. So you can just walk into a museum with a gun or gallery with a gun. You can set off some bombs you can put down road tax, that kind of thing. That's one way to do it. Sure. There are some guys in 2001 who drove their jeep through the front door of a museum and made off with some paintings worth 4 million. You could wage a war. Who did that? It happens in every war. There's actually been a huge for art. Sure. There's a huge push that's been ongoing to return what's called Holocaust era art really? To the heirs of the rightful owners. That's awesome. A lot of times the Nazis were like, give us this and we won't kill you, and then you give it to them, and then they killed you anyway. Right. And then that art gets matriculated into the underground and then legitimate art world. But there's actually a type of cultural law that's developed, and there's these lawyers making tons of cash in, threatening to sue or filing suit against people who own Holocaust or artwork to return it to their rightful owners. Good. Often this is museums as well, right? Sure. Do you remember what is it? Was it artwork from Machu Picchu? I don't know. The guy from Yale went down to Peru, I believe, and got something from Machu Picchu or a bunch of stuff from Machu Picchu, took it back to Yale, and Yale basically refused to hand it back over to Peru for decades. Really? He just finally, recently did it. Who do they think they are, Yalees. Wow. Have you ever stolen art? Yeah. I used to be part of a gang on my recent vacation. I don't think I told you about this. I went to a gallery in Salsalito across from San Francisco, and there was a gallery right next to my little end that had original Dr. Seuss paintings. Wow. Had, like, ten of them. Really? Cool. How much were they? I think they were like they were under ten grand. What? Yeah. I seemed to think they were under ten grand or around ten grand. That's awesome. They were really cool, though, and I really wanted to steal them because I don't have ten grand. You can just write a bad check. Oh, that's a good point. Sure. I should have done that check cutting. It doesn't carry quite as much of a penalty as art theft. And then, Chuck, do you remember in the Zoo episode where I said that Toledo has a surprisingly good art museum? Yes. There was a pretty famous heist in with a bunch of paintings that were en route to the Guggenheim, and they were on loan from the Toledo Museum of Art. Really? Yes. And there were some professional art transporters that had their truck and were transporting this art, and it parked overnight at a motel in Strasburg, Pennsylvania. And the people just looted the truck. Well, made off with the paintings. I think they were recovered. Yeah. I was at the Guggenheim a couple of years ago, and I was kind of there at a bad time. I think a lot of their really good stuff that was being transferred, it might have been during that thing, but they were sitting there in their big boxes that they used to ship them, just kind of right there, and there was no one watching them. I mean, they were huge. Like, I couldn't have just walked out. Or maybe I could have if I would have a machine gun. Yeah. Everybody get down. Everybody freeze. So, Josh, this is all well and fine and fun, but why would you steal art? What can you do with a Van Gogh that you have stolen? Well, first off, we should say that art theft, the trade of stolen art, ranks third in the world as far as illicit activities go, and generating money estimated 6 billion annually. Because art is really expensive. Sure, yeah. And it's right behind drugs and then arms. Not bad. No, it isn't bad. Well, it is bad, right? Yeah. So I would say money is the big reason why the thing is, when you are stealing actually, I would say money is the only reason why. Yes. But how do you unload art? I'm getting that settled down. I know the answer. When you steal art, you're going to get maybe a 10th of its legal market value on the black market. Sure. But if you get a $20 million painting, that's pretty good scratch. Sure. That's $2 million right there. Boom. Right? Yeah. And you're going to get a 10th of his value two different ways. One, you're going to sell it to an unscrupulous dealer. It's so funny they always use the word unscrupulous. It's part of the art world. When they're talking about art theft, the word unscrupulous always comes before somebody who is knowingly buying it's. Not evil or low moral. Yeah. Shady. Yeah. It's like saying they have no tech whatsoever. Exactly. An unscrupulous art collector or dealer will buy it, but is going to buy it for 10%. Sure. And you can also sell them as fakes, high quality fakes. And those usually are replicas, we should say, as they say in the art world. And those usually fetch about 10% of the market value. That's probably a lot easier, too. But they were saying that from 1980 to 2010, an estimated 1000 objects of art have been stolen just in the last 30 years. They think of a lot of these stolen pieces of art are in legitimate collectors collections who unknowingly think that they're replicas. Well, yeah. That's one of the keys. If you get a piece of art that is less known, maybe it's not the Mona Lisa. You can sell it, and then that gets sold and it's sort of I think they put it in the article like art laundering. Right. The first dealer kind of dumps it quickly for a lowish price, and then they'll sell it to someone, the other person will sell it. And by the time it gets around two or three places and maybe it goes off to auction. The auction thinks it's a legit because it comes from a verified owner. And that happened to one Stephen Spielberg. It did. I remember when this happened. He found out he had stolen Norman Rockwell in his collection. Of course he would have. Norman Rockwell. That just figures. Switzerland is notorious, apparently, for holding illegitimate art auctions. They're legitimate. These are legitimate auction houses, but they're knowingly selling questionable or stolen art. And the very fact that it's passed through this auction house and been purchased legitimately, there's some sort of legitimacy attached to that stolen art now. Right. So it befuddles claims of due diligence. There's this thing called buying a piece of art in good faith, right, where you're like, I didn't know it was stolen and I bought it legitimately, so it's mine. Right. And the international police community who deal with art theft have kind of come up with these rules that are carried out in the courts, and first among them is due diligence. You have to go look to see if the painting is stolen. Right. If your work of art is stolen, there are certain steps you have to follow. You have to lower the authorities, you have to put it on the stolen art register. Right. So if it's stolen, you take certain steps. If you're buying a piece of art, you have to take certain steps. But first among them was something that you mentioned was quick art sale. Right. If you buy something in haste, that should be a red flag to you. Somebody's just trying to unload it. Let's just do this. I just want to get rid of this Ram brand real quick. Exactly. So if they find out that you made a quick sale, your claim of due diligence is out the window. And I can't say that you bought it in good faith and you're probably going to lose your money and the pieces." | ||
How Bitcoin Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-bitcoin-works | In 2008 Bitcoin, the world's first decentralized, anarchistic all-digital currency, was introduced to the world. Its value has risen, fallen and risen again and speculators, techies, libertarians and economists alike are taking it seriously. | In 2008 Bitcoin, the world's first decentralized, anarchistic all-digital currency, was introduced to the world. Its value has risen, fallen and risen again and speculators, techies, libertarians and economists alike are taking it seriously. | Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:18:10 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=20, tm_min=18, tm_sec=10, tm_wday=0, tm_yday=168, tm_isdst=0) | 34541469 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from houseofworkscom. 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, the Tech Addition, in which we don't dive into Tech too much because that's J Strick and Lauren's territory. Yeah. And frankly, we're a little scared of them. Our cohorts at Tech Stuff, they do a great job. Sure. But we've gotten so many requests for this topic that we were like, we got to satisfy the Stuff You Should Know pans. We don't want them showing up with torches led by mobile bartender at our door. Exactly. This might be the most requested of all time. Possibly. Do you think? I think it might be. I can't think of another one that comes to mind that was maybe like, Mormonism. Yeah, Mormonism, Scientology. And I see accents a lot. People want to get to the bottom of accents. That would be a good one. Yeah, we need to do that. You want to do that now instead? Crikey. That's good. I could do how bad accents work. Do Italian. No, I'm not to your monkey. That's good stuff. It's not that I think you're my monkey. I know. It's that you do accents way better than me. I'm just a fan, man. No, meaning that I attempt them and do them poorly, where you don't even attempt them. I've got your claim center, and it is off the charts. It's not bad. So, Chuckers yes? You know much about money? Not much, no. I know that I got a few pennies in the bank and that's about it. How that works. Okay. Well, we've talked about money before. Where was it? That the first. We use a lot of financial stuff. There was something we did recently where we were talking about how Mesopotamia wasn't it? Like the first coinage. Yeah. In China. Of course, too. Yeah. But nowadays, when we think money here in the US. At least, and in Canada and actually pretty much the world, because the world uses dollars. Yeah. We think of paper money or coins. Sure. Printed by the US. Mint at the behest of the US. Treasury on behalf of the United States government. Yeah. All banks are backed and insured. Clearly, we know that they're covered in case something goes wrong. Yeah. Because you and I are covering them, buddy. Yeah, basically. But this system that we take very much for granted now of ones, hundreds, and then there were some other ones. This is fairly new. It was just the beginning of the 20th century that the Federal Reserve was created. Yeah. Before that, during the Civil War era, I think maybe even post Civil War, at more than 80 different entities, typically banks that were printing their own currency. Yeah, man, we talked about that. What was that? Was that the barter thing? Maybe so. Yeah. But you're right. It's a new thing. It's a great well, to go back to because it's so interesting. Yeah, $8,000. And if you're a bank, you can just be like, hey, I got a bunch of gold here, right? I'll print some money based on this and I'm going to put my picture on it. Or maybe a picture of my favorite horse. This is a Jim McPherson dollar. Exactly. See, anyway, all that went to the wayside when the Federal Reserve came about, and everybody was like, Stop. Right. Just the federal government can print money from now on, and we're going to back it with gold. And then you know what? We're not going to back with gold anymore. Let's just say you guys believe this has value. We'll go with that. Well, at that point, everyone had bought in, literally and figuratively. Exactly. So we went from the gold standard to a fiat currency, which is everybody believe that this actually has value and it actually will have value. It's pretty magic. And that transition to a fiat currency gave birth to what we're going to talk to today, or the possibility of what we're going to talk about today, which is Bitcoin. Yes. Which is the real thing right now. Will it survive? Who knows? But as of the recording of this podcast, it is super legit. And what about a billion dollars? It may, in fact, be too legit to quit. It may be. I didn't see an estimated value of all the Bitcoins in circulation. I saw that. But as we will find out, it fluctuates on a minute to minute basis. Yes, it really does require, like, $0.25 next week. Yeah, but like you said, though, the whole thing hasn't crashed. It may be what we're seeing is a bubble and then another bubble and just bubbles bursting. Right. But the system hasn't crashed. And that's because the system the theory behind it, and the practice, it turns out, is extremely sound. And what's even more awesome about Bitcoin, which is, we should say, the world's first entirely digital, decentralized currency, is that it has a great origin story. It's shrouded in mystery. No one knows who created it, and the things that it's used for can be shady and weird. And it's all just very some of it is on the deep Web, and it's just very interesting and salacious and it's very anarchistic in nature. Not only is it not backed by any government, it's not issued by any central authority. If you're part of the Bitcoin network, then you are part of this. The authority to issue it. Yeah. Technically, it's mathematics that has the authority to issue Bitcoins. Yeah. It took me a while to wrap my head around it because it's such an entirely new thing and it's very complex. Yeah. Well, although it really isn't like when you break it down. That's what I had to eventually figure out. I studied, and that's where I was like, oh, wait, this is actually kind of simple. And at the root of it all. Who wrote this? Did strickland write this? No, this is Nathan Chandler. Chandler points out, at the root of it all, basically all that you have to do to invent a currency is have enough people say this is currency. Right. And then you have currency. Like I said, whether it sticks around, who knows? But as of now, there are enough people buying and selling bitcoins and speculating and using bitcoins as trade. It's a thing that's the other thing that gives it value is if there's somebody out there who's willing to accept that currency for a pizza, then it has the value of a pizza. At least. That's right. So let's talk about the origin first, huh? Sure. The origin. Back in 2008, a mysterious pseudonym popped up, satoshi nakamoto. And we don't know if this is a lady or a man or men or women or both. Could it be a group? Who knows? He or she or it published a document that outlined what bitcoin was said. This is a new thing that we or I or me are trying to create. And I believe that person minted the first 50 coins himself or herself or themselves. Yeah, that was 2009. In that document that satoshi published in 2008, it was really groundbreaking because it figured out a longstanding problem that was preventing digital currency from being established, and that was what's to prevent anybody from copying and pasting the code that makes up your digital currency and then using it again and again and again. Well, there's one easy way around it. You have a ledger, but you have to have somebody you trust to keep track of the ledger and what satoshi came up with. And what bitcoin does is it makes the ledger entirely public so that everyone is working out the ledger, and it's actually that process of keeping track of the ledger and who has what coin and what coins been transferred to whom. That actually meant new coins. Yeah. So we need to step back and explain what's going on here, okay. Because I think people are already confused. If you don't know what bitcoin is, you're like, what are these guys talking about? Bitcoin is virtual money that you can now use online to buy and sell things. And there are a number of retailers that are accepting this. It's not just the deep web. We'll get to that in a minute. And now they're even go between companies that allow you to I guess they not transfer, but they convert your real dollars into bitcoins. If you want to shop at, like, macy's, let's say, well, they convert your bitcoins into real dollars. Bitcoins in real dollars. The other way around. Chandler points out a good way to think of bitcoins is it's a digital standing for cash because it's anonymous. Exactly. And that's the big key. So if you want to buy things anonymously, or if you are libertarian and you just want to stick it to the government. Or if you don't trust the government or you don't trust banks, a big thing that Nakamoto prayed on was the financial collapse, obviously, and was basically like, hey, look around. What's going on? Right? You're going to trust your money. There like, why not trust this new thing? Let's give it a try. Let's give it a try. So basically, there are a couple of different things you can do. You can either participate as just someone who buys Bitcoins with your credit card or whatever, and then uses them to shop. Taylor says that you can buy with credit cards, but I saw from a couple of different sources that, like, most places do not take credit cards, that you either have to give them your bank account or else figure out a way to pay cash, like using money. Graham well, that's been the more preferred way as of late, but there's still credit card people that will take a credit card. Okay, so the first thing you need to do is set up your wallet, and that is basically your account, your digital account. And then you buy Bitcoins and they are in your account and you use them for whoever takes them, right. And you buy them from, like, a central currency exchange, probably Mount Gox, although we'll talk about them in a minute, too. Right. But they've been handling about 60% of all Bitcoin transactions or purchases of Bitcoins. You go to Mount Cox typically. So, like I said, one reason you might want to do this is if you don't trust the banks or you're tired of the government getting involved in your money, or if you just want to save some money, because what you're doing is you're skipping middlemen and so you're saving a lot of transaction fees. Yes. Have you ever purchased something overseas through PayPal? No, not overseas. Oh, man, it gets expensive. Bitcoin has no central authority, and so there's no bank you're dealing with. So you're not going to be charged the banks fees. And the transfer companies that do work with Bitcoin typically charge like, $2, $3, something like that. So you skip all that. You're not paying as many fees. The wallet is a software program, so it's not like a literal wallet. Obviously, you download your wallet, you've got your little account, you buy your Bitcoins. And you can just do that if you want. You can just buy things. You can buy things on the regular web. You can buy things on the deep hidden web. You can also just hang on to them and speculate. Well, that's the second thing you can do. Okay? You can speculate and buy and sell the apparently the Winklevoss twins. The Winklevi? The winklevie from the Facebook movie. In real life, they have, like, $11 million worth of Bitcoins. They know how much it's worth now or how much it'll be worth tomorrow. But, yeah, they have millions of dollars worth of bitcoins. Yeah. So they're apparently supposedly bitcoin millionaires that have made their money speculating by buying and selling just like you would a stock, let's say. Right. So that's another thing you can do. The other thing you can do is actually participate in mine these coins, which is sounds complex, but it's really not. All right, well, let's get into this, because now we're talking about the bitcoin network, right? Yeah. It's a peer to peer. We should point that out. That's very important. Peer to peer network. Right. Like BitTorrent or skype. Yeah. There's no centralized mainframe running this thing. Exactly. The whole thing operates on the computers of the people who are part of bitcoin network. That's right. Okay. So the mining is really the most important, and I think that's where a lot of people get tripped up. There's three things, basically, that mining coins. You're creating coins. Essentially. Well, let's get into it. Transactions are released in ten minute blocks. So every ten minutes, 25. Now coins are released into the system. That's the approximate about how long it's been taking computers to figure out this mathematical problem. Now they're released every ten minutes. Okay. Whether or not they're figured out or not. It might take longer than that. Okay, well, then you can explain this to me, because I was a little tripped up by this too. So every ten minutes, the computer that happens to be working on the math problem and solves it at that ten minute part gets the coin. So is it random? Well, I think we need to step back again and explain what these are. It sounds confusing, but it's not. Every ten minutes, they release what's called a block. And a block is essentially a group of transactions across the bitcoin network. Okay. So it is up to a person, but usually a group of people team up to do this because it requires a lot of computing power to perform to basically handle these transactions. Just like American express pays someone to handle their transactions. Totally. Got it. Thank you. This is what was tripping me up. Yeah. Okay. And then that block is a group of transactions, right? Yes. And this is the transactions form the ledger. Like, who has what coin, what coin got transferred to what person, like verifying all that stuff. All that takes money. Usually those are the fees you're paying, like amex to do something like that. Right, okay. And this is also encrypted information. Well, yeah, that's the key. So that block is basically a math problem for a computer to work out, and everybody so every ten minutes, everybody on the network gets that same block. And whoever figures that out first get the newly minted. Bitcoins gets that reward. They call it a reward. I got it. That's pretty much it. Here's the thing, though. It's a diminishing return at this point. They have it every four years. Every four years, the number of bitcoins that are released. Per figuring out a math problem is halved. So when it started out, it was 50, and now we just reached the four year point. 2013 is the beginning of the year, so now it's 25 when you unlock a block. That's right. In 2017, it will be 1250. So every ten minutes, they're releasing these coins. So it has three functions, really. It's A, to satisfy the transactions and get everyone working together as a big group to make sure the transactions are good. And it keeps the ledger up to date. Keep the ledger up to date. Two, it releases more money into the system and it's carefully planned out, so it's not like it's a very steady rise, basically, over the years. Right. Central bank can't flood the market with more money to devalue what's out there. Right. Basically by 21, 40, they know exactly how many coins will be out there, and it will be 21 million on the nose. And then that's it. Yeah. It's all controlled. Right. And then the third thing it does is it keeps the system secure. Yeah. So that's what mining is in each block. It's very energy inefficient each block. To fully satisfy over the course of twelve months takes about $10,000 worth of electricity. I read way more than that. I read 150 kwh for block for 24 hours of hardcore data mining, or hardcore bitcoin mining. Sorry? It costs up to $150,000 in electricity. Oh, really? Yeah. But that's with one of these. There's like, certain computers out there that people have set up that are dedicated just to bitcoin mining, because bitcoin set like, $230 apiece, 25 of those puppies. That adds up. And if you can get more and more and more and you have computers dedicated to it, then people have just bitcoin miners and they have computer systems or they're parts of co ops that divide the bitcoin. Right. Well, that's kind of the only way to do it now. They say if you're a single user, then you have virtually no chance these days, I would imagine, because it just takes too much computing power for the average home computer. Right. And if you team up, even if you got a great system, if you team up with ten people with a great system, then you're ten times as likely, because that was the other thing. The number of bitcoins that come out are halved. Right. Yeah. And the math problem, the encrypted math problem that is released as a block becomes increasingly difficult. Yeah. They want it to be hard. Right. That's the whole point. And there was an article, I don't know if you read this that I sent you, that right. Now, you can still make money mining, but it won't be long because it's a diminishing thing before it's going to cost too much in power and hardware to even make it worth your while. I'm kind of curious how that's going to work out. Yeah. I saw, like, a computer built specifically to mine, bitcoins started about six grand on ebay and that's like again, the electricity involved is just ridiculous. Yeah. Plus, if you're splitting 25 bitcoins, that ain't a lot of dough. Right? Well, it depends. Like we'll see that's it that's the network. That's how the bitcoin network functions. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Cool. And it's beautiful thing about the elegantness of the figuring out a math problem to unlock new coins is what you're doing to keep the ledger up to date. Right. That's awesome. So it's providing these three functions all at once, and not only is it open ledger, they have open source. So their code, if you're a programmer and you know what you're doing, you can actually look at their code and figure it out because it's not a big deal if you understand their code, it's not like you can hack into them. It's very secure on that side of things. But it can also be not secure as we're learning hackers are now getting into. You can actually convert your bitcoins into real cash, and those are the places that are susceptible to being hacked at this point. Right, right. It is just one more thing about why it's secure. In theory, when the computer figures out that math problem that unlocks that block, what they came up with is shared with every other computer in the network to verify that this ledger is accurate. Oh, is that a hole? Yes. So that's why it's secure, because everybody knows. Everybody's computer knows what's what. And if there's a discrepancy, then it has to be worked out. That's why a transfer of bitcoins transaction can take a long time because it has to go across all the network got you for verification. Yeah. All right, well, that's cool. Okay. But insecurity. Well, many ways it can be insecure. Like we said, they can hack into, like when you go to a what's one of the places they listed for converting back to cash Bitspeed is one, I believe. And what was the other one? Is it BitPay? Yes, BitPay and bit spend. They convert your bitcoins into credit or whatever. You can shop anywhere or your local currency. Like, if you want to cash them out and get your cash back, there are companies that do that. And that apparently is where hackers can get in there. Yeah. And they can also get to mount Gox, which is the currency exchange, which apparently, if you have an account at mount Gox, a lot of people are like, oh, well, this is like a bank. Right. It's not like a bank. And whether it's Mount Gox or whoever, that's a really bad place to actually keep your virtual currency, because number one, since it's a decentralized system anywhere where there's a bunch of people's stuff parked, that's a target. And since there are fewer targets, that means that people can get better and better at attacking them. Right. So it's a terrible place to keep your Bitcoins. And then also a lot of those places, a lot of those currency exchanges, if they go under your Bitcoins go with them. And that's the thing that they have. Your Bitcoins are gone. Yeah. They're just gone and you don't have them any longer. Which is why if you have a Bitcoin wallet or account. You want a physically removable backup of them somewhere. A flash drive or removable hard drive away from your computer so that if your computer crashes or Mount Gox goes under or the Fed swoop in and sees something or free something. You still have your Bitcoins because you've got that account of it on your flash drive back. Yeah, I would back it up two or three times. Yeah, exactly. I did read one account of this guy that lost like 800 of them because his laptop crashed. Oh my God. But it was early on, so he was just like it was no big deal at the time because they were like twenty cents a piece. Yeah. Can you imagine? No, I couldn't. So I mean, that's one of the dangers of it and one of the risks. Right. So let's talk a little bit about this whole speculation thing and the wild ride of Bitcoin, right. Because it's like the Wild West out there so early on. It is. And it's gone from twenty cents at the beginning to a high of about $260 per bitcoin early this year, right? Yes. In 2011, it went from $30. In 2010, it was worth a few cents. It rose to $30 in 2011, and then it dropped down towards the end of the year to $2. Like, currencies are not supposed to do that. No, that's one of the big problems is like it careens wildly all over the place because of speculation. Yeah, some people are attracted to that, though. Yeah, like the cowboys are into that. Like get rich really quick and get out. Right. But if you're the average person, like buying some Bitcoins because you really believe in the anarchistic sentiment behind it, then you're really at the whim of speculators who can gain the system fairly easily because they're the only ones who know how to do it, because the community is small enough. Well, and a lot of financial gurus say it's a sucker's bet and it's just a bubble maker, basically, is one way to look at it, at least for now, because it's too unstable. It's like the Lawrence Welk show out there. Half of our fans are going, huh? So the Deep web we've mentioned, a lot of people don't know this, I know Matt Frederick of stuff they don't want. Like three years ago came up to me and was like, dude, check this out. Yeah. The Silk Road and the Deep Web is a web that's not accessible. You can't go to Google and type in Deep Web and say no, I'm on the deep Web. You have to have, like, special software to take you to this deep web. Yeah. Tor. Yeah. T-O-R. And that's where bad things go on. Well, I think it's like an operating system that allows you to be entirely anonymous. Right. And yet, if you don't have Tore, I don't think you can even get onto Silk Road. But if you did, be a really bad decision, because Silk Road is where you go buy, well, drugs, pretty much anything. I think out of the 30,000 things they offered, roughly 20,000 of them were drugs. Yeah. And this is like there's some dude in Chicago who's got a bunch of heroin for sale, and you go, use your bitcoins on Silk Road to buy heroin, and he mails it to you, and your bitcoins are put into an escrow account. And then when you say, oh, yeah, I got my heroin. Thanks, man. I just came out of, like, an eight day stupor. The escrow account releases the bitcoins to the guy in Chicago, and that is going on right now. Yeah, but now that guy has a little addendum that says, would you mind releasing before you do all the hair point? Exactly. Yeah. Don't forget. Right. But it's a thing you can buy, like, whatever you want. There are services that you can hire hitman yeah, this really troubles me. And kidnappers and people to rob someone's house or burn down your house for insurance money to hire someone called black market reloaded. Is that. And then there's another one called the Armory, which is apparently like an arms marketplace. And all of this stuff would not be possible were it not for bitcoin. And you can understand that this is really kind of gathered the attention of the Feds. Yeah, well, it's attracted more than the Feds. The Silk Road actually, as of about a week ago, was shut down oh, really? By an unidentified hacker. Basically, a blackmailer named Lance G threatened to crash the site with a DDoS Distributed Denial of Service, which is, I think they basically flood your site so much that it's inoperable. Right. It just crashes. Right. So Lance G, whoever that is, threatening to crash the site unless they paid $5,000, which everyone was like, that's a really weird small amount. And so they're thinking it might be either not someone that's interested in money, but someone that just wants to see it taken down. And some people speculate that the US government is actually behind that. Well, some people actually speculate that the US government is behind bitcoin as well. Oh, really? Either it's some genius economist, some genius mathematician, maybe somebody who works for the government. Right. Or it's actually like a government project. That's one of the things. There's a really great article called The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin. It was from BuzzFeed, I believe, or wired. When it was wired, was it wired? Yeah. And it's just amazing. It's like a nice long form article. It'll take you a little while to read. And it's from 2011, so it's a little out of date. Like the big bubble hasn't happened yet. Right. But I mean, it talks a lot about Satoshi Nakamoto and who he is and who he could be and all the wild theories running around. But it also gives you a really good explainer of Bitcoin and how it operates. And Nakamoto supposedly got out too. If you believe the story they tell you, he's not like, sitting on some pedestal getting rich. Supposedly he created this and then said, now it is yours and got out. Right. But who knows? I have to get back to this psyops thing that we're working on in the Pentagon. So as of now, the Silk Road is shut down. I'm sure it will pop back up or something like it will pretty soon. So the hacker just basically crashed the site or disabled it, I think threatened to or maybe did. I'll have to look into that. I'm not sure if it actually happened. And there was a DDoS attack on Mount Gox as well. Yeah. And the problem is when you don't have anything backing your currency, the value of Bitcoin is plummeted when that happened because 60% of your transactions were halted. Right. This is one of the games that a speculator who's very. I guess. Hacker savvy or is a hacker. Let's call it. That. Could do to manipulate the value of Bitcoin is like. Attack Mount Gox. Let the value plummet. And then go to one of the other exchanges that aren't crashed and buy a bunch of them there. And then just let everything go back to normal and let the value rise once more. It's definitely not stable. No, it isn't. And you were saying that the Silk Road got hit by a hacker. Well, the feds have finally interviewed Vein. A lot of people have been waiting for this because you can buy drugs, you can get around paying taxes, you can hire a murderer, you can do all these things thanks to Bitcoin and now the Department of Homeland Security. Right. Not even the IRS. Yeah. The DHS froze Mt. Gox's, the parent company's accounts yesterday. Yes. Right. Well, this should give you a good idea of how things are not stable. On Tuesday, May 14, that story broke that Mount got they shut them down or did they just they threw some of their accounts and it was so a lot of like the transfer companies, the companies that work with Mt. Gox are saying, like, we're not doing anything with Mount Gox anymore. So if you want to make some purchase or whatever, you're going to have to figure out another way or use somebody else. So that happened yesterday at the same time, another story was released yesterday that someone who funds startups is investing $350,000 into Bitcoin. They're interested in making it easier to. Spend Bitcoin currency, they're making security better. They think those are good opportunities, basically, to make money on. Those are huge problems that this currency has right now. In the same day the Feds shut down Mount Gox, one company invested 350 grand. And yesterday CNN Money Global risk strategist Ian Bremmer said predicted the end of bitcoin. So that just shows you, like, no one knows. Right. He said, I'll be highly surprised if this is around in ten years. And what he thinks is going to happen is this is the first one and someone's going to learn Bitcoin will not be around, but something else will pop up that does it better and that may last. Exactly. Like somebody in one of the articles I think we researched said BitTorrent wasn't the first PDP file sharing network and Skype wasn't the first VoIP network. Exactly. So Bitcoin may not be the first one, and there's a lot of rivals just waiting to take over if Bitcoin falls. But it seems like the precedent has been established and it's been shown like, this can work. Whether or not it will be allowed to work is a big question, because, again, the Feds can always step in and shut down whatever they want. If they want to go after Mt. Gox, they can do that. Well, yeah. And the big boys are already getting involved, of course. Amazon now has Amazon coins that you can buy for the Kindle network and spend them like money. So you realize what we're talking about is the same thing that was happening post civil war in the US when 8000 different banks were issuing currency. Yeah. That's what we're seeing right now, but in a digital form. This is the beginning of it. It's crazy. It's the Wild West. It's pretty awesome. Aside from the hitman, I don't think I have anything else. People get it. You know the guy from the lead singer of Sila Dying, that metal band? I don't know them. He got set up trying to buy a murder for hire from an undercover detective to murder his ex wife. Through Bitcoin? No. Or just bag full of cashful. Of cash the old fashioned way. Right. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's a tough one to get away with. Although maybe people get away with it when you just never hear about it. Yeah, I hope it's a tough one to get away with. That definitely should be hard to get away with. Yes. I think the moral of the story is kill someone yourself. Just kidding. So if you want to know more about Bitcoin, it's pretty interesting and there's a lot of really great writing all over the web about it. Yeah. I would first go to our beloved House stuff works. Type that word in the search bar, then maybe start next at Wired. The Economist has a good explainer. Mother Jones has some good stuff on it. Go check it out. Or check the news feed because literally every day you're going to get some new changing story, right? I mean, by the time this is released, there may not be any bitcoins. In two weeks, who knows? Yeah, but there will be. Yes, I hope so. Or else we're going to have to add an ed to how bitcoin work. Do you have any? Have you bought any? No. I'm the fool. I think I said search bar in there somewhere. So that means it's time for a message break, right? That's right. And then a really good listener mail now, Chuck. It's time for listener mail. Thank you, sir. This is from Pink, chris Pinkerton, who has been a fan of our show at the very beginning and active on our Facebook page. And a famous detective and a good guy. That's right. So this is about ECT, our electroconvulsive therapy podcast that just dropped in real time. And he has a story. While in high school, guys, in Omaha, Nebraska, I met two girls, Gloria and Susan. For about three years, we were inseparable. We would hang out after school, party together. Gloria and Susan were even closer. And sometimes I was just the third wheel. I know the feeling, buddy. Yeah. The girls being a year younger than I, stayed in school when I was shipped off to join the Marine Corps, or that was shipped off. He chose to go. He shipped out. Yeah. We lost touch. But then eventually, I moved back to Des Moines, Iowa, and I found Susan living there as well. She informed me that I should call Gloria and fill her in on the misuse while I was away. Apparently, Gloria had a daughter who passed away under terrible circumstances and became very depressed after the loss of her daughter and actually had to undergo act for depression. In your podcast, you stated, there's slight memory loss, but in my experience, that is an understatement. Gloria had no clue who I was, did not remember any of our high school years. Gone were the memories of harassing teachers making out in the auditorium, and memories of working on my car and shop class. Apparently, she was pretty good with the wrench, so we got to tell her all over again. Yes, as it turned out, she had forgotten Susan as well, but not as much as she had forgotten me, because Susan was there for her throughout the treatment. And Gloria has been able to recall more memories of her due to this. It's very sad to me that I've lost a friend, not because of intent, but due to a treatment I failed to help her through and failed to understand. That is one regret I will always have. And it shames me to think that she has no clue who I am and how important to my life she was. Ever since I vowed to tell people how important they are to me in case they never remember. At least I'll know that I tried to explain that. And Pink, let yourself up, buddy. You're in the Marine Corps, you were serving your country, and it was a very unfortunate series of events, and so take that off your shoulders, I say. And Chris goes on to say, Enjoy your day, guys. Smile and have fun. And that is Chris Tinkerton in Des Moines. PS. Could you tell Jill Marie McFadden that she's the love of my life? I think you just did. Yeah, we don't thanks for the words, Pink. He's always super supportive and just a nice guy. Yeah, clearly. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Pink. Well, if you have a story that you want to tell us that's almost overwhelmingly depressing, we want to hear that. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com and join us at our home on the web@stuffysheneo.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetepworks.com. With over 100,000 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. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this charttopping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music, the free Amazon Music app, and listen today." | ||
How Space Stations Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-space-stations-work | It seems like we largely take it for granted these days, but the fact that we have humans living in space is the realization of a scientific dream a century old. Visit the space stations orbiting Earth past, present and future in this episode. | It seems like we largely take it for granted these days, but the fact that we have humans living in space is the realization of a scientific dream a century old. Visit the space stations orbiting Earth past, present and future in this episode. | Tue, 21 Jun 2016 13:56:01 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=13, tm_min=56, tm_sec=1, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=173, tm_isdst=0) | 46415278 | audio/mpeg | "This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. The sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music. My favorite murder from exactly right media. My favorite murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarif and Georgia Hardstarkk, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is sponsored by Squarespace. Whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, a professional blog or an online store, it's all possible with the Squarespace website. Go to squarespace.com and set your website apart. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry. This is stuff you should know. Okay. You sounded like Steve Rule. We were just talking about Steve Rule and that was very Brulet bruleesque. Not bruleesque. Right. Bruleesque. Brulees. You're saying you wish you'd do a movie? I'm surprised he hasn't. I could watch a continuous loop of brutal rules over and over and people thought, you don't be done with an homage to that homage or a rip off of depending on who is. Well, it was neither, but it was reminiscent of it in good ways. But I don't think that meant it ripped it off or that you were paying tribute to it. It's definitely not intentional. It was just two, incidental, two great things that go great together. Sure. Why can't there be both? Like Reese's cups? Yeah, they go great with Kit Kats. Oh, man, that'd be good. Sure. Just take two full KitKats and put two Reese's cups in the middle. Like a sandwich. I think you just came up with something. The new S. Moore. The Reese cat. Chuckers? Yes. Have you ever looked to the sky at night, seen some stars flying by and thought, why don't we live up there? Sure. Have you ever seen the ISS cruising? No. I used to. Apparently you can. Yes, I used to get either text or emails. I can't remember. You just put in your zip code and it sends you text alerts when the ISS is going to be flying overhead. I thought you were going to say one of the lead astronauts would just text. You be like, Josh, what are you doing? We're over your house right now. But, I mean, basically it's not from the astronaut, but it's the same thing. It's saying, like, look up in this direction at this time and you should be able to see the ISS. Pretty neat. Yeah. I don't think we actually ever went out and looked at it because it was always at 300 in the morning or something like that. Yeah. This really thrills me to no end. Once I started looking into this, I never paid a lot of attention and it really just dawned on me, like, people are living in outer space continuous, full time. The International Space Station has been continuously inhabited since it was launched in 1098. Yeah. In fact, they just took their 100,000th orbit of Earth. That's really neat. In May of this year, and Expedition 47 began in March. That's so cool, man. It's like you were saying you don't really stop and think about it, but we're living in space now. Humanity is extended at least into Earth's orbit. Right. That's where we're living. And we just kind of seem to take that for granted. But that wasn't always the case, actually. And I think the reason why we do kind of take it for granted is because the conception of living in space that we're at right now is remedial compared to where everyone expected it to be. In, like, the mid 70s, when the idea of space colonization was at its peak. I mean, NASA Ames Research Center was conducting summer studies is what they were called, where they would just get the public really jazzed about living in space. And the best you can say, or the least you can say, is that it bore some pretty awesome artists renderings of what space colonies will look like. Yeah, it seemed like every other issue of Popular Science was just some cool new picture of like, one day we're going to be living out here. Right, exactly. But the one day seemed a lot closer than it does now. Right? Yeah. But at the most, you can say that that space colony fever that was going on in the 70s definitely laid the groundwork, paved the way for where we are now, which is living in space. We just don't have, like, Stanley Kubrick esque space hotels that are big rotating wheels at the moment. It doesn't mean we're not going to. It just didn't happen as fast as everybody thought it was going to. And I was trying to figure out why. And apparently it's because of the shuttle program. The space colony fever was based on the idea that launching the space shuttle was going to be way cheaper than launching any of the rockets had been previously. That didn't turn out to be the case. And that there would be something like it was going to be like a space tax. Yeah, I remember those words. At least 60 launches a year, which didn't turn out to be the case either. But they thought that, yeah, we're going to be going back and forth to space for, like, next to nothing all the time, and that we would be colonizing space pretty quickly. That didn't pan out. The space shuttle program didn't pan out to be that as cheap or as frequent. And so this dream of space colony or this enthusiasm for space colonization was kind of lost. But luckily, it wasn't lost by the actual engineers who were in charge of putting people in space and figuring out how to live in space. And the whole idea is probably still coming. It's just a little further down the road. Yeah. And there are many hundreds and hundreds of people that help make this reality over the years. But a lot of this can be laid at the feet of Mr. Verna von Braun, who was the architect of the US. Space program. And he was the big champion of space stations early on, in a real viable way. He was like the Carl Sagan of his day. He realized that he had a quote. He said that we can publish scientific papers and treatises. Still, hell freezes over, but if we don't get the attention of the taxpayer, we're not going anywhere. And how do you do that? You start putting people on the moon and start building space stations? Well, even more basic than that, he wrote, like, popular articles and popular magazines to get the public's imagination prime for that kind of thing. Yeah. And his idea was it was not just like, hey, look at a neat thing we can do. You have an Antarctic outpost. Back in the old days, you had an OutWest outpost. He was like, we need an outpost. We need a place where people can live and work as their base station, essentially. Sure, space is the frontier, but you watch the Star Trek knows that the final frontier. Right. Well, that's what we think. That's what we thought back then. Right. I'm sure there's other frontiers, new dimensions to explore. Sure. That kind of thing. Right. Well, let's just talk about why. What are some of the reasons we should do this? You mentioned just capturing the public, and it certainly would do a lot to rally people around, spending funds on space travel. NASA allocating funds toward this kind of thing. Right. You mean like space tourism? No, not space tourism, but just initially they needed the support of the popular American opinion. Right. Which is why von Braun says to reach out to the public directly through Colliers magazine. He hosted a three part show on The Wonderful World of Disney about living in space. Great show. And we really got people jazzed about this. Back in the then it peaked again. In the was saying. Yeah, but one of the big reasons that you would want to have a working space station is aside from the convenience of having it up there and not having to go back and forth every time you want to do something right is things are different up there. And you can do different things without gravity that you can't do here on Earth. Right. Like research. Yeah, like remarkable things. So it turns out gravity has a weird effect on crystals and the way they form flaws them, inevitably. But if you're out there in micro gravity there are far fewer flaws and the crystals tend to form more perfectly. So you can do things like make really good semiconductors. Right, for microchips? Sure. You can also crystallize drugs better to make them more potent. You can really knock your socks off. So research up there that can make things better here. Right. Not just research, but figure out how to do it there. And then build on that by building a manufacturing facility for semiconductors out in space. Yeah, man. And then bring them back to Earth and be like, Watch how fast this baby goes. Another thing that no gravity or microgravity does is it makes flames here on Earth with our stupid gravity pulling it in every direction. Makes the flame very unsteady and unpredictable. Makes studying combustion more difficult. Remember when we talked about fire? Yeah. Fire and space is very consistent and perfect. It's round. Yes. It's so cool. So you could potentially with a perfect flame like that that perfect flame has got to be a song. Eternal flame is what you're thinking of. No, I'm saying perfect flame. No, you're thinking of eternal flame. Such a joshuism. It's one of my favorite microgravity, though. You can have that eternal flame that is perfect and you can study combustion in a more pure fashion. And you could build a better furnace, maybe. Or find out how to reduce air pollution by making things more efficient. Right. There's just, like, two things that you could do in space. I'm sure there are 1000 things we could list. Right. And as a matter of fact, some of the early ideas for space stations were concepts that were used like moon mind minerals and materials and assembled in space so that you didn't have to launch them from Earth. Yeah. So this whole idea of creating things in space is even used to form the basis of these places where we would actually live while we were doing this stuff. It's pretty cool. Yeah. It also offers a unique perspective on the Earth if we're talking about landforms and oceans or atmosphere. Speaking of which, they can take much better pictures looking in the other direction into deep space because they don't have that pesky atmosphere in the way. Right. So lots of great reasons to be up there. Not the least of which is something you mentioned earlier. Space tourism, which is going to happen at some point, right? People are looking into who is this one company, Galactic suite. Yeah, they're still at it. Well, now that I saw, it still says they're planning on launching in 2012. Oh, I thought they were still kind of obviously not on that timeline. Right? Unless they're still up. Somebody's still paying for the domain. That doesn't mean much, but it still says they're going to head for the stars in 2012. And then I found another Russian one that looks pretty promising, but their site apparently was not updated since 2010. But a company called Bigelow Industries very recently had SpaceX ferry capsule up to the ISS. It was an inflatable capsule that was a habitat module that was meant to be a prototype for a space hotel. And they couldn't get it inflated. They just aborted the mission. But people are still working on the concept of space tourism, like today. Well, I know the Galactic suite said, we think it will cost $4 million for a weekend stay, and our data suggests that there are about 40,000 people in the world that can and will pay for this. Maybe their site hasn't been updated because they got scared with the end of the world 2012 thing. Maybe. And while they were hiding in a cave somewhere, somebody played a prank on him and they're still too scared to come out and update the site. Maybe. Well, Richard Branson, he's trying to fly people into space still. Yes. I looked at that. I was like, wait a minute, is this Alaskan Airlines merger? Did that kill Virgin Galactic? And apparently not. It was just Virgin America that Alaskan Airlines took over, apparently in a hostile take over, but Virgin Galactic still added, okay, well, that's good, I guess, if you're loaded and want to ride into space. Yeah, if you're Ashton Coochie or Katie Perry. They were on the list, right? Sure. They have disposable income. Sure. Send the coach up there. The coach. Either one. I feel like I should take a break and regroup, and then we'll start talking about space stations past. I'll take one with you. It's 2022 and things look different. Like doctors visits, for example. Sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for nonemergency situations, like a sinus, infection or allergy. And that's why teladoc gives you the chance to connect with board certified physicians right from your home via phone or video. That's right. Doctors are standing by 24/7, so you can schedule a visit according to your schedule. You can see for yourself why teladoc is ranked number one by JD. Power and telehealth satisfaction with direct to consumer providers. Telecom is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teladoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teladoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's teladoc.com stuff. For JD Power 2021 Award information, visit JDPower comAWARDS you know you're a pet mom when you growl back during playtime and you insist on feeding them the highest quality food you can find. Enter Halo holistic made with only whole meat, no meat meals, and probiotics. For digestive health, our first ingredient is always responsibly sourced protein raised with no antibiotics. And bonus, our fruits and veggies contain no GMOs. It's a lifestyle and a pet bomb thing. Find Halohallistic at chewy amazonandhalopets.com all right, let's talk about the first one. Josh. We had a great episode on the space race. It was pretty much a two love that one. A two nation race between the US. And the Soviet Union. Sure. And they beat us in a lot of ways, as far as first to the punch, man, they really did. They don't get enough credit around these parts for the stuff that they did as far as space goes, because they definitely did beat us in a lot of ways. Sure. Like, we beat them to the moon, basically. Yeah. Which we pointed out in our show. Really got us going. Sure. And led to our advancements. Yeah. But also what was it? There was another show we did recently, Sputnik, led to Super Bowls. But do you remember we were talking about the Superball in the Super Ball episode, how Sputnik, like, made America, post war America wake up and be like, hey, stop being coddled and lazy. We need to get back to innovation. Yeah. Innovating again. And it was Sputnik that did that. Yeah, that's right. Nothing like the threat of Communist Russia or Soviet Union to get people going or being left behind. So back then, they were the Soviet Union, and they were the first, as we said, with the Salyut One station. 1971. Dude, they had people living in space the year I was born. It's crazy. Yeah. And it was actually a combination of a couple of different system. One. The Almaz and the Soyuz. The Almaz was a military system, and the Soyuz was the actual spacecraft that ferried people to and fro. They're still using that thing. That's how American astronauts get to the ISS is on Soyuz rockets. Oh, really? Yeah. What number they had, I wonder? Oh, who knows? They launched them a lot from Kazakhstan, I think. Oh, really? Very nice. 45ft long had three main compartments, your standard compartments, which are, like, dining and recreation, food and water storage. You got to have your toilet, exercise equipment, and then your sciencey stuff. Yeah, that's sciency stuff. That's a big deal. Sure. Because not only are they looking at how to make crystals better, they're also studying the effects of microgravity on the human body, which we're still getting a handle on. Yes. We should do an entire episode on how space affects your body. Okay. I think that would be like I got three or four episode ideas out of this one article? Well, yeah, we should do one just on the ISS, too, I think. So just kind of briefly, one of the things that they found so far about living in space is that your bone mineral density decreases by 1% a month, which is like 1%. There's still 99% left. Who cares? Here on Earth, if you are a senior adult, you lose about 1% of bone mass a year. Wow. So that's pretty significant. And another thing that they found out was that living in microgravity, when you're here on Earth, your fluids and blood and stuff tend to accumulate in your lower extremities. Right. In microgravity, it tends to accumulate up in your upper body, in your upper chest, and in your head, and your brain is like, oh, I'm bathed in this stuff. I need to shut down production on fluids, including blood, so that when astronauts get back on Earth, they tend to be fainty. Oh, wow. Because they don't have enough blood for a while until their body's like, whoa, something weird just happened. I need to start making blood. And they say I'm fainty because of space. Somebody gave me some tang. My blood sugar is low. The other thing they found out was that in space, no one can hear you scream. Yeah, they try. It 15 after every hour. All the astronauts scream as loud as they can, and nobody can hear. And that, of course, was the famous tagline from the first Alien movie. Oh, really? Yeah. I remember seeing the ad with a big egg. Space, no one can hear you scream. I know. I thought, that's terrifying. I'm going to watch it. Yes. Oh, one other thing that they're learning about effects and gravity. So Scott Kelly, the astronaut who famously just spent a year on the ISS, he has a twin who's also an astronaut, name is Mike, and Mike has been studied here on Earth. So you got to split those guys up over the same year that Scott has. Yeah, and now they're comparing them. Apparently, Scott came down, and he was, like, an inch or two shorter than his identical twin material. That was just one thing. But they're examining them on a genetic level to see what differences have happened so they can get a better handle on what living in gravity does for the human body. He says, I'm shorter and more faint, for starters. He just fell dead away, and they just slapped his face and poured Tang down his throat. Well, I think what's lost on a lot of people is that these are real human experimentation is going on, and who knows what the long term effect is going to be? These people are really, like, sacrificing, potentially. Right. I mean, not just being away from family and stuff, but who knows? Faintly might turn into something really bad. Well, not only that, they're also exposed to solar radiation and just space radiation that the Earth's atmosphere protects most of us from they're exposed to it, and apparently there's a huge possibility of their lifetime risk of cancer just goes through the roof from living out there. So, yeah, there's a lot of questions we have that it's good that we're not all just living out in space, because we can we got a lot of stuff to figure out beforehand. Heroes, sir, is what I say. So the Soya Ten crew for that very first Salliet space station that Russia had, they were supposed to live up there, but they couldn't dock correctly, so they could never enter the space station. So they never could even get in. Big disappointment. Yeah, they just went they just hung their heads and put it in reverse. And the little module went. Yes. So the Soyuz Eleven crew actually successfully lived there for 24 days in 1971, which is remarkable, but very sadly, they all perished upon reentry coming back to Earth. Yeah, their capsule depressurized, and the capsule at the time wasn't designed for them to wear suits. So they were all asphyxiated. Yeah. Just, like, died instantly, right? Pretty much, yeah. They would have lost consciousness almost immediately. So after the Soyuz Eleven, they launched a different space station altogether, the Salyut Two. That one didn't even get up into orbit, so they were, like went through three, four, and five in pretty quick succession, and each one basically they got better at getting people to and from and they could stay up there longer and longer. Yeah, I think the last one was launched in 1982, and it was up there until, like, 1994, and they actually used it when they launched the mirror, which we'll talk about, and I think I guess it was up there then they were going back and forth between Soly at Seven and the mirror. Yeah, I guess probably going like, we can use this vodka over here. Got to go get it from Solute and take it over to the mirror. So it was up there for a while. They got there, they figured it out. And one of the big differences between the early Solyutes Chuck and the later ones was that there was a secondary docking module. Yeah. The first ones only had one parking space, essentially. Right. And so you had the parking space for the crew that was there, and if they needed supplies, well, TS for them, nowhere to park. But if you had a second docking port, then you can use well, they used the unmanned ship called Progress to ferry supplies from Earth to the Salyut stations. Yeah. I'm surprised that it took them up to the Solute Six to realize they needed another parking space. You're going to forget something. Right? You left the iron on back home. We're stuck up here. No one can visit us. Exactly. Well, like you said, that they figured out, which is wonderful. And that all led to the United States in 1973, launching their very famous Skylab one space station, which is the best patch of any NASA related space based anything. Skylab one is the best. Yeah, Skylab was awesome, but it got off on a very bad start on a bad foot, because upon launch, like, just getting it out there, it had these two main solar panels. One of them was completely ripped off. The other one didn't extend out like it should have. And so this thing almost burned up completely initially, because it had very little power and they couldn't control the heat. Right. They couldn't cool it. The interior of the capsule went up to, like, 126, so they said, hey, guys, it's hot. We need you to go up there and fix this. And actually, there were three different crews that were sent to Skylab on Apollo capsules. And the Skylab module itself was actually designed roughly initially by Werner Von Braun out of a Saturn V moon rocket. The third stage of it became Skylab. And I think at the air and space museum in Washington. Not the one at Dulles, but the one that's in around the mall. Yeah, I think it has a replica of skylight you can walk through. Oh, cool. Which is so awesome. Dude, I would love to do that. But the three crews that got sent up there, Chuck, they managed to kind of, like, put Skylab back together with duct tape and bubblegum. Yeah, that first one skylab, too. They just sent them up a week and a half after the, well, not fail launch, but problematic launch. And it's so funny how some of this NASA stuff is so simple. They said, go up there and essentially take this big sunshade it looks like an umbrella, and pop it open right? To cool it down. And then see that solar panel. That didn't stretch out far enough. Stretch it out. And they did. Commander Charles Pete Conrad, Paul Whites and Joseph Kerwin essentially saved Skylab. Yeah, right off the bat. And not just them. Again, there were three crews that kind of did one after the other. They didn't overlap, but they finally got the thing working. And I think the last crew spent 84 days in orbit. Yeah, the first one spent 28, the next, 159 and the final 184 days. And this is a big deal. This is the first time they were testing these long duration manned missions to see, like, can we go to the moon? Because it takes a while to get there and back. Right. That was the thing. The only day that we had was on moon missions, which is about a two week mission, so we didn't have any data on what happened to people longer than that. Yes. Can we set up shop there? Colonize the moon, even? So, they called anything over two weeks a long duration space flight. And I remember in 1979, I remember being a little eight year old kid, and I remember hearing about, because this is in the 70s when families would sit around and watch the news, and it's like, how you got all your information. Yeah. And I remember sitting around and hearing that Skylab is coming back down to Earth in an unpredictable way. And I remember being sort of scared and thinking, like, wow, this is a little weird and kind of a big deal. Yeah. Like, even little eight year old Chuck knew, like, something didn't seem quite right. There are a lot of people who are really anxious about it because NASA very famously said that everybody calmed down. There's a one in 152 chance that somebody will be killed by Skylab. Well, yeah, they like one in 152. You want to hear numbers from NASA? Like one in a million or one in a billion? One in 152. Yes. You're like, I know 200 people. I know 153 people. It also forced NASA to admit we were so excited about getting this thing up there, we didn't really think a lot about how to control its descent, because that was essentially the story. We don't really know how to guide this thing back down. They said it would cost too much to have designed in a way to bring it down safely. Yeah. And I think they were in a hurry. Well, also the problem is they thought that its orbit would decay a little bit and then fall into basically the orbit of space junk circling the Earth. It would just stay there indefinitely. Sure. But its orbit decayed more than expected because there were solar flare activity that NASA hadn't anticipated. And so all of a sudden, Skylab is on a collision course with Earth. NASA's saying it'll probably enter somewhere over this 1000 kilometer stretch of Earth that includes Australia. So heads up, Australia. And there were lots of Skylab parties. Yeah. Because it's America in the 70s. People went like, Skylab crazy disco parties. Yeah. And the San Francisco examiner actually offered $10,000 to anybody who could bring in a legitimate piece of Skylab within 72 hours of it crashing. And some kid actually collected. Yeah. In Australian. Yeah. He got on a plane. He had a little piece of Skylab because where did it end up crashing? Esperance, Australia. Near Perth? Yeah. I mean, mostly in the ocean, but they did get a pretty good amount of debris in Australia. Yeah, like sizable parts, but it's Australia. They're tough. They're like, everything tries to kill us. Your silly space station can't do it. Right? Yeah. This kid flew over in San Francisco and said, Here, pay up. He's a Skylab. Yeah. His name is Stan Thornton. He was 17, and without even thinking twice about it, he grabbed it, hopped on a plane, and went to San Francisco, like you said. And the examiner paid him, which I did. The Westgate inflation calculator. That's about $33,000 in today's money. Not bad. No, I'd do that and hop on a plane. For that. It's a salary of a first year teacher, right? Sadly, yeah. You can also buy pieces of Skylab today if you've got some dough and an Internet connection. Alleged pieces of Skylab? Well, sure. Just like anything, it should be not verified. What do you call it? Verify. Authenticated. Yeah, authenticated. Supposedly, NASA, instead of exerting its domain over pieces of Skylab, the debris that was found, and saying, you give us back that. Some people sent their pieces to NASA. NASA authenticated them and sent them back mounted, saying, this is an official piece of skylight to the people who mailed it in. Good peeps. Not bad. Good peeps wearing brown polyester pants up to their chest. All right, buddy, let's take a break for a little jog around our 100% gravity office, and then we'll talk about mirror and ISS. All right? It's 2022, and things look different. Like doctors visits, for example. Sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for nonemergency situations, like a sinus, infection or allergy. And that's why teladoc gives you the chance to connect with board certified physicians right from your home via phone or video. That's right. Doctors are standing by 24/7, so you can schedule a visit according to your schedule. You can see for yourself why teladoc is ranked number one by JD power and telehealth satisfaction with direct to consumer providers. Telecom is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teladoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit Teladoc.com stuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's tedoc.com stuff. For JDPower 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS. You know you're a pet mom when your camera roll is all pics of your pet. At Halo, we get it because we are pet moms, too. And just like you, we know their nutrition is one of the most important decisions you'll make. Halo is natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science and thoughtfully sourced. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Find Halo at specialty pet stores and online. All right, we talked about the Soviet, which was the Soviet Union's big first success and some failures, but overall, I think they saw it as a success. Right. And at the same time, a couple of years later, america had Skylab. And then the Soviets said, we can do better than what we're doing. We can do better than anybody else. We're going to create the mirror. Yeah. And by the way, Skyla was not supposed to be permanent. No, that was never the intention. But Mir, was it supposed to be permanent mirror? Yes. Okay, so were the later Soviets. Okay, so the mirror definitely was meant to be a permanent one. All right, well, the first crew cosmonauts leonid Kazim. It's a great name. I think it was just those two dudes. They shuttled between the Salyut Seven, which is being retired in Mir, and there was some like you said, there was some crossover there. Right. And overlap. They had to get the vodka. Yeah, they had to get the vodka. Right. And they spent 75 days on the Mirror, and it was continually manned over the next ten years. Manned and built. They build these things out there, or assemble them out there, I guess we should say. But they don't just launch a space station. Right. Ready to go. They carry pieces of it out there. Right. Just like ISS, and they put them together. Although I think, as we'll see later on, I think the Chinese launched a full space station. Oh, really? Yeah, of course they did. I think they did. But we're talking 2013. Come on. So the Mirror had twelve main parts, which we won't go over all those because we don't like to just read lists, but it's everything you would expect. It was a GWiz space station. Yes. A lot of modules, living quarters, transfer compartments, docking places. They had more than one parking space. They figured that old mess out. Yeah, it was like we should have guests. And they did have guests. They had American guests, actually. They sure did, which is pretty cool. It wasn't until the 90s, after the Soviet Union dissolved, and actually there was a cosmonaut aboard Mirror when the Soviet Union dissolved on December 26, 1991. His name was Sergei Kirkov. It's harder to say than you would think. And he was known as the last Soviet citizen because apparently being in space made him immune from the dissolving of the Soviet Union. Oh, really? Yeah, not really, but that's what everybody said about him, whether he liked it or not. Well, the Mirror, they had some problems kind of later in its life. There was a fire one year, and then the supply chip was called the Progress, I think you mentioned. It actually crashed into the mirror trying to park, and it's a little parking space, which damaged it. And at that point they said, you know what, we should just make this thing space junk, even though we thought it was going to be permanent. The US is talking about this ISS station they want us to come help them with. And there was a big campaign to keep the mirror alive, called Keep Mirror Alive. And private corporations stepped in and said, no, let us take it over. Let's privatize this thing. And they said, yet not going to do it. Yeah, we're not going to just hand over a space station, okay? Now we're going to crash it into the Earth. If I can't have you, no one can't. Pretty much. So they had a little bit more advanced capabilities, and Skylab had as far as directionally. In February 2001, they slowed those engines down, and it reentered the atmosphere. On March 23, 2001, burned up, broke up, and again tried to kill Australia. Australia is like, what the h? Why is everyone trying to land their space junk on us? Right, but it was about a thousand miles east of Australia in the ocean. Has anyone found these things? That's what I was wondering. Mirror at the bottom of the ocean. I'm sure somebody found some parts of it pretty neat. Yeah. Talk about, like, space records at the bottom of the ocean. That's a movie. Who was it? Was it Jeff Bezos that went and got, like, one of the Apollo really stages that had been scuttled in the ocean recently? Probably. I think it was Jeff Bezos or James Cameron. We talk about him too much, though. So that brings us to ISS, 1984. Ronald Reagan said, you know what? I'm about to do a Reagan, but I thought the better. I think everybody wants to hear your Reagan. No, I don't want to do it. He said, hey, man, let's get an ISS station going. There's a dead on Reagan. Is that good? Yeah, we'll call the International Space Station and it's going to be super expensive, so we need some help. Let's partner up with 14 other countries. Canada, Japan, Brazil, and then the European Space Agency, which is the UK. France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden. And he said, as a good faith measure, let's invite the Soviets. I don't know if that was all. No, it was Russia by then. Yeah, you're right. And Russian said, sure, why not? We are not doing anything. And not just being friendly. But they were probably the second leading. Well, I don't know. By that point, there were other players in space science. Yeah. But they were still pretty highly regarded. Sure, yeah, big time. Yeah. Probably more than they get credit for again over here. Agreed. So they started putting the ISS in orbit in 1998, and the first people showed up, they were launched from Russia in 2000 and they spent about five months there, like, basically getting everything up and running, taking all of the little desiccant packets out of everything. Like the do not eat things that keep stuff dry. What is that, a Silica gel? Yeah. And pulling off all of the cellophane from everything. But they left it on the lamp shades, which I thought was tasteless. Well, it's shiny. Yeah. So they've been living up there. Like I said, they just launched the 100,000 I'm sorry, the 47th, but 100,000th orbit of Earth. And we'll do one on the ISO. I really think we should. But I did look a little bit into their day to day life. They work about 10 hours a day, Monday through Friday, about half that on a Saturday, and then they take Sunday off. And then the rest of the time is relaxation. Emailing your family, hanging out poolside, face, timing. They have 16 sunrises and sunsets a day, which is decidedly weird on your body. So they generally just keep those windows closed so they can get on a reg schedule. And apparently the food isn't great. They don't love the food? No. And they have to overspice it. I didn't know that's. One of the things space does is reduce your sense of taste. I've heard that in microgravity, I think it makes everything taste like Styrofoam. Yeah. So apparently they really overspice everything to try and make it palatable. And they have to be really careful of crumbs because remember Homer Simpson? I do remember one of the great all time scenes when he opened a bag of chips in space. Great scene. And then Pooping and Peepee got to go somewhere. They have two toilets. It goes in the new guy's chair. Only two? There's usually only three or four people up there. There's six right now. Oh, six with two toilets? Yeah. How many hair dryers? Who knows? They keep their hair short, though, because there's very few hair dryers in space. Well, there's no showers. I mean, they can wash themselves. They have, like, water jets, but not the same. Yeah, not the same. Man, I'll bet that first shower when they get back down Earth feels so good. Yeah, but there's two toilets. They use a fan driven suction system. And you have to latch yourself to the toilet oh, yeah. For that, too. And there are restraining bars to ensure there's a good seal, because it happens. If there's not a good seal and micro gravity, things will float away. And then there's a lever that they hit. A suction hole slides open and a big stream of air carries the waste away. The solids are collected, actually, into an aluminum container, and they are then transferred to the Progress to take away the little shuttle ship. Like here's all our poop. Yeah. Progress is like, thanks. Yeah. I wonder why they call it Progress. And then the peepee is evacuated by a hose that's attached to the front of the toilet. Do they drink it? They do. I was getting there, but sure. I'm sorry. No, it's recycled. It's a recovery system, and they eventually recycle it back into drinking water. Tastes like chicken. And the toilets for PP are anatomically correct. They have these funnel adapters. So men and women have different adapters because they have different parts? Yes, they do. They do have different parts. Is that like the second grader? You don't think about this stuff. That's the first thing. I thought it was like, oh, man. How do they eat? How do they poop? Do they watch movies? Do they watch movies? Yeah, they just sit back. I think it was the Atlantic had a great photo spread of photos that this new mission is taking of space and the Earth and all that stuff. But then pictures on board, and one of them, they were this huge flat screen watching the revenant. Watching the revenant. Yeah. Wow. That's what it looked like. I could see that two guys on a horse. It was hard to tell because it was in the background, but I think it was a revenant that are cloudy with a chance of meatballs. Probably not the movie gravity. Yeah. No, they were probably like, that could never happen. Remember when Neil degrasse Tyson lost his mind about gravity? Hey, he's your pal. He went on a Twitter rant about it. Then we should talk about the Chinese, because I think it's unfair not to. Sure. The Chinese launched something called Tian Gong One back in 2003. They became the third nation on the planet to launch a human into space. And they launched their space station in 2011. And there's been two missions to the space station. I think it's no longer active, but it's still up there. But the Chinese admitted this year that they lost contact with the space station. It's no longer under their control, so it may end up coming back down to Earth and we'll have a new Skylab party for it. Right. But the two missions included China's first two women astronauts, liu Yang and Wang Yuping. And they were in 2012 and 2013, and they lived in space for a while, just like everybody else had. But the Chinese don't participate in the ISS. I don't know if they've not been invited or if they declined an invitation, but they're doing their own parallel thing, which I would get the impression that's making people nervous. Interesting. Well, I know it's important that they've had women astronauts, female astronauts on the ISS because you need to see what space does to them. And I just wonder if they're going to get to the point where if we really want to colonize space, we need to see what happens when a baby is up there, or give birth in outer space, or have a ten year old or a 75 year old man, a ten year old aboard a space station for life. A year. Yeah. Oh, man. No, thank you. There's one other thing I wanted to mention, Chuck. There's talk about saving a lot of money with a space station by putting in what's called a LaGrange Point. And there's LaGrange Point L Four and L Five, these little spots between the Earth and the Moon to where the gravity between the Earth and the Moon is counterbalanced. So all it does is just go in orbit around the Earth and the Moon, and it will stay in that orbit forever because gravity is not pulling on it one way or the other. Wow. So you don't have to use fuel to keep it in that orbit forever. Right. And this is actually like an early idea. I think Arthur C. Clarke was the first to put it out there in 1961. And these LaGrange points are the orbit's like 90 0 mile across. You can put a bunch of space stations in these things and just leave them out there. And there's actually something called the l Five Society that came about, that is all about this kind of thing. I bet their parties are wicked crazy. Yeah, well, they plan to disband on a space station in the l Five band at some point in the future. Really? When they all come together there for the first time. Sounds wonderful. Yeah. Oh, one more thing. Valerie Pollyakov. Yeah. Record holder, right? Yeah. 438 days he did aboard Mirror in 1994, and he'd done, like, 238 days before then. Crazy. I bet he's super fainty all the time. He's rushing that. He can take it. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right, well, that's it for space stations for now. If you want to learn more about them, you can type those words in the search bar, how Stuff works. And since I said search part time for listening to mail, I'm going to call this Chuck's graduation post. So I put out a post about my nephew graduating high school. Oh, yeah? Did he really? Yeah. Noah has graduated from high school and also Noah, the same year, my niece Reagan, graduated college from mayor of college, moving to New York City like a good girl. Wow. And my other niece, Abby, moved on matriculated into high school from middle school. Nothing better than matriculation. Nothing better. So I went to Noah's graduation, and it really affected me much more than I thought it would because I haven't been to a graduation since my own. Oh, yeah. And I didn't walk in the college one, so I literally have not been to a ceremony since 1989. Right. And just stirred up all these amazing feelings. Oh, I thought you're going to say Mr. Matt. No, it was really neat just to hear these kids and their speeches. And I put a Facebook post. I was like, you know what? We're great people. Millennials get a lot of crap, but talk to a 17 year old for a little while who's doing it right, and we're headed in the right direction, like this very empathetic, carrying forward thinking generation. Nice. So it was a really neat thing. So I just congratulations to all the graduates, especially. Well, if you're listening, then I guess you are a listener. But all the stuff you should know, listeners that have been with us throughout high school, we appreciate that. A girl named Hannah, I want to say, wrote in and asked for any advice for graduation. That's right. And she mentioned you in the speech. Yeah. So congratulations to her as well. Pretty great stuff. But you're right. All stuff you should know, listeners who are graduating or matriculating, congratulations. Yes. Very big accomplishment. So this is from Brandy in Kansas. Hey, guys. I want to thank you so much for that Facebook post about Noah's graduation, how you have so much hope for the up and coming generation. I'm really excited about the world changers coming up. It's so rare to hear someone come out and say how awesome they are on that thread. Have you considered it doing a show on Kids Today fallacy? That's a well documented phenomenon where each generation downplays the bad things. Our own generation didn't believe the ones that follow were lazy, spoiled, entitled. There are quotes literally dating back to thousands of years ago of this very thing. Wow. And the music stinks too. I'm sure that's the other part of that. Yes. No. Yes. The music today stinks are much better. I would love to hear you explain this nonsense, help people stop being so crotchety and instead recognize their role in helping to shape the future generations. Second request. Come to Kansas. You guys make fun of us enough and it's time to face a visit. We top some lists for the most beautiful sunsets and landscapes and also have cities on national lists of places to live. It takes more than a beautiful sunset to get us to do a live show and listicles. We make fun of Kansas because of our good friend Aaron Cooper. And our buddy Isaac McNary is really the two people that we're targeting when we make fun of Kansas and the governor. And it's all out of love because Isaac and Erin are great. And we met Aaron at our show in Denver, and he's just as nice and cool as I thought he was going to be. And we met our pal Tyler Murphy too. And met Tyler. Really awesome. And his friends Timothy and Sarah and our friend Jane Genev was in the audience. And our old buddy Greg Storkin was in the audience. It was something else. Yes, denver was like some of our oldest, oldest fans were in attendance. That's a great show. It was wonderful. Anyway, we're not coming to Kansas. Thanks for a great show, guys. I only have a few episodes left to go for them caught up and then I will enter the pit of despair. So at least satisfy one of my requests. You can help pull me out. And that's brandy in Manhattan, Kansas. Thank you, Brandy. Good luck in the pit of despair. If you want to get in touch with us, you can hang out with us on social media. We're on Instagram and Twitter at s yskpodcast and on Facebook@facebook.com, stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. 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Do you lose the right to privacy when you die? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/do-you-lose-the-right-to-privacy-when-you-die | If you live in a place where privacy is protected, the legal system keeps prying eyes from your personal information. But does that privacy extend beyond death? That depends. Tune in to learn more. | If you live in a place where privacy is protected, the legal system keeps prying eyes from your personal information. But does that privacy extend beyond death? That depends. Tune in to learn more. | Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:11:25 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=14, tm_min=11, tm_sec=25, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=293, tm_isdst=0) | 32804878 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is one Charles W, Chuck Bryant. He's a good guy. Which one are we doing? We're doing privacy. Correct. That's how Lucy played here, people. Lucy Goosey. Sometimes. Yeah. How are you doing? Great. How are you? I'm good. I think we're both pretty pumped for these two subjects today. Yeah. Mainly I'm pumped about putting out a decent episode for once. Once in your life. I hope we do. I probably just jinxed it, sir. I'm going to overthink it. No, this is great. It's gold. Here we go. All right. Chuck? Yes? Have you ever heard of something called Death Switch? Is it a movie? No. Was it a band? No. It should be. I think Kill Switch is a band, then. Okay. And a thing, maybe even a fail safe. But Death Switch is a service, an Internet service that you or I or any schmo with even a dial up connection can go get. Okay. There's a free version of it where you can insert one email address in one message. And then there's a premium version where you can do up to 30 email addresses and all this other stuff. But the point of it is this. You set up all the stuff you want to say to people after you're dead. Wow. Whether it's like, I know it sure. See you in hell, right? Or see you in heaven. Yeah. Well, I guess it depends on your disposition or your bent or I love you. Just wanted to tell you one last time, this is all your fault. Freaking you out, that kind of thing. Yeah, I know what you did. That kind of thing. And with the premium service, you can attach things like movies and things like that, so you could be like, hey, here's one last bootleg. I know you always like my pirated movies, so here's one more. Wow. No, but, like, video cutie patootie. And you would have it sent to me every day for the next 40 years, right? Well, I think it just goes out once. But the point is, you create all these emails, and then Death Switch sits on them for you securely. They're secured. Sure. And then on a fixed schedule, they send you an email saying, hey, click this link and put in your password. Basically, are you still alive? Exactly. Okay. And if you don't answer, it does it again and again, and then there's a set amount of times where it starts to really kind of pepper you, like, hey, man, we're about to, like, the biggest yeah. Your boss is going to get that email if you don't do this. And then it goes, okay, you're dead. You're either dead or you're in a coma or you're critically incapacitated. Can't even ask for a computer. And here you go and it sends out your emails for you, which is pretty cool. And I think it's cool that anyone get one free message from this company. You can do one email address with one message, no attachments or whatever, for free@deathswitch.com of which I owe no shares for a stake or any kind of financial income. God, I hope not. How much is the premium service? I don't know. I'm curious. What am I? Am I your Google? Let me google that for you. So the point is, death switch is kind of the service that straddles the line of what we're talking about today, which is privacy after death, because they maintain your privacy while you're still alive and then after you're dead, the whole point is to go blab whatever you want to blab. Right. For the very least, after you don't return their emails. But the presence of death switch and the whole service provides actually falls squarely on one side of what's kind of a pretty big moral, philosophical, ethical discussion I'm finding after researching this. And that is whether or not you do have any right to privacy after your debt. Yeah, and I thought this was a pretty good it was the grabster who wrote this article, so of course it's quality. He should get paid extra for this. Yeah, we should at least meet him. Yeah, he should come back. You met him? Yeah, no, I emailed him a while back and early on, hey, dude, thanks for you. That's right. He replied, leave me alone. Yeah. Who are you, pod? What? So the grabs throughout this article, you know, it's quality and he makes a really good point right out of the gate. To understand whether or not we have any privacy rights after we're dead, let's first investigate the privacy rights we have when we're alive. That's a good way to go about it. And they are both at once sweeping and attenuous. That's a good way to put it. Thanks. Well, the constitution, if you're going to talk rights of American citizens at least, no better place to start. Yeah, because it says in the constitution, everyone has the right to privacy. No, it does not. It doesn't say that in that document or the bill of rights. But the supreme court over the years has interpreted the constitution in such a way that it in many cases does provide a right to privacy based on largely 9th amendment, which says go ahead. 9th amendment says that there's probably rights that the framers didn't think of. Yeah, pretty broad. Fourth amendment, of course. Unlawful search and seizure, my favorite. And the 14th amendment, which is that the feds can't deprive you of life or liberty or property. Buddy right. And in the interpretation of liberty, privacy is a major aspect of that. Sure. So this is played out several times. Anything that's not in the constitution that can be challenged means it's up to the supreme court to decide what's what. And they have generally sided with the rights of the individual to privacy. Time and time again, the government has had the back of its hands smacked when it's tried to say, hey, parents, you have to do this with your kids education. You can't homeschool them hippie. You need to put them in public school so we can teach them exactly what we want. And the Supreme Court said no. They also said, by the way, you also can't outlaw sodomy between two consenting adults. Do you remember that time when there was, like, sodomy was illegal? Yeah, we were alive and sentient. Yeah. Griswald. I'm sorry. Lawrence v. Texas, 2003. Yes, I know. That's pretty recent. That was john Lawrence and Tyrone Garner were lovers. Lovers. Boyfriend. Boyfriend. Boyfriend and boyfriend. They were committing an act of coitus lovemaking in the privacy of their own home in the bedroom. And it was consensual. It's a big one, too. Very much consensual. And in 1998, and a sheriff's deputy entered the apartment with his weapon drawn because a call had been made by their neighbor saying that there was someone waving a gun and there was domestic dispute going on. So the sheriff goes in there, see, these two guys are doing it, and they're like, you're under arrest for doing that. And as it comes out later, the neighbor, he's like, do you see this phallic symbol holding in my hand? It turns out the neighbor that had reported this was previously in a relationship with one of those dudes. It was a false not charge, but what do you call it? A false report. And he was convicted of 15 days in jail for making that call. Can you believe petty jealousy ended up changing the law under the Supreme Court? Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. But they basically went to the Supreme Court and then a six three ruling. They said, you know what, dude? You can do that. Deed nice in your bedroom there. Good for you, Chuck. Good for Texas. Good for Texas. Good for the gay community as well. Sure. There's this great do you ever read any Egg Bar and Jeff comics? Matt Graining stuff from Life as Hell. I knew Life as Hell, but I'd never heard of the other. Was that part of that akbar and Jeff was part of it? No, the two guys who looked like twins who both wore fed. Oh, yeah. There was one where it was like they were both sitting on the couch together, and it said they were watching the news, and it said from the TV, sodomy has been outlawed. And they move apart on the couch, and then they move back together and they go, damn the law. The first case you mentioned, though, was Meyer versus Nebraska, and that was in 1920. A teacher was teaching German to a student, and they busted him and arrested him. They're like. You're not teaching anyone German. You need to be teaching them freedom language. Exactly. Aka American, but he won. And then in Connecticut, two people, a Planned Parenthood director and a physician, opened a birth control clinic, and they were arrested for selling contraceptives. But that was overturned. Right. So they're siding with the people. So those are cases of privacy, basically, based on what you do in your own home or what you do in your own educational system business, not so much, because you can't use the right you can't refuse service to somebody based on their skin color or anything. Yes, but you can sell contraceptives. That's what I mean. You totally can. You can sell contraceptives to anybody you want, but those are all based on the idea that it's what you're doing in your own home, it's your own private business, that kind of thing. But there's actually an act, there's a federal act that says you have privacy, especially when it comes to government agencies. And that's the Federal Privacy Act, appropriately named of 1974. That came about at the time when people were just starting to figure out what computers were capable of. They're like, wow, those punch cards can do this. And the public realized that, wait, there's databases now, and you don't have to walk all the way across Washington, DC. To get my file, which means you're not going to do that. So I'm safe now. You can cross reference things from agency to agency. My information is just up for grabs way more than it ever was before. So in response, the federal government passed the Federal Privacy Act in 1974, which basically says you can go up to the EPA and be like, hey, Feds, I want to see my file. And they have to show it to you. What's interesting is it certainly doesn't cover them getting the information for that file. No, it just covers the dissemination of that information. And if you walked up to the FBI and said, hey, Fed, let me see what you got on me. Come in right over here. Can we get you some coffee? It's like De Niro. When Lorraine Bracco comes to him at the end, he's like, no, just a little further right there. Right. See that fur? Can get you a fur. Yeah. If the FBI ever offers you a fur, just walk away if you can. So that was a pretty landmark act, and that's definitely one of the in addition to the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution, it forms a pillar. The other pillar, strangely enough, came out of the Clinton years, and it is the Health Insurance and Accountability Act HIPAA, which you might be familiar with from filling out, like, doctors forms and stuff. Basically, it's saying, like, here's the HIPAA waiver, not portability. No portability. That'd be weird. Yeah, because then you could drink it. You can't drink and act. Sorry. Yeah, 1996. And that basically covers medical information and things that like your doctor or your insurance provider can disseminate about you. Right. And so you put all that together, and you have a pretty reasonable right to privacy and at the very least, to see what the feds have on you depending on whether they're law enforcement or not. Exactly. So if you are alive, these are the rights that are afforded to you alive and a member of America American family. Right. A card carrying member. The moment you die, though, that privacy act, the federal privacy act, you're dead to me. You have no rights whatsoever under my umbrella. Ella. Ella. That is true. Explicitly says so. HIPAA is the opposite. It actually extends those rights very plainly to your family and says, you know what? Your family is now in charge of this, and it's completely transferred. The permission for information sharing is given completely to them. Right. The whole aspect of, well, it's your state. It's part of your state. Yeah. Basically the right to say, yeah, that person can have access to that medical information, whatever that passes to the survivor. So HIPAA is real strict. Federal privacy is like, you're dead. HIPAA is like, you're alive. You live forever. It's called descendant or there's a descendancy of the right descendable. Right. I'm sorry. And so too is something called the right of publicity. Yeah. This is pretty interesting. Yeah. So there's this thing that came out of the 1950s when baseball stars started saying, like, hey, wait a minute, man. I'm not that hip with this guy coming out and taking my picture and, you know, putting it on top and then tops, making money. I should be able to make some money. That's my picture. And everybody went, but these are just baseball cards. Yeah. And then afterwards, one of the baseball players said, no, they're not. There's more to it. And everybody said, okay, maybe you're right. We give in, baseball star. So out of that came the idea of the right to publicity, which is a celebrity, somebody who can make money off of their image, their likeness, their identity, down to you. Or you down to, like, einstein's identity is owned actually by the Hebrew university of Jerusalem and willed it to them. And most people's identities are managed by their estate. When you're talking about famous folks. Right. There's also a company called PNG worldwide out of Indiana. Unbelievable. Their business model is collecting right to publicity, like buying them off of estates or managing them for estates, but basically their thing is licensing the identity of a dead person. Unbelievable. So do you remember wasn't it like a course commercial or whatever, and John Wayne was in it? I sort of remember that, but I definitely remember fred astaire was in a dirt devil commercial, like dancing with a broom. Right. The broom became the dirt devil. I think that was the deal. Right? Now, if his family exercises the right to publicity of his estate, dirt devil paid to use his likeness yeah, I wish I would have remembered to look that up. I can't remember which way that one went because there was a stink over it. Well, the thing is likely, even if you are big on privacy, right. Your right to publicity is taxable. So even if Fred Astaire's heirs said no, he wanted to rest in peace. He didn't want to do any more dancing, especially not CGI dancing. He just wanted to be dead. They likely did charge for that rather than just granting permission because they have to pay taxes on the right to publicity, whether they use it or not. How do they figure that? I don't know. I think it might have been Gene Kelly, actually, come to think of it. No, I think it was Fred Astaire. I'm picturing Gene Kelly. Well, you know, we'll eventually know that maybe Jean Kelly was the broom. Jean Kelly was always the broom to fret us there. It's not fair. It varies. Actually, in most of the world, the right of publicity does end at death. But in the US. It's a state law issue. Yes, state by state. In New York. It terminates at Death. But other states, like Tennessee, Washington and Indiana, which govern the rights of Elvis Presley, jimmy Hendrix and CMG is based out of Indiana. Probably no accident. Yeah. They say the control of the identity is secured for a term ranges from like a hundred years to forever. Right. Which is really interesting. And like we said, it's the person's image, it's their likeness, it's their identity. And like, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem sued some costume maker for creating a wig and a mustache that was based on Einstein. Well, did they call it the Einstein now? Probably because I went wig shopping the other night, I really did, for El Chipoto's plan to come as your favorite rock star party. So we were like, well, we got to be dressed up as well. So we went wig shopping. And they had and this is before we knew we were even doing this podcast they had wigs that were clearly people living and dead, but they were just named something different. Right. Like shock jock was the Howard Stern. They had an Amy Winehouse one called the Rehab Wig. Jeez. I know. See, now her family probably just isn't aware of that. I'm sure they would have a lawsuit on their hands. They could sue an American court if it's an American company. See if you can guess. Top Hat Rocker. Hold on. Edgar Winter. That's good. Of course. But what was funny was among this wall of wigs of thinly veiled names, there was a snooky wig, and it was snooki with her face on it. So she's like, sure, I'll take money. Right? Make a wig. Yeah. Well, yes. Wouldn't you if you were snooki? I'd do it if I was Chuck. So that's the right to publicity. That and the HIPAA protection are descendable rights. So it's passed along. And Einstein, his estate makes $76 million a year. Well, they did in the last five years. Oh, five combined. Yeah, but that's a lot. That's a sign. Yeah, that's Einstein. I knew Elvis and Hendrix and those guys, actually. Marilyn Monroe in the public domain. Is she? Yes, she is. There was a fight over that. California tried to basically pass like a lover boy law. It just made up that term. But it makes sense where they said that everyone has to work for the weekend. Right. Everyone has to wear bandanas, where they said, like, Maryland. Monroe estate is part of the right to publicity as a descendable thing. Sure. And I guess somebody didn't want that that way, and they went to the trouble of proving that she was a resident in New York at the time of death. So t s. Well. It's fortuitous that you mentioned Monroe. Or maybe I did. Because autopsy photos come into play here. And her death photos. Arguably among the sexiest death photos of all time. Probably autopsy photos of generally and murder scene photos have been generally protected from release when someone submits for the Freedom of Information Act and says. Hey. We want to see these photos. And the courts have generally said. No. You know what? You can't right. Well, with Freedom of Information Act, that's this thing that's this spearhead into the heart of the other of HIPAA and the Freedom of Privacy Act because it's this Catch 22. It's like the government is tasked with if they're going to gather information on you and keep it, they have to protect it. It's your privacy. But government also has to be transparent. If somebody asks about your information, the government has to give it to them under Freedom of Information Act, unless, again, if it has to do with law enforcement, they're just going to turn you down outright. Yeah, but on a case by case basis, it's usually decided whether or not they're going to grant it. And a lot of times they kick it to the courts and let the courts decide. And there have been some big ones. Usually the court rules in favor of rules against the Freedom of Information Act, especially when it feels like there's going to be harm to the phantom. Yeah. If it's harmless or if it's been, like, many, many years, they might allow it. But the one that the Grabster mentions in here was the Vincent Foster case, who the attorney who killed himself in 1093, who worked for the Clintons or the Clinton administration? No, he was, I think, a whitewater guy, too. He's been with the Clintons for a while. Well, when he committed suicide, there were photographs of the scene, and they were not made public. So conspiracy people filed an FOIA, whatever report you have to fill out and said, we want to see these photos. And they said, no. Apparently the guy still managed to get four polaroids released, which is effort. Good for him. If you want to spend a full day, at least just go ahead and type in Vincefoster. Click on what really happened.com thing on it. It's extensive exhaustive, I'm sure. So, yeah, Dale Earnhardt, more recently, he crashed and was killed at the Daytona 500. Yes. Did you ever hear he apparently died, like, flipping off the guy who like, really who spun him out? Yeah, that's what I heard. That's a nice way to go out, at least. Screw you, buddy. Yeah. The Florida courts rejected the plea to release those photos in the newspaper and the Supreme Court, they said, you know what? We're not going to entertain this case. Bye bye. Yeah. Florida passed a law, another lover boy law to prevent these photos from being released. That's a lover boy law. Okay. I was silent because I was scanning my brain for another lover boy line, but I couldn't make it. One chuck even more recent than Dale Earnhardt's death. That whole crefuffle over his death photos? Well, there's been a couple, but one is the News of the World phone hacking scandal. I don't know about that one. Okay, let me enlighten you to the despicableness of what News of the World was capable of and was doing for a while. It's not Weekly World News. No. Rip. Oh, is that not around anymore? It's a News Corp, which is Rupert Murdoch owned paper that's now under. It was headed by a woman named Rebecca Brooks, and she's now gone. As a matter of fact, News of the World is gone because of all this. They were hacking, like, the voicemail accounts of everybody, the royals, celebrities. But the one that was really, just really awful was the voicemail of a 13 year old girl named Millie Dowler, who in 2002 went missing while she was missing. This is big news in England. News of the World had some private detective hack her voicemail, and we're listening to her voicemail messages. And the mailbox is full. So they started deleting them so that people could leave more if possible, so they could hack more and report on more. What were they trying to get? Just any information they possibly could because the girl was still missing. She was dead at the time, but no help get clues? No, they were trying to get more leads. A full mailbox and a dead girl who's not getting her mail isn't going to help anybody as far as News of the World was going. So they just deleted some after they listened and written stories on them trying to get news story leads, not case leads. Exactly. Okay. It's all stories. Like, no one had any idea they were doing this. So the girl's parents thought she was still alive and was deleting her email or her voicemail. Wow. Yeah, so it was a very big deal. It also threw off the cops, too. It hindered the investigation. So everybody who has anything to do with that has now been executed by the state in Great Britain. That brings up a good point, though. Is this stuff a crime? And it sort of depends on the law. HIPAA actually does enforce criminal penalties if you knowingly share medical information, like selling Madonna's PAP smear, for instance. He could be put in jail for that. I almost just did a spit take, a genuine one. Does that happen? No, it was in the movie Slacker. Okay. Man, that was close. But I bet stuff like that does happen for sure, yeah. More often than not, though, there will be civil penalties instead of criminal ones, and you won't be going to jail. But you can slander someone after death. You can. Depending on what state you're in. They don't call it slander. You can say what you want after death. Well, there's AntiDefamation laws, right? In like, California is one state. That was the only state I could find. In most states, it's like, no, you can say whatever you want about somebody after they've died, but there's something of a movement toward getting AntiDefamation laws in place for the deceased, and it's based on this philosophical debate, like, can you harm a dead person? Right. What do you think? What's your opinion? I don't know. It seems like it would be a nice thing for your privacy rights to extend after death sure. In the name of respecting the dead. Right. So in the US. You've noticed most of the court cases, they were looking out for the family, the survivors. This is about the person, the individual. Even people who, like you, don't know any other survivors. They lived long enough ago that no one has any idea, right? But the whole basis of it is that through our lifetime, through our life's work, our accomplishments, our reputations, we build this thing that's called an identity, a legacy, and it survives us after death. And that's what can be defamed. And that's how you can harm a dead person if you believe that you can harm a dead person. And so that's kind of the basis of the drive to get people on board, like, hey, let's all be nice about dead people. Well, and in this day and age of the electronic life, your emails, your Facebook account, it brings up a whole different actually, can I tell you a really sad, tragic story? Always. Speaking of Facebook, I found an old friend from 25 years ago on Facebook by chance, and I was like, I haven't thought of her in literally 25 years. She looks great. How's she doing? I sent her a friend request, blah, blah, blah. Was kind of on her Facebook page. And then I saw a photo of her with her kid that said then someone said, very bittersweet to look at this. And I thought, oh, man, I guess her kid must have passed away. That's awful. Scroll down a little more she had passed away like two weeks previous. Wow. This girl in the middle of the night passed away. I was on her face. I had already sent the friend request, and I was like, oh my God. And for some reason, it just stuck with me for a few days. I haven't seen her in that long, but I was just like all of a sudden there's this Facebook page with pictures everywhere and, hey, this is me last week, right? And now I'm not here. And then her kids had posted they kind of took over her account where people were leaving memorial messages and things like that. And they bring up in the article, typically 90 days after an inactive account, they'll shut it down. I don't know if that's Facebook specific. Well, Facebook apparently has a policy in place where if you can prove your family member or something like that, they will revert control of it to you. It basically becomes a memorial page. Like you may have friends with DJ A M on Facebook. For some reason, she still is, and his page is now like a memorial page. People post on it like a couple of times a day, every day still. Well, I think that's what Facebook is trying to create here with their whole new system that's rolling out is like, this is your life collected. Yes, and we own it. If you want to know more about basically what we're talking about is whether or not you leave a digital legacy afterward. Stuff to blow your mind. Our colleagues Robert and Julie covered that, didn't they? Yes. Stuff to blow your mind. So you can search that on itunes, or you can go to the Stuff to Blow Your Mind RSS page just by searching stuff to Blow Your Mind RSS on your favorite search engine. And if you want to read this really good article by The Grabster, You Can search do you have a right to privacy after you die? How about privacy after death in the search bar@housetepworks.com? And since I said search bar, that means, of course, it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this something you called it, which is Cult Busters. Oh, yeah, this is good. I didn't call it that. The author did. I was that in the subject line? Yeah. Hey guys, have a great story for you. About 15 years ago, my uncle's wife passed away from cancer. He became disillusioned with his religion. At the time, he had a coworker who, in an effort to help him cope with his grief and confusion, invited him to attend his church. Well, it turned out to be a cult, and his co worker was a recruiter. It wasn't exactly a destructive cult in terms of violence. There were no drugs to get them closer to aliens, no suicides, no murders, et cetera. They're a pretty peaceful polygamous group following some basic Judeo Christianian principles. They didn't all live on. The ranch. A ranch. But they did all live in the same town. When my uncle joined, the prophet of the cult gave him a wife pretty nice. Here you go. Welcome. It's a welcome gift. And put him to work. My uncle soon came to be one of the prophet's top men. Our family knew that he was given several wives, but in his communications with us, he would only ever tell us about his first wife and his children by her. Fast forward to a few months ago. My uncle's daughter is 14 years old. The prophet of the cult ordered his daughter, my cousin, to be married to another man in the group. My uncle, for the first time in a long time, thinks like a normal person and becomes uncomfortable with the situation. He had never once questioned what he had been told. He never even considered that he was part of a cult. He just considered it a small religion. He really struggled with this after that. He consumed as much as he could from that point about cults and groups like his, and among that, he actually listened to your very podcast about cults. That is awesomely. Awesome. He realized that he was in the very wrong and he had to get out. Since he was trusted and respected by many other members, he was able to convince many other higher ups and lay members that they were also in a bad cult and that they had to get out. My uncle and many of the others were excommunicated, and the cult's numbers now are very much dwindling. So I would like to thank you personally for your involvement in my uncle's return to real life. I'm sure he still would have left the cult, but the extra nudge of your podcast was sure to help him along. And that is from anonymous. That is amazing. How about that? Wow. Yeah, that was really something else. I mean, I'm not one to begrudge anybody their religious beliefs or anything like that, but if we can provide information that helps people come to a decision they're comfortable with, I'm proud of that. Done. Yeah. So thank you, Anonymous, for that letter. That very excellent letter. That's legit t shirts or something like that. Yeah. If you have a story about how the podcast Stuff You Should Know has helped your life, we want to hear it or harmed it. It's a good one, just not how it affected it in no way whatsoever. We don't want to hear about that. You can tweak that to us in 140 characters or less. To syskpodcast. You can write it on Facebook at facebook. Comstynow, which will be up for eternity. Or you can send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@howtoffworks.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, stuff from the future. Join houseopeworks staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry it's ready, are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. 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What happens in the brain during an orgasm? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-happens-in-the-brain-during-an-orgasm | Chuck and Josh test the limits of their decorum as they explore the physiology of an orgasm. Learn all about this inexplicably taboo subject (including how even women who are paralyzed can experience orgasms) in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Chuck and Josh test the limits of their decorum as they explore the physiology of an orgasm. Learn all about this inexplicably taboo subject (including how even women who are paralyzed can experience orgasms) in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:58:51 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=18, tm_min=58, tm_sec=51, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=361, tm_isdst=0) | 36699837 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always. As Charlie L. W chuck Bryant. He's got a new haircut. Everybody looks really good. Take my word for it. Yes. Short, high and tight. Yeah, high and tight. Make the stuff you should know. Chuck had his ears lowered. Have you ever heard that? Yeah, I don't think anyone under 70 has ever said that, though. Yeah, well, I just have. I took the cake. Yes. Speaking of, have you ever heard of the origin of the word cakewalk, the term cakewalk? I wrote a blog on it. You should check it out. Very surprising. I'll check it out. Very eye opening. Again, tell us. Just go to the blog. So, Chuck, are you ready? Yes. Chuck? Yes. I want to commend you. Okay. Just a day ago, I woke up, checked my smartphone and found an email, and you said, how about these first stuff you should know? And one of them was, what happens in the brain during an orgasm? You mean a week ago? I'm sorry, last week? Yeah. What happens in the brain during an orgasm? And I thought, oh, man, I don't know about that one. Like, we've got some younger listeners. Like, are we qualified to talk about this stuff? When I started sweating, it was a wreck. It was a terrible way to wake up. And I emailed you and was like, Are you sure? And you said something that I thought was, this is why I'm commending you. You're like, look, man, we've done a lot of stuff on really violent things, which just off the top of my head, shrunken Heads, our step by Step Guide to Shrinking Heads, or Jack the Ripper cannibalism. Jack the Ripper. And we have. We've done a lot of stuff about violent stuff, and you're like, I don't want to just be able to talk about violent stuff, but not be able to talk about sexuality like it's bad or worse than violence. Yeah, I don't want to play ball with that scene. And that is very especially in America, it's a scene we just celebrated Thanksgiving. We're a very puritanical country still, and that's absolutely true. Like, violence is celebrated and okay. Sexuality is hidden and it's not okay. Right. And yeah, I don't subscribe to that either. So I wanted to commend you for having that level of foresight insight, every kind of site. Thanks. And for suggesting we do this. Thanks. Having said that, if your parent if you are a younger listener, maybe you should ask your parents. We're going to be very mature about this. It's not going to be funny, but if you don't think you want your kid listening to anything about orgasms, then switch it off. Hey, man, you're the parent. We're not. It's up to you to decide when you want your kid. Personally, I went to sex ed when I was either the fifth or 6th grade. So I learned about this stuff when I was from a teacher. Mine was like 7th or 8th. Really? I was younger. Yeah. Well, you're very experienced. I remember one very funny thing that happened. I can't say it. I wish I could. Oh, yeah. One kid in my class, I remember his name even, he asked a very funny question that he wouldn't mean to be funny, but now that I'm older, looking back, he was asking a legit question, and it was funny. Yeah, that was a great story quite a few years ago. My imagination is running wild right now. All right, let's get to this, Chuck. Yeah. This is a bang up way to start a podcast. Like what happens in the brain during an orgasm. Defining Orgasm from the Oxford English Dictionary. It's dry, it's stayed. It's like, clinical. It's perfect. It was perfect. Let's do that. The first one, there a sudden movement spasm contraction or convulsion a surge of sexual excitement. Yeah, that's pretty much on the head there. Right. Miriam Webster. Explosive discharge of neuromuscular tension at the height of sexual arousal, usually accompanied by the ejaculation of semen in the male and by vaginal contractions in the female. Right. And then famous Smut Peddler, dr. Alfred Kinsey. I'm sorry. Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. What was the name of the movie that Ray played him in? Was it just Kenzie? It was Kenzie and it was Liam Neeson. Neeson. Hold on. He called an orgasm. It can be, like, into the crescendo or climax and sudden stillness achieved by an orchestra of human emotions. Also, it could be compared to an explosion of tensions or the sneezing, which Shane and Freeman, who wrote this article, took issue with that's because it's not true. That's all myth. Like, if you sneeze five times, it's like an orgasm or you'll have an orgasm. I don't think that's at all what he was saying. Well, no, but that is a sense of tension and then immediate relief that washes over your body following, like, a heavy sneeze. I think that's what he was saying. Yeah, but there is an urban myth that if you sneeze, like, five or seven times in a row I don't think Kenzie Dealton urban myth. I'm a scientist. I've seen since then. So the point of all this is that the orgasm, while it is this sensation that washes over your body, it's an explosion of tensions. It's like sneezing. It's accompanied by ejaculation. In men, there's all these physiological experiences going on, but all of it is centered in the brain. The point is, the orgasm takes place in the brain. And thanks to the wonder machine, we now know pretty much what's going on in the brain. We don't fully understand orgasms, but we have a much clearer picture than we did even ten years ago, 20 years ago. Did you ever hear the Billy Connolly, the comedian? Yeah. He had one bit where he talked about when he first learned of an orgasm when he was like twelve years old. Like some older friend of his or his brother or cousin taught him how to achieve it and what it was. And he's like, I did it. And it was the best thing ever. And he said, and then he came back to me the next day and was like, you only get 1000 of those. He was like, the next week I've used them all up. Well, I don't know if it was 1000. They don't even know if it's going to make it on the air. We'll find out. So let's start clean. Okay, let's talk about where all this starts takes place. Orgasms begin in the genitalia and they end in the brain. Pretty much. That's it. Or they begin in the genitalia, go to the brain and then come back to the genitalia. Maybe. Or they begin in the brain and then go to the genitalia and then back to the brain. We're going to get to the bottom of this. But essentially there's a lot of nerves involved in this and you're not going to be surprised to find that the genitalia, both male and female, are extremely sensitive. Nervewise. Sure. Apparently the clitoris has about 8000 nerve endings just in itself, comparatively speaking, the penis, a circumcised penis, I understand it has about 4000 nerve endings in the whole thing, the glands. Oh really? Yes, and I didn't see the substantiated anywhere. But an uncircumcised penis supposedly has like 25,000 nerve endings in it. That's all propaganda. Is that brought to you by the Circumcision Society? Circumcision, it was on one of those sites. And also that reminds me, go listen to the Circumcision podcast. That was a good one. Oh yeah. Did you just want to remind yourself that we can cover these things without laughing? No, I just remembered that we did Circumcision and then I thought you were just like, I got to do this. I got to be able to say the word penis without laughing. Penis gland. All right. So what happens is you get all these nerve endings during intercourse and at climax there will be messages sent through these large nerves that run up your spinal cord except for the vagus nerve, which is very important that we mentioned that bypasses the spinal cord and to the brain and tells the brain, hey, this is great, this feels awesome. You want to do this again, right? And there's different bundles are, I guess stimulated in different areas, right? Yeah. So you've got like the hypogastric nerve which is located in the uterus and cervix and women and in the prostate and men. Yes. So if you tickle these areas you can conceivably achieve orgasm through the hypogastric nerve. There's the pelvic nerve transmits from the vagina and cervix and women obviously. Right. And from the rectum of both sexes. There's some overlap here. Go ahead and say that. Next one the padundal nerve. Yeah. Pudendal or pudundal, I'm not sure which. Or Pondundal, but either way, it's P-U-D-E-N-D-A-L. Right. That's the clitoris in women and the scrotum and penis in men. So that's like kind of the well established, long understood bundle of nerves. Is it? Yeah, because the whole concept that a woman could even have an orgasm is pretty recent. Sure. It's pretty new. Like the last century. Yeah. As far as science goes, you go to Europe and ask some lady 100 years ago, 200 years ago, she's going to be like, what are you, stupid? Yes. Watch this. They're like, oh, that's what that's called. We thought you just had the tumors. Right. And then you've got the vagus nerve, which we said bypasses the spinal cord. It transmits from the cervix, uterus and vagina, and 80% to 90% of the nerve fibers are sensory in the vagus nerve. So the vagus nerve is the money nerve and it controls more than just orgasms. Apparently, if you have vagus nerve damage, you choke when you try to swallow liquids. Yeah, we talked about that in something we said Vegas before, and it had to do with choking. I'll bet you it was either competitive eating or sword swallowing. Yes, sword swallowing was the sword swallowing, yes. Okay, so the Vegas nerve is involved in swallowing as well as in orgasm. And I could only find, obviously then, if it's involved in swallowing, it's in men and women, but I could only find reference to the vagus nerve and orgasms in relation to female orgasms. Yeah, me too, but we'll get to that later. And the Vegas nerve, though, also, like you said, that's a pretty important nerve and it's very only recently discovered as far as orgasms go. But the big key to it is that it bypasses the spinal cord and go straight to the brain, which is really good news for a certain subset of the human population. Chuck, aka. Paraplegics, people who have suffered catastrophic spinal injuries, even people whose spines have been interrupted, like their spinal cords are no longer connected top and bottom. They're totally paralyzed. Yeah. They can still come to climax, which is new because that was, I mean, forever. They said, those days are over for you. Pretty much. Right. But thank you. Dr. Barry Kamizarok. St. Kamisarak, who we should just call this guy Dr. O because he is the, as far as I can tell, the preeminent orgasm scientist he and Whipple are. Dr. Whipple? Yeah. Beverly St. Beverly. That's what the paraplegic people call it. Of course they do. They are at Rutgers. At Rattgus. Go, Scarlet. Knights. And they did some tests on women in 2004 who had severed spinal cords, and they found that they could feel stimulation in their cervix, they could reach orgasm. And they did the MRI and said, hey, it looks like this thing is bypassing. They're not just messing with us. Yeah, they're saying this is real because the MRI machine lit up like it's supposed to. Right. And like you said, they showed that the areas of the brain that respond to the vagus nerve were lighting up. Especially they're like, oh, it's the vagus nerve. I mean, we're not kidding around. That is great news, because that's one of the most upsetting parts I would imagine, of spinal injury, is to say goodbye to that part of your life, to lose your sexuality like that. One of my good friends dated a girl who was paralyzed from the waist down and she was able to have an orgasm. Thank you. Vagus nerve. Yeah. The Vegas nerve is basically proof that women are God's favorite. Oh, yeah. No, actually, we'll see that's quite the opposite. That's right. I mean, the Vegas nervous, it's pretty great for women, but overall, dumb lumbering men have it way better, as we'll see. Okay, so let's talk about the brain. Let's talk about the pleasure center, aka rewards circuit. This is a pretty new like the 1950s is when they first kind of discovered this, and it seems like we talked about this too. They did experiments on rats. They basically hooked them up in the Skinner box and said, hey, if you go push this button, you're going to get rewarded in a very pleasurable way in your brain. It was like cocaine or something, wasn't it? I think so. And they found out that the rats really loved it to the tune of about 700 button pushes an hour. Oh, yeah. And they didn't eat anymore, didn't want water anymore. They just lay there. They just lay there and push this button. And it wasn't cocaine. They had electrodes implanted in the brain's reward center. So it was going and just stimulating it every day. Oh, no. But I think it had to do with study on drugs because the reward center, like sexual arousal and the high from drugs is a lot of it's going on there. Well, not only that, eating, laughing, hanging out with other people. Sure. Basically anything that ensures our survival as a species or as an individual, the reward center has something to do with it. And the whole point of the reward center is we get this release of dopamine, this pleasurable chemical that teaches us, wow, this feels really good. I want to do that again so I will survive. These rats died of exhaustion, though. Yeah, that's so crazy. But that's where they discovered it, in the if we're going to talk about the pleasure center, we should mention a few specific areas, like the amygdala regulates your emotions and we talk about the brain a lot. So this is sort of rehashed. This is kind of like up there with fight or flight. Like, we talked about the reward circuit quite a bit. We do, yeah, because we like it well, it's a great circuit. I wish I had that button. I'd be pushing it 700 times an hour. I have to come along and be like, you need to stop. Right. The nucleus accumbens, which I don't think we've ever mentioned on the show, I think we have, that controls the release of dopamine. It's part of the limbic system. And this plays a really big role in sexual arousal and like the high you feel from certain drugs got you. The VTA or the ventral tegmental area actually releases the dopamine. It takes its orders from the nucleus accumbens. Acumbenz, the cerebellum, controls your muscle function. Muscles are very important in an orgasm. And the pituitary gland, this is a big one, because it's not just dopamine, this pleasure that you've sensed. Like it's not just pleasure, there's other stuff going on. Like there's tristas, crying after sex. Like that's not just pleasure. You're overwhelmed with emotions sometimes, and that is thanks to our friend. The pituitary gland, which releases beta endorphins that decrease pain, oxytocin, which increases feelings of trust, vasopressin, which increases bonding. And a lot of these same hormones and chemicals are released when you give birth, when a woman gives birth as well, which apparently forms bonds between mother and child. And also these things are released. I think like oxytocin is a lactation chemical as well. So both mother and child during breastfeeding bond basically are overwhelmed with the sense of, like, I really like you, and I get the sense you like me too, so let's hang out. Yeah. Oxytocin is called the hormone of love and actually means quick birth in Greek. And not only is it released during childbirth, but it sort of facilitates childbirth. Got you. And nipple stimulation is released and that's what makes you lactate, which is pretty cool and calmness. It reduces your anxiety, makes you calm. So oxytocin up with oxytocin. Yeah. And Vestopressin too has similar effects as well. So you've got all these chemicals flooding your body, you've got your reward circuit going and all the right ways. Yeah. And this is the orgasm, basically. Especially the female orgasm, we should say. Like the male orgasm includes ejaculation and it's been long understood what's going on there. Right, but like, it's pretty much an A to B relationship. Yeah, but like I said, it was pretty recent, like the middle of last century, that people that science came to really say like, okay, all right, so this is real. Women aren't just trying to get on board here, they really are experiencing something. And then in the late 90s, in mid two thousand s, a group of Dutch researchers said, we're going to take this MRI, we're going to stick people in this MRI, we're going to bring them to orgasm, and we're going to watch what goes on in their brains. Yeah, well, first they use the Pet scan. Okay. You're right. I'm sorry. And actually, since you mentioned men, you told me in another email said, this article is sexist because it only talks about women almost. And I look that up. Apparently it's because the men's orgasm is so short, it's hard to study it. Okay, so it's like, boom, it's over. Whereas a woman can have a prolonged orgasm. Much easier to study. That right. So Pet scan. So the Pet scan. But think about this. It's like the swing and a study. It's like kinkasy. These test subjects were brought to orgasm. Their brains were watched with Pet scans later on MRIs. And what the Dutch researchers found was that there really aren't that many differences in the brains between men and women as far as the pleasure circuit goes. Yeah, they saw all the stuff they expected to see. Apparently, the brain, if you take a snapshot of maybe the peak of it during orgasm, during peak orgasm, and you compared it to a snapshot of the peak of a heroin dose, it looks 95% the same. One of the Dutch researchers said. But there are differences between men's orgasms and women's orgasms as far as brain regions are concerned. And it's not really surprising what they found. When you hear it, it's kind of intuitive. Well, the other thing that they found was the same, though, was that the orbital frontal cortex shut down for both. And that is where the seat of reason and behavioral control in your brain. So it's no surprise that that thing shuts down for both of us. You just completely lose control. You're enthralled by your orgasm. So the differences that you mentioned when a woman has sex, I had this so right. Earlier period, caductal gray P-A-G is activated. And it says in here, controls fight or flight. I got more that it provokes your defense responses, and it's not necessarily controlling fight or flight. Is that right? Is it activating it or stimulating it? What I saw is that it provokes your defense responses, which is interesting. Okay. Well, I mean, you could say defense responses by flight. Yeah, that's true. As part of it, at least. Okay. The woman's brain show decreased activity in the midgula and hippocampus. This one made sense to me. Deals with fear, anxiety. So fear and anxiety are out the door all of a sudden. Yeah, which makes sense because for a woman to have and enjoy sex, just physically speaking, it takes far more trust than it does for a man. And emotionally right. You need to be relaxed exactly. In general. And then here is one that I thought was kind of interesting. The part of the cortex associated with pain, the insular cortex, which is used to judge the ferocity, basically, of pain, like just how bad pain is, is activated. So it's basically scanning, looking out for pain or judging the experience based on partially through the lens of pain. I think everyone's been there, whether it's like tickling or anything where you're like, oh, I hate that. I hate that. But I love that. I love that. Got you. Very fine line sometimes. It's a very egalitarian interpretation. Thank you. Faking an orgasm, not surprisingly, of course, it doesn't use the same part of the brain. There's really bears almost no resemblance whatsoever. I didn't even think that should have been included. I didn't either, but I was mad at Shana Freeman for being sexist at the time when I read that. Now that I look back on it, I still don't think it should have been included. That's right. So, Chuck, we've been giving all of the kudos and attention to people who have orgasms. No problem, right? There are people out there who can't have orgasms. An orgasmic, yes, they have an orgasmia, which is an inability to achieve an orgasm. One of the big culprits are SSRIs serotonin, sometimes reuptake inhibitor. What was the other s? I can't ever remember. Selective? Yes, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which keeps serotonin in your synapses longer, so you cannot be depressed. Problem is, it decreases the production, the natural production of dopamine in the brain. And dopamine, obviously, is how we learn to enjoy and go do something like achieving an orgasm again. So, fortunately, once people wean themselves off of SSRIs or start taking other drugs, that increased dopamine production. Usually that an orgasmia goes away. Usually not all the time. Now, sadly, a very small percentage. I didn't get a number, but I did see that it was uncommon. Thankfully, post SSRI sexual dysfunction means after you have weaned yourself off and you're producing dopamine regularly, you're still not able to achieve an orgasm. They have no idea why, because they're like, your dopamine is working. What's your problem? And this is thanks to Dr. O again, right? I believe so. It's all over this stuff. That's one of the main reasons he's studying the orgasm, by the way, is not just to be like, oh, cool, look at the brain. It's to help people that are an orgasmic or who suffer from persistent sexual arousal syndrome. Which sounds horrible. Yeah. That means you're always sexually aroused, but you can't achieve orgasm. Right? Right. And, like, you're genuinely always sexually aroused. Doctor O looked at women who have PSAs and put them in an MRI and looked at their brains, and their brains are showing, like, yeah, I'm turned on right now. I'm turned on right now for no good reason. I can't do anything about it, but I'm turned on right now. And then even if I try to have an orgasm, I can't. So it's like a curse. But the science supported it in the MRI, right? Right. Yeah. So, I mean, these people were physically sexually aroused, and they couldn't do anything about it. He figured out that they can use meditation techniques, apparently works, basically calming techniques. Apparently has an impact on decreasing the sexual arousal. I think he's still trying to figure out the an orgasmia part. Josh yeah. Did you know that some people can orgasm from being touched in other parts of their body other than the genitalia? I did know that. For instance, the nipples that happen sometimes, they think that these sensations are transmitted to the same areas of the brain as the ones that come from your genitals. And so it's just the brain saying, all right, I'll give you a little bonus there. It's lighting up the right part of the brain. So here's an orgasm apparently also knees, nose, people. There are apparently women out there who can have orgasms just from imagery alone. No touching, no touching. And again, these people are in MRIs, the brain is lighting up and they're saying, yes, science, of course. This woman is actually having an orgasm from a no touch encounter, which is cracking the phantom limb thing is what really gets me. Yeah. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah. Apparently some people can they feel the orgasm in their phantom limb. Yes. It doesn't generate there. So you know how you have when you experience an orgasm, Chuck? Do you know how it's concentrated in your genitalia? I do. Now imagine if that sensation were in your foot like that's what felt good just as easily could, right? Sure. Now imagine that your foot had been amputated years before, but you're still feeling your orgasm in your phantom foot. That's what they're talking about. That's nutty. Well, I think what happened is there's basically a map of your brain. The way we interpret it is as a map called the cortical homoculus. And the cortical homoculus is like, okay, this part of the body corresponds to this part of the brain. Like the nerves here correspond here. And apparently if you suffer an amputation, your brain is like, well, I need to rewire myself, I need to remap a little bit. So I'm going to assign the sensation in the foot that's not there any longer to the genitalia. So the brain can become confused by the genitalia being stimulated. That experience can be felt in the amputated foot, for example. That's what scientists think. Right now. You can also say that they have no idea what's going on, but people are reporting having orgasms and phantom limbs. I think it's my new band name Too cortical Humunculus. That's a good one. I've got some breaking news, Josh. Oh, wow. This is a surprise for you, my friend. Okay, doctor, I was at it again and this was just released on the old AP Wire last week, November 18. They kicked it up a notch and had ladies sit in the fMRI machine, which has even kicked up a notch from the regular MRI. And they now have the first movie of the female brain as it approaches experiences and recovers from an orgasm. Wow. So they put this couple of ladies actually, and one of them talked about it. She did a little, I think she blocked about it she said that one of the problems in doing this, obviously, is you have to not move very much at all because it'll disrupt the data. So they fitted her with a breathable plastic mesh helmet that was screwed into the bed to keep her still, eyes wide shut for some reason. And they told her to practice being still while bringing herself to climax. Okay? So she duck taped a kitty bell from her cat's, what do you call it, the collar onto her forehead. And for two weeks practice bringing yourself to climax without ringing that bell. And she said, I got good enough at it to successfully do this in the experiment. And it was successful. So you can go on the internet now and look this up and watch this video. The animation plays. You see the activity building up in the genitalia area of the sensory cortex like it should. Then activity is spreading to the limbic system, then it spreads to the limbic system, which is involved in emotion and longterm memory. Then, as the orgasm arrives, activity shoots up in two parts of the brain, the cerebellum and the frontal cortex that control the muscular tension. So all of a sudden, the muscles contract really heavily. So that shoots up during the orgasm. It reaches a peak in the hypothalamus and that's when it releases the oxytocin and all that good stuff and causes the uterus to contract. And I'm sorry, the nucleus acumbans, that's also firing off during the peak because controlling the release of dopamine. Yeah. And then afterward everything like you see, it just goes from all colorful back to the cold, dead blackness of your memory. The doritos center starts becoming active. So, Chuck, there's a very big question that we haven't really answered. We understand why men have orgasms. Why do women have orgasms? Evolutionarily. But why? I mean, it doesn't make any sense. If it's an evolutionary adaptation like it is for men, then why is it so hard for some women to have orgasm? You know, 10% of women will go through their entire lifetimes without ever experience an orgasm. How many? 10%. Wow, that's a lot. Yeah. So if it's evolutionary, that completely pulls the rug out of that whole idea because then it should be really easy for women and men, right? Yeah. Okay, so one of the ideas that's long been bandied about is a byproduct theory. Like, you know why men have nipples? Because women have nipples. We're all humans. So at some point during gestation or whatever, we still keep ours even though we don't need them. Men don't need nipples, but we're humans and women need nipples. So think for yourself. Makes sense. I don't use mine anymore. They think that possibly the female orgasm is the same thing. Men and women are both humans. Men need to have orgasms. So women do as byproduct. In this really weird study that came out last year of twins, they studied same. Sex twins and opposite sex twins and same sex twins had similar orgasm patterns. Right. Okay. Opposite sex twins who, if it is just a byproduct, should have the same or similar orgasm patterns. It didn't hold up. So where does that leave us? Well, you have no idea. Confused. They think that it could possibly be an evolutionary remnant, like it was strategic to our survival at some point in the distant past. And it's just a relic that kind of hangs around, which is kind of a depressing thought, because then that means we're watching it as it's endangered and it's growing extinct. And that's sad. And I think that it needs to be snatched back from the grips of natural selection. Well, some things maybe just shouldn't be studied. Maybe you should just I don't know. I'm sure there are women out there saying, just put the studies away. Yeah. Let's just look at it as a big bonus. Right. And that's a big guy. That's when Dr. Roe flicks the switch and the disco ball comes down from the ceiling. So if you want to know more about orgasms and see some pretty cool stock images of lit brains and things like that, you can type in what happens in the brain during an orgasm. You probably just type in orgasm in the search bar@houseworks.com. It will bring up some interesting, cool stuff. Sure. And I said, search bar. I believe. So. That means it's time for a listener mail. Josh, before we move on, we have to announce, I believe, one final time about our contest. This is the last time, because the contest ends December 31, I believe. Right. You have to enter to win, as they say. Yeah. And you have to enter only through Facebook. Yes. You have to like the howellsuffworks.com Facebook page, not the Stuff you should know page. We cannot say this enough yet still people write in on our stuff you should know well and say, Where do you enter? Yeah. Howstep works.com like it. You have to enter a few small details. Nothing too obtrusive. Right, right. Nothing too intrusive. What does it say? You have to the end of the year through December 31 to enter. We're going to announce the winner the first week of the year. What a great way to start your year off. Exactly. Like knowing that you're coming to meet a couple of schmo. Grand prize is you get to fly to Atlanta up to $500, airfare, covered. Stay in a hotel covered. Get an Amex gift card. $100. Yeah. For, like, nail clippers. Because you can't fly with those. Right. And if you refer someone, you can tweet it out or say, this is my Facebook status as I just entered this. If you refer someone and they win after they enter, then you win a Kindle Fire. Right. You don't have to keep track of that. We have, like, people who track those metrics. There's an algorithm. Yeah. So it's a pretty cool contest. Pretty straightforward. But we get to go to lunch. I don't think we said that. You come to the office, you get a tour. Yeah. We take you to lunch. We take you to lunch. Yeah. With Jerry. Jerry's coming. We're not going to make you spend that Amex gift card on it. That's for you. Although, if they wanted to buy me nail clippers, I'm not going to stop them. And sorry to those of you in other countries, I know it's a rub that you have to be in the United States here, but we can't win your lotteries or your contest in New Zealand, so you can't win ours. It's just the way contests work. Yes. And just go to the house, the work Facebook page, and I'm sure there'll be some sort of something up that says, hey, you should enter this contest. Agreed. Okay. So I think we should get on with it. That's right. Josh. This is about Jean patenting, I believe. And it's from Jim in New Jersey. Okay. Garden State. I loved your patent podcast. Guys at Dovetails love that word. Very nicely with the tech stuff. Patent podcast? Really? Yeah, that's what he says. I'm of the opinion that if you construct a new gene, then you can patent it. However, if you discover a gene already existing in nature, then I'm not sure that you should be able to patent it. This is just Jim's opinion. I like his opinion. Maybe you can patent the process of identifying the gene seems reasonable. Maybe you can patent a specific use of the gene, such as for testing, which you clearly covered as being controversial. However, you shouldn't be able to, quote, own the gene. What if it has another use? It's a good point. Yeah. In the epilogue on the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, rebecca Sculot describes a disturbing scenario. If you provide a sample of our DNA to a medical professional of your own DNA, and it is found to have a mutation that's the foundation of the next wonder drug, you are entitled to nothing. Yeah. So legally, your sample is considered trash unless you've pre arranged some legal arrangement. That means you've abandoned it. It's like Henry lack. Are you familiar with her? No. I've heard that, though. Have we talked about this? Yeah. She's kind of famous in this really weird way. She's like an African American lady from the 40s or fifty s. And somehow she donated her blood or some tissue or something to science, and it became the basis of all scientific research after that. So, like, all these breakthroughs and drugs and cancer blockers and all of this pharmaceutical research was based on this culture that's still around? Her line is still around. It's. Why she's immortal. Yes. And her family has gotten nothing from it. Interesting. And companies have made hundreds of billions of dollars off of this lady's life. Wow. Like her biology. And they've got nothing. I haven't read the book, but I've heard nothing but good things about it. I have to check that out, but that's from Jim in New Jersey. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Henry. The lax. Okay. 1940s, you said? I think 40s or 50s look that up. And it's probably even worse than that, I'm sure, than the way I described it, but we'll probably end up reading it. Yeah. Okay, I'm done. I'm ready. Let's finish this. That was a good one. Well done. Well done to YouTube, buddy. We kept it very mature. Tip of the cap to you two. Sir dolphin it as well. If you want to contact me and Chuck, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can visit us on Facebook@facebook.com, stuff you should know, and you can send us an email at stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The House of the Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime 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." | ||
Geothermal Energy: Earth's Gift to Mankind | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/geothermal-energy-earths-gift-to-mankind | Green energy is good for all, and it doesn't get much greener than using the Earth's own heat to warm your home or office. Learn all about geothermal energy in today's new episode. | Green energy is good for all, and it doesn't get much greener than using the Earth's own heat to warm your home or office. Learn all about geothermal energy in today's new episode. | Thu, 24 Sep 2015 12:42:21 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=12, tm_min=42, tm_sec=21, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=267, tm_isdst=0) | 32716684 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself. With no must, no fuss, turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comssk and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 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@ibmcom. Welcome to stuff you should know from Houseteporkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles to beat up Bryant, Jerry and me. Josh Clark. Which makes us Wishnow the podcast. That's right. I thought that I wrote this article, and it turns out it didn't. That's not your pseudonym Stephanie Watson. No, I thought it updated. I did something way back in the day on our website about geothermal energy. It might have just been an update that I didn't end up getting a Via line for. It was probably how to Survive a Shipwreck due to geothermal Energy or something like that. Right? Maybe. Didn't you do a bunch of, like, survival ones? Yeah. With Survival Guy for a while you were wearing that, like, bush hat, the safari hat? Yeah. Where one flat goes up, like the jungle guy from GI. Joe. What was his name? I don't know. I didn't watch those. That's crazy. Yeah, I know, right? Crazy. I was too sophisticated. Chuck. Yes. So do you know the Earth is about 4.8 billion years old? It's old. Super old. That's like so old. Some say it's a lot younger. Some people do, yeah. Science is pretty much in consensus on the idea that it's about 4.8 billion years old. And for about the first billion of those years, it was in a crazy state. Just loco, basically. So the whole thing is supposedly formed as an accretion disk, right. And the terrestrial planets in our solar system, which include Earth, Mercury, Venus, and Mars, happened to attract the heavier elements, elemental particles, which created a rocky core eventually. And then more and more stuff was attracted to this rotating, gravity pulsing core. And the Earth was formed eventually, right? Yes. Well, as it was formed or forming, at some point, another celestial body, which just took off afterward, slammed into Earth. And remember we talked about the moon. This is how the Moon was formed. Just basically spit out a bunch of the Earth, and then the Moon formed its own little accretion disk. And then there was the Moon. But when this body hit the Earth, they think that it melted. The impact melted the first several thousand kilometers of the Earth's surface. The depth just melted it. It hit it that hard. Isn't that cool? Yeah. So I raised this, I mentioned all this for two points. One, that heat that was originally part of the Earth's early formation, still there. Yes. And then secondly, the heat from the impact that eventually calves the Moon still there, too. Wow. Isn't that crazy to think that after 4.8 billion years, the Earth is still cooling down? Yeah. That's pretty remarkable. That's not all. So those accounts for combined about half of the heat found in the Earth's core. The other half is mostly from radioactive decay of isotopes in the core from these incredibly high temperatures and heat. The particles actually decay. And as they decay, a particle is sloughed off. And when there's an imbalance in the mass, that extra mass is released as heat energy. So that's about half of the heat in the core. But it's substantial. It is 4400 miles. That's 6400 clicks down. You're going to have temperatures of about 7600 degrees Fahrenheit. That's hot. That's the core, baby. And at that core, and we should say for our friends everywhere else on Earth, it's about 4200 degrees Celsius. That's right. And at that core, we're talking about rock melting temperatures, creating magma, which is that melted rock. Right. So you've got the magma down there. It's less dense, so it tends to rise. And we talked about a lot in the volcano episode. We talked about it some of the geyser's episode, when the lava flows, that is the magma. But when it just stays down there, it heats up underground water and that escapes, sometimes as geysers, sometimes as hot springs, even. Yeah. It can just be like an underground reservoir of really hot water. Yeah. Or it just stays there. And that's what's called a geothermal reservoir, is when you have this really hot water heated by magma just hanging out down there, waiting to be used. Yeah. And so just in the first 50 km no, I'm sorry, just in the first 10 km below the Earth's surface, right? Yes. Not that deep. There is an estimated 500 times more energy in the form of heat than there is in all of the oil and natural gas reserves in the world. 50,000 times more energy. Right. Crazy. Because of all this heat. And everywhere you go on Earth, you're going to find in some way, shape or form this heat that's in the Earth's surface. Beneath the surface. Yes. So I said it's just waiting to be used. It's not waiting to be used because it is being used in the form of geothermal energy. And that is not new. It goes back to the Roman times. Ancient Romans used hot springs. Yeah. The City of Bath in England. It's a Roman town. That's right. Built around hot springs right here in North America 10,000 years ago. Our American paleo Indian friends. They use Hot Springs. They bathed in them. They cooked in them. Yeah. They would imagine. Not at the same time. I don't know. They could be like Cramer. Remember he prepared that radish flower as he bathed. Yeah. A nice butt stew. Yeah. They used to lower FDR into the Warm Springs, Georgia. That's right. And the first real geothermal heating system was developed in Boise, Idaho, here in the United States. Right. But before that, it was developed in Italy, in ladderello. That was actually after it. So the one in I thought the first one was in Pizza in Lauderello. Now, we'll talk about the distinctions in a minute. But the first the first plant was in Italy, right? Yeah. So that was a geothermal energy production plant in Boise, Idaho. They used what's called direct geothermal energy, which is basically where you just pipe this really hot water and use it to heat greenhouses in the winter. Or there's a lot of cities that get snow on the ground that have basically radiant heat. Sidewalks, where the heat from the geothermal springs nearby is pumped. Any sidewalks or streets to keep the ice from forming? Yes. Climate Falls, Oregon. They have such a system because they knew we have a Kgra nearby, which is a known geothermal resource area. They have water from about 200 to 220 degrees just sitting underneath the ground. And they, like you said, melt their sidewalks, they melt their bridges, they melt their faces out there. They melt anything they can with that junk. So, like I said, 50,000 times the amount of energy in the form of heat just waiting to be used in the first 10 km below the Earth's surface. Everywhere on Earth. That's pretty attractive, man, for a few reasons. One, everybody knows that fossil fuels are dirty. They're problematic. Sure. They require transportation. And if you think about electrical production in the world, the world uses 17.7 million electricity, or it did in 2012. That's a ton of electricity. It is. Most of it was produced by gas, oil or coal. And the whole point of all of those things is you burn them and you create heat. Then you use that heat to heat up water, use that water to make steam, and use that steam to turn a turbine. Yes. We talked about this in one of our other ones, how amazing it is, electricity. Yeah. Everything we've ever come up with still comes down to trying to get that steam to turn that turbine. That's exactly right. That's why we use all of these fossil fuels, is to heat water. Not even just fossil fuels, man. Nuclear power uses radioactive we definitely talked about it there. Yeah. And they dip it in water, it heats the water up, turns it up in vapor, spins a turbine. I mean, with geothermal energy, one of the things that makes it so attractive is you're cutting out a lot of processes. You're not only are you cutting out the need to burn fossil fuels, you're cutting out entire steps, which over the course of the planet's lifetime, can reduce the cost of this geothermal energy production. Yeah. And it is caught on in a big way. I believe there are 20 countries now that are using geothermal energy. The United States is leading the way there. Yes, surprisingly. I didn't realize that. Yeah, but if you want to really see it in action, go to Iceland. It's the city of Ricky Vic, where basically the entire city is heated with those geothermal wells. Yeah. In the country of Iceland as a whole, a quarter of its energy is produced geothermally. Amazing. Same with El Salvador. Did you know that? I did. I thought you were going to say I did not. You got me there. The thing is though, is worldwide about 7000 geothermal energy are producing. Don't forget, we use 17.7 million. It's still producing megawatts. It is, but we'll talk about the different kinds of geothermal energy right after this. 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 of their own. Sleep. IBM. Let's create learn more@ibm.com It automation. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve compodcast. And start taking charge of your future today. All right. Kinds of geothermal energy. I like this. If you know the Earth science jazz is me, man. Yeah, well, whatever I did for this many years ago, I remember being very turned on by it. I don't know if it was updating or writing. I just remember thinking, man, this is cool. And if you are a critic of geothermal energy, hold your horses we understand that there's problems with it. We're just talking about geothermal energy, and it's pros right now. Why people get so upset about alternative fuel sources. I've never undergotten that. There's a lot of money at stake. A lot of geopolitical posturing and power and stuff at stake. The world is based on fossil fuels. I know, but I don't know, it just doesn't make sense. It seems like it would make more sense even for economies to like, hey, let's pursue it all. Well, that seems to be the prevalent mindset these days, an energy policy that includes everything. Although I think a lot of that, though, is just kind of paying lip service to the alternative stuff. And it gives you a blank check to pursue fossil fuels more because you seem like you're an open minded person. Yeah, it's just weird. I don't know. You hear something about, like, solar power and you think I think, well, that's neat, and I'll post something about that. Wait, what does solar power make you think, well, that's neat, and I'll post something about it on the stuff you should know. Facebook, while people are just so powerful stupid. That's so dumb. Why would anyone do that? What is up with, like, Facebook and stuff like that? It brings out the worst in people. Give a man a mask and he will show his true face. Wise words. Did you just make that up? No, that's an old thing. I think anything that says Give a man automatically reveals his age. And around the block a few times. Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he'll eat for at least two or three days. It's a fish for biting. Did you make that one up? Oh, that's a good one, Chuck. It's a T shirt. I never catch fish, so it should say, teach Chuck to fish and he'll starve because he isn't very good at catching. Can't get a bite. Nope. Got you. He'll go to Arthur traitors instead? Are they still around? I think there was one in La. That I remember. Seems like Captain D's really took over the market. I don't even see Long John Silvers anymore. There's still Long John's, but I mean, it's more Captain Dees than anything. Well, as it should be. Are you a captain? Deese over Long John's fan. I grew up on Long John Silver. They got me with the free pirate hats. Yeah, I think I like the Captain D's better. I just like fried fish. Yeah. Is Arthur Treacherous also ran just like those, or is it like, a little fancier? No, I think it was just another chain, but has seen its better days. Got you in the past, if I'm not mistaken. I might be wrong. Someone tell me about Arthur Treacher. Yeah, if you work at Arthur Treacherous, let us know if it's still around. All right. Direct geothermal energy. That is where you have one of those known geothermal resource areas not too far under the earth's surface. That's like if you're located near a place where there are these hot pools yeah. And you're not doing anything fancy with it, you're just basically piping that hot water into, say, a house and using it as hot water at that house, which is what that Boise district did back in 92. And you want to know something amazing? What? That geothermal direct use plant is still heating 450 homes in Boise today. Nice. Yeah. And it is not just to give you hot water. You can also use a heat exchanger and incorporate into your HVAC system. And all of a sudden, you are using that heated water to heat your home as well and to cool your home. Right. So that's a geothermal heat pump, I believe. Right. What, to heat and cool? Yeah. So I think those are both like a geothermal heat pump is an example of direct geothermal energy. Direct geothermal energy is not necessarily just like using the hot water to heat and cool your house. It could also be yeah, exactly. Or you can just use the hot water directly to wash your dishes or something like that. Sure. But when you're using a heat exchanger or something, this is actually extremely clever, and it's been around for a very long time. And as the green movement kind of caught on stupid green movement. It's this older technology that's starting to get re discovered, I guess. But basically, if you use a geothermal heat pump, the whole idea is that you bury in the ground beneath your house some pipes, a closed pipe system. Yeah, closed loop is what it's called. And there's like an HVAC system in your house that circulates air or say something like water or antifreeze through these pipes, and it takes the heat from your house and exchanges it through the heat exchanger in the summer, sends it through underground where it's cooler than it is in your house in the summer. So that water, antifreeze or whatever is cooled, which brings it back and then cools the air in your HVAC system, which then blows out through your ductwork. Yeah. Just a few feet under your feet. Underground, it's 50 to 60 deg year round. Yeah. Below the frost line, which is usually about 10ft below ground, since it's a steady temperature, depending on the season, especially if you have wild seasonal fluctuations where it gets really cold and really hot, depending on yes. Then you can really take advantage of this. So the whole idea is if it's say, like 50 degrees in the summertime when it's 90 degrees, if you're cooling that liquid, that's in turn cooling your air, that's easy. Sure. But 50 degrees in the winter, that seems not that much warmer. But just that little bit of warmth, that extra, say, 20 deg on a particularly cold day, that heats up that air. Which means that your HVAC system has less energy to expend in further heating up the air to say 75 deg. Yeah, call it an assist. Exactly. So you're still using a lot of the same technology, like a compressor and all of that that you would use with a traditional HVAC system in your home. But the steady temperature of the ground is, like you said, assisting that. So you're using less energy and thus your energy costs are less as well. Plus it's reliable. You know that it's going to be between 50 and 60 deg right. All year round. All year round. The third way that you can use this is with a power plant like we talked about. And that is when, like we said, they pipe it up through the wells and they generate electricity. There are dry steam plants where they just pipe it directly into the generator and power it. Right. That's I guess the easiest and most cost efficient. Yeah, I think the one in Italy, Lardarello, I think is Lardarello, Italy in still online today. They're basically like, we have the steam. Right. And let's use it. Let's just put a turbine on top of it so it cuts out all those middlemen it's just you're using the steam, naturally produced steam underground to spin the turbine to produce electricity. Right. And obviously you have to have a great amount of luck, I guess, to be located near such a place. Right. And so that's considered a dry steam plant. Yes. Then you have the flash steam and that's water between 307 hundred degrees Fahrenheit, which is super hot, that they draw up through a well and then use that steam to spin the turbine. That's right. And then there's binary cycle plant. So let's say you're not located over a super hot reservoir, but you still have pretty hot water, something that would be considered like a hot spring. Typically this is between 153 hundred deg water, which is as high as 148 degree. Okay. What you do is you take this water and you use it to heat another liquid that has a lower boiling point. Yeah, pretty clever. Then when that liquid with the lower boiling point begins to boil, it creates the steam that powers the turbine. So again, that's like an assist, I would say. Probably. And then lastly, there's another one that's newer that's called Enhanced Geothermal Energy and basically uses fracking techniques to create a geothermal hotspot. So they go in and they dig wells, they go a deposit well and they dig another well and exit well. Right. And then in between those two, they go in and just break up a bunch of this really hot rock where there's no water necessarily. But it's super hot, right? Yes. And then they pump water into this hot rock bed, let it heat up and then they let the hot water come back up the other well. And then they use that to create steam, usually like a binary cycle plant. And again, that spins the turbine. Yeah, it's all about spinning the turbine. All about spinning the turbine. Man all right, so let's take a break here, and we will finish up with, I guess, the low down on how it compares to other forms of energy out there. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call an IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create learn More@ibm.com only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve compodcast. And start taking charge of your future today. All right, so here we are. Is it good? Is it bad? Well, like everything, it's both. I'm going to have to land on the good side, though, for the most part, I think it's typically good. The thing is, the bad stuff is so rarely mentioned. Everybody thinks, like geothermal, it's as green as it gets. And there's a lot about geothermal energy that is very green. For the most part. It emits very little carbon dioxide compared to a fossil fuel power plant. Yes, I have some numbers on that. In fact, by the way, if you've ever driven by a geothermal plant and you see the smoke coming out, that's not smoke, it's water vapor. Yeah. So don't get all up on your hackles. Water vapor? Just water vapor. And I looked this up, I couldn't find anything. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas as well, like a pretty bad one. But I didn't see anything where that was like a problem with geothermal energy. Oh, yeah. All right, so here's some numbers. They did a case study of a coal plant. They meaning they scientists? Yeah, scientists. Doers may or may not have been funded by a front group. They say the coal plant with scrubbers, with good scrubbers and emissions control technology. So basically a newer coal plant. And they said that it emitted 24 times more CO2 and almost 11,000 times more sulfur dioxide and about 3800 times more nitrous oxide per megawatt hour than a geothermal steam plant. Wow. Pretty good. That's not bad at all. However, one of the concerns with geothermal is it does emit sulfur dioxide, which gives it a horrible eggy smell. Yes. And contributes to acid rain. But so two emissions from geothermal plants are about 30 times lower per megawatt hour than coal plants, which are the largest. So two source. Right. So that is one of the bad emissions. Other than that, not a whole lot of really harmful emissions. No, most of the problems that come from geothermal energy production come from the fact that when you are harvesting hot water from these geothermal sources before, they used to just pump it out. Yeah. That was an open loop system. And they figured out too much anymore. Right. And they figured out that this is a huge waste of a resource. Right? Yeah. So they started making closed loop systems where the water would be pumped out. It would be used to, say, heat some other fluid with a lower boiling point, or however you use it to make that turbine spin. And then the water would be captured and then sent back down into the reservoir to be reheated and used again. Super smart. It is very smart. And in that case, there's even fewer emissions than with open loop system. The problem is that it also leads to introduction of things like salts, sometimes arsenic, other heavy metals into the groundwater supply once it comes through and makes a cycle. So there's a threat to groundwater contamination using geothermal energy production. That's one problem with it. Yeah. Another one is those hotbeds that are used to basically use fracking techniques. Just like with fracking, they can cause things like earthquakes or like massive earth sinking. There's a geothermal plant in Australia where the area sunk about 5ft ever since it's been in production. Wow. Yeah. Because you're going in and you're sucking out all the water, you're breaking up a bunch of rocks that form bedrock. So when you start messing with that stuff, it can have seismic repercussions. That's a good band name. Thanks. Noise pollution is on the plus side because they say it typically produces less noise than the equivalent of leaves wrestling from breeze. That is not bad. Plus, the typical geothermal power plant takes about a lot less real estate. Yeah. You can do a vertical system if it suits the area, and it really doesn't use up much as far as spreading it out. What's called surface area. Right. Because it's going straight up and down, uses a lot less water. Geothermal plant uses five gallons of fresh water per megawatt hour, compared to 361 gallons by a natural gas facility. Isn't that ironic? It uses less water even though water is the basis of the whole thing. Yeah. And apparently binary aircooled plants use zero fresh water. It's all just down from the earth yes. And for the land use, I did have one more stat over a 30 year span, which is the time period they usually use to consider the big impact of the lifecycle of a system they said a geothermal facility uses 404 land per gigawatt hour while coal uses 3632 wow, that's a big difference yes. I also saw that they had like a net energy ratio of like four for every one input of energy you get five in return now which is really great the thing is. The upfront costs are very expensive so in a lot of places where it would be advantageous to start a geothermal energy production plant. They just don't have the money to set up that kind of infrastructure it's anywhere from 1 million to $4 million. For a well to be drilled and with. Say. Like a hot rock binary system. You need two wells at least that's just for one area yeah. So the upfront cost can be prohibitive and the same thing goes for if you're setting up like a geothermal heat pump in your home too yeah. I think it's pretty reasonable well. With government subsidies. It's super reasonable now with the energy savings they typically estimate the thing pays for itself within five years yeah for the 2009 Economic Stimulus Recovery Act they removed the cap on heat pump system rebates so now you can get 30% toward a qualified geothermal heat pump system so even the Richie Riches can make out so if you're looking at an average. A typical home of 2500 sqft boy. That's a typical home jeez a heating load of 60,000 BTUs and a cooling load of 60,000 BTUs it's going to cost about 20 to 25 grand to install you get 30% back and that's about double the cost of conventional heating and cooling HVAC but it reduces your bill by 60% and it lasts 18 to 23 years which is easily double what your standard HVAC will cost yeah. So you're definitely going to make your money back if you want to invest in something like this it's also better than wind and solar in many ways because you don't have to rely on the sunshine or the wind to blow right. It's 24 7365. That's the other thing it's dependable it's also typically considered renewable although they figured out that you have to take measures to sustain a production plant like. You can't just pump all the water out you have to make a closed system yeah. But even if you do use a closed system. Like. The area can cool off over time like the one in Italy has seen a 25% reduction in steam power since the 1950s because the geothermal reservoir beneath it has been cooling so you basically have to take it easy on it you got to treat it like a little gently yeah and apparently you can use. If you're putting in a system not just for your home. But like a. Plant. Other things can be going on there. It can be a golf course. It can be a horse trading facility. Sure. What else is landing? It can be a cemetery. Well, maybe not a cemetery. Yeah, because people don't get buried below the frost line. They just get buried 6ft deep. Well, my family does. Addressing that. A lot of people say, well, it just takes up too much land. But if you don't have a lot of land, you can actually build a vertical system where the pipes just go straight down rather than flat beneath your house. And you'll have the same effect. That's right. The last thing I have here is the world's largest facility called the Geysers. It's in San Francisco, right? Yeah, about 70 miles north of San Francisco and Maya Thomas mountains, a company called Calpine. It is 40 sq mi long and it powers 14 plants. And this thing's been around for a while. Isn't that new? 725 electricity. It creates enough to power 725,000 homes or a city like San Francisco. So it meets the power needs of Sonoma Lake and Mentino counties and portions of Marine and Napa and Satisfies. Almost 60% of the average electricity demand in the north coast region. Is the Golden Gate Bridge to Oregon. Yes. Isn't that crazy? That's so perfect for San Francisco. Oh man, they're all over that stuff. That's great. You got nothing else? No, man. My dad was an HVAC engineer. He'd be pretty proud of this one. Yeah, you're going to point it out to him? Probably. He probably won't listen, but still. And he'd say, what's that show you do again? If you want to know more about geothermal energy, you can type those words in the search bar at Housestop Works.com. And I said search bar somewhere in there. And that means it's time for listening. I'm going to call this organ donation follow up from an expert, as he said. Hey guys, I'm a donation specialist at an OPO, an organ procurement organization in the Northeast. I've been doing it for about eight years and the biggest concern I had with your show was how tissue donation was incorrectly grouped together with whole body donation. They are definitely not the same thing. Body donation for science research is completely different than tissue donation for transplant. Tissue donation should be and is grouped together with organ donation. Bone, skin, cornea, heart valve, and vascular tissue are both lifesaving and life enhancing gifts meant for recipients. In fact, when you register to be a donor with DMV or an online database, you're registering as an organ and tissue donor, not a whole body donor. Secondly, there absolutely is federal oversight, regulation and protocol for tissue. The FDA TB. American association of Tissue Banks. But that's a fun conference. Yeah, conference. The EBAA, the Ibank Association of America, some of those governing bodies, opioids and tissue banks are held to strict standards, including site visits and annual audits. Lastly, I would encourage you both to do some further research into tissue donation. And be careful not to perpetuate in for extreme types of misconceptions. This guy, this is from Josh Brennan, and another guy wrote in and was like, I see where Josh is going, but he's got it backwards. He said there's too much regulation on the Oregon side. 7000 people a year die because of the overregulation and they need to make it all for money. Disagree. And he sourced a bunch of academic he's like, the medical and academic communities are the ones making the call for this. It's like it's not like a bunch of free market zealots. Trump's not calling for it. No, he was like, doctors and scientists are saying this is how it should go. I guess the reason I saw fit to lump those things in together is because I saw that one of the outcomes from whole body donation could be the harvesting of your parts for sale. And that's why that happens from time to time that's legal or illegal or gray market. Yeah, that's what the guy the first guy said. The gray market is there because it's so heavily regulated. People are dying because they can't get this stuff, so they're willing to go pay. He said if you take out the if you give the demand, that illegal supply won't have to be there. Yeah, I mean, maybe that's the case as well, but I don't know. I think they're doing a great job with the organ perfume of things aside from the 7000 people that are dying every year waiting. Yeah, that's funny. Thank you very much for writing in, Josh. Oh, Josh. Oh, Josh, yeah. And do you remember the other dude's name? No. No. Anonymous masked author. That's right. Thanks for letting us know the deal. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at xyskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffytunnel, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@householdworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopeet.com." | ||
How Audience Testing Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-audience-testing-works | Did you know some of our most beloved movies originally had different, sometimes better, endings? That is until they were tested in front of focus groups. | Did you know some of our most beloved movies originally had different, sometimes better, endings? That is until they were tested in front of focus groups. | Tue, 30 Jun 2015 14:27:43 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=14, tm_min=27, tm_sec=43, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=181, tm_isdst=0) | 38317740 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles W, Chuck, Bryant and Jerry's over there. So let's just call this stuff you should know, shall we? Hey, that's a good name for a show. I came up with that. You did? You're the inventor. And from that was hatched all of the Stuff podcasts. Yeah, but I mean, how stuff works. But I don't know. I think you're selling yourself short. It's okay. So this is another one of our movie centric podcasts that people seem to love. We've done all kinds of things from exploitation films to movies that change filmmaking to how films are rated to the NPAA. NPAA. How TV Ratings work. Yeah. Ten Exploitation Films. Yeah, that was a good one. And some movies that changed filmmaking. That's right. All the stuff you just said. Before we get going here, buddy, we need a blanket spoiler because we're going to be talking about movies that had their endings changed. So this is your fair warning. Most of them are old movies. Most of this information is out there, of course. But if you're one of those people who gets really upset by this kind of thing, you may want to you've been warned. You've been warned. And now, drumroll. We're going to talk about audience testing, which is depending on the filmmaker. And the film can be a really super awesome, valuable tool. It can also be like a terrible the worst thing that's ever happened to you. Yes. And apparently, even if you believe in the system, it's a terrible experience. Says Ron Howard. Yeah, he's, well, not famous for but he is on record, along with his producing partner, Brian Gracer, who, by the way, do you know this about Brian Grazer best hair and show business? Well, clearly, yeah. But he has the habit of taking frame pictures of himself over to people's houses and when they're not looking, among their family photos. That's pretty awesome. Pretty cool. That reminds me. I know you hate George Clinte's guts, but there's I know you said that there's a famous practice. He's a big practical joker. And he prepared this one over the course of, like a year, supposedly told, like, his best friend that he had taken up painting, just kept that going and going and then gave some of his close friends these awful paintings. And you're kind of expected to hang it up, right? You're like. Oh, thanks, George. Yeah, that's a pretty good one. This is great. But he felt so good about himself after that, so glib. So Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Grazer are on record as saying that they really can get a lot out of it. And what they would hate is to put a movie out and find out there's something they really easily could have corrected, either like confused or upset an audience as a whole. Right. But he also said it's terrible to go through. Even when it's a good experience, it's never a good experience. And that's somebody who believes in the system. If you don't believe in the system and you still have to go through it like Robert Altman did. He's not a test audience kind of guy. No. Can you imagine putting him through that? No. That's like letting all of the town's ladies bring Boo Radley the pies for Killing Bob. You know, you can't put Robert Altman through the audience testing system. Who did that? I don't know. A dummy. Because he was a maverick filmmaker. My brother and Emily worked on movies with him. It's pretty neat. Legend. I know. It's good stuff. I wish I could tell a couple of the stories, but, I mean, did you expect to get rich off of a Robert Altman movie? No. Apparently these people did. I wonder what his top grossing movie ever? Probably the player or mash. I'll bet it was Mash. Yeah. Movies didn't grow so much back then. Yeah. But it's just a perennial classic. Yeah, that's true. The Player was great. Yeah. I mean, he's made a lot of great movies. And some kind of stinkers as well. Oh, yeah. But a lot of classics. Like Nashville. You ever seen Nashville? No, I never saw Nashville, man. So good. So the player saw shortcuts. Didn't see the lake. Wabagon one with Lindsay Lohan for some reason. What? Yeah, they did A Prairie Home Companion. Yeah. With Lindsay Lohan. That's just weird. And Meryl Streep. It was, like, not a good idea to get a casting director super drunk. They just have a point out photos, head shots, and then that's how we'll cast this. And then McCabe and Ms. Miller. That's a classic as well. Never even heard of it. Warren Beatty liked Mash, though. That was a good one. It was. So Ron Howard calls the process brutal and hideous. He said, Even if it's going well, it's not fun. Yeah. Francis Ford Coppola is somewhat responsible. Although they have tested movies all the way back in the 30s. Wizard of Oz. Yes. When the audience said, you know, that Somewhere Over the Rainbow song really slows things down. It's a stinker. Get it out of there. Thank goodness they didn't listen because that became one of the most iconic singing performances ever in a movie. Yeah. And apparently pointing that out is a really good way to talk somebody out of cutting something that a test audience remember wishing about. Yeah. Think about Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Chief. So when Coppola was making Apocalypse Now he had focus groups. Really? Yeah. Would not have guessed that. Well, that movie you've seen, the Hearts of Darkness, right? Know the documentary about it? Yeah. No, it's really good. He had a lot of studio heat coming down on him. You know, you've got a great movie when the documentary about your great movie is a great movie. Yeah, that's a good point. It's really good. I think his wife made that, although that's not necessarily true. The best, worst movie was a great documentary and Trolls Two was not a good movie in any way, shape or form. I've never heard of best worst movie. Have you ever heard of trolls, too? I've heard of Trolls, so I guess I've heard of Trolls, Too, apparently made by totally different filmmakers, completely unconnected, story wise and everything. This is just trolls, too. Got you. And this documentary caught up with the people from Trolls Too because it became like kind of this cool hipster thing to like, look at how terrible this movie is. Flap like the room. Sure. And this documentary kind of followed this movement and went and found the people who were in this movie who had no idea this is going on, and then basically puts them on the road, going around promoting, showings of Trolls Too and just living it up. That was great documentary. The documentary is good. The movie wasn't good. Right, okay. So I ate my own words. Understood? No, you didn't. But I think one of your pals from UCB is in it. In Trolls Too in the best, worst movie. Who the documentary? Do you know? One of the founders? No, not Matt Besser. Yes, it might be Matt besser. Maybe. I don't know, one of the guys from you. There's like a bunch of UCB people in it. Yeah, but okay, I got you. Besser was one of the founding members, though, with Amy Poehler and Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh, maybe. Matt Walsh is the one that was in old school, right? Yeah. So this is the other Matt. I think he might be in it. Yeah, he's a good guy. He listens to our show. Prove me wrong, Matt. Prove me wrong. Go Razor. Backs that's for him. He's an Arkansas fan or he just really likes Razorbacks. No, he's an Arkansas guy. Got you. Yeah, he's just a fan of the pig. Are we at an ad break yet? Not yet. Not until I finish the story about Copla He, when he was making Apocalypse Now, hired a man named Joe Farrell, or Pharrell, to help with marketing. And Pharrell said, you know what? I see a pretty big opportunity here. And so he partnered up with Catherine Para and formed the National Research Group. I don't think they're still exclusive, but at the time signed all the studios to an exclusive contract to do their audience testing. And I think they're still the top dog in audience testing, even though I think there are other companies that do it now. This is the company with the extraordinarily secretive name, NRG. The National Research Group. Yeah. And they also do, like, contract hits, I think, for the CIA and the NSA. No, but they don't have a website that I could find. Like, I was trying to just get a little information about the company. So they're a division of Nielsen. Well, which, of course, they're super secretive. We already thought they are. Yeah, it's crazy. It's like a cabal. Yeah, very much so. Randy Quad was right. He might be. And they don't just do audience testing. They also, back when people had telephones, would do a lot of just random calling and saying, like, market research. Like, did you know this movie was coming out? It's called Awareness. Yes. Awareness campaigns and stuff like that. And then they split you into four quadrants. Right. Which is the four quadrants that everyone on the planet is divided into. Men under 25, men over 25, women under 25, and women over 25. That's right. That's it. There's the division of importance. At age 25, you cross over and get put out to pasture, basically. All right, so that's the longest setup in history. So wait a minute. I want to make sure I understand what you're saying, because I made a lot of jokes in the middle of all this. They were flying. But you're saying that NRG, the national Research group, came out of focus groups done for Apocalypse Now? Yes, that's the way I understand it. Wow. Yeah. Did not know that. Yeah, but they were already doing focus groups. But this company really ran with it, I think, in corner of the industry. Yeah, I got you. All right, so let's take that promised break, and we'll talk more about audience testing right after this. All right, back with audience testing. There are many different reasons to test your movie. Sometimes, if it's a comedy, they will literally do multiple screenings just to test little bits and little jokes. That makes sense to me. Yeah, if you're testing a comedy, totally makes sense, because a couple of comedy writers that you put into, like, a room and say, write this hilarious movie, or take this dog of a movie and punch it up with some jokes, it's very subjective. Might sound funny to you. Sure. But then you're a movie executive and you have, like, a three Scotch lunch, so everything seems kind of funny right now. You know what I mean? Yeah. Right. So I get that. And then this joke landed. This joke didn't. This joke was too far, and it went against what the character we've developed so far. That, to me, makes sense. Yeah. Like, I see audience testing to that end. For sure. You see the value. But if it's like, should this explosion be 70% more explosive? Well, should this guy's brain splatter, like, more or less? Well, with the violence you have a point. That is something they will also test for. It like, are you turned off by the amount of violence? Could we dial it back a little bit? Yeah. What was the movie that was given an example in this article of something that was found to be too violent? Goodfellows. Yes. That was in a mental floss article, right? Yeah. Goodfellas. The audience and that was the first movie Square Safety had ever tested. Yeah. That's another guy I don't see, like, testing stuff. I'm really surprised about Apocalypse Net. Yeah. Well, like I said, it was studio heat. I got you. Yeah. Squares. I think, like, 40 or 50 people walked out in the first ten minutes because of the violence. And they said that they didn't like that third act where they thought it was too intense and apparently very drawn out. Way more drawn out than it even is now. Yeah. They thought the ending of Good Fellows is too intense. Right. And again, very drawn out. So he went to a quick cut montage thing, which actually ended up making it better because Henry Hill is like coke to the gills at this point. Sure. And that whole thing where he's looking, driving, watching the helicopter that's following him, and it's like, chop, chop, chop, it really gets the point across. Yeah. It's very effective. So it worked in that case, I think. Yes. Right. The system works. Well, I don't know about that. It worked in that case. Right. So how these things work is if you live in the Los Angeles area and you go to the mall, or if you're even in a movie line, you've probably been approached or seen. The people with clipboards don't run away because they're not trying to sell you something, they're trying to give you something, which is a free screening. That's true. And they'll come and sign you up. They'll ask if you're interested. Hey, we got a new Owen Wilson movie that we're screening in Burbank next Friday night. And everybody starts murmuring, oh, I love Owen. He's a national treasurer. And everybody starts signing up. What's with the nose? He got it broken when he was younger, it looks like more than once. I like that he didn't fix it, though. Yeah, he was a smart alec. That thing is just, like, so crooked. And he's just like, yes, this is me. He said he always expected to do something like go into advertising or whatever, but if you're a buddy of Wes Anderson's from a young age, you're going into movies. Sorry. I'm a big fan of him and his nose. Yeah. So you're going to get approached, like I said, probably in La. But they do test all over the country because we've talked about will it play in Peoria? Yeah. Sometimes they want to go to Ohio and see what someone outside of the La. Area feels about the movie. Right. But the reason that your chances are vastly higher of being asked to be in a test audience for a movie in Los Angeles is because a lot of times the people working on the movie who live in Los Angeles have to attend these things because not only do they want to. They want to get the feedback from it. Which we'll find out about. They also want to experience it firsthand. Sure. So they get a real feel for how the audience is responding. Yes. And if you're 18 to 34, you're more likely to get approached because that's the sweet spot, of course, that we talked about. If you're older than that, then forget it. No one cares about you. No one cares about yours. Just give up all of your dreams and work and smoke a pipe. Be quiet. That's right. If you are an assistant editor or any part of the editing crew, it's going to be a bit of a hellish experience because you're going to be scrambling, trying to temp in music and temp in special effects, like some really hackneyed version of special effects. Just so they know, like, in the scene, it's going to be a spaceship. The editor is like, well, can I just cut to this stock? QuickTime footage of a spaceship landing and get the point across? Sure. So they're going to be scrambling, trying to put together as much of a finished project as they can. And most of the time they will also be at the theater. They're going to queue it up and watch it just to make sure it's ready to roll. Yes. Before the audience sees it, you're going to have a moderator. You ever been to a touch screen? No, have you? Yeah. Cool. Yeah, it's neat. What? I don't remember. Wow. My son's been a very good movie. It was a long time ago. Nine to Five. Yes, that was it. I love that movie. I did watch that the other night, though, in full. That was one of the songs that I sang at piano karaoke. Nine to Five. Nine to Five. Couple of Dolly songs sang that. You mean? I sang Adams in the stream. Oh, well, did you do the Kenny Rogers part and you did the Dolly part? We switched it up a little. Yeah. No, 95 is very hard song to sing, by the way. And that movie holds up, man. It's still very funny. Yeah. The great Daphne Coleman. Great Lily Tomlin. The great Dolly Parton. Great Jane Fonda. The great Jane Fonda. So good. And, you know, the three of them, it was just a great shoot. They were best buds. And they remain friends all these years later. You can tell. Yeah, it's kind of neat. All right, so where was that? Someone's going to introduce the movie, and they're going to get you all excited and like, everyone's glad to be here in Wilson's new movie, right? Everybody reach under your seat for some free Red Vines. Yeah, you might get a little free something. You never know. And they're going to explain, like, what you're about to see is going to be a little rough in parts and the effects aren't complete, so just don't take that into account. Right. They're not looking for like, well, maybe you should color correct it a little more before you release it. They're aware of that. I think you're supposed to take the green screen out of the shot. What they're looking for is pacing. They want to know you as an audience member, is keeping up with the movie and how it is going. Right? Yeah. Well, you're going to watch the movie just as cleanly as possible, and then you're going to have to fill out comic cards. And they're pretty standard, but they can tailor it for the movie. Let's say you think there's a problem with one of the characters. They might specifically say, what do you think about the Luke Wilson character? Too much? Too little? He's no Owen Wilson. They might ask your favorite parts, your least favorite parts. How did it flow? Did anything stand out to you? Could you follow it the whole time? Yeah. Did it make sense? That's a good one, right? What did you think of the jokes? Yeah. What did you think of the jokes? They drill down. They try and get as specific as they can. And these are just the comment cards. Yeah. Supposedly, if you're in the demographic that they're shooting for and release and you're at this thing as you're trying to leave, they might come up to you and be like, hey, this is just kind of the slugby audience. You want to be part of a real focus group, come with us. And then you follow the stranger to a second location. Yeah. Do you follow them to a van with a little round window in the back? This has been covered over with a black plastic bag that got dark. It did. So the big thing they're looking for, though, the money question is, would you recommend this movie to a friend? That's the one thing they want to know. And that is where you're going to get your overall score that they really are going to hone in on. But they want to know that so bad that if they don't say, I definitely would. Yeah. They don't even count that. Yeah. You can say, like, yeah, maybe. Probably. No, a movie gets a score at the end, and it's based apparently exclusively on whether or not you said you would definitely recommend the movie to a friend. Yeah. Out of 100 people, they will score that. However many people. But for example, out of 100, if 60 people say that, yeah, I guess I would recommend it to a friend. And 40 people say that they definitely would. That movie got a score of 40. Terrible. Not even like you can't even take into account that, yes, probably. You have to say you definitely would recommend it to a friend to get a point for that movie. Yeah. And they said in this article, I'm sure there's a huge caveat in a sliding scale, but anything over 80, they think they're in pretty decent shape. I would guess 80% a low B average. They've been really a lot less than 80s lately, except, of course, for Mad Max. And ex machina. That was pretty great. Movie. So good. They ask in this article that it makes you wonder, like, when a train wreck of a movie comes out, what happened? Did they focus? Screw it. Did they test screen it? Did they ignore it? Yeah. How does that thing get released, is the question. Are you asking me? Yeah. Well, I mean, no, I'm just throwing it out there. I'm not the one who's been to one of these test screening. No, it does make you wonder, though. They probably did unfalvageable, they didn't screen it or the people who had edited rights didn't care to listen. But this article keeps picking on glitter, which seems mean because there's a lot of stinkers out there, apparently. Human Centipede Three. I think it came out recently. Is this the one in prison? I don't know. I think it's I've assumed that there's, like, hundreds of people through incentive. Yeah, it has the lowest Medicare score of all time. Really? You saw the first one? Yeah. Have you seen it? No. Dude, it's definitely worth seeing. Really? Yeah. I just think I get it just by seeing the trailer. No, I mean, there's no real surprises beyond what you've seen in the trailer. But it's not even appreciating it in an ironic way, even taking it on its own terms, you're kind of like, it's worth seeing at least once. Like, can't be disturbing or yeah, okay. But not like Hostel can't be disturbing. Have you seen Hostile? Yes. I didn't think that was very campy. It was just straight up disturbing. This one already disturbing. Yeah, the guy was definitely going for an arty bet despite the premise of the movie. All right. But, yeah, there's some disturbing stuff. I'm curious to see if that guy has anything left in his bag of tricks. Because you can only go mouth the butt for so long. What can't be disturbing? Give me an example of that, then. I think, like, reanimator type of thing. Oh, yeah, okay. I see. Yeah. Hostels not can't be disturbed. Reanimator. Definitely, yes. Can we talk about Tom Cruise for a minute and how obnoxious this move was? Yeah, I guess he really believed in the way the editing process was already going. Yeah, he crashed his own test screening of Mission Impossible Three allegedly. And ran in there and was like, hey, everybody, I'm Tom Cruise. Let's high five each other. Enjoy the movie. Give me a couch to jump on. I mean, can you believe that? That totally negates the purpose of an audience screening. Right? Because everyone there. I'm sure there are a few people who are like, I hate your gutsy, weirdo. But the rest of people like, oh, my God, tom Cruise just came into the very test screening. They probably didn't feel good about writing negative comments. Right. Which is why he did it here. You might want to hang out with me after this. And I want to be able to tell him that I gave him high marks. I can't believe he did that. I can't believe he did that, actually. Yeah, I can, too. By the way, also, there is a really interesting longform article in La weekly from about a year ago called how YouTube and Internet journalism destroyed Tom cruise, our last real movie Star. And it's not an apologist view, but it definitely defends him against a lot of it. Just read it. I'm still a fan of his acting in most cases. Like, the Edge of tomorrow movie was terrific. Yeah, I haven't seen it yet. I've heard nothing but good things about it. Yeah, it was really good. But I can still watch his movies and separate that from the wacko in real life. Yes, this is defending his acting as well, but it's defending that public perception of him as being a wacko. And it basically really kind of pulls apart, like, all the layers, and you're like, oh, yeah, it really goes to town. Stressing that he never jumped up and down on the couch. Right, he just jumped up on the couch. Exactly. But they go to great lengths to point out that that is not the same thing. It's just off handedly saying, oh, yeah, he jumped up and down on the couch like he was crazy. Yeah, now he jumped up on the couch once and then stepped down, or something like that. So it's a really great article. Really interesting, because he's just been, like, kicking around for so long now, it's almost surprising to see somebody step up, not as, like, a crusader on behalf of Tom Cruise, but just more to be like, everybody, put your knives away. Well, I think the knives are out. Not just because, like, oh, he's a scientologist, and people think that's weird. It's like when you dig down into scientology and find out the things that he abides by, like the slave labor to decorate his cars and to wash his truck, that makes you kind of not a good person. Yeah, I see what you mean. Like, that's beyond, like, oh, it's just a strange religion that's, like, people are being paid $0.15 an hour to take care of me. They're being paid that's not slavery. That's true. It's a good point. What's the name of the was it an HBO documentary? Going Clear? Yeah. Based on the book going clear, I saw the guy who wrote the book come speak. Oh, really? That guy like, something I didn't I don't remember his name, but whatever you think of his book for his journalism, that guy had brass ones. Oh, really? He's the one who did it. He's the one who went after Scientology when no one else would touch it. He's the guy who did. And apparently 5 million lawyers read that book before it was ever published. I think HBO supposedly had, like, 100 attorneys when they went to adapt it as a documentary. This is after it already been better by all of the lawyers in the book publishing world. Yeah, it's good. Great book. All right, let's take another break here. And when we come back, we'll talk about some of the more famous examples of movies that have been changed due to audience screening. It's going to be so good. So, Chuck, there's some legendary changes to movies that have been made over the years. Like we mentioned, The Boys Are of Oz, that was not a change, actually, but test audience suggested it be taken out somewhere over the rainbow. Apparently. Also very famously, James Bond's movie License to Kill. Yeah. Was originally called license revoked. And even after all the promotional material, posters have been made, they changed the name because American test audiences were like, I don't understand what the title means. Like his driver's license was for folks. Yeah. And they were serious. Yeah. It sounds like a Queen Latifah comedy license. Like, where she's a sassy school bus driver and, like the K and the R backwards or something like that in the poster. Yeah, absolutely. She's a pretty woman. The movie, the saccharine feel good movie from Richard Gear and Julia Roberts apparently not started out with Sacred. No, this is hysterical to me. It was originally titled $3,000 based on the amount of money it costs to hire a hooker for a week. Sure. That one made no sense. Yeah. Apparently they changed the name not because of the test audience, because the Execs were like, sounds too science fictiony. And they were right. They were right. Pretty Woman is a much better title for that movie. And then apparently it had a lot darker edge when it was in script form, and it ended with Richard Gear character kicking Julia Roberts character out of his car and driving away. That's how it ended. Not very romcomy. No, it wasn't a romcom. It was Gary Marshall. But see, what I want to know is wait, Gary Marshall? He's a romcommy director? No, that's what I'm saying. He made that. It seems to me like all that would have changed with Gary Marshall. Not like in test screenings. Yes, I think that's what happened. And then the test audience, the hand they played was that they were like, you need to change that ending. Okay. Got you. You need to get together. Right. Fatal Attraction famously changed. Yes. So the ending of Fatal Attraction apparently has Glenn Coast, glen Close, who's Michael Douglas former one night stand turned stalker, killing herself, flitting her own throat. Yeah, pretty good. And the knife with Michael Douglass's fingerprints on it. And then Michael Douglas is arrested for her murder. Yeah. And it's supposed to they don't show trials and things, but ends with him going to prison. Yeah. And that's a great ending. Glenn Close loved it. She was very sad when audiences were like, no, we hate this character so much. Like, she has to be killed. Off. She can't kill herself. Somebody has to kill her. And just for good measure, make it the wife. Well, that makes sense, because I think people weren't rooting for Michael Douglas in that movie either, because he was such a jerk. Right. Toyed with this woman, left her, had this great wife at home and kid. So people I think they said, you know what would go over the top is if the only sympathetic character in this movie right. Which is Ann Archer, is the one who does it. Right. And it was effective. I'll give it to him. Yeah. But apparently Glenn closes like the original ending was way better. She washed her hands of it. Did you ever see Scott Pilgrim versus the World? No. I like Michael Cera. It's a good flick. The original ending of that one had his character ending up with his love interest, Knives Chow, played by Ellen Wong, instead of his dream girl, Ramona Flowers. And the test audiences didn't like that and said, basically, this guy spent the whole movie annoyed by this girlfriend and pining for this other girl and defeating her evil ex boyfriends. He can't just not end up with her at the end. It's very anti climactic. So they said, all right, we'll change it. And that's how it was in the graphic novel, too. So I don't know why they changed it to begin with. Who knows? They went back to the original ending that the material is adapted from that's right. Yeah. Pretty in Pink. Yeah. This one's pretty famous, too. I'd heard this many years ago that originally they had Molly Ringwald ending up with John Crier with Ducky rather than Blaine. Andrew McCarthy, which, by the way, saw A Weekend at Bernie's again recently. No, it's not that bad. Really? Yeah, it's very thin. It's one joke. Yeah. Boy, they take it in so many directions. Yeah, it's pretty funny. And it's amazing how young Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy look. I mean, young. And the guy who played Bernie, he was like I don't think ever did anything else. No, I never saw him do anything else. He threw out the ball at, like, a Los Angeles Dodgers game or San Francisco Giants game or something. Interesting. No, like last season. Really? I don't remember the reason why, but it was like he's been working that character for a long time. You know what would have been genius? If they would have had Silverman and McCarthy out there, like, grabbing his arm and throwing the ball for him as if he were dead. It would have been great. That would have been pretty good. I think they call it Meta these days. Yeah, they do. Meta is already out. That's, like, two years ago, 28 Days Later. You saw that one, right? Yeah. That one ends with Jim's Syllan Murphy's character dying in the original ending, and his people were going to rescue him just like going back out to fight the zombies again, right? They're like, no, that stinks. I love this guy. Yeah, so he recovers. Yeah. Didn't it end in, like, a field or a meadow or they're, like, romping in the field and I think they see a plane. I'm sure Danny boy was like, oh, you want a happy ending? He'll give you your happy, stupid ending. Here's your stupid ending choking at you. Stupid audience. I like the ending, though. I like both. I don't mind a happy ending when it's done well, but I also like dark endings. Yeah. It doesn't have to be one or the other. What about the opposite? Dark beginnings and undark beginnings, like with Sunset Boulevard. All right, go ahead and break it down. I don't know that one. Oh, have you ever seen Sunset Boulevard? No, that's on my list. It's a classic movie for a reason. It's a truly great movie. But apparently at the beginning of it, originally, they had Bill Holden's corpse, the character he plays Corpse, talking to other corpses in the morgue, explaining how he got there. Wow. And audiences were like, Is this a comedy? Like, what is going on here? Apparently, a lot of people walked out and Billy Wilder, the director, was there and some lady told him to his face that it was a steaming pile and maybe didn't know it was him or something like that. But the legend goes that she told him to his face like, this is terrible. Steaming pile. He reshot the beginning to where it's Bill Holden's corpse, but it's a voiceover. And he's not talking to other corpses in the morgue. But it's not a comedy, right? Not at all. Maybe because it was Billy Wilder, people had an expectation. Yeah. And, I mean, there's some parts that you wonder, like, did he mean that to be kind of funny? Like, in a really dark way, maybe? Yeah, it's quite possible. But that is great. I need to see that Billy wild. You should watch it, like, tonight doesn't matter the mood you're in. It doesn't matter what you got going on. Just you could watch Sunset Boulevard and be like, this is a great movie. Okay. Heathers. Did you see Heather's, the regular ending? I'm sorry. Yeah. The ending they went with was christian Slater's character wants to blow up the school gymnasium during a basketball game. And Veronica what's her face Oneona rider's character shoots him dead, stops it and ends up bonding with the outcast girl. Yes. In the original ending, in the script, I don't think it was shot, but she kills Christian Slater's character, straps the bomb to herself and blows up the school. And everyone has prom in heaven. And, like, everybody gets along. The nerds and the geeks are all, like, living in harmony. Yeah, not bad. You're like, yeah, I can see that. Blade Runner, perhaps the most famous changed ending of all time. I had not heard that. Yes. The original ending of Blade Runner was very dark. And that's the one that ended up in the director's cut. Ridley Scott's director's cut. What was that, Annie? Basically, that Harrison Ford is going to die. Well, that Rachel Ward is going to die because Republicans have expiration dates. And is Harrison Ford a replicant or not? It leaves it open. I'm pretty sure the director's cut leaves it ambiguous, even though I think Ridley Scott came out years later and said, yeah, he is a replicate. So in the audience tested version, he turns to the camera and says directly to the audience, no, I'm not a replicant. Not quite end. But all that terrible voiceover narration was added in the non directors cut. And they had the happy ending with infamous blue sky shot. The only blue sky and the whole movie was them. Like driving down the road at the end and explaining via voiceover that, well, not all replicants have an expiration date. You're special. You don't have one. Well, so we can just live together in harmony. Philip K. Dick roll over in his grave. But that shot of the only blue sky wasn't even from that movie. It was pulled from outtakes of The Shining. The beginning. Really car scene in The Shining when they're driving up the road. Wow. Yeah. Blade Runner really screwed that one up. And really, Scott, of course, he was not so happy about that. I can imagine he makes this masterpiece and then somebody tacks on outtakes from this movie. Yeah, weird. Bad. You got anything else? No. Okay. I don't either. We could probably do this for a while, though, because there's plenty of other movies that were changed thanks to audiences. But if you were ever in a line at a movie theater and somebody trustworthy seeming comes up to you and asks you if you want to be in a test audience, give it a shot. Yeah, and a big thanks to Mental Floss for all a lot of that list stuff came from one of their articles. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's all I got. If you want to know more about audience testing, type those words in the search bar howstep works.com? And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Oceans are Cool if I pay attention. Hey, guys. Love the show. I used to listen every day when I rode the trains from Brooklyn into Manhattan to work. But recently I've started to work in Brooklyn. Close enough for me to bike to, so I don't ride trains anymore. There are pros and cons to that. On one hand, I save over $110 a month in Metro card fees. Don't have to wait for trains, which adds another 20 minutes to the Google Map travel times. On the downside, when it rains, it's tough to bike to work, although I'm learning to love that. And the other kind is that I don't have time to listen to you guys as much, since it's very detailed, and paying attention is key if I want to enjoy the show and I need to keep my thoughts on the road. My commute is also down to 15 minutes, which doesn't help much either. I need to reconcile this fellow. This morning, I tried to listen to the Oceans episode while doing some work on my computer. Wasn't long before I knew I'd missed something critical. At some point, rip tides were defined and laddered up to equatorial winds, a connection I recall from taking oceanography in high school. But I did not understand when I wasn't paying attention. This morning, when I used to listen on the train, the show had my undivided attention. Now I'm trying to find a new time to listen. Maybe I'll save up shows and binge them on a nice long bike ride. That is from Andrew Negroesh. N-I-G-R-O-S HROs. Negroes, something like that. Interesting. I've never heard that name. Well, thanks a lot, Andrew. We appreciate you getting in touch with us. We hope you figure this out. This sounds like a terrible conundrum. Maybe just get a new job that requires you further away. Yeah. Go work in Vermont. There you go. Problem solved. If you have a problem that you want Chuck and I to solve for you, like we just did for Andrew, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstepychnow. You can send us an email to stuff, podcast@howtofworks.com.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." | ||
8db4ee4a-ba8a-11e8-a624-33ea3842f4bc | Short Stuff: The History of Paternity Testing | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-the-history-of-paternity-testing | Paternity testing. It wasn't science for many years, yet they still tried to do it. Learn all about it in 12 minutes. | Paternity testing. It wasn't science for many years, yet they still tried to do it. Learn all about it in 12 minutes. | Wed, 06 Nov 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=310, tm_isdst=0) | 11517762 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, there's Dave. Be quiet. Let's go. So we're talking about paternity testing and the history of paternity testing, which is amazing because because it's all pretty new as far as really being able to do paternity testing. Yeah. You and I grew up in a world where I mean. Pretty much from the moment we realized that that would be an issue that somebody would need to solve. It was pretty much solved because we grew up in a world where you could genetically test for paternity. Like testing markers on white blood cells and produce basically 99.99% accurate assessment of whether somebody was the father of a child or not. Correct. Prior to us coming of age in this age of genetic paternity testing, however, it was a real problem, Chuck. Yeah. Like a long standing problem, apparently, yes. Should we talk about the story of St. Anthony? I was hoping you'd ask. Twelve century priests. St. Anthony. At one point a woman came to him and she said, you know what? My jealous husband thinks that he's not the father. He thinks I stepped out and cuckolded him and he's threatening to kill me and this child. And so Anthony went to the family and said, I'm going to do a test. It's called a paternity test. And he went to the little baby and said, who's your daddy? And the baby pointed to the jealous husband, this is an infant. And said, that is my father. This is an infant. End of story. So St. Anthony said hacha. And like, left, as he was known to do, and became a saint shortly after that's. Right. The end of this episode? No, it's not the end because a very smart person named Nara Milanich, who is a history professor at Barnard College, has authored a book called Paternity the Elusive Quest for the Father, where it really and Dave Rusel pal wrote this article. Did he talk to Nara? I believe so, yeah. And even interviewed her. And she really got down on this topic of researching the history of paternity. And it's pretty interesting because in the early days, like all early days of science and when there was a lot of pseudoscience going on, they were doing all kinds of wacky stuff. Yeah. Because again, people were like, what are we going to do? We have no idea how to prove paternity or disprove paternity. And there is a lot of people who really want an answer to this. So because the need was so great, quacks were allowed to kind of fill the void for a little while. Especially, apparently, in the 1920s, the nation was gripped in a panic that babies were being switched in maternity wards, in hospitals, too. So it wasn't just the idea that your wife stepped out and you had an affair with another man and that this wasn't your child? Men and women wanted to be able to prove a child was theirs, but there was just no way to do that scientifically. So like you said, Pseudoscience said, hey, we'll try this for a little while. Yeah. And so Quack might step in and say, we need to look at the roof of the mouth because we want to determine if they've eaten any Captain Crunch peanut butter cereal lately. Just the bloody flesh dangling from the roof of the mouth. No, they thought the ridges on the roof of the mouth had patterns, sort of like a fingerprint that were passed from father to child. Complete bunk. Yes. But imagine that exam. Well, but that wasn't fun. I don't know. Block jaw, anyone? Yeah. How are they going to see the roof of your mouth? Feel around or maybe do an impression test? That does not sound pleasant. What, someone sticking their fingers in the roof of your mouth yeah. And feeling yeah. It seems calming to me what eugenics comes next. And that is like, hey, let's measure your nose and ears and feel your hair, and we'll determine that way if this is your father right. And be really racist about it. Right. And then a dude came along in the 1020s named Dr. Albert Abrams and his bunk science machine, the Oscillo Four. Oh, nice pronunciation, Charles. Yes. So Dr. Abrams not only came up with the Oscilloshor, I'm going to say it a different way. The oscillophore. Okay. He came up with what? The oscillophore measures, which makes the whole thing totally made up. But he said that if you measure blood within Oscilla four I'm not going to say it either way, you will get what's called the electronic reactions of Abrams, which is a measure of the electrical movement or electrical vibrations in blood, and that the vibrations in the blood was related to your ethnic heritage. That's right. And if you're Irish, you're going to vibrate your blood will at 15 ohms. You're Jewish seven ohms. Everybody knows that. And on down the line. And so this was the only thing going at the time. So judges turned to Abrams. A particular judge named Thomas Graham in San Francisco. He hired him to determine a very high profile paternity case involving a guy named Paul Vittori, who was not good. Wait a minute. On behalf of all listeners, Chuck oh, I'm sorry. That's how you're going to say Paul Vittori? Paul Vittori. Thank you. And he said, I'm not going to pay child support for my infant daughter. It's not my daughter. So they brought in Abrams to court and they did the little blood vibration and said, you are the father because your blood is vibrating at the correct rate. Yeah. And that was that. And everybody said, this is a gross miscarriage of justice. And the judge is like, what else are you going to do? We can't do anything. This is just as good a guess as any. But what's funny is this is in the 1920s, I believe, right, yes. Within a decade, there would actually be a scientific basis for testing blood to determine paternity one way or the other. And Chuck, we're going to talk about that right after this message break. That's a great set up, buddy. Thank you very much. So we teased science finally coming into the picture, and it came through with blood types. Basically, they figured out that there was such thing as blood types, which, by the way, we did a really great live show on blood types before. Yeah, that was a good one. And my father in law shouted out that I'm pregnant. That's right, yeah. From the audience while we were testing my blood. Yeah. We tested blood on stage. Yeah. And he got bigger laughs than I did the entire show. But anyway, the fact that blood types were proven, somebody figured out that, oh, wait, you inherit your blood types from your parents. So we can go pretty far away in ruling somebody in or out as the possible father of a child. Yeah. Not 100%, obviously, or 99.99%, but there are some things we know. If the baby has AB blood type and, you know, the mother has type A blood type, then the father's got to have either B or AB. So they could really narrow it down in a scientific way, 100 times more than they ever could in the past. Yeah. And this came really to the public for which is a phrase I just made up during a Charlie Chaplin paternity case. Charlie Chaplin, the beloved Charlie Chaplin was sued for paternity by his longtime assistant, Joan Barry. Yeah. He had a knack for the young ladies and loving them and leaving them and Joan Barry was 23 when Chaplin was 54, and she said, this little baby Caroline is Charlie's daughter. And I'm kind of tired of this pattern that he's developed of getting young women pregnant and then leaving them in the cold. So I'm going to take him to court. And they took him to court and they used science and they showed that he was not the father of Caroline. Right. So that was it. Right. No, you'd think he'd be off the hook and that would have been the case had this case been tried 1015 years later. But instead the jury said, well, okay, he's not biologically the father, but because of his close relationship with Joan, he is Caroline's father for all intents and purposes. So you're still going to be allowed to sue him for child support. That's right. Of the twelve person jury, there were eleven women and one man, and they roundly said, Sorry, Charlie. Right. And he just sat there silently yeah, that's right. And walked into a wall. Yeah. His facial expression said it all, though. So I think 13 years later, California law said, actually, we're not going to decide this by jury like that. If we take a scientific test and it shows that someone is not the father, then they're not the father. Right. We're just going to leave it at that. And then after California passed that law, other states said, it's not a bad idea altogether, so we're going to do that, too. That's right. And then the whole thing, just like we were saying, all of it just went to the wayside when they figured out genetic testing, first in the eighties, but then by the nineties, it had been developed enough and the test had become cheap enough that it was very much widespread and used routinely and had completely supplanted blood typing as the test for paternity. So much so. And it's gotten so cheap that mory Povich has an ongoing thing on his Mori show. The daytime talk show. Oh, yeah. He routinely tests and then reveals on air the results of fraternity tests for guests and plays it up. There's all sorts of drama. And apparently they have mugs and T shirts with the catchphrase you are not the father emblazoned on it high drama. And every day, Connie Chung gets up and looks herself in the mirror and she's like, I've got dignity enough for the both of us. I always forget they're married. Yeah. Because of things like the coffee mug that says you are not the father. It kind of distances the two. In your mind, you got Povitched. That's right. So obviously, like you said, it got so cheap that you can get these tests now for around $15 or less, which is a great deal. But then, of course, you got to pay the lab fees. That's where they get you with the add on. Exactly. Over $100 to get that lab tested, because you can go to your local drugstore, but that's not going to tell you anything. It's not like a pregnancy test. No. You still have to have it read by a tea leave reader. That's right. I think that's it. Right, Chuck? Yeah. I've never taken a paternity test. Nor have I. Hooray hooray. Chuck. If you want to know more about paternity testing in the history of it, go check out this article by Dave Ruse on how stuff works. And since I said that, that means it's the end of the short stuff. Short stuff? Gaza stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Hanukkah Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-hanukkah-works | Hanukkah is an eight-day Jewish holiday, but what's it all about? And why do some people think of it as "Jewish Christmas"? In this episode, Josh and Chuck share Stuff You Should Know about Hanukkah. | Hanukkah is an eight-day Jewish holiday, but what's it all about? And why do some people think of it as "Jewish Christmas"? In this episode, Josh and Chuck share Stuff You Should Know about Hanukkah. | Thu, 09 Dec 2010 17:37:30 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=17, tm_min=37, tm_sec=30, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=343, tm_isdst=0) | 21067720 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charlie O. W chucker's Bryant. Ms. Jackson, if you're nasty and that makes this stuff, you should know, huh? Chuck, it's a nice dated reference. Dated from, like, last week. Where's the beef? No. Oh, you mean in the email? Yes. How are you doing? I'm great. Are you psyched? You know what today is? Yeah. What? Today is the last day of Hanukkah. It is. It's a big day. It is in the US. Yeah. The lighting of the we don't spoil it. No, there's a lighting of something. That's a nice foreshadowing, too. Yeah. Chuck and I, by request, are doing How Hanukkah Works episode. I think last year we did how Christmas works. Right? Yeah. And I think we promised to cover other holidays of other religions and peoples. We were originally going to release this right before Christmas, like two days before Christmas. And we figured out pretty quick through our research, and by we, I mean, Chuck, that Hanukkah would have been over for about three or so weeks had we done that. And that kind of reveals a certain mentality in the US. Among Christians, the Christian majority that Hanukkah is Jewish. Christmas But Chuck, have you ever heard of Hanukkah Harry? I think so. You always say this, and I always say no. And they always go, oh, yeah, I know. It's our thing. Hanukkah is John lovett wise guest. Do you remember? So Santa is vomiting. He has a horrible stomach bug, much like you get every once in a while. And I remember one of the elves is at his bedside and he throws up on the elf. Right. He's got a pretty bad and Christmas is about to be ruined because this is Christmas Eve that he's fallen ill. So the only person who can save it is Hanukkah Harry. They call Hanukkah harry, who is John Lovittz? And he's got a nice beard, and he instead of a sleigh with reindeer, he rides a cart led by flying donkeys named Moisture Hoychel and Sloan on Hoy Schulz. Good. And Hanukkahari, finally, he makes the rounds. But rather than the really great presence that Christian children expect at Christmas, they get socks, eight pairs, can you believe it? And slacks and that kind of thing. Right. And they're very disappointed since, fortunately, Santa recovers, comes down and saves the day with really great presence. Right. That's funny. That is Hanukkah in the United States. That's right. That's the conception of it. Which is to say that I'm glad we did this, because I really didn't understand Hanukkah. Yeah. And you know what? I'm glad you brought that up, because for our Jewish friends out there and by the way, if I could choose to be Jewish, I probably would be. You can, buddy. You convert Goldberg Sammy Davis Jr. Not the same. Not born Jewish. Yeah, it's not the same. Okay. Because I studied it in college with my comparative religion class and I remember at the time thinking that this is a religion I can get into. Really? Yeah, I liked it. But for those of you are Jewish friends that are worried that we're just a couple of boys and you probably think we're garnish TEF, why do you keep looking down on the piece of paper? But I want to say don't plot. Honestly, because we are a couple of boys, but we are menches as well. So no need to worry, we will do right by you. Is that what you were saying? I just like Yiddish words. Okay. Yeah. And by the way, since I printed these out, did you know a schlemil is a clumsy person in that person and a schlemazel is someone with constant bad luck? Does that sound familiar? Never knew that's. Awesome. So like 2 hours ago, that's Laverne and Shirley, right? Yeah, one's a schlemil, one is a flammasl. It's awesome. My dad told me that before they showed that show in Iran, and he said Iran specifically. And he told me it's like 1983. They had to show a disclaimer that these women were in a psychiatric hospital and that these episodes were filmed before they'd been committed. Really? And I was like, wow, the Iranians really don't have a very good sense of humor. Now I understand that my dad's just insane. Well, that sounds like an urban legend, although who knows? That might have been true. Yeah, what do we know? We're just a couple of boys. So, Chuck, let's talk about Hanukkah. One of the things that I figured out from researching this is that it's not really a very important holiday as far as the Jewish religion goes. Jewish culture, sure. Yeah. It's no Yam kapur. No. It's no rash hashana. No, Hanukkah means dedication. It is basically the well, it's the festival of life, right? And it commemorates the rededication of the temple in Jerusalem that fell and was recaptured by the Jews. Let's talk about Jerusalem circa 167 BC. Chuck Josh, Syrian king Antiochus IV, who was no slouch. Well, he's our bad guy in the story. He's the bad guy. At the time, there was a lot of Jewish persecution and he was one of the big dudes involved in that. Well, he showed up in Jerusalem, your religion, like you want to, you will be killed. And here's some Greek idols and you should worship them. And that's what you're going to do now, right? Some Jews went along with this. They're like, that's fine. This just makes us less cut off and isolated and makes us more worldly. So we'll do this. I don't know about fine with it. Well, there was a fraction, apparently, in the Jewish community at the time because some went along. It's very much like the American Revolution. There were some who sympathize with the king, who are loyal to the crown still, and there were others who were like, well, we'll tar and feather you for that. Hanukkah is about the group that would have tarred and feathered the loyalists. Yes. Okay. Specifically, that started with a family, just one family. The hasmonians led by Mattyahu, also known as Matthew, and his five sons, who must have been some pretty bad dudes, because they took a stand and sort of won, like right off the bat. Right. Well, there was apparently an incident where Matthew was told to go ahead and start praying to Zeus. There's a statue right there. It's a nice marble statue. Go ahead. And he said, no, and not only that, I'm going to attack you Greek soldiers. And he did. And that started the Jewish rebellion of 167 BC. In a good way. They were pretty successful early on, right. The family, the Hesmonians. Yeah, I think this guy and his five sons who led the rebellion became yeah, I think they were successful, but the most successful among them was Judah, who by this time, they had changed their names to Maccabee, which means strongest hammers men who are as strong as hammers. That's what I would pick, basically an army. His son changed his name to Judah the Hammer, and he was the head of the Jewish rebellion. So the whole thing kicked off in 167 BC. By 165 BC, apparently they have been successful enough because over the two years remember, we're talking BC, so it goes backwards. It counts down to zero. You remember? I do remember. They had recaptured the temple in Jerusalem, right? Yes. On the 25th of the Hebrew month, Kislav, which is Kislav 25. And they chase the crazy ball heads out of town. It's very important date because that's the start of haunting them. Yeah. Kislov 25, I think. The 25th of Kizlav. Yeah, yeah. That's the 25th day of that month of the Hebrew calendar. I think we can think of even one more way to say that. Let's hear it. The day after the 24th of Kiss Live. Right. Before the 26th 25. Yes. So, Chuck, what did they do on the 25th of Kislev? Well, they took the temple back and they said, you know what, we need to rededicate the temple because it's dirty from all these Greek worshiping pagans, well, private peoples. So let's rededicate it and let's light a lamp with the oil. But holy cow, we don't have enough oil. We only have enough for one night. Yeah. What are we going to do? Well, lo and behold, you've heard of Christmas miracles. This is the first Hanukkah miracle. It was because that one night of oil lasted for eight nights. It did. And that is indeed a miracle. It gave the Jewish rebellion chance to make more oil. So they didn't actually ever run out. Right? Yeah. So that's what this is. This is the commemoration of that miracle of the rededication of the temple. And it lasts eight nights, the eight nights of Hanukkah. Eight crazy nights. Yeah. So it's not Jewish Christmas, but it has become that nico de Mayo is in Mexican 4 July. I love the American purviews through everything. I recall you referring to Canada as America's hat recently on our Facebook page. The only reason I did that is because the Canadian introduced me to that term and I really found it very funny. It is funny, I guess. What would that make? Mexico. Our shirt? I would say it's our foot, our shoe. Well, if the hat is Canada, that would make Mexico our neck. That's not necessarily true. So, Chuck, as you said, it's not Jewish Christmas. It's the festival of lights. It commemorates Jewish culture. Right. And let's talk about the practical applications of this. How do you celebrate Hanukkah? Or Hanukkah? Well, as most people know, Josh, even a couple of guys like us know that there is a menorah, holds nine candles, eight that represent the eight nights. And then there's the shamash, which is the candle you use to light the other candles. You would make a good converted juice man. You got the pronunciation down, the enthusiasm, everything. I'm trying. So what you do is you insert it's very specific. You insert the candles from right to left, one for each day, for each miracle. You insert them from right to left, right. But you light them from left to right. Yeah. So the leftmost candle represents the most recent day that the oil kept burning. And by lighting the leftmost candle first, they're saying, we're very pleased with this most recent day of miracle. Yeah, perfect. They need to burn for you need to light them after it gets dark. They need to burn for at least a half hour after it gets dark. Okay. Which presents a problem on Shobit, because lighting a candle is work. You're not allowed to work after the sun goes down and shob it, what do they do? Shob it? They light it before the sun goes down, but it still has to burn 30 minutes after. So they got to timing out just right. Blowing out of candlework. Yeah, I think anything, but not necessarily because you're going to exhale anyway, right? You weren't going to light a candle anyway, just exhaling near the candle. Well, they do blow them out, so yeah, it does not work. Yeah. A heavy sigh and then there are some blessings. And on the first night, you recite all three of these blessings. You're going to try your hand at this, and on each subsequent night, you only do the first two. There's a blessing for the candles, for the Hanukkah and for the anew. So, Chuck, since you are so good at Hebrew andor Yiddish pronunciation, I think you should try these. And then I will translate after you've made it through each one. So go ahead, please. This is the blessing for the candles as presented by Charles W. Chuck Bryan Butcher. This the new lead hard lichner shell. Very nice. Beautiful. What Chuck just said to those of you who didn't get it is, blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with his commandments and commanded us to light the candles of Hanukkah. Once you do this one and I'll read the English, you're doing so well at it, let's do it again. This is the blessing for Hanukkah. So you say the first one, then you say the second one on each night, and then on the first night you say this third one that you're going to do as well. So do the second one, chuck the blessing for Hanukkah. Baruchata aronai elojano melacha olam shiasa nissan. Very nice. Trouble with the English version. Are you kidding me? Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who performed miracles for our ancestors in those days at this time. Pretty straightforward stuff. Yeah. And then the last one, this said the first night only. It's the Shek. And this is the first night blessing. So go ahead, check. Baruchata okay, so Chuck just finished the full blessings. All three of those of what he just said would be said on the first night, and then the first two would be said on each night after that. And what he just said is, blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the universe, who has kept us alive, sustained us and enabled us to reach this season. And that's Hanukkah. Every night you light a candle, you say the blessing and you spin the dreidel, don't you? Yeah. You also sing songs, traditional songs, recite psalms. You want to talk about the dreidel. And then there are games like the dreidel. So the dreidel is that top that you've always seen. And dreidel actually is German for to spin, right? I believe so. On each side is a Jewish character. There are four characters nun, gimmel, hay, and shin. Right. And they're actually the abbreviations for a phrase. Nesgado haya sham or A great miracle took place here. Yeah. Right. They're also German, Yiddish for nicked, goot, hobb, and Schlecht, which is no good, half, and bad. And they refer to the possible outcomes for playing the dreidel. Yes. You spin the dreidel and you get good, you win all everything's in the pot. What do you mean by everything? Well, gelt is usually what's in the pot. So the reason they spend there's some history here. The dreadle was what? They used to fool people into thinking they weren't practicing their religion. Right. So they're sitting around reading the Torah, some dudes come up and like, what are you doing? We're just spinning the dreidel, dude. And then the Greek soldier was like, those Jewish people in their dreidels, they love this. They take their guilt. Yeah. So that's the dreidel. It is. It's a gambling game. It is sort of four kids. You're not really gambling because gambling implies that you're putting money down for it to come up on a certain thing. And you're just from what I know, you spin it and depending on what it comes up as, you get money or nothing. That's gambling. No, it's not putting money on chance is gambling. No, but they're not saying, I'm putting 20 on gimmel. No, but you're just putting money on impossible outcome. It's gambling. All right, so we've got the gimbal. I bet you were going to hear from people that say it is never gambling. That's gambling. Okay. It is gelt. We've got gelt. We've got the dreidel. Yeah. And we can't forget the food, Chuck, because oil factors in so heavily into the celebration. The Festival of Lights. The food is generally cooked in oil and it's also generally delicious. Lattes sure potato pancakes. It's basically shredded potatoes held together with eggs and milk and deep fried. This is like the greatest holiday ever. I love Latin deep fried food as part of the holidays. Awesome. Well, you know what they say, josh Besar and friend mtgs at a creek's. Better one friend with a dish of food than 100 with a sigh. Yeah, sure. Words have never been spoken. And check where do the jelly donuts called sfcana yacht. Those sound delicious as well. They're just fried jelly doughnuts fried in oil and then with powdered sugar all over them. Well, yeah, they say they fry a lot of the stuff in oil because oil was such a big deal for the miracle. Right. I think they do it because it just tastes better if it's delicious. Nutritious. Well, there you have it. There we have it. Hanukkah. It's a lot more simple than I thought. Very simple. Not to say that's a bad thing. Christmas is pretty simple too. There's jelly doughnuts and lockers. I'll take it. So what's next year? Kwanza? I was thinking Quanza. What else is there? Ramadan. It's not Christmas, but it's pretty holy holiday, isn't it? Yeah, we'll cover all the holidays. They don't have to be December, end of December. Okay, I think that's a good idea. Well, then for next year we'll do I don't know, maybe we'll do. Center clause. Did we talk about we talked about him a lot in the Christmas window. Yeah, we'll figure it out. Yeah, we have a year. We're planning this thing out like years in advance now. That's dangerous. Well, until next year, we hope that you keep listening. We hope that you have a fantastic that you've had a fantastic Hanukkah. To our Jewish friends and listeners. For our Christian friends and listeners and our Jewish friends and listeners who practice Christmas. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. And if you want to learn more about Hanukkah, you can type that word in. We spell it on housetopworks as a type that into the handy search bar@housetopeworks.com. And that means now it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this one Medieval Times email. I got permission to read this, too. This is from Gerald in Boston, although I believe he said he was from Texas. Gerald says this interestingly, guys. My first job after college was the master of ceremonies, also known as the King's Chancellor. At many times. That was the role Andy Dick played in The Cable Guy. Okay. He was the master of ceremonies. I rode a very large and illusion horse, wore a velvet and sequined cape, and introduced all the knights and narrated much of the action on the show. Supposedly, our show was set in Spain in the 11th century. One of the more embarrassing aspects of the job was the occasional educational matinee that we put on for large groups of students. The show was not researched at all and was written by someone who didn't have a background in the entertainment industry, let alone any knowledge of history whatsoever. Among this is like a restaurant employee writing this. Basically, among the ridiculous facts, quote, unquote, we were required to present was that the knight sword weighed \u00a350, their armor weighed \u00a3300. Despite such misinformation, we couldn't do much about our show being written by someone who just made things up. The perils of a working stiff. Anyway, you might want to mention, not to pay too much attention to the information presented by a caped man on horseback in what is basically a rodeo arena with a medieval decor scheme and fancy lights. It was interesting work, although it was one of the worst jobs I've ever had in terms of hours pay and lack of benefits. Oh, how Night Hood has fallen. Killer show, dudes. Gerald. Gerald. I hear the chicken is good. I don't know. I've never been there. I haven't either. We should totally go sometime, just for laughs. Okay. And history. Okay. 50 pound stores and 300 pound suits of armor. Thanks, Gerald. How about your worst job? Let's hear about that. I've had good jobs. I can't talk about my worst job on air. Well, that means that we need to hear from all of you listeners to fill in for Chuck. Fill in the blanks. See if you can guess what Chuck's worst job was. He'll probably never actually say, but let's see what you got. Wrap it up. Send it in an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffs.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housefworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The House of Courses iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun'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 Hardstarke, this Truck Prime 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." | ||
412bf2ba-53a3-11e8-bdec-f7ebc04ea28b | How Ping Pong Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ping-pong-works | While Asia is well-known for being cuckoo for Ping Pong, the game was actually invented by bored British Victorian aristocrats. Go back and forth about Ping Pong’s place in the world with Chuck and Josh. | While Asia is well-known for being cuckoo for Ping Pong, the game was actually invented by bored British Victorian aristocrats. Go back and forth about Ping Pong’s place in the world with Chuck and Josh. | Tue, 29 Jan 2019 15:54:17 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=15, tm_min=54, tm_sec=17, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=29, tm_isdst=0) | 54500276 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. This is stuff you should know. The podcast list about Ping Pong. I'm excited about this one. I'm glad. I love Ping Pong. Are you any good? I don't think we've ever played, have we? I don't think we have. Crazy. There was that one time we were at that Ping Pong bar and we just stared at each other for an hour, but we never played. I remember that as being air hockey. I remember the staring. Yeah. Dude, I love ping pong. I'm pretty good for just a recreational ponger. And I finally got a table. I got an outdoor table. Oh, nice. An outdoor table. Fancy. I love it. Yeah, that's great. I don't have room inside. Well, yeah, if you have an outdoor table, it doesn't matter. Yes, I got one under the deck. Very nice. And it's just the best I have had many times in my life where and now it's just kind of when I can get someone over family and I have a window. But at various points in my life, I have played a lot of Ping Pong, including when I lived in La. My buddy John Pandel, chef John, you know John, he was, I think, living in a place that had an outdoor table, and this was outdoor in Los Angeles. So it's kind of great. It's just out there in the backyard. And then my brother and I have had epic, legendary Ping Pong battles at his house. Fun basement, like matches, like a single game that went on forever kind of thing. Not that, but like two out of three every time family is over there. At one point, we will disappear, and everyone's like, Where's Scott and Chuck go? And we're down there going at it. That's awesome. It's just so much fun. I love Ping Pong. I love Ping Pong, too, but my eyes are kind of open. I realize I'm not quite as much the Ping Pong aficionado as I once thought I was. Yeah, between you and this article, I realized I'm a total schlub when it comes to Ping pong. Yeah, I'm not bad. Good. So we're talking ping pong today? And Chuck, you can just phone this one in. I had to do a lot of extensive shoe leather research on this one. But the idea of Ping Pong, when you think of it, especially in the 21st century, most people think of China when they think of Ping pong. Sure, especially here in the US. But really worldwide, because China is nuts for Ping Pong. And there are plenty of other countries, too, that love Ping Pong. Don't get me wrong. Sweden is known as one of the major homes of Ping Pong. The Japanese love Ping Pong. It's basically almost every country except America really has a thing for Ping Pong. Here. It's just fun recreational stuff. In other countries, it is taken very seriously, and there are pockets that take it seriously here, too. There's the US Table Tennis Association, which has been around since the 30s. But I think what I mean, as far as the public goes, thinking about table tennis players, we don't exactly, like, put them hoist them on our shoulders and carry them around the room after a match, like what might happen to them in other countries. That's a very good point, but it's sort of more of a recreational, as you said, there are some competitive players, to be sure, in organizations, but it's a sport you can play while you're drinking a beer. Sure. Now, you don't want to do that if you are actually competitive pro, table tennis player. But I say all that, Chuck, because while we think of China as, like, the home of table tennis, it actually is a British invention. Did you know that? I did. Well, of course you did. You're a table tennis pro. No, I mean, I knew that just because it was a variation of tennis, which the Brits also gave us, it is a racket sport, which you can include things like Bad Mitten and Smoosh Ball and Smash Ball. What are the things they play down at Venice Beach? What is that called? Pickleball. Is that what it is? It is basically like a miniature tennis court. I think it's called Smashball. Okay. I don't know. People are yelling at their car right now at me. I think you're talking about pickleball. Is it pickleball? It's just sort of like a shrunken down tennis court. Yeah, but obviously it looks like tennis with oversized ping pong paddles, right? Exact. Okay. Yeah, that's pickleball. It might be called Smashball, too. There's regional differences, the Grinder Hero, that kind of thing. I think Smashball is something else entirely. You're thinking of Smash Mouth? Not that again. Yes. Reference to our live show that we just did. Okay, but what I was saying was it is known as a racket sport or a racket game, wherein you have a racket, you hit something over a net to another human or maybe robot. Even as we'll get to there's a court, there are boundaries of some kind that you need to hit it in. It's not just a crazy fee for all right, exactly. You can't just, like, win a point by crushing it over your opponent's head. That would be fun. It takes skill in finesse. Yeah. And it even takes more skill and finesse than, like, tennis does. Like lawn tennis, because lawn tennis well, there's a difference. There's royal tennis, which is played like I'm trying to remember what movie it appeared in. Maybe it was even down in heavy, I'm not sure. But whether you play it indoors, it's like tennis indoors, and there's like, the ball is hard and wrapped in cloth. Is that not squash? No, there's royal tennis and then there's lawn tennis, or modern tennis is what it's called. And Ping pong is a variation on modern tennis. But it takes more finesse because, yes, you can smash the ball, and that is a way to go. Aggressive, attack style playing. But there's also a really good way to play, too, which is strictly defensive. And it's all finesse and spin. And we'll see, like, there's a lot of thought that goes into it, which is why, if you notice, if you start to look around who plays table tennis, you'll find that there are table tennis tables in places where they are very smart people. Like MIT has a table tennis club and CERN has a table tennis club in one of their cafeterias. Smart people like this because there's a lot of physics involved into it and there's not a lot of running around either. Yeah, you don't see them. You don't see dumb dumps because they're just like, I don't get it. Yeah, like smash ball paddle. But we do know that although we don't know the inventor, there's not one person that is credited with its invention. But the story goes that British soldiers in South Africa or India were bored and the weather wasn't so great and they were probably drinking. And so they came up with this little smaller version of tennis played on a table, as the story goes, using cigar box lids, using Cbaro lids and a whittle down champagne cork to make it round. Which that wouldn't be a bad little first go I saw. That exact same story was attributed to some wealthy British aristocrats who were bored one day. That sounds about right. But there seems to be unanimous agreement that it was on a table with some cigar box lids and a cork widdled down. Yeah. And so it grow from there. It growed excuse me, I think you still got another try left. It grows from there into wait, you mean grew, right? You know I'm kidding, right? Okay. The first time, I knew you're kidding. The second time, I was like a straight man. You really are. It grew from there, and the names changed various times. The first manufactured, actually put out and sell ping Pong tables was the Jacques Games Company, and they called it Gossima. There was another trademarked name with WAFF, which was the slicenger company's name. And the world was like, you got another try there. There was one called Flimflam. I don't know if that was trademarked from a company or if that was just a nickname. And all these, with the exception of GossipA, they were meant to emulate the sound the ball made going back and forth. Right. Really? Yeah. With WAFF. That doesn't sound like whiffwap at all. What about flip flam? No. Maybe the sound of the paddle sounds like a whiff win a WAFF. Right. But not the ball. Okay, fine. But Gossima meant it was, like, after gossamer, which was kind of fine and thin and elegant, which was like the ball play was what that was describing. They were all terrible, terrible names. I can't believe I just did that. So they did use cork at first, but they didn't bounce great. Rubber wasn't good because it had too much bounce. The rackets were really kind of crazy looking at first. Some had really long handles, kind of looked like a bad mitten racket with vellum stretched over a wooden frame. But they broke on the table and stuff, so they were really kind of refining it in those early years as far as the equipment goes. Right. It was Jacques Jay, Jacques and Son who were the ones that were selling those, like what you just described, just kind of cheap, not well made, not really well thought out equipment for Ping Pong, which it wasn't called Ping Pong at the time, until the late 1890s, when that same company, Jacob and Son, who were sporting goods outfit, started calling it Ping Pong in their catalog. It just converted from gossima over to Ping Pong through these guys. Yeah. And before that, in 1885, there was an attempt to patent it as table tennis by a guy named James Devonshire. But two years later, he abandoned that pursuit. I don't know if it was just taking too long or if he saw the writing on the wall, but he left that behind. And then it would be, like you said, was when John Jacques trademarked that Ping Pong name? Yes. And then Parker Brothers bought the North American, or at least American rights to use Ping Pong exclusively. And they brought Ping Pong to the United States with that. And this is the reason why, if you look up any professional association or any competitive Ping Pong group, they always refer to as table tennis because Ping Pong is a trademark, table tennis is not. Plus, also, over the years, Ping Pong has gotten an association with people like me. Yeah, just people having fun, playing it where table tennis has been the route that most competitive denotes competitiveness, competition, pro kind of thing. Yeah, for sure. But I think if you're just hanging around the locker room or whatever with some table tennis pros, they'll refer to it as Ping Pong. And no one's like, I can't believe you just called it that. And you were like, no, that's locker room talk. Right. So the same year that Ping Pong was trademarked in 19 one, there was an Englishman named James Gibb. He found these celluloid balls when he went to the US. That it wasn't for table tennis. It was just a toy, a novelty toy. He's like, this is pretty great, actually. It's pretty lively. It's light, just the right amount of bounce. And so I think celluloid is kind of like the route we should take. And everyone seemed to agree, and that sort of became the de facto Ping Pong ball. Right? It's been that way forever. Celluloid is a type of plastic. It's super flammable. Like, it's what film stock like camera film was made from forever. But like I said, it's very flammable. And your ball is going to go up in flames if you pass it over a candle, like if you're lighting your game by candle. So it's not very good. But that was an enormous change that pushed ping pong way forward, because up to that point, a cork ball didn't bounce very well. A rubber ball bounced too much. You couldn't really play ping pong like we see it today. It was more like, sorry, here's another service. My point. It was just boring. When that guy came along with the celluloid balls and introduced him for ping pong play, it made it fun. Finally. Ping pong finally became fun. Yeah, just a year after that, too. The paddle and this is all sort of aligning perfectly. The paddle underwent a big change over the years, proceeding. They had used cork to cover them and leather sometimes I saw that you can still buy leather covered ping pong pedals at Tiffany's. Yeah, I could totally see that. Pearl handle, leather, leather facing. But they couldn't land on the right materials. And then at a tournament, a man named EC Good found this dimpled rubber coin mat, wrapped it around his paddle, and he's like, this thing is pretty boss. I can get a little spin on it. We got this ball from the year before, and everything's sort of clicking at this point, right? So you've got the great ball, you've got the great covering, and now ping pong is ready to explode. And it started to and then it just stopped. Let's take a break. Okay. All right. That's a good cliffhanger. And find out what killed ping pong right after this. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck stuff? You should. All right. So ping pong is finally coming into its own lane. It's finally getting good. And right as it is, it just drops off as a fad. The craze, especially in the United States and I think in Europe, too, it just kind of went away. And there's no real obvious reason why, but our old pal Ed dug up an example that he thinks might be behind it. There was an ad for the National Guard in 1914 where one of the major generals in the National Guard said that they don't want any ping pong warriors, which implies that the sport was seen as effeminate or that you were kind of a wimp or something if you played ping pong. So it's possible that kind of warlike masculinity rose above it and ping pong got pushed down as a result. Well, and also, World War I and the Spanish flu probably put a dent in fun games like this. Overall, I would say sure. I mean, that's just a guess, but they had more important fish to fry than playing ping pong. But I came back right after the war. Right after the war. And I don't think that it is coincidental that this was also a time when people started smoking pot a lot in America. The Jazz Age. So you had jazz, marijuana cigarettes and ping pong. Those are the big three of the Jazz age. Quite a mix. Yeah. And then so Parker Brother still had their trademark on this whole thing. They're like, oh, great. Hallelujah. It's the Jazz age. They started throwing these competitions with cash prizes and celebrities showed up. It was a big deal. Yeah. I imagine during the marijuana craze, too, they were like, this is great for what we're doing, but we got to keep score. And that's a problem. Right. Somebody's got to stay sober for this. What was it? Whose serve was it? No way. Is it 76? Do we play the 21? Man, you're way too uptight for this. So I believe in the 20s is when they started having these big tournaments. Parker brothers with prizes, celebrities were coming out the ITTF was officially founded in the mid 20s. That's the International Table Tennis Foundation. Yeah. And they start having World Championships in 1926. Yeah. Like right off the bat. Yeah. And it was a big deal. Obviously, they stopped during World War II for a period of time, but pretty much every couple of years since 1926, aside from the war, they started holding these, I guess would it be biannual or what's? Every two years? Well, that could be, yes. Biannuals every two years. That's not twice a year. I think it can be. It's one of those things I think you would use semiannual. Might even be quarterly. I'm not sure. I think it can be neither one. Just like with weekly. Yeah. But those first years, Hungarians were the dominant country. They won eight of the first nine. Four of those went to the same guy. A guy named Victor Barra won 32, 33, 34 and 35. Man, that's good. Yeah, so he was doing pretty good. But the United States was not. No. Like I said, the US TTA didn't form until 1000 1933. And even then, if you wanted to go play really high level table tennis, you went to one place in the entire country, lawrence's Broadway Court in Manhattan Town. Got to go to New York if you want to play ping pong, see if you can make it there. You can make it anywhere in the US. But don't even try it in Hungary. Yeah. It just didn't catch on like it did in Europe. No, it didn't. This is the same I think it was kind of big in the 70s, too. Again, pot in the United States, but it's never been like explosively, sustainably popular like it has in other countries and in particular. So the Europeans are dominating table tennis from about the mid twenty s to almost to the early. Then from 30 to 50, the Soviet Union banned it for 20 years. Oh, really? That left a Soviet vacuum. Okay, well, the Hungarians would have been under Soviet control then, huh? I don't know the answer to that question. Yeah, I guess they would have been. So that would have I guess I wonder if that's when it moved over to Western Europe, northwestern Europe, like Sweden and Germany, maybe. Supposedly the best all time players in Sweden. That's what I've heard, too. The Mozart of table tennis. I don't know. John Ove. Waldner with the John part. I'm like, I don't know if he's Swedish. And then the Ove really got me. Probably not John. It's probably Waldner. Yeah, nice. Supposedly the best ever. So is he contemporary? I don't know. Okay. You've got Europe dominating. America is like, we're not even trying right now. And this is basically from the then in 1952, Asia steps in and says, don't forget Asia in the form of a man named Hiroji Sato. And he showed up at the World Championship in 1952 in Bombay or Mumbai, and he said, hey, you know how there's no rules about what kind of paddle I can use or what size it is? There's not really a lot of guidance on the paddle. Check this out. He had put foam around his paddle, and boy, did that make the ball bounce back. It increased the speed of the ball tremendously. And he just dominated that tournament and became world champion in 1952. By the way, that guy is totally contemporary. January Baldner, he's in his 50s. He's retired now. I don't know why you would retire from table tennis. So one thing I read, I read an article about a kid who is one of the best in the world, who is actually from America, is an Indian American. He trains like, he has to train to move around the table fast enough. Well, supposedly if you're an advanced player, you can burn up to 500 calories an hour playing table tennis. Is that right? That's what they say. That's a Snickers bar and a half. Yeah. I mean, I work up a sweat. That's me as well, though. So I take that into consideration. Yeah. I can sweat playing chess. I can't wait till you reach the age where you just walk around in public with a hand towel around your neck. Who does that? What's his name from the office? Craig Robinson. Is that his name? Oh, Craig. Yeah. I think he's famous for sort of just draping a sweat tile over his shoulder. Yeah, why not? Good for him. I'm going to follow that lead. So there's worse leads you can follow for sure. Man. So Hiroshi Sato showed up with his phone covered paddle and just dominated and became the hero or the champion of that tournament and of the world. But there are two legends that happened to him afterward. One, he returned home and was hailed a hero and a champion by Japan. And two, he returned home and was scorned as a dishonorable winner because he used an unusual paddle and never played table tennis again. And it turns out that he doesn't show up in any other tournament after that one. So maybe he was like, Well, I achieved it. I'm going to go do some other stuff. Or maybe he really was like, everyone's right, this was dishonorable. I'm never going to play again. Interesting. I hope there wasn't some nefarious action taken. I hope so, too. So, over the years, a lot of changes have taken place to make it more playable. And this is like the official rules in competition to make it more playable and to make it better for people watching it, they lower the net by about an inch over the years to make it a little zippier and more fun, they increase. Actually, not too long ago, in 2000, they increased the size of the ball by 2. Slow it down a little bit because it was getting so fast people couldn't even follow it. It was like Forest Gump up in there. It's not a big TV sport here, obviously, but it's a big TV sport in a lot of the world. Right. People watch this stuff. Yeah. I mean, the camera has to be able to see where the ball is going, which isn't hockey. People want to see what's going on. They can do the glowing ball like they did in hockey for a while. Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah. Same company that did the ten yard line or the first down line. Oh, right. Was it really? Yeah, it was. They patented glowy things. Right. I think we talked about I can't remember what episode we talked about that one before, but okay, so you have the foam padded paddle, you've got balls that work really well, and you have what else, Chuck? You have a lower net. Yeah. You have a bigger ball, and then probably the cream of the crop. It's not what I'm looking for, man. Am I just the Kuna? No, that's the depth below. Okay. Well, the pinnacle. They made it an Olympic summer sport. Yes, but never forget it. Now it's like, okay, now you're not just wasting your life being a pro table tennis player, just in it for the pot. You can actually train to go to the Olympics for your country. That's right. Pretty monumental. Should we talk about playing styles a bit? I think we should. I like where you're going or not going with this. Next. Well, so the point is made in this article that table tennis is a game all about the style of play, sort of like boxing. You can come out swinging hard, you can come out with the ropea dope. You can play defense and boxing, and you can kind of do that in tennis. You can be really aggressive and try and set up for the big smashes. Or you could be what's known as a chiseler or a pusher and just be really fundamentally sound and wait for your opponent to make a mistake. Right. And that was chiseling was huge back before the phone paddles, because that's all you really had. You couldn't attack with a huge super fast return. I mean, you could try, but it wasn't going to really work. Yes, but once the introduction of foam came around, chiseling became like a decision. You could also be an attacker as well. Yeah. I mean, I think now you got to have all of the weapons in your ping pong arsenal, right? Exactly. You can play the spin game, you can be defensive, but you also got to hang 15ft back off the table and hit those big loopholes, right? Yeah. You want to be able to do both, for sure. So with the chiselers, though, the defensive minded people. In 1938, this legendary match took place the World Championships between two of the greatest chiselers of all time, a Polish player named Alex Ehrlich and a Romanian named Penns Pharkus. This was such a like, I mean, I read into this, too. It just doesn't seem like it's possible that the following took place. Okay, well, this is how it was recorded in 1965 and Sports Illustrated. All right. There are a lot of little points here. This is, by the way, did you say that? Yeah. Okay. The most epic part of this is it was the first point, supposedly the very first point took 2 hours and twelve minutes to complete. So they just kept hitting it back and forth. It was a two hour and twelve minute volley. It was zero zero at 2 hours and twelve minutes. That's how good these guys were at chiseling. Or just playing defensively. Like, somebody hits you, you hit it right back. Somebody hits you, you hit it right back. You're not trying to smash it down their throat. You're just patiently waiting for them to make a mistake. It's a fast game still. It's not like playing with a six year old. Right. But the thing is, it's a fast game, but you as the player and probably as the spectator, start to feel like you're about to go insane because you're locked into this. At the time, ping pong was played to 21, whoever got to 21 first, and then you had to still win by two points. So if this was zero zero for 2 hours and twelve minutes, the ball crossed the net 12,000 times. I just don't know if I buy it. That's a problem time wise. Yeah. So here's all the things that supposedly happened. A referee in the match, his neck locked up and had to be replaced midpoint. His neck had to be replaced? Yeah. Ehrlich switched hands because he got tired and played with his left hand for a little while. Every now and then I believe that during the point the ITTF got together to negotiate shortening the match, the game to five points instead of 21. Right. But they had to have the proper representatives from the different countries there, and Airlock was the representative from Poland, so they couldn't have this meeting without him. So they had the meeting at table side during the match. Like during this point, as it was going on, supposedly Eric had a chess board set up, table side, and during the match was also playing chess and saying what move to make? I don't know about that. That's what he said. That's why I don't believe any of this. This all sounds like tall tale. Well, there are other people there. All right, well, then he played chess. I don't know about that one, but I do think that there are definite elements to that. I believe that there was a two hour and twelve minute period where they were zero to zero. I don't know, at least that's true. Well, there's so much stuff attached to this, it makes me doubt the whole thing. Austrian players supposedly went to a movie, came back still during the first point, and then finally the Romanian panthefarks, Mr. Return. Eric goes up 100 and then they start in on point number two. They get 20 minutes into that one. And supposedly other members of the Polish team pulled out knives and bread and a two foot sausage, thinking that they were going to be there forever. And this made Farkas basically lose his mind. He lost his marbles like Burger King. He went on the attack at that point. He went from being what do they call the chiseler to going hard on the attack, hit it twice, ehrlich, returned both, and then he basically lost it, supposedly just blasted the ball over his head and ran out screaming. I love that story. That's one of the better ping pong stories around. Yeah, I believe about 10% of it. All right, but even if the only thing you believe is that they were zero for 2 hours and twelve minutes no, you keep saying, I believe that. I'm saying, even if that is the only thing you believe, then that's good enough. Yes. I don't buy any of it. What do you think? Like, that there was a match between these two and then that's it, everything else is made up? No, I think Laura has taken over and that it has been enriched over the years to where people were going to movies and the dude was playing chess. Sure, yeah. I don't buy it that it went down like that, but do you believe that they were zero for 2 hours and twelve minutes? I don't know if I believe that or not because I haven't seen a verified source other than this guy telling the story. Okay, where did you see it other than this guy telling the story? Nowhere. But I mean, That takes a lot of gall to just make up that story. Tell it to Sports Illustrated, have it printed in Sports Illustrated, knowing that anybody could go behind you and say, well, let's look at the records for that night and see, and just say, well, this guy is totally lying. Well, my answer is people have gall. Yeah, well, you and I are going to agree to disagree just to keep things moving, because I think at the very least, they were zero, zero for 2 hours and twelve minutes. I buy that. Here's what I think. I'm definitely not going to say it while it was in Sports Illustrated. What? So it had to be true. All right, enough ragging on Sports Illustrated from you. Hey, I got that magazine for many years. You know who's on my first cover? Giselle bunching? Muhammad Ali. Oh, wow. I started getting it when I was a kid. Jeez. Wow. Do you still have that one? I'll bet it's worth like $710 now. I do. I think my mom kept all many, many years in a box. It's kind of fun to go through and look every now and then. Oh, yeah, for sure. All right, so this fake match happens in the 1930s, jewish table tennis players. And we should point out that many of the early world champions were Jewish men. They fled Germany for England. And then Ehrlich, who we just mentioned, the Polish player was threatened, obviously. He was in Poland when the Nazis invaded, and he was sent to Auschwitz, and he was literally being led to the gas chamber when a German Nazi guard recognized him and spared his life. Yeah, like he was about to die. And he got moved around from concentration camp to concentration camp until the Allies liberated him and others from the concentration camp he was in. And then right after the war, he went right back to table tennis, man. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. All right, I think we should take a break. Okay. Talk about Sports Illustrated some more. That combustion of education and journalism. That's right. And we'll be back right after this. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right. All right. So, Chuck, we were talking about like, chiselers and attackers and all that. At first, if you played ping pong up until the until Sato showed up with his phone paddle, you're basically just chiseling. Everybody was chasing this is a patient back and forth game, just chiseling once the phone paddles came up and changed the game so radically. Like you said, they actually enlarge the size of the ball to increase the air resistance to it, to slow it down, which is a huge change for everybody to get used to as well. I think that was in the 2000s that change was made, but from the people were just crushing the Ping pong ball. It got really fast and really fast paced. It was fun, but it got too fast. So the ITTF stepped in and said, no, we got to make some changes. And that's some of the other things they've done too. They've made changes and rules over the lifetime of Ping pong to make the game hard and interesting, but also to make it fun to watch too. Yeah. Now you play to eleven and competition play. It used to be 21 for most sort of backyard fun players it's still 21, but these people are 21. These people are so good though, that 21 is way too long of a game. You can play a point for two and a half hours, right? 2 hours and twelve minutes could be precise. They change sometimes the serve rotation, like how many times you serve in a row before you switch it up, which side you play on. You can't hide the ball when you serve because trying to make the game as fair as possible. The dimensions of the table are kind of interesting if you're looking at it in meters. If you're from the United States, it's a nine foot long table, 5ft wide, two and a half feet high, but that's 2.74 meters, 1.55 meters wide, 76 CM high. Right. The net is six inches high. But that's after they lowered it a bit. Have you seen how they make balls? Yeah, like the little factory. Yeah, you saw like a video of it being made. I can watch that stuff all day long. I know. Same here. If you look at ping pong balls. Before they're formed into balls. They actually start as little flat plastic circles and that is one half of a ping pong ball and they take it and they form it. They press like a ball bearing. Ping pong ball size ball bearing in hot water to mold it and they take two of those two halves and put them together and seal them and then they trim off the fat and there's your Ping pong ball. But that's not the end of the life of the ping pong ball manufacturing process because the companies that make ping pong balls specifically, there's one that's like a globally dominating ping pong equipment company called Double Happiness, which we'll talk about later, but they do so much quality control it's astounding before they sell a ping pong ball. Oh, I'm sure like to measure bounce. There's like a specific amount of bounce that the itta requires for a ping pong ball and so a company will measure it by dropping it. A set height, I think like 300, has to bounce back up like 240 to 260. And they measure it with the digital camera. It has to have a specific hardness. So they use a robot with a needle to test the pressure it takes to puncture it with a needle. It's like Casper mattresses but they drop a human exactly. They roll it down an incline to see where it veers. There's a lot going on there just to make a ping pong ball that's usable in a game. Sure. I just think it's top notch that they take it that seriously. Any competition sporting ball undergoes incredible testing. Right. Like they just don't throw out an NFL football or a basketball either. Or a tennis ball. What? It's pretty amazing. Yeah, it is. But ping pong balls, that's what I'm talking about here. I think you secretly are kind of making fun of ping pong. I don't mean to be, but my idea of ping pong has changed as a result of researching this. How about that? So the paddles themselves, they are laminated wood. When you look at them, you can tell it's sort of pressed together of different woods. Some of them are fiberglass. There are carbon fiber paddles, which I would love to give that a whirl. Yeah, but I saw that the 85% of the thickness has to be wood. Does that mean there's, like, carbon fiber in the middle of it? Maybe just to make it slightly lighter would be my guess. I have no idea. Okay. There are all kinds of materials from just the regular. You can still get, like, the sandpaper paddles, very low fi, but that padded rubber on one side and the textured, little rubber dimples on the other side, which have to be two different colors, by the way, because the other player supposedly needs to know which side you're hitting it with so they know what's coming or to a varying degree, what might be coming. But that's sort of like the classic pedal that most people have settled on right now. Yeah. The smooth padded side would be for chiseling and the dimpled side would be for attacking and for probably the most important part of ping pong is spin to add spin to the ball. Yeah, I'm a pretty good spinner. Oh, you are hungry. Like, not just one kind of spin. Can you do multiple kinds of spin? Yeah, I've got a good backhand spinner shot that's very fast and then sort of a flick of the wrist that it just shoots off the paddle and then has a nice little top spin to it. Wow. And I try and angle that to the farthest corner that I can. That's really impressive, Chuck. Well, I didn't say I was great at it, but you try. That's the aim. This is what's going on in your head, at least, right? Yeah, but I'm not like a great what do you call it? A smash or a slam? An attacker? Well, just the big the smashmouth. Yeah, the smash mouth. I'm not a good smash mouth. I'm not great. I can get lucky every once in a while, but I still try because it's such a boss move. It really is pretty cool. But that's sort of the variation of the loop stroke, which is what you see on TV when someone just throws a big haymaker. It's all in the hips and the legs, tons of top spin. And that's sort of like that main shot for what would be a big smash to me is sort of the regular shot that people volley back and forth on in competition. Right. And when you're doing the loop, it's like, from what I saw, it's an upward chopping motion where you're just basically bringing the paddle up really quick as it comes in contact with the ball, which, like you said, gives it tons of top spin. And there's this thing called the Magnus effect with fluid dynamics. Whereas this Ping pong is moving through the air, the bottom, or the side of it that's spinning into the air is generating more resistance. So there's higher air pressure there than there is on top I'm sorry, on the bottom, which makes the ball fall because there's less air pressure there. So when you put spin on the ball, depending on which direction it's going, you can make it go left, right, up, down, and depending on the type of what's it called when you hit the ball, not the grip, the wing a pawn. Depending on I guess it's the stroke. Depending on the stroke you use, you can apply different spin to the ball. But that's the big reason why one side of a Ping pong paddle is dimpled so that you can make contact with the ball and really kind of grip it while you're giving it that spin. Yeah, ping pong. So there are all kinds of grips. The Shake Hands grip is sort of if you don't play a lot of Ping pong, it's probably just the standard little grip that you would want to use. The pinhole grip is what you see my brother and Asian players use. That's got to move is the one with the thumb on the back side of it. Yeah. Basically, your thumb and forefinger kind of wrap around the handle and almost touch each other. And then your other three fingers are resting on the back of the paddle itself. And it sort of looks like you're holding the paddle upside down. Well, because you kind of are. Yeah. But that's, my brother, is a total pinholer. Got you. What about the Sea Miller grip? Do you ever do that? That's Danny Sea Miller. I didn't really quite get them. That's like the Shake Hand. But what I saw was like, the thumb and forefinger are kind of resting on the face of the paddle. Sometimes the forefinger is wrapped around sort of on the side of the paddle. What I saw was that so you got your three, your pinky finger, your ring finger and your index finger that's on the paddle. Your middle finger are all wrapped yeah. That's on the handle. Your forefinger and your thumb are like control. They're like, up against the edges of the paddle and it makes it easier to spin the paddle and control it. That's what I saw as the seamiller grip. Yeah. Well, it's easier to flip the paddle to use both sides of it. Right, exactly. So you want to chisel here and then maybe a little attack there, put some spin on and then just push it back. You just flip it back and forth. Thanks to Danny C. Miller. Yeah, and I love the next part of this article, which is like, if you want to know all the rules of ping pong, go look them up. Right. Because it would be kind of boring just to read all those out. Sure. But I mean, if you're playing at someone's house, you play house rules, just ask what they are. Yeah, be a good guess. Be a good guess and say, what are the house rules? Because people play differently, some more, not obscure rules, but sort of nitpicky rules that casual players might not know. And depending on where you play the house rules, it may take effect or not. You're supposed to toss the ball at least 16 CM into the air before you serve. Right. My house rule is you just have to have some error between like you can't just hold it in your hand and hit it off your hand. Like, we don't say it has to be 16 CM, but there has to be a little bit of air between your hands. I see. The ball has to be suspended before you serve it. So what happens if someone violates your house rules? Are they like tired and feathered? Now? You say, Dude, what are you doing? Not cool. Here's a smash mouth for you. And you have to serve behind the inline. That's a pretty standard even for house rules. You're leaning over the table. Oh, I see what you mean. You can't lean forward a couple of feet. I got you. Because I was going to say I thought you were saying like, you have to get it inside a square to get it to the other square. And I thought that only applies in doubles. Yeah. You can serve it to either side when you're playing singles. Correct. Right. And then if it touches your hand that you're holding the paddle with, apparently, according to the ITTF, your hand is part of the paddle as far as they're concerned. So if it bounces off of your hand, there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, I always get the thumb hit, though, and it always sends it off in a bad direction and I always go thumb hit. You need to do more seamiller. More seamiller, less thumbsy. Right. The pimples, believe it or not, those are regulated. They cannot be larger than 2 mm. But astoundingly the size of the paddle is not at all regulated, you could show up with a pickleball paddle if you wanted to and they'd be like, yes, it works. But the foam padding on either side, if you're a competitive table tennis player, you glue your own foam on and you can cheat it, too. Right? Yeah. Until the Beijing Olympics. You could from, I think, the 60s until the Beijing Olympics, they would use a specific kind of glue that it would expand, but at the same time soften the foam underneath the exterior of the foam padding. So you've got, like, the layer, like the rubbery layer, and then underneath that is foam, like a spongy material. It would get into the pores of that spongy material, and it would make that ball bounce even faster and would just give it an enormous amount of speed. But just for a short amount of time, though. Right, right. So if you were in a tournament, you were pulling off and then regluing your phone pads on multiple times over the course of that weekend because you get about three or 4 hours of good, I don't know, ricochet return off of those things, and then they would dry up and it wouldn't be quite as useful. Cheaters. I love the article you sent where they were basically like everyone was doing it. Everybody. They called it doping, table tennis. Doping. But the problem is it had a lot of volatile organic compounds. So the International Table Tennis Foundation said, no, we don't want people getting cancer, so we got to ban it. And they actually test paddles now in a little machine that tests for volatile organic compounds. I love it. Yeah. Get those rats out of the game. Get them out. You got to win by two, as we said. Generally, you played a 21 at home. Eleven in competition, I think we said. And then, obviously, just anything is a point, if you get the point. It's not like volleyball. You don't have to be serving to get the point. Right. Which I love that, too. It makes the game go a lot faster. Yeah. And just my whole problem is keeping up with that score. Yeah. That's why you want a sober person there for you. And I guess we should finish with this. Well, a couple of things, but you've heard the term ping pong diplomacy. Yeah. There's a big story there. Yeah. That came from a real thing that happened, obviously. China lived in isolation for decades and decades from the rest of the world. And then during the Cold war, of course, the US. Was on the opposite side of China. Not a lot of travel going back and forth or allowed between the countries until the International Competition of 1971, where the Chinese table tennis team went to the championships in Japan, met some Americans, and in particular, one American named Glenn Cowan. And he was like, hey, man, we're all the same. Really? We all love table tennis, regardless of our grip. Let's shake hands. And he rode the bus with them on the way back to the hotel. So let me just interject here. He got on the bus accidentally. He had missed his own bus. And these were buses that were taking the teams to the hotel. And there was like the first ten minutes of this 15 minutes bus ride were silent, intense, because these two enemy groups were on the same bus, and no one knew what to do until Xuang Zedong stood up and said, I'm going to go talk to this guy. Yeah, but they got along great. Like I said, they had more in common than they thought. And table tennis or ping pong is literally what brought them together. And it was seen as sort of an emblematic thing. Flash forward a bit to the press covering this, it becomes a big deal. The US table tennis competition team said, we want to go to China because they're the best of the best over there. And Mao Zedong said, sure, come on over. They did so in April 1971. They spent a week there. It was big in the news, and it literally kind of thawed relations between the US. And China. Amazing. It paved the way for a trip by Richard Dixon. Like the US table tennis team went over there before Nixon did and just shared love of table tennis and this kind of international exposure of these two enemy countries, like getting along, whatever it takes to build common ground and consensus. If it's table tennis, awesome, so much the better. So it led to normalized relations between the two countries very quickly. Like within a year after the beginnings of normalized relations, within a year after the thing where all because Zidane came over and said, hey, man, I just want to say thank you for playing table tennis, and gave him a scarf, and Glenn Cowan had a comb on him, and he's like, this isn't a good enough reciprocal gift. So he later gave Zidane a T shirt with a peace symbol on it, which is pretty cool. And Richard Dixon, well known lover of Szechuan cuisine and marijuana. Yes, and peace symbol T shirt. He was all retired in one of those. In public. We should also talk a little bit about ping pong robots. They built a table tennis robot. It was okay, you could program it to imitate different styles, but it wasn't like when it played against a human being, what would happen there. It was just shooting them all to the same place at the same velocity. That's right, yeah. There wasn't a lot of training from it, but then they started inventing robots that could add spin to it and take its own moves. And that was in the early 90s when they first came out with those and the ones they have today. One came out in 2016 called fortheUS F-O-R-P-H-E-U-S. That thing is scary looking. Yeah, it is. And it can play some mean ping pong, but it actually plays you. It's an AI that plays you in ping pong, but it's like a giant mechanical spidery kind of looking thing. Yeah, it's really creepy looking. Like a big spider sitting high above the table across from you. And I saw the video, the guy playing it at CES and I felt bad for the guy because you cannot beat the thing. Well, plus, he also goes, well, plus I'm kind of nervous because all these people are watching. When he asked at one point, he's like, is there literally, like, nothing I can do that this thing won't return? They're like, Nope. So then he was like, well, why am I even here? Well, yeah, it's an AI. It's tracking the ball's velocity and trajectory and like, making calculations about how to best return it. You're not going to win against it. No, but you can train really well to beat other human socks off with it. That's right. So I don't have anything else, do you? I'm looking at my fun facts. I got in three of the four. The last one here is in 1993, the world record was set between two players who, if you're talking like speed ping pong, they hit it back and forth 173 times in 60 seconds. Oh, my God. That is some serious speed play. That's an amazing fact. But it's got nothing on the two hour and twelve minute point fake news. All right, now, you got anything else? I got nothing else. All right, well, if you want to know more about ping pong, go start playing the greatest thing you can ever try to do with your life. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. We should totally have a ping pong table here at work. I agree. I don't think we have room for it anymore, but at one point we probably did. I know now where it's all just like production space. Production space. We're like, where's Ping Pong? I'm going to call this. Well, we've been getting a lot of heat lately for two errors, one of which was sort of a joke by me, which I'm going to read now. But we should also say about figs and dates and prunes, same things. They're all the same thing. It's like pork, ham and bacon. Now, we heard from a lot of people about that and we understand now. Yeah, I mean, I got it flat out wrong, so sorry about that, everyone. You can stop telling us now, right? This is about average life expectancy, which I was kind of just kidding about, I think. Spanish flu episode. I made a joke about the life expectancy being like 50 or something, and I was like, so I'd almost be dead. So I'll just read this. Hey, stuffers. I hope this doesn't come across as being snarky or trolley, but I think you should try and clear up the difference between average actual life expectancy and average life expectancy. Chuck, more than once. So I guess I've said this before, you've made it sound as if people in the past could only expect to live into the 30s or 40s. That is not the case. People live well into their sixty s. Seventy s, eighty s and ninety s, just like today. And he gives some prominent examples of old people back in the day. And then he says what drove the average life expectancy down was the insanely high rate of infant and childhood mortality. People had huge families back in the past just to try and ensure that some of their children survived into adulthood because so many died as infants and others never made it past their second or third year due to mumps, measles, influenza, et cetera. The absolute horror of whooping cough. Let's not forget polio and any number of plagues that modern medicine has managed to render vastly less lethal, thanks mostly to our friend vaccines. So more and more children are surviving the battlefield called childhood, growing into adults, and the average life expectancy has become much longer. This is a great email. Thank you. Western medicine. That's from Joseph Cattrell. And Joseph, I was kind of just kidding about that. Which time? Well, every time. It was a recurring joke. But that was a very kind email, and it was fun and funny, and you did it right. So thank you. For sure. Plus, also, it gave you a chance to tell everybody that, you know, that's the case. Yeah, and it gave me a chance to let everybody know that I was totally wrong about dates and figs. Sure. Well, if you want to correct us like Joseph did, that was an A plus. Correction. Email Joseph. You can get in touch with us, go to stuffyshanelle.com and check out our social links. Or you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts@housetepworks.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 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 like 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." | |
Josh and Chuck's 2014 Christmas Extravaganza! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/josh-and-chucks-2014-christmas-extravaganza | It's that time of year again! Time to get cozy and tuck in with Josh and Chuck as they spread glad tidings and warm Christmas cheer. Tune in to hear about Letters to Santa, A Christmas Story, mulled wine and more neat stuff. | It's that time of year again! Time to get cozy and tuck in with Josh and Chuck as they spread glad tidings and warm Christmas cheer. Tune in to hear about Letters to Santa, A Christmas Story, mulled wine and more neat stuff. | Thu, 25 Dec 2014 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=359, tm_isdst=0) | 36941419 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the Christmas Podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Shuckers Bryant and guest producer knowl is with us today. Yeah, we got a Jerry Stocking, though, hanging over by the fireplace. Sure. And I am glad you built that fire, my friend. It's a little hot in here. Keeps me in the mood, though, you know? Sure. Christmas spirit. The Christmas mood. I see. Oh, yeah. You talk about the mood for that. That, too. Yeah. We have, like, glad tidings and good cheer and warmth and Christmas lights and color and sugar sprinkles and stuff, like, all over the place. It's our Christmas. I have to say, my friend, you really know how to set the mood in here. You really go all out. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Very well done. I'm glad you feel comfortable. Noel, do you feel comfortable? Nolto. Yes. He painted his beard white. Mine is going white naturally. I'm not going a beard because I'm gray in there. Sure. I've made my bed. I don't know why. Does that make sense? Sure. So, Chuck, I think we want to say welcome to everybody out there. Yeah. And we hope that you're having a wonderful holiday season so far. So kick off your shoes, put on your slippers. Well, make yourself comfortable. Yeah. Put on your comfy pants. There you go. As we prepare for our 2014 Christmas extravaganza. So, Chuck, you have seen the great movie A Christmas Story. Yes. Not just one of my favorite Christmas movies. It's one of my favorite movies of all time. Yeah. John Hudson has never seen that. Weird. I thought so, too. And disappointing. Yes. He said he's not a fan of Gene Shepherd. So I guess if you're not a fan of Gene Shepherd, you wouldn't like the Christmas story. Yeah. This is tough to swallow. I know. Like I'm having trouble swallowing right now. Hodgman stuck in your throat. For everyone else out there in the world besides you, John, a Christmas Story is a beloved holiday movie. Oh, yeah. And it's actually got kind of a cool little backstory, to tell you the truth. It was the movie that wouldn't go away, that would not be overcome. That's right. It's the bob Clark is a writer and director, and he's driving a date around and he's flipping the radio around because his date was dull. Sure. And he comes across writer Gene Shepherd's recollections and stories. He's an audio storyteller. A humorist. A humorist, exactly. Talking about growing up in Indiana in the he was smitten with it and apparently was so smitten that he just kept driving until the program was over and said, you just stay there and be quiet. I'm listening to this story on the radio. Okay. So, yes, smitten is a good way to put it. Enthralled, maybe. Sure. But he decided right then and there, I'm going to bring Gene Shepherd stories to the Silver screen. That's right. It took him a little while, though, because, as this article says, and we got this from Christmasoryhouse.com clark, he was a Journeyman director. He specialized in B movies. Yeah. Not many people know this. He made a movie called Silent Night. Evil Night. You made another Christmas movie. Really? Yeah. Not silent night, deadly night. No. This was called Black Christmas. It's one of those that was released under several titles. Was it ever silent night? Deadly night. Yeah, it was Black Christmas or Silent Night. Evil night. Okay. And then there was another title, and he also did a movie called Moonrunners about moonshine that Duke's A. Hazard was based on. Wow. This guy was all over the place. Yeah, he got a big fat settlement when they released that Duke's of Hazard movie recently. Nice. Good for him. Like $18 million. That's great. Yeah. So Bob Clark in the 60s becomes enthralled with Gene Shepherd, and it wasn't until the early eighty s that he got to make a Christmas story. And the whole reason he got to make a Christmas story is because he finally made a blockbuster movie known as Porkies. Yes. A teen sex romp comedy. Man, that movie was the most mysterious enticing thing when I was a kid, because I was ten years old, and it was supposedly just the dirtiest thing that had ever been made. I wasn't allowed to see it. I wasn't allowed to say, I have not seen Porkies. You know, it's funny. Watch Porkies and you'll be like, this is pretty tame. Yeah, it's body, but it's really not like I thought it was borderline pornography. That's what I took from it, too. No, it's not at all. So, huge hit, though. It was an enormous yeah, one time, for a brief time, it was the best. It was a top 25 all time grossing movie and the best selling comedy of all time. Wow. But only for a brief window. I think Ghostbusters quickly dwarfed it. So the studios came back to Bob Clark and said, man, do that again. Make a Porkies, too. He said, despite John Hodgman's wishes. Yeah, I'm going to make another movie first. It's called A Christmas Story. That's what we're going to call it. I'm going to base it on Gene Shepherd's. Stories that were collected into a book called In God We Trust. All others must Pay cash. Yeah. And they said, fine, just go do your movie or whatever. And he did. He made this movie. He scouted out 20 cities, I believe, and finally settled on Cleveland. And one of the reasons he settled on Cleveland was because Gene Shepherd grew up in Indiana, which is very near Cleveland. Sure. And Cleveland had a department store called Higbee's. And Higbees said, hey, man, we were around in the 40s. Why don't you just go ahead and film some of your stuff in here? And you said, Cleveland it is. Yeah. They had to dress it, of course, but it still had that old apartment stored look. That classic look. By the way, if you're ever in New York again, go to Macy's Herald Square and ride the wooden escalators. Okay. And be prepared to be delighted. Oh, really? It's just the coolest thing then. I didn't even know they existed. But they are wood. The rails, the steps, the whole thing. Yeah, the people on them. And they haven't redone them. They're still like well, sure, it's really pretty neat. Sounds like the cutting edge new wood elevators. No, but it feels like a hip bees way. Escalators or elevators. Escalators. Okay. Yeah. Even cooler. It feels like you're in a higbee, though, when you're at Macy's Herald Square because it just has an old school department score feel when you're on those things. Right. They didn't give them much budget for Christmas Story. No, they didn't expect very much from it either. No, they gave them just about 900 screens the weekend before Thanksgiving, and it made a little bit of money, a couple of million, then about 4 million the next weekend. Yes. Like 6 million. And it's first two weekends. Yeah, but they didn't have a big plan to roll it out because they didn't count on it being much. So they didn't roll it out. Right. Grossed about 19 million. Which of course, made the money back and then some. So it was a moderate success as far as making the suits happy. But it wasn't some runaway hit until cable TV. Well, yeah, not just cable, but video as well. Yeah. So MGM, like you said, didn't think too much of this movie and they sold it to Warner Brothers. They tossed it into a pot of 50 movies that Warner Brothers bought. And after Warner Brothers bought it, I guess they had to do with Turner because TNT in stunt on Christmas Eve, where they ran it twelve times for 24 hours. They played A Christmas Story back to back, and they just, I guess, did it to fill some airtime. And it was just a huge hit. People started clamoring for it. And every year, I believe, since they've had a Christmas Story marathon now on TBS. And at some point during the day, 40 million people tune in to watch at least parts of this movie. And for good reason. Do you want to know why? Why? Because A Christmas Story is one of the greatest movies ever made. It's really pretty great. So you want to hear some cool facts about A Christmas Story? Yeah. How about the fact that the part of the father that was ultimately played by Darren McGavin was originally offered to Jack Nicholson? Man, I shudder at the thought. Can you imagine Nicholson in that movie? Actually, I could. I can't. I think he would have been pretty great. But Darren McGavin is the greatest. Yeah. I was actually lucky enough to go to a screening at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, California, over Christmas. And Bob Clark did a Q and A. Darren McGavin was there. That's awesome. Right before he died and was old and frail, and he got a standing ovation and his wife helped him stand up. And I think it just wasn't clear to him. And she was like, this is for you. This is for you. It's just the sweetest moment. Yeah. One of my best Christmas moments ever. That's a nice Christmas moment. It was great. Gene shepherd, he did all the voiceover narration as Ralphie, right? Yeah. He's grown up, Ralphie. Yeah. But he also made a cameo. So the old man who says that's the back of the line, where the line starts there, that was Jean Shepherd. That was and Bob Clark also had a cameo as Swede, the neighbor with a Southern accent who stopped Spy to marvel at the infamous leg lamp. He goes, oh, you won an award. Yeah. A major award. Yes. That was the director and the kid, Grover Dill. Right. The little toady. Yeah. He actually went on to become the $2 paper boy in Better Off Dead. I had no idea. $2. Didn't ask for a done $2. Yeah. And apparently those are the only couple of three movies that he was ever in. Yano Anna. It's an odd name. Yeah. Speaking of leg lamp, it was based on a real lamp, a Nehai logo that was illuminated, and the style was, of course, Ruben Freed, the production designer, created the leg lamp. And I wonder if he has any claim on that thing because those things are sold like crazy now. Sure. Little ones, big ones. Like Keychains. Yeah. I wonder who's making that dough. Hopefully it's going to him. I doubt it. Probably going to MGM or Warner Brothers. Probably. Yeah. It's not very Christmassy. No, you can pinpoint even though it's never said, you can pinpoint the month and year when all this action takes place, thanks to the Little Orphan Annie decoder pin that Ralphie gets. Yeah. Great scene. The one he gets is the Speedomatic model, which is the one that was released in 1940. So A Christmas Story takes place in December of 1940. Many the exteriors are filmed in Toronto. Toronto. Except the house. The house is in Cleveland, and it's now a museum. I've been there, so you have? Oh, yeah. Okay. Do you recommend it? I've talked about it before. It's the best thing ever. You go and there's the original house. And you can walk through that's still dressed like the movie. And then down the street, someone bought another house and has a museum of artifacts and things from the movie. And it's totally a great time. If you're ever in the Cleveland area around Christmas, do it. Okay. It's going to be busy, but don't go in the summer. Right. You really got to get that Christmas feeling. Yeah. But a lot of the exteriors are filmed in Toronto because in one scene, you can even see one of their red trolley cars in the background, which Cleveland does not have. Or Indiana. Wow. As far as I know. So, Chuck, that's a Christmas story, huh? Yeah. I guess we should say that there were some deleted scenes that never made it. The Black Bart scene. He shot several of those, including one with Flash Gordon. And at the Christmas Story house, you can see clips of those and some of the artifacts. And Ralphie went on to be a big shot producer. Oh, yeah. Peter Billingsley. Peter Billingsley. Of a lot of those Vince Vaughn Favreau movies he's attached to. And I think Vince Von still calls him Ralphie sometimes just to get under his skin. I could see that. Of course, Chuck, it wouldn't be one of our Christmas specials if we didn't talk about booze. Offer an alcoholic recipe. Right, exactly. So this year we're doing mold wine. Mold wine is old, actually. They think that it was developed to keep old wine from spoiling or when it was about to spoil, to use it up really quick. Yeah. And it gained a lot of notoriety when Charles Dickens put it in A Christmas Story. I'm sorry? Christmas Carol. Right. I still got that on the brain. Yeah. And that's largely where it's association with the holidays comes in, I think. Sure. I don't like it. Do you? I love it. Yeah. I can't do it. They sell it on the streets of Budapest. And it is wonderful stuff. Yeah, I tried it. I don't like the hotness and I don't like those spices. Just not my thing. You would not like mold wine. Yeah, but I love wine. But not mold. I read this article from 1940, I think, of the New Yorker. It's about this bar, the oldest bar in New York, and it was talking about how some of the old timers would take their mugs of ale and put them next to the pot bellied stove and heat it up to like, coffee temperature. Oh, really? And drink their beer like that I'd never heard of. I think back then they were like, I'm cold and I want to be drunk, so let's just do those two things. Yes. Which is what mold wine was, too. So with mold wine, you typically want to use like a dry red, like maybe a serra or zinfandel, which I didn't realize were dry. Oh, yeah. Okay. You want to add a little citrus. Usually you fortify it with something like brandy. Yeah. Other people use pork sometimes. My big pork. Exactly. And then spices, despite Chuck's taste. Yeah. Clove and cinnamon. Ginger, nut bag. The traditional Christmas drink spices. Right. Clove. I think it might be what ruins it for me. Oh, really? Maybe it's just not my thing. I don't like sanchria either. Yeah, I could see it. You wouldn't. Some spices or some recipes say you might want to sweeten this a little bit. So add some honey, add some sugar, do something like that. And that's the beauty of mold wine. It's like you can just kind of start with some wine and add a little bit here, there, until you come up with your own concoction. But we'll give you, like, a basic mold wine recipe. I think we got it from Grape.com. That sounds like a good place to get a mold wine recipe. Yeah. Sounds like authoritative. So you want to take one bottle dry red wine. I'm guessing a 750. Yeah, probably. You want 6oz of brandy. That's a lot of brandy. That is a lot of brandy. So it's getting just better and better by the second. This recipe is one orange sliced into rounds, two lemons sliced into rounds, half cup of honey, three cinnamon sticks. Refer to our cinnamon episode. Yeah. Six whole cloves, one teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg. That's delicious. Yeah. And then maybe some ginger, if you want. You combine everything in a large sauce pan, and this is very important, Chuck. You heat it slowly. Don't let it boil. Yeah. Don't just crank that heat up too high. No. And as it starts to steam a little bit, it's done. You serve it in mugs and enjoy that's right. And I was reading this a bit you sent about the Charles Dickens Pub in Worthing, England, and they served mold wine by the glass, and it sounded like a really neat thing until I saw that they use a microwave to heat it up. Yeah, it's like, man, they take 6oz of Spanish red wine at 1oz of berry cordial, which I'm curious, what berry? Yeah. Elderberry. I don't know. English berry, I guess. Yeah. And they pour it over an orange slice with a cinnamon stick and two cloves. And then, like you said, they put the glass in the bike, and they ruined the whole experience. The traditional microwave featured so prominently in Oliver Twist. But, hey, at least they're trying. Yeah, and you can try, too. Let's know how your mold wine recipe goes. I think in Oliver Twist. You're right. They said, Please, sir, may I have some more? And he says, well, let me get out of the microwave first. Yeah, then you can have some more. That was the original line, and Dickens crossed it out. So it won't hurt our feelings if you pause us to go make some mold wine and come back and listen to the rest. Glorious. So, Josh, let's say you're a little kid and you want to write a letter to Santa Claus. Are you allowed to do so, sir? And if so, when did that start? Well, it's pretty old. Have you heard of this Twitter account tweets of old? No. They just take old, like, newspaper clippings and stuff and tweet them. So it's not supposed to be funny? No, but it comes off as funny sometimes. Got you. Some of the stuff these people said were funny. Bizarre, random, but around Christmas time, they do kids letters to Santa, like old timey ones. Oh, neat. There are a lot of kids who are not just asking for stuff. They were also asking that the siblings got nothing. Sure. Which is hilarious. I was never like that, but apparently no, I wasn't either. I was like my brothers and sister. I wanted us all to have what we wanted. Right. At the very least, you realize that Santa would frown on that kind of avarice. That was a good sharer, I guess. Yeah. So apparently, though, as far as the United Postal Service is concerned, all of this started around 1912. Yeah. Long time ago. That's when they say they started really receiving a noteworthy amount of letters for Santa Claus. And as we all know, Santa gets extraordinarily busy around this time of year, so he can't sit down and answer all these letters. So the postal service said, maybe there's another idea. Yeah. Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock said, you know what? Why don't we write these kids back? I'm going to authorize not just employees, but volunteers, regular citizens. You and I could do this. Yeah, you can. You just have to go to your local post office, if it's a participating post office, fill out a little personal info, put your fingerprints down right. Stand there for a mug shot, and you'll get some letters from children that you can answer on Santa's behalf. Yes. It's called Operation Santa, and it's a pretty neat thing to participate in. I've never done it, but I might try and do it this year. They are now redacted, obviously, because they want to protect the anonymity of these kids and their families and the addresses, which is pretty smart move, I think, in 2006 is when they started doing that. But, yeah, you can write to kids from all over the world, I guess, or at least all over the country. It is voluntary as a post office. You don't have to do it. Right. But if you live in a major city, there's bound to be a post office that's participating. Yeah. And the USPS says they'll take all charitable organizations, groups, families, friends, whoever, just come along and fill out your info. Yeah, we should do that one year for how stuff works. Okay. And get, like, the whole company to sort of take part. Yeah, that'd be neat. And since its territory reaches the North Pole, the Canadian postal service maintains a postal code specifically for Santa. How nice. They use letters in their postal code. So Santa's is h zero zero, which spells ho. Ho. Nice. Ho. All right, buddy. I am glad you stumbled upon this, because I had never heard of it, and it is now my favorite thing ever. We have to thank Snopes for this one. Barbara Mickelson is just hats off to her. She's almost single handedly written to Snope's website. Do you know that? Yeah. Good. Well, this is the story of the christmas pants, and it is true. And basically it goes like this. There are a brother and a brother in law, roy colette and larry kunckle. Great minnesota name. Sounds like a christmas villain name. Old man Kunkle's house. So when did it start? 1964. Larry Kunkel's mom gave him a pair of moleskin pants, and he said, these aren't so good in minnesota because they freeze and get kind of stiff, and I can't walk, I can't walk. So, as a joke, he re gifted them the following year to his brother in law roy. And this started what I think is one of the best back and forth practical jokes ever. Yes. For more than 20 years, they would send them back and forth, and at first, it was just kind of like, haha, here they are again. Sure. Here they are again. Well, eventually, I think, after the first couple of years, it was larry kunkel who took the pants. He took the pants and rolled them up and stuck them in a three foot long, one inch diameter pipe. Yeah, man. And then wrapped that up and gave that to larry kunkel and said, good luck. Here's the pants. Yeah. And so that obviously inspired. Oh, yeah, brother in law. Yeah. I'm going to one up you. And it became a game of one upsmanship each year, and eventually there were some rules. Most notably, the pants could not be destroyed. Yes, the game was over if the pants were destroyed, they had to remain intact. What were the other rules? There were some that they had to be legal and moral methods. Right. Supposedly, they wanted to use junk parts as much as possible, but I don't think that rule panned out all the time because they clearly spend a lot of money over the years in tuning these pants and various things. Yeah. So let's talk about some of these methods. Like you said, it started out pretty basic. Stuffing them in a pipe, then I think, the following year, wrapping them in wire and giving basically the whole idea is make them super hard on the receiver to get to. Right, so he can't give them back. Yeah, exactly. Because you would win, I guess, if you're like. I just can't get these pants. Exactly. Yeah. The other guy would win, and he would have to keep the pants forever. How about this one? I think my favorite one was one of them had them put in a gremlin car and had the car compounded to when you compound a car to a little tiny square, the pants were inside a compacted gremlin. Yeah. 1974 gremlin that was crushed into a three foot cube, and it weighed \u00a32000. And it was in the glove compartment of the gremlin, and it was crushed. Yeah, that was a pretty good one. It got, like, even bizarre, I guess. Kunkle had the pants put into a 17 and a half foot long red rocket ship filled with concrete that weighed six tons. It was 5ft in diameter, and the pants were put in there somewhere inside in one of the 15 concrete filled canisters inside the rocket. Pretty good. Not bad. One year, 1982. Kunkel had a hard time getting the pants out of an eight foot high tire, 2ft wide, filled with \u00a36000 of concrete with the smarmy note on the outside. Have a good year. Yeah. Terrible. Yeah. Another year, collette had to get the pants out of a station wagon that was filled with this is mind boggling to me. 170 generators that were all welded together with the pants located somewhere in the middle. But you don't know where. No. And collette had to get in there. And, I mean, these things were welded together, and you couldn't just rip this apart, because if you wasted the pants, you lost. Yeah. So he managed to get it out of there. What toy was popular in 1985? Let's say rubik's cube. Rubik's cube. So colette had an idea and made a four ton rubik's cube in 1985 made of concrete he had baked in a kiln and then covered it with 2000 board feet of lumber, and the pants were inside. And you had to solve the cube. And he did so because that came before the generator. Right. I love these dudes. So the end of the pants came along in 1989, and colette apparently had a buddy in tennessee who ran a glass manufacturing company and said, hey, you know what scrap class you have? Why don't you melt it down and let's encase the pants in it? And the friend said, okay, yeah, \u00a310,000 of jagged glass, and let's go drop it in his front yard. The problem is, a chunk of molten glass broke the canister that had the pants in it and just turned them, just disintegrated them. So the pants were put into an urn instead. The ashes of the pants are put into an urn and given to kunkle that year. Colette conceded defeat. Yes, along with an epithet that said, sorry, old man utilized the pants. An attempt to cast the pants in glass brought about the demise of the pants at last. And apparently, kunkle still has that earn. And these are two of my favorite dudes in the world now. Yeah. I can't imagine carrying on a joke like this for that long. They must have worked on this for a couple of months. Out of the year, at least. Oh, sure. They probably started on January 1, devising the next year. Yeah. This is great. And all true. Somebody should make a movie about that. Christmas movie. It's a new holiday classic. Hey, chuck, you know how people are like, don't you dare write Christmas xmas? Yeah. People are very offended by that. They are very offended by it. Well, it turns out that it's not so offensive to write Christmas as xmas. And if you do write christmas as Xmas. You shouldn't pronounce it Xmas, you should pronounce it Christmas, and there's a pretty good reason why. Yes, there is a good reason, because it isn't an X. No. And it is not meant to take the Christ out of Christmas. Right. Never was. And we have our friends at the Straight Dope featuring Cecil Adams to thank for this one. That's right. What is it, Josh? Well, the X is the Greek letter ki. That's right. C-H-I and Ki, when you see it spelled out in a word, you're supposed to pronounce it the K. Sound like Christmas or Christ. That's Krit. Yeah. So for a very long time, I think even before the Middle Ages, that term or that X was used to abbreviate Christ. That's right. It's not a new thing. No. So if you write X and then MAS, what you've just done is taken the abbreviation for Christ and substituted it for the Christ and Christmas. So it's still Christmas, and there's still Christ in Christmas as far as that X is concerned. And that's the straight dope. So, Chuck, we're going to finish with a Christmas story. That's right. I didn't realize this, but the guy who wrote the gold standard classic wizard of Oz directed Porkies, right. L. Frank Baum. He also wrote a long Christmas epic story called The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. Yeah, it was long, wasn't it? Yeah, very. I mean, it was a book link thing, but it basically tells the story of Santa Claus, and we're going to read when the World Grew Old. It was a chapter from that. And basically Santa Claus has spent his whole life is this the setup? Yeah, if you'll indulge, of course. So Santa Claus, he was found in the woods as an orphan and raised by AK, the god of the woods, and he proved himself to be Santa Claus, doing all the Santa Claus things he's famous for. But now he's become an old man with white hair and a white beard and huge cheeks that are still jolly. But he's at his deathbed. Oh, man. And AK goes to the other immortals, gods of the woods and the rivers and all of that stuff, kings of the gnomes and all people like that, and gathers them and says, look, man, this guy, if there's ever been a human being who's earned immortality, the gift of immortality, it's this guy. He loves kids, he makes toys for them every year. He's just a great humanitarian. He created, like the Christmas as we understand it now, let's give them the mantle of immortality. So they talk about it and debate back and forth, and they finally agree and they go to Santa Claus's deathbed and they bestow him with immortality. And this picks up the next morning when Santa wakes up after thinking the night before that he's going to die when the world grew old, the next morning when Santa Claus opened. His eyes and gazed around the familiar room which he had feared he might never see again. He was astonished to find his old strength renewed and to feel the red blood of perfect health coursing through his veins. He sprang from his bed and stood where the bright sunshine came in through his window and flooded him with its merry dancing rays. He did not then understand that what had happened to restore him the vigor of youth but in spite of the fact that his beard remained the color of snow and that wrinkles still lingered in the corners of his bright eyes, old Santa Claus felt as brisk and merry as a boy of 16 and was soon whistling contentedly as he busied himself fashioning new toys. Then at came to him and told of the mantle of immortality and how claws had won it through his love for little children. It made old Santa look grave for a moment to think he had been so favored. But it also made him glad to realize that now he need never fear being parted from his dear ones at once he began making preparations for making a remarkable assortment of pretty and amusing playthings and in larger quantities than ever before. For now that he might always devote himself to this work he decided that no child in the world, poor or rich, should hereafter go without a Christmas gift if he could manage to supply it. The world was new in the days when dear old Santa Claus first began toy making and won by his loving deeds the mantle of immortality and the task of supplying cheering words, sympathy and pretty playthings to all the young of his race did not seem a difficult undertaking at all. But every year more and more children were born into the world. And these, when they grew up, began spreading slowly all over the face of the earth, seeking new homes. So that Santa Claus found each year that his journeys must extend further and further from the laughing valley which, by the way, is in the North Pole and that packs of toys must be made larger and ever larger. So at length he took counsel with his fellow Immortals, Larry King and the others how his work might keep pace with the increasing number of children that none might be neglected. And the Immortals were so greatly interested in his labors that they gladly rendered him their assistance. AK gave him his man Kilter, the silent and swift. And the Nook Prince gave him Peter, who was more crooked and less surly than any of his brothers. And the Rile Prince gave him Nutri, the sweetest tempered Rile ever known. And the Fairy Queen gave him Whisk, that tiny, mischievous, but lovable fairy who knows today almost as many children as Santa Claus himself. And Larry King gave him suspenders with these people to help make the toys and to keep his house in order to look after the sledge and the harness, santa Claus found it much easier to prepare his yearly load of gifts. And as they began to follow one another smoothly and pleasantly yet after a few generations, his worries were renewed, for it was remarkable how the number of people continued to grow and how many more children there were every year to be served. When the people filled all the cities and lands of one country, they wandered into another part of the world, and the men cut down the trees and many of the great forests that had been ruled by act. And with the wood, they built new cities. And where the forests had been were fields of grains and herds of browsing cattle. You might think the master woodsman would rebel at the loss of his forest, but not so. The wisdom of act was mighty and far seeing. The world was made for men, said he to Santa Claus. And I have but guarded the forests until men needed them for their use. I am glad my strong trees can furnish shelter for men's weak bodies and warm them through the cold winters. But I hope they will not cut down all the trees, for mankind needs the shelter of the woods in summer as much as the warmth of blazing logs in winter. And however crowded the world may grow, I do not think men will ever come to Bursey nor the great black forests, nor to the wooded wilderness of Brass unless they seek their shades for pleasure and not to destroy their giant trees. By and by, people made ships from the tree trunks and crossed over oceans and built cities in far lands. But the oceans made little difference to the journeys of Santa Claus. His reindeers sped over the waters as swiftly as over land, and his sledge headed from east to west and followed in the wake of the sun so that as the earth rolled slowly over, santa Claus had all 24 hours to encircle it each Christmas Eve. And their speedy reindeer enjoyed these wonderful journeys more and more so year after year and generation after generation and century after century, the world grew older and the people became more numerous, and the labors of Santa Claus steadily increased. The fame of his good deeds spread to every household where children dwelt and all the little ones loved him dearly. And the fathers and mothers honored him for the happiness he had given them when they, too, were young. And the aged grand sires and grand dams remembered him with tender gratitude and blessed his name. The end. Well, not the end. The end of that chapter. So that's it. That's our Christmas show, Chuck. Merry Christmas to you. Merry Christmas, buddy. Happy holidays to everyone out there. On Dasher. On, Dancer. On, Donor. On Blitzen. We have Comet and Cupid and Kraken. The Kraken and Cthulhu. That's right. And Rudolph up front. Happy holidays, everybody. We'll see you next year. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarif and Georgia Hard Start, 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." | ||
87147e1e-3b0e-11eb-9699-73ab721bff98 | How mRNA Vaccines Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-mrna-vaccines-work | The two mRNA Covid vaccines are the first vaccines to come out of a new field of immunology and represent such an amazing leap forward that they are taking us into a new era of medicine. Learn all about them so you can set your uncle straight. | The two mRNA Covid vaccines are the first vaccines to come out of a new field of immunology and represent such an amazing leap forward that they are taking us into a new era of medicine. Learn all about them so you can set your uncle straight. | Tue, 02 Nov 2021 13:39:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=13, tm_min=39, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=306, tm_isdst=0) | 49717572 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. Jerry is persona non grada. And that's stuff you should know. Of course. Just the usual. Yeah, that's the stuff you should know. Stuff you should know regular So, can I say a couple of things here? Oh, a preamble from Charles. Let's hear it. So we're going to be talking today about the COVID vaccines, specifically MNR. I'm sorry. Oh, boy, this is going long. mRNA vaccines, A-K-A Mr. Nah, how I like to call him, I hadn't picked up on that before now I can't unsee it. Well, that's because the M is little. Yeah, but still now I see it very clearly, the Mr NA vaccine. And just quickly, I wanted to say that Josh put this together from whole cloth, from about 80,000 sources, and you did a great job. This is a complicated thing that you did work your wonders on, and you're really good at this. Is that what you wanted to say? Thank you. I wanted to say that. And also our hopes here are that you can understand this. I know we're kind of preaching to the choir a bit with our listenership. Not fully. There's plenty of people, there's a lot of varying opinions among Stuff You Should Know listeners. Absolutely. But I think when it comes to vaccine hesitancy, I think most of our listeners are on board. And our hope is that you can understand this a little bit before Thanksgiving with your weird uncle. So maybe you can say, hey, I know how these things work. And it's not something to be feared, it's something to be like to stand up from this turkey and this table and applaud with full no reservation and full like, what in the world has science done? It's amazing. Yeah, it really is, because it is. It's unbelievable that science has figured this stuff out and they did it that quickly. I know. And that accurately. I know. It is. It's a triumph of modern science, for sure. I'm one of the biggest. It's impossible to talk about the mRNA vaccines without talking about how it differs from traditional vaccines. And it is a huge step forward in vaccine research and vaccine production. Like, it's the future of vaccines. It's amazing what's just happened. But that's not to throw any shade whatsoever on traditional vaccines, which we still need. Which we still use vaccines. Yes. Without which there would probably be a great many of us who would not be here either because we hadn't survived, our parents hadn't survived, our grandparents hadn't survived some disease that a vaccine was developed to combat. So hats off to traditional vaccines. But mRNA vaccines are pretty astounding in what science has managed to come up with. Yeah. So we hope to clear up some myths about what the COVID vaccines are and are not. And hopefully by the end of this, you will agree that it's literally like there's some serious Nobel Prizes coming in the future toward these people. For sure. At the very least, we hope that you hear this episode and are able to go, so that's what's in me. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's not in you anymore. We'll learn that too. That's true. Chuck, nice foreshadowing. So it's really hard to kind of overstate just how big of a breakthrough it was for mRNA vaccines and that they do kind of represent like this new path forward. But to kind of understand how the whole thing works and what makes it so magnificent as far as medical breakthroughs go, you kind of have to first understand what mRNA actually is and what it does. Don't you agree? Yes. I mean, all this stuff is really new. The quickest version of the history is that this stuff was identified, messenger RNA is what we're talking about. Identified in the 1960s and then in 1984, the very first strand of mRNA, I'm going to say mNRA so many times. You know, that M stuff, the first strand of Mr. NA was artificially produced in a lab in 119 thousand 84, which in terms of science is not that long ago. And since then they have made leaps and bounds to the point where they now can and did produce a COVID vaccine on a computer. Yeah, I mean, that's basically what they're doing these days is they're saying, oh, I want a vaccine that produces this little viral protein. I know the genomic code of this little viral protein. So I'm going to tap that in. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap and then press Enter, basically. And the computer sets off some desktop machines that produce that exact version of mRNA that is really, really simplified version of what's going on. But in a nutshell, it's basically where we've arrived now. And like you were saying that's in the last 35 years, the very first time we ever synthesize mRNA. And as easy as it sounds now, Chuck, there were a lot of obstacles between 1985 and 2020 when the very first mRNA vaccines ever in the history of humanity came out just in time for the COVID pandemic. Yeah, there were a couple of big hurdles to actually turn that original miracle into, boy, I was about to get so religious into fish to feed the masses. Wow, I would have gone with water into wine. Hey, that was a good one too. A couple of them being and we're going to get more into this as we go along, but they learned how to our mRNA is really fragile, so they learned how to protect it by putting it in these little tiny fat capsules called lipid nanoparticles. And so now they've got a little sort of a little vehicle to travel in that helps them get into a cell. And I know we've talked about cytokinestorms before when the human body has a really overblown reaction and overblown immune response to the point where it can actually kill somebody. Yeah. And those cytokine stores just kept smacking down mRNA research over and over again because even when they finally did manage to come up with a way to keep the fragile mRNA from falling apart in the body, the body would be like, what is this? Get this out of here. I'm going to just overblow so hard against this weird foreign invader that I'm going to threaten to kill my human, which is not at all what you want. And they finally figured out that if you use some different nucleotides in place of other nucleotides, which are the building blocks of life, when you're building this mRNA and then you really purify it, you get like no slop whatsoever. You have a chance of making something that appears natural enough to fool nature. That's right. And we're able to really clean that stuff up because it's not a live virus. Yes, it's not a living thing. And we'll get more into that and that's another big way how it differs from other vaccines. But it's not a live virus, so you can just dump a bunch of bleach on it, basically. Essentially, we'll say in a nutshell, but yes, it cuts down on any type of contamination that you might get. Yeah. And we have to thank for all of this, really the Human Genome Project, because if not for that, which started in the 1990s, thanks to the US. Government's funding of that, we wouldn't have had any of these breakthroughs to begin with. As far as reading the genetic code, yes, it was a huge investment and it really has paid off in multiple ways. And just one of them is mRNA vaccines. The whole thing that is just to me, just amazing and astounding and just confirms that we are living in some sort of simulation. That the breakthroughs that push this research for mRNA vaccines from basically a pipe dream that we had no idea how we were ever going to get there, to, okay, we're ready to actually create mRNA vaccines just in time for this pandemic that's coming along. They all just kind of came together in part because people were already working on coronavirus vaccines. And what's really cool about mRNA vaccines is you can plug and play different stuff. Thanks to the Human Genome Project, we've learned to kind of read the genetic codes of stuff and to write it and produce it. And because of that, because we can do that on computers now, you can say, I've got a template for a coronavirus, let me get specific with it and make it as SARS CoV two coronavirus. Now that we've got the genetic code, we can deploy a vaccine against it. And that's how they were able to do it so quickly. That's right. And they estimate that as of July of this year, in 2021, that vaccine has saved almost 280,000 lives and prevented about 1.5 million hospitalizations when hospitals are overrun. And that's a really important thing. I'm going to lobby for an early ad break here. Okay. So we can just get cooking and go uninterrupted and unmolested until the second ad break. That sounds good. Yeah. Lobbying approved. Okay, we'll be right back, everyone, and tell you how all this stuff works right after this. Okay, so we should talk about, like I was saying, what mRNA does. Thank you for swooping in and reminding me that oh, yeah, this article that you wrote, you got the history part first. Let's start there. That makes sense. Is he skipping that? No, he's not skipping. My vision is blurry. I'm so interested in this. Okay, so we're talking about mRNA and mRNA is short for messenger RNA. And messenger RNA, basically it's a blueprint, right? It translates, it copies a little strip of the blueprint that is encoded in your entire genome in your DNA. And it takes that little bit usually, which codes for like a protein or peptide, which are really important things that our body uses to do everything from contracting your muscles to making you feel hungry. Basically everything comes down to a protein or peptide. And the instructions for building each of those proteins and peptides are encoded in our DNA. And it's messenger RNA that goes to the DNA says, okay, we need some more of this protein. I'm here to make a copy. May I please make a copy? There are some flowers. They said if I brought you some flowers, you'd be cooler with this. And the DNA says, proceed. And the mRNA goes and produces itself as a copy and leaves the nucleus. This is really important. mRNA goes to the DNA, makes a copy and then leaves the nucleus. And from that point on, the mRNA is all about the cytoplasm. Right. So I kind of like the and I've expanded upon the wonderful metaphor you have of like a building site, and I think we failed to mention that the amino acids in the body is what's really carrying out the work. Right? Like making your eyes blue, let's say. Yeah. Well, the amino acids, they're the building blocks of proteins and peptides. If you arrange a certain set of amino acids in a certain way, you've got a polypeptide and you've got a protein. Right. So mNRA in this case, if we're talking about this is like a job site. Yes. Did I say NRA again? You said mNRA. Well, the NRA is just so like embedded in our that's just so sad. I haven't said NRA once. I know it sounds like it's. You going so mRNA just like black Angus. Yeah, that one got a good reaction too. That was good. So mRNA in this case would be like the architect showing up with a blueprint, wearing some sensible chinos, but work boots. But they're really expensive work boots. You can tell them there's not a scuff on them. Okay. And so it heads over to the work site, which is the cytoplasm of the cell outside the nucleus. Right. And then I think in this case, the ribosomes would be the contractor. Sort of, yes. Because the contractor maybe translates these blueprints into, I guess, marching orders for the little workers that are the amino acids. Yeah. The ribosome clears sandwich off of the drafting table and spreads out the mRNA. Blueprints is okay, let me see what we got here. Wipes his mouth some crumbs away from his mouth and gets to work taking that blueprint, taking that messenger RNA, and translating it into those amino acids that get constructed in just a certain way to produce a protein. And the mRNA says, do it again. Do it again, do it again. Let's keep going. I'm feeling good. Let's keep this going for a little while. That's right, for a little while. And it just happens a certain number of times. It's not specific. It varies, but it's limited. And then that mRNA starts to break down. Nice going, Chuck. You said mRNA. I know. I'm really concentrating now. And then it's carried away from the cell and eventually out of the body through the lymph nodes, and it's disposed of. So, like all jobs, eventually the contractor will disappear on you, right? Well, no, that was the architect that got used up. Right. Well, the architect disappears earlier, I guess. Sure. I guess so. Do you always want the architect to come back? Sort of, yes. Well, the architect is going to come back. You'll get another architect. There's always more mRNA. The body is always happy to produce more mRNA with sending out blueprints and instructions to go make this protein right now. Man. I really screwed up. I thought the contractor disappeared. How perfect would that have been? It would have been pretty great. And you still got the joke, and it was just wrong and the wrong joke scientifically. But the thing about mRNA vaccines is that researchers have figured out how to use this natural process to help us vaccinate ourselves against diseases. And they do that because we've reached a point where we can. Rather than having the mRNA produced in the nucleus of the cell and going out into the cytoplasm vaccine, researchers produce the mRNA outside of the body and then injected into the body, and then it goes into the cytoplasm from outside of the cell. And then from that point on, everything else follows the exact same process. That is where we're at right now. And that is where you can start to feel your head opening up like a blooming onion and outback. Yeah. And of itself is remarkable. They said. You know what? This stuff can actually go into a cell, even though and we'll get a little bit more into this, even though it can be up to 10,000 times too big to permeate that cell. We'll figure that part out. Right. And they did that's courtesy of the little fatty lipids. That's the vehicle that allows that to happen. But just the notion that they thought, I wonder if we can get this stuff to go from the outside in yeah. Was remarkable. It really is. And it was just this contribution from hundreds of researchers just building on one another's work and that finally led to the point where it's like it went from, wow, this is a really cool idea, to okay, we're actually preventing death in a pandemic thanks to these things now. Right. And there are a few ways that you can immunize a person, like literal techniques using mRNA. And it turns out that we got I don't know if it's lucky or just divine intervention simulation type stuff. It turns out that the one that that we works really well and that we're using for the COVID vaccine turned out to be sort of the cheapest and the easiest one, which means in vivo within the living. So in other words, you just get it injected into your arm as opposed to like in vitro. That's the other way, which takes a lot longer, it's really complicated, a lot more expensive. And they figured out, hey, we can just do this with a shot in the arm. Yeah. And then it's a conventional mRNA as opposed to something called self amplifying that we're not going to sort of get into now. But it's a conventional in vivo shot that goes into your arm. Yeah. It's the most straightforward it could possibly be at this point in our mRNA vaccine technology, which, like you said, is rather lucky. Yeah. It didn't have to be that way. It could have been the most expensive and the most difficult and time consuming and we'd be in a much different spot right now. Yes, for sure. So to kind of explain how mRNA vaccines do their thing, it helps to kind of view it as like a metaphor for a training session. Like when you are vaccinated against something, your immune system is being trained to fight an invader. But it's like a training session that uses blank rounds. So it's much safer than, say, like capturing one of those enemies, pushing them onto the field and giving everybody live ammunition. Things can get messy in that sense. It's like a military training session. I guess so. Sure. Okay. Yeah. All right. I was thinking more SWAT team, but sure. So we mentioned a couple of times those lipid nanoparticles that encase the mRNA and that these things are anywhere from 1000 to 10,000 times too large for what normally could pass through the cell's membrane. But that lipid coding basically opens that gate and says, you know what? They're with me, you love me. I'm a little slippery fat cell. Right. And just coming along inside the cell with me and I'll shut the door behind us. Yes. Which is really something, because if any of the what are called toll like receptors in the cell, which are always looking out for something out of the norm, notice like mRNA. What are you doing out here? You should be in there. What's going on, everybody? Hey, come quick. You've got a big problem. And you would not be able to actually successfully vaccinate somebody because you'd set off the alarm too early. There's something called interferon that actually does interfere with mRNA from being transcribed. And so it's a perfect name. So if it caught mRNA out, the interferon would come and prevent the mRNA from ever being transcribed into the viral protein. That's a big one. That lipid coating helps protect. So, say now we've got the mRNA showing up in the cytoplasm again, coming from outside the cell, but now it's in the cytoplasm, everything's cool, everything is normal, and things can kind of proceed from there. That's right. And it shows up with those blueprints rolled up under their arm. It's got the little work orders from the big boss, and it says, all right, ribosomes, you're about to get a lot of work thrown your way. Are you going to be okay with that? You got to create all these different proteins that were coded for, and in this case, we want to stop a pandemic, so it's coded for this virus, and we've got just a tiny little bit of this virus body. And don't worry, you're not going to get this person sick or anything, because my friend Josh Clarke taught me, he made another metaphor of like a piano player. Traditionally, if you want to play the piano, you're going to use at least an arm and probably one of your ears, traditionally. But you really want both those arms and both those ears yes. And a body to go along with it. Like just an ear and an arm can't play the piano. Right. So just a little bit of this virus isn't going to make you sick. No, exactly. Or let you spread it to someone else. That's a big one. And that's what the mRNA shows up coded for. It's a little piece of the virus that you want to immunize the person against. And it says, hey, everybody, let's start making this. Hey, everyone. Hey, we're here. Come make this viral protein, which is called the antigen. And so the body starts doing that because it didn't know the mRNA was outside of the cell or was ever created in a lab. And so it starts transcribing that mRNA, and the viral proteins start getting made. And the whole point to all this, if you want, like, a really good immune response, Chuck, you want to trigger both of the two immune systems that humans have. You've got the innate system, and you have the adapted system. Adapted systems, yes. You got two because you're a vertebrate. And if you can trigger them both to a large degree, but not so big a degree that you end up with a cytokine storm that can accidentally kill you. You've got a good immunization going. That's right. And we've talked about with great wonder and marvel about the human body's immune system before. But as a refresher, we do have two of them. We have the innate, which is the first line of defense. This is like Sergeant Slaughter. Foreign invaders come in and Sergeant Slaughter just wants to kill. Yeah, kill. Kill everything that comes in his little scope. Right. And that's the innate system just neutralize everything the second it sees it. Be on the lookout for everything. And if it looks weird, kill it. And that's like if you get a skin on your knee or a cut on your arm or something and it's mild, that inflammation around the cut is that innate system. And if it's mild enough and it doesn't get complicated or anything, that may be all you need for something like that. Sergeant Slaughter is all you need. That's all you need. But in this case, and with anything a little more sophisticated, you're going to want to engage that adaptive system as well. Yeah. Which if the innate system is activated on high enough alert, it's going to basically go tell the adaptive system, like, hey, this is something more than just a cut on the knee. We really need to pay attention to this. And the adaptive system is made up of specialized white blood cells and they basically are trained to take a look at this weird new foreign invader, which are called non self materials. Basically, anything that isn't part of you that comes from outside of your body, it's called non self. I think so, too. I see. Maybe Phil Collins final album. Non self material. Yeah. But then it'd just be the cover album, which is good. It's a great name for standards. Okay. So they look at this non self material and they say, okay, we got to remember that. So they basically learn it, learn to recognize it, catalog it, and then figure out how to produce antibodies that specifically attack this virus or this antigen, the little bit of the virus that can be infectious, and then it remembers it. And so the next time that antigen or that virus comes into your body, your body is ready because the innate system triggered the adaptive system which memorized and cataloged antibodies to fight they used to fight that virus. Yes. And it works great, and it works fast. There was a study that found that the antibody producing cells can produce 10,000 antibodies per hour no per minute, no, 10,000 antibodies per second. So it literally just wants to flood that site with reinforcements, basically to kill all the stuff in a very smart, strategic and pinpointed way. Yeah. So you've got your innate system, your adaptive system, you want to set them both off. And so we're going back into the cell and by now, in this whole time that we've been talking, the cell that took up the mRNA that was injected into you in the vaccine has been making that viral protein, that antigen, over and over again. It's like I like this. I don't know what to do with it. I'm just going to start wearing it on the surface of my cell. And the cell doesn't know any different. It thinks that everything's going hunky dory, but it looks good on me. Exactly. But luckily we have some kind of a immune cells as a native immune cells who are on the lookout for anything weird. They're total fascists. They don't truck any kind of nonconformity or anything out of the norm. And they look at this new muscle cell because that's what you get your vaccine injected into, wearing all these weird viral proteins. They come with me and they overwhelm that poor cell. They take them out back and basically disassemble them. I love that. It makes you wonder, like, all these cells are just doing the same thing, but some of them go, wait a minute. Like, you are very suspicious and you're coming with me and I'm going to introduce you to my friend. The adaptive system, do they know which cells or is it just a random thing? What do you mean? They know what sells the sales that go that are more suspicious. But I guess what they're saying is like, stop expressing yourself. All right? Is that what you meant? Sort of? No, I just find it interesting that some of them are just doing their thing and then some of them, I mean, they're the same kinds of cells. No, there are different kinds of cells, okay? They are different. The cells that are suspicious, those are your innate immune cells. They're constantly on lookout for something weird and when they find something weird, they just kill it. All right? And all the other cells are just yeah, they're just sitting there like, not me, don't look at me, I'm normal, I'm normal. I've got no weird proteins on my surface. Okay, that makes sense now. Okay, so then those cells that take the poor muscle cell that's been creating this viral protein and thinks it looks pretty snazzy and is now being disassembled, they take some of those viral proteins to the adaptive immune system and that's where they say, hey guys, look at this. We don't know what this is, but we think it's a problem. So you might want to remember it and create some antibodies that you can deploy against it if we ever see it again later. And at that point, after all of that happens, you are vaccinated against that. Yeah, and here's the thing. Some other myths that people think that this thing will live inside your body and who knows what's going to happen in ten years? In ten years we'll all have horns growing out of our heads because of this. That's not what happens. The RNA leaves you. It's very fragile, like we mentioned and different studies have shown different results. But somewhere in the neighborhood of a few days to a couple of weeks is basically as long as that mRNA is going to survive before it degrades and then leaves your body through the limp system. Yeah, under normal circumstances it's just a few days, but they've figured out how to make it a little stronger because you want it in there a little longer because the more that your muscle cells are producing this viral protein, the more of an innate response and then hence the more of an adaptive response you're going to get. But no matter what they do, the mRNA is going to go away. It's going to follow all the normal processes for exiting the body. Those cells that produce that viral protein are going to be destroyed and then those viral proteins are going to be taken up and taken to the lymph nodes where they're shown to those TNB cells that produce the antibodies against them. All of that is a totally normal process. And that is the point of vaccination because during this process, maybe your innate immune response makes you feel like you got the flu for a few hours or half of a day or maybe your arm hurts really bad. That's the innate response. But you're not going to get sick. You're not actually going to have COVID because it's that live training with Blanks to train your immune system how to recognize it. So that when Sarskov Two virus comes along and says, I'll see what's going on here, it goes, oh my God. Oh no. Somehow this body has already been trained to attack me and now I'm dead and gone and I can't possibly infect this person. That is the point. And that's what's been done with mRNA vaccines. Yeah. And I was about to describe this last part as another miracle in this. But I think we're degrading the hard work and research to describe it as a miracle. Sure it is. Hard work and research is what led to this stuff. So I guess we'll call it a breakthrough. One of the other biggest breakthroughs is that they had to find what you call the Goldilocks Zone, that perfect amount so this thing would work perfectly. So we talked about the cytokinestorms. You don't want that. You don't want to overblow it and do too much. So you had to dial it back a little bit. But it can't be so weak that it doesn't even notice the antigen to begin with. It's got to notice. So it designs those antibodies. So you have to find the Goldilock zone in there. And then there's this last bit of the fact that there's basically an early warning system in the body that prevents mRNA from being translated. If it thinks like it's not built well, if it's misfolded or something, it can really wreck the. Body system. So it's on the lookout for that stuff and it has to get past that early morning system in order to make all this work anyway. And they did it. They did all of those things. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. They made something that's natural enough to fool nature. For all intents and purposes, your body is like, oh, I made this mRNA. Cool. Let's listen to it. Let's start translating it, which is astounding. And then everything just kind of follows that process just perfectly. And it really is like, hats off to those people who made this stuff. Hats off. And I think let's take a break. Okay. I think we did a pretty good job there. Yeah, I think so, too. And we're going to talk about how they make this stuff right after this. All right. I love how you put this so much in this article. I'm going to read it verbatim. Okay. To put it in a nutshell, that's so oversimplified, it's basically wrong. Engineers spell out the genetic code they want the mRNA to carry. They add the ingredients, they press Enter, and the computer tells the lab equipment what chemical reactions to carry out and for how long. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of it in a nutshell, in the simplest. Like, if you really need to tell your weird uncle at Thanksgiving how it works, you may just want to start there and see what his reaction is. He goes, they press enter. That's my greatest fear. Right? Haven't you ever seen war games? Right, but to start, to start at the beginning, though, you have to understand what the genetic code of the virus you're trying to fight. And again, thank you, Human Genome Project for pushing that along. And once you have the genetic code and you study the virus, you can figure out what it's Achilles heel is. And in the case of the COVID vaccines, the two, one from Mederna and then one from Bio and Pfizer can't forget to mention Bio and Tech. Basically, they're the ones who actually came up with the template for this vaccine. And Pfizer was like, hey, let's partner. So it's wrong to just call it the pfizer vaccine. And by the way, just announced today that they approve mix and match. I heard that, too, which is awesome. I mean, everybody loves variety. It's a spice of life. Well, I got the Medona to begin with. I'm going to get the Moderna booster. I like variety, but I'm just going to keep it in the family. No, that's my plan, too. I like the Mederna as well. And by the way, this is so new. And Moderna is such a new company. I think they were organized in 2010. The Covet vaccine that they make is the only product that they sell. Yeah, that's how new all of this stuff is. It's crazy. But for the coronavirus vaccines, the COVID vaccine, chuck, they figured out that the spike protein. The S protein is what it's called. That is the viruses Achilles heel. It's the thing that gives the coronavirus that spiky appearance. Yeah, that crown. Yeah. And that is the thing that it uses to fuse to a cell's membrane and then basically coax it to open up so that it can spill its viral contents in there and make more and more viruses. So it's the weakest point of the virus and that's what they figured out how to target. But to understand that, you have to know what the genome is so that you can go in and say, here's the part of the genetic code of the Sarskov Two virus that makes that spike protein. Let's take this, plug it into a string of mRNA and then we'll have that mRNA that produces that spike protein and we can use that in a vaccine. And that's what they've done. It almost seems like a Greek myth or something with a crown, because I remember when we talked about the coronavirus and that fancy crown, I'm like, look at my fancy crown and it turns out that fancy crown is what's going to drag it down. Yeah, hubris in vanity, that's what it is. We're playing a lot of human emotion, right. They flew too close to the sun. That's right. So they identify that little crown, like you said, as the Achilles heel and they got that little bit of code and then the rest of this is, and this is sort of another one of the big breakthroughs. I'm not going to call it a miracle again, they figured out how to do this all outside of the human body because they got a hold of plasmid, not plasma plasmid, plasmid DNA, usually from E. Coli. But don't let that freak you out. It turns out it's really helpful in this case. And this acts as like a template. It's like the working DNA that they used to figure all this stuff out. It's standing in for the human's own DNA and it's on that work site, it's in that cytoplasm and it's like almost extra bonus DNA that's outside the nucleus. And so they're using that to stand in for our own DNA so we could figure out how to make this stuff work together. Yeah, it's almost like if you were looking at a piano keyboard and the piano keyboard was plasmid DNA and say it coded for luminescence or something like that, if you went along and took out some of the keys and put in different keys, then now that it's coded for an entirely different kind of protein, in this case, the antigen that you want, that spike protein. But the point is, it's like a structure. I keep using the piano metaphor in different thrilling ways and I'm pretty happy with that. But it's the backbone. It's the thing that you use to hold the original code. Because remember, mRNA likes to go to DNA to make a copy of that little code, that string of G's and T's and C's and A's, that's how it's made and that's how it happens in the body. That's how they do it in the lab, too. And to start, that means you have to have DNA, okay, right. But here's the thing. You can't just create that template and then that's it. No bing, bang, boom, bon jovi. You got to transcribe that into the mRNA. And I think in the 1980s at Brookhaven National Lab is where they developed this really ingenious technique that used bacteriophages, which are these viral parasites that and this is where the E. Coli kind of comes back in, that infect bacteria like E. Coli. And they have a really efficient RNA transcription engine. So they said, well, let's just use that because it's already really good at that. Yeah, which is pretty cool. And here's the other thing, too, if you're like, oh, my God, e. Coli, plasmid DNA, bacteriophages that are viral parasites, they're using this together is like Frankenstein stuff. Keep in mind they're not harvesting like wild E. Coli or wild bacteria fages. Like they're building those things from scratch in the lab. And they're getting to the point, if they're not already there, whether like, oh, we only need this part of the plasma DNA, which, again, by the way, does not create E. Coli, it creates an extra bit of something, or we only need this part of the bacteriophage. And so they just make those parts that they need or increasingly just ordered from lab supply companies online. That's the point that we're at now, because again, these are all nonliving things that you can sterilize, and they are in some cases not just parts of nonliving things like plasmid DNA or bacteriophage. Yeah, it's amazing. So they put the plasmid DNA template and they take the bacteriophage and they put it in a big soup kettle on the stove. They add a little chemical gojuice that says, all right, get started. And then the bacteria fashion says, wait a minute, I know what I'm good at. I'm great at that transcription. And so I'm going to just start transcribing right now, and I'm going to transcribe that code in the plasma DNA, and I'm going to produce a ton of mRNA strands. Like a lot. It doesn't sound like a lot, but if you have an average production run, you're going to get about 2 grams of mRNA per liter. That's like seven to ten coffee beans. Average size coffee beans, yeah. And that's in a few days. And you might think, like, I thought he said a lot. A couple of grams isn't a lot. These vaccines use, I think, respectively, moderna and Pfizer used 130 micrograms per dose. So that 2 grams ends up producing anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 actual vaccine doses. Yeah, and also, don't forget, we're talking about mRNA, which exists on the nano scale, and you're producing ten coffee beans worth of that stuff in three days. We're talking small. Yes, very small. So they've got tons of mRNA each time they run one of these batches and then they take the mRNA that comes out and they purify it. They get rid of any leftover nucleic materials from that transcription process, clean up the slop like I was saying, and then they surround it with a lipid nanoparticle, that packet of fat that's going to help it get into the cell and protect it on its wild journey through the body. And then they mix it with a few other things, usually a few kinds of salts, often to mimic the PH of the body so that it's accepted a lot more easily. Sugar. They use sugar to stabilize the whole thing. And that's about it. And not even about it. That's it. There's some fat, there's the mRNA, salt and sugar and then that's what you have in your vaccine, whether it's the biotech pfizer or the modern one. That's right. And if weird uncle says, yeah, but what else is really in there? Say that's it the salt and the sugar and what I just told you about Dumb dumb. And he'll say hopefully, well that makes me hungry now. Yeah, the gravy sounds delicious in my mouth. He's like, there's no butter in that. All right, yeah, there's lipidanoparticles. So we're going to finish up talking a little bit about what differentiates this from traditional vaccines. The biggest thing is that it's like we said before, it's built from scratch in a lab outside the human body and that's very different and it's nonliving like we said. And other vaccines are called viral vector vaccines and they either use like if you get a flu shot or something, you're talking about either a dead virus or a live one that's been weakened or proteins from a live virus and it takes a long time to produce these. It's not like this thing went at light speed but not in an unsafe way. In a truly astounding applaudible way. Yeah, no. I was reading about the emergency use authorization process and the FDA did not mess around. They definitely did double time to try to get these things out the door because they needed to, but they did not cut corners on safety from anything I saw. It was a really safe process but it was still really fast. Not because the FDA cut corners, but because mRNA vaccines are able to be created really fast. And so I think bio and tech pfizer had emergency use approval within eleven months of developing the vaccine. The second fastest a vaccine had ever been developed before prior to mRNA vaccines is four years. Yeah, I want to say a little bit something else about that because I think that's a big reason for vaccine hesitancy is the speed at which it was approved and there's no way they knew what was going on. I read a lot about this and not even for this, just like, over the past year. And how that process usually works is it's related to funding? Like, you're funded a certain amount of money as a company to get approval for studies and stuff like that, and you get funded that certain amount, and you can only work within that amount of money. So your study is only going to be of a certain sample size, and they're pretty big. And then you also have to take a certain place in line with this vaccine. They had a sample size out of the gate that was humongous because the entire world was getting infected with this stuff, or not getting infected, but tons and tons of people are getting infected. The entire world was on watch and on guard. And so you had no problems with sample size, you had no problem with funding, and you had no problem with waiting in line because they said, all right, you're immediately at the front of the line. Right. So it didn't get approved because they just wanted to speed it through there really quickly. It got approved because it jumped the line. It had tons of money behind it and it had a ton of people in the getting, thankfully, volunteering to get jabbed early on for the test, which produced a ton of data that they more data than usual. Yeah, because they have more participants than usual. That was everything I saw as well, too. So frustrating, though, because they actually got more data than they usually get. They just got it a lot faster and people still think that there's just not enough information. It is frustrating because it didn't take as long. Yes, it is very frustrating because people are like, I'm wary of that because it was so fast. And it was so fast because it is one of the biggest advances in the history of medicine that's happening before our very eyes. But rather than just being like, oh, my God, what an amazing time to be alive, what an amazing accomplishment humanity did. A significant portion of people like, no, I don't trust, they're trying to kill me or catalogue me, or Bill Gates wants to keep tabs on me because Bill Gates cares what I'm doing. Yeah, we've met Bill Gates, you guys, a couple of times. He doesn't care what you're doing. I hate to break it to you. He does not care what you're doing. And we mentioned before that it's almost like we were waiting for this. We had the mRNA vaccine sort of technology figured out to a certain degree, and we were just waiting for the Chinese government and the researchers to release that genetic code. Yeah. And once they did, they were like, all right, here it is. It's open source in January 2020. And everyone's like, Great, that's all we needed and we are ready to rock and roll. And I think did you say it was 25 days later did they produce their first successful batch? Yeah, amazing. 39 days after that, the first phase of human trials were underway, which, I mean, that's just so fast. But to kind of go back to that point too, Chuck, because I think a lot of people are also suspicious about that. Like, why were they just waiting for this pandemic? It's pretty suspicious. There were people who at Bioenetic and Moderna who already had these templates ready. They were working on mRNA vaccines for a number of different fields. And then there are other groups who are specifically working on coronavirus vaccines because we've dealt with coronaviruses before. MERS Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. SARS. The original SARS. Those are both coronaviruses. Both of them share their Spike protein with SARS CoV Two, the virus that causes COVID, that's a coronavirus as well. They all have the Spike protein, so they had Spike protein templates. So like you said, when Chinese researchers posted the genome of the SARSCoV V Two virus, people were like, cool, let's take that, plug it in and see what happens. And it worked. That's why it was so fast. I can't say plug and play enough. Yeah, I mean, that's literally the situation, because in the future they might be able to solve things like HIV and rabies and maybe even certain kinds of cancer. It's a technology that can be applied to a bunch of things. And they were just ready to go for this. Yeah, the cancer one. I mean, that's just amazing trickiest. Yes. But they're getting to the point where they can say, okay, you've got cancer. Come in. We're going to take a sample of your tumor, we're going to study it, we're going to figure out what its genome is. We're going to create a tailor made vaccine to train your body to fight that cancer, and we're going to vaccinate you against your own personal cancer. We're a few years away from being able to do that kind of thing. And then when that happens, if we can do it, we will have beaten cancer. That's the next thing that mRNA vaccines are about to do. It's amazing. It's a reason to applaud science. I know you have a little bit more that I didn't fully understand, and thankfully you're going to tell people about it. Well, the other shit is sweeping in. I mean, one of the other things, if I'm not mistaken, that it seems like vaccine hesitant people are worried about is that mRNA vaccines are going to embed themselves in your DNA and alter it. And that's actually the opposite of what mRNA vaccines do because like we said, they come from outside of the cell and they do their work in the cytoplasm. They don't go anywhere near your nucleus or interact with your DNA. They don't need to. They've already got what they would have needed from the DNA and that the mRNA shows up with the blueprints, ready to be translated into the proteins, right? They can't get into the nucleus, right? No, I mean, as far as anybody knows, they can't or they don't. There's no reason for them to. There's no reason they should. And then even if they did, that doesn't mean that they would be transcribed into your DNA, right? Right. The actual wild SARS COVID two virus doesn't even do that. A lot of viruses actually go in, take their RNA, reverse transcribe it into your DNA, and then get your DNA to produce more viruses. That's how a lot of viruses infect you. But the sarskovie two virus is not like that. It's called a positive sense RNA virus, where it shows up in much the same way that the vaccine shows up with ready to go mRNA. The sarscovae two virus shows up and says, here's some RNA, just start making more of myself. And it has nothing to do with the DNA in the nucleus, it just works in the cytoplasm as well. So there's no reason to think or believe and there's no evidence that the sarscovae two virus embeds itself in your DNA. And I hate to say this, but even if it did, at least 8% of your DNA human being is made up of ancient viruses. DNA that has been injected into humanity over the eons. And as much as 48% of your DNA is actually all viral DNA. That's just junk DNA now. So it doesn't do that. It doesn't insert itself into your DNA. Even if it does, basically, you would be good at making ears of coronaviruses for a while, right? That's it. I love it. So there you go. That's mRNA vaccines. Nice work. Nice work to you too, man. Thank you for doing this one. This is a great one. Of course. And if you want to know more about mRNA vaccines, then just start researching. There's plenty of stuff out there to explain this even further. And since I say just start researching, that means, of course, it's time for listener mail. This is a quick one. I'm going to call this about the Church of the SubGenius as a follow up. Good morning, fellas. I've been listening to your podcast for several years. Some of my favorites include How Soap Works and How Sloths Work. I'm listening to the tale of the Church of the SubGenius episode as I type and I often Google the topic you're enlightening us with. And when I search for Bob Dobbs, a recent Twitter post from Bob Dobbs said this earthlings of Earth, you will be punished for the 1970s. That is all. Hashtag SubGenius hashtag Starkfish hashtag Tuesday motivations. And Chris from Arlington, Texas, says hysterical. I love your podcast. My wife and I have great conversations about your episodes all the time. And again. That is Chris from Arlington, Texas. Very nice. Thanks a lot, Chris. That was a nice little pick me up. We love the 1970. So screw you, SubGenius. Agreed. Chuck I'm glad somebody said it. Well, if you want to give us a pick me up like Chris chris. Right, Chris. Like Chris did. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheart radio.com. 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." | |
c3531968-5460-11e8-b38c-f7ae81137497 | SYSK Selects: What's the Deal with Crop Circles? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-whats-the-deal-with-crop-circles | For a while in the 1980s, people were fascinated and confused about what exactly crop circles were. Now we know that they aren't signs left from aliens, but art made by humans. Learn all about these stunning, large form art installations in today's episode. | For a while in the 1980s, people were fascinated and confused about what exactly crop circles were. Now we know that they aren't signs left from aliens, but art made by humans. Learn all about these stunning, large form art installations in today's episode. | Sat, 15 Jun 2019 16:16:03 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=16, tm_min=16, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=166, tm_isdst=0) | 37666163 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, this is Chuck. I hope you had some breakfast cereal and cartoons this morning. And now you're moving on to stuff you should know. Select. My pick is. What's the deal with crop circles from November 2014? This is pretty interesting to me because crop circles are clearly manmade and just there for Internet weirdos to think are made by aliens. And what's better than that, right? Please enjoy right now. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry, which makes this whole thing stuff. You should know the podcast. That's right. How's it going? Good, man. I got on my snowshoes and I'm walking in a wheat field making geometric patterns. How do you run into snowshoes? Well, it's sort of a large snowshoe. I could do that, though. Yes, that would definitely work. Snowshoe takes longer. Yeah, right. But it's easier. You can do something else with your hands while you're using that. That's a good point. So did you ever have the leads up in box set from 1990? My college roommate did, yeah. So you're familiar with the crop circles? Oh, yeah. And the suggestion that by Led Zeppelin that it was their zeppelin that was responsible for all of them. Is that what that was? Yeah. I didn't pick up on that because on the cover of the box that there's, like, this awesome, very real life crop circle formation and then the shadow of the zeppelin floating over it. Oh, I don't think I noticed the shadow ever. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that was the whole thing. Led Zeppelin took responsibility for those. Right. And by the way, we got a lot of responses on how they got the name Led Zeppelin. So thank you to the hundreds of people. Yes. Where the E or the A went. They didn't want people to think it was Lead Zeppelin. Exactly. That makes total sense. Right? Yeah. The zeppelin in front. The Lead Zeppelin. Anyway, it turns out that it's complete fabrication that the Lead Zeppelin zeppelin was responsible for crop circles. But that's one of the few suggestions that have been made for what makes crop circles. And this is a really strange topic, frankly, because it's been out for about a quarter of a century how crop circles are made, who makes them. And yet there's still a lot of people called seriologists after series, the Gallus of Agriculture, who are like, no, those people. That's the whole catch. It's a hoax. Right. They're responsible for 80% of crop circles, which leaves 20% unaccounted for. Yeah. I don't even call it a hoax. I just call it art. Well, yeah. So I saw somewhere at one point somebody say it's the most science based art there is because the stuff that crop circles are made of, a lot of them, is some really impressive Euclidean geometry. Yeah. Some smart people are behind these what I like to call art. They're not just a bunch of dummies walking around on a corn field. No, but they are people. Yes, they are. And we kind of spoiled it. So if you wanted to find out who makes crop circles, it's art, you can turn the episode off, but if you do, you're going to miss out on some cool, interesting stuff, if you ask me. Yeah. And what I think is weird is that despite the fact that it is definitely not aliens and all the stuff that people propose, we'll get into all that is that even when the people came out and said, no, we've been making crop circles for years, some people like, no, no, they're being paid to say that. Right. Aliens. In fact, that's something that you run up against with conspiracy theories, though. Just admitting that you're responsible to suggest that somebody's put you up to admitting it's disinformation, basically. And that's what a lot of people have said. A lot of people say it's Mi Five. And the reason they say it's Mi Five is because if you start tracing the history of crop circles, they originated basically, the hoax did in England, specifically in a couple of counties in England. Yeah. I mean, not only originated, but I think 90% of all crop circles have existed in southern England. Yeah. Even though they've had someone like Japan in the United States, some other parts of Europe, but yeah, 90% over in southern England. They clearly are inspired in that area to undertake the process of circle art. Exactly. For one reason or another. Who knows? Well, I can tell you how it started out. Yeah. So crop circles, if you're a seriologist, you will point to the 16th century, maybe, when somebody's like what could be described as a crop circle is accounted for. I couldn't find anything to back that up, but apparently in the 16th century, that's where the first description came from. I did find in the 17th century, in the 16th, there's a wood cut of something called the Mowing devil, and it's a devil, and he's clearly making a crop circle. But there's a pretty good explanation for the whole thing. Well, yeah. I don't understand how this became some sort of weird pseudo proof that they had crop circles back then, because if you look at the wood cut, it is Satan with a sith, and he is clearly cutting down corn or something. Some wheat harvest. Right. He's cutting it. Yeah. That's a distinction. Crop circles aren't cut. It's a cornstalk that is laid down, but not damaged, supposedly. Right. They yield the pressure without breaking. So this is just complete hooey to me. And there's even more. So there's an explanation on the wood cut itself. It's a story, basically. A man balked at the price that he was quoted by a laborer to harvest his grain, and the man said, I would rather have the devil harvest my grain than you. And so when he woke up the next morning, he was quite surprised to find that the devil was harvesting his screen, and he probably went to hell for it. But that was the whole story behind the Mowing devil. If you're a seriologist, this is the first evidence of crop circles, which kind of says a lot, if you ask me. But something that does kind of pop up that's a little less easily explained came along in 1880 in the issue of nature. There was an Englishman named John Rand capron or Capron, and he was from Surrey, and he said that he found a field of wheat that appeared to have been knocked about as if by wind. And they say there's a crop circle. Yeah, maybe it's possible he said that to him. He thought it was cyclonic wind action. And again, we'll get into other explanations later, but one of them is that they are the result of, like, tornadoes or cyclones. Yeah, but what he didn't say was that it was like a perfect circle, and the circumference was it could have just been a windy spot where some stuff was knocked down. Right, yeah, exactly. He didn't say it was in the shape of an Egyptian ank or anything like that. Right. Or an alien smoking pot. That's a real one. Really? Yes. Those are, like, the earliest evidence of crop circles. And then in, the modern idea of a crop circle came about in Australia, and there was supposedly a depression in a bunch of grass, a circular depression, and it had been associated with a UFO sighting, and it made the rounds in the media. And even then, a lot of people said it was probably a tornado or a cyclone or something like that. But there was a dude who happened to be in Australia at the time when it was being reported on. It was a big hubbub and everything. And his name was Dave crop circle. Dave crop circle. No, I'm sorry. His buddy's name is Doug Bauer. Oh, yeah. And Doug Bauer, when he got back from Australia, he was hanging out with a friend of his one night in 1978, drunk. They'll just come out and admit it. They were drunk at the pub. And he told his buddy about that, and they said, wouldn't it be hilarious if we went out and made our own crop circle? Yeah. And Dave said, I think that would be really hilarious. So much so, let's go do it. So they figured out how to do it, and they made the first crop circle in 1978. Like, the first crop circle, the first hoax crop circle, what you call art, was made in 1078. And what's funny about the whole thing is they made these things for years, hundreds of them. Yes, but say the first couple of dozen, maybe nobody noticed because they made them on flat fields, and then they finally figured out why? What if we made one on, like, a field that was on an incline? They made that one, and all of a sudden, the whole crop circle paranormal phenomenon took off like a rocket. 1981. Yeah. And people caught on, obviously, and started making their own crop circles all over England and all kinds of cool designs. By the 1990s, it was a genuine tourist attraction. Even farmers were saying, come to my farm and pay me some shillings and come look at my cool crop circle. Well, apparently, they were charging to offset the damage under their crops by so many people flocking to these farms. Yeah, I saw where it didn't damage the crops. I just don't see how that's possible. The actual crop circle itself. Yeah, I think it can damage it, but the hallmark of it is that the grain is bent, but not broken. So as long as it's not broken, there's still a pretty good chance it could continue growing or try to grow back upright or something. But yeah, I'm sure there's tons of broken grain in a crop circle. Yeah. I guess we should talk about the designs. Most of the times are circular, but not always. They're all sorts of different shapes now, but they started out as circular, either singles or doubles or triples or quadruples. And sometimes they are connected, sometimes they're not. They are usually bent in one way for a while. So either laying down clockwise or counterclockwise, or if they get super crafty, they can be clockwise for 10ft and then counterclockwise. And from the sky, you see these different kind of swirly patterns, like a layered swirly pattern. It's very impressive. Yeah. And again, this started really kind of to take off in the throughout the as they became more and more popular and more and more widespread in the media and among people who watch the x files. And again, the 90s were a deeply paranoid decade because of the impending millennium. So I think that kind of really helped the popularity of crop circles explode. Yes. Because there are a lot of people like these are signs from aliens. They're either alien landing yeah. Like alien spacecraft landing and leaving these impressions, creating artworks. Right. Or else they're leaving science first. There's even a movie called science, a terrible, terrible movie starring Mel Gibson about this very thing. So there's a lot of people who bought into it like that. And as the awareness of crop circles grew, so did the complexity of them, to where you did have people who were sitting down and coming up with really incredible math and then going out and doing it in crop circle form. Yeah. And some people use that. Like, this one is exactly four times larger than the one below it. And as evidence that it's something extraordinary and not just people who are good at figuring out design and geometry and math, there's specifically a man who kind of, I guess, provided a stumbling block to the debunking of crop circles. His name is Gerald S. Hawkins, and he is a retired astronomer who became a crop circle enthusiast, and he used his math skills to analyze crop circles and basically said, I've discovered a new kind of Euclidean geometry in crop circles, which implies that there was some non human agency creating crop circles, something advanced beyond the scope of human understanding. Right. Because if this incredibly brilliant mathematician could learn something from these something new, then that implied that something extraterrestrial was behind them while his findings have been challenged time and time again. So he believed it was I thought you said he was debunking. No, no, he confounded debunking. He created this. Oh, he bunked. He did bunk. Yeah. And the thing is, the language he's using, the math he's using is real math. Yeah. So the average person can't come in and look at this and be like, this is wrong for this and this reason and this reason. Right. And then I think the real giveaway, though, is his work is not discussed at all in what appears to be normal academic math forums. Right. It doesn't exist. It doesn't get any recognition. Even though he published his initial findings in, like, a respected math journal, if this guy had discovered a new kind of Euclidean geometry, it would be in textbooks. Revolutionary. Yeah. And it's just not discussed. So I think that in and of itself is a pretty good example of how serious it is. But up against skeptics and the whole thing is continued, somebody will present a body of evidence, and then nobody is either capable or willing to just go to the trouble of debunking it. Yeah. And these things this article is I don't know if I can recommend people read this one. No. It seems like it was written by a believer. Yeah, it was pretty bad. But one thing that struck me as odd in this article at least, is these things are usually like, they're big, they're several hundred feet, maybe 100ft. It says sometimes they range from several inches. I don't understand that. That's called, like, stepping on a piece of wheat. Right. Like, how can a crop circle be several inches across? There is some stuff in here that I couldn't find any support for anywhere else. Like, here's a sentence for you under the title who makes crop circles? The first sentence is the answer of who or what is creating these crop formations? Is not an easy one to answer. Sure it is. Actually, it's absolutely easy to answer. There's another sentence, too. Even with crop circle makers claiming responsibility for hundreds of designs, hoaxes can account for all the thousands of crop circles created. Sure you can. Yeah. Again, hoaxes can account for every single one of the crop circles ever created. Yeah. I was really disappointed with this. I put in for an article update. Good. All right, so we'll talk a little more about where these are located and what kind of fields are used after this break. All right, so you mentioned a couple of counties in England, hampshire and Wiltshire are where most of these are, which kind of makes sense if people are saying, hey, mate, I built some crop circles. Oh, yeah. How do you do that? Right. Here's how you do it. Oh, cool. I'll go do one. Right. It's localized for the most part. And the reason it's localized there is that's where Dave and Doug lived. Exactly. That's where they live. That's where the crop circle started. So, yes, they were concentrated there. The other thing, though, unfortunately, is that's where Stonehenge is. Yeah. A lot of people are like, sure, Dave and Doug live there. Who cares? They were put up to it, saying that they did it by Mi Five. The real story is that Stonehenge is right there. Yeah. All kinds of fields can be used for this art. Corn, oat, barley, tobacco, weeds. I like the Cornwalls. I think that makes a nice canvas. I don't know that I've seen a corn one. Oh, yeah, I like the cornwoods. Well, I think they were corn and not signs. Right. Are you surrounded by corn? I tried to make myself go to sleep. I wouldn't allow my hippocampus to form memories of that movie. So I guess we should cover some of the theories, because we covered, like, bigfoot and other things that aren't real, too. So here's what serialogists believe. We mentioned that it's an alien calling card, perhaps. A lot of eyewitness reports supposedly say, I heard some strange noises. I saw some weird lights. There's a famous video called the Oliver's Castle Video where you see these strange lights above a field and you actually see the crop circle on video form. It's a field, and then it just depresses into a crop circle. You've seen this? Oh, yes. It's on YouTube. Okay. But that guy who made that video came out and said, here's how I did that. It's these computer programs, and it's paint and it's all fake. But some people say, no, that guy was paid off to say that. Or am I? Five kidnapped his family. Exactly. And made him say it. But it's very cool looking. But that is one of the points that rational people point to, is, like, if these things are being made, why isn't there a single image anywhere of it happening? Right. Because cameras are ubiquitous video cameras. People look for this stuff. They camp out in fields trying to get those images. Well, yeah. There was a very famous operation by a group of serial artists who camped out at a field for several. Like. A week or two. I believe. Back in the 80s or ninety s. And apparently. Not only did no crop circles form during the time they were camped out in that area. None did in all of England during that time that they publicized that they were camping out. And then right when the operation ended. A crop circle popped up. Like. I think. A couple of football fields away from where they've been camping. That's because Doug and what was his name? Dave. Dave. Were like, all right, they're gone. Exactly. Let's go mess with them. Another one is that a lot of people say that there's this plasma that can form ionized wind, basically. Yeah. The plasma vortex theory, and that it forms a cyclone. It's cyclonic, which means that it moves clockwise, I believe. Yeah. Or counterclockwise one of the two. They're cyclonic and anti cyclonic. Whichever way that they said the cyclone rotates, the dog and Dave started doing crop circles that rotated the other way. And when they were like, yeah, there's anti cyclones, people started making square ones. So every time there's been a real tug of war or playfulness between people popping up in the media, experts on crop circles saying something, and the people making the crop circles doing the opposite of what those people just said to prove them wrong with their crop circles right after that. Yeah. I think the English have, like with banksy, I think there's an undercurrent in England of cheeky mess with the establishment sort of subversiveness yeah. Subversive art and hoaxes and pranks and seems like I admire it. I think it's kind of neat. Sure. Another theory is that downdraft from, like, a helicopter and airplane, a small airplane might push it down into these perfectly shaped geometric patterns, but they've tried to recreate that. And of course that's not possible. No, it's not possible. But that is a theory. Again, there's the cyclone theory. This is another thing in this article that got me. Probably the most scientific theory says that crop circles are created by small currents of swirling ring when called vortices. Yeah, that's not the most scientific theory. The most scientific theory is that humans are making the crop circles. Like, what is going on with this article? It's just wacky to me. It is. But that is a theory. That's a theory that some people put out. They say when that crop circle in the 60s in Australia was created, a lot of people said, oh, it's a cyclone. They call it a willynilly. Did they really? That was my Australian accent, too. Now they call it a willy. Willy. Willy. Yeah. And that was something that they said that it was possible. It was. That they also said it could be a lot of things. Probably wasn't a UFO. But that wind theory has been around for a very long time. And a guy named doctor Terrence miden, who's from the tornado and storm research organization in England, in Wiltshire yeah. He says that there's this thing called the plasma vortex theory. He says that dust particles get caught in charged air that's spinning, and not only can they make crop circles, this dust can glow. And that accounts for the light scene. There's the UFO. Yeah. He's using pseudoscience to debunk even further. Pseudoscience? Yeah. I'm surprised it doesn't say. Dr. Terrence Medan, formerly of the Tornado and Storm Research Site. Electromagnetic radiation is another theory. Supposedly there have been strong magnetic fields measured inside crop circles, and people that go to visit them report feeling tingling sensations all over their body. I think this is explained as easy as if you get someone that believes in an electromagnetic radiation of a crop circle and stick them in the middle of one, they're going to feel a tingling sensation. Yeah. That was another thing, though, that I ran into. I couldn't find any evidence to back that statement up, like, who's finding electromagnetic radiation in these fields and are they reproducible the findings? There was another crop circle called the Julius Set. It's a fractal. Yeah, it's pretty cool looking. It's amazing. Yeah. From what I could find, it's the largest ever. It was like 300 meters, 900ft in diameter. That's enormous. And it's 409 circles. Just basically look up the 1996 Julius Set. It's cool. It's very awesome. But it was right next to stonehenge. Yeah. There's plenty of images of this crop circle with Stonehenge in the background. And apparently a lot of women who went to visit it found that their menstrual cycles synced up. And then some women who'd already been through menopause started menstruating again. Both are things that can happen, can they, without aliens taking part? Did that happen, though? Who documented this? This is the thing, like, people are just saying stuff and you can say whatever you want, and it doesn't count necessarily, at least not if you're trying to explain something. Yeah, I think both of those things can happen. I'm a 40th. I think there are limits to science, and there's stuff that exists beyond science's capabilities to explain things right now that there are things that will understand more clearly that appear to be superstitious. Now, crop circles, to me, are not one of them. They're just not. That's because it's art. Right. In the 1990s, there was a biophysicist named Dr. William Lebanonad who discovered that crop circles were damaged as if they had been heated by a microwave oven. So he says, I think they're being heated from the inside by some kind of microwave energy. And there was a guy named Richard Taylor from the University of Oregon, a professor of physics, who said, yeah, you can build something called a magnetron using stuff from like, a household cooker and a twelve volt battery, and you can essentially use this to create crop circles and shoot microwaves. So, yeah, that might be possible, that they've been heated by microwaves, because that is another way that you can make a crop circle. He says that these crops usually have joints in the stocks, like a cornstalk does, and if you heat it up, it expands like popcorn. Yeah. And it's going to fall over that would be funny if there was a bunch of popcorn and it popped. But he says, I'm not saying this is how they do it, but using GPS coordinates and a computer and a design program, you can actually use one of these magnetrons to do this. And that is something that possibly could happen. Got you. Again, the clearest theory is that humans are doing it. And we'll talk more about evidence that seriologists point to and evidence that skeptics point to, and then how you make an actual crop circle right after this. So, Chuck, there's a couple of pieces of evidence that serialogists point to. They're very rarely, if ever, footprints found around a crop circle explain that they're walking between the planted crops. Yeah. If you look at any picture of a crop circle, any picture of any crop circle ever made, you're going to see little lines that go all along the field. Those are left by the tractor. They're tractor tracks. Yeah. And crops are planted in rows. Exactly. So you can just move in and about them. And you know why they're planted in rows? So you can move in and about them. Right. Without stepping on the crops. Exactly. And like we mentioned earlier, Dave, Charlie and Doug Bauer came out in 1991 and said, hey, we did this. BBC, come along, let's film a little documentary, and I'm going to show you how to do a rope and plank crop circle. And apparently one of the guys had racked up a bunch of mileage on his car yesterday. I don't know if it's true or not, but it makes for a good story. And his wife got onto him and was like, hey, what's going on here? Are you cheating on me? And that's why he came out and said, no, I haven't been cheating on you. This is why there's all this extra mileage and I'm going to go public with it. They were the only three people in the world who knew about that for a while. Apparently they went public because the government, like, people had bought into this lock, stock and barrel. It was just UFOs possibly that were doing this. Smart people were talking about this. The media was covering it, like, are these UFOs? And these guys are just sitting back laughing. And apparently the Queen had a book on her summer reading list that was released by her press people that included, like, some crop circle experts, like UFO analysis of the crop circles around the world and what was going on. So the queen was even reading this, and these two guys and the guy's wife are just sitting back laughing, having the time of their lives. And then apparently the British government was about to conduct an investigation and these guys were like, we don't need to let taxpayers waste their money on this, so let's go forward. And they came forward in September of 1991, and apparently within days, they were on Good Morning America, showing the world how to do this stuff. And a lot of people started doing it after that because they're like, this is kind of fun, and I'm an artist as well. And here's how you do it. Well, there are some different ways you can get a magnetron, apparently, but the most conventional way is, like I said, the rope and plank. So you're going to choose a spot, you're going to choose a field, you're going to create your little design. It could be a circle, it could be the Mendel Brought set or the Julia set. Yeah. Whatever it is, you want to put it down on paper. Yeah. Because it is math and you have to work it out. And you have to have a pretty good eye or brain for design, I guess, to draw something on a page and make it hundreds of feet across. It's like, these are talented people. Sure. You're going to get to your field and you basically act as a human compass, exactly like a math compass that you used to draw a circle, not a compass to show you which way north is. You're going to put one person in the middle, and that's going to be he's essentially the little point. And then you use rope and you're going to mark off your four opposite marks as the circle. And you're going to give the guy in the center of rope, give someone on the outside of rope, and they're just going to walk in a big circle as he holds that rope. And then it's going to make, essentially, a near perfect circle. In theory, yes. It forms the diameter of the circle. Yeah. If you're taking your time, then you're going to have a pretty good looking circle. Right. And then after that, you start just moving inward from the outside in. Just stomping the grain down yeah. With your big snowshoe like things. Right. And there you have a crop circle. Yeah. And like I said, you do one for 3ft going this way, and hey, I'm going to jump around and turn the other way and lay the corn or wheat down that way. It appears that stymies the weirdos of the world. Right. How does that happen? Yeah. And the whole key, apparently, is just planning it out ahead of time and then just translating what's on paper into real life. Basically, all it takes is a little bit of multiplication, some ropes, poles, and a couple of boards, and you can make a pretty awesome crop circle if you know what you're doing. Yeah. You could also use a gardener, lawn roller or the traditional rope stalker. Right. And there you have it. There's a group called Circlemakers.org, and they were very much inspired by Doug and Dave. I think Doug and Dave kind of became honorary circle makers. But these guys, their website is still up. It's not nearly as active as it was like. Five or ten years ago, but they were getting paid by companies around the world to make crop circles. They made a Nike crop circle. They made, like, a Swedish furniture stores crop circle. I think a Nike one would be. Did they make the switch? They made a foot, like a footprint, like a huge footprint. And they just did tons of them and got paid, apparently, like hundreds of thousands of dollars for each one. They did. Good for them. So these guys spent the early 2000s making bank running around doing crop circles. At the same time they're teaching people how to do it. And simultaneously, serialogists are still investigating this. And so the serialogist came up with they're also called croppies. We should say croppies came up with some steps you need to take when you're investigating a crop circle. Are we going to go over these? Sure. They talk to eyewitnesses, did you see or hear anything weird? Right. Because there's a crop circle and they'll say, yeah, actually, come to think of it, I did hear something weird. Am I going to be on the news? They check out the weather patterns in the area of the previous night because it always happens overnight, which enthusiasts will say they're doing it under nightfall to not be caught as aliens. And they're sending secret messages and rational thinking. People say, no, the artists are doing it under nightfall to not get caught. So you can keep the hoax going. Right, exactly. What else do you do? Supposedly, they will bring out machines to actually measure soil and use, like, X ray diffraction analysis and electromagnetic energy readings. Right. They're analyzing all of this information and I don't know what they come up with. Clearly, they've been forced to say, yes, some of these are hoaxes. Like the alien smoking pot 80%. Right, right. 20% cannot be explained by seriologist. Yeah. There was a famous one that said, we are not alone. Spelled out all in one word, basically, but in all caps, we are not alone. And a lot of skeptics say, shouldn't it be you are not alone if these are messages from aliens? And do they just happen to speak English? Yeah. So there's a lot of points that skeptics point to the ones that do go to the trouble of debunking these. And there's a guy named Joe Nicholl, and he writes for the Committee for Scientific Investigation, CSI, and he basically came up with four good points that debunk crop circles. One is that there was an escalation and frequency as they became more and more popular. Sure. Which is kind of a weird thing. The geographic distribution of them was again concentrated primarily in this region of England. Right. Even though you'd find them elsewhere, brazil, Japan, all over. You can also explain that by the fact that people were inspired by other crop circles. Yeah. There's an increase in complexity, which means that they're getting better at it. Exactly. Yeah. And then there was they called the shyness factor, which was they were only done at night. No one had ever seen a crop circle formed. Right. That one guy's YouTube thing, not outstanding. Sure. Well, which was faked. Exactly. Unless he was paid off to say it was faked. Exactly. Yeah. And it's pretty tough to disprove that. Yeah. Like I said, I think if people just look at this as really cool public displays of art because they're amazing. It's really neat looking what people are able to accomplish with their hands and feet. Somebody redid the Nasca, hummingbird the Nazca lines. They did, like, kind of a more stylized version of that. Again, the pot smoking alien. Somebody else just did a straight up pot leaf. Yeah, of course someone did. The mothman. The West Virginia mothman. The Shroud of Turin. Nice. Yes. People got really good at this. And like you said, if you look at it as art, it's pretty easy to appreciate it. I bet a fun conversation over here at an English pub is a crop circle brainstorming session on what kind of circle they can make next. I bet that's a lot of fun to listen to. Yeah. In a rural county in England and a pub. I'd love to be in on one of those. Yeah. Well, go to Wiltshire. Yeah, maybe I will. You got anything else? I got nothing else. So that's crop circles. The mystery continues. If you want to learn more about crop circles, you can type that word into how stuff works in the search bar or don't. And it will bring up this weird article. Yeah. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Chilean camouflage. Hey, guys. And Jerry. I was writing to make a comment on something Chuck said on the last listener male animal camouflage. At one point, Chuck read that the listener suffered from mental illnesses that were practically ignored by her parents, who happened to be doctors, then commenting that that was quite a shocker. Oh, yeah, that's right. I remember that. Yeah. This girl had, I believe, doctor and psychologist parents who kind of just ignored her mental issues, which I thought was weird. He said, I don't know if it's just the country where I live, Chile, but we have a saying for that. In casa de herrero Cuccio de palo. Jerry, do you know what that means? She says, no. That literally translates into, in the blacksmith home, stick, knives. It alludes to what happens when an expert on something tends to neglect his field of expertise once he gets home. Yeah. It's like here we say the Cobbler's children have no shoes. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. I bet every country has their own thing. It makes more sense than the knives thing. Yeah. I'm not sure what that means, but I'm not Chilean. The doctor thinks that a sick child is just fine. The electrician that has a mess of cables on appliances, an accountant that can't control her own expenses, a chef that orders fast food, et cetera. Maybe they're just tired of doing that same thing over and over again. They just want to stop and rest when they get home. Or maybe they're just jerks. Who knows? But apparently it happens often enough that the situation got its own saying around these parts more than one stay classy. Best witches, Matt. Thanks, Matt. And Matt was super excited that this was going to get on listener mail, because he's been a listener from the get go. He says, all right, Matt, way to hang in there. All I had to do was write in. You're bound to get on at some point. In Casa de Jerrero. coutil de Paulo. Let me get that tattooed above my waistline. And the Blacksmith's home stick knives. I don't get that one. All right. Thank you for confounding us, Matt. That's good stuff. If you want to try to confound us, you can do so via Twitter at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffyjano. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@howstuffworks.com. And, as always, join us at our home on the Web. Stuffyshow.com. Stuffysheanow 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." | |
What has the world's deadliest venom? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-has-the-worlds-deadliest-venom | Venom isn't unique to snakes -- animals like scorpions, spiders, jellyfish and even platypuses can all use venom. Join Chuck and Josh as they explore the world's most venomous creatures (and break down the difference between poison and venom). | Venom isn't unique to snakes -- animals like scorpions, spiders, jellyfish and even platypuses can all use venom. Join Chuck and Josh as they explore the world's most venomous creatures (and break down the difference between poison and venom). | Tue, 25 Jan 2011 21:24:46 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=21, tm_min=24, tm_sec=46, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=25, tm_isdst=0) | 29050759 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Snowpocalypse Eleven. Yeah. This is the first day we've been in the office this weekend. It's Thursday afternoon. Yeah. And I know all your northern folks like to make fun of us here in the south. Well, I told the godfather thing to make fun of. I said, you know what? Next time it snows and ice is seven inches in your city, wherever you are up north, like, don't salt any roads. Don't get out any snow chains. Don't get out any snow plows. I saw and see how you do. I saw and that guy was like, I'm sorry. He was fine. He was a nice guy. I wasn't trying to be a jerk. I'm just saying we don't have the stuff to deal with it. No. Apparently we have ten snow plows. Ten snow plows for the city of Atlanta. Yeah, that's about what I don't think we should go out and buy 50 snow plows now, though. I didn't even know we had ten. Yes. I thought that was pretty decent. It's a southern city. It's the weather's fault, not Atlanta's fault. That's right. So, yeah, we had to come in to make sure that we still continue getting everybody stuff. You should know. I can't imagine that publishing it'll never happen. Chuck, are you not going to work? You're in America. It will never happen to Chuck. Sorry. Okay. My knuckles are starting to hurt me. Are you ready? Yeah. Warm enough to do this? Before we start this, can I say something to Australia? Because we're going to be talking about Australia. They're suffering through some flooding there in Brisbane. It's like a 500 year flood. Right? It's a big flood, and it's killed so far, about 34 people. And so we just want to say that we're thinking about you. Australia. That's an awful thing. And we're going to be poking fun at you later on with all the deadly creatures there in your Outback Steakhouses. Yeah. But we're thinking about you on a serious note. So having said that, let the jokes lie. That's tough. You just shut me down. I know. Sorry. All right, are you ready? Yeah. Let's do this. Okay, so, Chuck, there is a couple of different guys out there in the world who are in stiff competition right now to come up with a cure for cancer based on scorpion venom. Are there two dudes leading them to two dudes, and they are scrambling for their lives right now. Right. There's a guy at the St. Louis University School of Medicine. And there's another guy who is at the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan. Okay. All right. Awesome. And both of them have found, or are working upon the idea that scorpion venom, something in it attacks gliomas, which are a very deadly type of cancer cell brain cancer tumor. Right. They go after gliomas first for some reason, so if these guys can figure out the treatment is really weird, you inject the scorpion venom. It goes and attaches itself to the glioma, and then you radiate it and it just destroys everything. So if they can figure out how to get this to work reliably, they would have basically come up with a cure for brain cancer. I knew a guy undergoing the treatment. You are joking. Yeah. This was at the very beginning stages of it, like, probably seven or eight years ago. Yeah. This is from 2006. Yeah. This guy I worked for a company that produced documentaries, like medical documentaries, and they were documenting this guy's fight with cancer. And one of the things I remember at the time hearing was that he was undergoing a very experimental thing with scorpion venomous. We were all like, what? But it wasn't about that, so I didn't learn much about it at the time. Yeah. Interesting. It is very interesting. And scorpions, of course, are extremely poisonous right now. Josh oh, really? Here's your cocktail party fact of the day. There is a difference between venomous and poisonous, and the difference is not in the toxin, but in the way the toxin is transferred from the animal to the whatever. That's right. I never knew that. I suspected as much. So poison is transmitted passively, so you have to ingest it or absorb it somehow. And venom is injected. Right. And usually poison, like, say, a poison tree frog. What is it? The dart frog? Yeah, the poison tree frog. Poison dart frog. Poison dart frog. Where am I getting tree from? I think they're in trees. Okay, all right. The poison dart frog, it creates this poison passively, like you said, usually through a diet. That's how poison is created. And it's not out to hurt you unless you eat it or handle it in a way it doesn't like. You get the toxin absorbed through your skin. Boom, you're dead. Right. Or if you're a human being, you're on one heck of a trip. Yes, I would imagine so. You said something very important, though. That's another difference. Poison is created through the diet, whereas venom is inherent in the animal itself. Well, the animal creates it. Yes, the animal creates it without the help of diet. Right, right. There's like some sort of mechanism in their metabolism that creates venom. And poison is generally has a defensive role in venom is usually for the offense, for predators. Right. You want to get your prey bite it. Yeah. Like with a fang or a stinger, release some venom. Boom, you're fine. You just got dinner. Those are the differences. Yeah. Pretty good. So a scorpion isn't poisonous. It is venomous. It produces its own venom on purpose. Uses it on purpose. Venomous. Right. Poison tree dart frog. That's poisonous. That's right. It even says it in the name. Poison tree dart frog. It creates it through the skin. All right. So, Chuck, this is something I've always wondered, right? Yeah. What is the most venomous animal on the planet? I would imagine that it's something along the lines of a cobra. Coral snake, maybe. Maybe they have them in Florida. Those things are extremely poisonous. Right. Are they the most poisonous? I'm sorry, venomous animal. How many times do you think we'll do that? This time, I know after we explained it, we're going to screw it up. We'll get a very accurate number from Aaron Cooper. I'm sure the most venomous animal, I would think, is either coral snake, I should say, before I read this article, the black mamba, maybe. I've always heard those are pretty bad. That's another one, too. The black widow spider, or possibly the brown reckless, like you always hear, black widow is going to kill you. That's what my dad always said to me before I went to sleep every night. But the brown recluse, apparently, is way worse. Yeah, sure, I've heard that. Black widows, man, I see those all the time. They always scare me. Yeah, well, they look really scary. That shiny black body with the red hourglass and that look like, what are you looking at? I'll kill you. Those are not Josh, but I would have placed my guesses on some of those things as well. Yes. Before this article. Apparently, the deadliest, most venomous animal being on the planet is found in the ocean right off of the coast of Australia. The box jellyfish, aka the sea wasp. Right. Aka the marine stinger. Yes. I think that's a stupid name. I like seawasp. Seawasp is bad. I think they have these at the Georgia Aquarium, although I may be wrong. It's possible. They have those little translucent, sort of fluorescent, almost jellyfish. I think a lot of them are like that, though. Are they? Yeah. Well, no, I know that they're not like solid orange. They have tentacles. Yeah, they sort of look like jelly. These are pale blue, almost transparent, and they are of the most deadly creatures in the world because they can kill a human in five minutes or less. That's pretty quick. They can. So if you're out at sea, you will likely die before you reach help. Yeah. You go into shock. The venom of the box jellyfish or sea wasp, it paralyzes your central nervous system, right. So you can't breathe, your heart stops beating, your muscles stop working. You probably do all sorts of unpleasant things in your pants. Yeah, I'm not going to lose control yourself. And that's probably the least of your worries at that point, because you are dying and you're swimming back to shore. The problem is, when you encounter one of these things, if it does indeed sting you, if you pull your arm away, that actually tends to cause more of the stingers to latch onto you and deliver even more venom. Right. So if this happens to you, just lay still and let it sting the crap out of you. How does this happen, though, Josh? What are these little dealies called? They are called nematocysts. Right. Nematocysts are these little cells that has something called cenaido blast and kanaido. Is it really? Yeah, and it was a lovely British one. She went, Kanaicho lost kanajo blast. Kate Middleton it was this is the only British one we know right now. So each tentacle has 5000 of the nematocysts that are housed in the Konaido blast. Okay. The Canada blasts are basically like the little charge of venom that shoot out, right? Yeah. And there's a trigger protruding from the Madison, which basically is like a little it looks like a little claw. The trigger is and when this thing is triggered, the Kinaido blast shoots out, deposits the venom menu and you're in big trouble. Now, that's just one Kanido blast, right. There's apparently a ton of these on any given tentacle. Correct. Yeah. 5000 stingers, 75,000 total. If you have 15 tentacles, 75,000 nematocysts, that's a lot. Oh, yeah. And all it takes is probably a few to do some major damage. Yes. I wondered if one of the reasons it was so deadly was because there's just so many zapping. You definitely think so? I think it's very powerful venom. Yeah. Right. So the pairing of the two is deadly. Yes. And the reaction of the nematocyst trigger blast, the nematocyst is triggered, releasing the Canada blast by chemicals in our skin pheromones, I would imagine. Yeah. That's key. And some Australians have very cleverly figured out that for some reason, nylon, as in pantyhose, keeps this chemical from seeping out and being detected by the Kanido blast. So you can just walk right up to a box jellyfish with pantyhose on your arm or your head and rub the jellyfish and it won't do anything. I love that. Do not do that. But I'm just saying, theoretically, you could. So if you see some Aussie surfers wearing pantyhose, then don't hate that's probably the reason why. That's the reason why. Well, you never know. You don't, do you might just be into that kind of thing. Luckily, there are some cures for this. There are things like vinegar. Acetic acid can render it harmless. Yes. Isn't it funny? It's like one of the deadliest animals on the planet, but then vinegar is fine. It's crazy. And there's an antivenom, and notice it did not say antivenom, which people usually say antivenom. That is not correct. Although it's sort of accepted now. It's still not proper. It's antiven and V-N-I-N yes. One of my personal little gripes. People say jive. Yes. They do not jive. Chuck apparently it takes about two to three minutes to die from a box jellyfish injection. Right. There's been over 500 people who have died since 1000, 954 in Australia alone. How many? 5500. Wow. Yeah. That's a lot. Of dead people just from this jellyfish? Just from the box jellyfish, just in Australia, and apparently from November to May, they come into the North Shore, and a lot of times it's like, well, the beach is closed until May, until these things leave, because they will kill you. Right, right. But also in Australia, they believe that there is, pound for pound, another jellyfish, which, by the way, the box jellyfish is not a true jellyfish. It's in the family, it's not a true jellyfish. And neither is I'm going to try this, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to put you the Arukanji. I haven't heard of that. Is that in here? No. Okay. It's the Arukinji jellyfish. It's like the size of a fingernail, but it can kill people. It can kill you. Just this little thing. Right. Pound for pound. It's definitely more venomous than the box jellyfish got you. But there's this guy who there's a thing called Arukanji Syndrome, and the Aruk and G are a tribe of Australian aborigines and they live near the water and every once in a while, one of them would go out into the water and just mysteriously die right there swimming. So there was a doctor who suspected that there was a jellyfish involved and he started looking for it and he found it. It's now called the Arukanji jellyfish. But to prove his point, he took this one little tiny jellyfish, stung himself, his son and the lifeguard on duty, and all three of them ended up in the hospital, like, at the edge of death because of this one little jellyfish. And he's like, I found it. So that one is probably the deadliest jellyfish. Pound for pound. Definitely. Wow. Well, the box jellyfish, we should mention, too, even if it doesn't kill you, it is a how do you pronounce that? It's dermotocratic. Is that right? So that means that it kills your skin cells and tissue underneath. So even if it wraps around your arm and you manage to get it off and live, it can turn your skin black and dead and you'll be scarred for life and no one will love you. No one will ever love you again. But I think you'd be so happy to be alive, you could live without love. Sure, for a little while. And then you'd be like, why didn't the jellyfish just take me? Why didn't I wear a pantyhose? So there it is. Right. The box jellyfish, or at least the erukanji, jellyfish, are the deadliest, most venomous animals on the planet. Right. So are we done? No. You know as well as I do that we're not done. It's teasing. Yeah. Let's talk about venom in general, and the reason why it's hard to test its potency is because it's like so the answer to the question is no, they're not necessarily not necessarily what? The most venomous animals on the planet? No, they are. Okay. I'm just talking about difficulties in testing venom potency, it's tough because let's say you get this deadly venom and you inject it into a lab rat. It's not necessarily going to even if you do the pound, the equation to equate it to a human, like a full size human. What are you laughing at? A rat doesn't necessarily react in the same way that a human would. Right. And what you're talking about is what's called the lethal dosage standard LD 50. Right, yeah. Explain that. It's kind of cruel. It's very cruel. Basically, they figure out how much of a venom it takes to kill 50% of a lab population. And we're not talking about, like, the grad students, a bunch of mice or rats or whatever. So let's say you have 20 mice and you inject them all with a venom. However much venom it takes to kill half of them is what's considered the LD 50 measurement. Right. Which you'd express in terms of, like, with a mouse, you'd be like, it's five milligrams of box jellyfish venom to every 10 grams of mouse weight. Yeah. It's for every 100 grams of the animals body weight, the amount of venom. Right. The larger animals is kilograms. Yeah, sure. So a low number is deadly. For instance, the coral snake has an LD 50 of 1.3 and the box jellyfish is zero four. So the coral sink has an LD 50 of 1.3 on, I guess, a mouse, because it's specific to the animal. And, like, a proper LD 50 measurement will say the way that it's injected, like, oily the skin injected and then the animal. So it will be like, 0.4 LD 50 rat comma skin transdermal, 1 kg. So, sorry. And you bring up an excellent point. It is a very cruel way of figuring out how deadly a venom is. Right, yeah. So in large part, it's been discontinued or abandoned. Well, at least there's been calls for it. I don't think the research is quite as fast and loose as it once was. Right, yeah. They were such a crazy time for LD 50 ratings. Yes. They're trying to figure out better ways to do this, but the whole point is to create a scale of comparison. You don't want coral snake to bite you, but you really don't want a box jellyfish to bite you. I don't really want either one to bite me. You have to stay away from both of them. Yeah, that'd be my call. I wonder what some of those methods are. They didn't mention this in the article. Curious. What? Well, to measure the potency of a venom, if they're getting away from LD 50, how is she going to tell unless you kill something? I wonder if it's one of those things where you know how it says not tested on animals? Right. One of the reasons why there are so many products that say that now is because they already did all the animal testing. They're not using a lot. There's not a lot of new stuff that they're introducing that need animal testing. So these people didn't test it on animals, but somebody 30 years ago did, and it's fine. That's what the label should say. No longer necessary to test on animals. Right. We specifically didn't test on animals. Right. You want to talk about some other deadly venomous creatures? Yeah. And they're in Australia. Yeah. Also dangerously with really dangerous stuff. Yes. The geographic cone snail, Josh, is found along the coral reefs of the IndoPacific, and it is a little brown and white gastropod, and it has the ability to paralyze you almost instantly with a little mini spear. It's, like, extends a tube like organ with a spear on the end of it, and just, boom, you swim by and you're paralyzed. And some little smaller creatures die before they even realize they've been bitten. Isn't that awesome? Yeah. They're like, what the or not even what the yeah, they're like, I wonder what I'm going to have for lunch. And then nothing. Yes, then you are lunch. And apparently this little spear, this protrusion, can reach anywhere in a shell, so you can't pick it up anywhere. Oh, really? Yeah, or you're in big trouble if you go at it from the very rear. And you think I'm safe here? I think you probably use, like, long tongs or something like that. That's how you handle the cone snail. The inland taipan. I've never heard of the snake. It's a snake. It's in Australia. In England. Let's talk about it's. Venom. Okay. The taipan has a venomous bite powerful enough this is the Chigana T shirt to kill 15,000 mice. Yeah. It's a lot of mice death. I don't know how many humans that is, but that's certainly more than one. I would think they created an anti venom, luckily. But before that, you were pretty much toast if you got bitten by one of these. Yeah. Do you want to talk about antivin real quick? Anti what? Anti venom. Yeah, go ahead. So you know how it's made, right? No, I didn't until today, but it's pretty awesome. Let's hear basically the milk, and there's actually a guy in Kentucky whose job it is, and he's one of several. I imagine he milks venomous snakes. Yeah, that's pretty cool. It makes some pretty good money doing it, but it's a lot of repetitive work. Yeah. Like a gram of what is it? I think rattlesnake, maybe? No, coral snake. A gram of coral snake venom to be used to make antivenom is like a grand $1,000. You can sell it for $1,000 pop. But it takes, like, three to 400 milkings to create a gram of this venom. Right. Yeah. So the guy's working hard, but he's being paid well for his effort. Anyway, they milk whatever animal it is, whether it's black widow, a box jellyfish, a rattlesnake. Exactly. And they take the venom, they slowly introduce it into a horse's system. I think I did know this. The horse becomes immunized through to this venom, whatever it is, right. Over time. Yeah. And then this immunization is expressed in its hemoglobin. So they take the horse's hemoglobin. So it's immunized horse hemoglobin. That's aneven. Wow. That's what they're injecting into you. Wow. And I was reading how they do it. If you come in, you're like, I got bit by a black widow, just like dad said. Right. Apparently, if you're aged 16 to 60, black widows are not quite so bad. You can treat this with muscle relaxes and it should go away in a couple of days. Yeah, I've heard you feel pretty bad. Yes, very anxious. Well, you have trouble breathing, but after a couple of days, it should pass and muscle relaxes will work and Barbiturates, if you're real anxious. Wow. But if you suspect it may be a fatal bite, you use this antivenom venom. I'm sorry, Chuck. You take a little bit and you mix it in with sodium solution, salt water, Sally, and you start out with a .1% solution. Right. And you go up to, I think all the way up to a one to ten solution. Wow. And then you give them the full dose of antivirus, which is horse hemoglobin. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Except that never happens to us. That's how we treat snake bites in the 21st century. Here's some horse blood. You mentioned painkiller. I did want to mention quickly that the cone not the cone snail, but the cone shell. I wonder if that's the same thing. Apparently the Coneshell's venom has been developed by drug companies for chronic pain, because the venom is said to be 10,000 times stronger than morphine. That's a painkiller right there. Got anything else? Oh, wait, the funnel web spider. Yeah. Also in Australia. Also can kill you very quickly under 15 minutes. Yeah. And it's known for being very aggressive. So you put two words together, aggressive spider. And you'll see the back of my head walking out the door for the airport. I know. I don't like spiders. I'm not big on spiders either, nor aggressive ones. Well, those are the worst kind of spiders, really? Because you're raised like well, if you leave them alone, they'll leave you alone. Except for that one. Yeah. They'll come after you in your sleep and crawl up your nose and kill you. I wonder if LD 50 research has been replaced with cancer fighting venom research. I hope so. I hope so, too. Except now they're developing cancer in mice to see if they can treat it with mice. Yeah, that's it for deadliest venom. If you want to learn more about venom and see a very cool drawing of the Canada blasts of a box jellyfish type in deadliestvenham in the handysearchbar athouseporks.com. Which brings us now to listener mail. No. That's right. Do we have a jingle for this? Facebook questions? Yeah. There we go. Facebook questions laughed. Not because she thought it was funny, because she's, like, sweet. I don't have to go find some actual music. She just made my job easier. Yeah, we asked for some Facebook questions the other day on the Facebook, which we are going to do from time to time. And we're going to go through a few of those now and then on the next one we recorded. So let's just fire some of these out. All right, here's one from Peppy Brown. Marianne or Ginger Law? I don't know what that means. You're up. Lol means laugh out loud. Okay. And Marianne Ginger is asking the age old question from Gilligan's Island. Which style of lady do you prefer? Like the little farm. I tried this one already. We have I think I said both. Yeah, go ahead. Let me see. Amberly Stewart says, when was the last time Chuck had no facial hair at all? Last Halloween. I did the mustache. That's facial hair. And then I shaved the mustache after Halloween to grow out just an even goatee. I don't think I saw you. That was nine. I was around. I don't think I saw you. I have a scar on my upper lip that's covered by my stash. Is that from your handsome older brother scar? No, it's from a lawnmower accident. Yeah, that was the last time I had no facial hair. This riveting stuff here. Well, here's one from Jennifer Lugar. What do your family think of your sys k fame and fortune? My family is largely unaware of it. And the stuff that they are aware of, they're like, don't get a big head. And the word fortune is not quite applicable at this point. Modest fame. My family thinks it's neat. My nephew thinks it's pretty cool. My brother thinks it's cool. That's right. He listens a lot, right? My dad, remember he finally bought an ipod? Yeah. I still don't think he's listening to one. Yes. I don't think my dad is, either. Andrea Steele. What are you afraid of, josh, chuck and Jerry. I'm not really afraid of anything as far as phobias go. Not crazy about spiders and snakes, but who is? What are you afraid of, Josh? What am I afraid of? Mine are more emotional. I'm afraid of being left out. Yes. Of not getting invited to things. That's a good one, Chuck. You still didn't say anything, Jerry. Anything. What are you afraid of? Lightning. Really? I used to be afraid of dying in a plane crash or falling off of a building. You've done pretty good with that. All right, what you got? Let's see. What's your deserted island food. As in if you were stuck on an island and could only have one food to eat forever. Really good. Mild buffalo wings with ranch and blue cheese. Okay, that's pretty good. I'll say. Same thing. Okay. I can eat buffalo things for the rest of my life. That was, by the way, Mary margaret shepherd. Thanks for that one. Devin Stone. Chuck, what was inspiration for your band name? El Chipo. That was given to us by friend Justin. And my parents actually used to say that it was sort of a saying in the El cheapo car dealership or this El cheapo pizza place or no way, Jose. That was a big one in the 70s, too, wasn't it? And the guy's name Jose stood up and we were like, shut up. We say yes way. So, yeah, that's where it came from. Here's one from Daniel. What did you do during our snow days? I worked. Yeah, me too. I even wrote a blog post about working during snow days. Yeah, we may have been in Jammies, but we were working. Yeah. How many more, Josh? One, two. Let's do one more, guys. This is from Colleen Sweeney. If you were a baseball player, what would you have them play when you came up to bat? How players always pick out, like, some tough song. Yeah. What would you play? You're the best around. Joe Esposito. Pretty good. Boy, I should have thought about this. I didn't even think about it. I've got the answer at the ready. I would play something tough, like classic rock, maybe like when the Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin. That'd be a good one. That's intimidating. Yeah, that's what I do. Okay, well, that's it for now. Yeah, you do one more. I'll save buying next one for the next time. Okay. If you want to join in the fun on Facebook, we strongly encourage you to go hang out there on our page. And while you're there, feel free to like us if you want to. It makes us look cool. Not to my family, necessarily, but Chuck's family. At least that's Facebook. Comstuffytechnow. We also tweet that's S-Y-S kpodcast. And of course, you can always drop us a line via email if you're old at stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The House of the Work's iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena 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." | ||
41a281d2-53a3-11e8-bdec-032bb2adba5e | Remembering Live Aid | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/remembering-live-aid | Live Aid was a revolutionary concert event in two countries in 1985 that spanned the world via satellite. The brainchild of musician Bob Geldof, it really did help change the world in many ways, but its direct impact on Ethiopian famine relief remains in question. Listen and learn today! | Live Aid was a revolutionary concert event in two countries in 1985 that spanned the world via satellite. The brainchild of musician Bob Geldof, it really did help change the world in many ways, but its direct impact on Ethiopian famine relief remains in question. Listen and learn today! | Tue, 07 May 2019 13:30:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=13, tm_min=30, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=127, tm_isdst=0) | 49941178 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know in the house. I think we should say what just happened off Mike, because as Jerry does once every 300 episodes, she realizes what we're recording on and has an actual comment about it. Right. And this is about live aid. And she went, yeah. I was in London when Live Aid happened. And Josh said, did you go? Jerry said, no, I didn't know what was happening. Right. Because we forget in 1985, there wasn't an internet blast. Like Live Aid was a big deal. But little Jerry, little twelve year old Jerry in London doesn't know what's going on. No. To get any info, you have to go down to the corner and look at the telephone pole and see what somebody stapled there. Yeah. Or go to hear the town crier on his soapbox in the park. Hide park. Sure. So it was a very anticlimactic story because it led to nothing. But like anyway, I was there. Yeah. Her justification was I was twelve. I had no controller agency over my life. Probably true. But Jerry, had you been just three years older, you might have been pulled up on stage with Bono to dance. To dance to dancing in the dark no, that was for Springsteen and Courtney Cox. He did not play live aid. You know it was Courtney Cox, though, right? Sure. It was not real. It was set up. She was an actor. I thought it was just coincidence, but yeah, one of the most famous moments of Live Aid was when Bono we'll get there. But I watched it again today, man. I got a little teary. Did you? It was such a great moment. Oh, I just wanted to be like Bono. Stop. No, that's what everyone in the band was doing. I'm sure. It was like Ed still had hair, he started wearing Beanies all the time. And they were playing the great song Bad, and they did like a 17 minutes version of their 22 minutes set. Because Bond, I wanted to dance with a girl. And he finally jumped down onto the floor of Wembley Stadium, got this young 15 year old girl, danced with her for like 15 seconds, right. Took another five minutes to get back to the stage because that's how long it takes to get back up on stage. Like, a panic starts crossing his face as he realizes what's going on the edges up there. And Adam Mcclayton has his big white afro, and Larry Mullen still looks identical as he always has a drummer. Yeah. And they just played that same riff from Bad over and over. And they were a little mad because they only got to do two songs. They were going to close with Pride in the Name of Love, which everybody wanted to hear. Sure, it was a big hit. They were a young band at the time. Bono was only 25, and the band was a little miffed. But then, as it turns out, that became one of the iconic moments of Live Aid, and it really launched you, too, into the Stratosphere. Yeah. Which I mean, Bono lucked out on that one. Yeah. Because I imagine backstage right after that set was not a pleasant place for him. Dude, it's not about you. Yeah. What are you doing? Yeah, but it was a nice moment. He said, I really wanted to dance with that 15 year old girl. I know, it was very sweet. Her name is Cal Kalik, and she says that she was getting kind of smushed and that kind of helped her out. Was security, like, pulling her by her hair over the barrier? Yeah. It doesn't look very comfortable. It was rough. I should probably say at this point, or we should. A lot of the stuff we're talking about, you can go see, actually, when I was researching this, I was like, what a time to be alive, man. I was just pouring through these videos. Yeah, you can just go watch. Most of the stuff we're talking about is out there on YouTube. So if you ever just go what? Pause. Go to YouTube. Youtube.com. Type in L-I-V-E-D. Yeah. You don't even need the dash. Their algorithm is that smart. It'll know what you're talking about and start watching videos. Yeah, I watched a bunch. We should just talk about some of the ones through the episode that we watched. Okay. The last thing I watched before we got up to record was Sabbath. I didn't watch that one. The Sabbath reunion. And we'll also say this was 1985. So when you think, man, Zeppelin reunion, sabbath reunion, what that really means is, like, chubby, big haired Ozzy and, like, Robert Plant wearing electric blue and zcabare pants. He was dressed like a Slater from Say by the Bell. Yes. It's a big, fat 80s reminder. Like, oh, right. That's what people look like. Yeah. Even John Deacon from Queen had, like, a big, puffy pleated outfit. 85 was like they had the 80s flag going. Yeah, full bore. But I was 14, and I think I've told this story before, but I was babysitting. I had an everyday summer babysitting gig as a 14 year old babysitting. These two kids that were, like 17 and 19 yeah. They were pretty close to my age. Looking back, they were probably, like, eight and nine or something. I was sort of, like, paid to go there and kind of hang out with them and make sure they didn't get in trouble. It wasn't like babysitting babysitting. Right. But I remember. I watched virtually all of the live Aid telecast on MTV. That's awesome. And was just stuck to it all day long. Cool. I was nine and we were in London, but I didn't care. But you and Jerry were in Hyde Park, hanging out. She's like, there's this annoying nine year old just following me around, talking about podcasts. So he's from the future. Right. Something about a way back machine. So, yeah, thanks to Julia Layton, who we have doing some writing for us now, dr. Late from back in the old days. She's great and writes great stuff. And I threw Live Aid out there because I thought it would be good to learn a little bit more about it. It was a good idea. Thanks. So let's talk about the origins of this. Yes, because Live Aid happened on July 13, 1985, and the whole thing started. The seed was planted about six months before. Well, more than six months before, but not much more than that. When either the BBC or the CBC, depending on who you asked, ran a series of documentaries about a drought in famine that was going on in Ethiopia at the time. And apparently no one knew about this. No one was reporting on it. It wasn't talked about. And today it's hard to imagine that with our news cycle. But it was different back then. Right. But even still, we became so indoctrinated from that point on, the idea of famine in Ethiopia, it's hard to think of not connecting the two. But no one knew about it, and no one knew about it until I should say that the CBC or BBC documentary series was aired, and it was powerful. There was a very famously a young girl let me see if I can find her name. She looked like she was on the verge of death. Her head just kind of lolling around. She's skeletal and she looks like at the camera at one point and became kind of the face of starving children in Ethiopia, like, really drove home what was going on there. Her name was Birhan Woldu, and she's grown now and is an ambassador. I was afraid to ask. I don't think she's an official ambassador. She's kind of an unofficial ambassador for poverty, combating poverty, hunger. Well, I bet she knows. I guarantee she does. But she really kind of drove home what was going on to viewers, including a guy from Ireland named Bob Geldoff yeah. Who truly refers to as a bliss Irish rocker. It's probably pretty accurate. Boomtown. Rats were medium big band at best. He also, if you're a Pink Floyd fan, he played Pink in the movie The Wall. Oh, really? Yeah. I think he told me this every time Bob Galvo comes up. We talked about this before. Yeah. Obviously, there was no Pink in real life, but in the movie there was a character named Pink, by the way. Which one's? Pink? Right, exactly. So Geldoff. They had that great song. I don't know why I don't like Mondays. Pink Floyd did. That was the moon town. Rats, my friend. Yeah. We got that one plenty wrong. That was their big hit, though. That was Geldof's big hit, which, again, I thought was an Elvis Costello song until you explained it to me. That's right. We definitely talked about that. So, man, I wonder if 20 years if we're going to be like, remember when we yeah, it's already happening, but we don't sound like Abe Simpson quite yet. So Geldof saw this, really spoke to him, and he said, here's what we're going to do. I want to put together a fundraiser. And this is not live aid yet. No, this is Band Aid. Right. Previous to Live Aid, they did the song that we, some of us all still love around Christmas time. Good song. Some of us hate it. Who does? Do they know it's Christmas? Who hates that song? I think some people hate all Christmas music. Yeah. Or at the very least, get sick of certain songs. I can see that. Yeah. But that one is good. Okay, let me put it this way, I've never gotten sick of that one yet to this day. No, I agree. Bono, of course, boy George, Bowie, Banana, Rama Durandran, Wham, you two Thing, Phil Collins, you name it, they sang on that song, and it benefited Ethiopian famine relief. That's what got the ball rolling. Yeah. And again, this is bob Geldof saw this documentary and started calling up everybody he knew pulling all these strings and put this together, and everyone was going, how did Yellow get my number? Exactly. He was a fellow Cyrus rocker. Right? He got this single produced and released by December. He saw the documentary in October. So that kind of gives you a hint of the kind of dude Bob Geldof was. He gets things done. He lied, he bluffed. He didn't take no for an answer. He got things done, sure. But to him, it was always for the greatest, greater good. The ends definitely justified the means, especially if it manipulating, spoiled rockers. Yeah. And we'll get to some more of that later. He for sure did that song itself, though, by itself, raised more than $10 million, and they have, over the years, done a few different versions. It seems like they update it every now and then with whoever's the hot British rockers are at the time. Ed Sheeran. Right. He was in the 2014 version. So it was One Direction. Okay. They're the group, right? Yeah. Okay. They're a super group. Well, I don't know if that's actually accurate or not, but then Seal, you know, super group doesn't just mean they're super. That means right now, that's why I correct. Okay, got you. And then Shanado Connor, she was on it, too. Oh. On the New Orleans, the 2014 version of Do They Know It's Christmas? Oh, nice. Yeah. So a month after that, harry Belafonte got together with a producer named Ken or Kragan, and they said, well, we need to do our own version over here in the US. Because we're looking pretty bad. Right? Geldoff is a B list Irish rocker and he's getting all the limelight. I'm Harry Belafonte, right? So he gets together and this is something I never knew. The song We Are the World, of course, is what we're talking about. I always heard USA for Africa. I always thought it was United States of America. That's what they wanted you to think. I never knew that it stood for United Support of Artists for Africa until today. Or yesterday. Well, there you go. How about that? I think it's a great thing that they surreptitiously slip that in. And that song was quincy Jones famously worked on it. It was supposed to be written by Lionel Richie. Michael Jackson, stevie Wonder. Stevie Wonder wanted to work on it but was a little too busy to get involved in the writing at the time. So it fell to line on Ritchie and Michael Jackson. And apparently, if you believe LaToya Jackson, it was mostly Michael who put that song together. I don't know about that, man. Because Lionel Richie is a pretty stand up dude from everything I've ever heard. Well, I don't think he's made some claim. Like, I wrote half 50% of that song. He was apparently pretty blown away because Michael Jackson, after he left, went ahead and cut a demo. Oh, really? And brought it back. And he was like, oh, well, that's impressive and exclusionary, right? Yeah. Good ideas. Okay, go home. You literally waited till I walked out the door to hit record. I'll see you later. I'd like to see Lionel Ritchie. I just looked up his he played somewhere and I was like, what's he playing these days? I looked up his set list. Is he coming to Chastain anytime? I don't know, man, but the set list is amazing. I'm like every single song because he's doing Commodore stuff, he's doing his own stuff. It seems like a fun show. A little bit of deep purple. Oh, sure, yeah. Do we take a break already? No, we haven't. Chuck and I think it's high time that we did. All right, let's do it. So where we left off, Charles, was, I guess, probably by this time, about January 1985 in USA for Africa, which does not stand for USA like, you think at least We Are the World because they were inspired by Do They Know It's Christmas at all? And apparently Boy George had an idea of going bigger and said to Geldof, look, mate, you did pretty good. You raised $10 million. You inspired USA for Africa, which raised, like, $44 million within a year. But you can do more. What if you put on the biggest concert ever? Maybe you should do that. Boy George out vanish in a puff of smoke like he does. I'd like to see Boy George, too. I bet that's a fun show. You mean? I saw culture clubs. They were good. How long ago? Like, within the last few years, I guess. Yeah, like last two years. Was it the original dudes? Yes. As far as you know. Yeah, and I actually learned at that show that we are never to let on that we're tired because this is the penultimate show of the tour and Boy George kept talking about it to the guitarist about how tired they were, and they just had one more show after this. It's not a good look. Is it still a boy, George? But yes, it does not come off very well to the audience. Well, I'm not tired. I feel great. It's because we do two shows back to back once a quarter. Oh, you mean live. Live is what I mean. Sure. We can talk about anything here. It's the live stuff. Right. I want to go see Adam and the Ants, too. I've been checking out their touring again. Are they around? I don't know. I mean, it's adamant, for sure. I don't know if it's any of the original Ants. Would you know the difference? No, but he's doing great, too. Sure. It's like I like seeing these people coming back around healthy and like, the 80s did not kill them. Well, they're clearly taking a lot of dietary stuff, a lot of botanicals. So, like you said, from the point, where do they know it's Christmas? And the famine documentary started rolling out. It was not very long after that they managed to pull off a concert in London and Philadelphia transmitted by 13 satellites to 160 countries to an audience that was 25% of the world's population. I saw at one point that they announced that 95% of the world's televisions were tuned in at some point to that broadcast. Wow. That's amazing. It is amazing. And that's amazing today. It was spectacular in 1985. Yeah. And by comparison, the Summer Olympics the year before was only broadcast to 67 countries. Yeah. Only. Yeah, 67 countries. And Live Aid was 160. So we cannot overestimate how huge of a deal this was. Right. And to just really kind of show off, but also to kind of bind the Western world together. It was held, like you said, at two places at once, in London and in Philadelphia RFK Stadium. There were concerts going on constantly in both places. And the show, what you would see on TV, what you watched when you were babysitting, would just kind of switch back and forth depending on who had the bigger act at the time. Yeah. These days you could probably do a split screen or they would just show both on two channels. Yeah. But the fact that they were doing it at a time when, as Julia Layton puts it, during a time of cassette tapes and Cathode Raytube TV, it's just really impressive that Bob Geldoff managed to put it together and help pull it off with very little problem. Yeah. In just a few months, too, 16 hours total for both of the shows. They overlap by about 10 hours. And then there are also various satellite concerts going on all over the world. They didn't have like 60 performers, but smaller shows kind of stage in conjunction. Yeah. I got the impression that people who had already booked their tours and were locked into a tour date, but still wanted to take part showing, why not? Like Celine Dion doing a number from Las Vegas on New Year's Eve or something. So it all kicked off at twelve noon London time, 07:00 A.m. In the US. The Cold Stream Guards played God Save the Queen. Charles and Diana came out on stage. I know it. That makes it pretty cool. It is pretty cool. They did Diana part. Yeah, of course. What? No love for Charles? I mean, sure, but he's still around. He's not a live aid type. You know what I mean? No, I think he irons his jeans. I don't think he wears jeans. Right. You know why? Because he doesn't iron. He could probably find somebody to iron for him if you wanted to. So they take the stage at Wembley, they inaugurate Live Aid, and then wait, hold on. Was that a joke or a reference that just went over my head? Ironing thing? Yeah. No. Okay. Because I'm getting intel and feedback from listeners once in a while who write in like that was a hilarious reference. Chuck me. That went right over Josh's head. I hate that. Really? Yeah. You can't get all the references. I want to get all the references. So do this from now on. Okay. Josh is blinking at me, everyone. So to kick it off in anti dramatic climactic fashion, that's not very cool to say. The band Status Quo was the first band. They were big in England. I guess they were, butny they were legendary. I think their first hit single was in 1968, and this is 1985. Sure. They've been around the dude. They got it off, like, if you watch Status Quo covering John Fogarty's rocking all over the world, which I did, like, the stadium is bouncing with energy. So they were clearly popular over there. They were just never big in the States. No, but they still did a fine job. No, it was fine. An adequate workman. Like, way to kick off live. That's right. And who kicked it off in the US. Josh? It was Joan byez. Why not? Right. Who came out and was like, this is your Woodstock, it's long overdue. And they went, who are you? And she sang an acapella version of Amazing Grace. Oh, nice. Kind of clumsily, leading the audience by singing very quickly the next line, and then singing that same line in the American Grace melody. That really is clunky. It was slightly clunky. Yeah. But it's a good way to start the show. Sure. With Amazing Grace. Good song. Status quo and Joan by Clunky. Singing amazing Grace It got better from there, basically. Well, it did. There were 70 acts. Every act had 20 minutes, which was more or less how long they played. A few bands went over by a few minutes. But if you've ever done a festival or something, it's like it's not cool to just be like, we'll do one more tune. Right. That's just not something you do. Yeah, I've never played a festival, but I can imagine. No, we've done festival stuff when we do sketch fest every year. Oh, yeah, that's right. You did outside lands by yourself. Sure, but I didn't have the impression oh, yeah. They did kind of hustle me out of there. I was like, what else you got in the green room? And they're like, Just go, you're right. Okay. All right. I got you. I thought you were, like, at the end of your end of the world thing. You were like, hey, anyone want to hear something about, like, get them off Phil Collins? And this was a very big deal and a total publicity stunt, but it worked. And I think we mentioned this in the Concord episode. We talked about it. He played both continents, and they had a film crew following him around. They would cut to every once in a while, like Phil Collins on the plane or hustling through an airport. There is no better singer then or now to have done this. Maybe James Corden would be the go to person, but this is Phil Collins. Yeah. There's no cynicism, no rock star. He was kind of goofy and fun. Love that guy. I think you're totally right. He's playing again, too, which is great news. I didn't know that. Yeah, because he wasn't able to play drums for a while and he's back at it. What happened? I can't remember exactly what it is, but he had some illness. I can't remember exactly what, but where. He wasn't performing and didn't think he would again. Oh, boy. Yeah, so it's kind of cool he's back out there again. He's great. Sue studioing it up. That's awesome. I love that, man. Because of the 20 minutes set, some bands got, like, you two only got in two songs. That was so dumb. Generally, it was about three. Some bands, like Tom Petty and Heartbreakers with their tight dunk Boris get to the chorus. They got in four. Oh, did they? Yeah. Wow. Their set was epic. It's great. Somebody had, like, five. I counted. Well, Queen did sort of some medleys, and so they ended up getting more songs in there that way. There's somebody else, though, I can't quite put my finger on. Sorry, everybody, but I saw well, it's a lot more songs, and it seems like everybody else had they're probably hurry up. Hurry up. No banter. Yeah. So 170,000 people total were live at the two shows. But like we said, 25% of the world 1.5 billion people watched it as it was happening. Yeah. Pretty amazing. So on the actual day of the show, you already kicked it off, right. It started in London and then started in Philadelphia 2 hours later. Santasko and Joan Bias. And then there was overlap for, like, 10 hours, I think. Yeah. Ten of the 16 hours. And then it went afterward. It went back to Philadelphia. But, Chuck, you saw Bohemian Rhapsody, right? Three times. Did you really see it? Three times. That's adorable. Yeah. So that part at the end when they recreate Live Aid did you see the YouTube video of the Live Aid version and the Bohemian Rhapsody version? I did not watch the side by side comparison because it is pretty close. Yeah. I mean, I've watched that Live Aid performance dozens and dozens of times. Really? Yeah, and they nailed it. The thing that bothered me about that movie was how much they rewrote the timeline of the band. Oh, yeah. So it was not Queen's first performance back and they had just reunited and forgiven each other and he had just told them about HIV. Like, none of that. The timeline is so out of whack. Supposedly, he didn't know he had HIV yet at the Live Aid show. I can't remember exactly. Is that it? I'm pretty sure. But a lot of license. They took a lot of license and it's fine. You're trying to make a more dramatic film. I get it. But I don't know if it needed it, because that performance itself still. If you look up any what were the best performances of Live Aid? It's almost roundly, clean in the number one spot. Yeah. Not just Live Aid. Like, a lot of people point to that as, like, one of the greatest mini set ever. No. The BBC did a poll in 2005 and that was named as the number one greatest rock performance of all time. That is really great. It just gave me chills. Pretty amazing. I got chills right now not even watching it. Just hearing you talk about a BBC pole or if you're a medium writer. The article said it was like Adam touching God on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Check. Ben Franklin wielding a lightning rod. Or Et. Phoning home. No, man, they had me right up until the last one right there. That's just so like come on, just say it's great. I didn't get the last. It's like Et phone at home. Yeah. Like, I really tried to go on the writer's head, too, and I was like, Nope, that was personal. That person really was moved by Et phenomenon or something. What else do we get? We got a lot of any time you have a big thing like this, you have a lot of people collaborating on stage. Sting and dire straits, of course. Well, yeah. Mick Jagger and Tina Turner. That was pretty unforgettable. But not just McJagger and Tina Turner, because it turns out that Tommy Matola, who's the head of Sony record said, hey, if you don't get Holland Oates on with Mick Jagger, mick Jagger is not going on. And Holland oates backed up. Tina Turner and Mick Jagger. Oh, really? Yeah. See, I thought that they were saying, if you don't give Holland Oats a primetime slot, then Mick Jagger won't come because he represented both. I think that was there. They equivocated by saying, I got you. We'll have them back up. McJagger and Tina Turner. And even still, if you look up Holland Oates, it just comes up Mick Jagger and Tina Turner. They're not even listed in the video anymore. But at least John Oates was backing them up. Yeah, I'm pretty sure Daryl Hall was, too. Man, they were good. Yeah, still are. Emily when saw them a couple of years ago, just killing it. Still. Yeah, it's good stuff. I like that. Live at Daryl's house, too. That show. I haven't seen that. I don't know if he's still doing it, but he did it for a few years at least. And it's basically his awesome home studio. He just has people over and a camera crew, and they just jam and do songs. That's great. They'll do like, a hollow note song and then mainly the songs of the artist. I feel like I've seen them. It's fun since they've been back around. Definitely saw tears for fierce. Well, they played with them that might have been we didn't stick around for Holland notes. And I think the reason why is because we had seen Holland notes already. What happened in my brain, phil Collins. They got a lot out of Phil Collins because not only did he sing in Both, he played drums with Eric Clapton. He played drums with Led Zeppelin. Yeah, famously. Yeah. So let's talk about that Zeppelin performance. You can't dance around this any longer, Chuck. It was not very good. It was terrible. Yeah. If you saw Led Zeppelin in, like, a 50 person club and they've been drinking at the club the whole day, this is what you would expect to hear from. And you'd probably be like, that was awesome. Yeah. But for the first time back on stage together in five years since the death of their drummer, they went out at, like, their peak. There wasn't a decline of Led Zeppelin. They were at their peak when Bonham died, according to me. Okay. You don't think so? I think their last album was kind of a disappointment. What was that? Physical Graffiti? No, Coda. Oh, well, I haven't heard of that one. Okay, all right, fair enough. They were still huge and they still had plenty of music left to put out. Yeah. So there were expectations on Zeppelin. Okay, sure. Okay. And they come out and play. Just a terrible set. So much of that. Phil Collins, later on in his autobiography, said, I was really thinking about walking off stage in the middle. And the reason I did. Was because I knew that people would be talking about to this day how Phil Collins ruined Led Zeppelin set, not about how bad Led Zeppelin set was. So he said he was air drumming, trying to keep out of the way because there were two drummers. Yes, but he didn't realize there was going to be two drummers, and he basically said it was just terrible. And if you watch it, it was pretty bad. I'm looking at Woods Upland now because I don't want to mess up. I thought you were texting. No. Presence was their final album, not Coda, what was on Present. Oh, no, wait. In through the outdoor see, this is what I'm saying, man. They were still very much at their peak. Oh, good Lord. I can't believe I'm getting all this Upland stuff wrong. Oh, Coda was released in 1982. Yeah, but that was a compilation album, right? That's what I was thinking. So their last studio album would have been what, Presence? Or into the I think presence. Okay. Which didn't have much presence. Sorry. Should we cut that joke? Nobody's becoming, like, full bore. Did I have a micro expression? Go over my quite a few. If you watch Zeppelin's performance, they wanted it scrubbed from the world. You can still find, like, cruddy versions on YouTube. Not the official live aid. No, just like, the guy that had the camera on his shoulder in his living room, basically. Apparently, Santana requested the same thing. You can't find santana said anything. Oh, really? Because they said, don't include that on the conversion. It worked. Wow. No strike end effect on them. Zeppelins isn't the worst thing I've ever seen, but Robert Plant was not in great form vocally, and he admits such they all look back, and we're like, It wasn't great. No. Jimmy Page didn't do that great of a job, either. It wasn't so horrendous that you're just, like, holding your nose, but it just wasn't anything like what everybody was hoping for. Sabbath was pretty good. I really, despite it was chunky, big hair at Ozzy, but what else do you want from Ozzy? They did. Children of the Grave, iron man and paranoid and nice. It was pretty I want to say words here we don't say on this show b wording. Yeah, it was we say that. We said that before. Really? Sure. All right. It was awesome. Okay. Live Aide at Wembley ended at around 10:00 p.m.. Do they know it's Christmas? They brought everyone that they could out on stage, of course. Paul McCartney there, was there? The who was there. And then right after that ended, they switched the live feed over to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with their great, great set. They did. American girl. Refugee. The waiting and rebels and 85. Despite the clothes, it was still, like, kind of peak. Tom Petty, too. Sure. I think the clothes really got to you. It's just kind of you think of these classic rockers and then you see them in cavarcchis and, like, I think it's dope you like bob Dylan was there, man. Bob Dylan, very famously, will not pick up an acoustic guitar and play his old folk standards anymore. Did he, on this one? Yeah, he played Blown in the Wind and he was dressed almost identically to the fresh print. That would have been really disappointing. Oh, my Lord. And then they closed the Philly show with We Are the World. Right. And whoever was there who could chip in, like Kenny Loggins and Sheena Easton. Melissa Manchester, man, this is so 80s. Do you remember her? Oh, yeah. Okay. I had to look her up. I think I know the name, but she's saying, don't cry out loud. Good song theme from Ice Castles. Yeah, that's our mutual friend Alison that we used to work with calls us car sex songs because it just reminds her of, like, being in the back of a station wagon listening to Am radio and being like, carsick. I think it's a good thing. So they raised about $125,000,000, which is about 300 million today. Donations did pick up when Queen played. They really played that up in the movie. But they did have an uptick when Queen went on because it was such a great performance. Yes. I think Geldof was kind of anticipating, like, the phone to be ringing off the hook the whole time. And he got very frustrated, visibly, several times during the broadcast, he said the F word. Yeah. That got people pumped up. It did. They went to an interview where they were kind of talking up the reason why Live Aid was going on. And the interviewer was like, well, let's get the address up on the screen. And he said if the address, just give him the phone. Yeah. Like, what are you supposed to mail in a check? Right. Yeah, that's what they were thinking. Like, his bandmates. I don't know. Who else was there? The other rats, I guess. Maybe one. Was his name? Midge arrey Cow from Ultravox. Yeah. He's kind of an unsung overlooked coordinator. He really helped Geldof put this together. He might have been up there, but they all kind of look at each other like, oh, my God. He just said the F word on the BBC. And that got the MTV generation going. The phone started ringing around then because somebody just said the F word on TV. Which, if you remember back before South Park came along, that did not happen. No, it did not happen. Like, Damn was I don't want to say controversial. Yeah. But it perked your ears up when you heard that on TV because it was just so out of the ordinary. This guy said the F word on TV, on live TV being broadcast around the world. It got people's attention for yes. That's still a big deal to hear in a live teeth. Like, if you hear that at an award show or something. It's not shocking, but everyone goes, you have to do that a little eight year old, and he's like, you're going to get in trouble. Exactly. All right, let's take another break, and we'll talk about what went on behind the scenes and where all this money went. So to put together a show this big, especially in six months, there are going to be a lot of problems. And if you talk to the artist, they all across the board had monitor issues. Oh, really? Yeah, and just couldn't led Zeppelin, they didn't blame it on that. But even hear Robert Plant in the thing say, like, let's see if we can get these monitors going. And they couldn't hear themselves. And I always had heard that until I started playing shows with my dumb old man band. Like, we can't hear ourselves. And I was like, what do you mean, right? You got these amps blasting. But it's true. You can't hear yourself on a stage, and especially an outdoor stage, unless you've got really great systems and monitors, you can't hear yourself. And it's very disconcerting to play music when are you hearing, like, the twang? Well, it's just weird. Like, you know that they're hearing something that you're not hearing, and you're just like, I hope it's okay. I got you. So no one could hear themselves, which is a problem. I believe that they had power issues at Wembley, where they thought it might completely go out, like they were having little brownouts. Even though this is for charity, you still are dealing with huge diva, pop and rock stars and their management, who had all by this time found out that Jerry wasn't there. So what's the point of going on stage? Well, they were still behind the scenes, like ego battles and like, you can't go on after this act, and my guy won't go on after this person or trying to get more time than 20 minutes. Well, so much so that Billy Joel actually did not go on because his manager was like, they want you to do piano, and believe me, these other guys ain't playing piano. You're going to look puny compared to his other sets. And he went do you mean Piano Man? The song? And they went, no, they want you to play the piano with that was so great. Dumb. And he was like, you mean the instrument that made me famous that I wrote a song about that I play on 99% of my songs? They want me to do that. And he went, yeah. And he went, I'm not doing it. No way. Billy Joel and played piano for nobody. He's like, I'll just get my Telecaster and do Matter of Trust three times. That's a very good song. That's a Billy Joel joke. Is it? No, not the deepest, but that's the one where he plays guitar on stage. Okay. It's kind of like the only song that he plays guitar on. Do you know, he went and played, like, a couple of dates in the Soviet Union and ended up helping to thaw relations between the US and the USSR almost single handedly. He also threw a tantrum on stage the first night because it was a bunch of, like, government muckety mucks just standing in the front row stairs in the military, what was it? And government muckety mucks. And he was like, Get the real fans out here. Right. So he pushed his piano over and it doesn't miss a beat. Like, keeps singing and the band keeps playing, even though they're probably terrified that they're going to be putting a Soviet gulag forever. I will still go see him every single time. Sure I have a chance. But anyway, Billy Joel didn't play live. Eight is the point. No, he didn't. He wasn't the only one. Yeah. Van Halen turned it down. Diana Ross, Liza Minelli. Boy, I don't know why they asked her. Well, I don't know. Liza. Yeah, I mean, I'm not knocking her, but I don't know. It just doesn't seem like a fit. It doesn't. You're right. It's like between Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, they're going to try lives in La out there. Gets troubles. Come on, get happy. Yoko Ono. Cindy Lauper talking Heads stevie Wonder HDC. And Springsteen, who still really regrets not doing live aid. Not just him, a lot of them do. Frankie Goes To Hollywood, turned it down, and apparently that was their manager who was like, you don't want to do this. It's going to be like a disaster. And the band was like afterwards, they said it was the worst management decision in the history of Frankie, Said, the lead singer. Really? Yeah. They were really upset that they didn't do it. Springsteen said, I really wish I was just throwing the guitar in the back seat and driven on down. That's what he said. He'd wish he driven on down the Thunder road. Yeah, springsteen should have done it, and I think he knows that. But there was a lot of regret among people who didn't. Some people were like, I'm just absolutely not doing it. Michael Jackson was it says here that he was in the studio, but I read that he didn't sign on in protest because there weren't any African acts on the bill interesting. Or enough African acts on the bill for his taste. And then Hughie Lewis was another one. Yeah, that was a big one. That turned out to and that will be a good segue, too, to what happened to the money. Because Huey Lewis is one of the few artists who came out just a few weeks before and publicly said, like, where's this money going? And is this really helping to fight famine? Because that's what's important to the news, my friend. I was really surprised. I didn't realize that Hurry Lewis was at woke. Yeah. And that's a very good point. Can I say woke? Okay. Jerry. Jerry. That was the big question to Hug Lewis, and he's like, I'm not going out there and signing up for this, because I don't really know. He was slightly cynical, but rightfully so, I think. Yeah. He had been in USA for Africa and was like, I'm not convinced that that money, by this time, tens of millions of dollars, is actually making it to the famine victims. And everybody's like, what famine victims? He's like, don't you remember? That's the whole reason we're doing this. And Geldoff I don't want to make it sound like Geldoff ever lost focus. Like, that is why he did this, and he proved it during the show when he stomped on stage. He's like, Give me your money. These people are dying now. And he's still very adamant and defensive about the funds. Geldoff is, but Hurry Lewis was the first one to publicly say, I'm not certain that these famine victims are actually getting this money. And we talked about this. We did an episode on famine and droughts, and I believe it was the famine one that we talked about it in. Yeah. But six months after Live Aid was finished and complete and just made, like, a believe. Something like that. Yeah. Worth more than 300 million today. This concert, one day concert raised nearly $300 million for victims of famine in Africa in a little country called Ethiopia that most people hadn't heard of. And Spin magazine sent a reporter there and said, go find out what happened to that money. And Spin magazine's reporter came back and was like, I don't know if you guys want to hear what happened to that money, because it turns out that Ethiopia was in the midst of a civil war that was being reported on even less than the famine. And it turns out that the government in Ethiopia was actually largely causing the famine, or at least exacerbating the worst of it. Yeah. So there was the Dirge, is that what it was called? Which means Councilor Committee. They were the military junta. Yeah. The dirt regime. And after Holly Selassie died in 1975, they took control as his military group. Well, they may have actually strangled him to death. Well, it says in the article suspicious death. Yeah. So I think that's fair to say. Okay. But basically, there are various stories, depending on who you want to believe. Bob Geldof still says that most of this money went there, but there are other reports that it was being intercepted, aid was being intercepted, and they were funding their civil war and that they were making the famine worse by dropping napalm on croplands this whole time, cutting off supply lines to the north. Yes. And the north, there was a civil war going on because the north used to be a country called Eritrea. And then in World War II, Ethiopia said, you're coming with us. You're part of ethiopia now, and there was an insurgency that eventually was successful, I think in 1092, Eritrea became independent from Ethiopia again. But this is how that happened, through the civil war. And all of a sudden, the west injects $125,000,000 into this country that's wrecked by famine and civil war. And civil war that's helping cause the famine. And apparently either a lot of people didn't know about this or a lot of people didn't think we may actually be helping this civil war by injecting this money into the country and turning it over to the Ethiopian government. And still to this day, it's not entirely clear how much the Ethiopian government spent on arms and supplies to fund this war against the insurgency in the north. Yes, I think that's one of my biggest fears of any kind of thing like this, of like handing over these kind of sums of money to countries that you don't know where it ends up. It's just like it's maddening to think because you want to do the right thing, right, and donate and support these causes, but if it's actually making things worse, right. That's the thing. It's one thing if it's not helping as much as you would like it to. Right. It's an entirely different thing. If you're actually giving money to make it easier for somebody to kill some other person, it's like making it worse. And that's the big question that surrounds the funds from live AIDS. Yeah, it's frustrating because the BBC in 2010 published a report kind of claiming a lot of this, the money being diverted to ill reputed places and people. Yeah, they said the opposite. They said that the rebel insurgency in Eritrea intercepted most of the money and they used it to fund their civil war. But then they retracted a lot of the stuff because Geldoff got mad. This is only eight or nine years ago, and he was like, no, that's not true. So there's still just a lot of debate over where that money went. Right. The BBC retracted the story and published an apology, too. So they may have gotten that really wrong. Yeah, I don't think they do that kind of thing just because Bob Geldof gets mad. He's a Beatless. I responded, right. I think they got the reporting very wrong. Yeah. But I also have the impression that Geldof, whether he believes a lot of the funds went to NGOs on the ground, aid groups on the ground, it didn't all just go to the Ethiopian government. No. And apparently in the aid industry, they still look at this like, okay, even if some of the money didn't get to where you wanted it and it went to places you wouldn't want it to go, this still helped raise awareness of the kind of stuff that goes on in Africa that the west was not aware of. It had a huge, huge impact on how you should do these events in the future. This kicked off Farm Aid and Hands Across America. Remember that? Across America. For sure. Have you seen us yet? No, but I ran across an article that referenced that, and I was like, I can't wait to see that movie more now. It's good. But yeah, I mean, it kicked off, like, every benefit concert, global benefit concert you've ever seen since then can trace its roots back to Live Aid, including Live Eight. Right. Which was another gal left one that a lot of people said, call it Live Aid, too, and you'll get a lot more traction. Yes, but that wasn't to raise money. That was just to raise awareness for the Live Eight conference. The G Eight. Yeah. What I say? The Live Eight conference. The G Eight. But think about it. Gelloff wasn't trying to raise money anymore, right. He was trying to raise awareness. And I wonder if that's because he either became convinced that that money did go to sources that he didn't want it to, or if he was just like, I'm tired of arguing about it. I'm not going to go through this again. But as a result of that, the 18 poorest nations in the world have their debts canceled by the eight richest nations in the world. And I think the aid to Africa is, like, doubled over the previous G Eight summit. Yeah. And, you know, previous to, you had, like, George Harrison doing the Concert for Bangladesh, which is kind of one of the first high profile things like that. But you didn't see a ton of big rock stars out, you know, championing causes. Right. And I think it really inspired a generation of young people and of the pop and rock celebrities of that age, too, to maybe do something beneficial with their riches in their life. For sure. Left cocaine for a couple of days and go do something with your life, you rocker. Yeah. You can get back on the cocaine in a week. Sure. Just put it off to the side. Just put an upside down magazine over it and come back to it later. It was a monumental event and one that I have a lot of fondness for still. Big deal. That's great. I don't remember any of it. I remember watching on MTV and my big sisters were there, but I don't remember. I have no real memories. I was pretty stupid, I guess. You were nine. I was almost nine. Two days shy of being nine. Yes. I mean, what is that, third grade? I was probably out playing with, like, he man stuff most of the time. Exactly. Trying to find cigarette butts on the ground. Not yet. Just a few years later, though. That's right. If you want to know more about Live Aid, I think Chuck and I am probably Jerry would strongly advise you to just go on to YouTube and spend a little time looking at concert footage from it. Yeah. Or send in your special Live Aid memories. That's a good one, too. Yeah. I like being in London and not knowing what was going on. I love that one. And since we said that, since we may find a Jerry's terrible Live Aid story, it's time for listening to me. Hey, guys, listening to your episode on rape kits, my heart sank. When you apologize for being two dudes educating people about the options one might have after being raped or sexually assaulted, it sounded as if you thought that men in general are not fit to do this, which I don't think is true. I'm a doctor, guys, who works with men and women that experience sexual violence, and I imagine that male victims would find an apology of this kind unnecessary at best, as with the male therapists who are doing great work. And you can serve as much needed therapeutically invaluable counter examples after someone has had bad experiences with men. I also don't think your initial disclaimer that this would be a serious episode without any jokes was warranted, and I'm glad the episode didn't turn out that way. If anything, your good natured humor brought some much needed warmth to the discussion. We are all still trying to figure out how to talk about these topics, and I would like to encourage you to stand by your efforts, shining a light on a difficult topic for the benefit of your listeners. Thank you, guys. Keep it up. That is from Hano. Hano. H-A-N-N-O. Thanks a lot. Hano. It's a great name. Yeah. And if I'm not mistaken, it said Hano was in Hanover, Germany. No. Yes. Really? I wonder if they liked the town so much, they just said, call me Hano from now on, everybody. Maybe. I love this town. It's like me, I'm from Chuck town. You're at all? What atl oh, got you. Yeah. Chuck town, I guess. Makes more sense if either one does. Well, thanks a lot, Hannah. We appreciate that. We will try to take your advice to Heart because it is pretty good advice. And if you want to get in touch with us, like Hano did, you can go on to stuffychoto.com and find our social links. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun is shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing Poolsite, tune into the podcast series on Amazon. Music. My favorite murder from exactly right media. My favorite murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen 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." | |
Will the Large Hadron Collider destroy the Earth? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/will-the-large-hadron-collider-destroy-the-earth | In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck discuss the Large Hadron Collider, from its purpose and origins to how likely it is to wipe out all life in the universe. | In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck discuss the Large Hadron Collider, from its purpose and origins to how likely it is to wipe out all life in the universe. | Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:50:52 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=18, tm_min=50, tm_sec=52, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=342, tm_isdst=0) | 33486724 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, uses Charles W. Bright, as well as our producer Jerry. You can just call me Boson. Higgs, Boson. No one's going to call you that would be a great name, though. Yeah. Higgs, Boson. Higgs. I wonder if that thing is discovered, if somebody will name their kids Pigs Boson, Mekow, Wit, or whatever. Well, if someone names their kid yet detroit. I think someone essentially named the kid Pigs Boson. There's even a comma, I think, in there. Isn't there any Detroit? Yeah, I don't remember. Exclamation point. Yeah, there's some sort of punctuation when you get punctuation into your name. Your parents were messed up. Yes. Chuck's talking about a theoretical particle called the Higgs boson, and we'll talk about it in a minute, but first we're going to talk about the place where they're hoping to find proof positive that the Higgs bosom particle exists. Yes, Josh. And this is very science heavy. Super science heavy, because it's about science. So science heavy that Chuck and I are a little nervous about this one. I have dark matter oozing out of my ears. Yeah, you do. Which is proof that it existed. Exactly. You just amended the standard model. All right, let's talk about this. Dude, what is this? We're talking about the Large Hadron Collider. Right. Which you may have heard about, you may know a lot about. And if you do, I imagine we'll probably get some angry emails from you when we mess it up. Right. But on the border between Switzerland and France yes. 100 meters underground. Beautiful country. Sure. Lots of good skiing out there. Sure. There is a facility with a track that's, what, 17 miles long, I think. 17.716.7. Okay. We'll just call it 1717. And around this track, they shoot beams of light. Pretty simple. It is pretty simple. Can I stop now? Yes, we can. There's a large Hadron collider, everybody. That's what it's called. It's called the Large Hadron Collider. It's been built, I think they started in the 21st century, and it finally went online for the first time in 2008. So far, it's cost $6 billion to construct. Yeah, I've heard. Up to ten, even, depending on who you ask. Well, yeah, and there's a lot of countries involved. There's thousands of scientists who are going back to their home countries and saying, we need more money. We need more money. Right. But yeah, France and Switzerland are running the show there. CERN is the name of the company we should point out. Right. The organization the European Organization for Nuclear Research abbreviated on Francis CERN okay. I was about to say those letters don't match up right there. So what is it, Chuck? They shoot beams of light. Yeah, it's a particle accelerator, and it is the largest and most badass particle accelerator in the history of particle accelerators, sure. That that's the easiest way to say we've got particle accelerators that look like old donkeys pulling carts with square wheels compared to this thing. Seriously, this is as big as it gets. It's as ambitious as it gets. And basically what they're trying to do are several fold. They're trying to prove the existence of the Higgs boson particle, aka the God particle. Well, let's talk about this. Why would anyone want to prove the existence of a theoretical particle? Should we go back to the Standard Model? Yeah. Should we back into this? Let's do it. Basically, it tries to define the fundamental particles that make the universe the forces. The forces. Right. You've got a strong nuclear force. Strong like bull. Weak nuclear force. Electromagnetic force. Yes. So the Standard Model, which combines Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum physics, I believe quantum theory and all that other stuff you just said, it combines those two, and it proves the existence, and it accounts for those three forces. The problem is gravity still remains unaccounted for. Yeah. That's the fourth fundamental force. Like, we can account for it theoretically, but we can't say, yes, this is why gravity exists, and this is all the stuff gravity does. We're still with strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and electromagnetic force. We've advanced leaps and bounds beyond classical physics, Newtonian physics, but we're still at the apple falling off the tree level as far as it goes when it comes to gravity. Right. So the Higgs boson particle, if we find it, if we detect it, it will fill out the Standard Model Higgs. Exactly. And it's a theoretical particle at this point that we're looking for. Right. Would they think that it exists and that basically it's responsible for giving mass, or matter mass. Right. Which is important, they say, because not all matter has mass. Things called neutrinos. Right. Delicious and nutritious. Neutrinos do not have maths. Right. I've practiced that one. Did you? Yeah. Okay. It's actually written down. What name is that? So not everything has math. And the idea is that if you explain the existence of mass using the Higgs mechanism, we'll all be better for it and understand our origins. We are ultimately, it's what it comes down to is we're, like, theory is not good enough. We have to know. So the Higgs bosom particles, one of the bigger ones, named after Peter Higgs, by the way, physicists who theorized it. Right. How do you know a theoretical particle when you see it? That's a good question. Do you know? This is what I understand, that you can't just say, oh, there must be this particle out there. Sure. And name it after me, by the way. Right. I think Peter Higgs went a little further and said, this particle must exist. And if it does exist, basically, this is energy, its mass. So find this and name it after me. Right. Exactly. And so what's going to happen when they turn the Large Hadron Collider on this Christmas? Right. I think it begins the process, which will take several months after that to collide. Right. Yeah. They'll have their sensors looking for a particle that's created that has that, I guess, mass that energy, however it's described mathematically. The dark matter on my stuff, it's coming out of my ears right now. So dark matter is another one that they're hoping to find. Right. Yeah. You've got to come out of your ears. Tell us about it, Chuck. Well, here's the deal with dark matter, is right now, humans can observe about 4% of all the matter that must exist in the universe. That's all we can account for. Yeah. That's not very much. No. There's a theory that dark matter is this undetectable matter, and that, coupled with the matter that we can detect, makes up only about 25%, which is still not much now. And the other three quarters is what they think might be a force called dark energy. Right. Which scientists have become alarmed over the last few decades when they've detected that the universe is actually expanding, and they don't know why. Well and they think that dark energy may be the reason. Right. So they're looking for that, too. Again, once you theorize something, you kind of have to back it up with, and this is what it's going to look like. Right. And so you sense for it. Right. Sure. They're also looking for antimatter, which is Matt's hated foe, and they like to cancel each other out. Yeah. That's how it supposedly worked, as there was more matter than antimatter when the Big Bang happened. Which is how we're here. Exactly. But they don't know why, and they're hoping to recreate that. Yes. And that is the hook, Chuck. What they're going to do? They want to find all this stuff and more by recreating the Big Bang. Yeah. What the universe looked like a trillion of a second after the Big Bang. Right. Because we think what happened was the universe expands and cools, and all these particles floating around join up together and form larger particles, and then protons. All of a sudden, evolution sure starts rolling. Right. If you believe in that kind of thing. They're also looking for some other stuff, slightly stranger stuff than dark matter and antimatter. They're looking for evidence well adherence of string theory are looking for evidence of string theory, which would mean another dimension. Several up to eleven, I believe. Yeah. That makes you okay, I think theorized eleven. I don't buy string theory. Yeah. And you've always pooped I have a real problem, and most likely I just don't understand it. But from what I understand, very smart people don't understand it either. Well, there's no impression that Kayku is like, this is what he didn't come up with the measurements to back it up. Right, but you're on the same page as a lot of scientists, though, they also say that it's a philosophy, it's not science. Right. Under his theory or under his philosophy, however you want to say it, there's up to eleven different dimensions. We're currently aware of four. Height, width, depth and time. Yes. Those are our four dimensions that we exist in. Under KKU, there's eleven total, so there's another eight that are unaccounted for. And that all matter in the universe is made up of tiny vibrating strings. Some are closed, like little rubber bands, some are open like little, I don't know, tapeworms, like a cut rubber band. Right, sure. Yeah. These strings can vibrate and like, a guitar string, and one vibration might make it look like an electron, one might make it look like a neutrino. A delicious and neutrino. Right. And that's string theory, and it's the most simplest form, but even still, the strings are highly hypothetical, and even if they were created, we apparently wouldn't be able to sense them. What they're looking for, the string theorists, is evidence of supersymmetry. Right. And supersymmetry is you have a particle, and it has an opposite particle, like a neutron and a positron, positive and negatively charged and anti particles. Sure. Right. Those are super partners even further into supersymmetry. And this will somehow, I guess, proves string theory. I don't understand how it will and oh, my God, can you imagine the length of the emails we're going to get from people who explain how this proves string theory? Yeah, I'm already suffering from brain melt. I can't imagine anymore. So you've got the neutron and the positron. Yes. And those are super partners, but each of those have a positive partner, too, rather than an opposite, they have one that's like them as well. Each one has their own partner. So each particle will have three partner particles. Three counterparticles, counterparticles. Perfect. Chuck. Yes. So that would be supersymmetry. And apparently, if they find evidence of supersymmetry, then bada boom, bada bing. String theory is right. Right. And it also helps to explain dark matter. Yes, it does. Wow. Is anyone still out there? Yes, everybody. We're muddling through this part, but it's about to get a little more interesting. There's like ten nerds that are like, this is the best thing ever. No, they're like carving their knives. All right. Ready to slice us up? Yes. So that's what they're looking for. And also, I think this is what I find most fascinating about it. Most of the scientists out there, I think there are very few who are looking for evidence to back up their theories. Most of them are actually hoping to learn, like, everything they know is wrong, and there's all this new stuff, so they can go out there and figure out how this fits here and all that. I find that very interesting. Yeah, me too. It's a very ambitious project. And as Strickland points out in his article, very comprehensive article by the way, there is no practical application for this. Yeah. It's all just to see what happens. Yeah. Which is pretty cool to sink six to 10 billion into. Well, and if you've ever seen the thing, the pictures of the Hadron Collider is just unbelievable. It's ginormous. It's ginormous. So what are they going to be doing? Chuck, how does this thing work? Well, Josh, there are eight sectors at the Hadron Collider and they basically use magnets to steer these beams of light, these protons in a circle, because otherwise you just saw straight. Right. You love that part. Yeah, because that's the only part that makes sense. Right. The magnets are actually super cool. Right, Chuck? Yeah. Well, there's 9600 magnets if you want a little status. This one is heavy. This is your show. So 9600 magnets, many of them weigh several tons, which is pretty big. And they are cool, Josh, to 1.9 degrees Kelvin, which is negative 270 1 Celcius or negative 456 Fahrenheit, which is just above absolute zero. Yeah. And the reason why they would want to call an electromagnet to just above absolute zero is there's very little electrical resistance sure. When you turn that thing on. So it can operate smoothly. Exactly. Ideally. Right. Because it's purpose isn't to a jokey, attract all of the pots and pans at a certain facility to it. I mean, it has a purpose. It's steering beams of light, which is much more difficult. You go out there and try to steer a beam of light. I know. Trying. Yeah. It's tough. It is tough. Okay, so how do they cool it, though? That's a pretty cool stat. They cool it using liquid hydrogen and helium. Right. Liquid nitrogen. Yeah. That stuff burns 10,800 tons of liquid nitrogen and 60 tons of liquid helium to finish up. Right. That's pretty hardcore. Okay, so you've got these magnets, and actually inside the magnets are pipes which are vacuum. Yeah. You got to have a vacuum. So basically, if you hear you've heard vacuum and almost absolute zero. This sounds an awful lot like outer space. Like deep space. Exactly, yes. So they're creating a vacuum to keep any particle out. Right. Any particle could screw this whole thing up. So imagine that there's inside this almost 17 miles track, there's nothing. They're creating deep space, 328ft below the Earth's crest without the space junk. That's nuts, dude. It is. Okay, so Chuck Long, this and also the eight sectors, each one is an arc, like you said. So it's basically one big circle. Yeah. And along this big circle are six stations, basically. Right. And each one of these is outfitted with tons of sensors. There's 150,000,000 centers, I think, throughout the whole collider. Right. And so each station is basically working to measure one thing or another. Right. Yeah. And we could go into detail here, but this is really when people would tune out. But just suffice to say, there are eight main stations where they're looking, six of them, six main stations, six of which are really ginormous, collecting lots of info, and then two kind of smaller ones. Right. And remember, they're collecting things like information about radiation, sudden changes in mass, gravitational fields, electromagnetic fields, that kind of stuff, and then it's going to sort through. And actually, another interesting thing about CERN is that it's getting something like 15 petabytes of data gathered every year, which is 15 millionGB. Yeah. And the sensors are constantly feeding back information. Yeah. Well, it's say that was enough information to fill 100,000 DVDs, which is not as impressive as I would have thought. I'm pretty impressed. Okay. And they're actually using grid computing, using off the shelf computers, which is pretty cool. Yeah. They just linked them together. Right. Why do they do that? It's more efficient, from what I understand. Yes, I think so. And it's cheaper. Right. Speaking of cheap, you know what's not cheap? Their power bill. No. Did you see that? Yes. Unbelievable. $30 million per year just to power this thing, after they've already sunk between six and 10 billion into it. Right. And once this thing gets revved up, what they're going to do the first step, Chuck, and this is like the big experiment, basically. They're just shooting beams of light and then smashing them into each other. Right. Okay. So what they're going to do first is they're going to take hydrogen atoms. They're going to strip them of their electrons, right? Yeah. Which produces protons. They're going to take the protons, and they're going to send them through a machine that fires them as beams, the PS booster. That's the accelerator. Right. I think that's what gets there's a bunch of them, but that's what gets it going. Right. So it's just a beam, and then it's a beam. Right? Right. Okay. Chuck so when they get these beams ready right. When the whole thing is ready to go online for the big experiment, sometime early next year, hopefully. So the first step is to take hydrogen atoms and strip them of their electrons, pork eyes, which makes protons. Right? Yeah. And there we have our protons, because ultimately is a proton accelerator. Right? Right. What they do is they feed these into a machine called the line act two, which fires the beams of protons into the accelerator, which is the PS booster. Yes. And dude, that uses radio frequency electric field to push the protons along and kind of get them started on their journey to just below light speed. Yeah. Right. It's like, get along, little proton. Right. And you're going to meet some other guys later that are going to whip you even harder. Right. Yeah. That PS booster makes them go from a beam of light to a beam of light. Right? Right. Okay. It's good way to say it. Thank you very much. And the magnets are going to come in now. They're keeping these proton beams on track. And the thing is going along pretty quick. Pretty quick. And then the PS booster injects it into another accelerator called the Super Proton Synchrotron. It sounds like a children's toy. It does. Very expensive one. So the beams are now really picking up speed, and they're divided into bunches. Right. Okay. So you have just imagine one beam, and it's divided into, I think, 2800 bunches, 2808 per beam, and each bunch has 1.1 times ten to the 11th power protons. Right. And this is important to say that they shoot one counterclockwise and one clockwise. Right. They need to be two different tunnels. Yeah. So, yeah, they're going different directions, but they're getting faster and faster, and they're actually coming very, very close to the speed of light. At one point, remember, this is a 17 miles track. At one point, the beams are getting to their top speed. They make 11,245 trips around the track per second. State of the year? It may be. Dude, it's what is this, mid November? And that's the state of the year. Yeah. More than 11,000 trips around a 16 miles track per second. If you ever wondered how fast the speed of light is, that's 99.9% there. Yeah. But you got to admit that 100th of a percent is pretty substantial. Sure. I wonder how many trips they make at the speed of light. Yeah. The fact that we have figured out how to do this, not you and I, obviously humans, to figure out how to do this is pretty amazing. If it works. Amazing or terrifying. Which we'll get to in a minute. Yes. And then, Josh, you know what happens then? They converge. Yeah. They direct these bunches of beams of protons and to each other, and boom to boom. 600 million collisions per second at that point. And I get the impression also that it wasn't clear, but the beams can be directed toward one or another at each of the six sensor stations. Oh, okay. Really? I think so, because I think you have to have your centers right there. Right, we'll see. That makes sense. We'll find out where going. By the way, I already booked us a trip. Oh, really? We'll be there. Sweet. So what happens, Josh, is they theoretically, they're going to collide and they're going to break up into small particles like quarks, and they're accompanying energy called gluon. Yes. Gluon keeps it all together, which is why it's called gluon. Is it really? Of course not, but quarks are really unstable, and they will decay in just, like, a fraction of the second. But we have all these sensors to pick up what happened. Exactly. I think that's part of the problem with why we can't detect the stuff in the universe is it's already happened. Right. And we're witnessing its effects. We're part of its effects. Right, right. So they want to recreate the beginning of the universe to see if these things really exist. And what their effects are, etc. Or et cetera. There's possibly going to be some other things that are created inadvertently. Yeah, photons and muons and black holes. Chuck yeah, that's possible. It's very possible. Actually, even CERN said it was possible. That's one of the critics one of the things the critics point out is you may create a black hole and you may destroy the Earth. So much so that sue dudes sued them, basically to try and stop it. And not just two dudes. A guy named Walter Wagner and Louise Sancho. Walter Wagner was the former nuclear safety officer for the Large Hadron Collider. Right. He was like the guy who was in charge of safety, and he filed a lawsuit in a US. District court in Hawaii to file an injunction or to create an injunction to stop that thing from being turned on. Yeah. Because you know what a black hole is? It's a bad mama JAMA is what it is. I love how Strickland puts it. Black holes are regions in which matter collapses into a point of infinite density. Not good. No, it's not. And again, as Chuck said, CERN has said, yeah, maybe they may create some black holes, but really teeny ones. That's what they're saying. They're saying, yeah, the black hole, you know, and love, is a star collapsing on itself. We're talking about subatomic particles collapsing on themselves. Right. So you need a black hole, but it's going to be tiny. One of the concerns that Wagner and Sancho have is that, sure, it may be tiny, but no one's ever done this before, and you guys have no idea whether this is safe or not. This is too much unknown. Right. And they're like, no, our magnets are safe. They've been tested. They're like, we're not talking about the magnets. We're talking about all the stuff. You have no idea what's going to happen. And they also said one of CERN's response was, and there's no one allowed down in there while it's going on. Right. And they're like, Dude, what about the Earth? Right? Being swallowed up into a black hole. Sure. Forget the one scientist that wants to watch the explosion. Forget him. Yeah. He can write out of the black hole what's going on down there, you know? Yes. Josh and you know what? You know what else? They think they might produce a strangelet. Yeah, these things are a little scary. Yeah. It could be worrisome strangelets. Could possess a gravitational field that could convert them and the entire planet Earth into a lifeless hulk. Right. They think that strange lists have this they're very dense. I think they're theoretical as well. Right. Yeah. The hypothetical, they apparently have the property of lending their incredible density to any other particle it touches and setting off a chain reaction. Kind of like Rogue from X Men. Sure, maybe. Kind of. I think there's a lot of quantum physics in Xmen in my p brain that's what I'm going to think. So they're worried that if a strange lit is created, it could set off a chain reaction that turns all matter on Earth into this ultra dense, dead halifolis hulk. Including us on Earth, because we're on Earth. Yes, but CERN dismisses that for a few reasons. They say, first of all, that it's hypothetical, so we don't even know that. Right. So don't get your panties in a wide yet. Right. I believe that's what the memo said, actually. And then they said, actually there's an electromagnetic field that would really repel normal matter instead of changing it. Sure. So don't sweat it. Then they say even if it does exist, it would be really unstable and would probably just decay like instantaneously, like those black holes. Right. And then the final thing they say is that high energy cosmic rays would produce this stuff naturally anyway and should be hitting the Earth already. Yes. And we're still here, so don't worry about it. The one that I have the real problem with was the third one that should decay almost instantaneously. Yeah. Does it really take a very long time for a strangely to transfer that to set off a transaction? That's true. We'll find out if the world's a lifeless hulk this February. Sweet. There's a couple of guys remember that Higgs boson particle that we talked about at the beginning? Right. There are a couple of guys who are actually very well respected physicists right, chuck that's what I'm told. Who have come up with a couple of papers that basically say and these are real physicists. These are real respected physicists, and they're not joking. Right. They're saying that the Higgs boson has already been created in the future at CERN at the Large Hadron Collider, and it was so abhorrent that it rippled back in time and sabotaged itself so that it could never be created. Sabotage the LHC. So it can never be created. So what's the analogy? They liken it to coming back from the future to kill your father so you will never be born, your grandfather's, whatever. That's actually a paradox. You can't do that, or else you never would have been born in the first place. Exactly. But they make the case that it's not a paradox to travel back in time to push your grandfather out of the path of an oncoming bus. Right. Which is what they're saying the Higgs boson is doing. Right. And the reason they say this is because it has failed on a spectacular level so far. It has been ridiculous. Strange things you could say. Well, there have been some strange ones. The first one wasn't that strange. It was a coolant leak and destroyed a lot of the magnets, which was pretty expensive to fix. Sure. So that knocked it off track for quite a while. Off track, literally for a good year. Yeah. And then, Josh, you know what happened last week? A bird dropped a baguette, a piece of bread into this thing. Yeah. Into one of the magnets. This is really what happened. Yeah. Can you believe that? I can, because I'm kind of with the two physicists who think that the boson has been created and traveled back in time. Yeah. So this bird drops us into a piece of the outdoor machinery and overheated parts of it, and it was not operational at the time, but they said that it produced such a spike that if it had been turned on, that dropping this bread would have enabled the automatic fail safe and it would shut it down. Right. Piece of bread. Right. From a bird. Yeah. That's a little hinky. It is. But at the same time, if you think about it, it's not really that hinky, but everyone paying attention is. So, like, this could be really great, or it could conceivably end life as we know it and see what happens. So anything that happens to it is just hugely under the microscope. Yes. And I just realized that I was agreeing with the string theorist. One of the physicists is Holger Beck Nielsen and his compatriot Japanese physicist Maseo Nino. Mia. And these are the two that are saying that the Higgs Boson was created and traveled back in time. Right. They have a very easy way of solving whether or not the LHC should be put online. How's that? A card game. Really? Yeah. They want to come up with basically, let's say, 100 million cards, and 99,999,099 of these cards say, Go ahead. Right. And then one card says, Shut it down. And obviously this is all software, not actual cards. Yeah. And then you ask the LHC to pick one, and if the LHC picks the one that says shut it down, then we should shut it down. Shut it down, then it's fine. Wow. Yeah. Are they actually going to do this? I don't think soy or CERN anyway. No, they don't. They're not related to swarm. But like I said, they are both respected physicists. And the physics community, when they first heard about this, we're like and then they read it, and they're like, yeah. Because it is possible, hypothetically, and if the LHC is involved in anything, it's hypothesis in theory. Yeah, big time. Until it proves everything or destroys the universe. We should say, too, that this baguette in the works has not thrown it off schedule, apparently, this time. No, it's just shut it down for the time being. It's still on schedule, like you said. I think they're going to start cranking it up sometime this winter, and then they're going to break for Christmas and come back, and then, boom, see what happened. Chuck, I propose, and I also propose this to all of our listeners having a big old party on the day that they do this because it could be our last. Could be. I also want to point out that I just saw. This in the news today. One of the scientists was arrested in France as an al Qaeda suspect. That weird. Yeah. And of course, they're saying that this has nothing to do with al Qaeda trying to get their hands on the LHC or anything like that. It was just kind of one of those things. And there's, I think, 7000 scientists working on it. Right. So it's not that big of a deal. No. I guess it is for him. Yeah. He's in big trouble. So that's the LHC the Large hadron collider. Yeah. And probably talk about it again at some point in time, don't you think? Yeah, we should follow up when it happens, if it happens. And we'll probably read one of the emails from one of the physicists that write in and let us know how supersymmetry could prove string theory. Right? Yeah, I look forward to that. Yeah. So if you want to read this article, I strongly recommend it. We didn't cover all of it. Good article. Written by Strickland. You can type in Large Hadron Collider in the search bar@houseupworks.com and bring your drip pan to catch the melting brain, the antimatter that drips from here. And I guess now, Chuck, it's time for listener mail, right? Yes, it is, Josh. My favorite portion of today's show, we're going to call this a response to my admission that Emily and I fight before every plane trip. Okay. And when I said that yeah. So we have someone out there that agrees or not agrees, but it happens to her and her husband as well. They've been married for 16 years, and every time before we take a trip, my husband has a major anxiety attack and acts like a total Ahol. I know that's what it is, and I am pretty tolerant. But until he's on the plane or in the car, he refuses to acknowledge the reason for his tension or even that he's particularly grouchy, which is what I do. So the few days before we travel are always fraught, and we always end up fighting. About the only time we do fight once we're on our way, he's fine. I'm still totally aggravated, though, from him being such a jerk earlier this. They've been married 16 years. I mean, that's how she's talking. Earlier this year, we went to Chile for a month, and when I booked the flights, I seriously considered getting separate seats. I threatened the next time I'm booking my flight a few days earlier than his. Anyway, I just wanted to share this so you know you're not alone. As always, thanks for the great podcast. The site is great in general. Searching for Unicorns linked me to some information on hardy roses, which I'd actually recently been looking for. Awesome. There you have it. Wow. And that is from Anne in New York City. And Anne says, as a PS, I could not find your team on Kiva. How do I find it? Well, anne, you can find it funny you should ask by going into the URL bar of your web browser and type in www.kiva.org team cash stuff You Should Know. And Chuck, there's all the more reason, by the way, I want to say I could not be prouder of our team. Chuck the stuff you should know. Army is awesome. We're at straight up 100% loan more. Are we really? Yeah, something like 750 members and 780 loans. We're above one loan per member in four weeks, everybody. We donated $20,000. That's phenomenal. And Colbert has already been left in the dust. His leaky team is donating like eight grand. I think they might be at nine grand so far. Chuck and I actually issued a video challenge to Mr. Colbert. We did. We want to see who can be the first to what did we decide on $100,000? I think that's a pretty big undertaking. I would say yes, but I think we can do it. So, everybody, we have challenged Colbert's team to see who can get to 100,000. Yes. And he's ignored it so far. So if anyone knows Mr. Colbert or if anyone has any connection with the show or you're a fan, go smack him on his big fat head and tell him about the little challenge. Damn right. That's what I say. So again, that's www dot keep you should know. And if you have an email for Chuck or me or Jerry or the Large Hadron Collider, you can send it to stuffpodcast@housetoftworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housetoftworks? Check out our blog on the Houseofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | ||
3fe02c62-121b-11eb-ba6a-479bde2083ef | Short Stuff: Space Hurricanes | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-space-hurricanes | Space hurricanes are officially a thing. What does that mean for us here on Earth? Probably not much. | Space hurricanes are officially a thing. What does that mean for us here on Earth? Probably not much. | Wed, 28 Jul 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=209, tm_isdst=0) | 11458813 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's the special but normal producer Dave here. I just mean special, like in a way that everybody is special in all the right ways, in a Romper Room sort of way. That's exactly right. And I'll tell you something else that's special, Chuck. Something very special happened on August 2014 over the magnetic North Pole of this year planet Earth. For the first time in the history of humanity, we documented what's known as a space plasma hurricane. Isn't that neat? It's neat. And this is something that wasn't fully well. It was documented here and there, but Nature Communications wrote about it in February of this year. So I think it got a lot more attention seven years after the fact. Almost seven years. But yeah, this was, like you said, above the North Pole, it happened over a few hours. The result of what happened up there was there were some satellites that were disrupted. The geomagnetic field got a little hinky for a little while, but back here on Earth, well below the ionosphere, we were just like, I don't know what I was doing on August 28, 2014. I could probably go back and look. It would have been unremarkable, though. I wasn't thinking about space hurricanes. No, because no one really noticed, because in August, that's a pretty terrible time, typically, to see the auroras, or at least the aurora borealis, because the days are so much longer than the night, so you can't really see these fantastic light displays. But had you been able to see the aurora borealis that night, you would have been knocked right out of your hiking boots, basically, because this was, again, a space hurricane. It doesn't happen every day and we don't really understand fully how they happen or why, but they're called space hurricanes because from what we saw, from what this Nature Communications paper from February 2021 said, it bears a striking resemblance to a tropical hurricane or cyclone or an Atlantic hurricane, where there's a mass of energy basically spinning around a calm center. There's a million differences between Earthbound hurricane and a space hurricane, but the fact that you could even call both hurricanes is kind of startling, actually. It seems to me, Chuck kind of like it's presenting like a new pioneer in scientific research now. Like, we're like, OK, how does this happen? Where do these come from? What is going on here? I agree. And I also have to admit I was distracted for a minute because I was obsessed with trying to figure out what I was doing on August 24. Did you ever figure it out? No, because I didn't open up my calendar and go back. But I did find out that it was a Wednesday, so I know we probably weren't recording this now. And it was a year after our TV show aired, which aired over the course of what, like ten days. Yeah. You're probably in hiding. Still may have been. Yeah. But I think that's probably a good place. No, we can't break yet, can we? Sure we can. It's a short stuff. Anything goes. All right, let's take a break, then I'll get my head back in the game. Okay, Chuck, you took a salt tablet, you walked it off and now your head is back in the game. Right? My head is back in the game. Where did you leave off? I left off about how space hurricanes are basically presenting a new pioneer frontier in space research because we didn't really know they existed. We suspected something like that existed, but we certainly had no idea that there were arms of plasma that spun around at staggering speeds. A calm center. But it's not wind we're talking about. These aren't clouds, this isn't water vapor. This is plasma. These are ions and electrons and just incredible energy and magnetism. It has nothing to do with the Earthbound hurricane and yet it bears a striking resemblance to it. It's very bizarre. Yeah, it is interesting in that there is what you can think of as precipitation in both in that we get the rain on Earth and there's an electric precipitation. And it's super interesting that there is an eye and that they spin and have arms, which obviously is why they're called hurricanes. I know there was one meteorologist in here in the House of Works article that said he thought they might have been called space vortexes initially because it was over the North Pole and resembled the polar vortex. But they went with the space hurricane, I guess because it's a little sexier. Probably one of the other ways that they're different is the shears. Well, from where they occur, obviously, the Earth's atmosphere from, I think, ground zero, or we should probably just say the ground the surface from the ground to about five to 9 miles up is where you're going to find an Earth hurricane. Yeah, that's the troposphere. Yeah. Whereas the space hurricane is in the ionosphere, like I mentioned early on. And then the sheer size. This one, I think, was about 600 miles wide. Right. And it's huge. It is a good size. It's about double the size of, like a giant Atlantic hurricane. Yeah. And it spun really fast, 4700 mph, about 7560 km/hour, just whipping around. And again, there's a calm center where this activity is not happening, where this rotation is taking place, or is the center for the rotation. And we have a fairly good handle on hurricanes. Our explanation in our hurricanes episode notwithstanding, science generally understands how hurricanes here on our week space hurricanes again, this is new. There was one I read an article about a guy who said, yeah, we're pretty sure one of these happened like 50 years ago, but we didn't have anything like the instrumentation today, so we couldn't document it. This is the first one we've actually documented. So this is like brand new to us. But rather than wind and water vapor and clouds, the space hurricane is made of plasma. Plasma, as we've talked about many times, Chuck, is the fourth state of matter where it's like solid, then you make it a little more energetic and it becomes liquid, a little more energetic, becomes gas, or even more energetic than that is plasma, where it's such high temperature. And of course, temperature is just another measure. Are you thinking about where you were on August 20, 2014 again? No, I'm thinking about how plasma is the, umami, of states of matter. Okay, good enough. As long as you're thinking about plasma right now, I'm with you, man. But it's so energetic and it's so high temperature, which is a measure of energy, that the electrons and the positively charged nuclei just get ripped apart and spread apart so that they don't interact. So you just got this electrified magnetized, incredibly hot, energetic gas, and that instead of clouds of water vapor, would make up the arms of the space hurricane. Right. And as far as the conditions of when this happened in 2014, if you remember from not the sun episode, but what was it on solar winds? We did one on space weather. Is that it probably when we talked about the eleven year cycle of the sun, yes, I'm pretty sure that we probably talked about it in both of them, but yes, space weather, I think it was better in space weather. I agree. So at the time, in 2014 when this happened, I still don't know what I was doing that day, but on that Wednesday, the sun was at its maximum of that eleven year cycle that we talked about and was also at a time of what the AccuWeather people called low solar and otherwise low geomagnetic activity. So the people that they interviewed from AccuWeather said that it did resemble an Earth hurricane. And that was usually like quiet, like the calm before the storm, the quiet conditions, and it was the same in space. Although now I think we're not sure if it was the maximum of the eleven year cycle set against low geomagnetic activity or if it was the minimum. And this is a misprint. Oh, I see. So what I understand is that whatever it was, the upshot is that the space weather was calm, right? Like whatever normal space weather we get from the sun, it was generally calm. Which is weird because you'd think that it would be that solar wind from the sun that would cause this kind of thing, but they're like, no, we actually have no idea where this thing came from. And the fact that it isn't related to the solar cycle, that eleven year cycle makes them think that it's probably a little more common than we realized. And now that we know what to look for, we're going to start noticing them. So they think maybe it has to do with a change in the magnetic field lines where one was ripped apart and then connected with the neighbor, releasing a tremendous amount of magnetic energy. That's one of the explanations I've seen. There's a few others, too. Yeah. And to borrow your phrase, the upshot is that it's really not going to matter much to us on Earth. I guess if we had any kind of space exploration going on during one of these, that probably wouldn't be great if you were up there. Right. Just to guess. But they kind of come back with a line that you always hear when it's something that could disrupt satellites is here on Earth. It might mess with your GPS. I feel like that's always what you hear. Yeah, pretty much whenever there's satellite interference, it can be problematic. I mean, that was a big part of the space weather episode, too, but yeah. NY two k. Am I right? Yeah. We need to do an episode just on that. I can't wait to do that. Really? Yeah, we're going to okay. The 90s are back. Are they? From what I understand, you know, a new 70s sort of disco tech bar is opening in Atlanta this weekend. Oh, sweet. When things are feeling really good, I think you and me and Emily and you me should all go get our Studio 54 on. I would love that. I'm going to go get some replacement goldfish from my platform shoes. Great. Because those other ones have been dead for years. They're getting a little gamey. I have to you got anything else about space Hurricanes? Nothing else. Look out for them. It's the new thing. Yeah. This is going to get a follow up when we understand them a little more because they are amazing. So until then, this is your introduction to space hurricanes. I hope you enjoyed it. Chuck hopes you enjoyed it. Dave hopes you enjoyed it. And space stuff, short stuff, is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-10-10-sysk-rolling-jubilee-final.mp3 | How the Rolling Jubilee Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-rolling-jubilee-works | Everyone thought it was the pits that banks were bailed out by taxpayers in 2008 while those same people weren't given any relief by the banks. So some Occupy Wall Street members did something about it. | Everyone thought it was the pits that banks were bailed out by taxpayers in 2008 while those same people weren't given any relief by the banks. So some Occupy Wall Street members did something about it. | Tue, 10 Oct 2017 14:24:02 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=14, tm_min=24, tm_sec=2, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=283, tm_isdst=0) | 44327160 | audio/mpeg | "Attention, celebrity listeners. Hope that got your attention. Hey, everyone, this is Chuck, and as some of you have heard, I have announced that I have a new solo podcast coming out in November called Movie Crush, the Show show where I interview your favorite people about their favorite movie. And that's a long and short of it. It's really cool. I've had a bunch of guests in the studio and just had a nice chat about movie fandom in general and what their favorite movie is and why, and I need more guests. So if you are a stealthy celebrity listener, if you're an actor or a writer or producer director, if you're a musician, if you are a book author, I've had all kinds of people in the studio, and that's kind of the point, is to hear from neat folks of all walks of life. If you are out there and you want to be on Movie Crush, I would love to have you. If you're in Atlanta or going to Atlanta with a movie project, that's great. If not, we have partner studios in La and New York, and we can work it out. If you live in a flyover state, even, let's say so, hit me up. Just send me an email to moviecrush@howstuffworks.com and put in the subject line Moviecrush Guest. And I'll know it's you, and I appreciate it. It's a lot of fun, trust me. And here's two recording podcasts together. Thanks. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles Wuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know. Come on aboard the Rolling Jubilee. Yes. Not to be confused with the Jambery, which is what the Boy Scouts do. Yeah, Rolling Jubilee sounds so fun, and for a lot of people it is. Yeah. Unless you're like a Wall Street shark who hates seeing lower income people get out from under debt. Miraculously. It's a great time for everybody. I honestly didn't know much about this thing, so good. I didn't either. Yeah. Actually, I saw it in the sidebar while I was looking for an article to do, and I was like, I have no idea what that is, so let me check it out. And it was just one of those hidden gems, if you will. Yeah. Should we talk? Let's talk about debt, baby. Yes. And I want to say that this is largely about the Rolling Jubilee, but we're going to scratch the surface of the consumer debt secondary market. I would love to do one on just debt and debt collection and just the whole industry and the I guess the whole massive ball of whack somehow. The business of debt. Yes. And in what cases it's actually good to have and how it kind of powers the economy, all that stuff. Did we ever do one on bankruptcy? No. All right. We should put one of those in there, too. Yeah. We got a lot to do left. We have a lot left to do. More work to be done. All right. So in this case, we're talking about consumer debt in the United States. It is an astounding number and problem. Is that fair to say? I would say that, yes. I think that might even be an understatement. Although as of when this article was written, which appears to be about December of 2012, it was a bigger problem than that. It is now, from what I'm seeing. Well, I have a higher number now than then. Okay, go ahead. Well, the number I see, the original number from 2012 was eleven point 44 trillion. Trillion. The number I got today was twelve point 73 trillion. I saw twelve point 29 trillion. Okay. Which is still I mean, yours is almost a trillion dollars more in four years. I'm sure those are. So that's 2017 numbers. Yeah. Okay. Well, that would explain mine was Q, two of 2016. That's the distant past. A trillion dollars increase in five years. That's all of the household debt. Credit cards, mortgages, car loans, old medical bills, all that stuff. Student loans. Big part of it. Yeah. That's a big one, too. That all households have in the United States, right? Yes. As of 2015. I'm hats off to you, man. I could not find 2017 numbers. Yeah. So here's the thing. If you talk to someone who knows finance, they will say debt is not the worst thing in the world. It's not like being in debt. It's got to be the right kind of debt. Like owing a ton of money to high interest credit cards is not good by any measure. Right. Emily and I got smart when we I think I've told the story when we bought our house, we had a bunch of stupid credit card debt, and this was twelve or so years ago. And what we did, because they were giving away money back then, foolishly. And this could have bought us in the butt, I guess, if we hadn't gotten jobs and been able to afford payments. But we rolled all that credit card debt into our home loan, so we literally paid off every cent of it and told each other we're never going to go into credit card debt again. And since that day, and it was tough, we have never not paid off a credit card in full at the end of every month. Yeah, we almost always pay them off, too. And it's like just the best feeling to be able to look at that stuff and be like, oh, wow, I'm not dying here. Well, yes, and to be able to kind of give the finger to a credit card company and say, I'm using you for what you're supposed to be used for, which is to pay for things easier, but to not mortgage my life away with ridiculous interest rates because I'm buying stuff I don't need and can't pay for. Right. Thanks for the sky, Miles. Chumps. Yeah, for real. All right, so that's bad debt. They're all kinds of bad debt, but debt is not the worst thing in the world to have. What's bad is delinquent debt right there is, like you were saying, I think good debt to have if you live in a consumer based economy right. That kind of makes the world go around. But yes, delinquent debt is across the board bad debt for almost everybody involved. Yeah. And about 10% of the debt in the US is delinquent debt. See, this is where I saw a major drop, actually. Okay, so is it not that high anymore? No, man. Like, by half. Wow. Yeah. Again, I found Q two of 2016, but in this article that was written in 2012, it says 1.6 trillion is delinquent. I saw in 2016, it was 589,000,000,000. Oh, well, that's in the right direction. And then about three quarters of that was super delinquent, I think they call it. Seriously delinquent. I like super delinquent more or way delinquent. Oh, my God. Which means three months, 90 days late, or more. Probably not in all cases, but probably delinquent to the point where you're not going to pay it. Right. But as anyone who's ever owned a bill longer than 90 days knows, banks and lenders of any sort will just be like, here, collection agency, go take this. And if you can get something out of them, we'll split what you get. Right? Yeah. And you're in the cycle because collection agencies, that's their business, right? Lenders lend money. Collection agencies try to go get money that's owed. Right. They're like a different ilk altogether, and there's actually different kinds of levels of that, as we'll see. But you're in the machine, and your life is going to be made unpleasant by the people who are trying to collect on those bills, right? Yeah. What the Rolling Jubilee, which we're talking about today, what that does is they have entered the debt collection industry, but rather than trying to collect onto debt, they are buying debt and forgiving it. Yeah. So here's what can happen. Back up a second. Let's say you owe a ton of money on a bad credit card, and you have been delinquent for a little while, and you call up that credit card company and you say, you know what? I want to pay this. I spent this money, but your interest rate is really bad, and can you work with me on this interest rate and get it down to a point? And they'll stop you right there and say, oh, sir or ma'am, I'm sorry, but we don't own your debt anymore. And you go, huh? And you say, no, we sold that debt to an investor. And you go, huh? And if you don't know that this is how this works, then, well, you didn't pay attention during the mortgage crisis because that's basically what that was, bundling debt to an investor. Bundling loans mortgages bad debt into securities that are then sold to those investors who buy it really cheap, with the idea that they can then go out and collect on a portion of that to make a big profit. Right. We'll get into the details a little more in a minute, but the Jubilee itself, the idea of buying debt, entering the industry and buying debt, but rather than trying to make a profit, like you were saying, but just to forgive that debt so that the people who owe the money don't have that burden any longer, that is the whole point behind it. And if you're like, Wait a minute, wait a minute, this sounds like some sort of plot out of maybe Occupy Wall Street. Well, then you would be 100% correct, because at Zuccotti Park in, I think, 2011, the idea for doing this was bandied about and there was a guy named Thomas Gorker who was there at one of these conversations, and he went on to found this thing called Strike Debt, which is an offshoot organization from Occupy Wall Street, and Strike Debt has this project called Rolling Jubilee. So it's a direct outcropping of Occupy Wall Street. Yeah. This is in 2012 when Strike Debt was finally launched, and the whole deal with Occupy Wall Street was basically protesters getting together and saying, well, you'll bail out banks to the tune of billions and trillions of dollars, but the banks don't then turn in turn say, well, we're going to forgive consumer debt as well, since we were bailed out. They'll bail out the big banks, but the consumer is still in big trouble. And so the idea of the Rolling Jubilee and Project Strike Debt was a bailout of the 99% by the 99%. Yeah. And there's one facet to that lopsided bailout situation, too, that I think you left out, which is the banks are getting the bailouts from the government, but the government's getting that money from the taxpayers. And very frequently those taxpayers who actually gave the money to bail out the banks are the same ones that the banks are turning the thumb screws on. Sure. So they're basically saying, thanks for the bailout money, give us the money you actually owe us individually now. Yeah. And, yeah, Occupy had a big problem with that, and I think for a good reason, frankly, if I can go on record for saying that. Yeah, so I agree, the Rolling Jubilee, as far as structure goes, and we're not going to get too much in the weeds on this, but they have a board of directors and then volunteers who are not paid. Ascent. Originally they had brokers, they sell brokers and web developers who have been paid but well below market value. They're not completely donating their time in all cases, but they're getting paid attendance for this cause of what they normally would. Right. Like pre wrapped cooler, sandwiches, money, you know what I mean? Not even like a recognizable brand of sandwich that you buy in like a bodega or convenience store, just somebody's last name with a poorly drawn logo next to it that's over printed so it's smudgy. You can't even really see what the logo is supposed to be. That is the kind of sandwiches these people are able to buy with the money they're getting from the Rolling Jubilee. Yeah. There is no discernible difference between the meat and the bread. They've just coalesced into one lumpy moist unit. Yeah, I know. I grew up so many people out there with that word combination. Moist. Yeah. Moist units. Moist lumpy units. Is that what I said? Wow. Should we take a break so soon after moist lumpy unit? Yeah. All right, let's do that. And we'll come back and talk a little bit about the origins of the word Jubilee. All right, Josh. I kind of thought Jubilee meant jamboree because I'm a big dumb dumb sometimes. Hey, I'm right there with you. But it's not true. It actually comes from the Bible, specifically the book of Leviticus. I'm not sure which one. I used to know all those in order I could rattle them off. Genesis the third book of the Bible, I think. Right, I know. Genesis, exodus. Leviticus. Narrative. Joshua judges ruth first and second. Samuel Ruth of Ruth. Yeah. Some of that stuff really just comes right back into my pea brain. I didn't know that. So, anyway, in Leviticus and the Old Testament, jubilee is actually an English variation of the Hebrew word jobl, J-O-B-E-L which means ramshorn. And this is how you would blow in this horn and announce the signal of the year of the Jubilee. Right. Which came, I saw, every 49 years, apparently. This article says every 50 years. Okay. Roughly every half of a century. Let's just say they blow the rampshorn and that was a big deal. Sure. So according to Leviticus leviticus 25, I guess, which is some section, the 25th section or verse? Or what chapter? Chapter 25. Is it chapter? Okay. Yeah. It's chapter, then verse. Okay. So the 25th chapter of Leviticus basically says, here's how you do Jubilee, and everyone who is a member of the House of Israel, all the Israelites right, are to have their debts forgiven. So if you are an indentured servant, you are freed. Yeah. Or if you said, I'm a farmer, but I can't pay this debt. I lost the farm on a bunch of magic beans. Because before the common era, people thought magic beans were a real thing. You would give that person who sold you the magic beans your farm as collateral, basically, and you would lose the farm. But during Jubilee year, you could get that farm back. You were given that farm back, restored your land, like all debts were forgiven. Yeah. It's basically God saying, I'm a liberal hippie every 50 years, we're going to wipe the slate clean. Here's what we don't know for sure if this really happened, right. You can tell, like the Israelites were like, oh yeah, good idea. Yahweh, that's a great one. Nice idea, god. And then just kind of didn't bring it up again yet. Do you think he noticed? Right. So we're not sure if it's that actually happened, but there are records in history of other cultures that did this sort of clean slate tradition. They have records under Hammerabi in Babylonia, in Egypt, under Tulumi, and even the Rosetta Stone has a Jubilee proclamation recorded from 196 BCE. Right. So it did happen. Think about this, Chuck. That is really heartening. That pretty early on, I guess, in the agrarian system, once people settle down and all of a sudden you had like, surpluses and income inequality and economic strata. You also had the idea that debt should be forgiven too. It was a natural outcropping of that, because that wouldn't exist prior to those things. Because if you're a hunter gatherer, you can't go into debt. It's not possible. You're responsible for your own food gathering and all that. So the idea that it's kind of naturally emerged out of it, I find that heartening. It gives me faith in humanity again, or at least humanity from hundreds and thousands of years ago. Right. So the idea of those Jubilee was, like we said, once every 49 or 50 years, the idea of a Rolling Jubilee. The word rolling just means it's an ongoing thing. And so therefore they named it Rolling Jubilee, which just to me still sounds like a party on a farm with people selling whippets out of plastic bags. Right on ecstasy. Hence the rolling part. That's right. So this is how it works, right? You got the Rolling Jubilee started. I think they started with a benefit concert, and they managed to raise like 500 grand pretty quickly back in 2012. And what they did was they looked around and they identified how this was happening. They knew that there were people who were in debt and that the people that they owed the money to weren't even collecting any longer, that what had developed was a secondary consumer debt market. Right. And you kind of went over it a little bit. I think it bears, like, fleshing out. Yeah. I mean, it's a little hard to wrap your head around if you're not in this world. No, but I don't mean if you live on a different planet, but in the world of finance, if you're rolling on a farm, you may have a hard time wrapping your head around this. Yeah. But the basis of it is this, right. So you go to a lender and you say, Lend me some money. And if you fall behind on your payments after a certain amount of time, I think what did you say, three months? Well, it kind of varies, but sure. It could be you have reached this level, like a new level of delinquency. And banks say, that's it, you're done. We're not collecting from you anymore. You're a loss and we're writing you off. And they do this actually, because back in the 1980s, up to 1994, the savings and loan crisis, which were savings and loan banks were the place you went to go get a mortgage in America. Yeah. And because they were over regulated from the interest rates they could charge, the banks started engaging in risky investment behavior because in that sense, they were under regulated and they lost a bunch of money. Well, one of the outcroppings of the san, the loan crisis was that there was some really shady accounting going on and it was actually one of the early bailouts. It was like $125,000,000,000 bailout, which in 1009 that was an astounding amount of money. Trump changed today. Sure it is, but at the time, that was a huge deal. So it was a taxpayer bailout of these banks that had engaged in risky behavior and stopped me, if this is starting to sound familiar, but it was largely because they were able to get away with it. And the problem got to be so big because the accountants were keeping these bad assets on the books. So debt to you is an asset to the bank. It's something that they've got money they can collect on from you. Right. But these delinquent assets that they had were being kept on the books to make it look like that. The banks were a lot more flush than they were. So after the savings and loan crisis, the government stepped in and said, you guys can't do that anymore. If you have a delinquent account on your books after, say, 90 days, you have to write it off. But you are the banks and we love you and we want you to be happy and prosperous at all times, so we're going to give you a tax deduction for that too. And they say, well, okay, what do we have to do after we write it off? And the government says, do whatever you want. Sell it, we don't care. But you have to write it off and you can take a tax deduction and then if you want to sell it too. And that's where the secondary consumer debt market was born. Yes. And if you think that sounds like a pretty sweetheart deal, it gets even better. Because sometimes when they bundle this debt together and sell it to people who think they can go out or firms usually who can go out and make money by just recovering, like we said, just a portion of the stuff of these debts, they will then do the loan deal with that firm as well and make an additional amount of money as a lender. Yeah, they finance the purchase of that debt that they're selling to the person. Crazy, man. So weird. How things work in this country. Weird. It's one way to put it for sure. You said that they bundled this stuff, right, like they did with mortgage backed securities. They bundled mortgages together and then sliced them up and sold basically them as shares. Right. This is a little different, but there's also bundling going on. But rather than just sell each debt individually, the banks will take, say, all of the ones that they're doing that day or that week or that month or whatever that they've written off and they'll bundle it together into what's called a portfolio and then they'll sell that portfolio for pennies on the dollar. Yeah. We're talking like you can spend like $1 to buy up to $32 worth of debt, let's say. Yeah, I think that's about as good as you can get. That's the best I've seen, I've seen anywhere from $0.10 on the dollar to one to 32 ratio. Yeah, that's a great on one hand it's super cheap, but it's very risky still because what you're doing again is buying debt that you may or may not be able to collect on. Right, exactly. And so the whole industry is based on the idea that you'll be able to collect some of the debts that are in this portfolio and that you'll probably only be able to collect on a portion of the debt that you do collect on. So some out of the gate, the people just aren't going to pay you. No matter how much you call them and harass them, they're just not going to pay that debt. And if it's small enough that it doesn't make any sense to spend the money taking them to court, there's just nothing you can do about that. If they're like, I'm on year six of this debt being reported on my credit, I'm not about to pay now because once they make it to year seven, you guys can't do anything about it any longer except to call me, they're not going to pay. But there's going to be some in that portfolio where either the people just want to pay to get you to stop calling if the debt is big enough that you could conceivably take them to court or for other reasons. So there's going to be some in there that you can collect on and then when you do collect on those, you're going to collect less usually than the full face value of the debt. Right? Yeah. They'll offer a deal, let's say, like, hey, you're behind on your debt. And what they're usually doing is trying to target people who were maybe in financial trouble and are now pulling themselves out of financial trouble rather than going after the debt that they, like you said, just probably have no shot at getting. But now, hey, you got a job again, you're making a little dough, pay us back like 50% and we'll call it square. And the people think, well, that sounds like a good deal to me. I'll just go ahead and take that 50% deal, right, exactly. Sometimes, apparently, people are like, wow, that was a really generous thing you're doing here by offering me to absolve my debt for just half of it. But again, those people may have paid $0.03 on the dollar for that debt, but you're about to give them $0.50 on the dollar, so they're making out like bandits. And again, there's something slippery and ill like and clammy about the fact that you're having to deal with these people who you never even borrowed the money from. You don't know these people from Adam, if you'll forgive the biblical thing. Right. And now they're inspiring the sense of gratitude in you for just charging you for 50% of that debt that they had nothing to do with originally. They just bought on some secondary market. Yes. The whole thing is slippery to me because on one hand, like, targeting poor people who maybe lost their job due to circumstances beyond their control, it's not going to help anyone to keep them poor. It's not going to help the nation or the economy. But then there are also people who were very irresponsible with their money and bought too much stuff and said, you know what, I don't want to pay for this. I'll file for bankruptcy, or I don't care about my credit rating any longer, I'll just go ahead and not pay it. Sure. The thing is, though, is for years and years now, the second group of people that you pointed out have been used to excuse mistreatment of that first group. Correct. You know what I'm saying? Like, there's no real separation. It's like, oh, they're both debtors. Unfortunately, they all deserve it. Yeah. And here's the deal with the Rolling Jubilee. Like we said, the whole idea is they will try and purchase these debt packages just like these firms do. I think they gave an example of one of the firms, like, there's one called OnCore Capital Group, and here's just one example. I think in 2012, they spent $47 million to buy $1.1 billion worth of debt to make a lot of money on, and their aim and what they did in that case was recovered about three times what they invested through these settlements with the debtor. So let's say they made 3.2 or three and a half billion dollars off that $47 million investment. Oh, no, they would have made like 150,000,000. They just bought a billion dollars for the debt. Okay. Profit. Okay. Yeah. But still, I mean, that's substantial for one quarter. Yeah. For basically just saying, hey, we'll take over the harassing phone calls from here, everybody. Yeah. And they basically like, the banks have given up on this because they would have to spend way too much money to not become bankers any longer and to become bankersdetcollection agencies. So they've just given up on trying to collect. Well, these other people are like, no, we do this. This is what we do. So we'll take it. Exactly. And again, they're required banks or lenders are required by law to write off delinquent accounts after a certain number of days. So even if they wanted to keep collecting on it, they can't. Yeah, that's right. So with the Rolling Jubilee and we'll talk about a little bit how they do this, but they buy this debt, forgive it, like we said, but it's not like if you're someone who is in trouble, you can't contact the Rolling Jubilee and say, please buy my debt, because it's all lumped together. They do help people and families, but a lot of times they don't even know who these people are. Sometimes they do, and if they have their personal information, they will then contact them and say, your debt is forgiven. But because it's a Rolling Jubilee, what we would like you to do now is donate a little bit of money back to the cause because your debt is forgiven. And I wonder what their numbers are for stuff like that. Extraordinarily low for people donating then afterward. Yeah. So not only donating, but getting back in touch, apparently, I read this interview with Thomas Gorky and they asked him that very question, what kind of response are you getting from people? And so they've got everybody's personal information, they just don't have it until they buy the portfolio. Right? Yeah. So they'll send everyone in that portfolio a letter saying, here's the amount of debt that you no longer owe. We bought your debt, it's being abolished. And I think most people are like, Is this a scam? Are you trying to get my Social Security number? So they're just totally ignoring this letter and they say, no, we're the Roland Jubilee. Right? It doesn't help matters. No, it doesn't, because they're like the Boy Scouts. Right. But regardless of whether those people get back in touch, regardless of whether they donate to the cause or not, their debt is still forgiven. Because the Rolling Jupiter or Strike Debt makes this point that this is not like their goal isn't to decide, well, who deserves this? They can't make that judgment because when they buy a portfolio, they have no idea who the individuals are in there. They just know that these people owe money and that the likelihood, since they're delinquent on their debt, that they either are experiencing a time when they're down on their luck or are getting out of a time when they are down on their luck. That is enough. That's good enough for Strike Debt to justify buying their debt and abolishing it. Well, yeah. And not only that, but Rolling Jubilee and Strike Debt's goal isn't. They're not saying, we're going to solve the consumer debt crisis, or even we're going to solve, when we'll talk about student loans more in a minute, but we're going to solve the student loan problem. They're literally. Just saying we're going to solve a tiny fraction of this, but what our real aim is to raise awareness, because you can protest all you want, but you simply can't ignore a real program like this. Right, exactly. Because it gets a lot of press, too. Sure. So let's take one more break, Chuck, and then we'll come back with more on this. Okay, we're back. So apparently, Chuck, initially they were really worried about how they were going to be able to kind of come into this industry because it was a pretty tight knit industry. Yeah. Like, when a bank goes to sell debt, it's not like they place a one ad and say, well, who's out there? They know who's out there, they know who these firms are, and they have trusted, which is kind of a funny way to say it, working relationships with these firms. Right. So they were thinking like, well, we need to have people on the inside buying debt for us. It's the only way they're going to ever let us do this. We have to sneak around and do it. The way this article puts it is they had sheep and wolves clothing buying debt for them on behalf of this Rolling Jubilee. Right. So, again, this article was written in 2012. Apparently, that did not pan out at all. Yeah, I would say so. As they got more into it, they almost became amazed at the willingness of this secondary debt industry to sell to them, knowing that they were going to abolish it or not caring to find out whether they were abolishing it or who they were, what they were doing. Which means that's interesting. Yeah. This industry is so inscrupulous, it doesn't even look out for itself. I think as they got further into it, too, and this may have actually developed since 2012 as well, this industry is spread even more. I think it's a little less tight knit than it once was. There's a lot of brokers that are set up where they're the ones that are dealing with the banks and then turning around and selling it on behalf of the banks and then taking a little cut of whatever the portfolio goes for. Right. But then there's also, like, websites that do the same thing. Just like you have an online stockbroker, there are websites where you or I, Chuck, can put together $1,000 and go buy a portfolio that was worth, like ten to $30,000. Yeah. So if you want to really stick it to your fellow man, go do that. Go start doing that, because it's something you can do online now. That is correct. All right, so will this work, is the big question. It certainly will work with awareness. But as far as raw numbers go, as of today, which is what, october 4 5th? It's the fourth October 4, 2017. They have raised $701,317. This is a few hours ago, so it's more than that. Probably by now, and they have forgiven about $32 million total to date, which, like we said, is a not even a fraction. What's below a fraction? Infantismal amount. An infantizable amount? Did I say infantizable? I think it just made up a word, but it kind of works. It's so infantizable, it's invisible. That's right. It's such a small amount that it makes no dent in the problem, really, except for those individuals and families who are like, oh, well, this really worked out for me. But $32 million is raising awareness, which is a good thing. Oh, yeah. Again, there was a huge thing in 2012 when they first announced it. It was everywhere. Right. Everybody was talking about it. They got another bump in 2014. I can't remember what happened. But then I think either this year or last year, they made the rounds with Media again by buying debt from something called Corinthian Colleges, which is a for profit college, like company corporation. Yeah, I saw some of that. And Thomas Gorky called them. He said that they were, quote, the worst of the worst, and they have just tons of lawsuits against them for just all manner of activities. Yeah. And the Rolling Jubilee got something like three and a half million dollars worth of debt from them. And this would be student loan debt. Yes. And the reason that they were able to do student loan debt is because this is a for profit college. So this wouldn't have been federal student loan debt. Yeah. Like 90% of student loans are from the federal government, and the federal government does not sell their debt. No. So if you have a student loan through the federal government, the Rolling Jubilee is never going to be able to help you. No. At least not directly like that. But that also raises one of the longstanding criticisms against this idea. If you are against the entire predatory lending idea of the banking industry in the secondary market, the whole thing, this whole Icky mess. Right. You're going to criticize Strike Debt for contributing to it. They're throwing money into it. Sure. Even though they're, like, abolishing debt, they're still giving money for it. Right. Yeah. And so Strike, that's whole thing is like, hey, man, the level that we're operating on is so small that we couldn't possibly affect the market. Yeah. Like, in their wildest dreams, they could affect the market, such where they could drive up the price and really compete as a top dog in the industry and maybe even drive some of those other firms out of business. And that will never, ever happen. No. And they also point out that banks have to sell this stuff anyway, or they have to get rid of it anyway. By law, they have to write it off. So this debt was going to be sold one way or another. And they also try to buy debt at that really lucrative for the debt collectors, where you have been more than 90 days delinquent for about a year. So you probably went through that rough patch like you were talking about, Chuck, but now the likelihood that maybe you got a job again and you're starting to get your debt under control and are therefore amenable to an offer of just paying half yeah. That's the kind of debt they're trying to buy, because those are the people who are most vulnerable to this kind of industry. Right. So they're saying all this is going to happen anyway, and we're not affecting the debt that people are paying, and we're not really helping the banking industry any more than they would have been helped anyway. Right. The thing that sticks to me, though, is, and I couldn't find this, did you see if they bought that debt from Corinthian Colleges directly? Oh, I don't know. Because if so, then they were paying money to Corinthian Colleges. Right. And I could see that criticism just being there, because Corinthian College or any for profit university isn't required to write off bad debts, so they wouldn't be forced to do that if they bought from them directly. They also work with a lender. That's just a guess. I don't know. I don't want to speak to that. Well, I saw this one site that basically was teaching individual investors how to go get into this, and one of the things they suggested was go hang out at small claims court, and when a company comes in and they're taking some debt or to court to collect on a debt, just go up to them after court and be like, hey, let me handle this. Just sell me all your debts, bundle them together, and I'll buy it from you. So people do go directly to companies that have, like, bad debts on their books, so it's possible they did go to Corinthian College. I didn't see that one one way or the other. Very interesting. And then there was one other thing that was kind of an early concern that apparently didn't pan out, and that was that whether or not the government could consider this debt abolishment as income for the person who owed the debt and would therefore owe taxes on it. And so apparently, Occupy Wall Street Strike Debt got with some lawyers, and the lawyers said, it is our professional opinion that this would not qualify as income, and so these people should not owe any tax burden. And so far, no one's gotten a tax bill for their tax being abolished by Strike Debt. It's so convoluted. It's a little convoluted. Do you have anything else? No, I think that's it. Man let's see. If you want to know more about the Rolling Jubilee, go check out this article on how stuff works. It's a good one. Grab your banjo. Yeah. And since keep an eye out eventually for just a larger debt episode, because it is interesting and weird. And since I said weird, it's time for Chuck administrative details. Beautiful. This is part two where we thank people for their lovely gifts and the kindnesses that they bestow upon us. All right. I'm going to start with Emily Winfield. She sent me a reformed Bedweather's Society patch. I'm on record as a late Bedwetter and I've always championed people not being ashamed of that. So apparently Emily was. And she made a patch. It's really cool. That's amazing. I got to see that one. I didn't see it. Let's see. Jackson Harder sent us a jigsaw puzzle postcard. I appreciate that. Thanks, Jackson. David Velasquez and Samantha Penna sent another wedding invite. Oh, yeah. Mazeltop. Nick Sokol sent us a bunch of great stuff from Korea. Thank you very much for that. Jonathan Beale sent us handmade copper flasks from his company, Sertodo.com. S-E-R-T-O-D-O. Stuff you should drink copper flasks. They are dutiful. Yes, terry M. Has a daughter named Chuck who wrote us a very kind thank you note about the HIV episode. And we want to say, Terry, we hope your friend's partner is doing well. Absolutely. Chris west of Carlton Brewery in New Jersey. Well, he sent us beer. Thank you, Ryan. And Chloe sent us a Montreal postcard. Thank you, carolyn Cross. She was very moved by the Ms episode because her mom had Ms. So she sent some sponge candy from Buffalo, New York to make me feel better about my friend Billy. Nice. That was very sweet. It was. Connor. T send us some candy. Send us some smarties and a nice letter. Thanks. Counter. T Sara Van Dang or Van Dang. D-O-N-G-E sent us her book. I love love Walla Walla. It's her book about loving walla. Walla? Washington. Alexander Pepe. Thanks for the thank you note. And you're welcome for helping you kick your Diet Coke habit. That's right. Julia Deckman sent us well, sent some hand painted pictures for me. It was pictures of my dear departed dogs Buckley and Lauren for you. She sent you one charleston Hospitality, which was a painting of the Belmont and Queen Street Grocery. And for Jerry sent her one of a pink Pionee. And you can go to Bybyjdeckman.com to check out her work. And since then, we have paid her jesus so sad. Paid her for portraits of Lauren. And we're about to commission another one for the wizard. So the core four will be represented by Julie Deckman's art in our household. Nice work, Carolyn. And I'm not even going to attempt your last name, Carolyn. I'm just going to spell it. S-W-I-S-Z. That's sweet stick. Put that together with A.com and it will take you to her site, which has her awesome Zen featuring us called The Dread. Appropriately enough, Jordan Pearson from Canada sent us some Canadian chips, lace ketchup and old Dutch ketchup chips. Sans gluten is what it says, because it's French Canada. And also, Jordan had the nicest handwriting I think I've ever seen. Yeah, thanks a lot for that. Nice handwriting. These days that will take you far. Yes, it will help in the past. Let's see. And then Catherine from Bella drone sent us some CDs. Thanks a lot for that, Catherine. Matthew Grubb sent us his first children's book called Tommy P. Tinker and the Super Duper rare 1892 bottle cap. Nice. And then we want to thank Max from Chirps Chips, who sent us some Chirps Chips. Remember in our cricket episode? Well, eating crickets, basically, we mentioned chirps and they heard it and they said, here, guys, try this. Did you try them yet? I have yet to try it. I think we should try it, like on Facebook Live or something like that. That's a good idea. Jake Moore. And that is with one o sinuses hot sauce. Thank you very much. Is the name of the hot sauce. I'm not just being cheeky. And then that's all I've got written down. You got any more? I just got one more. Matthew from Minnesota, and this is joke book, the river of Wahhaha. Great. I love a good joke book. Great. Well, thanks everybody for sending us stuff. And if you want to send us stuff, we always are grateful for it. You can get in touch with us via Twitter. I'm at Josh Clark, and the official handle is S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstnow or charleswchuckbryant. You can send us all an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
02bd41f0-3b0e-11eb-947e-332135b053ee | How Cleft Lips and Palates Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-cleft-lips-and-palates-work | Cleft lips and palates are common birth defects, but for the kids who have them (and their parents), its no small matter: Years of surgeries, therapy, and possibly lifelong health issues, not to mention the teasing that comes along with looking different. | Cleft lips and palates are common birth defects, but for the kids who have them (and their parents), its no small matter: Years of surgeries, therapy, and possibly lifelong health issues, not to mention the teasing that comes along with looking different. | Tue, 25 May 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=145, tm_isdst=0) | 38820967 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant, and Jerry is literally right there. And I'm Chuck. I want to going to start something. I actually have a jar at my studio at home. Square jar, kind of, but it's the use of the word literally jar. I'm trying to break myself of that, except when it really, truly makes sense. When it literally makes sense to use that word. Okay. Like, in this instance, Jerry is literally sitting right here. So do you have a problem with that, with misusing that word, like, so many people? Yeah. No, not necessarily. It's overuse. That's what bothers me. What about you mean, is she donating to the jar at all, or she just, like is literally the dumbest idea? I don't think she has an opinion on this one. Okay. Yeah. She just spends the money. Well, I keep the jar at home. I can get money out of it when I need to. It's more just a ritual of, like, punishing myself, calling out, that's good, that I'm doing something stupid. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic. Basically. Yeah. This is Stuff you should know. And we are talking Chuck today. How are you doing, by the way? I'm great. Good. We're in the same room. It's still a little weird. Getting used to it. Still? Yes. I went to a baseball game last night. Oh, my God. And that was weird. It was great. And once we got on our seats, they're fully just selling seats, but where we bought seats, there just happened to be no one kind of around us, which is good. So you're at a Brave game? Yeah, we do Brave game, but they're supposed to be policing and saying, unless you're in your seats eating and drinking, you should be wearing a mask. And so we, the four of us wore masks in and out in the bathrooms and the food lines and all that stuff, but nobody else was. Well, I mean, we're in Atlanta. There's a lot of jerks. Yeah. In Atlanta. Yes. It is what it is. We took care of ourselves, and it's fun. Yeah, it was fun. Well, that's good. I'm glad you had a good time. Walk off homer. Oh, yeah. Bottom of the night, man. I've only seen, like, one of those in my life. Wow. Great game. Yeah, it was cool. Who do we play? We played the Metz, and our star player, Akuna, blasted one in the bottom of the 9th, 1st pitch. It was just great. I thought Freddie Freeman was our star player. I mean, they're one and two. They're neck and neck on any given day. I got you. Yeah. I wouldn't want to be number two, you know what I'm saying? But yes. No, of course not. That's why I'm number two. No, that's not true. You, me, Jerry, all tied for number one. Okay, but anyway, it's just a little jarring to be among a lot of people again. But it also comes back quickly, like, oh, wait, I spent the first 49 years of my life among people, took a year off. Now I'm back in the swing. That's good. I'm hoping to get back there myself. Yeah, you should. At any rate, this is still a little weird. So we're talking today about clefs, and most people, when they think about clef, they think about cleft lips. But there's a lot more to that. Or treble clef. Sure. That's a little different. There's an extra letter in this one that I'm talking about at the end. How is that spelled? Is that just treble clef? No, clef. Oh, there's no t treble clef. Clef. I didn't take piano. That's okay. All right. But no, that's a clef. This is a cleft. Okay. A cleft. In this case, it's a division. It's a trench. It's a void, I guess you could say. Yes. And that is what we're talking about is a very common, actually fairly common birth defect. That's right. It occurs in the embryonic stage, and a child is born with part of their lip and or part of their palate. The roof of their mouth is another way to put it missing. It's just not there. Unjoined. Yes. And we should probably say right at the beginning, this is a birth defect, but it is a visual difference is what we call things like this. It is not a disability, although there are many complications we'll go over, but it's a visual difference. And the term hair lip is not something you should use. It was used for many years, even by doctors, to describe this condition. But it is not a good, nice term, so just stop saying it. Yeah. I don't know anybody who says, I don't think so, but some people just may not know. Sure. That's what it was called. Right. And when doctors use a term you can sort of understand, like somebody falling into that trap. Sure. But it's not a term that we use anymore. No. And I think that was a good thing to say. All right, so the COA is finished. So like we're saying, like you said, it is a birth effect, but it is just a visible difference. That's it. It is tied in with some syndrome, some genetic syndromes. But plenty of people, I think, in the United States, somewhere between one and every 700 births comes with some sort of cleft, either a cleft lip, a cleft palette, or both. And that's it. That can be it. That's the only thing that is different about that child. There's no developmental problems. Like you said, it's not disability. There's nothing else. That's it. And what's fascinating to me, I had no idea about this, but I never really thought about it is that the kid with the cleft lip or the cleft palette, their palate or their lip just never finished forming. Yeah. There's a symmetry generally running down the center of your nose and the two sides of the lip. The stuff forms when you're in the womb very early on. Actually, I think the lip is first and then the palate, but they join together, and in this case, they just don't join. Yeah. You know the little bit under your nose joining the bottom of your nose? Your top lip. Yeah. filtrum okay. And that is where your lips join together. Your upper lip joins together. Right. And that is where your mustache can part. Yeah. You got a little mustache part. I have a mustache part because mine but some guys do you shave yours in just for looks, or is it naturally it just kind of parts naturally. Hair doesn't quite grow right there, but if you're like a Bert Reynolds type or Wilford Brimley, you can just grow it over the whole what's it called? Phil Trum. Philtram. P-H-I-L-T-R-U-M filtrum. Which would be a really great nerdy boy's name. Phil Trim. Yeah. And his brother Baxter. Second thought, though, don't name your son Pilgrim. So when you are in the embryonic stage, like you said very early on, the lip forms in, like, the fourth to 7th week. And very frequently, woman might not even know she's pregnant at that time. And that lips for me. Yes. Already, I saw a really cool BBC documentary sequence, basically, where they took 3D images of a baby in utero and basically turned it into a flipbook video showing the faceforming. Your nostrils are giant when you're forming, and they're, like, on the top of your forehead, they move down, and each nostril is part of a tissue plate. And then the bottom jaw and your bottom lip are part of a third tissue plate. So you have three forming and coming together. And as they form, new cells form new skin, and they just kind of move into place. If you have a cleft palette again, that final meeting in the middle just never happened. Yeah. So when you watch something like that, are you amazed at the miracle of life or are you disgusted? Amazed at the miracle of life. Okay. Yeah, for sure. Because when you think of nostrils on the top of the head, it's nothing. It's neat, actually. It is super cool. Yeah. For sure. So miracle of life is what I'm going with. So there are different ways this can happen. Your palette on the top of your mouth is in a couple of sections. The one closer to the front is the hard palate, and the rear is the soft palate. And if you have a cleft palate, it can be in the soft part. The hard part, it can split both. Yeah. Because if you rub your tongue top of your mouth don't do that. The front part is bony. That's your hard palate. If you go further back, it's really kind of tough to do, but you can go. What? You got to stop. You don't like that? No, I don't think anyone does. Oh, really? You think some people like hearing that? I think it's kind of pleasant. Anybody who like that, shout out, I want to hear you. I think there's some kind of a pressure point in your soft palette too, for is it migraines or something? I remember hearing about, like, pressing your thumb into your soft palate to do something. Ice cream headache? No, it wasn't that. It was something else. You can carry an ice cream headache. Maybe multifunctional. Anyway, in the very back, you have just a muscle. Like, your hard palate is boney with some skin covering. It further back, it's like muscle with skin covering. And that's your soft palate. It feels like a little rib cage up there. And you can have this division that's cleft in either part or both, right? That's correct. Yeah, that's what I said. So an incomplete cleft is missing. It's a little notch, and it's missing from the middle of the upper lift. A complete cleft is all the way through into the nose. And then with the lip, it's always the upper lip. But it's usually off to one side or the other, I think, because of that symmetry and how it forms. Yes. And it's always the upper lip because it only affects the two top plates of flesh that are forming that from your upper lip and your face and those forehead nostrils that come back down to your nostril area. That's right. God, it's just like old times. Cherry is literally dropping food out of her mouth onto the table. Is she eating me so much? It's amazing. No, but it's so funny. I don't know. I think there might be a little all day and she chooses to eat when she's in here. Yeah. I think she should take a break. I think so too. All right. That's a good opening, Salvo. So we'll be back after that. All right. I think I might have missed you, Salvo. I don't think so. Is that right? Yeah, I associate that with, like, a Tiffany or Cannon going off. Oh, sure. Fanfare. Yeah. All right. I think you used it correctly. All right. It was clef that you got wrong. Yes. Back to clefs. They are developmental defects, like we said very early, and what causes them? Genetics can play a part. I think if you're a parent with a cleft, either a palate or lip, you have a two to percent eight chance that your kid may if you have a biological child, and then that goes up. If you have siblings or if you have your parents and it's sort of passed down, I think that number can go up to, like, 20% or 30%. Yeah, it can. If your parent has a sibling that has a cleft as well. The chance of your kid having a cleft is definitely increased, and then it can keep going up depending on whether or not your parent has a genetic syndrome that they're passing along. Right. I think there's something like 300 to 400 different genetic syndromes that are associated with cleft lip or cleft palate. And together we should say they're both called orofacial clefts. Oh, yeah. We didn't say that, did we? No. And I've also seen it abbreviated as CLP. That seems to be kind of like the shorthand for it, because doctors don't like to write full word. No, they don't. And their handwriting is just terrible. And then I've also seen them called affectionately as clefties. Oh, that's nice. We'll talk about the acceptance of facial differences if you have a cleft or have friends or family members. And that's a big, big part of it. And I think something like cleftees might be by way of embracing that. Sure. So there are some other things that could be risk factors and increase the risk of all kinds of birth defects, certainly including clefs. And one of them is if you're smoking and drinking booze while you're pregnant, one of the reasons alcohol affects any kind of birth effect is because it disrupts the absorption of folic acid. And that's another reason, if you don't have enough folic acid, that's why pregnant women take extra. It's a natural form of B nine. It's a vitamin. And I think in the late ninety s, the FDA said you got to start putting extra folic acid in like all kinds of common foods. I remember that sort your recyclables start taking folic acid. Yeah. And just like put it in bread and pasta and grains and cereals and things that people eat. A lot of it's naturally found in sunflower seeds and fruits and beans and peanuts and stuff like that. So you want the folic acid. I think if you're pregnant, they recommend you take at least 600 mg per day. And then if you're just a regular old non pregnant woman, 400 mg a day. Yes, if you are in your reproductive stage or age. Right. But you need folic acid anyway. Right. Why not? Just as a person? Sure. Yeah. I eat a lot of bread. I get a lot of folic acid. So smoking and drinking is one, diabetes is another, right? Yeah. That's a really big risk factor. Diabetes and obesity both seem to be correlated to increased risk of class. I'm not sure what the incidence is for women with diabetes, but it is an increased risk. And then there's also a couple of epilepsy medications that increase your risk. The thing about all this is there is no definitive understanding or explanation of why class form of what it is that causes some children's lips just not to join together or their palates. They're not fused together at that last final stage. It seems to be multifactorial is what they call it, where there's just a bunch of different factors and also, in addition to genetics, like your parents having one or your parents having a sibling with one, depending on your race, actually, your risk is increased. Apparently, it's far more common among Asian people and Native Americans. I think it's the highest among Native Americans. Something like 3.6 out of every thousand births, I believe. Oh, boy. Math with Josh, too, among Asian people, it's the lowest among African Americans. Yeah. I think Chinese babies are more commonly diagnosed. Is it diagnosis or just what do you even call that? No, you're diagnosed. Okay. But, I mean, it's, like, very easy diagnosis. Like, okay, your child has a cleft flip. Right. But what's interesting, Chuck, is with the cleft palate, you can have a cleft palate, but it not be visible. It can actually be hidden. That's called the submucosis cleft palate, and you might never be diagnosed with it because there may be no problem with it or that arise from it, like with other clusters, like we'll talk about. But that's kind of rare, from what I understand. Right. And the palette is less visible anyway, as opposed to the lip. And if you see any kind of photo image of clef palette, it's usually a doctor taking a picture of someone with their mouth wide open, kind of tilting their head back so you can get a good angle on it. Right. Health problems that are associated with clefts are they can be numerous. It seems like everything is something that can be overcome, but there are challenges nonetheless. And there are challenges that especially can just make a kid, when they're growing up, feel not so great about themselves. So that's a big, big part of overcoming these challenges. But to be sure, there are some physical things that happen. Like, it can interfere with how your teeth are forming and growing in. Sometimes you might have to get bone grafts on the upper portion of your gums, especially if you have a cleft lip. Yeah. Clef lips, seems like, is usually where the teeth problems come from. And then one of the first things if you're nursing your baby, then if your baby has a cleft lip and or a cleft palate, they may have trouble latching on and getting a good suck is what they call it. Yes. And luckily, there are different methods for improving that. There are certain types of bottles which can help with that. So, again, that's a problem that can be overcome pretty routinely. It's the easiest to overcome and to nurse a child with a cleft lip, because you can set the baby up and, as usual, chuck them in the air, and after they latch on, you just kind of put your finger over their clutch flip. Oh. And just, like, close the gap, basically. It's easy as pie. With a cleft palette, it can be much more difficult because we use our palate to create suction. Use your tongue and your palate, your soft palate in particular to create suction. So there are specialized bottles for feeding babies with cleft palates. And in particular, if the baby is just not able to latch on for breastfeeding, they still say, well, just pump your breast milk and feed your baby the bottle milk because, unfortunately, because of that gap in their palate, there's basically a passage into their nose and sometimes their ears. So breast milk can get in there, and they found it's far less irritating. Breast milk is then formula when it does get in the little baby's ears and nose. That's right. And because of that same gap there, I think throughout we'll talk about the surgeries, but throughout childhood, babies and children with cleft palates and lips have higher incidences of ear infections, sometimes chronic. Sometimes they might have trouble hearing and learning how to talk. But again, these are all early challenges that it's such a common birth defect that they really, really know a lot about how to overcome this stuff. That's exactly right. Fortunately, especially in the developed world, there's a lot of services available that are pretty routine. Yeah. And if you're fortunate enough to live in a country with socialized medicine, you get it all for free. And if you're not, you're going to be dropping some money on surgery. I think the statistic is $200,000 average for medical procedures over the course of your life. And I don't know if that's figuring in insurance, if that's a $200,000 sort of total, and you pay a portion of that if you're insured. I get that that's out of pocket. Oh, you think so? I think so. Oh, interesting. So do you want to talk specifically about some of the treatments for clefts? Yeah. So the diagnosis of cleft often happens through ultrasounds. So you'll know your baby is going to be born with a cleft lip, especially. Cleft palate is probably diagnosed after birth, but shortly after birth, usually upon the first examination by the doctor, they'll say, okay, well, your child has a cleft palate. Don't panic. There's a lot of stuff in place. We know exactly what to do. We know exactly when to do it. But it's going to be really tough for you and your family, because before your baby turns one year old and actually as early as maybe three months old, they will undergo surgery, like a major surgery, where they are given general anesthesia. And basically it's a form of cosmetic surgery to repair is what they call it. Their cleft lip or their cleft palate or both. And it's basically the first in a very long line of surgeries that will take up their 1st 18 years pretty easily. Yeah. The first one is called Kyloplasty. It can be a few surgeries, like I said, about the teeth. It can include bone grafts. And I think the cleft palate surgery is a little bit later. That's only for cleft lip and cleft palate, though it's still before they're 18 months old. Right. And even though it's routine, it is like you said, it's stressful for a parent to see that little baby go under general anesthesia and go under the knife. Yeah. And when they come out, they're in pain. They're not very happy. They're pretty uncomfortable. It's no fun. Fortunately, they've actually come up with a procedure called nasal alveolar molding, or Nam, thank God, where this reduces the number of follow up surgeries because they don't always get it on the first surgery. Right. They might just kind of be like, well, this is the first step, and we're going to let this heal and kind of fuse a little more closer together. We're going to try it again and again, and we'll finally get there after a couple of surgeries or a few. Nam kind of does that follow up surgery ahead of time by molding the little baby's astoundingly malleable features? Ahead of time before the surgery? Yeah. It almost sounded like braces for your faces. That's right. It's a clear plastic retainer inside the mouth. And like you said, it helps mold it as they grow and then like braces, they adjust it as they grow and maybe, like, tighten it down. I think for Cliff lips, if it's a small one, they add a little plastic post that's up in the nose to lift that up because it can also affect the shape of your nose early on, too. Yeah, I'm not sure if we mentioned that. So it's all sort of tied in together developmentally. And it sounds like this Nam retainer device sort of just limits, like you said, what's going to happen in the future. Yeah. And it just brings a head start. Cliff closer together so that when they actually do go in to do the surgery, there's far less trauma and it's far more successful at bringing it together. The palate surgery is called a palletoplasty, and it actually because especially if it's going through the bony part of your hard palate, they may use bone grass to kind of fuse that, or they may just basically cut the gums along the roof of your mouth, of your mouth and bring it together and just basically cover it up. And for all intents and purposes, the pallet has been fixed. There's not milk going in their ear canal any longer. Rub their nose, they're going to be able to speak clearly because they'll have that soft palate, which we use to basically make almost every sound we make phonetically, we use our soft palate to close the airway. I'm doing it right now, literally. Right now, I'm doing it literally. So if you could just kind of cover that cleft palette with gum tissue. I mean, you've fixed a lot of the issues that arise from having a cleft palate. Yeah. I mean, in addition to that speech surgery, there may be speech therapy that your kid might undergo early on their rhinoplasty sometimes, because I did mention the nose. Sometimes a rhinoplasty comes into play, and then there's also orthonathic orthonathic that g's. Got to be silent, don't you think? I don't know, man all right, take a stab. Orthogonal. Yeah, I think that was it. Really? Yeah, I think so. All right. Well, this is jaw alignment surgery, and this is something that happens later on because your jaw has to stop growing. This is sort of similar, I think, to my issues with my cross bite. And it's all sort of orthodontic related in a way, as well. Right. And that ridge that says right behind your teeth, that your adult teeth actually grow out of that. And if you have a cliff lip in particular, like you were saying, you might need a bone graft. That's another surgery that you're talking about. I know all about those implants for your front teeth in particular. So that's a pretty decent amount of surgeries, and that's not necessarily one and done for any of them, especially, I think rhinoplasty can take multiple surgeries to kind of get the nose back where you want it to. But again, the doctors who handle this stuff at children's hospitals around the country and basically everywhere in the global north just know exactly what they're doing and what to do and when to do it. And the outcome is usually very good. The prognosis of a baby born with a cleft lip is pretty good. Yeah, it's great. There can be scarring, obviously, especially that first surgery. There's sort of a signature scar from a cleft lip surgical procedure, and kids can be very self conscious about that stuff. But I think they encourage parents to try and just be open about that stuff and get them to own that as a facial difference and as a visible difference to really drive home to the kid. This is not going to you can still be an athlete. It doesn't affect any kind of learning or anything like that in school. So it's really up to the parents and then through the help of friends and family, hopefully, to get that kid on the right track. That's a huge one, too. Supposedly, parents who are given, especially with an ultrasound, a diagnosis of a child with a cleft lip, they can take the news pretty hard. Sure, yeah. I was reading I remember I read it, but it was basically like a first person account of having a child with a cleft lip. And the woman was saying she was really worried that she was going to have trouble bonding with her baby. Remember our cute episode in the Kinder Schema? She was basically worried about that. And then she said the moment she saw her baby, she just fell totally in love. And it was just like having any other baby. It was her baby. So of course she loved it, no matter whether she had a cleft lip or not. But that is a common concern among parents when they're first getting their feet wet with this. But I was reading some studies, and they found that there are basically no bonding issues that differentiate parents and children of kids with cleft palates or lips from kids without cleft lips. Yeah, basically, the outcome is the same. One of the things that you do have to be careful with, though, is it's very easy for you to become an overprotective parent, right? Because you're dealing with a baby that you're sending off for surgery. Sure you don't want any harm to come to it. You've now seen your baby with heart monitors like IV tubes sticking out of them, and it's just not a site you want to see. It can really make you even more protective of your baby than before. And then when they come home and they're being teased because of their facial difference, which they cannot help, and they're not guilty of anything. They don't deserve any of that kind of bullying or teasing. I'm sure it makes you want to go kill those little kids who are doing that. So you kind of have to. It's a process for everyone. You know, it's a definite crucible for parents that you have. It's an additional challenge that you would have to take on. But parents do it all the time, and their kids turn out totally normal all the time. All right, well, we'll take another break or another break, and we'll come back and finish up right after this. All right, so we should talk about some of the great things that are going on around the world, but we first have to talk about some of the not so great things. We've been talking to this about this from the perspective of someone in the United States where it is very common and very treatable, and outcomes are great. Unfortunately, in developing countries, there are a lot more challenges. Of course, there is a lot of stigma attached to this anywhere, but especially in developing countries, you might come into a situation where, like, a father might blame the mother and say, you were to blame because you didn't do whatever right. That my child looks like this. And there can be a lot of shame involved. I think there was a study in Kenya where mothers of babies were blamed by their husband and extended families for that. And they interviewed some of these women, and some had contemplated taking the baby's life or their own life or both. And that is just unspeakably tragic. Of course, their access to medical care is different. Obviously, the further they are away from good care and the more expensive it is, the harder it becomes to overcome these challenges. But there is great news because there are some great organizations. One's called Smile Train. One is called Operation Smile. And what they do, instead of sending in doctors, they try and go in and train up doctors in these places to deal with. This better to teach them how to perform these surgeries and to help educate the public at large about facial differences. And that it's. Okay. Yeah. I was looking at charity navigator. You ever go on there? Sure, man. They're great. It turns out Operations Smile has, like, a 75%, which is fine. Okay. But Smile Train has a 100%. Charity Navigator. Are they brand new? No, they've been around for a while. No. That's amazing. Both of them have, like they're spending tens and tens of millions of dollars a year on providing these services for children around the world. So 75 or 100. Hats off to both of them for that. That's great. I think Operation Smile has 31 medical centers in 16 countries, and they have these international medical missions every year, like, over 100 of them, that they like I said, they just go in. They teach the doctors instead of bringing in doctors, and the whole teacher person to fish thing comes into play. Teach a person to fix a cleft lip, and they'll be doing it again and again. That's the old saying. Yeah. There are actually, since it's, I think, one out of every 750 births in the United States alone. That might even be, like, a European statistic, too. There's a lot of famous people who have cleft lips, because, like you said, if you have a cleft lip or a cleft palette, it doesn't prevent you from doing anything. Sure. So you could excel it, say, acting as maybe Mike Hammer, if you wanted to. Stacy Keach. Yeah. Is that you're talking about? Sure. Yeah. Stacy Keach has that cleft palette. Or I guess clef lip surgery, scar. Ford surgeries. Actually, that Stacy Keach had cheech marin. Sure. So I guess he can still smoke tons of weeds. I was going to say he's got the suction thing down, maybe. So who else? Joaquin Phoenix actually is widely considered to have, like, a cleft scar. It has what looks like that cleft scar. Like, he had a cleft lip repair, a Kilo plastic, but he doesn't he has a microform cleft. It's looked like that since birth. Yeah. And apparently Wendy Williams, the talk show host, got just jumped all over last year because she was talking about how cute she thought it was and then was, like, basically pulling her. Oh, really? Yeah. She didn't do it right at all. She was ultimately trying to give him a compliment, but she did not do it in the right way. Yeah. Definitely suffered for it. And then Pete Manning is another one. Yeah, I think his was a pallet. Right. He had, I think, a lip, too. No, I guess it says pallet. I thought he had a cleft lip, because I feel like I've seen him he has a scar. Like, his lip really looks turned up a little bit, but maybe it was his cleft palate. So he had a couple of surgeries, and I think he had braces for like eleven years. Yeah. From like age four. Yeah. Man, that's tough. Four to 15. Having braces. I mean, I had braces twice, and that was bad. That's the Jolly Rancher years and paid. Man, I missed out on those, I can assure you. You did. Did you like the individual candies or the sticks? The sticks. There was just too much, man. It was over the top. Was it? For me, I kind of liked them because the more you licked on them and sucked on them, you can make them into a knife, basically. Right. Like a poop knife. But Jolly Rancher, it was very sharp. What was your flavor? I was always green apples. Same here. Love those. Watermelon are good, too. It's okay. It gets old fast. Don't come at me with grape. I don't like the grape. I had no problem with grapes. What about the blue? I think blue raspberry one. It might have been after that, maybe. But boy, those green apple. Yeah, they're good. I haven't had one of those in 40 years, I think. I haven't either. I still have some stuck to my molars. Wow. Dennis never just couldn't even get it out. They try. They try and they fail. Every single one of them. So Payton Manning, he, like I said, has done a lot with his money over the years, in addition to throwing lots of touchdowns, a lot of philanthropy. And I think even the St vincent's Children's Hospital in Indiana, they renamed that Peyton Manning Children's Hospital at St Vincent. Sure. Because they have the leading or one of the leading pediatric cranio facial centers in the country, and he has shoveled a lot of money their way. There's also one other thing. We were talking about how other kids in other countries don't have access to a lot of the services. And apparently a lot of people have said, I want to adopt a child from a developing country, and I am going to just basically go ahead and go right onto the canonization track and adopt a child from a developing country who has what's called an unrepaired cleft and like, you know this going into it. Yes, you sign up for it. There's actually a group, by the way, called Rainbow Kids that connects people to adoptive parents, to children with developmental or other kinds of special needs, and that includes kids with clef lips, cleft palettes, that kind of thing, which I think is pretty great. That is great. And that's one of the stressors of the many stressors of adopting a kid, period. I can say from experience in that you are oftentimes dealing with a birth mother that may not have practiced great prenatal care, had access to it. Smoking and drugs and alcohol could play a part. And you sign up for this and they ask you these questions beforehand. They're like, what would you do if you are in the birth room and the baby comes out with a cleft lip or Clef palette. What's your reality? They ask you that? Yeah. I mean, it's just called your tolerance list. Like, what if this happens? What if this happens? What if you go in there and the baby comes out? That's an unexpected race. And you're like, oh, okay, well, can that happen? Yeah, well, sure it can. They tap on their clipboard and look at you, and they're like, what would you do? You just got to fill out all this stuff, and it's really interesting, and it makes you do two things. It makes you really take a hard look at what matters and also take a hard look at your own family and genetics and eventually probably end up saying, like, hey, we're no prize either, so let's just do this. That's fantastic. Yeah. Do an adoption podcast. I agree. In full. I agree. Jerry could even maybe say a few words. She just thumbed up and then shook her head. She's a little sleepy now. She's blowing her nose. She just finished lunch. We'll see. So you got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay, well, if you want to know more about Clef Lips and Clef Palettes and Craniofacial clefts, then you can go do some more research online. As I said, go do more research online. It's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this I inadvertently said something, and I didn't even know what it meant. I don't think we did this one yet, did we? About Netflix and chill? No, I don't think so. I said Netflix and chill. I've heard it's an expression. There's a Ben and Jerry's flavor that I love. What's in it? Oh, I can't even remember. It's just really good. It's got a lot of good, delicious, crunchy, sweet things. Okay. Going on. It's one of my favorite flavors. Go check it out. But let me just read this welcome back stuff you should know. Team listening to your Appendix episode had a good laugh during the podcast. Chuck said, our immune system is not good at Netflix and chill, and I really started laughing. Did you know what this meant? Yeah. Why didn't you say something when I said it? I don't know. I must have been thinking of my next joke or something, because I don't know how I missed that. Did you know, Jerry? You know what? That, man? I'm an idiot. I'll go back and listen if I snorted. Last week, my 30 year old daughter was visiting. I said to her, let's Netflix and chill, and she promptly told me, mom, that is code for having sex. What? Who knew? Obviously, Stuff You Should Know did not get the slang decoder memo either. And we should say, Chuck did not. Okay? I'm observing you and Jerry. Thank you, but thanks for making me laugh. And that's from Rosie. And Rosie said that I could read this and her daughter would get a good laugh about it, but I feel like a robe. I had no idea. And it makes sense now. Like, I could see some kid being like, what did you guys do last night? Just Netflix and chill, when in fact, they were doing unspeakable things. But now I know. Netflix and chill. Yeah. I don't know how I let that one pass. Maybe it was purposeful. That's all right. Well, thanks for that one. Who was that again? Rosie. Rosie. Appreciate that. And I'll bet that was a really great conversation you have with your mom. I'm glad we're cleaning this up, though, because there's probably a lot of people that were like, what is Chuck that dumb? Or maybe they thought, like, you had just gotten bone dry in your sense of humor, maybe in timing and delivery. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Rosie did, we want to hear from you. You can email to us directly at stuff. Podcast@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." | |
c55c108e-5460-11e8-b38c-7fb7a06f6231 | Selects: Who was America's first murderer? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-who-was-americas-first-murderer | John Billington didn't just sign the Mayflower Compact -- he was also the colony's first criminal, and had the dubious honor of being the first European to be convicted of murder in this new place. But how did it happen? Tune in to this classic episode to find out. | John Billington didn't just sign the Mayflower Compact -- he was also the colony's first criminal, and had the dubious honor of being the first European to be convicted of murder in this new place. But how did it happen? Tune in to this classic episode to find out. | Sat, 05 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=156, tm_isdst=0) | 28593517 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone, it's Josh here. With this week's SYSK selects. I've chosen who was America's first murderer. It's a classic episode from 2011, and it has history, even more history and at its heart, art. It's a true crime story. Plus, it's just straight up interesting. We did record this ten years ago, so some of the words or language that we use seem a little out of date. Please forgive us. The world has changed tremendously in the last decade. I hope you enjoy this one as much as we do because it's a great one. 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. And this is stuff you should know. Episode 398 no, it's not. Why I'm saying it is. Okay, so now it's episode 398, episode three something. Three, nine or eight. That's good. Josh, is that your intro? Rocking and rolling, splicing and splashing over the horizon. What could it be? Looked like it's going to be a new country. You remember that one? No. What are you talking about? That was I genuinely have no idea what that was. The schoolhouse Rock for the Mayflower voyage. Wow. Really? Rocking in the roll and splashing and splashing. You remember that? Kim coy over the horizon. What could it be looked like it's going to be a free country. Nice or new country? Either way, it was both new and free. Probably new. Yeah. Because it was not free for everybody. That's true. Yeah. So you're talking about this because we're going to talk about the first murderer, right? Yeah. And before we start, I want to ask why has no one ever made a modern film about the Mayflower voyage? It seems like a no brainer. Yes. I don't know. Especially after gotten around to it. Like the awesomeness of Master and commander. Did you ever see that? The one with Russell Crowe. Yeah. It was very good. Surprisingly good. Yeah, it surprised me, too, actually. I didn't get the colon. It made it sound like it was a franchise, but it was like the first of the franchise. I guess. Pirates of the Caribbean did have a call in the first one, didn't it? I don't know. That was Peter. We are Master and Commander, so it makes sense that it was awesome because he's such a great director and related to Bob Weir, I think. Really? I don't know. I don't think so. I've always suspected. Did he do the Truman Show? That was written by Bob. We did Gatica. I don't know who directed that. That might have been Peter Weir, but he did Gallipoli and scores of great movies. Well, cool. Well, thank you for joining us at this discussion of Peter Weir's film. He should direct the Mayflower movie is what I'm saying. For goodness sakes. Okay. They need to do it like a realistic because when you learn about it in school, at least I did. I thought you learned about it from Schoolhouse Rock and you get the picture. They sang songs and kind of rock and rolled over the ocean and then ran into Plymouth Rock and shared Thanksgiving with the Indians. And they need to make a real movie about how it really was. Well, yeah, because that whole Schoolhouse Rock impression is pretty widely held, even among adults, educated adults. And the reason why is because there's a very small amount of firsthand information that left Plymouth Colony right. And was allowed to stand. There was a small group of people who are controlling all of the info about that place, and they were trying to paint it in as good a light as possible because they were trying to attract investors. And these first hand accounts that basically painted the Puritans as these hard scrapple people who were guided by a divine hand in the wilderness has stood all these centuries. Hard scrapple. Hard scrapple. So let's talk about the Pilgrims, the voyage. Right. They landed in 1620 just as a quick primer. So as you and they were Pilgrims. They were Puritans separatists, as they were often called. They were people who were so pious that no one in all of Europe was pious enough to contend with them. And they were like, I'm sick of all your sinners. We're going to go find a new republic in the name and for the glory of God, and we're going to be really good, and we're going to do it in the New World. And that's what they did. They sailed over to Massachusetts and landed in Plymouth. Yes. As it turns out. Nice place to land, I imagine. Well, I mean, are we going to get to the murderer guy right away, or should we just ease into that? Well, let's talk about who is there. It wasn't just Puritans. It wasn't just Separatists. There's a whole other group of people who don't get talked about a lot, and they were called the Strangers. Yeah, that sounded really creepy when I read it. For some reason. I think it sounds cool. I think it sounds creepy. They look like they should have been dressed in the Pilgrim black, right. Like with wide brim hat so you can't see their eyes. Yes. What was the deal with them? Were they Catholic? They were anything but the Separatists, the Puritans. So they were Catholics, they were sailors, they were Africans. They were whoever kidnapped Indians. I don't know if all those people were on the Mayflower, but there was a bunch of people, right. The Puritans got them over there, went with them. And the Puritans were pretty rigid. Obviously, they didn't like Catholics at all. They were indeed extremely rigid. But to this degree, as we'll see, they found that nobody is this rigid. And there were a lot of strangers who broke a lot of laws, but there were a lot of Puritans who did, too. And they just kind of glossed it over. They kept records, but these things just didn't get promoted. Right. Yeah. Mortgage Relation. Yes. That's what you're talking about. Yes. Mortgage Relation, written in 1622 by William Bradford, who was clearly the governor, longtime governor of Plymouth. Right. His cousin George Morton wrote he was a separatist, and he wrote this book or an account, and that's sort of looked at as the account of Plymouth. But as it turns out, as you point out, because you wrote this, mortgage Relation was written to attract funding for Plymouth, there's basically like a lengthy in depth brochure to attract investors. And what are you going to say? You're not going to say, we're starving to death over here. Right. We're having a really hard time. We're probably not going to make it. People are committing bestiality. Yes. Buggery is what they call that. Really? We'll get to that in a minute. Okay. And they're not going to say this. They're going to say, things are great. We're really living by God's will. We're really just making it over here, and we need some more money. Yeah, they did. So that means take it with a grain of salt. But they didn't just pretend like the strangers weren't there, but they painted some of the strangers in possibly a less than flattering light. Right. Yeah. I mean, are we at the Billington's, then? Might as well be. The Billington's. The family, John Billington, his wife, Eleanor, his son's, little John, john Jr. And Francis, who was a boy, his other son. They were sort of painted as reading your article. They sort of seem like, on one hand, like the first white trash. That's one way to put it. And then they also sort of seem like, no, they might have been kind of cool and just rabble rousers. Yeah. Yes. I think that's very accurate. But they definitely weren't any friends at Bradford. He did not like these people. No, he didn't. He wrote in a letter to a Mr. Cushing, I believe yes. Who had some sort of authority, I guess, over the colony back in England. But he basically says that Billington still rails against you and that he's a knave, which means a scoundrel, and he'll always be a knave. He'll live and die as so he'll live and die, yeah. That was Cushman, by the way. Thank you. Same thing. And he also said he said they were one of the profanest families to come to the colony. And it wasn't just John. He didn't like any of them. His kids were a bit of a handful, too. Well, one of them it doesn't say who in the records, but on the way over, decided that he's going to shoot off his father's musket. Right. Gun in a cabin filled with people, which is bad enough. Right. But he did it right next to an open, half filled keg of gumpowder. Right. So he almost just blew the whole Mayflower up. Yeah. And history would have changed forever, probably. So that was the first thing that happened with the Billington's and the rest of the people on the Mayflower? Yes. No, actually it wasn't. There was a mutiny that John Billington, the father, was involved in, and he was let off the hook because it was his first offense. But that started. Tensions were already high, and then one of his sons, either Francis or John Jr. Shot off the gun in the cabin. So you start to get an impression of this family, especially when you look at when you think of them bristling not just the average person's eye, but a Puritan. Right. Because you can screw up, like, innumerable ways in the eyes of a Puritan, especially if you're not a Puritan. That's right. And then once they got to the New World, they continued their shenanigans. John Jr. Kind of wandered off one day, 20 miles worth, and wandered into a Native American village, and then he was taken to another village by those Native Americans, and eventually they send out a group to go find them. It took them a little while. They set sale, actually ended up on Cape Cod, what is now Cape Cod, and said, you're going to have to come back. Yes. And they found him because of Mesa SWAT, who is the great statium of the Wapanoag. Yeah. Well, panelag, we're getting email for that one who was involved in the first Thanksgiving with the same people. So he might have had something to do with that then, huh? Well, he did. He basically was trying to use the Englishman against his rivals, I think the Abanaki, to basically run them out rather than consolidate with the other Indians against the English. Got you. And basically that turned over the whole continent to Europe. That one act is largely considered as the turning point. Well, how about that? So he was already pals with them, and we helped him find the boy. And if you're from Plymouth, if you live in the Plymouth area, then you might know Billington Sea, which is a pond, and that's named for John Jr. Yeah. He wandered off. Right. Yeah. I think that he might have found that. I mean, he discovered the pond, but he may have discovered it on his wander. Right. His sojourn, yeah, if you will. But they found him, and he was bahung with beads, so apparently they kind of adopted them a little bit, like he was the mascot. Yeah. And then they gave him back. And then I think the colonists gave the Indians a couple of knives and said, thanks, and went back to Plymouth. Thanks for the beads and the guy. But you have to imagine that mounting a ten man sailing expedition into Indian country because your kid wandered off. You're going to rub the back of your neck and be like, thanks a lot. If you are a Billington, you're like, thanks for getting my kid back. Do I owe you anything? Not so, though, because Billington had a bad reputation in that he scoffed at Captain Miles Standish, and you don't scoff at Stanish Miles Standish proud. Miles Standish was trying to get people to serve in the military, and Billington was like, no, dude, I'm not doing that. Yeah. He was a part of anti government groups, government subversion. Well, there was in 1624, there was what's called the older man Lifeord Conspiracy. That was the name of the two main conspirators. He was named as a co conspirator. And reading his history and then the actual history of this conspiracy, which is a lot of secret meetings about how they should overthrow this puritan regime and start governing this colony the right way. Right. He was probably a part of it, but he denied it and was let off the hook again. Well, and he also apologized for standing up against Standish, and they said they threatened him with hog tying, which can actually kill you. I didn't realize that I could see that because all your weights on your chest right. Well, they tie your legs together, they tie your arms behind your back, and then they tie your ankles to your neck, around your neck. What? So unless you stay completely arched like that, you're going to start cutting off circulation like it's a form of torture. It's not just, we're going to tie you up. Well, that whole second step has been kind of lost to history, as I understand it. Well, now, is it just tying the hands and legs, tie your hands and your wrists and your ankles together behind your back, and yes, you're arched, but I don't know anything about tying the ankles around. That that's horrible. Apparently, the old hog tie is a little more brutal. Yeah, which makes total sense. Which also makes sense why he's described as basically, like, pleading for mercy, not to have that happen to them, which is why they let them go. Yeah. Miles Anish is like, all right, get out of my site. Billington, we're hog to you, and we can't forget. We can't leave out the fact that these people were original Plymouth colonists. Like, they were the first he's on the charter. Right. The first English, European Americans in the first what would become one of the first states of America. These are important people, no matter what their reputations are. He was the signer of the Mayflower Compact, which is the first European based governing law, I guess you would call it laws. And he helped hug the colony out of the wilderness. He was one of the colonists, right? Yeah. And there's a PDF online I found that traces his family tree. And apparently, James Garfield, the president, was a descendant of Billington. I wish I would have written down some of the last names. I know Witton was one of them, but, I mean, there are people that say, like, still alive today. Oh, yeah. Apparently. I remember researching this. I couldn't find it when I re researched for this podcast, but there's like a whole group of people who are into that kind of thing who are proudly ancestors of Billington. This rabble rouse is the first real troublemaker in America. Well, people are proud, period. Just to be descendants of the Plymouth colonists, for sure. Hopefully everybody has kind of an idea of how Billington and his family were regarded. Right. Well, we didn't get to his wife and daughter. I know that was after what he did. Go ahead. But his wife was Eleanor, was locked in the stocks and whipped at one point. She also had to pay fines of five pound sterling because she was found guilty of slandering her neighbors and his granddaughter. Dorcas, I love that name. There's only one way to pronounce that. Right? Yeah. D-O-R-C-A-S dorcas. I'm going to bring that one back. Yeah. If I ever have a daughter, she's going to be Dorcas Bryant. Dorcas apparently was sentenced to whipping because she had sexual intercourse when she was 22 years old. And you didn't do that. The whole family was definitely not they didn't fall in line with the rest of the crowd, although that's not true because a lot of the rest of the crowd was doing even worse things, as it turns out. You just didn't read it in the brochure. Right. So can we talk about some of the stuff that people were doing, please? Okay, so remember, by 1690, there's still only 755 people in Plymouth Colony. 775. Okay. So this stuff is happening like 2050 years before that. There are way fewer people. And yet there were incidents where people like Thomas Granger, who is a servant, was indicted for buggery, which we established before was bestiality, with a mare, a cow, two goats, diverse sheep, two calves, and a turkey who he fell in love with. He was sentenced to die by hanging John Walker the next year. Turkey? Yes. He laid with a bitch, as it's put. And of course, we mean the Pilgrims meant the dog, the female dog. Sure. Another guy, he was held on suspicion of buggery with a beast. Another guy had buggery with a mare. And it just keeps going on and going on. So basically, somebody would get caught sleeping with a dog and would be whipped, put into the stocks pillaried and it was just recorded but never talked about. Yeah. There was also rape and sodomy against humans going on. Yeah. The way they put sodomy was that John Alexander and Thomas Roberts back in 1637 were caught and they got the hot irons, which wow, that's rough. So you hear about this stuff and you think Dorcas doing sleeping with a man, I presume, is a very normal thing for a 22 year old middle aged woman to do, right? At the time, yes. She's not laying down with turkeys. No. So Eleanor got put in the stocks for Slander, right? Yeah. There's no recording of what she said. Basically, we've reached this point here where we should probably talk about what John Billington did. Okay. Because now that we've debunked the fact that not everyone was super pure and you can't necessarily read mortgage relation the brochure and say everything was just hunky dory over there. Actually, maybe this is why the movie hasn't been made, because he wants to see a guy sleeping with a turkey. I don't know. I think you get your there's a market for that kind of movies. You paid a lot for it. You know what I'm saying? There's a market for that, but it's not box office grossing, record breaking numbers. Peter Weir wouldn't touch that one, not with the ten foot pole. So we should probably talk about how billington became America's first murderer. It took place, what, ten years after he got there? So you have to think like, this guy is an original settler, and he's been farming, and hewing an existence out for himself and other people. And as an original Mayflower compact signer, he got a bunch of land parcel to him, like this part of his land now. Well, he made an enemy, clearly r1 enemy. He made quite a few, Bradford being one of them. But he made one enemy named John Newcomen, who was a newcomer, as it turns out, to Plymouth. He hadn't been there for ten years. And it seems like history is a little sketchy because, like you said, it's not all recorded at that point. But one thing I read was that it was possibly over hunting rights, and I don't know how true that is. It is very true. Oh, it is? Yeah. When I was going back and reading the source material for this, I'm like, why was I so vague when I wrote this article? Because did it confirm that? Yeah, well, in the Branford version, basically, is like, billington waylaid. newcoming right. We should explain what Waylaid is. Waylaid is like, basically lying in wait and then murdering. Yeah, like hiding in the Bush ambushing. Premeditated. It premeditated. It's huge. If you read a stranger's account, there's an account by a stranger. I don't know who. It's not in the source I cited, but it talks about how New coming was already known to Billington, because he used to steal from Billington's traps. He poached on his land. Okay. And billington had chased the kid off a bunch of times. New coming to 17 at the time. Got you. He's a little jerk, basically. And he was what the strangers called a saint, which meant you were in good with Bradford because you were a puritan. And compared to a stranger, you had exponentially more rights, and you got away with exponentially more stuff. Got you. Okay, so here's Billington, who already has a bad reputation, and there's some little 17 year old punk kid stealing from his traps, who is chased off time and time and time again, and he catches them there. So he goes after him with his gun, and the kid goes and hides behind a tree, and Billington shoots at the tree. I don't know if he meant to shoot at the kid. Apparently he was a pretty good marksman. But he hit the kid in the shoulder. Right. Not exactly a lethal shot today. Sure. Well, the kid died in, like, three days of an infection. That's how America's first murder took place. And it was apparently with a blunderbuss. Have you ever heard of these guns? Is that the one with the big yeah, it's sort of like you see Elmer Fudd is the pilgrim hunting with yeah, a little bit. I mean, it's not like an elephant gun, but it does flare out at the end. And it's sort of like what would be considered today is sort of like a sold off shotgun. So, like, it was a musket, but it was short and flared, and so I imagine it had a wider spray, even though it wasn't well, it wouldn't be a spray because they didn't use pellets, but they compared it to a sawdust shotgun hand on the pump. Exactly. So that's how the first murder took place. I get the impression Billington, who is also described as beloved by many in another account, by a stranger, kind of a satirical take on Plymouth Colony. Yeah. Thomas Morton in the New English Canaan, said that he was a beloved dude. He was beloved by many. Basically, if you were a stranger, you probably liked Billington. He sounded like a kind of a fun guy, to be honest. Right. I know he's the first murderer, but he's a rabble rouser. I tend to associate with those types. Well, Billington thinks that because of the fact that they need people there still each individual is very important, and that this kid had been really it was the kid's fault that he was on his property. Billington warned him all that he would be spared his life. Well, no. Governor Bradford himself was the one who ordered him to death, and he didn't like him to begin with. Right. Now he had his chance. Right. So this is what you could call unfair to a certain extent, perhaps. And not only did Bradford sentence his longtime enemy or somebody he disdained for many years to death, he was also the one who literally wrote the history in addition to what is it, Mort's? What? Mortgage retort? Not mortgage retort. I was kidding. Mortgage relation. Okay. So in addition to mortgage relation, the other probably largest cited first hand account of Plymouth Plantation is called of Plymouth Plantation. It's Bradford's own journal. So he literally wrote the history for Plymouth, and of course he's going to paint it. He's going to paint himself and his fellows in the best light. And that's what we go on and billington in a poor light because he sent it some of the hang. Yeah. So I think, if anything, this was the episode intended to tell you to always take historical accounts of the grain of salt, especially the old ones. There's always two sides to every story, and the Three Stooges actually get better as you age. Stuff you should know. You got anything else? No. If you want to learn more about America's first Murderer, type america's First Murderer america you may have any trouble saying that these days. You can type it in the handy. You can type wherever you want, but you're going to get the best result if you type it in the handy search bar@houseworks.com. Sure. And that, of course, brings up listener mail. Yes, Josh? I'm going to call this nicotine poisoning from Erin. A couple of years ago, guys who came home from university to find my kiwi roommate working away in the kitchen. He decided to bake brownies for the first time, and I hurried upstairs to try some because he wanted to support his friend. Okay. Quickly, I was overwhelmed by a sour taste, which was only mildly canceled out by the cherries, which were mixed in with the batter. I was very close to spitting it out when my roommate walked in and said, what do you think? I didn't want to insult them, so I popped the rest of it in my mouth and said I could use a little more sugar. I left the room, and that's when everything got hazy. What I do remember is my roommates bursting into my room. This is crazy. They found me curled up into a ball with my head between my knees, rocking slowly. I was covered in sweat and muttering to myself, letting out loud moans, which is apparently what alerted my roommates. When they opened the door, they flooded the room with light, caused intense pain in my head and for some reason in my stomach, not really thinking, I bolted to the bathroom and induced vomiting, trying to get all the evil out of me. I was exhausted, laying on the floor, trying to figure out what was wrong. Apparently, there were two boxes on the table. Did you read this? One? No. One containing brownies and one with shisha tobacco destined for the hookah that they kept in their house. Bar. In my haste, I accidentally consumed about 3oz of cherry tobacco mix that was destined for the hookah. Not sure exactly how much nicotine my body absorbed in the hour or so it was in me, but when I stood up, I promptly passed out and, according to my roommate, started convulsing on the floor. They wanted to take me to the hospital, of course, but I refuse, being the bull headed Midwesternner I sometimes can be or the college student who doesn't want to pay for that kind of thing, right? When I did go to the hospital the next morning explain the situation to the Er. Tech. They immediately took my vitals and said I was lucky to have survived without any serious complications, that it very well could have been a fatal dose. Yeah, I'll bet. And all I can say is, if you're ever in the same situation, Erin, on the side of caution, call poison control right away. Yeah, and he's lucky that his roommates, one of them, had EMT training, because it could have gone the other way. And Aaron might not be a fan of our podcast today. Man, the aide who gets tobacco popped it in his mouth. He said it needs a little more sugar. Wow. Aaron. I'm glad you made it. Yes, I'm very glad he's around. Yeah. Okay. And if you are a member of the billington clan by blood somehow, or marriage, whatever, we want to hear from you. Send us an email to stuff. Podcast@howstuffworks.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart artradio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
c7da9410-361e-11ea-bbe5-3f8086cbb5e6 | Short Stuff: Mary Had A Little Lamb | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-mary-had-a-little-lamb | Did you know the little nursery rhyme is controversial? It’s true: Two towns in New England can barely stand to see one another on the map (kind of). | Did you know the little nursery rhyme is controversial? It’s true: Two towns in New England can barely stand to see one another on the map (kind of). | Wed, 20 May 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=141, tm_isdst=0) | 12670065 | audio/mpeg | "Hey everybody. I don't know about you but I am excited that it's summer, school's out, the sun is shining and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks or you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus with Amazon music you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. This is Short Stuff and we are talking about little nursery rhyme, pretty adorable in its nature that you may have heard of before. It's called? Mary had a Little Lamb. Wait a minute, was this lamb's fleece as white as snow? It was, and there was something remarkable about it in that wherever Mary went, the lamb went as well. Sounds like a stalker to me a little bit. So this is pretty interesting in that this is controversial. I mean this cute little nursery rhyme that every English speaking kid on the planet has heard at one time or another, especially if you're raised in America, may have had, number one, a real life origin. And number two, there are two towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire where the local historical societies will fight each other with bike chains and brass knuckles if they run into one another in public. Yeah, this is really interesting. In Sterling, Massachusetts, if you go you're going to see a little copper statue of a little lamb and it's Mary Sawyer's little lamb specifically, which she brought to school in 1815. She was a little girl who and I guess we should say allegedly for all this stuff because everyone's saying that each other is wrong. So allegedly, Mary saved this little lamb, nursed it back to health overnight and over a few days the lamb got much better and then she was going to go to school one day and her brother Nat said, hey, why don't you bring that lamb to school? Since you love it so much, why don't you marry it? And she did bring the lamb to school, hiding it in a basket under her chair. And at one point she stands up to take part in a recitation lesson and the lamb bleeds. The teacher laughs, she takes the lamb outside and kills it. Now she takes the lamb outside and stores it in the shed. But this caught the idea of a guy named the Eye of a guy named John Rollstone. Yeah, he was an older boy who I guess was visiting the schoolhouse where all this took place. That day he was on his way off to Hovod and he died shortly after of tuberculosis. But before that he wrote a poem, several lines just basically what everybody knows from Mary Had a Little Lamb. Supposedly that night he was so taken by this thing, by this event, came back the next day on horseback and handed Mary the little poem he wrote for her. And Mary Sawyer went on for the rest of her life as Mary, the girl with the little lamb that she'd nurse back to health. And the source of the famous nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb. Yeah. And it's important to note that he wrote but three stanzas of that poem. And I think he was just thought it was cute. I think it's an adorable story that not only did she nurse this little lamb and take it to school, but this rising freshman at Harvard was so smitten with this whole thing on his little visit to the school that he wrote a poem about it. That's right. It's adorable. Then he died of tuberculosis later that year. Point that out again. So John Ralston and Mary Sawyer are the source of the inspiration and the basis of that nursery, mary had a Little Lamb as far as Sterling, Massachusetts is concerned. But if you drive a little further north, about 90 miles north into New Hampshire, southwest New Hampshire, you come across the town of Newport, you will get a totally different story. That their position is basically that Mary Sawyer was a lying old lady who lied her whole life and made up this fantastic tale, and that it was really Sarah Joseph Hale, who is a native of Newport, New Hampshire, who is very famous for setting up the first Thanksgiving in the United States, like as a national holiday. She's the one that made that happen. That. She's the one who wrote Mary Had a Little Lamb. Right. And I think we should take a break. Okay. And before we do that, I want to point out that Josh did not misspeak her middle name was Joseph, and not Joseph or Josephine. Yeah, it just sounded a little funny. And people might think, why did Josh spice that one up? Put a little mustard on it. So we'll come back and explain more about her story and where Henry Ford figures in right after this. It's 2022 and things look different. Like doctors visits, for example. Sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for non emergency situations like a sinus infection or allergy. And that's why teladoc gives you the chance to connect with board certified physicians right from your home via phone or video. That's right. Doctors are standing by 24/7. So you can schedule a visit according to your schedule. You can see for yourself why teladoc is ranked number one by JD. Power and telehealth satisfaction with direct to consumer providers. Teledoc is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teladoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teladoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today, that's teladoc. comST. For JD Power 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. 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All right, so Sarahjosef Joseph Hale. I like Joseph, but I hadn't considered Joseph. Joseph. That's a good one too. That sounds really biblical. Like she suddenly just grew a beard without a mustache. You know what I mean? Yes. Come to me, Joseph, and let me put oils on your feet. Right. That's exactly what I was thinking. Remember what congressman was it that literally anointed someone? Ashcroft, I think, wasn't it? Was it? Yes. What a bizarre time. I think it was. It was Ashcroft. You're totally right. I think he also sang some weird patriotic song about the eagle flying high around the same time he got some bad press. Everybody was like, wow, you're bonkers, buddy. Oh, man, I missed that guy. He was fun for the news cycle. He really was. All right, so Sarah Josepha Hale moved to Boston in 1828. She was a poet and a writer, and she was actually the editor of the very first women's magazine in the US. Called Gotti's Ladies Book. And it was here in Boston that she met a man named Lowell Mason, who was a musician and composer, who said, you know what? If we get some of these poems and set them to music, they would be called songs, and we can use these in schools to make a little kids good, moral kids. When I think of Lowell, this kind of folk musician, children's music study proponent guy, have you ever seen that Mr. Show where David Cross is like, the guy who sculpted the little body that he moves from Appalachian folk art? That guy. That's who I think of when I think of this guy, just kind of weird and hapless and, like, out of it his whole focus is learning to get music into schools for children. And I don't know why, but it's really stuck in there. You know, our buddy Scott Ocrman wrote for Mr. Show. It was kind of his entree into the entertainment industry. And he does a spot on impression of Bob Odennkirk. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's great. I got to see that. It's very funny. All right, so Mason and Hale are writing songs together. They put 15 poems to music called Poems for Our Children. And we should point out that the original tune that they wrote for her version of Mary Had a Little Lamb was not the familiar melody that we know. That came on later, I think. Yeah. Apparently that comes from a British song that goes, merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along, merrily we roll along over the dark blue sea hey. Nice. Thank you. I practiced pretty extensively for it. Who's on key? I'm a little tone deaf. It's a little pitchy, but it was fine. Okay, thanks. I'll go with It was fine. No, it was good. But, yeah, that came on later, the original melody. I don't even think we know that, do we? No, but if you can get your hands on Juvenile Liar Liar lyre that book that it was originally in. I think the notes are in there. Okay. It sounds like in a Gadda Davida, that's your go to. So Mary Sawyer going back to her, the little girl who allegedly actually nursed this little lamb, who followed her around and stalked her, she said, you know what? Those first three verses of your poem, Ms. Hale, is exactly like the ones that John Rollstone wrote about my true story. What is up with that? Yeah, I guess she just thought that somehow Sarah Joseph Hale had gotten her hand somehow on this poem that John Rolston had written for and just expanded on that. And Sarah Joseph Hale was like, no, that's not it at all. I made this whole thing up from scratch using strictly my imagination. I've never heard of you or your delightful little story from your childhood about the lamb, which sounds totally made up, by the way. Right. And so this was like so now you had two upstanding women. Sarah Joseph Hale, the founder of the American Holiday Thanksgiving, and Mary Sawyer, who went on to become the patron of her local hospital, were basically saying that one another was lying without saying that one another was lying. And two towns like Reputations were on the line. Yeah. And they actually, as older ladies, signed sworn statements saying that what they were saying was true and correct. And it kind of went on like this for a little while. And I promised Henry Ford, and here we are going to deliver, because in 1927, automobile magnate Henry Ford got involved and was firmly in the mary Saw Your camp. He was just a fan of hers, I guess, because he bought the original frame from that red school house and moved it to Sudbury, where he owned an inn. And he wrote a book about this called The Story of Mary and Her Little Lamb. I find that him moving the end to Sudbury confuses the story tremendously, because it just takes two small towns and adds a third one. Unnecessarily, if you ask me. Sure. But, yes, Henry Ford wrote a 60 page book just basically touting Mary Sawyer's story, much to the chagrin of the town of Newport, New Hampshire, and its historical society. And to this day, they will say, like, henry Ford made a great car. I don't know how he would be, really, as an historian, so his opinion doesn't count for much. What I want to know is what was on the other 56 pages? Right. Couldn't have taken more than four to tell this little story. No, I know. I don't know what he talked about. And I think my joke bone is broken because I can't come up with anything stupid to add. Well, there are very much two camps here. And to this day, people that defend Hail I mean, people to defend Sawyers are like, this is a sweet girl who had this sweet story. Why would she make this up and tell it her whole life? And Hail defenders were like, well, why would she just conjure up this poem out of thin air? Or Why would she copy it and claim she conjured it from thin air? Because she wouldn't have even known about this poem. Yeah. From what I can tell, she doesn't seem like the type who would have committed plagiarism and then stuck to the lie her entire life. Yeah. It's a mystery. It's a mystery, and even Henry Ford couldn't solve it. But to end this one because we don't really have a resolution to it, there is, like, the full poem by Sarah Joseph Hale. It ends pretty cutely because she's talking about how everyone wanted to know why the lamb loved Mary so much. And in the poem, it says, well, it's because Mary loves the lamb back. And then it ends with and you each gentle animal in confidence may bind and make them follow at your will, if only you are kind. And that's sweet thing to teach little kids. Be kind to animals, and you can basically be the boss of them. Yes. And you will never be a serial killer. That's right. Because you're kind to them rather than torture something. That's right. Well, that's it for short stuff, everybody. We're out. 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." | |
8dbb4952-ba8a-11e8-a624-8304886fc292 | Short Stuff: Backyard Burials | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-backyard-burials | Time was that you’d bury a deceased relative in your yard; now it’s just weird. But it’s still legal – and if you want to do it, here’s how! | Time was that you’d bury a deceased relative in your yard; now it’s just weird. But it’s still legal – and if you want to do it, here’s how! | Wed, 20 Nov 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=324, tm_isdst=0) | 12555956 | audio/mpeg | "Hello. Welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Jerry. This is Short Stuff. Giddy up. So a while back, we did a podcast. I'm not even sure which one it was, but you said that your ultimate wish was to be was it fired from a cannon? Yeah. That's like so, like, yesterday's news. What's your current plan? I actually am still in the process of figuring that out. Again, I am trying to figure out just how much or what parts of my body might be donated to science, if any. I've kind of been creeped out by a lot of the stories where it's like, we found a head in the woods, and it was clearly surgically removed. And I guess the people who it was donated to didn't need it anymore, so they just dumped it in the woods kind of stuff. Right. And you don't want to one day become a soccer ball for wildlife. But the weird thing is, when I read about stuff like what we're about to talk about, I'm like, well, it doesn't matter if this land gets subdivided 100 years from now and somebody accidentally digs up the grave, who cares? So it's weird. Part of me is very precious about what happens to me after I die. And another part of me is like, it does not matter. Yeah, I'm in that camp still. I have an alarming amount of or a lack of reverence for a human corpse after they're gone. I know I've seen you pee on one before. No, I wouldn't do that. But I don't know, man. I just think that once you're gone, you're gone. So burn me up, ash me up, spread me around someplace I liked, cut you into lines and snort you up. I did bury my cat Lauren in the backyard, but all of our other animals have been cremated. And Emily didn't love the idea of burying Lauren, but she was like, he's your cat. You do what you want. And I like him being out there. Yeah, I'm with you. So there's really no beef that you're going to get from anybody for burying Lauren in the backyard. And by the way, rip Lauren, he was one of the great ones. But if Lauren had been, say, your father or your brother or something like that let's go with my brother. Okay. If Lauren had been your brother, if Lauren was Scott and you tried to bury Scott in your yard, buddy, you would have probably run into some issues with the authorities. At the very least, your neighbors would have been rather upset with you, and they could have called the cops on you, and the cops would have been like, dig your brother up, and that'd be that. And I'd dig up Leron and be like, here he is. Right? Yeah. Well, this is definitely an old prairie kind of thing, the idea of bearing relatives on your land, and it is still really very much legal in a lot of states. California won't let you because I guess the real estate is just super valuable and that they said that there are concerns that in the future, like, you were talking about, if they subdivide their land to sell parcels and plots, that someone might be disturbed. Washington State, Indiana and Washington, DC. Is on record as just being like, there's no room. Sorry. Right. Barrier dead in Virginia, probably so right. But anywhere else, you can, if you own enough land, bury anybody you want to on your land, especially a family member. I think that probably greases the wheels a little more if you're actually a blood relative or relative by marriage of them. But there are some rules that you have to follow no matter what. But one of the first questions you want to ask yourself before you actually do this is, do I really want to do this? Because if you're not planning on spending your dying days on this piece of property and handing it down to your kid who wants that property, there's a good chance you might want to sell that property in the future, and it may affect the resale of that house and property, knowing that there's a dead body buried in what's now a cemetery on your land. Yeah. Like, I got to give my house one day to my daughter, and she's like, Gross. Uncle Scott and Lorna back there. No, thanks. And why did you make them share the same great? It's under the bird bath. It really is. So if you are going to do this and we'll get into the nitpicky details after the break, but there are definitely going to be nitpicky details. You can't just say, well, it's legal in my state. Here we go. Give me a shovel. There are rules and regulations depending on the state and the county or the district that you're in. They're definitely going to be setbacks. Like, you can't bury it right next to your property line or next to a stream because it's pretty it's going to have to be well away from the water table, any kind of water, and any kind of building or adjoining properties. Yeah. Which are really good things to keep in mind. You don't want the cadaver fouling up the local water supply, basically. You don't. No. So you want to take a break and then come back and get into the real deeds. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Okay, Chuck. So you've donned your overalls and taking your shoes off, got a little thing of grain in your teeth, and you're saying, I'm ready to bury a loved one. Just give me one first. Yeah. Which I would not do barefoot, by the way. You wouldn't? No. So there are some states where you can just basically do that. You can show up at the hospital or the hospice or wherever your deceased loved one is and say, hey, I'm a blood relative. Here's proof. Give me the body. Put the body in your station wagon and take it to your house and bury it, depending on the time frame of when all this happens and again where you live. Yeah, I mean, I looked up Georgia just out of curiosity, and I found a few little interesting tidbits, but one of them is that, and I imagine it's like this in a lot of states, embalming is not a state law. Funeral directors do that because they have the body for a period of time, sometimes before the actual burial or ceremony or whatever you're going to do. So they embalm for that reason. But you're not required by law to involve a body. And if refrigeration is okay, but even if it's within a really short time span, you may not even have to refrigerate a body. Right. Typically in states that allow you to take possession of the body yourself and handle the burial yourself as family, they usually say about 24 hours. And actually I shouldn't even say about within 24 hours. Yeah, if you bury the body within 24 hours, you don't have to involvement, you don't have to refrigerate it. You can just, again, go to the hospital, put it in your station wagon, bring it home and bury it. Probably just to be smart, you should dig the hole first, dig the grave first, have it ready. It's not very cinematic, but sure. No, it really isn't, now that I think about it. Usually dig the hole with the body right there. Right, exactly. And also if you're going to do this, just a little tip from us, like make sure that somebody can see you and that they see you nervously looking over your shoulder a lot. And maybe let's do this at dusk or nighttime. Okay? Right, exactly. And here's the thing. You're also going to have to create an easement for your property. And that doesn't mean you have to pave like, a concrete path that leads to the grave. But you do have to provide for some sort of future public access to that grave site. Right, exactly. It has to be on the deed. That that is a possibility. That's right. There are some states who say, no, the funeral directing lobby is far too powerful. In our state, you have to hire a funeral director. It varies on a spectrum of just how involved the funeral director has to be. In some states, the funeral director would have to take possession of the body or would at least have to file the death certificate. In other states, it's like a total free for all. Like you can handle all that, but you do have to file a death certificate, which from what this article says, I think Dave Rus actually wrote this on how stuff works. He says that there are no funeral police, but they typically want you to file it within, I think, five days of death, but you just have to file it's one of those things that has to get done. There's a lot of stuff, a lot of responsibility you take on when a loved one dies and you say, I'm just going to bury them in the backyard. Yeah. And this was another little thing that I would never have thought about or considered. This is like a county clerk, so they have regular business hours. Right. So if this happens at 501 on a Friday, you're not going to be able to file that certificate until Monday. But if you're a funeral director, you can party twenty four seven and just file it electronically, which I would guess would be the big advantage of working with the funeral director. Sure. And the best way to do this also, if you're going to handle it yourself, is to be waiting outside of the county clerk's office when they show up the next morning and be covered in gore and grave dirt. Right. Waiting to file this death certificate. They're like, I got to get my coffee first on Mondays. So bearing a body, you always hear about 6ft under. That's the sort of rule of thumb. That's actually not the law in most places. Only New Mexico, as far as the United States, where it's legal to bury a body in your backyard requires 6ft. New Jersey is four. It's astounding to me, but most states are between 18 and 30 inches. But see, that to me, makes the most sense. Like 6ft, you're removing the body from a lot of the aerobic processes that happen in soil. Right, true. So all you're doing is prolonging this decomposition, where I guess if you're trying to decompose the body, shallower grave is a better bet. But you're walking a balancing act here. Like you want it to be shallow enough so that the soil is like part of the soil. Right. But not so shallow that, say, coyote is going to come along and be like, oh, yes, and dig it up because I can smell it. Yeah. Which we have in our neighborhood. There are coyotes all over Atlanta. They're everywhere. I have buried Lauren feel like a couple of feet, because I wanted to make sure that he like the whole idea was that he became part of the land. Right. And quite frankly, I didn't want to dig any further than that. I'm being honest. That's when I hit that really hard clay pan. But you don't want a smell, and apparently 18 to 30 inches will take care of that. That's enough. Yeah. That's what my dad always said. That's right. And then so one of the other things, one of the last things is when you do this, you are by definition, your land becomes a cemetery. That's pretty cool. Like, you don't go in and say, I need to file this little plot of land as a cemetery. Just the act of burying somebody legally on your land, that portion of your land becomes a cemetery. So it's protected by all sorts of laws and antidepressant laws and cemetery laws. And actually these laws, like, go back to Roman times, from what I saw. But to do that, you need to file it with your there's usually like a cemetery or some sort of commission that keeps track of all the grades in the town and has some giant book. Yeah. That's kind of the coolest thing. It's a giant book. A black book covered in dust with gold leafing all around it. Yeah. And when you open it, it makes a giant echoey thud when you open it. It does. Wow. Yeah. When you open it down the middle, let's say I got you. Yeah. And then a creaky old finger with a yellow fingernail runs down until it finds the spot where they're going to enter your name in blood. Well, that's it. Yes. That's all I got. It's an interesting option. That's all I'm going to say. Yeah. Maybe if you're thinking of doing this, look into all the laws first. Agreed. Well, thank you very much for joining us on Short Stuff. This is the end of this short stuff. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
c5b3a3bc-5460-11e8-b38c-b396a4f558b0 | Selects: Why is Venice so wet? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-why-is-venice-so-wet | Venice, Italy has a problem. It's sinking, and the water around it is rising. Thankfully, some engineers are working hard on the MOSE project - huge gates that keep high tide from happening. Learn all about Venice in this classic episode. | Venice, Italy has a problem. It's sinking, and the water around it is rising. Thankfully, some engineers are working hard on the MOSE project - huge gates that keep high tide from happening. Learn all about Venice in this classic episode. | Sat, 16 Oct 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=289, tm_isdst=0) | 33267885 | audio/mpeg | "Hi everyone, its Charles W. Chuck Bryan here on a lovely Saturday in Atlanta, Georgia, cohost of the Stuffy Chanel podcast bringing you this Saturday Selects episode all the way back from June 2, 2014. Why is Venice so wet? The answer coming up right now. 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 Knowles with us again. And it's another Morning edition. Yeah, we got an email. I think we had our last morning thing session not too long ago and someone wrote in and said, please don't do that again. I didn't think it was that bad. You guys are clearly like really tired and not the same. So what I say is, if you have a choice, is save this one for the morning and just pretend like where your local NPR station work a cup of joe like Josh is drinking. Yeah, it smells so good. And let's do this morning style. Let's do it, man. Let's do this morning style in Italian. Yeah. This is going to be a fan favorite, I predict, because there's some Italian pronunciations that I'm sure you will do for everybody. Right? I'm going to do it my best. Oh, that was a good little taste of it. Yes. It's one of the accidents you can have a great time with without people saying that you're offensive. That's a T shirt. Yeah. So, Chuck, you heard about the sea levels? Yeah. Rising. Falling, yeah. Due to climate change, some say. Well, it's climate change. The big bone of contention is human caused or anthropogenic. The thing is, it is undeniable that sea levels are rising at a rate of about 3 year, which doesn't sound like much, but buddy, if you live for 1000 years, you'd see the sea levels rise by 3 meters, which is almost 10ft in America. Yeah. Not the biggest deal in some parts of the world. Big deal in Venice. Yeah. And if you're waiting 1000 years to watch it rise 3 meters, that's the current rate of sea level rise. It could speed up tremendously. And while 3 mm might not sound that much to you out in the Rockies sure. Yeah. Because it's nice and dry there in the middle of the mountain. They're all stoned, right? Yeah. Because it's legal there. Yeah. Who cares if you're in a place like the Maldives, you're saying, wow, my country is probably not going to exist in the next 20 years. Yeah. That's scary. If you're in New Orleans worried about the same thing and a little town known as Venice, Italy, is facing the same problem and has been for a very long time. And you say little town, it is getting smaller, not only physically, but the population, because Venice is such a mess, has declined down to about 60,000 people now over the years. From like 180. Yeah. Because people are tired of getting wet. They are they used to get wet. So back in 1900, they would get wet about ten times a year due to flooding. They could expect ten noteworthy floods a year. And when we say noteworthy floods, we mean, like, the squares throughout the city are flooded up to maybe your knees. Yes. Kind of like the whole ground floor of Venice. Yeah. It gets flooded like you're slogging around, which I mean, it sounds kind of fun when you're a kid, but it's not that fun, especially when you're an adult who may be a germophobe. Because Venice has an antiquated sewer system that's antiquated is the perfect word. Yeah. By antiquated, we mean all of the sewer pipes go right out into the canals. They have, along the years, added, like, septic tanks to treat the stuff first. But not everybody has those, and sometimes they get backed up, too. But the raw sewage or septically treated sewage in Venice goes into those canals that you float around on boats. And when you're swimming around in the flood like a tourist, you're swimming around in fecal material. Did tourists get in that water? There's a picture of it on a man. I can't remember, I think, like a Bloomberg article about Venice or maybe Wired. But it's like, if you know about Venice, you'll think, these people are crazy for swimming in this floodwater. And it shows a couple of tours, like swimming in a flood in the middle of the square. San Marco. The San Marco Square. Yeah. And now that you know it's gross to see. They're like it tastes briny and sort of, umami right. Why are my lips swollen? Yeah. That's one of many problems facing Venice right now, an antiquated sewer system. And a lot of the problems are unique just because of the city and how it's created. Yeah. Let's talk about this, because Venice is not something I knew a ton about. I knew it was on the water. I knew it was sinking. Shout out, by the way, to Venice is sinking. Athens band. Oh, okay. And stuff you should know Finns. Oh, nice. Well, then I like them already. Yes. No one you know those guys. He does, in fact. Noel says noel talks, Jerry doesn't. What if he was loud and was like, oh, yeah, they're great. He launches into, like, a five minute discourse on them. So I knew a little bit about Venice. Very little, though. I've never been there. But when I watched this awesome video that Josh found, we should go ahead and plug it because it's just super cool. Yeah. It's called Venice backstage period. How does Venice work? Yeah. And it was created by the Insula Spa, which is, I guess, the production arm of the city of Venice. Yeah. So it's like a locally produced video about Venice, but it's one of the most fascinating 18 minutes videos I've ever seen. Yeah. I mean, they pack a lot of learning into that 18 minutes. So if you don't know much about Venice, if you do know something about New York City, imagine like, the Greenwich Village. And I use Greenwich Village because it's not on the direct, like north, south, east, west grid. They got all those crazy diagonal streets. Plus, it's so hot right now because of Lewin Davis. Yeah, true. Imagine Greenwich Village if every block was an island. And that's essentially what Venice is. Right. It is 124 tiny little islands all packed together. And instead of streets, you have water 183 canals. And it's all connected by little foot bridges and real bridges. Yup. And yes, canals by boat. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. I had never even seen the big zoom in from above birds eye view of what Venice looks like, and I was like, that's what's going on. Yeah, it's crazy because especially when you're in the city, like, you're walking over canals, but you don't give too much thought to them. You're just like, oh, that's so quaint. You're almost thinking like they dug that out on purpose or something to get tourists. Now, those are necessity. Yeah. It was an odd and different way for a city to form. Right. They didn't start from a city center and grow out. Each little block and section was its own little thing. Yeah, it was kind of its own little municipality. And the reason that these people set up shop hundreds and hundreds of years ago on these islands was for protection. Yeah. Venice was a very well protected municipality or cluster of municipalities. Right. Yeah. It sits in a lagoon, and there are three waterways that flow water in and out every day. Twice a day with the tide. Yeah. The Adriatic flows in to the lagoon and brings it out. Brings the water back out at low tide. Right? Yeah, yeah. High tide, it brings water in. Low tide, it takes the water out. Which is why they're not that worried about their sewage going into the canals, supposedly. Yeah. Because the water comes in and kind of brings all the trash out to the sea and then no one sees it. It's a self flushing system. Yeah. Well, I mean, it pretty much is. So that's how they've been able to put up with that for so long, because twice a day the water is exchanged. There is a big exchange to it. The problem is when that water comes in, especially when you include sea level rises, and now up to six times more flooding per year. Remember, it was like ten times a year, 1900. Now that's up to about 60 floods. You have kind of a problem now. You have a sinking city, essentially, is what it amounts to. Yeah. I mean, it's two things. It's the water rises in Venice itself, the buildings are sinking. So those are two bad things that don't taste great together. The reason that sinking is because they extract fresh water from beneath the city. Right. Yeah. So there's less of a solid foundation now. And there's also drilling nearby, like for natural gas or fossil fuels, and it's also just, eroding well, yeah. They've done a lot of things over the years. When you've got seawater lapping up against, well, let's step back. It's not just dirt and stuff. They realized pretty early on, we're not going to be around unless we in case the entire city basically in brick below the waterline. And they came up with some really ingenious construction methods that you can super ingenious in that Venice backstage video on vimeo. Is it vimeo? Yeah. But even though they've ensconced the whole city in brick as a foundation, that was lapping saltwater. And these canals are busy. It's not just the gondolier singing the song. If you see real footage and not movie footage, they're packed with boats. Yeah. Motor boats, cruise ships, all sorts of stuff. And that action creates a lot of movement in the water and it just whittles away those bricks little by little over the years. Over hundreds and hundreds of years, that's right. And then that's why Venice is sinking. Part of the other problem, too, is sediment builds up in the canals. They're supposed to close them down on a fairly regular basis, basically dam them up, drain them and then remove the sediment and basically call all the dead bodies. Yeah, they stopped doing that as frequently as before and there's been a problem as a result. Plus saltwater permeates bricks. Bricks are semi permeable and they have capillary action, so it draws saltwater up into the bricks, which, I mean, as long as bricks are connected by mortar, that water, that saltwater will rise all the way to the top of a building. And when the water evaporates, the water is gone, but the salt stays and it apparently increases in volume tremendously and basically crushes the bricks from the inside out. Yeah. And they've been taking steps and measures little by little in different ways over the years to help, but they're kind of fighting a losing battle. They'll like inject resin between the bricks and into the bricks with hydraulics, a barrier. But they're fighting, like I said, they're fighting Mother Nature here. Right. So finally they've said, let's turn our attention from these piecemeal measures of kind of treating bricks and go to where the problem is. Let's go to the doorstep of the problem, which is the Adriatic and the three inlets into the lagoon. Yes. And they turn their attention to that and now they've come up with a pretty great plan for dealing with rising tides and floodwaters. All right, so there's a plan. You know, one thing on that video too quickly that amazed me. You're talking about the building construction. The walls in Venice, the exterior walls have a tendency to bow out at the top, and so they have these basically hooks that pull from the inside the walls in and then those long metal hooks travel into the floor where they're spiked into the floor. So they're trying to pull it in there. And then the roofs of the buildings in Venice aren't just like, hey, let's keep the water out. They are literally like caps that lock the walls in at the top. So it's not just like a weather protector roof. It's actually like if the roof wasn't there, the walls would bow out. And then the interior walls don't even connect rigidly to the exterior walls. Yeah, it allows some give so that they can move back and forth. The wave action basically moves the walls. So, I mean, we're saying Venice is a mess but it's really an ingenious city of just engineering the fact that it's still there at all. Right. Another construction point that kind of stuck out to me was that buildings in Venice are built on piles of stakes. Like wooden stakes driven into the ground to kind of reinforce the mucky ground to build on first. It's really a remarkable place when you look at all the things they've had to do just to make that what shouldn't even be a city. I mean, let's get real. Well, it's very neat. Beautiful city. Have you been? No. You mean I went last summer and it is gorgeous. Yeah, I did. Rome. Very neat. Rome is neat too. Just walking around and all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm next to 3000 year old ruins. Yeah. Just basically part of the cityscape. Right. Whereas here in Atlanta you're like, oh, there's a Burger King. Right. But it's from the exactly. All right. So we had a pretty good cliffhanger that they had an idea. So go ahead and announce it. Okay. Well, the idea is called Mose. Or you should do this. Chuck the Modulo Spare. Mentally electromechanico. Not bad. Electromechanico. So that's the Experimental Electromechanical Module, which is the reason that has that clumsy name is because Mose, the acronym is also the Italian spelling for Mose or Moses. And basically what Moses was well known for, one of his many hits was Parting the Red Sea. Right. Well, they thought that was very clever. That's his biggest hit. They were coming. I don't know. He did a lot of stuff. Yeah. Commandments, that was a pretty big hit. Burning Bush. I would say the Red Sea was his American Pie. Or no, that was his Baker Street. The Ten Commandments was his right down the line. Who did? Jerry Rafferty? Baker street. That was the saxophone one, right? Yeah. And right down the line was his other hit. I've never heard that one. You have. You just don't know it. Okay. It says you I was just about to bust it out. Too early. So anyway, moses. Moses in Italian. That's a clever use of an acronym because this thing, the contraption they came up with, it's pretty ingenious and clever to defend against these rising high tides. Which are known as aqua alta. Yeah. And this is one of those things where you say ingenious and clever, but I would add in its simplicity. Right. These are my favorite kinds of projects. When man looks at something and says, why don't we just build a big gate? That's pretty much what it is. Yes, but it's more complicated than that. Let's talk about the mosaic. Remember we said sea levels are rising in general, but high tides are a really big problem in Venice because they're getting higher. So the mosaic project, it consists of a bunch of gates that can be brought up and raised on command. They have a magician who commands the gates to rise, and the gates come up and basically separate the lagoon from the Adriatic Sea. Yeah. So imagine a big, huge steel door that lays flat on the bottom of the ocean, and they fill it with air, and it's got two hinges on one side. So that big steel door just raises up as it fills with air, obviously becoming more buoyant, and until it looks like about a 45 degree angle facing out into the sea, away from the city. And that's it. It's just a barrier. Yeah, it just swings up. And I think there's about a two foot differential in the water levels, and it essentially prevents high tide from happening within the Venice lagoon. That's exactly right. And these basically walls, floating walls is what they amount to. Like you said, they have hinges on the bottom, and there's all sorts of pictures of the Mose project, the Mosaic project, all over the Internet. I found it exponentially easier to understand when I saw what they were talking about. Yeah. It's like, oh, that's all it is. Right. But allow us to clumsily, try to get this across. So you've got the hinges hinge the metal wall to the bottom of the sea floor, right? Well, not to the sea floor. Well, to a concrete trench within the sea floor that the thing sits in when it's not in use. Yeah. They tried to pound it right into the sand, and they were like, It's not working. Right. Get us some concrete. So these trenches also provide a place for engineers to go underneath and basically fix things and fiddle with stuff. And it also provides a delivery system for the compressed air that the hollow metal walls gates basically fill up with air so that they start to stand upright. Yes. And how long does that take? Like 20 minutes or 30 minutes. Yeah. And then it takes about the same time to fill them with sea water again to return them back to their laying position on the floor. It's a little quicker going down, but it makes sense. Yeah, but that's pretty much it. When high tides coming, they fill them with air so that the gates stand up above water. And then on the lagoon side, the sea level stays low on the sea side, it can get as high as it likes. And because they're hinged and filled with air, they're not rigid, which means that they can take a pounding and they can sway back and forth a little bit and still not give. Yeah. So, like you said, it's ingenious and it's simplicity. It is. And it officially launched in 2003. And this was after years of, I guess, ideas and bids and plans, and the Mose Project is what finally went out. They said it was going to be two to $3 billion and would be done in 2012. It's still not done. They're looking at 2016 now. They did the first successful test late last year. And like with every big project, city project like that, it's going to be over budget and over scheduled. Yes, but there's a lot of accusations of corruption. Really? Yeah. Southern Italy a big public project, so corrupt, the group that suggested the thing in the first place is called the you want to take it? Someone's going to be offended by me, by the way. Maybe. I'll bet they're not Italian, though. Consortio venezia Nova. So that's basically the New Venice Consortium. It's a group of companies and construction companies that said, hey, we've got an idea for this problem. Let's try this, and we'll build it for you. We have all the companies under our banner that can provide everything you need. Right. And they said, we'll build it for you for two to $3 billion. Sure. And everybody went, what? Which sounds like a lot, including to people in Venice. Is that American dollars or is that euros? That's American dollars. Okay. As far as I'm seeing right here. Yeah. But if you go to Venice, martini is, like, $15 or 20 or $25 for, like, a little tiny martini at Harry's Bar. I know. Yeah. So it sounds like a lot, but all you have to do is go open the cash register at Harry's Bar on a Tuesday afternoon. You can get two to $3 billion to pay for this project. All right. Someone's a little salty about their vanishing. It was really expensive. Yeah, it is. It was neat. But it's also really expensive. Europe is not cheap. No. So there's a lot of accusations of corruption, of kickbacks, of the thing being artificially expensive. Apparently there was a study that found that this thing is they've padded this tremendously, but by the time this came out, public opinion apparently wasn't enough to stop it. Construction had started. They did their first test in 2012. Apparently, it was successful. And the Mosaic Project continues, and I believe they're tracking for 2016, they are to have all of the gates across all three of the inlets operational. Yeah. And you said multiple gates. So each of these inlets, you have the Lido, the Malimoco, and then I pronounce this chiogia. But I heard it much differently on the video, so I know that's not right. But those are the three inlets. Well, that was a British student. They just pronounced things however they want. Yeah, that's true. And then we assume, because they're European, they know you're right. So it's not like one big gate for each of these things because it's on a curve and you can't just have one huge gate. So the Malimoca has 19 gates, the Chioga has 18, and they're all in one row. And then the big daddy, the Lido, has two rows, one with 20 gates and one with 21 gates. And they're the same width, but they're not all the same height. Right. And I mean, they don't need to be. No, some are taller than others. They're all about 16ft thick. So these are huge walled gates. I don't know if we've gotten across how big they are. You said they're 16ft or about 5 meters thick. Yes. The deepest amount of water is 100ft, which is like 30 meters. So these things are taller than that, or if need be, and then there about 350 tons. I think that's just for one of the gates. Yes. Like one single panel weighs as much as a 737 or is it 747? 47. And they are using something that Rolls Royce makes that is basically an elevator for ships to convey each of the gates out to the sea floor. Really? Yeah. And it takes three days to move a gate. Wow. Yeah. So they're really, really big gates, but they are going to be very nimble when filled with compressed air and smacked around by waves. Plus they're in water. Yeah. So that helps with the weight. That reminds me that this project faces a lot of problems that the project faces. So some people have said maybe this is a good idea in theory, but practically this may or may not work. What if sea levels rise faster than we think? Yeah. Then these things are going to basically be very expensive, totally obsolete gates. Like the water would just go right over the top of the exactly. That's a nightmare scenario. When I saw what I saw, it didn't look like to me they came out of the water enough. I was like, I would add another 5ft, just to be safe. Just to be safe. So that's one possible problem. Another one that apparently they haven't addressed is the build up of sediment. Remember we said that you have to clean out the canals pretty frequently because sediment builds up, backs up septic systems, it crumbles bricks, walls. Well, it will also fill in these trenches, which apparently need to be totally flat. And if sediment builds up, then these things aren't going to lay flat again. And you may have some problems, apparently, that's something that hasn't been addressed by the Mosaic project. How to deal with sediment build up? Well, I know they got about 150 people that will just be full time caretaking staff and I guess part of their job will be to clean that stuff up, I would guess. And some of the other problems. Anytime you're undertaking a project like this that has to interact with the elements and Mother Nature. They're going to be environmental concerns. And they range the spectrum here from we don't really know how this is going to affect things and disrupt the ecosystem to well. Wait a minute. We need this constant flow in and out of water twice a day to flush our giant toilet that we're living in. And proponents will say it's going to be better, actually, because and it sort of makes sense, if you have three holes going into something and you plug up two of them, you're going to have a stronger flow in the one hole. Right, exactly. So they're saying we can actually use this to manipulate this flow of water artificially and make a better toilet flusher. Exactly. Yeah. But I think that hopefully the ones who are like, well, why don't we just use this as an opportunity to update our septic system as a whole, or sewer system as a whole? Hopefully those guys will win out. But pollution, increased pollution levels are definitely an issue that environmentalists are looking at. And I just get the picture in southern Italy, it's a tough game. There seems to be a lot of fighting. Like, this is a very controversial project, but still remains so. Yeah. And it seems to be marching on. One of the other criticisms was that they basically just ignored easier, less expensive options that have proven effective elsewhere. Yeah. The Netherlands. Yeah. Like building barrier islands underwater dikes. But although apparently they have a lot of this stuff already, and it's not necessarily helping, it's mainly just reinforcing the natural barriers that already exist. I guess they're like, why don't we just put up more of that? Yeah, I think it's interesting. It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. I really hope it works because they suck a lot of money into this and they moved all in on this Mose system. They can't scrap it and say, well, it didn't work. Let's think of something new. Yeah. And I wonder how much it would be. You can't just add a new gate, a new, taller gate, if the sea levels do rise faster. And the ones they have proved too short because it has to sit flush in the trench. Yeah. So you'd have to create a whole nother trench to accommodate this larger gate. It would be a real problem. That's the worst case scenario to me. Yeah. If they're too short. Yeah. I mean, surely they thought of that. It didn't look right to me. But they know what they're doing, right? I hope so. Pretty neat. And hopefully they had all this in that great video, a lot of footage where it looked like some parts of Venice on a daily basis with high tide is slightly underwater. Yeah. They just showed people walking to work through water and delivering stuff to places through water, and everyone looks very sick of it. Yeah. Go check out on Vimeo. Venice backstage. That is definitely worth watching. Venice back stage, period. How does Venice work? I think they meant to put a colon there. The period bugs me. Period in a title. They're from England, Josh. No, these are the Venetians that made this. They're from Venice, Josh. They know what they're doing. Yeah. And check out stuff on the Mose Project. I just want to say moz from Paper moon. Your favorite movie, right? Yeah. Boom. And if you want to learn even more about the Mosaic project, you can type in Mose Project in the search bar athousetoforks.com. And that will bring up this article. Yeah. And, hey, check out Venice's. Sinking from Athens, Georgia. Yeah, that's nice of you. My one buddy is no longer in the band. But you're still friendly with the other guys? No, they haven't been in touch, actually, but they send a record. And you're good folk. Well and if you ever get a chance to go to Venice, I recommend you do it because it is a neat town. But don't go to Harry's Bar. You have to go to Harry's Bar. Is that the legendary place? That's where the bellini was created. Why didn't you have a bellini? You had a bellini. She had a bellini. I had a martini. What is a bellini? A bellini is a peach juice, peach puree, and champagne. Okay. Very good. Yeah, but again, it's like, basically a shot for I think it was like, $25 or maybe even more. Yes, but you have to you have to go you walk past the seat that Hemingway used to drink at. Right. It's a neat place. Yes. There's a lot of those seats around the world, though. Yeah, right. Find a cheaper one. Yeah. I think we already went through the whole rigmarole. That leads us up to listener mail. So now it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this murderer in our midst. Midst? Not murderer in the midst. You're thinking of gorillas in the midst. You guys have a boring job, so I binge listen several days a week to your show. I was listening to the insanity defense episode, and I heard a very familiar name. I happened to have met John Delling during his killing spree. I used to manage a coffee shop, and a guy was oddly peering in the window with his hand pressed against the glass, but the store was clearly open. He paced around the building for a while, thought it was pretty weird, so I sent the girl working with me. Pretty brave of you, Josh. His name is Josh, by the way. Okay. I can see what I do. I sent the girl working with me in the back. Oh, no. Okay, I take it all back. He was trying to protect her, and. That was me. I sent her in the back and told her to hang out there until he left. He came in, looked the menu over and asked if our ice cream was any good. I gave him a free sample. Here you go. We don't want any trouble. He liked it and said he had to go to his car to get some money. He literally said, I'll be right back. Then he went out to his car for a while and drove away. A couple of days later, the girl I was working with at night called, crying and told me to find a newspaper. Well, no wonder he's in the back. She's clearly fragile. She's crying like the guy was at the front door. You see that Sunday New York Times at $6. Now, on the front page was a large mug shot of our guy from a couple of nights previous. Turns out he had actually left the store and murdered someone. Crazy. Because the ice cream drove him nuts. I guess so. And he stole something. Stole their car that same evening. Anyway, I just thought it was an interesting connection. The guy was definitely in need of some help and, as you mentioned, had no shot at getting it in. The legal system here in Idaho is clearly a tricky ethical area. Thanks, everybody. And that is from Josh. Noel. That's from way back. The insanity defense. Yeah. That was a good one, though, it turned out. Yeah, we learned a lot. So he fed a guy ice cream and he went out and killed someone. Man, that is really scary stuff. His coworker, who was around for none of it, cried when she read the paper. Yeah. Apparently she never got any work done because anytime a customer came in, she gets sent to the back. Crazy. What was the dude's name? Josh. NOL. Oh, yeah. Josh. Thanks, Josh. It's always good to hear from another Josh, because we are the greatest names on the planet. Josh. This is such a great name. It is. Especially if you say it in other ways, like josh or harsh. Yeah, there's all sorts of ways you can say Josh, but really the only right way to say it is Josh. And it's a verb. Yes, you can. Josh. And it's a friendly verb, too, because you're making fun of somebody, but in a nonhostile way. Yeah, chuck is a verb, too. How about that? Yeah, look at us, right? Joshing and Chucking. Yeah, that's good to tell. Chuck. I can't believe it's taken us this many years to come up with that. If you want to tell us to shut up, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychano, drop us a line via email at stuffpodcast@housetepworks.com. And wait, don't press stop yet. Go check out our awesome website. It will be your new favorite home on the web. Just bookmark it. And do yourself a favor, make it your home page. The URL is http stuffyoustenenow.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 codes." | |
451f17c8-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-fff1cf0d2471 | Short Stuff: Vomitoria | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-vomitoria | A vomitorium was a place where ancient Romans went to make themselves throw up after gorging themselves at a sumptuous banquet. Everybody knows that. Except that’s not true at all. Learn about what vomitoria were in this episode and impress your friends. | A vomitorium was a place where ancient Romans went to make themselves throw up after gorging themselves at a sumptuous banquet. Everybody knows that. Except that’s not true at all. Learn about what vomitoria were in this episode and impress your friends. | Wed, 07 Nov 2018 17:01:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=17, tm_min=1, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=311, tm_isdst=0) | 11865243 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the shorty. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Jerry. We don't say last names on this because we're crunched for time. Does that mean we need to say welcome to the long form when it comes to the other ones? All right, I think that's a great idea. Change is good, but you have to roll your L. Welcome to the long four. Whoa. I didn't know you were so good at that. Oh, wait, there's an L and an R in there. Let's see if I can do it. Welcome to the wrong form. How is that? You look like and sound like you're underwater and eating peanut butter. Speaking of eating peanut butter, did you know that in ancient Rome, if you ate a couple of gallons of peanut butter, it was very acceptable to stroll on over to a vomitorium and throw it up and stick a feather down your throat? Or sorry, have some young child stick a feather down your throat. Or Bill Murray so you could throw up and then eat even more peanut butter. That's right, Chuck. That's an indisputable fact of history. Not true. No. And you know what? Something was bugging me researching this. I was like I feel like I've said something like on the podcast before, where I referenced this being correct, and it wasn't. I probably did. But, I mean, pretty good company because we've got this idea that, yes, in ancient Rome, it was totally normal to go throw up, basically, binge and purge. Yeah, but purge in, like, a public area that's designated to go purge that's been around for at least since the 1920s. And we can trace it all the way back to Aldus Huxley, actually, who created this misconception. Yeah, I mean, I thought this was a true fact up until two days ago. Basically, everyone does, so don't feel bad. Again, you're in the company of Algus Huxley. How are you pronouncing that? Huxley. That's the first name. Algus. Alguis. What do you pronounce it as? Deleterus. I think you're swapping the u and the o. Aldois Aldous. I think it's Aldous. Oh, I like algae. All right. I've wreaked christened him. Well, he was a very Alduous person. I don't know what that word means. I just made it up. Okay, cool. Good, because I was really embarrassed for a second. Yeah. So apparently well, let's go back to Rome. To quote the great Frank Black in the Catholic song Vomitoria, which is the pull of vomitorium. There were these things in ancient Rome, apparently. Yes, but it was just a very well to my ear, weird name for a very now common thing. Yeah. And they actually know who was the first two references? A guy named Microbios back in the fourth century Ce. He just used it as a term to describe basically, a passage into and out of, say, like, the Coliseum, where people would be discouraged. Out. That's such a gross word. You've been to Coliseum. Right to the Coliseum. Yeah. Okay. Same here. It's an amazing place, and there's just a lot of walking space that's actually really effectively designed. And one of the reasons why it's so effectively designed is because of these passageways, basically to your seat and then back out into the main walkway around the perimeter inside the Coliseum. Those places in and out between the two, those are vomitoria. Yeah. What do we call them today? It's not a portal, but a portico, maybe? No, I mean, it's just like it's like any modern stadium design. It's the hallway open thing that you walk through and then you're like, now I'm in the stadium. What do you call that? Concourse? No, I think we should just go back to calling it Bombaia. Yeah, I'm going to say that next time I go to a Falcons game. Yeah. Hey, meet me at Vomitoria 244. Pardon me, can you direct me to my vomitorium? I can't think of the word. It's really bugging me. I know what you're talking about, and I want to say it's like portal, too. I mean, it is a portal. Maybe some people call them that, but I think that's what they're called, like sports. Yeah. So there were 76 of these, though, around, up and down the Coliseum, and apparently did you say how many people that they could shuttle in and out of there yet? No. Apparently 50,000 people could get in and out of this thing and like to their seats within about 15 minutes. That's not bad. That's amazing. Can you imagine the poor schmo who had to sit there and time it by looking at the sun? So many went blind, right until it finally happened. They'd have to replace the person every 30 seconds. They were carting them away. They'd be like, I got to 30 seconds. What is the name of those things? I don't know. Should we take a break and talk about Aldous Huxley again? Al Jeus. All right. Right after this. All right, so you set us up with algebra. Huxley. What in the world in the world could he have affected this? I mean, I guess he just heard of it before, and basically he mentions that in passing in a single line. He wrote a comic novel called Antique Hay is about postworld war I decadent, like upperclass society. And he just basically mentioned, like, a goth coming into a vomitorium. And from the line I saw, it didn't even really seem to be like he was talking about the golf was going to come throw up or anything like that, but that was the first instance they could find of somebody using it, not in the way that microbius was using it as that portal thingy. Right. So they think that he was the first one to say this or put it down and pen to paper, and you have to give him a break because he just injected a tremendous amount of LSD into his own eye before he started writing this. Right. So we're going to excuse him. The next person who gets zero excuse whatsoever is Lewis Mumford. He was an historian, he was a critic. He should have known better. He did not do his research. Apparently, he had been reading Alduos Huxley and just basically cited it as fact in one of his books. The City and History. Yeah. And he fullon defined it is where you overeat and you go and make yourself throw up. And he just made that up. Yeah. As a fan of Huxley, I guess. Yeah, I guess so. I don't think he ever took a drop of acid either. He has zero excuse. Louis Mumford does. Well, here's the thing, though, and this is where it does get kind of gross, because even though they did not originate in ancient Rome, there are real vomitoriums, apparently, in places like Vietnam. And I looked this up and I was trying to find a picture, and I did find one, and it looks like where you would go to the sink and wash up in a public bathroom, but it looks like a tiny toilet bowl. Like, it's got the shape of a toilet bowl on a waist high. Right. And then above at least this one, it had a little tiny toilet tank, even. It looks like a miniature toilet, except waist high. So I saw one that was like a big stainless steel sink with one of those dishwasher. Have you ever washed dishes for a living? Oh, yeah. That was my first job, so you know that's, right. We talked about that. Didn't you rent out, like, everybody jay's barbecue? I didn't rat out anybody. What are you talking about? What was it? I worked at JJ's. I was a busboy and dishwasher, but they stuck their tennis shoe and, like, the Brunswick Stewart. Awful like that. Yeah, but I didn't write them out. I should have. Okay. Yeah. So, anyway, so, you know, like the dishwashing sink thing? The faucet? Yes. It had, like, one of those. So I guess you're expected to rinse the sink out after you vomit into it, but the way you know what you're doing and I saw your picture, too. Is there's a sign, like a road sign type graphic of somebody throwing up? Yeah. And that's how you know to use it. So it's like fiction became reality. Yeah. So, like, it has someone kind of been over heaving out graphic spew. Great band name, right? They opened up for guard for a while. Oh, man, I'll bet. Actually, I did see a band called Vomitorium. Oh, I'm sure. Graphic spew, though, man, a lot. But apparently all over Ho Chi Minh City, you can find these things. And some of them even have, like, pictures of ancient Rome and stuff, I guess as a nod to the false claim that they started in an ancient Rome. I know. My head is about to pop. And what about Germany? That gets even grosser. So this article on how Stuff Works says that they're puke pans. They're known locally as puke pans. Not true. The only place I saw that on the Internet is in this House Stuff Works article. But there are vomitoriums in Germany. There's a place called Huffgrow House in Munich. It's a beer hall that's known to have a vomit. Oh, I've been there. Oh, really? I've been to the Huff Bray House. Did you see the vomitorium? No, I'm sorry. The puke pan. I did all my puking in the potted plants. Oh, there you go. I think that's ghost, man. That's like wearing white after Labor Day. No. So there is one at the Hofbry house, supposedly. That's what I saw on TripAdvisor. So our article claiming that in German frat houses first of all, I didn't know Germany had fraternities. That's got to be this whole thing just stinks of misconception. Yeah, well, their source was antique dashphotos, whatever that is. It's a crystal link site, I think. So at the very least, we know that in Germany, there are designated puke places. And anyone who I mean, first of all, you shouldn't be drinking so much that you regularly throw up anyway. That's point number one. But if you've ever been in a bathroom stall and walked in like, oh, boy, I got a pee, and it's just vomit everywhere. It's one of the worst experiences you can have as a human. Yeah, especially if you don't have to pee but have to poop. Well, forget it. It's like Train Spotting. I never saw that movie. What happens then? Well, there's a scene where he goes to throw up some heroin that he had ingested so he can shoot it. Oh, man. It's like it's sort of a dreamy sequence that the bathroom is labeled as the worst bathroom in Scotland, and it's nasty, and he pukes in there and then reaches in, and eventually you and McGregor goes all the way into the toilet and swims around. Oh, wow. So it's a fantasy sequence. It does sound a little dreamy. You know everyone's fantasy about going into a poop puke infested toilet and swimming? Yes. Am I missing out not having seen train spotting? Yeah, it's a classic. Okay, well, I'll go check it out. Right. You got anything else on this? Gross. I'm ready to move on. Yeah, I am, too. Everybody, we're moving on. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go onto our website, STUFFYou Should Know.com, look for our social media links, and then send us an email to stuffpodcast athousedofworks.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 edition 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." | |
What's the Deal With Poop? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-poop | We are going to get down and dirty with all things poop in this episode: What a healthy poop looks like, how to poop your best, the history of using poop to survive in the Canadian wild and lots more interesting stuff. | We are going to get down and dirty with all things poop in this episode: What a healthy poop looks like, how to poop your best, the history of using poop to survive in the Canadian wild and lots more interesting stuff. | Thu, 11 Feb 2016 16:19:49 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=16, tm_min=19, tm_sec=49, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=42, tm_isdst=0) | 45349561 | audio/mpeg | "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 not paying attention, which means it's time for Stuff You Should Know. I heard Jar. I'm totally paying attention. I've killed you in my dreams before Jar. I choked the life out of you. You know what song I've been seeing in my head all day and researching this? What? Stool Boom from Waiting for Guffman. Let's hear it. Stool Boom. That's all I'm saying. But there's more lyrics to it. Yeah, I mean, the whole joke. No, I've never seen that one. Oh, boy. I know. I can't believe I haven't Gothman is that investment show to me are tied for first. Yeah, I can watch those just about any time, even though you haven't seen one of them. If it's anything like Best in Show, I'm sure I can watch it. And I assume it's virtually the same movie. Yeah. The joke in Duffman is it's the anniversary of the town of this very small town. And so they do a stage musical about the history of the town. And the town was sort of founded on this one guy who invented the stool. So the town had a Stool Boom and they have this big number called Stool Boom. That's great. And of course, it's the play on poop. Well, dude, stool is a word that sticks out to you when you're researching poop. It is a weird word to use, and it's got this definite quasimedico smack to it. Sure. But at the same time, it's also got a droopy, dangly quality to it that makes it like, super appropriate stool. Yeah, just the way it sounds. Like the sound that poop makes coming out of your rectum stool. And everyone who is just turned off by that, you better skip this episode because we're talking about poop, buddy. And if you can't handle it, go hide your head under your bed and pretend you don't do it. You can't handle the poop. Yeah. Do you like that famous line movie record? Yeah, I mean, we'll go ahead and give the warning. Surely you're not going to sit down with your lunch and click on whatever you title this one. Poop is going to be in the title. What's the deal with Poop? Yeah. So just we're going to talk about poop and what it looks like and smells like and what it should look and smell like and qualities and properties of its consistency. It's going to be medically disgusting. We're going to be drowning in poop in this episode. Yeah. Stool. But it's important because you can learn a lot from your poop. Yeah. And you should not ignore your poop. Maybe not every time, but you should check in on your poop and look at it. Okay, so there's a couple of things regarding that because that definitely is recommended. We use the Impart Mercola article. Yeah. Very helpful. And there was a lot of encouragement to stop and turn around and look at your poop before you flush. You know, smell the roses. Stop and take the time to smell the roses. Right. This is sort of like that, but it's poop. But hold your breath. No, you should smell it. I guess you should a little bit. I think it's more if you hold your breath and can still smell it, then there's a problem. But there's also such a thing I think is paying too much attention to your poop. After researching this, I was like, oh, man, am I just letting it go? Is this too hard? Is this straining? Like, what's the problem here? I feel like I'm freaking out a little bit. So I think there's a certain something to be said about just chilling out about your poop. But yeah, keeping an eye on it once in a while. Because if I learned one thing from researching this, it's that if suddenly your poop starts falling out of its normal patterns, whatever that may be I thought you're going to say starts, like, falling out of your ear. Right. That's a big problem. Like South Park, remember, they pooped out of their mouths. Yeah. By the way, there is such a thing as fecal vomiting. Okay, well, let's just get to that right now. What is when you are so impacted? Compacted, which you would be impacted as well. Okay. Your poop is so backed up in your colon that you actually regurgitate back up, but it does not come up looking like a stool. It doesn't matter. It's not like it's so gross. I'm so sorry, but you're buying at the other end. Yeah, it's digestive fluids that are behind the poop, mainly. So it's not like can I say turd? If you want. I find that an unpleasant word, but some people are fine. It's not like a stool comes out of your head. Hey, buddy, you can say the T word if you want. So really, how is it just not vomiting then? Because it's directly related to the backup of feces. I got you. Yeah, well, those ones that were hanging on just to see, they're gone. Now it's just you and me, Chuck and Jerry. Yeah. So anyway, if your poop suddenly takes a strange turn and it stays that way for a little while yes. Then it's time to really start paying attention to your poop. Maybe call the doctor, maybe look into the whole thing. But don't overthink your poop too much. Just keep an eye on it. Yeah. And it's like you said, there is a tremendous amount to be learned from your poop. As a matter of fact, in 2014, some archeologists in Denmark, in Odense, Denmark, which is where Hans Christian Anderson is from, discovered a latrine, a buried latrine of barrels and barrels and barrels of 700 year old Danish poop from the town. It just dried up. What it still smelled. Wow. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, because of that, they're able to really start to dig into this quite literally and find a lot out about their diet, about the evolution of human gut microbial. Yeah. Which we're going to get into. And there's a lot you can tell from it, too. Interesting. You don't have to go digging around Denmark to learn about your own poop. You just have to look through the toilet. So, to know what to look for, it's best to understand, well, just what a healthy poop is. Yeah. Well, let's get a couple of stats out of the way. The average Joe and Jane produces about \u00a310,000 of poop in a lifetime. It's like five tons, right? Yeah. Where did you find that? The only place I could find it was uber facts. And then this article, the article that you sent I thought was pretty reputable. Okay, I did, too, but I couldn't find it anywhere else except Uber fax. All right, well, how about this? We'll just caveat that with two people say that you produce \u00a310,000 in a lifetime. Five tons. Five tons. And poop is made of well, it's made of about 70% to 75% water. Right. Fiber, undigested foods. Water. I already said water. Fats, cholesterol, salt, phosphates, cellular waste, dead. And live bacteria. Yeah. About 30% is dead bacteria. Right. So that's nasty. It's a lot of bacteria. The nasty stuff is the live stuff that you're shedding because it's not supposed to be in there. Poop comes in many sizes and shapes and colors, and we're going to get into those in more detail. So there's this awesome thing called the Bristol Sewell Scale, and it is an illustrative guide to what healthy poop looks like. And it's type one through seven. Type one looks like little deer poops. They're characterized as separate, hard lumps, like nuts, and then apprentices, hard to pass, and then apprentices again. You know what I mean? Type two, sausage shaped, but lumpy. That looks sort of like a baby roof, which is why I think they use that in the movie Caddy Shack. Sure. Type three and type three, four and five is now we're in the sweet spot. Yeah. That's the good range of where you want to be. And apparently, four is the best poop of all. Dr. Mercola calls it the Holy Grail of poops. Type four. Type three is like a sausage as well, but with cracks on the surface. So I guess the sausage is not very well made. Right. It's a rustic sausage, type four. It's a smooth, consistent surface. It's like a snake between one and two inches in diameter, up to 18 inches long. I hear that in my head. Spins. Yeah. That's a big poop. Yeah. And I also read that literally, the perfect stool is a number four. An S shaped number four. Yeah. And the reason why it's shaped that way is because it's developed into that S shape in your intestines, right? Yeah. And my brother, my amazing brother. Oh, I'm sure it makes a cash register sound. He used to send me pictures of his poops because he was very famous for his long poops. We post some of those. We should make a gallery. Well, I'll have to this is before digital photography. He would take a photo, get it developed, and mail it to me. Wow. In college, man. That's Scott. And one of them was a beautiful, perfectly shaped S. And he was like, Look, I pooped my initial, but now I know. And I can tell him if he doesn't listen to this one. That dude, you have the unicorn of poops, the Holy Grail, the long S. Yes. 18 inches, two inch diameter, perfectly consistent exterior. What was tapered at both ends. It was gorgeous. And the color also is very important, too. Just tittering like a child. A light brown color is really what you're looking for. I think most people understand what poop is supposed to look like. And the reason it has that light brown color is from Billy Rubens, which are from Paul Reubens. From Paul Rubens. Paul Billy Rubens, which are a pigment that comes from the breakdown of red blood cells in the liver. So it breaks it down. Get some bilirubins. That's what makes your poop from we'll talk about color more in a minute. I just couldn't wait. I know. Type five, you're still in a pretty good zone if you have soft blobs with clear cut edges. Still, it's caused to be like, I can do better than this. If it breaks apart on impact, you're like, I can do better. And I can tell you exactly what you need to do to do better. We'll get to it. Yeah. Fiber, man. Sorry. Type six, this is when you're heading toward bad news. Fluffy pieces of poop with ragged edges and mushy means you're hungover. Yeah, quite possibly. And number seven, finally, watery, entirely liquid, no solid whatsoever. Aka Chuck on antibiotics, which I call poop pills, which I've said before on the show. Yeah. And by the way, the Bristol Stool Scale. We should give props to Dr. Steven Lewis and Dr. Ken Heaton of the University of Bristol. Go Fighting Stools. Yes. 1997 was when they first published that thing. I love that thing. And you can find those. You see them in doctor's offices. Certain kinds of doctors, sure. In my house. Do you have one? Is it just right in front of the toilet? It was okay, but you mean it's like so, Chuck, you said fiber was a big deal, and we're going to talk about fiber in a little more depth later on. But if you do have stool that is not sticking together and you can't get past it, all you have to do is up your intake of fiber. There's two kinds of fiber. There's soluble fiber, which actually is absorbed and that slows down your poop process, and it allows more nutrients to be absorbed from food. Good stuff. Then there's insoluble fiber, which is what most people think of, like, fiber, like grains and things like that, that actually isn't digested by you. It actually becomes food for the gut bacteria later on down the road, which is great if you want to keep them alive. It also has the added benefit of bulking your poop up and acting like a sort of glue that keeps your poop together into that one long, perfectly smooth, 18 inch, two inch diameter, S shaped snake. If it is softer but not completely diarrhea, like soft serve ice cream, it may be lactose intolerance, which is something I suffer from. Oh, really? Yeah, a little bit. Not terribly. But you love ice cream. Yeah. I mean, it only really hits me hard if I have a lot of lactose in a single meal. Like, if I have a lot of cheese, if I eat, like, a cheese pizza and top it off with an ice cream sundae, it's bad news. Yeah. I just don't do that. Or I do, and I know what's coming, but I just can't help myself. Or if you use artificial sweeteners that can cause your stools to be looser than normal, or if you have some sort of gluten intolerance or celiac that can make your poop looser as well and wreck all kinds of things in your body. We need to do it on artificial sweeteners, man. Yeah, we should probably maybe revisit gluten. I know we did that one, but that was a while ago. It gets done. Is it done? Sure. All right. Have we ever done lactose intolerance? I don't think so. No. Really? I'm surprised we haven't done milk. There's a lot of cool stuff with that. Like, there's different kinds of milk depending on where you are in the world. And they think that that has to do with lactose intolerance is like, type A or type B milk. It's pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. And did you know that skim milk has an additional chemical additive? It has a lot of high fructose corn syrup in it. Oh, really? Yeah, because when you take that's the whole secret to low fat. It's why low fat stuff made everybody tubby and gave everyone diabetes. Because when you take the fat out of stuff, there goes the taste, too. So you have to bring some taste back with high fructose corn syrup. That has nothing to do with the fat content. It just gives it some flavor. But it also is sugar added sugar. Yes. There's also some other additive that you need. I don't drink a ton of milk anymore, but I started drinking whole milk again, and it is so delicious. What is it doing to you if you're lactose intolerant? How did you reintroduce milk into your diet? No, that's the thing. Like, I can drink a glass of milk or eat a bowl of cereal or something that doesn't wreck me or anything. Like, it has to be a lot cheese pizza followed by a sundae. Yes. Just too much. And a glass of milk isn't too much. Okay. I'm lactose, I think semi intolerant. Okay. An optimist. And a glass of milk is half full. You're lactose semi tolerant. Yeah. There you go. We'll call you that. All right, well, let's take a break here. You read my mind. Let's gather ourselves, and we're going to come back and talk a little bit about the difference between healthy and unhealthy stools. All right, Josh, you want to talk what a good, healthy stool looks like? Yes. And by proxy, an unhealthy stool as well. So we go back and forth. No, I think we should go healthy, unhealthy. Okay. That's how I think it'd be best. All right. Are you cool with that? I'm great with it. Okay. So healthy stool. You already said medium to light brown. It's pretty good. Different colors can mean different things sometimes it's not a big deal. Like if you ate Beats the night before and you're pooping red, don't fret and think, I have internal bleeding. It's just the Beats. Have you seen that Portlandia where they're like so they're 911 dispatchers, but they're like, did you have Beats? And the person's like, yes, it's the Beats. It's always the Beats. Yeah. No matter what it is. Like, Jeff Goldblum gets in a car wreck, and he's like, I need some help. And he's like, I'm covered in red stuff. And they're like it's beat. And he looks around. He's like, oh, I did run into a beach truck. How did you know that? That's pretty good. And then they hang up on him, and he's like, I still need help. That's a great one. I haven't seen that. Or like, I know from experience, too much red wine, believe it or not, can cause black poop. Sure. A little distressing if you have black tarry poop. From what I read, where it's, like, literally sticky, this is something you've started to notice about your poop. Or it could mean that you're bleeding internally. Right. And it's not good. That's not good. No. All right, let's go back to healthy stools. Yeah, that is what we're going to do. Yeah. Medium to light brown, soft and smooth, and not a lot of pieces. Like we mentioned, the S shape is just amazing. If you can do that on a regular basis, you should keep a little crown in your bathroom. Just don't do it out all the time. It's not a participant ribbon. Really want to save it for the right one. And listen up, too, because here's something I didn't know. How the poop falls into the toilet, whether it floats or not is a thing. Yes. So it says in here, the slightest little gentle whoosh, not a big cannonball, splash like an Olympic diver going into a pool. Oh, well executed dive. Right. Not one where they lean a little too far. No, it's supposed to go stool. Yes. And then I think the floating deal, if it floats, it may be that you're eating too much fat. Right. Which means it could be a sign of malabsorption. Well, yeah. It could mean that you're eating a normal amount of fat but your body's not absorbing it. That could be a digestive issue or celiac things. It could be pancreatitis. It could be some problems. Again, if it's not becoming evident yet. There's a lot of stuff, a lot of information you can glean from your poop. Yeah. And floaters are fun and cute because you can poke them and play with them, but you really want to sinker. Yeah. Do you still have that bathroom stick I got you for Christmas? The poking stick? I thought that was a back scratcher. Boot poker? Yeah, for floaters. I can use it for both. We're at right now. Oh boy. Alright. Unhealthy poop. Did we finish healthy? No. Ribbon like or pencil like. That's not good. That can be bad news. That could mean you have some sort of obstruction, maybe a tumor, sort of matching things together. Yes. And again, once in a while something happens like this. You don't need to go call 91, but just keep an eye on it. Yeah. Because it's just the beats. That's what they would tell you. Right. You covered a black and tari. Bright red is also not a good sign. No, it could be a medication. Apparently black licorice can cause black and tarry poop. Yeah. If you're eating black licorice, though, you're a gross person and you should stop that. I don't like any of that stuff. Black licorice. Gross. Or any, like, Red Vines and Twizzlers. You don't like any licorice? Red licorice is great. Well, Emily loves which is the superior one? Twizzlers. I think it's the Twizzler she loves. She may think Red Vines are there's a lot of people that do Twizzler head. Okay, good for her. But I've never gotten it. I don't get it. Gummy bears and stuff. I don't like those. Those are like a totally different thing. Isn't the texture kind of the same? No, not really. I don't like any of it. Chewy, I guess, but no, not really. Not a fan. You should try them. You should also try licorice and gummy bears next to each other so you can suss out the difference. Okay. Because they're not the same thing. Well, the point is, I don't like either one. Why would I try that? No. So white, pale or gray stools is no good. It may mean you have a lack of bile or a variety of diseases from cirrhosis to hepatitis. Yeah. You want to be producing bile. Yes. If you have white stool, it could also mean that somebody slipped you a little barium sulfate and gave you an x ray. Oh yeah. Okay, so if you've drank barium cell sulfate recently and you have white poop. It's probably not caused for alarm. They'll probably tell you that when they give you the I would hope so. But just in case somebody got a lousy medical provider, we're here to help you. Yellow is no good, right? Yeah. Gilbert syndrome, which means that your liver is not processing the bilirubins, so they're not breaking down and turning your poop brown. They're passing through intact and dyeing your poop yellow. Gilbert. Not Gilbert, no. I love it. Thank goodness for the Mayo Clinic. Gilbert yellow stool could also be giardia or problems with your gallbladder. Yeah. And then mucus chuck so if you look closely at your poop, especially if you open it up with your poking stick, you're going to find that there's some mucus associated with it. Yes. A small amount of mucus is totally normal. Your intestines actually produce mucus to coat your colon so that it helps smooth the stool through. Right. Yeah. So, of course, your stool is going to be coated in a little bit of mucus. If you notice that, all of a sudden it looks like someone snotted all over your poop. And this is a new development that is caused for concern because there are conditions where you can overproduce mucus and it can be a problem. Yeah. Odor. Here's what to look for. All your poop is going to stink somewhat because it's poop. Yeah. Bacteria chew on undigested food and produce gases as a byproduct. And that creates the stinky poop smell. That's right. But apparently, if it is really bad and they quantify this as over, above and beyond the normal stinky poop smell right. If it could make a billy goat puke. Very nice first blood reference. Thank you. It could be some other issues at play if it's really that bad. Malabsorption again, celiac crohn's, chronic pancreatitis, cystic fibrosis. Yeah. And I guess that's subjective. I think the key in all of this that I've read is look for big changes. Right. That's the key. Yes. If your poop is normally just pretty stinky and then all of a sudden you are revolting yourself, then you could have something else going on. Or if your pet billy goat is just throwing up everywhere every time you go, that's a big change, too. And again, you yourself, you have your own pooping rhythm, you have your own pooping thing. And a lot of people wonder, how often are you supposed to poop? And apparently it's a very wide range, anywhere from three times a week to three times a day. That's me. So I think that washes out. Which one? About three times a day. Okay. I don't have a normal but then again, if you said three times a week, that would be normal, too. Yeah. I've never had issues with getting backed up and having trouble, which, thank goodness, it's terrible, you know? Yeah. Well, never mind. I won't reveal too much about my family. All of that washes out to about once a day on average. But that's a terrible thing to average out because it makes people think, well, I do it three times a day, or I do it three times a week. So really, anywhere between there is normal. Yeah. And different things can cause you to get backed up if you're traveling a lot. Sometimes it hasn't happened to me, but I've seen it before on vacations when beloved family members have trouble pooping while they travel, whether that's from being in a different not wanting to poop in, like, a public restroom that's part of it, to just changes in your diet. But Canadian rhythm because of jet lag. Sure, absolutely. Hormonal fluctuations, how much sleep you're getting, what else if you're sick, obviously. Right. All those things can add up. And apparently age has a lot to do with it as well. If you are 65 and over, something like 40% of people over 65 have some sort of constipation. It's just part of growing old, I think. Which sucks, because if you can go three times a day and you're snapping while you do, you're a lot happier than if you are over 65 and constipated. Sure. There's a lot of problems with constipation initially. There's just the problem of straining when you go, which is not fun. There is not feeling like you have fully eliminated everything that needs to go. Apparently, you can feel sluggish after you go. Really weird. There's that defecation syncopy, which I said correctly this time. Oh, right. And then there's larger problems. Like, after a while, your digestive system is okay to hold about a week's worth of food at one time if it needs to. It doesn't want to, but you can. Once you go beyond that, or even if you are eliminating, but not eliminating everything, it starts to build up and you're constipated. You can have an impacted colon. And then the real joy begins. Yes. By joy, you mean pain. Yeah. They will go in with a mineral oil enema to start. If that doesn't work, they may go in and manually break up your poop, which is exactly what it sounds like. Thank you for demonstrating that with your hand. You're very welcome. And then if that doesn't work, they may surgically remove the poop from your digestive system. Man, it's not good to not poop. That's sad. We're going to talk about some ways to help yourself poop. If you're one of those people who poops less than you'd like to, or you find yourself constipated a lot, we're going to help you out right after this. All right. It takes about between 18 and 72 hours for your food to become poop and for you to pass it in general. And if that's shortened, that's when you're going to get the diarrhea, because that means your intestines didn't have enough time to absorb the water to make that poop more dense. Yeah, we talked a lot about that in the digestive system episode, which was great. Yeah. We also did one on fecal transplants. Yeah. But we haven't still, in my opinion, focused enough on just the poop, which is why we're doing this one. Thank you. We need a poop spotlight, and then constipation is the opposite. That is when too much water has been absorbed, and that's those hard stools and hard to pass stools, which can lead to hemorrhoids. It can. So hemorrhoids is the result of swollen veins in your anus and rectum. Not awesome at all. No, I had a bad one. It's no fun. It can be very painful. Yes. And it makes you not want to go because you have to strain. It's like a vicious circle, right? Yeah. Like, you have to strain, but it hurts to strain because it makes your hemorrhoids worse, and then you don't want to go at all, so you avoid going, which is a cardinal sin. As far as staying regular go, when you get the urge to go, you go. You don't hold. It doesn't matter if you're at a truck stop or at the Queen of England's house. You go, I would love to poop there. Hemorrhage will eventually clear up with treatment, especially. But it's a part of the problem with being constipated, is you can very easily get hemorrhoids. Yeah. The key is really tried and not strain. Even though you really want to get the poop out, it's just going to make it all worse. So that's easier said than done. What do you do if you are constipated or you don't poop as often as you'd like to? What are some of the fixes for that? Well, they don't advise you to run out and start using laxatives immediately. No, that's sort of a last resort home remedy, which is crazy, because laxatives are marketed in a way that makes it seem like you have trouble. Take a laxative, you'll be fine. They're supposed to be a last resort option, like a nuclear option, basically, because they train the muscles in your intestines to rely on them and to basically get weak. And you need to keep those things strong. Yes. More tips? Yeah. Eat whole foods. We're talking fresh veggies, fresh fruits. Fiber is you should have, I think, an adult I think they recommend now between 25 and 35 grams of fiber per day. Yeah, but we're getting like ten. Yeah. And Mercla suggests 50 grams of fiber per thousand calories we consume a day. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's a lot. Yeah. That guy's got colon blow. Do you remember that live commercial? Oh, yeah, that's a classic. So the fiber you want should come from not grains, but from vegetables, like we mentioned, those artificial sweeteners, too much sugar, MSG, too much caffeine, and too much processed food that can all wreak havoc on your system. And this is all just good for just health and digestive. Health in general. Exactly. Did you say exercise? Not yet. That's a big one. Yeah. Exercise not only gets things moving, usually when you exercise, one of the things you're doing is working on your core, whether you mean to or not. Kind of the center of all of the rest of the muscles you're moving. And when you're working on your core, you're inadvertently strengthening those intestinal muscles. That help. That choreographed dance of moving your food into your poop, along and out of your poop chute is what it's called. Staying hydrated. If you're not drinking enough water, that's not going to do any favors in the poop department. Right. If you are addicted to painkillers, one of the awful side effects, aside from being addicted to a drug, is you're going to have a real hard time pooping. Yeah. Because it relaxes those muscles, too. They need that help. They sure do. They're out there wearing sunglasses, laying on a chaise lounge at, like, two in the afternoon, like the rest of your body when you're on those things. And then let's talk a little bit about the toilet, the shape of the modern toilet. By the way, Strickland and I did a tech stuff on toilets that was really fascinating. Oh, really? Yeah. It's counter intuitive to how your body should be positioned to poop. We did not evolve to poop sitting at a 90 deg angle as if on a chair. No, I've said it before on the show when I go camping. You go out in the woods, you walk a little bit away from where your friends are, at least three, 4ft. Three or 4ft. You squat down. And that's the most natural way to poop. It's effortless. It comes right out. You don't even think about pushing or straining. I believe what it does doesn't it straighten out the pathway, so it relaxes your pubo rectalus muscle, which yeah. Which straightens out your colon, which basically says stool release right there on the leaves. It's wonderful. Well, do you remember when we were talking about India's defecation problem, like outdoor defecation problems on Internet round up years back, and they were saying one of the big things they were running up against is that people who live in rural areas say this is one of the benefits of wholesome rural living. It's getting to poop outside. Man, get off my back. Right. I can understand where they're coming from. Yeah. So there are things you can add to your toilets now to raise your feet. Stools. Yeah. Ironically, little footstools. Not to buzz, mark it too much, but I know the squatty potty is something that fits neatly in front of your toilet and basically it just gets you more in that squatted position than you are normally on your toilet. Right. And this used to be the domain of strictly the Whole Earth catalog or something like that, but you can find those things that like Bed, Bath and beyond. Now, yeah. I think people are kind of catching on. It's a better way to poop. Yeah. So you can still use your toilet. You have to squat. It just does the squatting for you by lifting up your legs. Yeah. It's like you're giving birth, basically. Yeah. It's still no substitution for actually squatting. Right. Right. On the ground. Which I mean, in Japan, they have toilets that are made for squatting exclusively. Oh. It's just like a hole in the floor. It's a lot like a urinal. Okay. On the ground. Interesting. Yeah. So it's not vertically oriented. It's horizontally oriented, but it looks just like a urinal. So when you go to, like, an old city park and the urinal has fallen off onto the ground and you squat and poop in that, you go to Japan. It's the same thing. All right. It's kind of like that. Imagine that. But the cleanest experience you could ever imagine. Even the squatting toilets are clean in Japan. I believe it. It's nice. And here's a little tip. If you want to avoid hemorrhoids, or if you just want to live a cleaner, more sanitary life, get a bidet. I know, I talked about it when I installed my little unit. They have a day. Well, you can attach them to your regular toilet now. Yeah. Just like a tea line or something off of your water. Yeah. And it sits under your toilet seat and it's spring loaded, so when you turn the water on, this little nozzle pops out. It shoots right up your butt. And I've long campaigned against toilet paper, and now that I have a baby, it's even more apparent. It makes no sense to me that you have a baby and you're like, well, yeah, use wet wipes, because that's how you should clean poop. And then you get to a certain age, you're like, all right, let's just go with dry paper now. Like, forget the superior wet method. Well, the thing is, it just doesn't make any sense. Why would you move to dry, white feces from your butt with a dry piece of paper? I understand what you're saying. It's nonsensical, but our sewer systems in the United States are not set up to accept wet wipes. Well, that's why you have the bidet. Okay? No wipes. I mean, dab it dry with a couple of squares, but I'm telling you, it'll change your life. It's amazing. I have a feeling, though, people with bidets are going to be the first with their backs up against the wall when resource conflicts break out over water throughout the world. They'll be like, you're doing what with that water? Use toilet paper. Yeah. Well, what they're going to say if that happens and it's not a ton of water? You'll turn it off, but you'll be crying setting it's here. Goodbye by day. See you in 150 years. Where are you? What else we got? We're pretty far off. Oh, the microbiome. We should talk about that. And we did a great podcast on the microbiome, if we do say so ourselves. Yeah, it was a good one. And what they have found is that the modern diet, where you're not eating nearly as much fiber as you should and you're eating more processed foods, is not only just impacting your short term degrading, your short term digestive health, but it's affecting your microbiome, which, you know, if you listen, could also affect your children and your children's children's. That was another good one. Can your grandfather's diet shorten your life? So fiber is great. It's hard to digest, so it doesn't break down fully. And that's what you want when it's going through your colon, because, as you said earlier, the bacteria feeds on that, and you want to keep that bacteria alive. Right, because it's great for you. This is a mental flaws article that we were working off of, right? I think so. They were talking about a study from Stanford that found that they've created mice that are microbe free, which is beyond bizarre. I don't understand how they stay alive for even a second. But then they fed these two populations of mice, both microbe free, high fiber diet and the same diet with low fiber and no fiber, I think. And they found that with the microbes in the mice that had a high fiber diet, they had, like, three times more diversity in their microbiome than what the other mice developed. Yeah, I think you mentioned they were microbe free, and then they put human microbes in there, so it simulated humans. So then the human microbiome was reduced by 75% in the mice with the low fiber diet. That's what it was. And if they change that diet, after a number of weeks, it could partially recover, but only partially. It could never fully recover. Yeah. So the upshot they did say poop transplants are a viable way of taking microbial colonies and diverse microbial colonies from a healthy person and putting them in an unhealthy person. Yeah, and fully recovering. Right. And then you can get it all back. But the point of this was that our diet is largely based on almost a fiber free model. We eat very little of fruits and vegetables, and apparently we're supposed to be eating something like ten to 20 cups of fruits and vegetables of high fiber foods a day. Ten to 20 cups? When's the last time you ate 20 cups of fruit and vegetables in a day? Never. Right, exactly. And then even the other stuff, the bad type of fiber stuff we get from grains, the grains they were eating have most of the fiber removed, like bleached flour, virtually no fiber in it. So we're not getting a lot of fiber. And it's becoming increasingly apparent that not only do we need it so we can poop better, our microbiomes need it so they can make us better. Serotonin, high quality serotonin is what you're looking for. Yeah. There's a big push against white foods. White flour, apparently most white things. White rice, white sugar. Not great for you, right. You wanted to cover some of these weapons. I really mainly just wanted to talk about the guy in northern Canada, the Inuit. Yeah. All right, well, quickly, this is from Vice, and there was a list of history, brown death calling a history of poop as a weapon. And they list out sometimes throughout history where people have put poop on the end of their arrows or literally launched poops in, like, a poop exploding poop bomb to make people sick and infected poop. The Soviets had a method of getting rid of poop in a tank. Basically, when you're in a tank and you're going along, you got a poop. So they said, well, let's just turn it into a weapon yeah. Poop in the artillery shell and launch it out. But this one about an Inuit man who lived in the 1950s. Apparently, he appeared in a Ted Talk by Way Davis, and he was the guy who did the serpent and the Rainbow. Okay. I knew the name is amazing. Yeah. He said that this guy was basically left by some Canadians to starve to death in Arctic Bay. Right. In northern Canada. Apparently, in the 1950s, Canada forced Inuit people into settlement camps way in the high Arctic Zone. And it was basically like, here's a couple of dogs. Good luck dying. Right. And that was it. Yeah. Inuit elder was like, I'm going to survive this one. This is not my first rodeo because you know how it's super cold outside? I'm going to go outside and poop, and as my poop freezes, I'm going to fashion it into a knife, and then your face is going to be red because I'm going to use that knife to kill one of these dogs and use it for meat. Yeah. That part made me sad, of course, but it was for survival. And I think we didn't mention that they took all of his tools away from him. So he didn't have the knife. Right. He just had himself, his poop and the two dogs. Yeah. Until he fashioned his own poop knife. Frozen poop Knife. Yeah. And he butchered one of the dogs, used it for food for him and the other dog, and basically turned that dog into a sled, use the other dog to pull said sled and high tailed it down to San Antonio. I was waiting for the end when he then stabbed members of Canada's government with a poop knife. But that didn't happen. No. He didn't have any sour grapes. He just said, It is what it is. I'm just glad I got out. And frozen. Poop Knife is not a good band name. No. And I feel bad for saying this because I love these guys, but there's a band called Diarrhea Planet that are great. What do they sound like? Oh, it's just a wall of guitar. They've got, like, four guitar players and it's just really good. But it's the worst name ever. And I don't know why someone hasn't said, guys, just do yourself a favor. Like, you're not helping yourself here in your career, right, by calling yourself Diarrhea Planet. If you're listening, guys, change it to Frozen Poop Knife and thank me later. I want to say before we sign off, you got anything else? No. I want to hear your euphemisms for pooping. Oh, like dropping a deuce? Yeah, something like that. You got any clever ones that I haven't heard before? I'd love to hear them. Yeah? Yeah. I've always thought Take a dump was weird. It's terrible because you're leaving a dump. Yeah, but even still, this is gross. Yeah. What do you say, stool? That's what you say. I'm going to evacuate my bowels. You've heard me say that before? I think I have, actually, yeah. Very medical. While you're sending us those, go ahead and go on over to Howstep Works.com and type in Poop in the search bar and it'll bring up some cool stuff. And since I said poop, it's time for listener mate. I'm going to call this listener mail that Josh picked out. Hey, guys. Started listening to you a couple of years ago. Since then, I've blown through almost every episode. The reason I say almost is because they didn't keep track of which episodes I listened to in the beginning. So I constantly have to go through all the old episodes to figure out which ones I already heard and which ones I hadn't. The reason I mention this is because I noticed something. What he started doing was keeping track, basically, right? And he said, I noticed something curious as to start listening to only new episodes almost exactly the next day after a new show. I noticed that whatever topic you covered has made its way to me in some other form. Usually this comes in the form of a reddit post or a Mashable in Gadget or Gizmodo article. The latest such occurrences from your episode on Cryotherapy go to in Gadget. You will find that today there was a post talking about the subject. The article covers exactly what you two had already covered. I call this the Chuck and Josh effect. I love that. Yeah. And usually berate my wife about how I just listen to you to talk about the subject. I'm sure it's been happening for quite a while, but it's always fun to see new articles pop up from the subjects you just covered. You have a big influence on the interwebs and what information gets passed around. I don't know if that's due to us or coincidence. I think a lot of it is coincidence. I'm sure it's probably we're inspiring. I had tickets to you in New York City last time you were here, but unfortunately our beloved dog Henry passed away. That day. Sorry. I'm sorry to hear that. Dead. I hope you two are planning to make another trip out east. It's not out east, it's up north. It's up north. Out west, back east and down south. Oh, yeah, back east. Back east. Wagons east. But if you live down south and you're going east, you don't say. I'm going to say you're going up north. Yeah, you go up, you go east, you end up in the ocean. And just because we don't hear Jerry doesn't mean she shouldn't get recognition for the work she does there. Terry gets enough recognition. Hope to see you on the next to her. That is Ted Wheeler. And Ted, we read this in the Poop article. So I don't know how this is going to touch your life personally, but I can't wait to hear Ted. He just said poop article and touch your life personally. May all your Poops be brown, s's and Jerry. Way to go, man. If you want to get in touch with this, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffysheanow. You can send us an email to stuff, podcast, howstep works.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyshando.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-09-27-sysk-ice-age-final.mp3 | How Ice Ages Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ice-ages-work | Believe it or not, we live in an ice age. The polar glaciers give it away. Those glaciers used to come clear down to New York. We now know the traces they left are everywhere if you know what to look for; it just took some Swiss peasants to figure it out. | Believe it or not, we live in an ice age. The polar glaciers give it away. Those glaciers used to come clear down to New York. We now know the traces they left are everywhere if you know what to look for; it just took some Swiss peasants to figure it out. | Tue, 27 Sep 2016 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=271, tm_isdst=0) | 44663605 | audio/mpeg | "This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Squarespace. Whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, a professional blog, or an online store, it's all possible with a Squarespace website. And right now, listeners to Stuff You Should Know can start a free trial today. Just go to squarespace.com. Com and enter the offer code st UFF, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace set your website apart. 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 guess who's over there being quiet as a church mouse? The producer who may or may not exist. Jerry. People still think that. I think a few people do. Yeah. She's real. So you she's real because I can always smell her miso from here. Oh, man. So I like avocado a lot, right? Say what? I like avocado a lot. Sure. Basically an avocado a day. And normally I make guacamole. As you know, I make probably the best guacamole on the planet. Okay. We'll have a guac off one day. Oh, yeah. But it's personal taste. You know, that whole thing. Remember? No taste is absolutely. Sometimes it's just too much to make guac. Sure, right. That's where avocado toast comes in. Yeah. So easy. It's totally different, too. So if you start to get sick of guacamole, you're like, I'll have some avocado tests. Anyway, the upshot is I recently took antibiotics, which are disgusting poison, but just had to have them this time because my body would not get rid of whatever it had. And so I've been repopulating my gut flora with fermented stuff. Like miso. Yeah. Took some miso, put it in some avocado, whipped it up, spread it on some toast. It was great. Wow. And the avocado, being a fibrous vegetable, should be a prebiotic. It will probably provide the conditions for that miso to ripen into some really top notch gut flora. Well, I'm grossed out now. Are you really? Yeah, I found it so fascinating. Well, that's your gut flora. It's a matter of personal taste. I guess. It's like people like the smell of their own poop. That's not two different things. Do you like the smell of your own poop? Sure. Smells great. Really? Yeah, I like all my smells. I got you. Do you like ice ages? I do. We're in one. Yeah. How can we be in a nice age? It's hottest summer ever. Right. But the climate is not changing. Boy, this summer has been awful. Yeah. Supposedly every year we just keep getting hotter and hotter. Yeah. And I have a feeling here in Georgia it's going to be hot into October. I noticed the change take place today. Oh, really? Not me. I was out there this morning letting memo out. Well, yeah. And I was like, oh, it's not muggy. Nights are getting cooler. That's where it starts to change. Yeah, but it's still, like, up in the 90s during the day. Yeah. During the day is still kind of nasty, but it feels different to me. Like the air feels different. Yeah, not me yet. That first fall blast I haven't experienced. Maybe it's seen, like, cinnamon brooms and kroger. That's put me in the fall mood already. I'm just noticing it where it's not there. Christmas decorations. Yeah. Halloween stuff spin out since August, man. Just ridiculous. So, back to ice ages. Like you said, we are actually in an ice age, to be specific. We are in the Holocene epoch, right? Yes. Which features the Quadrantary Ice Age, and specifically, we're in the Flandrian interglacial period. But still, even though it's interglacial, it's still an ice age that we're in. That's a mouthful. It is. Who wrote this? Was this Molly? Molly Edmonds, our dear old friend. Yes. She put out quality. She did, yeah. Molly points out quite astutely that if you look at Antarctica and Greenland, you still see ice sheets and ice ages, though we don't have to have the entire or a third of the Earth covered in ice to be in an ice Age, because within an Ice Age, there are periods of cooler weather and warmer weather, and right now, glacials and interglacials, respectively. And right now, we're in an interglacial. Right. That's all it is. But like I said, when people look around, they don't think of us being in an ice age because we're just during one of those warmer periods. Right. I was reading this New Scientist article about I think it's called The History of Ice on Earth, and they said that there are basically three settings that the Earth has. Greenhouse, which is basically there's no ice anywhere on Earth ice House, which is like an Ice Age glacial period where there is ice. Even like today, there's ice on the Arctic and Antarctic caps. Right? Yeah. And then there's a snowball setting, the most fun of all, which is like, the entire planet is frozen over the least fun of all. Right. There's been periods of Earth's history where the whole thing was just a giant ball of ice. Yeah. If you want to talk about the I don't know if you want to call it the Big Ice Age, but when we think of the term Ice Age, most people are probably talking about the one that began about 70,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene era, lasted about 60,000 years. And if you're talking about the United States and the four major glaciations, they hit the Midwest, the Nebraska, the Kansas, the Illinois, and the famous Wisconsin glaciation. Yeah, that's the one that just ended, that we just came out of the Wisconsin one. That's right. And they call them this because that's where they were geographically. Well, that's where I think the greatest evidence of them has been discovered. Right. It's kind of confusing, actually. But the current ice age that we're in started 258 million years ago. Right? Yeah. And again, it's still going 258 million years to present the Quadrant area ice age. And so those little other subdivisions have to do with when the ice has been relatively scarce or when it's been all over the place. And then to make it even more slightly confusing, during periods of glaciation, there's even periods where the glaciers retreat and advance that's stadium and interstate deal periods, and those tend to be a little more local and happen a lot more quickly. And glacial and interglacial period happened on the scale of tens of thousands of years. Yes, that's right. And this is nothing new. Like you said, this has been going on since there was a planet Earth. But actually recognizing what is an ice age is sort of on the newer front, because in the old days, they would see a big rock and they would say, boy, that thing looks like it slid down that mountain there, because you can see that mountains all carved up and this rock shouldn't be here. And that's weird. So that was the great flood of biblical times, which we did an episode on. Yeah, that was a good one. And so that was kind of how things were explained, how these things ended up places where they probably did not start out. Yeah, people noticed that there was just weird stuff going on in the geography around them. Right. But they didn't place it correctly until it turns out the Swiss peasantry and some German peasants as well, started to notice that their glaciers were receding. And as their glaciers receded up there and, say, the Alps, it left some markings that they noticed, also the same kind of markings further down the mountain. So the Swiss peasants put two and two together and said, you know what? I think the glaciers used to be way bigger than they are today. And that maybe that is what explains these boulders that shouldn't be here, being here in the middle of this field. And I guess from what I can gather, it was kind of like common folk wisdom in some areas of the Swiss Alps long before science understood it. Sure. And it was actually a Swiss geologist who was the first one to advance a genuine bona fide hypothesis for ice ages. Yeah, Louis, I guess CIS is how I'm going to pronounce that. And he in 1837, presented his ideas about this glacial activity at a conference, a science conference, and everyone was like, eh, I don't know. I don't know about you. I don't know about that. Right. Well, they did know about him. He was a smart guy. Right. He was established, but they're like, just go back to your opium, pretty much. And apparently his first theory was that there had been an ice age. It happened very quickly. Yeah. He was off, by the way, basically like night and day, and that it had followed a catastrophe. Right. Yeah. I wonder if he would have that seems like the one thing that might have put them off with how unlikely that sounded. Right. Because he was wrong. I wonder if he would have said, it happens slowly over time, let's say. Yeah. They may have said, like, oh, I might buy that. Now he's presenting his findings. He's like, what do you guys want to hear? But I'll massage it in that way. Yes. It happened overnight. And they all just cross their arms. He goes or overnight. Over a very long period of time. So before him, though, quite a few years before him, there was a Scotsman oh, yeah. Born in Edinburgh. Edinburgh. Buried at Gray Friars. Wow. Which did you ever go there? I walked past it. I never made it in. Okay. Well, my hotel was right there, so I walked through it. Amazing cemetery. I went to Mary King's clothes instead, which is pretty awesome, too. You had to go to one or the other. Right. They're close to each other the other way. There's only so much time in the day off. Not close enough. 1785, a man named James Hutton. And, man, this guy was a stud. The father of geology. He had this idea that he was one of the first people to look around and say, you know what? The earth is always changing. If you look around and pay attention, look at it. That bird just died. He might sit for days and look and wait for something to move. But he said, the Earth is constantly changing. And I have an idea that it's probably always been this way. So if we look at what's going on now and we apply that to the past, we might come up with some pretty interesting stuff here. Right. Yeah. He said that there's basically clues to the past in the present. Yeah. Just like, look what's going on around you. This might have happened 10,000 years ago as well. And that might explain something like that boulder being someplace different. Exactly. We keep going to the boulders, but the boulders are actually some really high quality evidence for ice ages in general. Sure. There's actually a term for it among people who study ice ages. They're called erratic. And an erratic is a very heavy boulder, way too heavy to have been moved by humans. That is also too far from its point of origin to just, say, roll downhill. Right. It doesn't make any sense that it's there, which is why it's called Neurotic. There's some very famous ones. There's one in the Swiss Alps. Well, I'm sure there's many, but there's one in particular. This article mentions it's in the Swiss Alps. That is about 50 miles from its point of origin. Yeah, there's one in Central Park that is many miles away from its point of origin in New Jersey. It moved, tried to make it in the big city. It was a bridge and tunnel boulder. Right. And that's actually one of the ways the Germans figured out that there was such a thing as ice age, because they said, see that boulder there in that field? I'm pretty sure that Scandinavian rock. And sure enough, they were correct. And so you start to put all this stuff together. Huge boulders being moved, valleys between mountains carved out in a U shape rather than that telltale V shape that a river carves out. Sure, these are clues. Well, they are erratic, but they're clues into the past. Yeah. When you start to put all of them together, the only thing that really explains them is huge, massive movements of glaciers. Glacial movement. Yeah. And when you study that stuff and you look at these grooves and you studied the boulders, you can actually make calculations. Right. And it's amazing that way back then they were able to make these calculations, agaziz in particular. And some other guys got together and they said that the present ice age at its peak, I guess, was about a mile thick of glacier. Mile of ice. Yes. It's amazing. Yeah. And further studies have concluded that in the last ice age, I guess, the Wisconsin Glacier, about a third of the Earth was covered in glaciers. Have we said what a glacier is yet? I mean, it almost goes without saying, but just in case yeah. It's just really densely packed snow. It is. And it's snow that isn't allowed to melt. It's cold enough so that it never fully melts with the base it forms to ice. And on top you've got more and more snow. And as more and more snow doesn't melt, the ice builds up thicker and thicker. And just from the sheer force of these things, mass encountering gravity, they can actually move. They're like, very slow most of the time. Very slow moving rivers of ice on a massive scale. Yeah. Well, we'll get to that later. I was going to tease something out. Okay. Should we take a quick break? Yes. All right. We'll take a break and we'll get back to a little more amazing glaciers. All right, so we talked about the sheer size, a mile thick of ice. Yeah. And I said, like a third of the Earth. I think it covered 17 million sq mi of the planet during the last glaciation. Cubic miles, my friend. Cubic miles. Right. Junk is deep. Yeah, a mile deep. Man, that is nuts. So Antarctica had about 10% more ice than it does now. And the big change, the big difference, what sets that ice age apart was the amount of activity in the Northern Hemisphere. It was very unusual to have the amount of ice in North America and Europe extending down, like through the Midwest of United States. It was a new scene. A new Chile scene. Yes. A whole new jam, basically was. And Chuck. It was largely in North America. But this also really covered a lot of Europe too. I mean, like Ireland was covered, germany was covered, scandinavia was covered by ice. And basically everything that wasn't covered by ice in Europe was a tundra very much like Siberia is today. I actually saw a documentary on, I think it was a History Channel show about the last ice age, and somebody figured out how much all of that ice weighed. Are you ready for this? Bazillion pounds. This might be more than a bazillion. 68,000 trillion tons was the total weight of the ice on the Earth. On the Earth during the last ice age? During the last glacier. How many big max is that? I have no idea. It's like more than 100. Well, in North America loan about 10 million sq mi of ice. And this all came from the ocean, which means the ocean level was hundreds and hundreds of feet lower during this ice age. Yeah, like Canada is used to having large parts of it being covered by glacier. Sure. The United States is not used to this, but it came all the way down into the plains in some cases, and basically from New York over to Washington State, totally covered by, again, a mile thick sheet of ice. You can ice skate on that without worry yet you're not going to fall through. They're going to crack. Did you ever do that growing up in Ohio? Like you'd skate on lakes? Yeah, and we were never allowed to do that until my dad went out and stomped on it and jumped up and down. And if he didn't go through, then we were allowed to skate. He's like kids if I die, right, it wasn't don't skate. It wasn't the most foolproof technique, but it was nice to dad to do that for us. I don't know, I think I'm not much of a worry wart, but that still would have creeped me out. I've seen enough movies right under ice. So the Mami River would freeze over, but we weren't allowed to skate on the river. Some people we weren't allowed to. Instead there was a golf course with ponds that would freeze pretty good, right? You weren't going to fall through these small ponds. The ice is pretty cold, pretty rough though, right? Like skating on it depends on and I don't remember what it depended on. Yeah, it's never like an ice rink, right? But certain type of weather, maybe non windy weather, I think is what it was. Got you. Because then if there was kind of like a choppiness to it from the wind, right? It could freeze like that. Freeze choppy. Whereas if it wasn't windy, I would guess it would be smoother. So sometimes it was pretty smooth, other times you're like, I can't even skate on it. But your dad would drive a Zamboni out there and fix it all up, move it over, and if the Zamboni didn't fall through, then we are allowed to skate on. I just picture the zamboni falling through, but it's a little pond, so your dad's still, like, just above? Just like knee deep. I feel like I missed out, though. Life is over. You can still skate on pond. Oh, it is. I don't picture myself going to Minnesota in the winter to give it a try. The trade off. It wasn't a very good trade off because the winters are pretty brutal if you have local ponds that freeze over. You're cold too. Sure. I still feel like I missed out. Yeah, you're fine. It wasn't that big of a deal. I was teasing when I said you did miss out. All right, so people are skating all over the world. A third of the world people are ice skating on during the Ice Age. And as we mentioned, these things, they've been described as bulldozers just plowing through the Earth, basically leaving large swaths. They call it glacial till, this debris that they leave behind. Once you figure out how it works, the evidence is everywhere of exactly what happened. Yeah, because as these glaciers move and that ice that has formed the basis of the glacier is in contact with the Earth below it, it's picking up all sorts of crud, all the debris. That glacial till, you said erratic boulders. And as it's doing this, it's actually creating a scrubbing mechanism. Right. So like you said, if you look around at mountains and valleys with exposed rock that were rubbed by glaciers, there's going to be crazy grooves work into them. Some of them look like roads, almost. Yes. Some are kind of polished and rounded. And it's all from this glacial activity, rubbing stuff over the tops of these mountains. It's pretty interesting stuff. And then other things you'll see, like a movie where this incredibly beautiful river valley has this gravel everywhere, like, just scattered all throughout, like, the valley floor. That's not supposed to be there. A glacier deposited. That's right. It's more evidence of the Ice Age. Yeah. That's interesting to think of it. It's not supposed to be there. No. And you think of that that's what that looks like? Of course that's supposed to be there. But no, it's technically not. Have we not had these glaciation events? That stuff wouldn't be there. Isn't that fascinating? It is Earth science. Is that your favorite science? I think it's become it. Yeah. It really does get me jazzed. All right. So it wasn't just the direct path of these glaciers that was affected. Out on the edges of these massive moving sheets of ice, you had things like Arctic deserts, and you had these big areas of dusty wind, and there's actually a few ways to pronounce this. L-O-E-S-S-I heard everything from Louis to lows to less. I like lowest. Yeah, I, like, lowest, too. Covering all over the Earth, basically. And this is created by those glaciers just like grinding into the Earth? Yeah. Stirring everything up. Right. And then the wind just comes and picks it up the finest of the particles and just deposits them. So in some places, you had so if your area wasn't covered by glacier, that didn't mean you weren't affected by the glacier. Oh, no, because you would have the lowest deserts, glacial deserts that formed, and in some places, the lowest was like 20ft thick. And apparently it's still there. In much of the Midwest, the Sub Strait below, the soil is lowest deposited from these lowest deserts. And so you would think when you hear about this kind of activity, that it had to be like 100 degrees chillier right. Or 50 or 40 even. But it was only about ten deg Fahrenheit, about 5.6 Celsius lower than temperatures now, which I wouldn't think that that would be enough. Right. But it's not all just about the temperature. That's kind of the point. No, the point that Molly makes is that it's not like, oh, it's just so much colder than it was before all the time. The key to an ice age forming glacier, the glacial period, is that the time when it's supposed to actually melt is colder than usual. That's right. So that there's less melt than before. And the less melt you have, the more chance you have for snow to fall and make up for whatever melted and actually add to it. Which means that the glacier is growing as long as more snow is added to the glacier than it loses during, say, the summer months yeah. Your glacier is growing. Yeah. And if it's not losing much, it doesn't take much snow. And this cycle starts. There's something called albedo, or albedo. Albedo. And it's the reflectivity of ice. And once this ice gets going, it's reflecting away the sun. It's why you're hotter in the summer wearing a black T shirt than a white T shirt. Yeah. And it creates that cycle, basically, where it's all just compounding all these different elements coming together absolutely. To make ice super thick. So if you have a glacier form on planet Earth and it reflects a bunch of sunlight and makes it colder, well, that's going to create the conditions for other glaciers to form, too. So it has a compounding effect as well. The albedo does. All right, well, let's take a break and we're going to come back and talk about a very famous Serbian mathematician. All right, so I said famous Serbian mathematician. Did you already heard of this guy? Yeah. Really? I'd heard about the Milankovich cycles. Nice. So his name was Militant Milankovich, and it's amazing to me that in the 1920s, people like, well, just say him was able to figure out right. With a lot of accuracy, the Milankovitch cycles. Basically, he said, you know what, I have a theory on why these summers are cooler and why this ice age happened. And it's not just the temperatures, but it's because of the Sun's. Relationship to the Earth and how much sun the Earth is getting during the summer months. Right. So we came up with three different factors. The tilt in the Earth's axis, the way the Earth wobbles on that axis, and then how close we are to that heat, how close we are to the sun. Right. He plugged those into a mathematical formula and he came up with every 22,040 1100 thousand years he's predicting that we're going to get these ice ages. Right. Pretty amazing math for back then. It is. Especially if you go back. So he figured this out and then they went back and looked at the fossil record, the geological record, because when he was working, they didn't have this understanding he wasn't proving that he was predicting. Right. So then about that time well, after that time, but in the was building army bases all over the world in some really crazy places, including the Arctic. And some scientists went along and started taking core samples from those places and they found air bubbles trapped in there that were from like a million years ago. Like the air was a million years old and it was untouched Virginia. And they found that they could do all sorts of stuff and learn all sorts of things from this air. And one of the things they found was basically the timestamp for the ice ages during the quarternaire period. And they found out that in the first 2 million years, the first two thirds of the ice age, the ice ages glaciation occurred every 41,000 years. Yes. And he just sat back and was like, yeah, that's what I said. He's like, but wait for it. And they said, okay, in this most recent million years, it switched to 100,000 years. And he just had his arms crossed. Very smugly. Yeah. And everybody said, that's amazing. That's fantastic. Scientists, you guys in the lab coats. What causes an ice age? And there's just crickets coming back from the scientists and there still is today. Actually, actually, no, that's the opposite is true. Not crickets, but a ton of different answers and a ton of different theories. Yeah, lots of crickets. Right, but not quite either. What would be the animal that would talking crickets. Jiminy Crickets. Sure. Everywhere. Man, that guy was annoying putting forth theories. And as with most things, we usually kind of center on I bet it was like most of these things put together, which most scientists do well. Dude, I was thinking about this and I was like, yes, chaos theory. We have such a propensity as humans to be like there's one true explanation, there's one factor that explains everything, and that is just not the case. This is a perfect example of that. I wonder if that's a tendency for humans to want to be right. Like the people actually doing the research say like, no, this is my idea. Right. I think that's part of it. But I think it's more just like our brains are wired to find the least common denominator, to find the easiest route. Yeah, maybe just for efficiency's sake. That makes sense. I kind of like the idea of like I'm Hands Across America. Did you participate in Hands Across America? No, I hated it back then, but oh, man, I did it now. I'm just kidding. I think I did, actually. Yeah, there were huge gaps, but it was still pretty great. We should do a show on that. Okay. I didn't know there were gaps. Of course there were. Oh, yeah. Pretty big ones. Yeah. It was at no point complete. I think our school did it. Wasn't that the deal? Probably did it. Hippie church. I don't know if my church might have been like, no, we're not holding hands. You could be holding hands with an atheist, you wouldn't even know it. That probably would have been the case. All right, so another theory is we've talked a lot about plate tectonics in our volcano episodes and what else the plate tectonics episode. Did we do one on that specifically? I think so, among the close to 900 episodes, and I don't remember where it first popped up, but it's definitely come up. Another one of your non pun puns. Yes, I hope. I'm like creating a pretty extensive case for the fact that all of my puns are accidental. Yeah, I don't think, like, that accidental. Pun is a good band name, too, ironically. It's okay. So plate tectonics is another theory. Basically, everyone knows when you get to a higher altitude, it's going to be colder and the conditions are more likely for glaciers to form. And so when these plates on the Earth are smashing together, everyone also knows from listening to our show, that how we get these lovely mountain ranges and why there are higher altitudes. So that's another theory that had a lot to do with it. Yeah, that makes sense. Some scientists say the Quadrant Ice Age, the whole shebang, the 2.58 million year old ice age that were instill basically, at the feet of the creation of the Himalayas, where Asia and India collide, creating the Himalayas and most importantly, the Tibetan Plateau, and this rising of land changing the way that air moves across this huge portion of land. Eurasia. And that it had an impact on climate, which has an impact on historical climate, which can change things, make things cold enough so that glaciers can form and really get a foothold. Right. Yeah. More interesting, Chuck, is that apparently they're like that's probably kind of a factor, but there's an even bigger factor that they think that came out of that upwelling of Earth. Bear with me. So when Earth meets Earth and there's an upwelling and they form mountains or something like that right. You know the process of weathering, it's like breaking in jeans or strategies. Right. You break in mountains, too. Well, that's actually a. Chemical reaction between, like, the air and the Earth. And when rock is exposed, it becomes weathered because CO2 reacts with the rock to basically form some sort of equilibrium that has been interrupted or disrupted by the exposure of unweathered rock. Right. Well, to carry that out, CO2 has to be drawn from the atmosphere, which means you're basically removing CO2 from the atmosphere. When you create a new mountain chain. And if you're talking about a mountain chain as extensive as the Himalayas, a lot of CO2 is going to be removed from the atmosphere. When you remove CO2 from the atmosphere, you reduce the greenhouse effect. And when you reduce the greenhouse effect, the Earth becomes cooler. Possibly enough for an ice age. The timing is right as well. The Himalayan formed right before the Quadrantary ice Age began. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? It is. Or science. The other thing is dust, atmospheric changes. A lot of dust in the air is going to keep the sun from shining down its warmth onto the Earth and keep temperatures cooler. And since I mentioned volcanoes, there were a lot of volcanoes, a lot of activity that preceded the Glacial Ages, launching a lot of dust in the air. I don't think it's coincidence. Right. It's probably all tied in together. Yeah. I would guess that it's not just volcanic ash, it was just dust, period, but the volcanic ash added to it. Right. And I think even after the volcanoes stopped, erupting gases that affect the atmosphere directly, they still interact with the water vapor in the atmosphere to mess with it in a continued way. Sunspots are also another one, too, right? Yeah. That's one of the main reasons for the Little Ice Age, right? Yeah. That we talked about in the strategy areas. Yeah. The Little Ice Age. Did you see that article I sent you? Yeah, I picked it. It was pretty interesting. But our understanding of the Little Ice Age, which is not the best name for it, but there's a period it should be lil I-C-H-L-I-L. Correct. From 1300 to 1850. Europe in particular. Well, the Northern Hemisphere. But Europe got it pretty bad. Yeah. It was basically what amounts to an ice age for this area. Greenland and Iceland were cut off by ice for months at a time. They used to grow wine in England. Not anymore. Scotland, they grew wine? Yeah. Like bottles would just pop up out of the ground. It's amazing. The Highlands of Scotland would be locked into ice at like 1200 meters and up. Yes. The Baltic Sea froze over. Yeah. The canals in the Netherlands routinely froze. It was a really rough time. Well, it wasn't. It wasn't. It's pretty interesting because this article you sent points out a lot of the history that it affected everything from shipping to crops to people turning on one another. In some areas than other areas, things flourished. Right. So apparently areas and groups that had access to extensive trade networks, especially with the south or the tropics. Makes sense. They flourished. But if you're in a marginal area, say like the Alps, you are toast, like you suffered from famine. Apparently glaciers were advancing enough that they were just overrunning towns. That's nuts, and it sounds absolutely nuts, but actually, glaciers can move surprisingly fast. Right. There was a glacier in Alaska in 1986 that was clocked advancing at 180 miles an hour. At 10 meters a day. Yes. 30ft a day. You can watch that happen. Yeah. Or the very least, you can set up your intervalometer camera and watch it later. Sure. Or if you're just super patient. Yeah. I bet what's his name, that dude? Yes, the Scotsman. I bet James Hutton would have sat there until he's a patient man. What else do we cover? The sunspots? No. Well, not yeah, I mentioned that. That might have been why the little Ice Age happened. And by the way, we on the Strat of Areas podcast heard from a lot of people about this double blind study where they had musicians play the Strads and then against modern violins, and they preferred, I think generally preferred the modern violin more. Right. So people are like, oh, you're just getting the brand name. That's kind of a reductive way to say it. Yeah. And then afterward to the violinist, they served him costly it's folders. Well, the other thing we heard from other people that said these violinists know what they're testing. They're testing, clearly testing a strategy against a modern instrument. They don't just say, like, put on this blindfold, and here's two violins, which one smells neat? So we probably should have included that. But I don't think that settles it in any scientific way or anything. Yeah, I saw in our research that that was not necessarily the case. I saw in a number of different sources that they can tell the difference, that it is actually the best violin ever made. And these are people that have opinions. It's not like you can't scientifically prove that because every person you pick out is going to have a different take on the matter. And we weren't poopooing modern instruments because clearly there are only a handful of Strads out there being played, and there's like 600 many orchestras, and they're not playing like, pawn shop violins. Pawn shop fiddles. No. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that. So these sunspots, right? There's actually a cycle that was recognized by a British astronomer named E. W. Monder. It's a pretty British name. And he was living during the Little Ice Age, and he noticed that it was cold. Yeah, he was like, Holy cow, it's cold. You can ice skate on a pond. He noticed that the Little Ice Age should actually be called the Little period where it was pretty cold and then really cold in two different points. And those points were between 1000 and 91,500 and then 1645 and 1715, it was really cold, like kind of ice ageish conditions, for real. And EW Monitor noticed that, especially the time when he was alive, between the 1645 and 1715 period, sunspots were not nearly as active. Yeah. And he was like, I wonder if this correlates to little ice ages. And it would make sense, even though it makes sense in a really weird way. A roundabout way, actually. Yeah. Sunspot. I guess we should just say what that is. It's a dark spot, a cooler spot on the sun. But the key there is it contains magnetic energy, so you would think that sunspots are cooler than the rest of the sun, while wait, now I've got it backwards. Yeah, you got it, yeah. So how would that keep it warmer on Earth? Right. But it's about that magnetic field cutting through cloud cover or cutting the cloud cover. Right. So less cloud cover means that the heat from the sun isn't trapped, it just escapes into space. Yeah. Counterintuitive. But it makes sense. Yeah. Because these sunspots are big enough that when it's facing Earth, it's putting out less heat energy. So you would think it would indirectly cools it. Right. Weird. It is weird, but amazing. Earth science. So whether or not we're headed for another one, there's a lot of debate on that, because some people say, well, there's no strict definition, even what an ice age is, so who's to say? Other people say, now, you know what, humans have caused such an impact here that there probably won't be another ice age. Yeah. It's extremely possible that we have altered the climate enough that we're not going to see, like, we may have ended on our own. The Quaternary ice age. It may be over now or on the way to being over, in which case we have a whole other set of problems to deal with. But not an ice age, not glaciers. There was actually a study that made the rounds, I think, this year or last year, that really drummed up a lot of media attention, because these researchers said that they predicted a period of very low sunspot activity in 30 years. Because we're due for one, technically. Right. We're at that 10,000 year point. Yes. We're due for another glacier. And these people said, well, there's going to be sunspots in 30 years, and the media took it and said, there's going to be another ice age in 30 years. And that's not necessarily the case. It's a pretty big leap from saying, yes, there's low sunspot activity, so we're going to have an ice age. Right. But if we hadn't burned all those fossil fuels, maybe that would be the case. Maybe we would start to see Glaciation beginning again in about 30 years again. We're probably not going to, because we've raised the temperature of the planet by a full degree Celsius since 1980. Yeah. So it's possible we won't ever see an ice age again, which is sad, because some people say that it was this last age, not just the last glacier event, but the Quaternary Ice Age as a whole, that pushed humans to evolve to the wonderful, amazing specimens we are today. Yeah, a lot of advancements happened because of it adaptations and animals and early humans, there was movement around Earth because the sea levels were a lot lower, so you could make your way around bigger parts of the Earth. They weren't cut off like before, like they are now. Apparently, our brains grew tremendously in size during the Quaternary Ice Age in a time period that correlates with it. And one hypothesis is that the cooler temperatures allowed us to dissipate heat more naturally and to save our energy or use more energy, which would allow our brains to grow. Interesting. And then other people say, well, you know what? The crow magnins also invented the sewing needle during this time because of the Ice Age, so that they could start sewing. And close is the technology that allowed us to truly spread out over the Earth. Yes, because you could go live where it was cold. Because you could make a big park out of a muscox. Exactly. The muscots would say, thank you for using me, human. I don't know about that, but you got anything else? No, I think that's it. Man, this is good one, Chuck. If you want to know more about ice ages, you can type those words into the search bar@howstepworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Remember in the animal testing episode when I wondered aloud about the names of pork and beef and swine? Oh, yeah. I'm glad you're covering this. Apparently, I'm the only person on the planet who did not know this. I didn't know it either, because we had a bunch of people right in and it's super interesting. So I picked one that was a good explanation from a gentleman in Bristol, United Kingdom. He said this before 1066, in England, most people spoke a form of Germanic English. And he says, by the way, I'm glossing over several centuries of linguistic history with that. However, after the invasion by William Mcconker and his eventual coordination, norman became the dominant language. Norman is based on Northern French dialects, so would have used words such as mutton and booth for sheep and cows. These words were used by people who would have been able to afford to eat such food, namely the gentry. However, peasants who would have raised raisy animals still use the Germanic words like sheep and cow, and these words stuck. English is full of high and low words, gentry or peasantry for similar meanings, with the highwards being French based, therefore Latin based. Really interesting. Having to stop myself from going on is a subject I've always been obsessed with, and I hope that I have piqued your interest as well. Be warned, the subject is a rabbit hole. I will also add I was gutted to miss your UK tour and I hope you enjoyed it enough to come back one day. Sure. I'll also chica Lee Plug Bristol as an amazing place to live and visit. Yeah. Congratulations on your new sky pier. I've heard of that. It's like a huge observation UFO that goes up on their coast. You can just see for miles and miles. Interesting. Much love to you both and thanks for doing what you do. Cheers. That is from Matt Gallaford of Bristol. Thanks, Matt. We'll definitely be back. And thanks to everyone who wrote in with that good information. I wish I could have read them all. If you want to get in touch with us, to let us know something we missed or to tell us how great we're doing, well, yeah, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can also hang out with me at Joshlark on Twitter too. You can hang out with Chuck at Charlesw. Chuck? Bryan on Facebook or our Stuffyhannow page@facebookcom stuffychano. You can hang out with us on Instagram. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Summer school's out. 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80e8fc09-67c7-45d0-bfc9-aec400f0dce6 | Selects: How Freak Shows Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-freak-shows-worked | Not too long ago, people would pay money to gawk and stare at a performer with a physical disformity. They were called freak shows and they began in large part thanks to P.T. Barnum, whose circus we still enjoy today. Sounds awful, but some of these performers became rich folks as a result. Exploitive? You decide, after taking in this classic episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Not too long ago, people would pay money to gawk and stare at a performer with a physical disformity. They were called freak shows and they began in large part thanks to P.T. Barnum, whose circus we still enjoy today. Sounds awful, but some of these performers became rich folks as a result. Exploitive? You decide, after taking in this classic episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Sat, 02 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=183, tm_isdst=0) | 46764700 | audio/mpeg | "You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo Elevate at petco pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores 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. Hey, everybody, it's Josh, and for this week's select I had chosen our March 2016 episode How Freak Shows Worked. It's one of those episodes that turns out to be more complicated and complex than you might expect. And as an aside, a pre aside, I guess I'd like to say rest in peace to Ronnie and Donnie Gallion, who we lost in 2020 and who come up in this episode. Okay, sit back, release your expectations and enjoy this classic EP. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Glark. It's Charles at beachock. Bryan. It's Gerry. And this is stuff you should know. You introduced as if you were asleep and I just walked by and poked you with a queue. And that's your first thing you do, is you wake up and just go, hey, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, that's what I do. How are you, sir? Man, I'm feeling fine. Yeah. Good. Feeling fine. That's the Simpsons reference from what? The Shining one. Oh, yeah. The shitting classic. It's a good one. So, a couple of quick matters of business, okay? A little COA at the beginning. We're talking about freak shows, right? And we will be saying freaks and things like that. That is obviously an antiquated term. Yes. But there are a lot of quotes in here and a lot of references to freaks and midgets and pinheads and all these awful terms that they used to call these people that had physical deformities and maladies. Right. So it's not us speaking. This is in historical context. Yeah. Like, we get the insensitivity. We're not being insensitive here's. Not yeah. And we want to shout out, we used a couple of House Stuff Works articles, as well as one from History magazine by Laura Grande. Price. Zachary Crockett wrote one. Yeah. Who have to say I'm a fan of that dude's work. Yeah, it was a good article. Price nomics, he's written some really interesting articles. The Greed and then one from Humanmarbles.com, which is just a good website by Jtonispedinal. I know that right. P-E-D-N-A-U-D. Yeah, that's a tough one. I assume the D is silent. Yeah, or maybe not. Maybe it's Pednowed, pennawd, Freaky and a couple of other places we visited and everyone kind of said the same thing but it's a nice well rounded thing, I think. Yeah, well, we're talking about the history of freak shows and there's only one history, certain things happen and we found very quickly that you can't extract freak shows from PT. Barnum or vice versa. No. They are inextricably bound but freak shows barnum was working in the 19th century but the concept of freak shows which is basically someone who is a human curiosity and that could be someone who was born with a genetic deformity. A physical deformity. Some sort of mental incapacity or some people have turned themselves into human curiosity. Say through the wonder of tattooing or learning to swallow swords or something like that. Yeah, or like these days, body modification, like the Jim Rose show or there's one in Coney Island still that does like a traditional show. Yeah, side show by the seashore. Right. Also a great song by Luna, one of my favorite bands. So the whole concept of this of having a human curiosity and basically charging gawkers to look at it, it dates back quite a ways. Well, actually not that far, the 16th century. That's pretty far. I guess so. But you would think like well, the Greeks or the Romans did this but apparently no, from what I understand, everybody just kind of steered clear of human curiosities to that point. Yeah, I think people feared them. Right. They were locked away mainly because they thought it was some evil curse or punishment from God. This wasn't someone you wanted to consort with else you might bring back bring down the wrath of God upon yourself. That's right. But like you said in the late fifteen hundred s, people started to say, you know what, I'm curious about someone with hair growing all over their face. I'm curious about the human curiosity. Exactly. Chuck, I want to say I don't think it's coincidence that about this time science was starting to spread throughout Europe. Oh, sure. So the idea that this was God's breath was taking a bit of a backseat to this is a human condition of some sort. Yes, but not so far down the road of science to where there was this intermediate period where they were gawked at and as we'll find out later, science would eventually take part in ending the side shows. Right. It created them and it ended up yes, it's kind of neat. Good way to look at it. So one of the first viewings or one of the first people put on display and this is also going to be we'll get into it later but the morality of this is very up and down with exploiting people and these people that would normally be locked away actually having super lucrative careers, sure. Long lasting made them rich. Well, plus, also, I think one of the authors, I think it was crockett, points out that early on, if you were in a freak show, there was a good chance that you had been abandoned by your parents, became a ward of the state, and adopted by somebody who just ruthlessly exploited you and maybe barely took care of you. But one thing you can definitely say to his credit, as Barnum came into it and basically normalized or created an industry out of freak shows or for freak shows, conditions definitely changed and the exploitation seems to have lessened somewhat. Yeah. I think with the big names like Norman and Barnum, I think there were all manner of minor sideshows that probably didn't treat them as well. Right. And usually Barnum and Norman bought their curiosities from those minor side shows. Lesser showman. Exactly. So we're talking about Tom Norman out of England. Yeah. They were basically counterparts. Yeah. And we'll get into them. But back to one of the earliest quote unquote freaks was a man named Lazarus colorado. Not Colorado who was a conjoined twin. He had a brother, Johannes, who was upside down on his chest, and technically it was a parasitic twin to Lazarus. Oh, not conjoined twins. They were conjoined. But Johannes didn't eat. Oh, okay. He didn't speak. He never opened his eyes. And apparently the only way you could get a physical reaction out of him was if you rubbed his chest. That would make him squirm like quad. And total recall. Very much. Got you. So he went on tour, performed before King Charles the first in the early 1640s. But it was not a big deal. It wasn't a super lucrative side. Shows weren't really a thing at that point. No. But this guy was saying, you guys are going to ostracize me. Well, I'm going to charge you to look at me then, and I'm going to support myself. And my brother doing this. He did it himself. It's not clear whether he worked with the manager or not, or promoter, but he definitely made his own choice to go do this. Yes, exactly. And he was apparently an otherwise handsome man. Yeah. That's how everyone described him. Right. Which I think probably for the court or Europe who came and looked at him, probably just made it even more mind boggling. But he's a good guy. Right. PT. Barnum. And I think we should do a whole podcast on PT. Barnum at some point okay. To really close out the circus suite. Well, then we shouldn't mention him again in the show. No. Barnum as a teenager, he always had a pinch for making money. He was one of those magnets, sort of weird ways. He ran his own lottery as a teenager in Connecticut, and he said, here's what I'll do. I can sell these tickets. I'll give out prizes in varying levels from $25 on down to $0.25. Sure. Lottery. Yeah. But it was a very well thought out for a teenager. He wasn't just like just one prize. He spread it out so he would entice people to play more. Right. And he actually made a lot of money from it until they outlawed the lottery. Yeah. He was making like eleven grand in today's dollars a week as a teenager. Yes, 19. Not bad. But then Connecticut and the rest of the country said, no more lotteries for now. We'll bring that back up later, though, don't you worry. TBC and he had to find other ways to make work. Moved to New York City, and in 1835, England is where a lot of this started. We'll talk about Norman in a second. But he got his queue from England and said, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to buy a person. I'm going to buy my first freak, this blind, paralyzed, slave woman. And this is a hallmark of freak shows. I'm going to make up a story about her that's sensational and crazy, like a Ripley's Believe It or not kind of thing. Right. And Barnum in particular was well known for just taking these things to the nth degree. Like, no one's going to buy that. But he could sell it in such a way that people believed it because they were exponentially dumber back then. The story for her was that she was 160 years old, was George Washington's nurse, and you can pay to see her when in fact she was only 80 years old. She was half that age. Yeah. And her name was Joyce Heath. She was just an old lady. Right. Yeah. She was an old slave woman who was paralyzed and blind and was being exploited by PT. Barnum in the year before her death. That's right. So she dies, but before then, as he's touting her as a 160 year old former nursemaid to George Washington, that gets an initial reaction. And then ticket sales drop. And then PT. Barnum did something quite smart. He wrote an anonymous letter to a Boston newspaper and accused himself of being a fraud and saying that the 160 year old woman was a fake. She was actually a machine, a robot made of whale skin and wood, and ticket sales went right through the roof again. Man, what a guy. There should be a good movie about him. I can't believe there's not like a modern one. I'm sure there is. Surely. What's the one the Greatest Show on Earth was a movie, right? Like a DW. Griffith movie or something. Yeah, that's what I mean. But like Tom Cruise should play him. That should be directed by Michael Bay. Russell Crowe should no, not Russell Crowe. Well, how about who could play PT. Barnum? You know, he would be good at it, but it would just be so him. Sam Rockwell. Oh, totally. He can play anything. So I'd rather see somebody even broader playing them. Yeah, I heard recently. Oh, Gina. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, Gina. Who would end up playing him is Frigging, Hugh Jackman and everyone. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Because he can do cartwheels. Yeah. What are you going to say? It might have been during the Bill Gates interview or something yesterday that somebody said that? No, it was on CNN. Tom Hanks is the most trusted person in America. What? Some poll found that the most trusted person in America is Tom Hanks. Were we on the list? I don't think so. No, no. Sure. You got to trust we're not even also rand. We're never rand. All right, so he purchased that woman, what was her name? Joyce Heath. J-O-I-C-E-H-E-T-H for $1000. And he made about that every week from exploiting her. I imagine that she got very little of that. Yeah. Although you can't necessarily say that I didn't see what she was paid. True. She was very likely paid, and she was probably fairly well taken care of, especially considering that she probably this is based on how Barnum treated other people later in a documented manner. But I don't want to say he rescued her from slavery because she went from being a slave to being owned by somebody who exhibited her. Sure. But it's not a guarantee or a given that her situation got worse after she was purchased by Barnum. Right. Does that make sense? Yes. Man, that felt like a minefield. I was talking about slavery, human exploitation, a blind woman who is also paralyzed. Good luck, sir. His first big hoax after that. Well, actually, I guess it wasn't a hoax, aside from the made up story. But he had a real hoax. It was a hoax. Well, a hoax, sure, but this was a hoax in 1842 because nothing about it was real. He was promoting something called the Fiji Mermaid, which was basically rogue taxidermy is all it was. That's exactly what it was. It was a creature with the head of a monkey and the tail of a fish that he bought from Japanese sailors. Well, he didn't he got it from a sailor who bought it from Japanese, and actually it was Japanese fishermen. Yeah, well, what's the difference? Well, they didn't necessarily go to sea. They were like islanders. Got you. And this is like traditional art for them. Folk art. Okay, so not a sailor, but fishermen. Right. That's Pet Entry 101. Sorry, man, I get so fixated on things. Yeah, and he leased it for twelve point $0.50 right. From the owners of said road taxidermy. And he printed up pamphlets and tried to convince everyone it was some real thing. So he actually had a partner named Levi. What was Levi's name? He's definitely an overlooked guy. Levi Lyman. Can you imagine, like, being PT. Barnum's partner? Like you'd never be in the spotlight. Right? Anyway, so Levi Lyman posed as an English doctor a scientist who was in possession of this mermaid, and PT. Barnum very publicly was trying to get his hands on the mermaid, and this guy was very publicly resisting him because it was a man of science. And this is the real deal. Right. And it helped just convince everybody, including the newspapers, that this is the genuine article. Man just rubes nation. A world of rubes. Yeah. It seems like he ended up opening up a museum on Broadway in New York City in the 1840s. Sort of like ripple's, believe it or not, kind of thing. Curiosities and weird things. Yeah. His stock and trade. And then we should talk about his counterpart in England. Tom Norman. Yeah. Tommy Norman. He was named the Silver King, and Barnum actually gave him that name, apparently, after meeting him, and he said, Boy, what a huge silver showy. Silver watch you have there. You're the Silver King. He goes, I am the Silver King. I've been waiting my whole life for somebody to notice. Exactly. So he was doing the same thing in England, actually. He toured with Joseph Merrick. The Elephant Man. Yeah. And he got castigated by a lot of people saying, you're exploiting this guy John Merrick. Is it John or Joseph? What did I say? John. Yeah. And it's like an ongoing thing. Oh, is it? Yeah. I can't remember if it's well, let's find out. No, it's Joseph for sure. I just misspoke. Oh, sorry. He was attacked specifically in a memoir by Dr. Frederick Treeves called The Elephant Man and other Reminiscences. And he shot back and he said, you know what? I haven't mistreated Merick. I haven't abused him. He wasn't forced to do anything. And he said, in fact, the big majority of showmen are in the habit of treating their novelties as human beings and in a large number of cases, as one of their own. Not like beasts. Right. So the morality battle was being waged even back then. Yeah. And this time when people would go look at people who had physical deformities and pay for it. Just look at them just standing there, you think, well, the whole world was pretty evil and amoral. Sure. At the time. Not necessarily true. There's a lot of people who railed against this stuff, like Frederick Treeves. He was portrayed by Anthony Hopkins. Right. Isn't that him? Oh, I don't know. Yeah, he was in the Elephant Man in the movie. Oh, was he actually Merrick's doctor? Yes. Okay. I didn't know that. Yeah. Man, that movie. Yeah. David lynch. God, one of the best ever. And then there was an historian who at the time, I think, in, like, the 1860s, he wrote his name was Henry Mayhew in 1861, he was British. He wrote that these freak shows were nothing more than human degradation. And he said something that stuck out to me, Chuck. He said that the men who preside over these infamous places know too well the failings of their audience. And I think he really hit the nail on the head. He wasn't accusing the showman because I think he understood that most of these people were just under contract. Right. And he wasn't accusing the actual human curiosities, the freaks themselves. He was rightly placing the blame for all this on the Observers, the gawkers. Right. Like, if there wasn't a market for it, they wouldn't be doing it. Yeah. Like you're the one who is having the moral failing, who's paying to go see this person who may or may not be exploited. You don't know, and it's really on you. Audience yeah. It's a lot of foresight for back then. I thought so, too. So the point was, it's not like everybody was just going along with this. People have had a problem with it basically the whole time freak shows were around. Right. All right, well, let's take a break, and we'll talk a little bit more about the evolution of the sideshow right after this. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You weren't about to let any cyber attacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. 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For JDPower 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS you know you're a pet mom when you growl back during playtime and you insist on feeding them the highest quality food you can find. Enter Halo Holistic, made with only whole meat, no meat meals, and probiotics. For digestive health, our first ingredient is always responsibly sourced protein raised with no antibiotics. And bonus, our fruits and veggies contain no GMOs. It's a lifestyle and a pet bomb thing. Find Halo Holistic@chewyamazonandhalopets.com. We're back. I brought my pencil. What's that? Oh, give me something to write on, man, I didn't get that at first. I'm impressed that you did get it. Yeah. Nice. That was from Van Halen popular song Hot For Teacher. Yeah. From 1984. And we are now the side shows became a legitimate thing, a big way to make money. There were different kinds. There was one called a ten in one show, which I believe the Sideshow by the Seashore is today. I know you did it through my missing tooth. And that is when you have ten people on display on a platform at once, and people just walk by and look at them. It's not like a performance. There's a bearded lady, there's the dog faced boy, there's the tattooed man. Right. And they're all of a standing there. That's a ten and one. Get your look. You Yoko. They had things, and this was all to drum up more money. They would advertise something as adults only or a man only, even performance. Right. Well, the man only performance frequently had a stripper. Well, sure. Or stuff that they thought that a woman shouldn't see or children shouldn't see. I don't know if it was as much of that as if it was to just trump up like, oh, my God, it's so bad that a woman can't lay her eyes upon it. I see. I think it was all part of the show. That's my feeling, at least. One of the things that they displayed was something called a pickled punk, which is awful. Especially when you find out what it is. Yes. It's basically an abnormal fetus in a formaldehyde in a jar. And you could go by and look at pickled punks and gawk at them for money. It's awful. Yeah. This is what people did, like on Saturday night in Kansas. Usually the side shows or the freak shows. At first, you would be some enterprising entrepreneur in some small town, and you would notice that a little youngster, had a third leg, and your thought was, I can really make some money with this kid. Sure. You go to their parents and you'd say, I will give you 20% of all of the earnings of your child if you let me take him on the road. And he will stay in the finest hotels and wear the best clothes as the human tripod. Exactly. And he will become famous and the world will love him. Just let me handle it. I'm going to be his manager from now on. And the parents would very frequently, especially if they were poor, would say, that's great. Yeah, do that. Give me some money upfront, though, by the way. Yeah. Especially because a lot of times some of these people were a burden on their family sure. Because of their health condition. So they were happy to be rid of them. It's all very sad. Okay. So that's how it definitely started out. And then it went on like that for a very long time as well. But once Barnum and Norman and some of the other guys, the big guys came around, they would just basically keep an eye out for that kind of thing. Or they would be approached by these guys who would essentially be middlemen. Kind of like somebody who discovered a boy band selling their contract to a bigger record company. But this was with human curiosities, people with the third leg or hypertrichosis or what have you. And then Barnum would take them and would just take whatever exaggerated origin story that they came with and just throw it out and come up with 110 times more. After George Washington's nursemaid Joyce Hess died. It was not George Washington. Right. He started looking around for his next collaborator, if you could call him that. And he found out that he had a distant cousin, a fifth cousin named Charles Stratton, who had stopped growing when he was about two years old. Yeah, he never completely stopped. He grew very slowly. Yes. He made it to, like, just over 3ft, I think, by the time of his death. Yeah. He died at 45 of a stroke. And he was 3.35ft tall, but grew so slowly. I mean, he was General Tom Thumb. Very famously renamed General Tom Thumb by his half fifth, twice removed cousin PT. What does it stand for? Even Paul Thomas Anderson Barnes. So he said, you know what? This is great. You are a small person and you're cute as a Dickens, so let me dress you up in little adult suits, and you're my new sidekick. Yeah, he collaborated with the kids dad and said, let's make some money. And he taught him how to sing and dance. Pretend he was Napoleon. Yeah. He did impressions Cupid. He played Cupid sometimes. And then he told everybody that this little five year old kid was actually eleven. Which made it all the more astounding that he was that small. Which he didn't even need to do. No. And then, for about the next 15 or so years, turn Tom Thumb into what was essentially the first international celebrity. Was he the first international celebrity? Pretty much. Wow. Yeah. Tom Thumb was a sensation. Yeah, queen Victoria was a huge fan. Met with him twice, at least twice. She apparently was really big into sideshows, but Tom Thumb was her favorite. And they made so much money off of their first European tour that Barnum bought his museum with the proceeds. Is there anything grosser than the Queen of England laughing at a small person imitating Napoleon for money? She may have even known Napoleon at the time. Oh, I'm sure that probably made it all the funnier to her. Yeah. Unbelievable. But he was a rich dude. He was paid in today's dollars. Who? Tom Thumb. Oh, yeah. Over $4,000 a week. And retired and lived the high life in New York City. And he didn't feel like he was exploited? No, he actually got married. I saw that he had children, but I only saw that one place I didn't see it anywhere else, but he was married and actually, right after the marriage, was brought to the White House to hang out with Abraham Lincoln and Mrs. Lincoln. Yeah, he had 20,000 people at his funeral. Again, he was a very big deal. And from what I understand, at the end of the day, he shed his persona. He was just Charles Stratton, uber wealthy little person. And when he was doing his show, he was Tom Thumb, who would dress up as Napoleon or whatever and take your money. But he and PT. Barnum together really made a ton of cash. Tom Thumb was a little better at managing his cash than Barnum was, because Barnum fell in hard times. A lot of people don't realize this, but he made some actually really bad investments over time, too. Yeah. He invested a lot of his money initially back into his business, which was smart. Right. But a lot of times he would be like, this is going to be a hit, and it wouldn't be a hit. He didn't have the Midas touch, necessarily, and he fell on hard times more than once. One of the times Tom Thumb or Charles Stratton bailed them out. Oh, really? I get the feeling Barnum didn't know when to leave well enough alone. Like, he had a big thriving business, and he just kept wanting to push it further and further. Sure. Hugh jackman, I'm telling you. So now we will talk about a couple of people who are afflicted with something. Well, they were microsophalic, which means that they have a cone shaped head. It's smaller than normal shaped head as well. Yes. If you're a Howard Stern fan, then Beetlejuice, he has this condition, and they used to call them pinheads back in the day. Yes. Awful term. Right. And there were a couple of notable I'm not even going to keep saying that, but a couple of notable people that performed in these freak shows. One was Zip. William Henry Johnson. Renamed Zip Zip. He's from New Jersey, born to newly freed slaves. And when Barnum found him, he says, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make up the story that you were found during a gorilla expedition near the Gambia River. I'm going to shave your head except for a little ponytail tuft on top. I'm going to dress you in a suit of fur, and you get up on that stage and grunt like an animal. Yeah. He was paid a dollar a day at first to not talk to grunt and I guess to play the violin really badly. Yeah. I didn't get was he paid a dollar a day to start. Okay. I thought that might have been part of the story now that he was, in fact, paid $100 a day later. Okay. He became a very popular freak, I guess. Yeah. The thing is, William Henry Johnson was probably not microcephalic at all. He microcephalic. Microcephalic is totally. Different microcephalic. They think now that he had just, like, a slightly abnormally shaped head that was exaggerated by the haircut that they gave him, and that he actually had no diminished mental faculties at all. And he was just pretending the whole time. And not only fooling crowds, but he was also fooling promoters. Yeah. Because that's one of the hallmarks of that condition, is, I believe that usually it's accompanied by stunted cognitive development. Yeah. Usually very severe. Yeah, but not in his case. He was super smart, and when he died, said, we fooled them all with his wife. No, he was sister. In his deathbed, they were also married. Right. Not true. So he made a lot of money, too. He did. He apparently retired with millions. A millionaire. So he's not the only again, Pinhead is what this specific type of freak was called. Man, I can't believe I just said that. This feels so wrong. I know, but there's a very sideshow performer. Okay. And Chuck, another very famous sideshow performer who was also, I guess, technically under the umbrella of Pinhead, who actually was microcephalic, was Schlitzee. Yes. Schlitzi is one of my favorite people of all time. Yes, Schlitsey. They don't know for sure his real name, but they believe it's. Simon Metz, born in 19 and one in the Bronx, and by all accounts, from everyone who ever met Schlitzee, everyone loved Schlitsey, and he was a ray of sunshine and a nice, sweet, caring, kindhearted man. Yes. Love life, anything that you would take for granted. Let's see, probably enjoy the heck out of and he was very frequently billed as a woman. I think he was built as a an Aztec warrior at first, and then maybe even an Aztec woman. But he wore dresses all the time because he was incontinent, and this just made it the whole thing easier. So he was billed as a woman for a very long time, and including in the movie Freaks, the Todd Browning movie from 1932. Schlitze was in that. And Schlitze actually has this big scene that he has a whole speaking dialogue section, but to this day, no one has any clue what he says. Should we talk about Freaks now or take a break and then talk about it? Let's take a break. All right. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change an industry. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. It's 2022. When things look different, like doctors visits, for example, sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for non emergency situations, like a sinus infection or allergy and that's why teladoc gives you the chance to connect with board certified physicians right from your home via phone or video. That's right. Doctors are standing by 24/7, so you can schedule a visit according to your schedule. You can see for yourself why teledoc is ranked number one by JD. Power and telehealth satisfaction with directtoconsumer providers. Teleadoc is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teletoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teladoc.com stuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's teladoccom stuff for JD. Power 2021 award information, visit jdpower.com awards. You know you're a pet mom when your camera roll is all picks of your pet. At halo, we get it because we are pet moms, too. And just like you, we know their nutrition is one of the most important decisions you'll make. Halo is natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science and thoughtfully sourced. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Find Halo at specialty pet stores and online learning stuff with your shoes. All right, so the movie Freaks I've seen it. Have you? I saw it for the first time this morning. No way. Wow. That's a lot of college when most people see it. So good. Yeah, it's a pre code film. There was a time between 1929, when they started making movies, to 1934 when the motion picture production code kicked in. The haze code. Yeah. And properly called the hays code. For five years there, you could do whatever you wanted, I guess. Yeah. And that's when this director named Todd Browning made a movie called freaks about sideshow performers. And this guy, the director, actually ran away and joined the carnival when he was 16 and worked as a carnival barker and even participated in stunts. And he's a circus guy. Right. And he had a lot of sideshow performers as friends. And you can tell in the movie that whose side he's on. They're the heroes of the story. The protagonist antagonists are normals or whatever. Right. And it's a really morally fraught movie these days, but if you just step back and think of it as like, this guy having an affinity for sideshow performers and giving them a shot at stardom, being on the big screen for what they are, for who they are, for what they can do, then it's really kind of a heart growing tale. Heart growing? Yeah, in a very weird way. Interesting. It's wrenching to watch. When's the last time you saw it? College. Yeah, it's been a long time. You should see it again. All right, I'll check it out. Like, it's tough to watch. It's gut wrenching. There are a lot of well, let's just talk about some of the performers in the movie. One of them who stands out is John Eckhart, Jr. Who was a twin. And he was born with a condition. Everyone said that he was cut off at the waist. Not exactly true. We actually had unusable, underdeveloped legs that you never saw. But it appeared as though he didn't have anything from the torso down. Right. And as from a young kid, I believe he was even walking on his hands before his twin brother was even standing. Oh, really? So he was very advanced in a lot of ways. He's a very smart guy. He's a painter. Yeah. Very accomplished magician. And he had a great personality, too. You could tell. Yeah. And apparently he was good buddies with Browning. And Browning always wanted him around and by his side and was like, you need to come sit with me by the camera. And I don't know if you could consider him a co director, but he always wanted him nearby. Pretty neat. Yeah. Daisy and Violet Hilton. Yeah. Conjoined twins. Right? Yeah. Which they called Siamese twins back in the day, thanks to Changing bunker. Right. Yeah. They were actually some of the first super famous they were from a Siamese fishing village, and that's where the term came from. Yeah. Siam was what we now call Thailand. That's right. And Changing Ing were born in 1811 and they actually performed on their own for many years. Made a ton of money that got married, had kids, moved to North Carolina, of all places. And that well, actually interestingly. Daisy and Violet ended up in North Carolina, too. Yeah. But under much worse conditions. Yeah. But to finish with Changing, they eventually lost their money. They were millionaires, lost their dough and then worked for Barnum later on in life. But I got the impression that they did it kind of like at their leisure, almost, and ended up reimbursing another fortune. Interesting. From working with Barnum. And they fathered 21 children between them. Married a pair of sisters, man, each had a house, and they would spend three days at one house, three days at the next house. And yeah, they had 21 kids. Pretty amazing. Yeah. So Daisy and Violet Hilton, they were known as Siamese twins back then. Of course, we don't use that term anymore, but, I mean, I remember that term when I was a kid. Sure. So it's definitely held on for way too long. Remember Ronnie and dining Gallion? Yeah. Are they still with us? Let's find out. You're checking that? I'll continue. I believe that Browning spotted Daisy and Violet and said, you guys are great. You're pretty, you can sing. You'll be a big part of my movie. And they've been performers all along. By 18, they were on tour with Bob Hope as part of his dance troupe and made quite a bit of money. But sadly, their story ends in North Carolina because they made an appearance in 1961 at a midnight showing of Freaks at a drive in, and their manager ditched them. And this part, I don't get they had no way to leave North Carolina, so they just stayed there. Yeah. They had to get a job. That just seems odd to me. If you don't have any money and knowing to call to ask for money, you go get a job at a grocery store and I hope that you can eventually die there. Yeah. It seems like they would have gotten enough money to leave and go back to wherever they lived while they died in Charlotte, North Carolina, of the Hong Kong flu. What is that? It was a flu epidemic. Jeez. It originated in Hong Kong, but it's a different world back then. Siamese twins died a Hong Kong flu. None of that seems politically correct. No, it doesn't. Who else was in freaks? Let's see. There were a pair of little people named Harry and Daisy Earls. And they played Hans and Frieda. Right? Yeah. And Hans is like the ring master of the sideshow. And Frieda, in real life, Daisy was known as the midget May west. And in the movie, they're engaged, but actually in real life, they were a brother and sister. Yeah. And they were in the wizard of Oz even as munchkins, and were in a bunch of movies with Laurel and Hardy as well. So lifelong performers. Yeah. So this whole movie and again, we didn't finish with Schlitzie. Schlitze was in it, too, and had this whole big speaking part and was just adorable in the movie. Schlitz's personality just shines right through the movie. Very likable. Yeah. And Schlitze was actually adopted. No one had any idea who Schlitze biological family was. Right. They were not around. So the people he performed with and worked for actually took care of him. And when his adopted father died, his father's daughter, biological daughter said, hey, let's see. I'm going to commit you to an asylum in Los Angeles. And that's where Schlitze was until one day, just by total chance, chuck, another circus performer, I think a sword swallower, right? Yeah. Named Bill. Unks bill, you're slitzy. Yeah. What are you doing here? You look so sad. And Schlitzy was like, I remember you. Let's go. So Bill Honk intervened and got Schlitzee out of the institution. And he got to live out his days hanging out in the park, being recognized by passers by. Yeah. He lived near MacArthur Park in downtown La. And lived all the way up until 1971 at age 71. Yeah. You got to see Schlitze. You should see Freaks. But even if you don't see freaks, look up Schlitzee's part. Agreed. It will probably make you want to see Freaks. So, Chuck, the freak show is well, some people say that it's still around and that is just on TV in the form of reality shows. Like, basically that same sentiment and everything still is found all over television. Yeah. Exploiting people, like exploiting obesity and exploiting dwarfism. It's on television now, but the actual side show itself? Well, it went away in a lot of ways, at least as far as, like, a traveling sideshow went, and it went away with the rise of the rights for the disabled. That movement that came along starting in about the late 19th century, early 20th century, and then really gaining steam by about the time freaks came around the movie. Yeah, there were a few things that kind of killed it, but one was definitely, like you said, science invented it and killed it. Here's something that is sort of reprehensible that I found out. A lot of these side shows would try and keep doctors away from the people because they thought, I don't want a doctor coming in here and saying that the dog faced boy actually has hypertrichosis and it's a condition where you have hair all over your face. Yes, I told everybody he was a caveman. Yeah, exactly. Did you know, actually, there was a woman named Julia pastrana, and she had hypertrichosis, too, and she ended up marrying her manager. They were married, they had a baby together, and she died during childbirth, and the baby was born, still born. And her husband manager, who ostensibly loved her, said, show must go on. So he mummified his wife and they're still born baby, and then took them around to display them in the sideshow, as ever. Unbelievable. So again, doctors would come along and start explaining these things, and that helped kill the sideshow. The rise of television and at home entertainment meant people weren't going out to places like sideshows anymore. They could stay in their house and watch television. And apparently you could still find sideshows, like the American horror story. Was it freak show? I think so. Last season or whatever. Yeah. I don't watch that, but yeah, it was set in, I think, the think at that time, you could still see traveling sideshows here or there, but they were pretty broken down. Oh, yeah. By that point, they were pretty much gone. But by the 60s, there was a girl named Carol Browning, and all I could find was that she had deformed arms and legs. I don't know what that means, but that was the description that was given to her. But she went to a sideshow, and when she visited the carnival in north Carolina, I think she lived in Charlotte. No, Raleigh. And Carol, what is it with north Carolina? That's where things begin and end with sideshows. Well, Carol Grant, I think, was her name. Carol wrote a letter to the agricultural commission. The agricultural commission is in charge of sideshows at the time, at least in north Carolina, and said, this is wrong, this is beyond wrong. I'm offended by this and this should not be allowed to happen. And she actually sparked a national conversation about whether sideshow should be allowed to be around, even if performers wanted to be a part of them. And that was the final death knell that conversation, but a lot of people came out and said, hey, you know what? These people, you guys call them freaks, but you also empty your pockets to them. And they're wealthy, they enjoy the acclaim, they enjoy the money, and it's actually you who has the problem. And it didn't have much of an effect that shows you went away. And a lot of the sideshow performers ended up going from being pretty wealthy or well paid or having a steady income to being broke and ending up like, being abandoned by their managers, like Daily and Violet. Yes. It's a tricky ground. It is. It's pretty much sad all the way through, except for some success stories. Sure. And that makes the whole thing so morally ambiguous, if you think about it. It's just so easy to look from here and be like, you named your movie freaks. Right. Or you charge people to look at the Elephant Man. But what about those people who said, I'm cool with this, I'm signing on for this. Yeah. This has made a lot of people very wealthy. I'm happy. I've had all sorts of opportunities that weren't open to me before, and I love what I do. What do you do about that? Like, you can't condemn it. It's not an easy black and white thing to deal with. Yeah. It's called the moral ambiguity. You said there have always been them, those them moral ambiguity. There always will be. You got anything else? No. If you want to know more about sideshow freaks, that kind of thing, you can type those words into the search bar@houseofworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Hey, before listener mail, what about Ronnie and Donnie? Oh, yeah. Ronnie and Donnie are alive. Awesome. They are 64 years old as of this past October, I think 21st. And they are the world's longest living conjoined twins. Wow. They're adorable, too. They're Ohio, right? I believe so, yeah. Very nice. What documentary did we see on them or something? I can't remember, but we've talked about them a lot over the years. Yeah. So that's great news. Yeah, but they're still at it. All right, so listener mail. I'm going to call this one quick feedback on the Bill Gates podcast. Oh, that is a quick turnaround. Hi, guys. My name is Brendan Cologne, pronounced like cologne. And I'm a PhD student at Hobbit Medical School in Pamela Silver's lab working on artificial photosynthesis. Shout out, Pamela Silver. How about that? I'm a long time fan of the show and wanted to say what you guys did. You did a great job covering renewable energy with Bill Gates. During the episode, there was a question about the current limitations of artificial photosynthetic systems. At present, the biggest issues are scalability, the cost energy in producing the building materials, and the efficient extraction of produced fuels. These are standard engineering hurdles. But like Mr. Gates said, we can call them bill, by the way. I don't think you can, Brandon. We can, but we can. These are standard engineering hurdles, but like Mr. Gates said, the final product needs to be viable. Specifically, such a product would need to harvest and store more energy in the short term than what was required to build it. Makes sense. And do so on the cheap. Fortunately, biotechnology and photovoltaic technology is advancing at a breakneck pace, so the future of this technology looks bright. As new biochemistries are discovered, more products will be available for production. And one vision of this technology is a local and individualized production of chemicals on demand. Hope this helps. Feel free to reach out. Cheers, Brendan. Thanks, Brendan. Yeah. Brendan cologne. Pronounced cologne. That's right. If you are an expert in something that we talk about, we love hearing feedback from people like you. You can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, you know you're the best pet mom. When you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo listings made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics. For digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com." | |
Vocal Fry and Other Speech Trends | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/vocal-fry-and-other-speech-trends | You've heard lots of complaints about vocal fry, mostly from older white men. But it's not exclusive to the Kardashians. Learn all about vocal fry, upspeak and other quirky speech trends in today's episode. | You've heard lots of complaints about vocal fry, mostly from older white men. But it's not exclusive to the Kardashians. Learn all about vocal fry, upspeak and other quirky speech trends in today's episode. | Thu, 22 Oct 2015 13:33:36 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=13, tm_min=33, tm_sec=36, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=295, tm_isdst=0) | 34599658 | audio/mpeg | "Picture this, friends. You could be packing a carry on for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your city Advantage Platinum Select Card. So you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you Advantage Miles. Actually, you earned Advantage Miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the city Advantage Platinum Select Card. Learn more at citi comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. The Neogen Device, developed by Rst Synthesis, is a well established, advanced quantum based medical device using electric cell signaling technology. Treatment is noninvasive, safe, effective, and used in managing pain associated with neuropathy and other painful conditions. It helps improve circulation, offers better rehabilitation through pain relief, and activates the recovery processes, giving better patient outcomes. Visit Neogenreliefspain.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen system. Come chat with us. That's Neogenreliefspain.com. Your patience will thank you. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and we have a very special treat for everyone out there for your ears. Casey, our video producer extraordinaire, is standing in as our podcast producer, so he basically is in charge of us in every way, shape and form right now. That's right. I realized, Chuck, that you're just doing vocal fry. Yeah, I have no ear for it. Oh, really? Yeah. Before Casey, we asked him to choose which one to do first and he went vocal fry and I didn't even notice. Yeah, you got the fry filter. Do you think that means that I do it? Because I was trying to think I know that I upspeak sometimes or up talk, but it's fairly infrequent, I think. Yeah, but I don't know if I like vocal fry or not. I have no idea whatsoever. Yeah, I don't know. Did I just do it just now? I did, didn't I? Don't know. We'll have to listen to the playback, I guess I just did it. Listen to the playback. That sounds like normal speaking to me. I know, man, because, well, we'll get into this, but a lot of people contend that there's a lot of sexism going on with it because I just said it and people probably won't write in and say anything about it, but for a woman, people would probably write in and say, the way you talk is so annoying. You know what? I think a lot of people are trying to dance around this or prove that it's sexist. It's like no on its face. This is a sexist argument that's going on right now. Yeah, just look around. We had Tracy and Holly on recently and they talked about emails that they get about their voices being shrill. And I remember other podcasters here we had in the past, other women who had podcasts would get just lots of email detailing the quality of their voice. Right. And we don't really get those much occasionally, I guess. No, you want to have some fun? Go on the itunes, find a podcast that is hosted by women and read the reviews. Then go read the reviews for a podcast that's hosted by men. It's pretty black and white. Yes, it is. And when somebody like Bob Garfield from NPR calls vocal fright repulsive, that's a really good point for everyone else to stand back and be like, what's this guy's real problem? Yeah, because repulsive is not a correct word to use to describe vocal fry. No, it's wrong. It's wrong. It's like he's pointing at something else, but he thinks he's pointing at the vocal fry. Who knows what's going on. But yes, on his face. It's a misogynistic argument that's being carried out. Just put it out there right now. I don't plan on dancing around it at all. We're not dancing. No. It is all very ironic considering that vocal fry can be traced back to British men in the 1960s. Yeah. I mean, think about, like, Sean Connery. Okay. I'm thinking about him. Okay. That was it had nothing to do with folklore. I just wanted to see if I can get you to think about Sean Conner. Well, apparently they traced it back to 1964 when British men, the mid 60s, used it to denote superior social standing. Right. And I think I'm trying to imagine my head and I think it's like, you shall not question me. That's good. Like that kind of thing. Yeah, like masculinity and into a statement by lowering your voice to fry. That sounded like William Randolph Hearst, by the way. A lot like that. But it makes sense. Also, basically, when you hear vocal fry and we'll tell you exactly what it is in a second, but you know what it is. Sure. When you hear vocal fry, it denotes that you can't be bothered to be enthusiastic about it. Okay. Or in the case of British, another way to put it is very dry washing British. Yeah, kind of. And they say linguists, vocal fry in its current use among younger girls or millennials in general, is a way to indicate, like, I'm over it or I am not to be bothered with this any longer. Or in some cases, it makes them seem authoritative. We'll get more into that a little bit. So in other words, it doesn't mean they're dumb and don't know how to talk correctly. They're actually trying to accomplish something by speaking in a certain way like every other human on Earth. Exactly. I just did it again. This is really going to make me look at myself, I think. I think. Well, actually, let's talk about upspeak. This is vocal fry. It's upspeak. It's using the word like all these vocal mannerisms and tics, maybe, that people have these days. Right. Because language changes and evolves. We don't talk like we did 60 years ago. No. Like, for example, the mid Atlantic accent is gone. What was that? That was the radio announcer. Oh, yeah, that was kind of no, not really. I think that was the antithesis of it. It was more like, all right, george Plympton. Right. Fraser Crane. Yeah. Mr. Burns, the difference is split between British and Eastern American. I thought you were just naming old white dudes. Kind of, but, I mean, it was the language of the aristocracy in the first half of the 20th century. Right? Yeah. It is gone now. And they think that it was basically run out by guys like Jimmy Cagney robinson yeah. And Marlon Brando, and that the way that they talked was not like that. And they made their style of talking, which is how we talk now. We're like super brando now. Is a result of mid Atlantic going away, being replaced by this? Well, it's not really my theory. I'm sure there are a lot of people that agree, I think, that language does evolve and that the people that the Garfields of the world, the Bob Garfields, not the cat Garfield. Right. Don't drag Garfield. The ones who rail against it so much, I think, are like see, they like a lot, too. But people call me out on it. We also say I get called out for saying I get it. It's fine. Go ahead, man. So I think those people are just they're feeling like they're not relevant any longer and no one wants to be a dinosaur. Yes. And so I don't understand the language these young women are speaking, which is BS, because a lot of younger people, men and women, speak that way. It's just called the way the younger generation speaks. And it's not like, you old man. Right. So just go off to pasture Tuesday. Which is not the case. I don't think anybody's trying to make the older, middle aged white man feel irrelevant. We're on our way there anyway. Sure. And I feel irrelevant, but it has nothing to do with upspeak or vocal fry. No. It's the music these kids are listening to these days. But I think you have nailed it on the head, though. It is a form of contempt for being replaced by something new. Absolutely. Something that's different. And as we'll see, especially when it comes to linguistics, younger girls tend to be at the bleeding edge of linguistic changes, perhaps. And this is all we want to just make sure you guys understand that. We understand this total pop psychology on our part. Sure. But it's also intuitive. It makes a lot of sense. But the idea that older, middle aged white men who are threatened by vocal fry or find it repulsive or repugnant or whatever, they are projecting their sense of being replaced or being irrelevant and being put out to pasture. I agree wholeheartedly. I think that's exactly what they're doing. It's not enough to control the free world since the beginning of time. Right. Which the fact that they do still says that's the reason why we're even having this conversation. That's the reason why some women find the need to go to speech therapists to get rid of their vocal fry, which is something that some even podcasters have done. All right, so let's talk up talk real quick. Uptalk or Valley Girl speak as when you end a sentence as if you're asking a question like that. And that has been a thing for a long time. First of all, too, we should point out that most of the studies we're going to put in here are terrible social psychology studies. Yes. Funk almost all of them. Well, because they never do it. Right. You could do some decent studies on this, I think. Right. But for instance, this one at California San Diego, they did a close acoustical analysis of 23 Southern Californians perfect three sample size. Yeah. Two didn't show up from very diverse backgrounds, apparently. I don't know how diverse you can get among 23 people, but they said you have two tasks give directions with a map and then describe a sitcom clip. And they found that women did use up talk twice as often as men. But in making declarative statements like, my appointment is at 09:00, men and women use rises the same. So, like, basically men did the same thing with that kind of statement. And then the other one that makes sense to me is when giving directions, a lot of people use up talk because you're sort of asking a question like, go up to the McDonald's, a memorial drive, it's basically saying, do you understand what I'm saying? Right. Are you following me? Yeah. It's funny, I wondered this chuck about Uptalk in particular, is it like a way of kind of inadvertently mocking your listener? Like, men trail off very frequently when women start talking. So if women evolved to basically keep men engaged at the end of each sentence, like, yeah, are you still with me? Do I have to keep leaving you along by the hand in this conversation? It would not surprise me. I wonder if that's where it originally came from. placeholding or floor holding is another reason they found that women use up talk because they want to give the listener the idea that they're not done talking yet. Don't interrupt me. And it might make sense. Maybe women are interrupted more than men. Well, I would say that's a distinct possibility, yeah. There's been a bit of a linguistic trace to this whole thing. The upspeak in particular, vocal fry, I couldn't find where they think the origin of it was, but with Upspeak, I believe she was a linguist named Cynthia Mcelamore back in 1991 at University of Texas in Austin. She studied a sorority house on campus there and was the first person to detect upspeak, which became known as or, which was already, I guess, known as Valley Girl. Right. But she didn't coin the term Upspeak, but she was the first, I think, to really study it. And then a guy named James Gorman coined the term upspeak in, like, two years later. But Macklemore traced in this sorority house the origin of the Upspeak to the very popular girls from L. A. Okay. Although you're going to say to one sorority sister, no. I'm wondering, though, if there is like a patient zero in the United States. Exactly. Back in La. There's the Valley Girl talk that is clearly related to Upspeak. Right? Yeah. And that movie was huge. Right. So back in the 60s, they've traced it back to Australia or New Zealand. So it is possible, this is my own pet theory here, that some very popular girl moved from Australia or New Zealand to Los Angeles. Sure. Wowed. Her friends, she's so excited. We started emulating the way she talked, which is Upspeak, and it spread from there, you know. Now, to think of the Australian accent, it is sort of upspeaky, isn't it? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Because there's basically like you're getting hit in the ribs with their elbow just from the way they're talking. Yeah. You're following along. Yeah. It's very interesting. So let's take a break, man. Take a break, man. Yes. 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. 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Which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yeah. LifeLock monitors your info and alert 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 thieves 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. This stuff fascinates me, by the way. I could be a linguist sticker. I could study linguistics and be a linguistics researcher and specialist. Linguist. Yeah. They kept it simple. I like linguisticr. Linguisticr, yeah, sure. If you were a 13 year old girl, that would be a widespread word 20 years from now. Right. And people like Bob Garfield would say, Remember when we called it? All right, so specifically, let's just talk about what vocal fry actually is in the throat. Glottalization is probably the more scientific term. And what it is. It's a vibration when your voice falls and your vocal cords flutter very slowly because they can't make a tone any longer at that register. Right. It's called chaotic flapping. Right? Chaotic glottal flapping. I like it. Yeah. And it sounds like it would hurt, but it actually doesn't. Except although I think most ear, nose and throat guys will tell you that if you did this in a sustained manner, yelling for a while yeah. You could damage your vocal. Can you yell a Vocal Friday? I guess you almost tried. I did. I was like, I'm not doing that. Yeah. Because I associate it with falling off of a sentence and not being which is where it's usually placed these days. Right. But the author of this article on Hustle, forks, Voice and Curran, who's become the Grabster of late oh, yeah, yeah. The Modern Times Grabster. Oh, boy. Don't let me hear that. Well, no, grabs are still legend. Yeah. I'm just saying this person has stepped in to fill in the void a little bit. Well, let me say too quickly that I'm doing nothing but listening to my voice right now, and I can't imagine what it's like to constantly be worried about that, because usually we come in here and start say, but I don't think twice about how I sound. They sound how I sound? Right. But to put yourself under the microscope like that, which is I think a lot of women in broadcasting probably suffer from that. I just said, like, five times. Yeah, but I don't care. Who cares? You're a man. You're a white male age 18 to 49. Yeah. Still under 49. Yeah. Is that the cut off point? Then I become Bob Garfield. Oh, man, Garfield is going to hate us for this. So Garfield is not the only one. There are plenty of women out there calling out younger women, saying it's a disempowering act to speak like this. Naomi Wolf is one of them. She wrote an article that I read, and she said it projects uncertainty and weakness and low intelligence. I doubt if she thinks it's the same when men do it, which is Darren, it's as black and white as you can be. What's the difference? Well, yeah, I think that's ultimately the thing that kind of is I think that argument misses the point and it pops up a lot. People who defend girls and women's right. To vocal fry or upspeak or say like or just as another one, I'm very guilty of that. It's like, hedging your actions. I was just saying. Right. Not like I'm saying this is what I'm saying. I was just saying I'm going to tone it down a little bit. Yeah. Well, it's the same thing with women feeling like they need to apologize all the time. Sure. Using sorry a lot. Yeah. With vocal fry in particular, though, it doesn't really denote anything like what the people who are saying it does. It doesn't necessarily denote that you don't have any confidence in what you're saying. Right. I could see something like hedging things with just a lot or saying sorry a lot. Maybe so. But the idea that women have to be given advice on how to speak to keep up in this male dominated world again, I feel like it misses the point. I think that the better argument is to basically say, hey, what's the name of the mirror you're looking into there, buddy? What's your problem? Right. Fairly honestly, what is your problem? Not why. Yes, let's get on the bandwagon and rail against girls and women who do this and totally ignore men that do. But what's the real problem? And I think ultimately the real problem is these men have, whether they realize it or not, identified girls as significant agents of change that are bringing along a different world than these men grew up and were accustomed to. Sure. They're threatened. Right. And they're right in a lot of ways. There's actually studies that point to women and especially young girls as the agents have changed when it comes to grammar, vocabulary and speech patterns in the Western world for hundreds of years now. Yeah. Did you read a little bit about that study? Which one? So there was one in, I believe, 2009, and get this, these two Finnish researchers poured over 6000 letters, 6000 letters, and they were from 1417 to 1681. And they found handwritten letters. Yeah. Okay. They found from these letters in the Western world that women tended to adopt new words faster, discard old words faster, and just change their grammar and speech patterns or writing patterns much quicker than men did. Yeah. And then other studies have shown that men tend to pick up on this about ten to 20 years later. No shock. So I think what's going on when you're saying, well, men do it too, it's like, yeah, men didn't do it at first, men are starting to do it now. So if you take all this as fact and correct scientifically, then what we're seeing now is the widespread adoption of a change in speech pattern that began 20 years ago with younger women right in the Valley and has spread to the rest of culture and is being adopted. And this change to the rules of grammar, their rules to how you talk and address people, that's what's being railed against the change. But really, ultimately, again, speaking from a pop psychology standpoint, the world is changing and these guys feel threatened by it because they don't know what's going to come after this. Nothing. That's the answer. People getting all worked up about the way people talk is just folly to me. It's it's language, it changes. Nothing bad is going to happen. They're going to wake up tomorrow and the world is going to be exactly the same. Right. They're just not going to like it the way some people talk. I think also it's deeper than that. They do have something to fear. They do have, like, their nest egg to be lost in the stock market when it drops automatically, the value girls are going to take their money yeah, exactly. Or not being able to be employable but still needing a job at age 70. I think there is a lot to fear, and I think it's being projected onto girls who vocal fry. Yeah, agreed. Okay, I'm all over the place. Let's take a break. I need to regain my composure. Okay. All right. All right, Chucker. So you're kind of talking about why people vocal fry. Why fry? Yeah. Right. And there's some pretty good answers to it that have been studied in addition to Upspeak, where it's a placeholder where you saying, don't interrupt me, there's more to come, or are you following this? Because I'm really trying to keep you engaged here. When you hear someone, when you hear an interrogative at the end of a statement, you're immediately like, oh, I'm expected to respond. Right. So I better be paying attention. So this is almost like tricking people into paying attention. That's another way to do it. Yes. It sounds like a pretty good move to me. Right. On the other side, again, there's the idea that it says that women are unsure of their opinion, or anybody who uses Upspeak unsure of their opinion. By keeping it a question, it suggests that you can easily back off of it. Yeah. Like you're not committing to your statement that much. Exactly. Yeah, sure. And I actually saw something, it was a 2001 article in The Guardian about upspeak in particular, and they were saying that some people believe that upspeak became prevalent as a result of PC, like the political correctness movement to where it gives you the chance to be like but I don't really agree with that. Depending on the micro expressions of the have I just defended you? Exactly. Yeah. And that would kind of hold water in a sense, because we've definitely entered a second phase of the PC movement. It's definitely been a surge in it about the same time as the surge and upspeaker with it becoming widespread. It's a possibility. Again, no one has any idea at this point. Right. But those are kind of the two sides for upspeak with Vocal Fry. The critics of it say that it suggests that you sound unenthusiastic and on the other side yeah, that's actually one of the tools that it is. Maybe they're unenthusiastic about what they're saying. But you also said that it's been found to be employed, especially by younger girls when they're trying to sound authoritative. Yeah, I mean, that's what some linguists have said. Right. Here's another terrible study for you. And this one got a lot of press. I remember when it came out that you will have a harder time getting a job if you use Vocal Fry and upset. And for this one, they had two different recordings. They played to 400 men and 400 women from a range of groups, asked them to rate the speakers and who you might hire. And no one wanted to hire the Vocal Fryers. And what they came out with later was, oh, by the way, we didn't just use regular people who happen to Vocal Fry. We got people to Vocal Fry on purpose, like to act it out and to do an accent, which is just throw the whole study out the window. Then we'll see. In their defense, I'm sure this was all in the study, but the people in the media who reported on it didn't bother to read the study. They read the abstract. And then that's where all the headlines and then the tour through the news cycle came from. Right. So the idea that these people who were trained as part of the study to speak in Vocal Fry were not native Vocal Fry speakers, the idea is that they came off sounding like robotic and stilted and that it really has nothing to do with Vocal Fry. It's like you wouldn't hire somebody who's doing a bad mock British accent like me. Doing what? I don't know. If they hired me to do a study on what British people thought of their accents and they were like, let's get Chuck to do it. So do it. No, of course not. That'd be terrible, mate. That would be kind of funny. Actually, a lot of our colleagues I mean, we're kind of getting on this late. A lot of our colleagues have already covered this. IRA Glass did a segment on Vocal Fry and he said that listeners always complained about young women reporting on our show. They used to complain about liking upspeak, but now it's Vocal Fry. And he said, I am a Vocal Fryer, self admitted, and no one ever writes me about that. Right. That's just how Iron Glass sounds. Yeah, exactly. And then our buddy Roman Mars, the great 99% invisible, his producer, Katie Mingle, at one point, they were getting so many emails about it. She got an auto reply, right? They set up an auto reply that would basically scan your email to look for keywords and determine that you were complaining about her voice. This is what you got? Yeah. It said you've written in to voice her dislike of one of our female reporters voices. You're not alone. We have a filter set up that automatically sends these types of emails into a folder labeled zero priority. We'll review this folder and consider the complaints within. Well, never. Amazingly, we don't even have a folder for complaints about the male voices on our show because we've never gotten one. Isn't that strange? We think so. Anyway, I hope you can continue to enjoy a free podcast somehow. Love that one. Yeah. And if you can't, there are plenty of shows that don't feature women's voices at all. Boom. I know that's one of the great all time auto applies. Yeah, looks pretty great, guys. So Roman and Katie. Good for you. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. But you talked earlier about some of our colleagues also have gone to training and linguists to reduce their vocal fry. Which one was it? Yeah, Jessica Gross, who does a Slate podcast, or did I'm not sure if she's still doing it called Double Xgab Fest. Right. She actually went to a voice coach after receiving complaints and people like Penny Ekert, who is a linguist, are saying, no, don't do that. Like, you're an agent of change, is what you are. Right. And the weird thing is that would place, if we are watching the evolution of Western speech, especially here in the United States right now, right? Yes. And men are starting to vocal fry more and more. Men are starting to use upspeak more and more, which suggests that these things are going to become increasingly widespread as the years go by. Then the women who are doing it now are in a really terrible position because they grew up talking like this and now they're being forced to change and emulate, say, the predominant white male version of talking while the men are adopting it more and more. And then eventually down the road, the women will be able to take it on again once enough men do. Isn't that nuts? It is nuts, but that's probably where things are going. But in the meantime, people like Jessica Gross have to go to speech therapists to learn to talk, right, as far as her listeners go. And she was really worried that her career was being affected by this. And yes, like you said, Penny Eckert, the linguist who's quoted beneath her in this NPR article, is saying, like, yeah, this is ridiculous. You can't tell people how to talk. Like, I can't imagine a better way to just offhandedly and casually trip somebody up and make them totally self conscious than saying, by the way, your voice annoys everybody. Do something about it. Yeah, I can't imagine. Forget that. Gross also points out that MP article is great. They did an interview with a few women linguists and podcasters, and she points out about it's not just with the voice, it's with clothes they wear. And she uses Silicon Valley as an example. Mark Zuckerberg wears a T shirt and a hoodie to work every day. And all of a sudden, women who work in Silicon Valley, if you dress up and try and look nice, it goes against you. Yes. You must be a dragon lady. Yeah. Like, what's wrong with you? Are you not smart? Why are you trying to distract me with your good looks and your nice skirt? Right. Where's something dumpy? So now, of course, the culture there is, you go to work in Silicon Valley with your stupid hoodie and T shirt on to fit in. So I also saw another example. There was a New York magazine article from I'm not entirely certain when, but it was called can we just, like, Get Over the Way Women Talk by Anne Friedman. That was a good one. It was from July. And she interviews, I think, a feminist professor yes. Who's basically saying, like, women are damned one way or another. If they talk like men, they come off as overly aggressive and assertive. Sure. If they talk like women, they come off as dumb and unable to stand behind what they're saying. To have any conviction about what they're saying. Yeah. It's like, which one do you want? Well, in that case, it's like, well, if you're the agent of change, I'd just go with that one. The one that's changing, the one that you feel comfortable talking. Don't play ball. Yes, agreed. I read a cool article from The Guardian, too, that showed that at Oxford University, young women get 510 percent fewer first class degrees in English, even though the exams are graded blindly. And professors there say it's because he observes female students and women saying, like, letting the men speak first and second and third before they even jump in. Right. So they're not even getting a chance to shine because they're just so used to deferring to the needs in the group. And I think that that's probably something that's not necessarily just gender based, but I think that's just a lack of confidence. It's displaying a lack of confidence, and I think it comes from just being treated that way your whole life. Yeah, agreed. Here's another one from Amy. Gidden is director of Corporate leadership at Barnards College athena center for Leadership Studies. That's a long one. And she said the deal, though, is it's not that these women aren't confident. There's a disconnect going on because she interviewed these ladies and they are self advocates, and they feel like they're confident in their abilities and their smarts and ability to get things done, but they can't speak well about those things, according to men in the room. So it's not a lack of confidence. They have the confidence. It's just I think her point was that men pay attention to what men say and how women say things. Right. Not necessarily what they're saying. Right. Which is just stupid. Yeah. And not fair. Plus, also, I think if you are around somebody that you don't like, you're probably going to focus more on their perceived flaws. And if it's something like vocal fry or something like Upspeak, you're going to zero in on that. Basically, yeah. So I wonder, like, how much of it is to misogyny two. Oh, man. In this one, this is a great quote. This stuff is just one more way of telling powerful women to shut up. That kind of nails it on the head. Like, I read that quote and that crystallized it for me. Like you said, it's disguised. Not so like heavily disguised sexism, I think. Yeah, it's repulsive. It is. See? You got anything else? I got nothing else except just to be yourself. Be an agent of change. Yeah. Don't listen to Bob Garfield. You know what? I hope this gets to him. Oh, man, it really might. Yeah. Play more with Bob Garfield. Albert's second this year. Who was the other? Oh, the Australian jerk. Yeah. If you want to learn more about vocal fry, you can step out on the street and prick up your ears. You can also go to houseworks.com and type those words in the search bar. And since I said perk, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this cult deprogramming. Guys who grew up in a cultish environment. It wasn't like Jim Jones crew. However, the group made a clear distinction between us and them and getting out was difficult. I was only able to get free a couple of years ago at the age of 24, and because of most of my current friends are still involved. I haven't ended the courage to tell them I'm still not out yet. I attended an independent fundamental Baptist church. Baptist churches in general aren't cults. In fact, to still attend the Baptist church, but the IFB churches are a thing unto themselves, they stand opposed to modern music, alcohol and all Bible translations except the King James version. Some take it further and add movie theaters, pants on, women, beards on, men, swimming and mixed company and anything else you can imagine to the list of the for Bolton. These ideas problematic because they are not why I consider my previous environment to be cultish. Rather, it was the attitude with which they viewed descent. Modern Bible versions are not simply inferior than King James. They're part of the conspiracy to introduce error into God's word and poison believers, faith, modern music, even contemporary worship. Music channels demons and feeds the flesh. It even kills plants. He didn't follow up on that. Asking why we should believe these things is welcome since it gives the leaders an opportunity to allow I'm sorry, offer canned answers that we can regurgitate to liberal contemporary crowd in quote so basically, you're not questioning the interpretation, you're questioning God himself. So he says, now, I am happily a member of a more contemporary Baptist church that, while still fairly conservative, its beliefs and practices is much more open minded. Keep up the awesome work that is from Anonymous, because ISP will hunt him down. Thanks, Anonymous. I appreciate that. Yes. He's like, oh, totally read it. He or she. That is. Yeah. Did you just give it away? Yeah. Take my name off of it? Yeah. He or she says that? Yes, they did. If you want to supplement an episode that we have recorded, you can get in touch with us by tweeting to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffychnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastohouseworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffiesteanow.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 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." | ||
How Sleepwalking Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-sleepwalking-works | Sleep behaviors are pretty fascinating. Some people snore, some grind their teeth -- and some take a little stroll, or perhaps a drive. In this episode, Josh and Chuck investigate how sleepwalking, or somnambulism, works. | Sleep behaviors are pretty fascinating. Some people snore, some grind their teeth -- and some take a little stroll, or perhaps a drive. In this episode, Josh and Chuck investigate how sleepwalking, or somnambulism, works. | Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:25:30 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=18, tm_min=25, tm_sec=30, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=236, tm_isdst=0) | 24938178 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles, www. Chuck Bryant that makes this stuff. You should know. The late night edition. It's late. How's it going, Chuck? Great. Awesome. Couldn't be better. How are you? Same, just the same. So, Chuck, I got a story for you. Let's hear it. Back in 1845, in a little town called Waymouth, Massachusetts. Although in Massachusetts, they probably pronounced it in some radically different way than it would be spelled WMAF Walmouth or Worcester or something weird like that. There is a woman named Maria And Bickford, and she was a prostitute. And she was discovered on October 27 of that year murdered and brutally murdered, actually. And it was quickly traced back to a guy by the name of Albert Terrell. Jack the Ripper. No, but it was Ripper esque. Her head was severed, or almost completely severed. Yeah, and it was with the knife. But the reason everybody knew it was Albert Derro was because that was her boyfriend, and he had left his wife for her. He was a wealthy guy in Massachusetts, and he left his wife to be with Maria Anne Bickford, and he wanted her to quit the job, I guess you could call it. I would say that, too. Well, she didn't. She liked having an income because she didn't have to depend on any man for whatever she wanted, and she refused. It was ironic, though, because she was depending on men. Yeah, that is very ironic. Actually. She ultimately died, was murdered, and it was Albert Terrell who admitted to doing it, but he was sleepwalking. He said it was a pretty thin case, but he was ultimately acquitted, even though he had set three fires in the brothel in an obvious attempt to cover up what he'd done while he was still supposedly sleepwalking. But the jury bought it. And one of the reasons they bought it was because it was a jury of wealthy white men who weren't about to put one of their own behind bars, as big of a crook as he was. But secondly, because in 1845, we didn't really understand sleepwalking. We didn't understand what people were capable of. We didn't understand how sleepwalking worked. And I know you sent me an article as recently as a month or so ago, a guy in Arizona was acquitted of sexual assault because he was sleepwalking. Right. Yeah, it was Illinois. But that was today, the news articles from today. Wow. Even better. Even more recent. Which makes my point even more thorough, which is we don't understand sleepwalking too terribly much more than we did in 1845, as far as explaining why it happens. Right, right. Absolutely. But there are some really interesting aspects of this sleep disorder, which is called a parasomnia. Right? Yes, that's one of many. But it's called somnambolism specifically sleepwalking is not to be confused with Botulism. No, not at all. And there's an official definition if you want to look in a mental health professional handbook called the CSM Four. Yes. You leave your bed while you're sleeping, and you find it others find it difficult to wake you when you're sleeping. Sleepwalking. You can't remember what happened afterward. You're confused when you wake up. You aren't suffering from dementia or anything else physical. It's a big one, and it impairs your social life or work life or your life. And that's for straight up sleepwalking. Yes. Sleepwalking can be a symptom of things like dementia or Parkinson's or something like that, but that's kind of significant, and you should think that it's found in the DSM Four, which is the psychological Bible. Right. So it's considered a disorder of arousal, I think is what it's called, right? Yes. So, Chuck, while you're sleeping, when does this occur? When does it take place? If you're an adult, or actually kids, too, I think it occurs in the first third of your sleep, which is the nonREM sleep, which is when your body is you're in your deepest state of sleep, but your body is kind of awake, so you're tossing and turning a lot, but your brain is shut down. So it's sort of the opposite of REM sleep. Right. You've got nonREM and REM sleep. Right. And usually sleepwalking occurs during the deepest part, which is what, I think, phase three or four, or possibly three and four, as Katie Lambert, who wrote this article, put it, with REM sleep, your brain is active, but your body is not. With nonREM sleep, which is when sleepwalking occurs, your brain is just dead to the world, but your body is still moving around. Yes. Which accounts for sleepwalking. Right. Perfect recap. Thanks a lot. And your brain is also resistant to arousal when you're asleep. So that explains why it's hard to wake somebody up when you're sleepwalking. But it's not dangerous, necessarily. No. And that's a question that we should probably just go ahead and answer. Should you wake a sleepwalker? You've heard warnings against that kind of thing, I think, on everything from The Brady Bunch to Hawaii 50. Yes, you can wake a sleepwalker, but the rule I put in is wake a sleepwalker. Like you would want to be waking just from bed. Don't go shaking them or anything. You wouldn't do that. Somebody laying in bed asleep either. They'll probably have a heart attack. So be gentle and try and guide them back to the bed. If they wake up, that's fine, but it's not like a danger. They're not going to have a heart attack and die if they're awake from sleepwalking. No, but you could arouse their startle response, and they are going to be confused and not know what's going on. That's, like you said, one of the symptoms of sleepwalking. But if you do manage to get the sleepwalker back, to bed and they lie back down, that's it. You can pretty much rest assured that there's not going to be another incident like that, because most people sleepwalk only once per night. Interestingly. That's what they say. And 30 seconds to a half hour. I've heard it even longer than that. It very much depends on what's going on or maybe what you feel like you have to get done while you're walking around in your sleep. You're going to be sort of zombified, but you're not going to be walking around with your arms out in front of you like in the movies. That's a bunch of bunk. And you're probably going to be pretty clumsy. But you can still perform activities, which is kind of the weird thing about it. One of the weird things about it. Right. You just perform them clumsily or you get oddly, I guess, is another way to put it. Yeah. And sleepwalking is one of these it's a hilarious disorder, really, because it's not generally that dangerous. It doesn't have to be that dangerous, although it can put you in dangerous situations. And people have been hurt in sleepwalking, but the idea of just interacting with somebody with a glassy eyed look on their face who's clumsily playing the guitar. Right. That's a funny disorder. It's funnier than the chance. I haven't either. I've never been much of a sleepwalker. I don't think I've ever sleepwalked. I've sleepwalked, but I've never interacted with someone who was sleepwalking. Got you. Yeah. I've done it myself, though. It's good, it's a lot of fun. But it's one of these conditions where we have all this evidence and all this data, we just haven't been able to fully put it together to figure it out once and for all. Which makes for a better podcast for us. Right. A little bit more data that we have on it, Chuck, is that sleepwalking tends to run in families. Children sleepwalk more than adults? By far, yes. You're ten times more likely if you have a family member who has slept walk to be a sleepwalker yourself. So is it slept walked or sleep walked? No, slept walk. Sure. That sounds good to me. We'll just call it SW, past tense. It more often inspounding. Kids, obviously, is something you usually outgrow more often identical twins, which I thought was pretty interesting. Yeah, well, gene expression and all, and I think they said adults. 2.5% to 4% of adults sleepwalk, and they're almost always adults who sleepwalk as children. And if you start sleepwalking for the first time as an adult, you might want to get that checked out. You definitely want to get that checked out, because, again, it can be a symptom of another problem, like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. Severe stress, I think, has been associated with it, not just in children or not adults, but children, too, which I was kind of like, if you have a child who's suffering from sleepwalking and it's stress related. What are you doing to your poor kid to where you the kids suffering from such stress that he's running around at night. Absolutely. I wonder what I was stressed about. I don't know, man. I find it odd that you haven't asked me about sleepwalking yet, even though it said three times that have slept walk. I'm trying to drum up the tension. They used to think that it was, like, an epileptic thing or hysteria. Well, it still is associated with epilepsy, actually. Hysteria is kind of out the window, though. Yeah. They still think it's caused by epilepsy, though. It's associated with it still. Yeah. Did not know that. Yeah. We should change this article. And like you said, no one knows exactly why it's happening, but they can just say kind of what goes on when it does happen. Right. We have all this information that hasn't been fully put together, which, again, I find fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. So, Chuck, what are some of the, I guess, competing theories for why we sleepwalk? Well, a lot of people think it's just like you're in a transition stage between being awake and being asleep. So if you've got a dead brain well, not dead. If you've got a very sleepy brain and a very wired body, you could potentially get triggered, they think, a lot of times. I saw this one study where they took ten sleepwalkers and they kept them awake for more than 24 hours and then allowed them to sleep. And they found that a buzzer going off 100%. All ten people got up and slept walked when they heard this buzzer. Weird. After sleep deprivation and before during just regular sleep, three out of ten were triggered by the buzzer. So they think that any noise, like a dog barking outside could wake you up, wake your body up, and send you doing whatever. Good to know. Yeah. And sleep deprivation is a magic term as far as sleepwalking goes. They found that sleepwalking increases dramatically in studies when they're sleepdeprived, when the person sleep deprived first. And they recommend also that if your kid is sleepwalking, you should not only decrease their stress somehow, maybe let them give up the trumpet if they really hate it. Right. But also to get them on, like, a regular sleep schedule, too. That could be part of it as well. They may just be sleep deprived and stressed out. Yeah. Adult kids, for sure. Another theory with the kids is that there's all kinds of crazy hormones being shot about the body during the night, and that may disrupt the kid. And that's why that would explain why it, like, tapers off after puberty. Yes. Have you ever done something, say, driving or walking or doing anything where you realize you got somewhere and you hadn't been paying attention? It wasn't like you're blacked out or drunk or impaired or anything, but you were just distracted or doing something else? Daydreaming? Absolutely. So I would imagine that that has a lot to do with how we could possibly sleepwalk. It's like, maybe more basic part of our brain is activated, right? Like the brain stem with the controls, like breathing, walking, that kind of stuff. Correct. So maybe it's all brain stem. Makes sense to me. People have actually killed people in their sleep. Like you said, the first guy, there was someone else, and it kind of depends on the case. From what I've seen. Some of them get acquitted, some of them get convicted. One guy stabbed his wife 45 times, and he was convicted. Another guy murdered his father, and he was acquitted. So I guess it's sort of a crapshoot. There hasn't been any you can't go to a law book and say, well, we have the sleepwalking defense. Like the insanity plea. No, but I think that you could probably find the same state witness or defense witness in the acquittal or convictions. I bet there's some great professional witness out there that can convince any jury that actually, if you're sleepwalking, you can't possibly know what you're doing. Right. Well, the guy from Illinois last week that was acquitted, I think they proved that he had a long history of sleepwalking. And this was some friend of his. He went out drinking with her and slept, crashed on her couch, and then he said he woke up to some guy punching him in the face. She said, that guy was the guy I called because you were assaulting me in my sleep. Right. And he was like, I didn't mean it. Right. And they said, okay. Yeah. It took him, like, a couple of hours or something to decide the jury. Yeah. That was really fast. I thought so, too. That's what I'm saying. There has to have been somebody who convinced them and just laid it all out for them, because it's not like the average juror knows a lot about sleepwalking. It's all. The Cabinet of Dr. Kelgari. Or again, the Brady Bunch. Who was that? I don't remember. I just remember there was a sleepwalking episode. Seems like I could be making it up. You talked about injury, and I saw a study in England that 11% of people that responded sleepwalkers said they have been injured. And it's usually, like, bruising or cuts. But I think 11% of that 11% actually broke bones. Wow. Which is not a happy way to wake up. No, it's not. Chuck, sleep walking is not the only parasomnia. Remember, we call it parasomnia? Yes. Sleep disorder. There are other parasomnias. And the first that I think we should talk about is called some nambulistic sexual behavior sleep inexplicably abbreviated as SBS. Yeah, that's weird. I wonder what the B stands for. I guess that's part of the ballistic. Maybe that's the Spanish abbreviation. Perhaps it's some nembulistic behavior. Sexy. Wow. Yeah. So sleep sex or sexsomnia is like Katie says in here. It's pretty much what you think it's being asleep in the middle of the night and either masturbating or doing something to whoever is nearby. Right. Sexually. Yes. And again, that can lead you to an assault conviction or you could wake up very happy depending on the situation. Yeah, right, I guess so. And then of course there's the very famous sleep eating, which one generally associates these days with the sleep aid ambient. Right, yeah. Eating all kinds of crazy things with ambient cigarettes and raw meat. I think we've talked about it before, it seems like. Yes, we talked about it. Kristen Conger wrote an article on it and apparently the chemical zolpidem in ambient like crosses the eating and the sleeping wires in like one and a thousand people and they don't know why. But I also found another stat that said one in 1% of people have sleep eating disorders anyway, so I can't well, there's reports of people who have been on ambient and then switched to another similar drug and it said that it all went away, their sleep eating, abnormal sleep behavior. And then there was the first case of well, the first documented case of a woman who is on ambient who sleep emailed and I can't stand the term the media gave it, but z mailing with three Z. Awful. It's completely awful. Yeah, that was pretty cool because she emailed, she fired up her computer in the middle of the night, logged in to the internet, onto the internet. She had to use her password too, user password and sent several emails that apparently were a random mix of upper and lower cases and they were written in some strange language. Although when I read the first email it didn't seem very strange to me at all. No. It said, this is a quote come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks 04:00 p.m.. Bring wine and caviar only. That seems like a very normal email to me. Right. I've sent that same, very same email before. What about the second one? Yeah, one said whatthe dot, dot, I think. But it was the mix of all caps in lower case that really just kind of that had to be a little offputting to see that. It looks like brain damage. It's like brain damage in text form. She's probably seen a doctor by this point, I would say. Yeah. Although she was on ambient. Right? Yeah. Okay, well that probably explains that zolpadim, like you said. And then also this week, very sadly, a guy fell. He basically walked off of his third story hotel room in Mayorca and just like broke a leg and hit his head too. And hit his head. And his girlfriend, she woke up to find her boyfriend had gone out the window. Yeah. Awful. It's more than a bruise, my friend. And if you like connecting podcasts, there was a guy in England, in Hartlepool, right on Holy Island at the Crown and Anchor on Holy Island off the North Umberland coast. He woke up in quicksand. He drank too much, but then he sleepwalked. He SW, passed tensed into the marshland and found himself waking up and sinking in quicksand or trapped in quicksand. Crazy. And the guy was smart enough to know that you stopped struggling and lie flat and he listened. Was a fan. Wouldn't that be something? It's possible, Chuck, because this just happened, right? It was August 11. I wonder. So sleepwalker. Stephen Rook, if you listen to this podcast, let us know if we saved your life. Put the bottle down for the sake. Yeah, well, he said he did. He said he spent the next day in bed and he was avoiding alcohol for a long time and wants to thank everyone. A friend said, yeah, he'll be back on the sauce this weekend. I've said that before too. Yeah. My uncle actually was a famous sleepwalker in my family. My uncle Steve, who is the guy who's helped us out before with some stuff, the guy we bought scotch for, aka. Oh, yeah. He had a few incidences when he was young, and one time they found tracks in the snow leading from his house. So apparently he said he went outside to see if it was snowing. Another time he fell asleep on the couch after school, got up and ate dinner and then later on woke up and said, hey, what's for dinner tonight? And they're like, what? You just had scallops? And another time scallops specifically. That's what he said. I asked him today. And then another time he was going to the store with my grandfather and he fell asleep in the car on the way to the store and then woke up in the shop that they were going to like at the counter paying for something weird. What was he buying? I think he said tickets to like a Danny Thomas benefit show or something. It was like the early 60s. Yeah, I think pretty much everybody was sleepwalking in that line. Yeah. That's a hot ticket in Memphiso back in the day. Oh, yeah. I used to use a sleepwalk. All right, let's hear. Well, a couple of times I'd gotten up and just gone out to my we had a split level, so I'd go out to the banister overlooking our den and just start yelling things. And another time I specifically remember I got up. I mean, I remember after it, obviously, I got up and I got ready for school and took a shower and got dressed. And then I woke up the next morning. I was like, that was weird. I must have dreamt that. And I saw like the wet towel and my clothes on the floor look down. You had your saddle shoes on you. I was like clutching shampoo. So I don't sleepwalk anymore, though. I sleep talk, though. Do you? Yeah, I do too. So it is Emily, I think a lot of people sleep talk. That's no big deal. Yeah. What do you say in your sleep? Yummy actually likes to use her iPhone to record me sleep talking, and she loves to share it with everybody who will listen. I've never heard has actually emailed the sound clips to people before, but there's this one of me, like, just muttering, and all of a sudden I go, Tootsie Roll pop. And then that was it. I have no idea why. Why am I not on that email? That's disappointing. I don't know. I'm sure I could get it for you. Lastly, Chuck, there's one point that I found fascinating, which is people have always thought, and still probably think because we're dumb, that you act out your dreams while you're sleepwalking. Not true. The point that Katie Lambert makes is your brain's not really active. It's in this low delta wave that you couldn't possibly be dreaming in. You're not actually acting out your dreams, but there is a disorder called REM sleep disorder, where you actually are acting out your dreams. Right? It's a sleepwalking that occurs in that phase of sleep, the REM phase, where your brain is active, but your body is not supposed to be. Right? So you are really wound up. If you have an REM sleep disorder, you really need to give up the trumpet immediately. Yeah, that's when you wake up and you're dreaming that you're cutting wood for the fire and you're, like, chopping your wife's leg with your hand. Exactly. And she goes, what are you doing? That's not what she's saying. I say I'm cutting wood, babe. You say I'm correcting you. All right, well, that's it for sleepwalking. I can virtually guarantee you guys will email us your sleepwalking story, so please do if you want to learn more about sleepwalking and read a page that didn't make it into this podcast at all about sleepwalking in the office. Organically did not make it in. I guess you could call it organic. We didn't say let's not include that. Just go ahead and type in sleepwalking. That's one word. Or try SWAST and see what happens into the handy search bar@housetofours.com. And I said I wasn't going to use handy anymore either way. We've arrived at Listener, ma'am. That's right. Josh is going to call this pot Growing granny. And this is from Km. Okay, cryptic. Yes. Hi, guys. I literally just finished listening to your How Grow Houses work, and I couldn't resist sending you this story. My grandmother has always been an avid gardener and avid gardener. She was very interested in pretty plants and had learned at some point that marijuana was a very beautiful plant. So she decided she wanted to grow some just for the sole purpose of seeing what it looked like firsthand. Now, where would a middle aged woman in eastern Pennsylvania get seeds to grow pot? From my college age mother, of course. My mom, though, was not a smoker. By any means. So when she asked to find she was asked to find pot seeds. She, of course, pawned the task off to her frat member boyfriend, who later would become my father. My father was also not a smoker, but he had a frat brother that was known to partake in this particular lifestyle, and he has always only been known as Bob O and my family, which I think is pretty cryptic. So Bob O got him some seeds for the grandmother. She planted them, began growing pot in her yard, to the dismay of my grandfather, who was good friends with the chief of police and the mayor. Well, the plants grew beautifully in the open air of my grandmother's garden. They live pretty close to the center of the city, and as far as I know, there was no attempt to obscure them from being seen. The plug was pulled out when my grandfather decided that come winter or the grandmother said, we got to bring them inside this winter. And Granddad says, no, we're not bringing those inside. So they went to the compost pile. That's what the kid was told, and her glaucoma got much worse. Well, thanks for that. Who wrote that? Km. Km. Thank you, Km, for your cryptic email. We appreciate that one. If you have a story about your grandmother breaking the law, we want to hear it. Send it in an email to stuffpodcast@housetepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.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?" | ||
86ec03ee-3b0e-11eb-9699-4fbab29e6216 | All About Alligators | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/all-about-alligators | Here at SYSK, we love alligators? Why? Because they're basically living dinosaurs. Dive in (metaphorically) and swim with these beasts today! | Here at SYSK, we love alligators? Why? Because they're basically living dinosaurs. Dive in (metaphorically) and swim with these beasts today! | Thu, 30 Sep 2021 12:09:38 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=12, tm_min=9, tm_sec=38, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=273, tm_isdst=0) | 49346005 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant couldn't come up with a jokey nickname? Jerry is here, too, everybody. And this is stuff you should know. That's not a knife edition. So after researching alligators and looking at a lot of videos of alligators, you're an expert on alligators? I'm an expert. I've seen plenty of alligator footage and things, and I never really just sat and really watched them for long. And once you do that, you cannot help but just think, what era am I living in here to be watching this weird, crazy looking dinosaur dragon beast walking along. Okay. You got to see them walk. Like, seeing them swimming around, that's great. But when you see them walking around with their bellies off the ground, it looks crazy. Yeah. Especially if you have the theme that Alfred Hitchcock show playing alongside. It works really well. They look crazy. It doesn't look like something that should be walking along on today's Earth. Did you know that the theme from the Alfred Hitchcock Show is called The March of the Marionette? I didn't know that. It is. All right. How does it go? Right. Good evening. It's so nice you can't sing. Have you seen an alligator in real life in the wild? Yeah, sure. I talked about it at one point. It was when I did my okayi. Fenoki Swamp. That's right. And we woke up in the morning on our camping pad that they just have stationed periodically along the canoe trail. Well, now we know those things must be at least 5ft above the water. Right? Well, I tell you, I don't know if it was or not, but now that I've read this, that they can jump out of the water that high, I think it's just not something they often do. But we woke up surrounded by alligators growling at us or groaning or whatever they're doing. It's just sort of a yeah. Are you sure they were alligators and not crocodiles? I'm almost 100% sure, and I have a little bit of statistics to back that up. Okay. Even though the Okie fanoke is not Florida, I think there are about I'm sorry. Yeah. It wouldn't have been crocked out about 5 million American alligators. 1.25 million in Florida, whereas Florida only has about 100 crocodiles. I'm sorry, I got this all wrong. 1.25 million alligators in Florida. 1000 crocodiles. Wow. And that's the only place on Earth where crocodiles and alligators live in the same place. Yeah. Down in the Everglades. Yeah. Everglades are just like, Whatever, man. Bring it. And it's not Nile. Crocodiles. There's a specific kind of crocodile called the American crocodile. Just like there's the American alligator. Is that a crocodile or an alligator? I think it's an alligator. I remember that poster from the said, like, save an alligator, eat a preppy. That's right. What does your tattoo say, oh, wait, wrong one. It clearly has the rounded snout. We'll get to the difference between them. This is mainly about alligators, though. I just call them almost dinosaurs. Yeah, you're amazed by that. It came through in the article you put together. Yeah, it's amazing. Or dragons. Like, whenever you see the close up of a dragon, they have that same sort of scale male armouring. Chucky realized that dragons are made up by humans who have probably seen alligators. Right, exactly. I think we probably talked about that in our dragons episode. Surely we did. Let's talk about Gators. Yeah, we are talking. Gators and I live among them. Like, there's one just outside of my condo and the ponds that we have here, and I figured a lot around here you just have to be on your guard, just knowing when you're walking a little momo around, not to walk her alongside bushes you can't see through and just stuff like that. Don't walk around the pond. Just have to be a little extra smart. And they generally tend to leave you alone. Right. Stick to inner city parking lots. Exactly. I put her in the car, drive into the city, let her out, put her back in. They're fascinating in and of themselves. It never ceases to amaze me to look at an alligator, but I've had no idea how amazing they actually are. One of the things that you put down there was that they have intensely small brains. Like, the average alligator is many feet long. Ten, nine to 11ft long, probably on average, often quite longer. But that their brain is only like eight or 9 grams. And in this House Works article, it says it would take up one half of a tablespoon. So it's a really small brain. And on the one hand, that means that if you had an alligator as a pet, which is a terrible idea. It's a terrible, terrible idea. Like, the alligator is never going to come to love you, or there's never going to be a point where you can let your guard down and relax, because this alligator is not going to eat you. The alligator would eat you, like the first moment it occurred to it to eat you. Right? Yeah, probably. So they're killing machines in that sense, they're like mindless killing machines. But at the same time, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that they are way smarter than they should be for having a brain the size of half of a tablespoon. They can do things like climb chain link fences. Do you ever see a video of that? It's thankfully no, I don't need to see that. Terrifying. They can climb trees. They have been shown to be able to figure out how to escape enclosures. Not randomly either, like looking for ways out and can actually manipulate vents and stuff like that. And somebody found that they use tools and that they will put sticks on their snouts, like they'll gather sticks on their snouts and to attract migratory birds who might be nesting so that they might come to grab a stick. And then the alligator gets them. That's way smarter than you would think for something that has a brain the size of a half of a tablespoon. Yeah. Some of this came from the House stuff. Works article, I believe. Written by House, of course. Founder martial Brain. Oh, boy, it's been a while since I read one of those. But he called them instinctual living machines, which I think is a great band name. But what he basically means is if an alligator is hungry, it's going to eat something, period. It's sort of like the description of the great white shark and Jaws. All it does is swim and eat. An alligator basically just wants to eat and hang around. They are reptiles, members of the Crocodilia Order, of which there are 23 different species, including those crocodiles of different stripes and sizes. And cayman, which we're not really going to talk about much in here. No, the poor cayman never gets any of them. It's like, what the heck, guys? But the crocodilia as we know it, and that body form has been around for more than 180,000,000 years, which you got that big head, you got that big lizard like body, got those little stubby legs, and when they bring that belly off the ground to walk on them, it looks super creepy. And they got that big long tail that looks like it was just made for wacken things. Yes, and the tail keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger as the gator grows. And it might not usually, I think, tops out at maturity. I think when they reach sexual maturity is about the time they stopped growing. They used to think that the alligator would just grow indefinitely as aged, like goldfish. Yeah. But now there's like a top size for it, they realize. But the tail might not keep getting longer, but it can keep getting fatter because that's where the gator stores its fat. It's fat reserves any excess energy gets stored in its tail, which is one of the things that makes gator tail so ridiculously delicious, if you're into that kind of thing. Yeah. And you mentioned they can grow on average about 11ft. That's if they're male, five to \u00a3700. The ladies are a little shorter. They're about 8ft long and weigh about half as much. But there was one that I looked up. I think it's still alive. If the alligator adventures gator park in Myrtle beaches, they're at least not advertising that Utan has passed away. Yeah, he looked like he was still there, based on their website, I think. So unless you're just like, don't tell anyone Utan died. We're just trying to get people in the door. They just have an intern wearing Utahn ski. Right. Well, Utah, my friends, was born in 1964 and is just over 18ft long and weighs \u00a32000. And if you want to see something that looks like it's CGI from a movie, just go look at utah and how big this thing is. And watch the people in the cage with utan feeding it those skinned rabbits. Wow. I mean, they're in there in utah, and I guess the deal is, as long as you're feeding utah, you can do this show. And I guess we should go ahead and tell people. I mean, now is a good time to say that they don't eat that much for as big as they are. It's very surprising how little an alligator needs to eat to survive. I think they feed this thing a rabbit. It's got to be in bite sized chunks. It's not like a python that can swallow these big things whole. Although I did see a video of a python eating an alligator, which is remarkable. Wow. It was a small alligator, but it was a big python. You know what I'm saying? Sure, I know what you're saying. You know what? I'm laying down. What was I saying, though? You were saying bite size. Yeah. They don't need to eat that much compared to their size. And they can go a long time without eating because of those fat stores. Right. You mean a long time, like a week, usually in between feedings in the wild, right? Yeah. But if the s is hitting the fan, for some reason, alligators can shut it down for a year or two. I know that's like, using up a lot of fat up, but they have some skinny little tails. Yeah, probably by the end of a year, but a week in the wild, too. One thing I didn't see, though, was exactly how much it takes to fill them up. Like, how much percentage of their body weight do they eat? Like, is a rabbit enough for a week, or is that, like, once a day kind of thing? I bet it's a daily thing, just because I think they probably try and do a little feeding show every day would be my guess. Yeah. So one of the things that a lot of people might not realize, because they're so often associated with coastal areas, is that alligators are freshwater. Did you know that? I did. Okay. Sure. Of course they're not. Surely there's somebody out there who fits the bill with what I just described. They're like what? Yeah, they are freshwater. And one of the things about florida is if there's, like, something larger than ephemeral puddle, there's probably an alligator in there. Yes. Any body of water, they will inhabit a pond, a lake, a river, a stream, a canal, an irrigation ditch, a drainage ditch, whatever. As long as there's fresh water available, they will hang out there. And even when it dries up, they'll dig what are called alligator dens. That is basically a burrow back down into the water table, and that when some of these more ephemeral wetlands kind of dry up. The alligator then might be the only place in the area that has water. And then when the alligator leaves, they're leaving that water behind, that water filled hole behind. And then when that dries up, it provides a burrow for other animals. That burrow as well. In that reason they're considered a keystone species in their ecosystem. Just about to ask are the keystone they're so keystone, dude. It's like they have T shirts that say Keystone species. All right, let's take a little break. I'm well worked up and I'm all over the place, so I'll refocus and we'll be back right after this. Word up. Jerry Stuxnet. I don't know. You know, it's stucknet. That's the name of it. It's a great name. All right. Stuxnet with an X. Okay. So I did mention, by the way, I should just point out, since I mentioned Utan's, age of 57 years old, born in 64, that's in captivity. I think they can live a long time, but more like 40 ish years in the wild. So 57 is that's really on the high side. Utah is doing quite well in captivity, but I imagine Utah in the twilight years. Yeah, I've seen, though, like, I saw a couple of articles that said some alligator was captured based on and that was estimated to be about 100 years old. So I don't think it is necessarily just ridiculously unheard of. But I saw in Smithsonian Zoo, I believe they're pretty legit. They said 50 is usually around the average, I think, for a wild alligator. Probably a lot of that is humans cutting that average down, I would guess. Yeah, we'll talk about poaching in a minute. That's definitely an issue. Should we talk about the armor plating? Yes, I think we should. This stuff is cool. And what made me kind of think of this to begin with was watching that dumb show I talked about before, a lone beast, where they drop you off and give you a dead animal and no tools, and in the bayou, they gave people alligators, and people had to figure out how to cut into this alligator without knives. And they do the same for mammals on other episodes. But the alligator was a particular challenge because of this armor plating that they have, which is just really super tough to get into. Yeah, it's called osteoderms or scoots. I prefer osteoderms, don't you? I'm a scooter. Okay. But that's one reason why it's really hard to kill an alligator, especially as far as hunting alligators goes. The state of Florida in particular, really ties your hands with what you can use, and it really gives the alligators like a fighting chance. And they literally tie your hands. They do. And they push you into the water. Good luck with a bunch of gators. And so you shouldn't be hunting. So they literally do have that kind of like the bony plates underneath their skin, which does make them pretty tough. But despite being weighed down by what amounts to like, plate mail armor, they're surprisingly fast. And we did an episode years and years ago. Do you remember it? Whether you should run? Yeah. In a zigzag pattern. And the answer to that is absolutely not. Don't do that, because alligator will probably catch you because it's going to run straight, because it's going to be smarter than you in that moment. But they can top out at about like 11 miles an hour on land. Yeah, and if you're just a regular human, you may be able to run that fast at top speed for a little while at your sprint. And alligators are mainly that they don't have a ton of stamina, but they can get after you really fast. And if you've ever seen a video of them coming out of the water to get something unsuspecting creature on the shore, you know how fast they can be. It did crack me up in this article, how they were talking about that they don't have much stamina because of the way their respiration works. And like, if you need to just all you have to do is just outrun an alligator for like 30 minutes and they'll tire out. Right. 30 minutes, yeah. That seems like a lot of I would tire out. I know the alligator just laugh and laugh as it swam away like sucker. Five more minutes, I would have been tired out. But you only made it to 25 minutes. That's right. So one of the other things is we said that they're freshwater, right, and not salty. That's because they lack a salt gland, which is something things like sharks and shore birds have. They're glands that actually excrete excess salt from the body. Alligators don't have that. That's why they prefer fresh water. But they can hang out in water as long as it's fresh water. And they have a lot of cool adaptations. Remember, they're reptiles, they're not amphibians. They're lizards, basically, that can hang out in the water, which makes them pretty interesting in and of themselves. One of the things that they have are nicotating membranes over their eyelids, which are just these clear second islands. They have regular eyelids, like we do, but underneath those they have ones that come over as like a clear film that cover their eyes so that they can see underwater. Yeah, it's almost like a contact lens goggle hybrid. Yeah. And it functions exactly as that. They can see really well underwater. And I think they go back to front instead of just the regular top to bottom eyelids that they have. Yeah, that's pretty neat. And the other cool thing is when they do get underwater, they close up all their holes, all their orifices they have flaps on the ears. Are you laughing at that? They have flaps that close on their ears and their nostrils. They have those inner eyelids already closing and then they have a flap called the palatal valve or Palital valve. Probably that's what I had in my head that closes at the back of the throat and that's going to keep water out of the stomachs and the stomachs, like there's more than one, the stomach and the lungs. And so when they dive, there's no water getting in anywhere and they can stay down there for ten or 20 minutes on a regular dive. Or if there is some weird reason, some threats that they have to stay under for a couple of hours and just really rest and chill out, they can do that too. Yeah. And that palatable valve too means that they can open their mouths without water getting into their lungs, which means they can carry their prey underwater, they can bite still and manipulate things using their mouth underwater without drowning. Which is a big advantage as we'll see because we're talking now, Chuck, about the alligator diet. And here's where it gets gnarly. Yeah. It's the creepiest style of feeding. I think they are lurkers. Yeah. They're not hunters, they're not gatherers, they're lurkers. Yeah, it's sort of like ticks. They wait for something to come close enough for them to get it. Basically they stay very still, they just got those little eyeballs over the water. Maybe they're nostrils if they want to be. Like when you notice one that you hadn't noticed before and they're so still looking at you. Yeah, well, that's why at. Okipinoke, we heard the growling and I was like, WTF is going on? Right, cause it's not like you look up and there's a bunch of alligators having coffee on top of the water. You had to look and I was like, oh my God, they're everywhere. It's very chilling, like your fingers going to your mouth, like oh my God. They don't have really sharp teeth though. Those teeth look super scary. Their teeth actually aren't even very sharp. No, they look really gnarly in their mouth, but they're more for crushing because they need to be able to break bone and break a big sea turtle shell. And they can too. Oh yeah, they've got some really strong jaws. Their jaws have been shown to be about to exert about 3000, like 2900 PSI, which I think makes them the 6th strongest bite on earth. Wow. And crocodiles have them beat by about 800 PSI. Crocodiles? Yeah, crocodiles are number one. They have the strongest bite. And for reference, if you're not down with PSI, like you can't just immediately imagine what you're talking about when you hear 3000 PSI. Lions and tigers, adult lions and tigers typically have bites of around 1000 PSI. Yeah. So gators and crocodiles are mucho macho when it comes to bite strength, I guess is how you'd put it if you were insane. Yes. At one point in time we did an episode on the Worst Ways to Die. Is there a worse way to die about 100 years ago. And I don't think this is included but I would have to put it on the list because when an alligator gets a hold of you it's goal is to drag you into the water and drown you as you're getting essentially have the most \u00a32900 of pressure per square inch put down on your body. As your bones and ribs are snacking, they're snapping you're almost naked, almost going to be snacking. Snacky. That's what they do. They drown you and crush you basically and close that flap so they're not drowning again. And then eventually they'll tear you up into bite sized chunks because like I said, I get the feeling when this guy was feeding it the rabbit that was sort of a max size. Okay, got you. Yeah, they want, like you said, bite size for a gator and I guess it's about the size of a rabbit. They want bite sized chunks because they swallow everything whole and they just digest it too. They digest everything they eat, including bone. But if they happen to catch prey and we should say here like yes, that would be a terrible way to die. Very unlikely. If you look at an alligator you would think they must kill people like every day. No, apparently it's vanishingly rare that somebody like you are about 56 times more likely to die of a hornet, wasp or beasting in the United States than you are of an alligator attack. I think they get about one person a year and unfortunately that person is usually under age twelve because they basically attack based on size. They size up per day. So it's a big news story. Of course it is. So it's very unlikely that would happen. But yes, it would suck terribly. But more likely if you are a deer or like a warthog or some other larger animal in Florida that might wander too close to the banks of a pond and you're caught by a gator. That gator is going to take you and stash you under a log, as you were saying, and it's going to just leave you there for a few days, a week maybe and basically let you ripen so that it's easier to tear bite sized chunks of your riding flesh off from the teeth. And then they have to bring you up to the surface, toss you into the air and eat you because they have to open that palatal valve, man. There's one other thing about gators eating we should say is that they use what's called twist feeding or more commonly known as the death roll where they just basically spin on the axis. I'm not sure if that would be yaw control or what but they spin around lengthwise in the water and it's weird what they're doing. I thought it was just for drowning but actually what they're doing is they're actually like a type of biomechanical manipulation where they're actually trying to pull you apart the way of just pulling you apart. And there's this video of a dude at some aquarium or something like that, some demonstration or show where he's showing how he can stick his hand in this gator's mouth, maybe a crocodile. And of course, the alligator crocodile clamps down on his arm and catches him really well and immediately starts doing a death roll. And you can see the way that guy's arm twist. He had to roll with it. This guy suddenly rolled like he was hoist gracie and was grappling all of a sudden with this alligator. But when he wasn't able to roll as fast, you can see the direction that his arm was going, that the alligator crocodile was about to just twist it clean off just from this twist feeding it was doing. So it's pretty ingenious and clever way to break something into bite sized chunks. But that's why they do that death roll is to literally tear you apart so that they can eat you more efficiently. You got to do with steve winwood. You got to roll with it, baby. That's right. Or in excess and be like, never tear us apart. Oh, wow. Did you have that planned? No. How could I possibly have planned that? I don't know. Oh, man. R-I-P michael hutchins. I know. I thought it was from earlier when I texted you, just get ready for this steve whinwood joke, and I said, I've got my own lol. And here's the thing with that. The freshwater, like, launching from the water to the shore thing is that we've all seen the videos of the animals that are just like, oh, I have to drink it presents a real conundrum for mammals or anything really on shore that's like, I've got to get some of that water. Like, I need it to live. You look around you look around your warthog or Havalina, and you're like, I don't see anything. I don't even see those eyeballs. And you sneak down to that shore, and 2ft in front of them, there's an alligator there waiting. Yeah. And then that's it for the havilena. Unless he can run away quickly, which, as we've seen, that's possible. Oh, that's havalena's truck. And I could see that havolna is still continuing to run, like a mile after that alligator gave up. Can't you? Yeah. So, chuck because they are so just vicious when they're eating and that they're eating machines, killing machines. In a lot of ways, it's not really easy for most humans to sympathize with alligators. They got a bad rap for a very long time, and people used to kill them, especially. I don't know if we said their range goes from about north carolina down to texas along the southeastern united states. That's where you're going to find the american alligator. Yeah. And then in china, not for the american, but they have alligators in china? Yes. The chinese alligator. It's much smaller. It goes to about 5ft and it is critically endangered. Now, you can only find out on the lower Yang Z. But now American alligators are doing so well that I saw they're starting to show up in Tennessee. Really? Yes. They have extended their range to include Tennessee, which is nuts because it gets cold in Tennessee. But we'll talk about later how they adapted to that. But because they are these killing vicious machines, some of the early Europeans who lived in the southeastern United States showed up there. They would kill alligators mostly as a matter of course. You see an alligator, you don't want anywhere near your cattle or your livestock. So you kill the alligator. And that was about that. It wasn't a huge problem for the alligators because there were so many alligators, way more than there are now. But then as more and more people came along and human civilization encroached further and further onto alligators land, there were more and more encounters. There were more and more gruesome discoveries when you called in the cattle from pasture and more and more alligators started getting killed. But then it was the French, it was Leis Francis that really brought about the near extinction of alligators in America. Strangely enough. That's right, because French designers said, you know, what looks fantastic is a handbag made from alligator or maybe some alligator shoes. And then all of a sudden, in just 100 years in Florida, they killed an estimated 10 million alligators. And by the 1950s, I believe the entire United States only had about 100,000 alligators. Yes. Dude, that is awfully close to exposure. Yeah, especially considering there are 5 million now. So Florida outlawed alligator hunting in 1000, 962. Then federally, five years later, they did the same thing with its classification as an endangered animal. And in just a few years, though, things came roaring back, literally. Because alligators have sort of a unique breeding situation in that they recover very quickly because they can lay a lot of eggs. A female alligator lays about 30 to 50 eggs, buries them in rotting vegetation, and they're a little bigger than a big chicken egg. They're not huge. And that nest is sort of like a compost bin. It provides this heat. And this, to me, is one of the facts of the episode, is the alligator will be gendered depending on how hot that pile gets. Yes, and it's real specific, too. Like, basically, if it's in the low 80 degrees Fahrenheit, it's going to be girls, right? Yes. If it's in the higher eighty s or low 90s, it's going to be boys, little boys. And then if it's in between, it's going to be a mix. Like, that's how close the threshold is. Like, if it's between 80 and 90, just the small sways in temperature is going to turn one into a boy and turn one into a girl. Yeah, but if you're laying 30. To 50 eggs. I don't know about survival rates, but let's say half of those survive. What's the number? So it depends. Are you talking eggs or juveniles? Because let me just tell you, let's start with eggs. Eggs? I don't know. Okay, let's start with taking them both together. How about that? Okay. 80% of alligators do not make it to adulthood. That's still a lot of alligators. That's my point. It is still a lot. I saw some middle aged females are able to lay up to 90 eggs in a clutch at once. Survivors, that's a lot. But it makes a lot of sense that something like 80% of eggs and juvenile alligators would be killed. Because alligators are in addition to being a keystone species, they're also an apex predator, which means that they have virtually no predators, natural predators themselves. Like the occasional anaconda python, apparently, maybe once in a while, like a big panther will get a hold of one and kill it. But for the most part, like, an alligator is not going to be killed by anything other than a human, an adult alligator. So the way that alligators population is naturally controlled is by the faithful raccoon who comes along and steals alligator eggs much of its own personal risk. And in doing that and then also eating baby alligators after they've hatched hatchlings, the alligator population is controlled rather than on the other end. It's on the beginning and which I find fascinating. Nature is just gosh darn fascinating. I love it. Yeah, I mean, if you want your mind blown, just look at the video I saw of a leopard swimming through a pond to tackle an alligator on shore from behind and drag it into the pond. Wow. I was like, Wait a minute. My world is turned upside down. I thought it was the other way around. I didn't know these things. I didn't know any cat really enjoyed swimming. And this thing swam through the water and stalked on land, this alligator from behind and grabbed it and took it right back in the pond. I was like, what world am I living in? That is amazing. I can't watch that stuff anymore, though. I don't mind. I know what you mean. Like, Emily can't and never could. And I was always like, It's just the life cycle. It's the world's order. It's nature. She's like, I know, but I don't care. I don't want to watch it. And I was like, Fair enough, you can't watch it. Have I soapboxed about this recently? I don't think so. Let's hear it. She's like, Why? What's the problem? What changed? And I said I had to think about it, and I figured it out. It's not that, like, what you've just described, I'm generally okay with. I've read a lot of David Pierce who's this awesome philosopher who's on the end of the world, and he basically says, no, that's suffering still, and we should figure out how to program the biosphere so that there's no suffering any longer, so that there isn't that kind of stuff. But if you take all that aside and you do just kind of subscribe to the natural order of things, then I'm fine with that. What I realized I have a problem with is humans training their cameras onto it in almost like purian interest of death, of blood, of the end of life, of viciousness and that it's. Like, I don't like that impulse, and I certainly don't like celebrating and putting on display. And people not you, but I mean, the conservationists even, who make documentaries like that, saying it's just life. It's just the natural cycle of things. It's almost like a form of, like, snuff pornography, but with animals. That's kind of how I've come to feel about it. That's why I can't watch it anymore. I don't fault you for it. I'm affected by it now, and I wasn't before. I don't know what changes. Yeah, I hear you. And I'm not defending myself here, but I think I watch it through a very sort of scientific eye, and I definitely know that there are people that watch stuff like that, where they're like, yeah, right. Whereas I'm never like that. I'm always like, oh, man, that's terrible. I feel so bad for those animals. And like, boy, nature is rough is what I say when I turn the channel. Probably say it every time. Nature is rough. But I've never, like, I always feel bad. And it's always hard to watch. Right? Yeah. No, I'm with you now. I understand. Like I was saying, I wasn't calling you or anybody else out here. It was more like I had never really thought about why before, and it was definitely new, so figured it was worth sharing. Baby, it is, very much. And you did talk about that once. I can't remember. Well, then we're going to edit all this out because I don't want to. No, we're too young to start having that level of cognitive decline. You know that I couldn't add seven and six this morning. I was like, I think it's 13. And I sure I was like, what's going on with my brain? It was Troubling, I guess. Let's put a button on the breeding, and then we'll take a break. But Mommy is going to protect the nest as best as she can from those raccoons. And then about 40 days later, those little hatchlings are going to make a little noise, and then Mama is going to dig them out. And then Mama does something unique here in terms of modern reptiles and that she's going to stick around and protect those little ladies and dudes if they get into trouble right away for a little while. And that doesn't really happen with modern reptiles. It's usually like, you're on your own here's the world. But Mama alligator is going to protect them for a bit, which is something that certain dinosaur species did, which people say, like, hey, there you go. And that's why, as you were saying earlier, that they had this huge comeback because of their reproductive strategies. Yeah, even 20% of 50 eggs as a lot of gators. Sure, yeah. Because they get kind of Big ten. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk a little more about, I don't know, Chuck. How about alligators? Sounds good. That's the name of it. It's a great name. Stuxnet with an X. So, Chuck, I told you that I saw that article about how I think it was from the Tennessee Valley Authority, basically saying, like, yeah, there's alligators here now, and they're here to stay. You can probably thank climate change for that. I said that they didn't. It's Tennessee Valley Authority, but that just enjoy nature and steer clear of them if you see them. That was the message. It was like, yes, they're here now, they're not going anywhere. Which I thought was pretty interesting because Tennessee can get pretty cold. It snows, like, just about every year in Tennessee during the winter. And you think, you know, of gators usually is something that live in very hot tropical climates. Right, reptilian. Yeah, exactly. They are reptiles. They are cold blooded. They need to be warm. Well, they don't actually hibernate, I don't believe. Like, not technically. They will burrow and hang out, but they're not, like, in a state of hibernation. Like, you know, we did a whole episode on that. But when it snows, that means that the water can freeze. And if they're in the water, Chuck, they actually have a strategy for dealing with these freezing temperatures, because as everyone knows, if a pond freezes, it's not like the fish will die underneath. It's actually a little warmer under toward the bottom than it is up top. That's why it doesn't freeze all the way through solid. And the fish can hang out there as well. The gator can do the exact same thing. And I think we should just share with the world what their strategy is, because it's outstanding. Yeah, I think it could be summed up with two words, and this is probably what they yell out when that lake starts to freeze to each other nostrils out. That's right. That's kind of it. Yeah. They stick those little snouts up so they can breathe, and then they just let the ice form around them in their little snout. That's it. Have you seen a photo of that? I didn't look that up for some reason. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. I mean, it's exactly what you'd think it looks like. It's a gator snout just barely sticking out of the ice, frozen pond. But they're just sitting there. They're not sitting there, like, doing their taxes or anything. Like they're in a very slow state of metabolism. But again, they're not hibernating. And when the pond thaws enough, they'll break free and swim away until the next time there's going to be a freeze. And then they'll say what? Nostrils out. I guess the implication, though, is that it's better to be in that frozen lake than on the shore. That's my understanding. Again, I think maybe the water temperature is warmer than the air temperature below the ice. I don't know. I guess because my thing would be like, it takes a while. It's not like water doesn't freeze in an instant, so why don't they just get out of the water? But they must stay in there for a reason. Yeah. This is the day after tomorrow, for Pete's sake. Right. Man, that poor Scottish helicopter guy. Oh, goodness. So, yes, they can live in Tennessee now. Look out, Tennessee. One of the other things, Chuck, whether we've kind of talked about is we almost interchangeably talked about crocodiles and alligators, and they're definitely different. And when you look at them, if you know what you're looking for, you can very easily differentiate between the alligator and a crocodile. Right? Yeah. I mean, my go to would be to look at their teeth, and if their mouths are shut, you can see for both of them, you can see those upper teeth pointing downward. But only for a crocodile can you see those bottom teeth pointing up. Right. They have that toothy grin, is how it's put. And it really is an appropriate description. It is. They're creepier looking, I think, because of that. Yeah, but the actual shape of the snout is different, too. The alligators have a wider, rounded, U shaped snout, and the crocodiles are more long and pointed and V shaped. And I think alligators have a wider upper jaw, and then the crocodile have the same upper and lower jaw. That's why you can see those teeth, man. Speaking of crocodile teeth, you know that bird that cleans a crocodile's teeth? The floor. I feel like I remember that. Apparently, that is a science nature myth. Oh, that's sad. Supposedly, there's no genuine photo documentary evidence of this bird cleaning the crocodile's teeth, and that somehow, somewhere, a legend of it grew up, because that was like an example of symbiosis, right? Yes, exactly. But it's fake symbiosis, apparently, which is such a bummer. Man. I know we got a bus miss, but yeah. I don't want to drag anyone down in the alligator episode. That's okay, as usual. Give me the blue pill. I always forget which pill it is. Yeah, blue pill. The blue pill. You see that new Matrix document or trailer? No, there's a new one. Is it like the same everybody? I believe it is just Lana Wachowski. Not both Wakowski's, as far as the filmmaking goes. But, yeah, I mean, it's Kianu, and I saw what's her name? What was her name? I had the biggest crush on her back then. Carrie Ann Moss. Carrie Ann Moss. She was great in memento. And it looks like I don't think it's a D age. Larry Fishburn. I think it's just a younger actor that they got that looks a lot like Neo. Not Neo. What was his name? Jerry. Yes. Lawrence Fisherman's character in The Matrix is Jerry. Yeah. Just like our Jerry morpheus. Yeah, right. I think even the lady was in it. The Oracle. Yeah, I think she's even in it. Oh, yeah. It looks pretty good. I don't know. I mean, I'll go see it. Yeah, sure. Even though they burned us with the second third ones. I don't know about that. Did they? I definitely wouldn't have seen the third, but I think I saw the second one. Was it bad? They weren't well regarded. Some people will defend them, but they're generally we're not well regarded. I see. Okay. I guess quickly, before we go, we should talk a little bit about the fact that they do have a hunting program in Florida. Now, after saying you can't kill them at all they have introduced a hunting program where they issue a limited number of hunting permits. I believe you can only capture a couple of them and their limits is the size and all that stuff. And I guess this is population control, right? I mean, that's what hunters say, usually. And apparently it has helped stabilize the population from basically every account I've seen. I know there was a big outcry because the year after they took them off of the endangered list is when they started the hunting program. But from what I saw, it has kept the population stable. So it's been going on for 30 years. And I know, like I said, they tie hunters hands in Florida. Not literally. As you said, no firearms. You can use what's called a bang stick which basically delivers one usually a 44 caliber charge bullet to the back of the Chater's head. It's basically like a spear with a bullet coming out of the end. But that's it as far as, like, firearms go. You can't use guns or anything like that. You can use fishing rods. Did you see that? Yeah. I also saw a video of a guy that was fishing in a Florida pond and an alligator came up on shore after him and he ran away, like, filming it. Well, this is like people will fish for gators. They make gator rods. And you can use certain kind of fishing line and hooks to fish for gators. You can also use harpoons. You can use crossbows, bows and arrows. But again, these are things these gators are tough. And it takes a lot to fish for a gator and then fight it for 30 minutes before you can bring it in. So I don't advocate hunting in any form. But it sounds like Florida's kind of set it up where it's not just like you can't shoot. Exactly. Remember, Internet hunting may be the most despicable thing of all time. Yeah, supposedly. I refuse to write that article I know. Hats off to you, man. Back in the day. I was assigned that. And I was like. I'm not writing this. But supposedly it's not like that by any stretch. But supposedly a lot of the hunts. Especially if you're an out of state or coming to Florida to hunt an alligator. Like a Guy Ritchie type. And you show up. You very well may be hunting what amounts to a tame alligator from an alligator farm that has no fear of humans because it's been hand fed chickens and rabbits its whole life and wants to come toward you in that you probably are going to be hunting one of those. And it's perfectly legal, although it's kind of unethical. So if you are going to hunt alligators, again, I don't advocate it. You really need to do your research and your homework and make sure you're dealing with a legit outfit. Yes. Because poaching in the black market is still a problem. Since you brought it up, you should never feed alligators. No, as a matter of fact, you as a bystander should feel comfortable yelling at somebody who's feeding an alligator. Yeah. It's not something you do for sport. It's terrible. But I've seen people, like, drag meat behind their boat just for fun to tow an alligator along. Keep your distance, like you said. Don't walk your small dogs near ponds or bushes where you can't really see what's going on in there. And if you do get run out, they do say, like you said earlier, to run straight as you can, fast as you can. And if it happens to get a hold of you, you got to fight them like a shark. You got to hit them. You gotta poke out their eyes. You got to punch it in the head. Go for the palatable valve. I've heard plenty of times, yes, do whatever you can, because that alligator is going to need to adjust at some point. It's sort of like when you're playing tug of war with your dog. You act like you're not paying attention, so the dog readjusts, and that's when you yank it. Yeah, that's how you get the dog every time. That's also how you escape with your life from a gator dump dogs. Did you ever see the video of the guy who was walking his cute little dog too close to a pond and the gator got a hold of it? No. And the guy jumped in and just calmly, almost expertly opened the gators mouth to free his dog, and he was smoking a cigar. Had his cigar in his mouth the whole time while he's doing this, like he does it like it's part of his and his dog's morning routine. Was the dog okay? Yeah, it was okay. It was a little scratched up and I think probably deeply traumatized, but it lived. And I don't even know if it had to go to the hospital or not. Amazing. It is amazing. There's a lot of videos you can check out on alligators if you're bored. Yeah, it's pretty fun to watch. Yeah, it is. If you want to know more about alligators, then go learn more about alligators. There's plenty to learn. Just don't get too close. And I said don't get too close. It's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this gentle ribbing from Louise. Hey, guys. I was listening to the episode on Bombing this morning while I was making my breakfast. When I got to the part about the body's blood being drained out and going into a regular water treatment, it made me laugh how Josh was so dismayed that they would allow blood to go through the same process as poop and bee. It was almost as if he had never been straighted. This is a very embarrassing email for me. This is it both of us, because I certainly didn't say, well, what about menstruation? It was far from my mind, too. That's very nice of you to say, but this is really most embarrassing for me. I will take the bullet with you. While I occasionally have some background knowledge or added perspective on a topic, it is rare that I hear either of you exclaim and wonder over something I've known about since I was twelve. Just some gentle ribbing since you've managed to make me feel befriended over the years. I really enjoy your podcasts and all that I learned through your lighthearted and conversational tone during these strict shutdowns at the beginnings of the pandemic. You definitely provided me with a sense of companionship as I listen to you talk to each other while also teaching me. I appreciate the diversity of topics you present in the way you make challenging concepts approachable without being condescending. Keep up the good work, Louise. That was the sweetest, gentle ribbing we've ever gotten, so thank you for that. Really pulled it out at the end there, Louise. Very much so. Thanks a lot. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay, well, if you want to be like Louise and ribs gently, we always appreciate that kind of thing. You can wrap it up in an email and send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, you." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-03-23-sysk-hyperloop-final.mp3 | How the Hyperloop Will Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-hyperloop-will-work | If you’re out there, Elon Musk, this one’s for you (although you already know everything in this episode). Everybody else, buckle in and sit back for a 700 mph thrill ride from LA to SF in 35 minutes - coming soon! | If you’re out there, Elon Musk, this one’s for you (although you already know everything in this episode). Everybody else, buckle in and sit back for a 700 mph thrill ride from LA to SF in 35 minutes - coming soon! | Thu, 23 Mar 2017 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=82, tm_isdst=0) | 59426769 | audio/mpeg | "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 at Thanksgiving once a year, you should try out this thing called a podcast. Here's what they are. Here's a cool show you should try, and here's how to get it. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be our show, just any podcast you like in general that you think someone else would like. Just share it. Yeah. So get on board the tripod train. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopforkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Say hi. Hello. And there's Jerry. Jerry, say hi. Jerry can't talk because the tape is still holding after all these years. Yeah, it's amazing. Well, at any rate, it's stuff you should know. That tape has gotten kind of gross. There's like, hair stuck to it. We should swap it out every now and then. She screams, though, every time we do. Well, the little slit that we have cut so she can drink her miso through a straw is getting gamey. Yeah, I think some of that miso has a little bit of meat in it. Oh, you didn't like that one, huh? No, I find that satisfying. I find it ironic that we're podcasting today on this fast thing because I've had the lowest energy today. Any day I can think of in a long time. They need to bring Surge back just for days like today, man, because I would strongly recommend you drink a Surge brand beverage. I'm not into those things. Dude. Surge was so good. I'm not into any of them, but I've tried one once when I was super low energy. I'm not going to name it, but it made me feel like I was going to have a heart attack. Oh, yeah. That doesn't feel good. No, not at all. So what about coffee? You've been drinking coffee lately, right? Have you fallen off of that? I've fallen off, but I did. I had a triple this morning. Triple espresso latte. That's why you feel low energy right now. You're crashing, man. Well, that was low before and low after. So the thing are you okay? I'm fine. Personal problems that I don't feel like telling a million people about. Do we have a million listeners? Oh, I don't know. Who knows? What's a listener? What's a download, right? Are these bots? Who knows? No one knows. That's good. That was a nice conversation. Well, I'm super hyped up, Chuck. And you don't know why? Because you had a Surge energy drink. I didn't know because literally every project that Elon Musk has his hands on. I am jazzed about. He was in our short live television show. Supposedly, he was your man crush hero. Idol. Yes. And actually it has grown exponentially since then. Like, the more I found out about him, the more I actually have come to. I think he's a pretty cool dude. I would put it like that. Would you have such a crush on him if his name was, like, Bill Burles? I actually have a crush on a guy named Bill Burles. All right, so yes. All right. Elon Musk sounds so exotic. And James Bondi. Oh, it definitely does. He definitely has one of those guns that slides out of his sleeve when he needs it, but he can always talk his way out of anything. That's his real, but it shoots kisses. So anyway, I'm not the only one. Yummy. Actually loves the guy a lot, too. I'm sure you got to watch out for that, though. Yeah, it's like a nice, respectful love from a distance, so I'm not threatened by it. Just don't let them in a room together ever. Right. She has this t shirt. It says, save us Elon, which is pretty cool. Oh, really? Yeah, and she tweeted to him last night actually asking him to design well, it was on behalf of our dog momo. She was asking him to design safe dog seats for cars, specifically Tesla's to start. I think they have dog restraining systems that you're supposed to use. They do, but, I mean, imagine if Elon Musk put even half of a percentage of his brain toward designing something like that just on the back of a cocktail neck, and it'd be awesome. Yeah. MoMA would be in a plasma bag, right, with, like, one of those Hannibal Lecter masks. She's looks so cute. Oh, boy. So I bring up Elon Musk, though, because well, we're talking about one of his projects, but technically it's not actually one of his projects because the hyperloop was basically a concept that he thought of. 57 page white paper on it just roughly outlining some of the challenges, the problems, and then did something really unusual, especially for massive transportation projects, which is what the hyperloop is. He open source it. He said, here you go, everybody. Let's see what you can do with it. Somebody take this and run with it. He's kind of big on that, though, right? Yeah, I don't think he did that with, like, Tesla or SpaceX or anything like that. I think that's all very private and hush hush. Here's a really good idea. Here is how you would do it. Somebody go do it. Yeah. This is unusual, I think, even for him. He open sourced something. I can't remember. Maybe it was the home battery system or something. Oh, yeah, yeah. Maybe he open sources things that he doesn't feel like he can make a lot of dough on. Well, I don't know. That battery thing he said that I think he's going to use that to solve Australia's black and brown out problems. Oh, yeah. All right. Who knows? I just like that he does that occasionally. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Cool cat. Yeah, agreed. So let's talk hyperloop. You want to? Yeah. So the idea here originally, and I've kind of learned, too, through reading this, we're going to talk a little bit about his boring company, pun intended as well, at the end. But I've learned that when Elon Musk gets irritated with something, good things happen, right. If he has a problem and he's like, I'm tired of sitting in traffic or flying from La. To San Francisco is a real drag, he gets that cocktail, 57 pages of cocktail napkins. Right. And he said, you know what? How about if we developed a high speed transport system? Forget your maglevs. Those only go. I know you're building one in California for $60 billion, but that thing only goes 200 miles an hour. It's not even maglev. It's just a straight up bullet train. I thought it was a maglev now. No, he called it the world's lowest high speed train, or something like that. 200 miles an hour. Right. 200 miles an hour. That's super fast. How could you possibly improve on that? Well, by putting people in a pod in a tube and shooting them at almost Mach One in 35 minutes from La. To San Francisco. Or vice versa. Yeah, and I know he wants Muck one so bad. Yeah. I don't know what the problem is. I don't know if, like, the sonic boom would throw off the whole thing, the whole closed system. You mean make it cooler? Yeah. No, it definitely would. But in his white paper, he makes reference to the shock waves that are created as you get close to the speed of sound and the supersonic threshold. And I was reading the right stuff. That Tom Wolfe book about the early space program. Right. Great. And he was talking about Chuck Yeager when he broke the speed of sound, they had no idea what happened on the other side of a sonic boom. No one had ever gone that fast. Right. And it was Jaeger who figured out that he was just sure that once you hit sonic boom, everything would smooth out. But the closer and closer and closer you got to the sonic threshold, the harder it was to keep the plane stable. He said it felt like it was going to break up. His teeth were breaking off into little pieces. So I would imagine that if you're doing that inside an enclosed tube and you start to hit the same kind of shock waves, it would screw things up. So I would guess that's why they're not taking it to supersonic level. Got you. So it's a purposeful thing. I did look into Mach One, and apparently it varies. I never realized that we should do something on that at some point. Mach One varies. Yeah, it depends on the local conditions, like mainly temperature and air pressure. I see. As to how fast you need to be going. I mean, it's generally in that wheelhouse of 762. I'm not sure how high, but I saw 767. And it just depends sort of where you are, the object speed as it relates to the conditions. Right. Which is interesting. I got you. Well, that's one of the benefits of this hyperloop that he's proposed is enclosed. It's encapsulated. It's a closed system, which means that it can be controlled. Right. So you can control everything from the temperature to the air pressure to all that stuff, which we'll get into. But the hyperloop, I guess we should say, is this proposal for the line, like you said, from La to San Francisco, and it's two tubes side by side. They're actually welded together, but they are separate. That form this closed system on either end is a way for the cars to go one way, turn around and go back the other way. And like you said, it takes 35 minutes for this journey, a one way journey. I don't even know if you call that a journey. What would you call it? Just a year, whatever it is, it takes 35 minutes to go 350 miles, which is 563 km. We should say, hello, rest of the world. And he proposed initially that this thing would only cost about $6 billion, which the entire world scoffed at. That more than I think they scoffed at any other part of the plan. People were like, first of all, this train that we're building in California, 60 billion. And the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, we're just redoing that thing for 6 billion for the same price that you think you can build this George Jetson machine. But who knows? We'll see what it ends up costing. But $6 billion sounds like a ton of money. The thing that shocked me, I think well, first of all, let's not ruin the price tag just yet, okay? Except to say that it's shocking. What you would do is you would have this tube mounted on these pylons. The pylons are about they're reinforced concrete. They're about 100ft apart from one another, and they vary in height because of the train. He's going to run along I five. Yeah. Write down the median as long as possible, or as they call it in Los Angeles, the five. And it would be at varying height, 20ft, 50ft, 100ft, depending on the terrain. And part of the reason they put it on the five was because it just makes sense, because there's already a highway there. They wouldn't have to buy people out of their homes and businesses to build it. And I like to think another reason is that they could just make fun of people sitting in traffic. When you hear that sonic boom as it goes by yeah. The other thing about the pylons too, is it creates a much smaller footprint on the actual ground because the whole thing is raised up in the air. And those pylons, they're going to be 20ft wherever possible. It's going to be about the average height off of the ground of the hyper loop. Earthquake proof, supposedly, which is a big deal. Yeah, there's going to be dampers in the pylons so that it could take a pretty decent size earthquake. And then I guess just the whole process of running the system will cause some expansion and contraction. And so the whole thing, it's got to be pretty well together. I don't think so. You can't make it loosey goosey. So any movement is going to be compensated for in these dampers in the pylons. Any sway, any up and down, any barrel rolls, any of that stuff. Yeah, besides the movement. But just building something that travels that fast, full of people along the fault lines out there, that was probably a very early consideration. Am I just stupid for even but then he went so when he first started, I guess what the people like Elon Musk would call blue sky territory, people started throwing out ideas. He assembled a team and they were like, hey, you remember those cool pneumatic tubes and offices? Sometimes you got to look backwards at old technology to realize that you're wrong. And they had these fans that would shoot a letter from floor to floor through a tube. So satisfying. Oh man, those are the best. It's the same thing that they use them when you do a drive through banking thing. Yeah. Which does anyone do that anymore? Sure. All right. I can't remember the last time I went to a bank. I'm like, I've got too much gasoline in my car. I need to get rid of some of it and I need to bank. I got a lollipop. I'm going to combine those two. So they had that idea to use these giant fans and he said, I don't know if he personally said this, but they basically said, not a bad idea. It is possible to build a fan that large, but over 350 miles. That's going to create a lot of friction with this thing and it would explode. You know, something interesting is somebody actually created that very system in London in 1864 and exploded. It didn't explode. It ran for a year, apparently without major problems. It's called the Crystal Palace. Pneumatic Railway. I think I've heard of that. The thing is, it wasn't trying to go 1000 km an hour, right? Sure. It was just puts it along, like, isn't the feature amazing? We're in a pneumatic railway. But it worked. Right, so that had worked. But for what the hyperloop is trying to be pneumatic, it wouldn't work. It would just create too much drag. Pushing a column of air 350 miles. Too much friction. Too much friction, yeah. So the pneumatic one. He said, no, we're not doing that. By the way, that made me think the exploding thing. Did you know that cars don't really explode like a car on fire? Oh, yeah. I think there's a lot of safety features that keep it from doing that. Right? No, it's just gasoline just doesn't explode like that. It can catch fire very fast and cause a big fire very quickly. But it's not like a movie where a car catches on fire and then goes boom, really loud. Yeah. I feel like Chuck Norris really misled me all these years. Well, in many ways. But I saw a car it made me think of it because I saw a car on fire the other day on the highway, and the people were running away from it, which is probably not a bad idea anyway, right? Yeah. But I was kind of curious, so I looked it up, and apparently that doesn't happen. So if my car is ever on fire, I'm just going to stand right next to it, like the coolest dude in the world. You just light a cigarette off of it. Exactly. You're like, I don't even smoke. But I'm not recommending that. I would still get away from a burning car if I were you. Be away time. That's sage advice. So anyway, they came up with another idea, and they said, well, we mentioned Maglev trains. They said, that's a pretty good idea to get trains to go fast. And we did a whole episode on that, right? Yeah, we did a Maglev episode. It was pretty good. I think when we did the Maglev episode, everybody's like, you have to do a hyper loop episode. So there you go, everybody. Well, it's probably good that we did it years later. Maglev, when you put two magnets together in the correct way, that will either snap together or they will push each other apart. We also did one on magnets. So refer to that for that magic explanation. But the idea is that what you create is no friction. Right. And there's a couple of problems. We talked about drag and friction, or we're going to talk about drag, but those are sort of the two issues with the hyper loop. Those are the things that will make something slow down. Right. And there's like, really no problem with the Maglev train, except that it's extraordinarily expensive to build track. Right. So Musk was like, well, maybe we could put a Maglev train in this tube in the hyper loop. Yeah, because there's drag even on a Maglev train. But in a vacuum, there would not be. No, but that's what he was saying is, okay, well, we can put it in a vacuum, and it would just go zoom, and you'd be there in, like, half of a second. The problem is it would be extraordinarily expensive to build and operate. And the reason it would be so expensive to operate is because the closer and closer you get to creating a full or perfect vacuum, the more expensive the pumping operation gets. Right. So if you're one or 2% away from a perfect vacuum, you're spending $5 pumping out the air to get to that point, but it's say $100 trillion to get to a perfect vacuum. I don't think that those numbers are accurate, but you get the picture, right? Well, yeah. And the other thing, too, is it's nearly impossible to create something over that distance. Musk himself even said if there's one small leaky seal or small crack anywhere in that 350 miles tube, then everything's down. So one of the other problems, when they were in blue sky territory, which I guess was starting to look like dark sky territory at this point sure was. What if we had something like a syringe, like we're moving air through this tube, but it's pushing this entire column of air, and they basically said it would just go too slow unless you built it super big, and then it would go too fast, which I don't fully get. Right, because well, think about it. When you're pushing air, when you're pushing something through a tube, a cylinder, it starts pushing the air ahead of it, which slows it down. Right? Yes. The only way for that to get around that is to make your little whatever you're pushing through the tube smaller or make the tube bigger. Right. So he looked at all these challenges, the problem with a vacuum, the syringe effect, the idea of pneumatics, and he said, I think I'm onto something with a closed loop, a closed tube and pushing something through it. So I just got to figure out the details. And he did, and he came up with the hyperloop. And we'll tell you how we solve a lot of these problems in just a minute. All right. So he does not work in a vacuum, even though he works on a vacuum. That was terrible. Yes, it was. But he has a great team of brilliant, brilliant people. So he gets his engineers, the same folks who work on the Tesla and the same people at SpaceX. And I get the feeling that these men and women can kind of do anything when they put their mind to it. So, like you said, they proposed these two tubes, a northbound line and southbound line along I five. And he said, what we want to do is reduce drag and reduce friction, the kind of two things that will slow down something that you want to go super fast. Right. And if you notice jets fly really high in the air at high altitudes because it's less dense, you're going to have less drag. So he said, we can recreate that by manipulating the air pressure in that system in a big, big way. Yeah, by dropping it tremendously, like hugely. So he figured out that you don't have to have a vacuum. Sure. A vacuum is nice, but it's just so prohibitively expensive to pump the air fully out of an enclosed system and all it takes is one little leak and the whole thing's toast. Right? So he figured out that you could still get roughly the same effect by lowering the pressure not to a vacuum, but to super low. And what he settled on was about 100 pascals of air pressure within the tube. That's extremely low air pressure. It's something like a 6th of the air pressure on Mars, which is pretty thin. But if you haven't been to Mars, it's actually about 1000 of the air pressure at sea level on Earth. So it's significantly lower pressure air, which just means the air is thinner, which means things will move through that tube with that low pressure air much more easily with much less drag. Right. So the other point to having very low but not a full vacuum as far as air pressure goes is even if there was a crack or something in the tube, you can still pump that air. You can overcome it by pumping air out a little more. But it's not going to raise your cost to five or $10 trillion again because you're not creating a vacuum and just a little duct tape and you're all set. Right. So it's a durable system that you can do with existing technology. Right. So you've got your drag solved in a way, but then you have the friction problem. What, do we put this thing on wheels? Do we want it on magnets? He kind of had already decided against that. So he said, what if we put it on skis? And it's a perfect way to describe it in this article, like an air hockey game with these tiny little holes blowing air up from the bottom. And that is what makes the train not have contact with, I guess, the track, whatever that would look like. Right. Or the inside wall of the tube. Yeah. So the little ski, basically, like you just said, it floats on a cushion of air, very tiny cushion of air. Something like less than half of an inch, I think. So it's just barely above the surface of the tube, but that's all it takes. And you've got a little cushion of air that it floats on. And since it's already thin air, it just zooms along as fast as you like with very little drag. So the wind gets under the ski because it's kicked up a little bit in the front. And then, amazingly, astoundingly they also design these skis so that little bursts of compressed air shoot out of the skis to help support that cushion whenever it starts to erode, like, say, at a turn, or because it starts to get too hot underneath. Yeah, I mean, ideally you would do this all in a straight line, but you just can't do that when you're designing it to go as far as from La. To San Francisco. Right. So to get this thing to continue, this air flow, because it is a closed system, they have a really, really powerful electric compressor on the front of the pod that pumps air to the back. Yeah, pretty amazing. Instead of forcing the air to go around it, it allows a lot of it to go straight through. And when it gets compressed again, some of it gets shot to the skis. But a bunch of it gets shot to the back, which helps accelerate it, I think. Right, yeah. But that's not how it gets going. The idea with the magnets, he didn't completely discard it in order to get it started. At the beginning of your trip, he does use magnets on the skis, and they basically said it provides for the initial shove. This electromagnetic pulse gets it going. And he said, at that point, you're going to feel it when you start from zero. Sort of like you're taking off in a plane, basically. But then after that, once you get up to speed, he says that you can't even feel like you're moving, basically. Right. Which is amazing. Do you remember our electricity episode? We're just both so blown away with how electricity is generated. Yeah, like that's what that is. So on the actual inside of the tube, you've got a stator, which is basically just a magnet with a groove in it. And then attached to the skis on the capsule, the pod, you've got the rotor. And when you put them together, you have a linear induction motor. Right. So you run one through just like when you run like a coil of copper through a magnet, it generates electricity. If you run metal through a magnet in a straight line, it will also generate electricity. And when it does that, like you said, that's how they actually accelerate from zero to, say, 300. Then after you're at 300, you're going through a city going 300 miles an hour because there's almost no drag whatsoever. You're just coasting. And then as you get out of the city and they step you up to full speed, you go through another linear induction motor. And when this rotor goes through the stator, an electrical charge is created and it's like the tube. This is Elon Musk's words. It's like the tube is chasing the capsule and it just speeds it up to 760 mph, about 1000 or so kilometers an hour. And you just coast along fast as you like, going between La and San Francisco. Yeah. And these motors are sort of placed along the way. And I get the feeling that it works in concert with that air. And I mean, it sounds like something from the future, but we'll get to it here in a bit. It's actually kind of happening in a way, but we won't talk about that quite yet. Right, right. So this sounds very cool as it is. The actual experience on one of these things because it's Elon Musk. It's not going to be like a chicken bus, even though I love a good chicken bus. Sure. We've been on them in Guatemala, right. So he wanted to make it a little more posh, obviously. So what this thing is it's a pod that holds 28 people, got 14 rows of two. There's a little luggage compartment. You can put your junk. Apparently they're going to design them one day, hopefully, where if you're I guess I would imagine they would charge you a little bit of dough for this, but you could put your car in it and transport your car as well. Well, that's like he has basically two designs. He proposed two designs. One is like, the regular passenger, only one. Then the other is a passenger and a car, which makes a lot of sense because you're zipping from La. To San Francisco. Just shouting the future. But then when you get to the other end, you still need your car. You don't want to rent a car like Schmo. It should drop you off at, like, car rental row. Yeah, I think those would build up around the stations for sure. So they would take off about every 30 seconds or so during peak travel time. And you think, man, that sounds dangerous. You got to remember, 30 seconds later, this thing is already 23 miles down the loop. Right. So there's a good amount of space in between, even though it's only 30 seconds, which is a benefit of going 300 miles an hour at startup. And supposedly, and this is the thing that blows me away more than anything else, he said it would be about $20 each way, so that's how much you could charge and just break even, I think is what he was saying. That's crazy. So in other words, it would be $500 a ticket. Yes. Depending on who actually built it and started operating it, I'm sure. Yeah. And I imagine you get the romantic notion of being in Los Angeles at 315 and saying, I want to hit Napa Valley at happy hour. I don't think that will be possible. Like, surely this thing will be booked months and months in advance. Well, supposedly they say that I think 30 seconds of departure is what I'm trying to say at rush hour and then significantly less at other times. They say that that is enough in and of itself to account for the 7 million people a year who traveled between San Francisco and La. I don't know if that's by air. I don't know if that's by air or not, but there was some numbers that this number is satisfied that said, it covers everybody who would want it. So I don't know, I wonder if that's if they're just saying for, like, business travelers or something. Because once you get this thing going, you are going to have people like, I want to have dinner. In La. Tonight. Right. And then I want to have dessert in San Francisco. Yeah, if you think about it, mustn't cover this I'm riffing here, but all you would have to do is build another one right next to it or on top of it or right below it, and then boom. He just doubled. How many people can be served by this? He also said that if you need to add more people, that these things could depart significantly faster than 32nd Increments. And there's a lot of ways that you could do that. Right. Let's go to the future. Chuck, does the Wayback machine go forward? Yeah, just let me recalibrate it here. All right. Nice. All right, let's go like, I don't know, ten years from now. Okay, so here we are. We are at the San Francisco end of the hyperloop station. Right. I'm dead. You're not dead yet. That's twelve years. Oh, great. In the station, you and I are, like, handing off our baggage to a friendly hyper loop employee. Right. Aren't they smartly dressed? Yeah, those loopers are on the ball. They're all wearing silver jumpsuits, everybody. So they take our luggage, they put it in a luggage pod, and it's just a pod. Right. And these other guys are loading them up, and they close the luggage pod, and they say, Follow us. And we walk alongside the luggage pod, and the luggage pod gets put on a capsule, a passenger pod. It just kind of, like, clicks onto the back of it. Right. So you've just figured out a problem of getting luggage on board when you're trying to get a thing to depart every 15 seconds, right? Yeah. Because you know how fast that happens on planes, right? Exactly. So you do the luggage ahead of time using capsules that can be taken off and put on. Same with the batteries. And we'll talk a little more about the energy it uses in a little bit. But the batteries are rechargeable, and so on each journey, they get used and then taken off, and new fresh batteries are put on, and then the passengers get onto the actual passenger compartment through gold wing doors, which is just cool. Right. You get in, you take your seat, the gold wing doors closed, the luggage compartment has been attached to it, and the new batteries are on and you're off. You could conceivably do that in 15 seconds if you made everybody run and, like, clapped your hands. Well, like I said, anyone who's ever boarded a plane, I think they're dreaming if they think that that's going to happen. Yeah. I don't know exactly how they could, but he also said in the white paper that it has to be as safe as TSA. But having people just streaming on, like, almost constantly would somehow, in his estimation, make the screening process faster and more efficient. That I don't understand. But I'm quite sure that whatever TSA is doing could be made more efficient. I have total faith in that. It sounds like you'd be in a queue, sort of like a roller coaster ride. Yeah, probably. And I guess you'd have to have a system where, unless you had hundreds of these pods lined up, where you had the southbound ones doing a little Uturn right. And then heading back north immediately. Exactly. Yeah. When it reaches the end, it hits a turntable, turns around, and is aligned with the other streetcars. Yes. Or like a record. I didn't know until I wrote a streetcar. I didn't know they did that. I was kind of blown away by that. Did you get to ride it to the end? Yeah. Oh, wow. Well, no, I think I got on its departure point, and so streetcar came down, the city, moved around it, it seemed like, and then we took off again. What was the streetcar named? Desire. I had actually one of my best moments of my life, I had been to a bar by myself in San Francisco when Emily and I were traveling, she went back to the hotel, and I wanted to stay out and got a little saucy, and then I might have told the story on the way back. I caught the last street car to get back toward my hotel, and I was the only person on it for the whole entire ride. I had the streetcar to myself going downhill the whole way. And the driver I was up near the driver, and he kind of talked to me the whole way, and it was like as if I were Elvis and I had rented this thing. That's your go to. Yeah. He's the one that used to like, I want to rent out Six Flags, man. Oh, yeah, he did that? Sure. He'd rent out everything to see he didn't have to be bothered. But you didn't even have to lay out any extra money for that now. Even better. It was really great. It was just kind of one of those moments. Did you just keep singing the Rice Rony theme song over and over to the driver? I did. He finally kicked me off, and I rolled downhill the rest of the way. Nice. All right, so nostalgic travel memories aside, let's take a break, and I will take another espresso shot, and we'll finish up here with the hyper loop. Okay, so before we left, we didn't quite finish. Once you get on this thing, they're a little under 7ft tall, so if you're a tall person or you have claustrophobia, it might not be for you. Well, there's no bathroom on board, either. Yeah, there's no bathroom as of yet, because unless you have, like, a medical condition, you should be able to hold it for 35 minutes. Yeah, there would have to be a lot of bathrooms at the station just in case. Well, you couldn't bevy up like you'd like to. No, that's what I'm saying. And then you have your own little personal entertainment system, of course, to occupy you for the 35 minutes, because God forbid anyone just be alone with their thoughts oh, my God. For that long. That would make the hyperloop the most terrifying ride on the planet. And I think it would make periodic stops along the way, too. Right. That's proposed that you could have stations that branch off. Right. I mean, I don't think it would be a lot there's probably and there may be an express model, kind of like a subway, but it's not like we're going to stop in Bakersfield in Modesto. Maybe we can get a sandwich or something, see the site. Yeah. That's what the buses do. Yeah. This is the opposite of that sentiment. Right. It's just like, just get there. All right. So they ended up talking to this guy named Jim Powell. I think he designed the first Maglev train, didn't he? Yes. He was one of the designers, and they just want to get his take on it. And he said, well, he's definitely on to something with this closed system. He said, because part of the problem with the Maglev is the drag that we get. And he said, but he said, I still think you might have some problems achieving those speeds personally, and ideally, you're going in a straight line, because who knows what it's going to be like going around a curve with these people. Yeah. That's a big thing. If you go around a curve at these speeds, you're going to feel the GS. Yeah. And that's not the point of this. It's not to be scary or terrifying. What they're trying to do is get the sensation of GS to about zero five. Right. And that's like a 10th of a scary roller coasters GS. So it would be something that you wouldn't even necessarily notice unless you're taking a curve. And this is where they deviate from the I Five median. Right. In some cases, where I Five takes a bend with a radius of, I think, less than a mile. That's too much of a turn. So the hyperloop will actually, the route will just keep going straight until it picks up I Five again. Because if it turns too much, even more than a mile radius, it's a big, wide swing. Sure. Well, not when you're going that fast. Right. When you're going that fast, you feel it and you'll just throw up and puke all over your fellow passengers. But they won't care because they'll be puking on you, too, and everybody will get everybody else's vomit and everybody else's mouth. Yeah. And they'll go, It was worth it. It was so fast. I love you. I imagine they could slow it down a bit on those curves, too. They'd work it out. Sure. But apparently he is personally guaranteed that every passenger that throws up on his hyperloop, he will be at the station to receive them with a warm towel to clean their face off, and he will clean their face off with it and then pat their head and tell them it's okay. What a guy. Yeah, he is. And then Richard Branson will anoint their feet with oil. That's another great guy. I really hope I'm not, like, digging myself in a hole 510 years from now where it turns out that, oh, they both enslaved the world together. But Joshua like them. Right? Kind of the opposite of my Jared focal prediction. Exactly. So, Chuck, another issue that people have raised is what about energy consumption? And Elon Musk actually has that peg. First of all, he's like, there's not a lot of energy you need. Most of this is coasting. Something like 80% or 90% of the actual trip requires no energy whatsoever. Right. The stuff that requires the most energy is the compressor that's on the front of each pod that compresses the air to shoot out to the jets or shoot behind the pod, and the personal, like, entertainment system and lighting on board the pod itself. And the rest is, well, like, you've got the linear induction motor that doesn't require any energy, it just requires movement. And again, Elon Musk is going to personally shove off each pod. He's really going to be hands on in this project, from what I understand. And then any other energy sources that are needed can be covered and then some by solar arrays that are going to be built on top of the hyperloop tube. So the whole thing, the whole system will actually capture and generate more energy than it actually uses. Yeah, I mean, this is the guy who invented the Tesla and this battery bank that they're going to be using on Solar Home. So I think people would be foolish to try and call him out on energy consumption. Right. So he'll probably be like, they'll just divert some of the electricity to power irrigation systems and cropland along the way. That's who knows? Or road signs for I Five saying like, suckers, get out of your car. Yeah, get in the hyperloop. All right, so you sent me this article, I think that was from January. It's very recent called. These are the first images of what will soon be the world's first hyperloop tube. A little wordy, but like you said, because it was open source, there were a bunch of companies and startups mainly that were like, we want to get on this thing, because if you get on the Elon Musk train, you know you're headed for goodness. I think that's what the hyperloop tagline will be. Yeah. And so there's this company called Hyperloop One, and they are apparently sort of out in front of this race so far to make this thing a reality by having a test site. Where else? In the desert of Nevada. Yeah, it's pretty flat and straight and you can go real fast. And the only thing out there are buried bodies. Right. And once they decompose, you're fine. So they had this test site called the Dev Loop, and the only thing it's got pictures of it. And it looks exactly what you would think. It looks like a tube on pylons. And right now it's 1640ft long, 500 meters. But apparently they're going to top it out for testing at 1.86 miles, which seems way too short to me. Yeah, for sure. But I think you could probably couldn't test the actual maximum conditions, but you could probably test everything enough to see if to prove mathematically that you could do these top conditions, you know what I mean? But it would be like, all right, start test over. What happened? Yeah. No one knows. I mean, you couldn't even get up to speed at that. Yes. I'm not exactly sure what they'll be capable of proving with that, but probably just that the machine can run. I think what they're going to do is prove to the United Arab Emirates that it works because they're apparently in line to say yes. If you guys can show that this works, we want one immediately from Abu Dhabi to Dubai, which apparently is a trip that you'd be able to make in about twelve minutes. Normally it takes 2 hours or so by car. Yes. I mean, when I read that, I was like, well, of course they're exactly who's going to build the first one of these, right? They're like, how much is it? We're just joking. We don't care. Yeah, exactly. So Hyperloop One is, from what I understand, at the forefront of this. There are a number of companies and startups that have formed that are working on the project. But hyperloop one, I think, is at the forefront. So much so that now they're starting to show off. They've released CGI video of what it will look like when they drop the hyperloop underwater. Why not do that? And like I said, they've got at least one customer just waiting in the wings, if not more sure. Apparently they're going to test it this year in the spring or the summer. And man, if it works, it really would be a revolution in transportation. It would change everything. Especially if it comes even close to that initial cost projection. If it comes even remotely close to that, you could just say, goodbye, trains. So long, it was nice knowing you. Yeah, I mean, they may still have some, but it will be for, like, nostalgic tourists. Yeah. I mean, of course, we're talking about hundreds of years in the future when they had hyperloops on every route in the United States and throughout the world. Sure. Or 50 years from now. Well, actually, Elon Musk made a really good point. He said this would be really good for medium length travel, that at these speeds, anything over about 900 miles in distance, you'd actually be better off with supersonic flight. Yeah, I mean, what I would see them doing is doing, like, Boston to DC and doing up the coast. They would serve the coastal elites, as they call them. Right. And forget the rest of the country. That's how it always works. Yeah. Flyover, I guess, is what they call it. I don't know what they'll call it when it's a hyper loop. Zoom over. Zoom past. Sure. One of the other things that people raise, though, I wanted to say real quick, was safety. And apparently this is one of the other ways that it's revolutionary, is that it's fairly safe in ways that other modes of transport just aren't. One of the main reasons that it's safe is because it's an enclosed capsule, which means that you take weather out of the equation. Yes. You're not very good at math. No. Yes, that makes sense. Yeah. And each car, I think, is going to be equipped with brakes, like mechanical brakes and wheels. So, like, if something happens, if the whole thing loses pressure, you can just drive along. Yeah. I wonder if you would have to be strapped in. Yes. Oh, you would? Okay. Because I imagine going from 700 miles an hour to zero if one of the other ones is stopped in front of you, that would be a pretty quick braking. Yes. So the air pressure sensors would control the brakes on each car, like yeah. If one of them started to stop or something, or the thing started to lose air pressure, the system started to break down. All the cars would be directed to put on their brakes. Wow. And the other thing I thought this was pretty interesting, too, if you had, like, a medical emergency on board, one of these things, elon points out that you'd just be better off completing the route and then having EMS waiting for you when you got off, if there was anything else. Way quicker. Yeah. So you just sit there and hang on. Stay away from the light. Well, until you get to San Francisco or La. So, earlier on, I talked about his boring company, that it was a very purposeful play on words. And like I mentioned earlier, when Elon Musk gets aggravated, things start happening. I think it was late last year in December. He was in traffic, and he literally just tweeted out that he was in traffic, and he literally said, this traffic is driving me nuts. I'm going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging. Sad. Oh, did he say sad? Really? No. Oh, thank goodness. And people thought, all right, Elon Musk just fired off a tweet about something. So we know he's not one to just shoot his mouth off. No. Because he backs up what he says in most cases. And he has done this what he's trying to do is build this tunnel boring machine that would increase tunneling speed by, he said, between 501,000% and the idea is to go down. He's basically like, if we want to improve traffic, you can go up or you can go down. We're already too dense to keep building roads, basically. And he said, Going up isn't a great idea, I guess, because I'm going to have my hyperloop up there. So he said, I'm going to start digging. So right now, they have dug under SpaceX, a test trench. And this is December. This is, like, three months later. They've already got a test trench that's 30ft wide, 50ft long and 15ft deep that runs under SpaceX. And he sees the future, basically. And it's problematic in cities because there's already a lot going on underground, but basically, he envisions a future where they have these incredible tunnels that are dug very fast beneath cities where you could have highways, trains. And they even asked him, are you going to put you're going to combine your hyperloop through these underground tunnels? And he just tweeted back, maybe. Yeah. So I guess he was just being a little coy there. Yeah, I took it more like maybe he should have done Ellipse question mark then, and then fingers crossed. Right? We know what he means. I got one more thing, man. So the hyperloop was foreseen predicted back in 1965. Did you know that? What? That doesn't surprise me. Some science fiction writer. Yeah, actually a science fiction comic strip guy. Who this name is amazing athelston Spillhouse. Wow. Yeah. Pretty good name, right? He decided to create a comic strip back in the 60s called Our New Age because he wanted to get American kids interested in science to keep up with the Roost keys. Right. And in one of the comic strips, he basically talks about the hyperloop, this pod carrying passengers floating on air, traveling at hundreds of miles an hour within a tube to solve traffic jams. It's like the hyperloop. It's pretty cool. I, for some reason, thought there would be, like, ten different comic books that did this. It just seems like back then, that would be such a sort of obvious thing to do. Yeah, I guess so. But, hey, maybe it was just Spillhouse. Just Ethelston Spell house. It sounds like evil Simpsons character or something that would come into town to do something bad. I'd like to hear Sylvester the Cat say that name. You got anything else? No? Okay, well, everybody, let's apply some pressure on Elon Musk to get some dog seats made for cars, okay? Yes. Help me out. If you want to know more about the hyperloop, type that word and the search barhousofworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for administrative detail. All right? If you don't listen to the show ever, maybe we should set this up. Every once in a while, we get nice gifts from people and more and more from companies, and we like to read them on the air every few months as a thank you. Yeah. In a little weirdly, awkwardly titled segment called Administrative Details. You know, I came up with that name. I know it's the worst, but I love it. It is pretty bad, isn't it? Yeah. So here we go with our special. Is the music already queued up? Oh, yeah. All right. Here we go with the administrative details. We want to thank Matt and Kim of minsIng Mockingbird, Art and Design Company. They sent a book of his painting, plus some really fun journal type notebooks. They look like these vintage journals, but then it says things like Dope Rhymes, or my favorite one was Strange Ideas and then Pure Thoughts. And I love a good journal, so they are really cool. Yeah. Thanks a lot for that, you guys. I want to give a special thanks to Tyler Murphy, or Buddy Murphy. He likes to send me Highlander Grog Coffee, and it's been so long since he did Administrative Details. He's actually sent me two packages so far. Thanks for both of them. Tyler, Will and Dave from Bully Boy Distillers in Boston sent us well, they sent us a bunch of booze, some rum, and some gin. Seems like there was one other thing in there. There was a old fashioned premade. Old fashioned bully. Old fashioned. Did you have that? I bet yes. Was it good? Yes, there was. They were apparently the first craft distiller in Boston since Prohibition Times, and they opened up in 2010. So. Thank you, Bully Boy Distillers. Yeah. Thanks to Taylor Newton for the awesome Stoked socks. Did you get some of those? No, dude, I've been rocking those. They're like super 80s, just pop art socks that have their teal blue with lots of pink palm trees all over and stuff like that. They're like something DJ Jazzy Jeff for the worn back in the day. Well, you love your wacky socks. Perfect. Thank you, Sarah Austin. She sent us some fine leatherwork. Nice. Thank you, Mark Hickson family, for the very nice Christmas card. That was nice of you guys. Colin Flayhive Flaw. Interesting name. Dolly. D-A-L-I. Bars from Kunming, China. That's what they sent us. And a book called Great Leaps. Nice. Thanks, dudes. Karen Johnson. Every once in a while, somebody will find something or just come across some weird article and be like, josh and Chuck would love this, and they nail it every time. And Karen Johnson was one of those people. She sent us a series of articles about the dreaded out house peeper who kept Montana in his grip of fear in 1987. Oh, wow. Yeah. Thanks for those articles. Bob ticknor of way back. W-E-Y-B-A-C-H wayback guitars which are handmade here in Atlanta He sent T shirts. That was my way of building up suspense. They sent me a guitar. Huge thanks to Narelle, who gave us a bounty of Australian candy. And thanks to a lesser degree, for the tube of vegemite snowdrop gin. Thank you, Tim, from Saxton's River Distillery in Vermont for the snowdrop gin. Nice. Is that good? Delicious. We got another Christmas card, a handmade Christmas card from the Hoy family in Normal, Illinois. It was very normal. Adam Pobiac, he's a screen, printer and graphic artist. And he said, remember those awesome Repo Man posters? Those were very sweet. So thanks, Adam, for those. Yes. Cyrus iman or Amon. I never asked him how to pronounce his name. He interviewed me for his site. He's got a really cool site where he just interviews people he likes, and it's Cyrusaman.com. And he just a total class act just to say thanks for the interview. Sent some homemade chocolate chip cookies that were amazingly delicious. So thanks, Cyrus. We got an assortment of shrubs, like drinking shrubs. Not for the lawn from Shaker and Spoons.com. These are good guys. They're advertisers with us now, too. Well, fantastic. Yeah. Thanks, everybody over there. And speaking of booze, where would we be if we didn't thank our good friends at Crown Royal for always keeping us wet? They sent us not only did they give us some XR, which is like, really good whiskey, it's almost like Kanyaki whiskey. It's so good. They made us personalized velvet bags, like Crown Royal bags. They have our names on it, so we can say, that's mine. Sally Franklin. She works for Crown Publishing Group. They sent us a couple of great books about women in science. One called Women in Science and one called Head Strong. 52 women who changed science in the world. Good stuff. And they are on our bookshelf here at work now. And everyone reads all these things, so it's great. Yes. Alex Kernel sent us some amazing prints of states that his fiance makes. They're just beautiful and super kind of old timey looking. They just have a nice look to them, and you can find them at Stampiley stampily on Etsy. So go check those out, and thanks, Alex. Skyler brown SK I-L-E send us her book to stay alive. She said that we inspired her with our episode on the Donner Party, and she actually researched and wrote a book about it. Nice. Yeah, it was great. Wow. We inspired a book. That's wonderful. Yeah. Kayori from Tokyo, who sent us a beautiful holiday card. Just gorgeous. And some wonderful origami stars. So thank you very much. Our friend Jamie Buckner is a filmmaker and sent us a DVD copy of the indie film that he made called Split. Nice. Which is available also on your video and Demand and Amazon and itunes, if you want to check that out. Split. Matt Dragon sent us some home brewed beer. Thank you, Matt. Raymond Bizinger, Bizinger Beezinger, all three of them. They sent some really cool poster prints. These are the ones, and I really love this stuff. They sent Atlanta in 1871 to me, and Toledo in 1876 to you. And you know how I love my maps and you can find his work at 15 spelled out F-I-F-T-E-E-N CA. The last one for me for today is from Doug Frumpkin. Thank you, Doug, for sending us coins from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Who knew? I'm assuming that they're not irradiated. My last one. And we're going to continue this on our next episode. Kevin from Kevindraw.com. Send us hand printed note cards made from soy ink and they were quite lovely. Nice. So thanks, everybody. Yeah, thanks a million, everyone. Keep them coming. Absolutely. And if you want to get in touch with us, you don't actually have to send us anything. You can just say hi if you like. You can tweet to us at DC, at Joshundersclark and at Syskpodcast, Chucksomfacebook.com, Charleswchuckbryant and@facebook.com stuffychano. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstoughfworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushorenow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. 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 fans favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
How Lizzie Borden Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-lizzie-borden-worked | Everybody knows how many whacks Lizzie Borden gave her mother and father with that axe, but there is plenty about the infamous double homicide that remains unresolved, like who actually did it. Travel into the mystery of Lizzie Borden in this episode. | Everybody knows how many whacks Lizzie Borden gave her mother and father with that axe, but there is plenty about the infamous double homicide that remains unresolved, like who actually did it. Travel into the mystery of Lizzie Borden in this episode. | Thu, 31 Dec 2015 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=365, tm_isdst=0) | 40400504 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles Witch, hugh Bryant and and Jerry's back. Wow. Wow. Look at that fine looking lady over there. How's it going, Jerry? She gave us a thumbs up. Just like old times. Yes. Noel is just quietly weeping outside. He is like, back outside Noel. He's peeking in our little portal window, scratching at it. The stint of Noel Aka. The reign of terror, is over. Done. Yes. No has been deposed by Jerry. Yes. So now it's not Null sitting there or nobody sitting there, which happened more times than I was comfortable with. At least four Jerry's. Like, wait a minute, we can do that. I'm out of here. Yeah. So long, Jerry. So welcome back, Jerry. And we already said congratulations on little ines, but it just keeps getting cuter and cuter. Yes, I know things are going great, so we're happy to have you back. Lilynez, you're being very quiet. Just stay that way. She's just rocking in her little swing. Yeah. How great would that be having babies in here? Yeah. If they shut up. Wouldn't that be cool? Oh, for sure. Good energy. I would just feel bad for him because it gets pretty gamey in here, even after, like, 15 minutes. A couple of hours. I kind of stink today, actually. I was going to apologize. Yeah. I didn't use deodorant by the time I showered, which was, like, two days ago. That's fantastic. I know, it's terrible. I even dressed up, man. That's great. I got for that. Yeah, I'm going to take care of that tonight. It explains the sheen on your face. Yeah. So we're here. Jerry's here. I smell. Let's do it. Since you do smell, Chuck, I have to say, at least, at the very least, I'm grateful that we don't happen to be in Fall River, Massachusetts, on the morning of August 4, 1892, because that morning was particularly hot, unseasonably hot. It was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit by the time noon rolled around. Yeah. And that figures heavily in the case of Lizzie Borden and her 40 and 41 wax, which were more like 18 or 19 and eleven. Yes. You were familiar with Lizzie boy, everybody knows Lizzie Borden, right? Yeah. Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother 41. When she found what she had done, she gave her father 41. Yes. Wrong. There was no axe. Wasn't a real mother. Wasn't a real mother. There wasn't 40 and 41 wax. So all about that was just made up, they think, to sell newspapers? Yes. It's a children's nursery rhyme these days. Little sicko children. Sure. But they do think that it was possibly some newspaper hawker, a newsy if you watch Disney movies, who came up with it and things took off. We should change it to Lizzie Borden may or May Not Have Taken a Hatchet given her stepmother 18 or 19 wax. Right. 13 of them crushed her skull when she saw what she had done. Her father got home, she gave him eleven or so and then got away. Yeah. Scotfree. That doesn't have the same ring. No, it doesn't. But you basically did just sum it up pretty well. Pretty accurately, Chuck. Yeah. So for those of you who don't know who Lisa Borden is, just settle down, buckle in, prepare for a wild ride. For those of you who do know, do the same. Okay. Yeah. Because we have new evidence that we're going to reveal controversial evidence of exactly who carried out these murders. And the only people who have it is us, because we're going to make it up. And you'll find out in 35 ish minutes or 40. Apparently two stuff you missed in history class did an episode on Lizzie Borden. Oh, sure. It just floats. Your boat goes into that one too. Yeah. I should point out to the very first thing we said, we told Jerry were doing Lizzie Borden and she said lesbian. Yeah. And we said maybe. That's one of the theories. Yeah. This will all figure in. We're just teasing. Teasing like crazy. All right. So the morning of August 4, 1892, fall River, Massachusetts very cute town, by the way. I'm sure you mean. I visited recently. Did you go to the house? Yes. What else? Did you go there? That's about it. Yeah. That was on your death tour, your murder tour. Yeah. And 1892, like I said, it was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit on August 4. Really hot for that area. And at about, I think about 10:45 A.m., wasn't it? Yeah, about 1045. The first murder? No, the father coming home. Oh, yeah. They place both of these events within like 30 to 45 minutes. Okay. There's a give and take there. So about 10:45 am. When Andrew Jackson Borden returns to his home at 92 2nd street and Fall River, Mass. And the house is in a part of town that was very popular among recent immigrants, specifically Irish Catholics and Portuguese. Yeah. And I believe there are some Chinese immigrants there as well. It wasn't an upscale part of town by any means, despite the fact that Andrew Borden was an extremely wealthy man. Yeah. He was worth between seven and 10 million today dollars, I've heard. Twelve, let's say between seven and twelve then of today dollars. Right. That's a lot of dough and also a good reason to kill somebody. Yeah. Despite having a lot of dough, he lived in one of the lower rent sections of town. His house did not have indoor plumbing, which was kind of odd by this time for that area. Apparently many of the people who are far, far worse off than his family financially had indoor plumbing. He did not. He also didn't have any kind of electric lighting. Instead he used kerosene lamps and he kept doors locked. He was very afraid of being robbed. Yeah. Let's cover this bit real quick. I think we should read this. There's a lady named Angela Carter who wrote about the case. She actually factored into our fairy tales episode. She was a feminist rider and rewrote. Wow, fairy tales. What was that? Neil Jordan take on little ride ride in her hood? Yeah, I don't remember. She wrote the short story. The same lady. Wow. So she said the house was originally a two family home and they converted it to a single family home, but didn't take a lot of time. Apparently just knocked down some walls through in a staircase and it ended up being a weird house because of that. It is very weird. And she describes it as this way a house full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors for upstairs and downstairs. All the rooms led in and out of one another like a maze and a bad dream. It is a house without passages. There is no part of the house that has not been marked as some inmates personal territory. Inmate. Very nice. It is a house with no shared, no common spaces between one room and the next. It is a house of privacy, sealed as close as if they had been sealed with wax on a legal document. Creepy. No hallways or anything? No. Weird. No. Each room led into the next. And in fact, Lizzie's bedroom led right into her sister Emma's bedroom. For Emma to go to bed, she would have had to go through Lizzie's bedroom and then her stepmother and father's bedroom was behind hers. But it was sealed off by a locked door and access through staircase that only her father used. That you could get to only with the key. Yeah. And to go up and down the stairs, they had to go through their parents bedroom, right? Yes. But they didn't do that. It was off limits. It was locked. They jumped out the second story window. No, there was a front staircase. They actually built a second staircase so that their parents could come and go to their room without having to go through Lizzie's room. So for all intents and purposes, but this locked door, it was a wall that sealed off their parents room from theirs. Yes. And when we say parents, this is stepmother. Lizzie was born to Sarah Morris and her father in 1860. 3rd child had an older sister named Emma, ten years older, a second daughter named Alice, who died when Lizzie was two. Yeah, she died from hydro encephaly. You could just make up anything back then. Something believable. Right. And then her mother died in 1863 when she was just two of uterine congestion. And then when Lizzie turned, right before she turned five, he remarried to Abby Gray, who the daughters were in their 30s by the time the murder took place. Unmarried spencers and never seemed like they had a great relationship with Abby. They didn't, but they both adored their father, and he personally appreciated that for his benefit, they referred to her as mother. And they did for decades, until a time which we'll get to. But the reason that Andrew Borden kept the house locked all the time is because a couple of years before, there had been a burglary where some mysterious burglar had come in and made off with $100 and some Charlie tickets and some jewelry, I think. And it was basically pretty well known around town that it was Lizzie who'd done it. Yeah. It sounds like an inside job to me. Yeah. She robbed her own father rather than accused his daughter of this extraordinarily scandalous behavior at the time. Sure. He just locked everything, and all doors were locked all the time. And he kept the key to his room on the mantle, basically daring anybody to even try it because he would know what happened, because the only way you could get in was through this key. The only way to get to the key would be to have a key to the outside doors. We say all this to say that when Andrew Borden came back home that day. On August 4. That morning. He was locked out of his own house. And he had to be let in by the maid. Whose name was Bridget. But who Emma and Lizzy called Maggie because they had had another maiden named Maggie. And they decided that they just were going to call this one Maggie. Too. Do you watch the show? Another period. It's great. It's Comedy Central, basically a reality TV spoof of, like, Downton Abbey and the two lead, Natasha Lagero and oh, I can't remember her name from Garfunklan. Oats, the blonde. She's the other I think they cocreated the series. Okay. But they're just these rich girls who renamed one of the maids Chair. How have I not even heard of this? I don't know, man. It's really funny. It's got a huge, great cast. Nice. Big fan. Have you seen Anthony Jezzenick special on Netflix yet? Oh, no, dude. Love that guy, though. Really good. Yeah. So awful. But wonderful. Yeah. So Andrew Borden gets let back into his own house. Yes. Not Anthony Joseph Nick. No. And he gets let back in by the maid, and he decides he's going to lay down for a little while on the couch. Right. Apparently the whole family was under the weather, including the maid, because they had been eating the same mutton for, like, five days. Mutton is so gross. Mutton's gross to begin with. Five day old mutton that had been stored in the heat in an ice box outdoors is not just gross. It's really bad for you. So the whole family basically comes down to varying degrees of food poisoning, apparently so much so that Mrs. Borden, Abbey Borden, had gone to talk to the doctor the day before the murders and said, I think we're being poisoned by one of my husband's business rivals. Yeah. Or my stepdaughter. Right. Something like that. Yeah. That's not all the weirdness that was going on in the months and weeks before the murders. There was a lot of not strange, but a lot of financial goings on that kind of raised the ire of the daughters. Notably, Andrew started being fairly generous with other members of the family, giving away properties and things, including to Abby. He gave her a house that she let her sister live in. Yeah. Her sister was in big trouble, so he helped her out. Yeah. So he's got money. My daughters are like so he said, you know what? I'll give you each a property as well for one dollars, and you're welcome. And they ended up reselling that back to dad for cash later, which was kind of jerky. Yeah. Well, it was a rental property and he had a bunch of rental properties, and apparently his miserliness was very well known. He also directed some mills. Right. Yes. And Fall River is incredibly famous for its mills. It's a huge mill town. So he knew that if you worked in the mills and rented a home from him or a room from him, even, he knew if you got a raise and if you got a raise, he would raise your rent. So this is a rental property, one of his rental properties that he sold to his daughter so that they could have rental income. Apparently they didn't feel like doing that, so they just sold it back to him for, like, I think, 2400% increase. Yeah. Not bad. No. For doing nothing. The other thing that happened actually, the night before the murder is their uncle, John Vinnica Morris, who was their deceased mother's brother. He came a calling to speak about some business with Andrew. And there's a lot of speculation on what was going on here. Basically, they think that it just ramped up the tent situation even more. Like he probably had his hand out. I think it was fairly common for him to come by, and I don't think he was supplicant to Andrew Borden. I think they had business together a lot. Well, Lizzie didn't like him. That's news to me, too. Yeah. She apparently didn't even speak to him, she said at the trial while he was there. Right. Like, when he came to visit and stay the night. She hadn't spoken to him the whole time when he came and then spent the night and then left the next morning because it's very important. He was not in the house when Andrew Borden came back into the house. Right. Yeah. She never called him Uncle John, which is the dead giveaway if you love your uncle. Yeah. I didn't realize there was animosity between the two. I don't know if they're necessarily was here's. One of the problems that we're going to run into over and over again, and it's also one of the reasons why Lizzie Borden's legend has remained alive for so long. Like. We have a propensity to take very complex. Complicated people and their very complex. Complicated relationships with one another and boil them down into caricatures that we can understand and easily explain over the century or so. We've done the same thing to Lizzie Born case. So it's really easy to speculate on and it's also easy to interpret little things one way or the other. Which also makes the whole thing a lot of fun. Yeah. Everyone loves a cold case. Alright, so let's take a break and we'll get back to some of the nitty gritty deeds right after this. So, Chuck, you were saying that the family it was tense in the house. Yeah, to be certain, it sounded like it was always tense, but notably tense months leading up to the murders. Yeah. And apparently both Emma and Lizzie took off for several weeks right before the murders. When they came back, Lizzie didn't even come back to the house. She rented a room for a few days, I guess, to ease herself back into having to live in this house again. Like a halfway house? Kind of. That's weird. Maybe three quarters of the White House. And she and Emma both stopped calling Mrs. Borden mother all of a sudden around the time that their father had given the house that extra house to her. Right. Yes. Her sister was living in, they started calling her Mrs. Borden, including to her face. That's pretty chilly, right? Yeah. So that's tense. Like you say, Uncle John Morris might have increased this tension and the house is very chilly. Civilly. Cordial, to an extent. But it was a house full of adults who were not getting along and like you say, probably hadn't been for a while. Yeah. Then there was a matter of in June 1892, andrew the father killed a bunch of pigeons in the barn outside the house to make pigeon well, so Abby could make a pigeon pie. And supposedly Lizzy kind of thought of these pigeons as her pets. Right. So that would not have been a very cool thing to do if, you know, your daughter love these pigeons. So I'm in the move for pigeon pie. Yeah. He apparently also defended his actions by saying that he was worried about intruders because local boys used to like to come let themselves into their barn and hang out with these pigeons and play with them. So he solved two problems, dinner and boys coming over by just killing Lizzie's pigeons. That's right. And she also, beyond just liking these pigeons, she was also a huge animal lover. Yeah. She left a lot of money to an animal rights group right, when she died. So I mean, she probably would have taken this fairly hard. Sure. On the flip side, though, her father just that caricature thing I was talking about, her father's painted as like this Ebenezer Scrooge type supervisorly. Tight fitted. He definitely was that. But it's very easy to extend this idea that he and Lizzy hated each other, and that's absolutely not true. Both Lizzie and Emma apparently very much loved their father, and their father loved them. As a matter of fact, he wore a pinky ring that Lizzy gave him when she was like 15 and he'd worn it every day, never took it off. Yeah, they liked each other a lot. Only jewelry ever wore. Like there was definite affection there. That often gets overlooked when you're just kind of painting this thing in broad strokes, you know? Yeah, but like you said, he wasn't beloved in the town. Because if you ask me, if you have money and you're a tightwad, it's like the worst thing. It is. If you have money, be generous. That's what I say. Sure. Pick up checks, be generous with your friends. If you have dough and it's not going to make any friends, let's just say that it's true and it didn't in his case. So also, if you think about it, it reveals a lot psychologically that the whole family has been eating the same mutton for five days, and the first thing that Mrs. Borden thinks of is that their milk is being poisoned by one of her husband's business rivals. That's where her mind went. Exactly. It's not just inside this house, the tension, it's also coming from outside a little bit as well. Yeah. And I guess we'll go ahead and point out a few of the circumstantial evidence surrounding Lizzie. So one of the things was in the days before the murder, she'd been seen trying to buy a poisonous pursuit, acid. She said she was cyanide. Yeah, she said she wanted it to clean things, but other people in the trial said maybe she was trying to poison them. Although Autosis revealed no poison in the bodies, no poison in the milk. No. But the prosecutors wanted to use that to suggest that she had murder on her mind. Inadmissible. It was ruled inadmissible because they figured it would be too inflammatory. And it was entirely possible that she really did want to clean the seal skin coat with that stuff. All right, what else? The dressing is pretty damn. Well, hold on. Before we get any further into that, let's talk about the actual murders. Okay. You ready? Sure. So it's August 4, her father's just come back in. He's laying down on the sofa, right. And he goes to sleep and he never wakes up. That's right. The reason he never wakes up is because, like you said, he got hit from behind and above about eleven times with an axe and hit in about the same area. So that basically his face was cut clean away into nothingness. Yeah. Probably a hatchet, not an accent. Yeah, you're right, I'm sorry, a hatchet. And at about 1110, Bridget was upstairs sleeping because again, she'd been throwing up from the mutton when she gets roused by Lizzie calling from downstairs, saying, Hurry. Something's happened. She comes downstairs, and she said, someone's coming and killed Father. So now this alert has just gone out. The first body has been discovered, andrew Borden, who's still bleeding, right? Yes. And his face is hacked away. It's pretty grotesque. You can see the picture online. Yes. So Bridget runs across the street to the doctor to get him, comes back with him, and they say, Where's your mother? She's like, Stepmother. They're like. Where's your stepmother? And she says, somebody came with a note or something like that. I think she went to go visit a sick friend. Who knows? And then she goes, well, actually, I think I heard her come back in. Why don't you guys go look upstairs? And Bridgett is like, I'm not looking upstairs. There's a dead body here. How do we know there's not another dead body? So a neighbor lady and Bridget goes upstairs, and they see from the staircase into the bedroom it's really cool when you go on the tour of the house, you can stand where they stood and see exactly what they would have seen. And there is Mrs. Borden all, I think, \u00a3240 of her laid out on the floor with the back of her head just split wide open with something like 18 blows. And again, 13 of them have just completely crushed her skull. So now there's two dead bodies, and eventually they are dragged into the dining room, where they're autopsied, and rather than be buried before they're buried, they're decapitated and their heads are sent to Harvard. Yes. And then eventually buried at the foot of their graves. Yes. Like all decapitated heads. Exactly. So almost immediately, the cops went, lizzie was the only person in the house, right? That's right. Because Bridget was outside around the time that her mother would have been killed. Lizzie was ironing handkerchief with a little mini iron and a little mini ironing board in the dining room. Yeah. Emma was 15 miles away out of town. That's right. Uncle John Morris was away in town at the post office, I think, on business. Yeah. Because he doesn't use stamps.com. Right. And Andrew Borden was in town on his own business as well. So Lisa was the only one in the house at about 09:30 a.m. Around the time when her stepmother would have been murdered. She says that when her father came home and laid down around the time he would have been murdered. She wasn't in the house then. Yeah. She said she went out to that barn that she liked to hang out with the pigeons, and she was eating pears. Just hanging out in the loft. Eating pears. Eating pears. And the reason she was in the loft is because she's getting lead to make sinkers to go fishing with. Yeah. But while she was there, she's like, oh, I like it in here in 100 degree weather. Right. Especially upstairs in this loft. She's going to eat some pears. Right. So she ate some pears for 20, 1520 minutes, and when she came back in, she discovered her father called Bridget Down, and the whole chain of events entered the public record around that time. Yes. So we already mentioned the proic acid. She was caught burning a dress. Yeah. Family friend witnessed her doing that and then later gave testimony about that. And that's what led to her being indicted for murder. That's right. And she said that the dress was stained and that's why she was burning it. Stained with paint, though. Yes, stained with paint. Right. But this is three days after the murder. All of a sudden, she's pulling a dress out of the cold shoot and saying, this dress is stained with paint. I'm just going to go ahead and burn it. So this family friend Alice says, I wouldn't do that if I were you. And Lizzy said, Shut up, you. And Alice said, okay, and goes and tells the cops. So in the basement, they found two axes, two hatchets, and then a hatchet head that it had the handle broken off. They suspected that it was broken off recently, and that hatchet had, they say, look like it had been planted there and covered with dust and ash to make it look like it had been there a long time. Got you basically tampered with, evidence wise one officer at the trial said the handle was actually there and we found it. Another officer says, no, we didn't, so who knows? Yeah. I think the consensus among historians is that they never found this handle. Yes. But it's never explained why the one officer said they did. Yeah. So that hatchet that they did find, though, Chuck, they never conclusively showed that it was the murder weapon. They just said, this is probably a pretty good standing. Right. And they never found any blood or anything on it, which that's kind of difficult if you think, to completely get a hatchet head clean. Totally. Yeah. Right. So it's kind of weird. And essentially never found the murder weapon. Essentially. Well, they said they did. Oh, yeah, sure. The prosecution said that this is it. Right. But who knows? Right. Again, all suspicion is just immediately falling on to Lizzie. And there were a number of different hearings and inquests and things and grand juries before she was formally indicted. And each time, apparently, it looked like she was going to get off. Because despite what the cops thought at this time, in this place and era, victorian ladies did not murder people with hatchets. So that in and of itself is enough to get her off. Right, or to keep her from even being indicted. Yeah. But each time, her friend Alice from down the street would come in and say, I saw Lizzie Burn address that had some sort of brownish red stain all over it, and the jury or the judge or whoever would say, we think that's enough. And so finally it got to the point where I think the grand jury was indicted her for three counts of murder, right? One of her stepmother, one of her father, and then one of her stepmother and father, which is bizarre at the time, but she faced three counts of murder, and they used the hatchet head. That was their big case. But they had some real problems. Number one, if that dress had been covered with blood, it was gone now. But number two, Emma, her sister, said that dress actually was covered in paint. That was just paint that had nothing to do with blood. Right. And the big problem here is, it almost goes without saying, if somebody murdered Mrs. Borden with a hatchet and then murdered Mr. Borden with a hatchet, they would be covered in blood twice. Yeah. So what do you do? How could you have gotten around that? One of the theories was that Lizzie Borden, stripped down, was naked, killed Mrs. Borden, put her clothes back on, and then when she had the chance to close back off and then killed her father and then rinsed off both times and put her clean clothes back on, that probably didn't happen, though. Probably not. We need to take another break, though. And when we come back, we will wrap up what happened in the trials and what happened afterward. All right, we're back. Lizzie Borden on trial, in big trouble, and a lot of circumstantial evidence, but no hard evidence at this point at the trial. No smoking gun, as they say. No, not even with smoking hats. No fingerprints. They didn't do any fingerprinting at this point. Fingerprinting was new and not really trustworthy. So they didn't even bother. Well, yeah, pretty much every step of the police investigation was filed up. To begin with, the murders took place while almost the entire police force was off on the annual police picnic out of town. All these neighbors and looky lose came through the crime scene and totally messed up. But the big thing was forensic science wasn't in widespread use at the time. Yeah, so at the trial, they point out a lot of incongruencies. Her story changed a lot during the questioning, which is a little weird. The cops went into the barn and they said, it's super hot in here. I don't see how anyone would choose to just sit here for 20 minutes and eat pears. And we don't see any footprints anywhere around, which is weird, because two workmen later testified that they had been up in that place, like, the week before. Yeah, which well, who knows after a week what a footprint in a barn will do? And then the day before the murders, lizzie went to her old friend Alice and said some weird things that she felt like something bad was going to happen to. Her family, almost like she said, I feel as if something were hanging over me and I can't throw it off. And she was frightened. So this sort of looks like she was setting up an alibi. Yeah, she said she was worried something bad was going to happen to her father. Yeah. That was the day before the murders, the night before him. Right. So for the prosecution, they took two pretty big hits. One, the prostic acid, the cyanide, got thrown out of evidence. And then two, so did Lizzie's own testimony, because the judge determined that she had been on copious amounts of morphine at the time. And they were contradictory. And even at their base, they weren't admissions of guilt, they were protestations. Right. So the prosecution didn't have a lot to go on. They had almost an entirely not even almost a completely circumstantial case that really had tons and tons of holes in it. That's right. It was a two week trial. Lizzie never took the stand herself, and it was huge. It was the trial of the century. She was deemed guilty while the trial was taking place in her town, basically in her town newspapers all over the world at this point. So the impression I have, though, is that out of town, they had a different take on it, that these bumbling dummies, these yokels in Fall River, were trying to prosecute a woman for a crime that clearly some maniac had carried out and that they should just leave her alone finally. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. During the trial, this helped the sensationalized aspect of it. They actually brought in the chopped up skulls and presented it and like it was out of a TV movie, lizzie saw this swooned and fainted, which, of course, is going to get some sympathy from the jury. And it didn't take long. It was about 90 minutes. And the jury said, not guilty. Yeah. And she got away with it. So thanks, many people. What do you think? I don't know. Well, here are some theories. One, that she was in a fugue state and committed these murders. Yeah. But a fugue state that lasted 90 minutes, where she was able to conceal the murder weapon and her own guilt and wait for her father to come home and fall asleep. That's not a huge state. That's what they say. And it could have been less than 90 minutes. If you take the shorter side of both ends of the murders, of the time range. One was that she was gay and that she was having an affair with the maid. They were caught by the stepmother. She was really super mad. And so Lizzie killed her with a candlestick and then went and confessed this to her father, thinking that he might understand, and he got really mad and so both killed him. Okay, that's another theory. One, that she was abused by her father, sexually and physically abused, although there's no evidence to substantiate this. Right. One is that the maid there was a deathbed confession from the maid to her own sister, which no one knows if that's true or not. Yeah, I mean, the maid was most likely not a lesbian. It's entirely possible that Lizzie Borden was because later on, after the murder, she and her sister continued to live together. They bought a mansion in the well heeled part of Fall River and Lizzy named it Maplecroft the Maiden eventually remarried, got married. Well, she just totally falls off the map for five years and then pops up again in Butte, Montana and gets married and dies in 48. But Lizzie and her sister lived together until 19. Five. And then all of a sudden her sister moves out of the house and they never speak again for 22 years until they die. And some people say that it was because her sister didn't improve her relationship with this woman named Nancy O'Neill. Yes. An actor. Yes. Which is entirely possible. Who knows what happened? It could have been that her sister believed she was innocent and then finally Lizzie admitted it in her sister's, like, I am done with you. Who knows? One of the other theories is that William Borden, who was the illegitimate son of Andrew and also a butcher, basically he killed them because of failed extortion attempts. So was he proven to exist, William Borden? Yeah, I thought he was. Hypothetical, is he like a real person? I think so. And then the final two was that Emma did it and had the perfect alibi and setting up that she was 15 miles away. Right. And that Uncle John did it, who was there visiting. So basically anyone who had anything to do closely with the family, there's a theory that they did it. Right, yeah. And these are all theories. Like, if you look at the evidence, I think you can basically get rid of everybody except Lizzie. And there are some big problems with their story too. Like, even if you believe she's innocent, there's some stuff you really have to contend with. Like, for example, she says she was in the house at the time her stepmother would have been killed and her stepmother was like \u00a3240 and the police came and they dropped a 200 LB weight in the place where her stepmother had fallen when she would have been killed. And the cop downstairs, whose job it was to listen, to hear if he heard anything, said it felt like the whole house shook, I'm sure. Right, yeah. And Lizzie's. Like, I didn't hear anything. That's kind of a weird thing, right, sure. Then Lizzy also, she behaved rather strangely here, there like when the neighbor came over, she was like, oh, Mrs. Churchill, do come in. Someone's come in and kill the father. Yeah, like, come in for tea. Yeah. There's just a lot of weird stuff that she's done. And then the dad was posed afterward on the couch. Yeah. His favorite coat was rolled up beneath his head. Yeah. And he had his arms folded over in his lap. And this is creepy. Yeah. But if you really look at all the evidence, too, especially the prosecution's case, there's no way that that jury should have convicted her. They definitely did the right thing in acquitting her, because there was no case against her. Really? Yeah. She was little. She's, like, five foot one, and basically one of the big defense points was, like, this tiny little lady just couldn't have done this. These were, like, brutal, powerful, forceful blows with this hatchet. And despite the fact that she has crazy eyes, maybe it's just that one picture, I don't know. But I didn't do her any favors in history. Like, that one big photo of her. She looks like a psycho killer. She does a little bit, for sure, but they said that there's no way this little lady could have done this. And that was kind of one of their main defense points. But it didn't matter what happened because everyone thought she did it. And she would go to church and have people whisper about her and kids threw rocks at her windows for years and through rotten eggs at her house and ding dong ditch, and basically was shunned by her local town folk as a murderous and even the people, all the out of towners who came and used her to promote their own stuff, like the suffragettes, like me. Her basically a hero. By the time she died, most people had left her, and she died a fairly lonely old woman. Despite having not spoken to her sister in 22 years, they died within nine days of each other. Lizzie died first, and then Emma, and sweetly, oddly weirdly, all of the burdens lizzie, Emma, Andrew, Abby, the original Mrs. Borden, and their sister who died as a child, are all buried next to one another in the family plot. Yeah, that's normal. It's not weird. That's just how they did things. Not weird. She did change your name, too, which I thought was you didn't go far enough. She changed her name to Elizabeth Borden. I might have gone with something completely different without Liz, even in the name. That would be my recommendation. Maybe like Tammy Borden or something. Or Tammy Smith. Oh, yeah. You could get rid of the board. And I got a whole thought about that. She's like, I want to disappear. How about Elizabeth Borden instead of Lizzie Borden? No I ever suspect that I'm Lizzie Borden. And she was pretty young. She was 66 when she died. Yeah, her sister was, like, almost a decade older than her, so she died at, I guess, a respectable old age. Lizzie died youngest. Not bad. Her sister named Die of an olen. She fell down the stairs, supposedly with push marks in her lower back. So we've basically just given a really broad overview. You can dedicate all of your spare time to this case. It's really fascinating and there's a lot of stuff on it on the Internet too. And if you're ever in the Providence or Boston area, do yourself a favor and go down to the Lizard boarding house and take the tour. It's pretty cool you can stay there, right? Yeah, it's a bend breakfast that you can stay in. Supposedly haunted. Allegedly. Yeah, if you believe in that kind of stuff. Oh, wait, our new evidence, though we didn't reveal it. Okay, go ahead. I have none. I don't either. Okay. Man, you scared me. I thought, like, you really did after a second. Yeah, that'd be great. I wouldn't be sitting on that. And you can type Lizzie Borden and all you want in the search bar. It just turns up some lame definition of her, I think, on our site. So just go look elsewhere. As I said elsewhere, it's time for listener mail. Greetings, gents and Jerry or Noel or empty space. I've recently developed somewhat of a novel biological effector. Remember we talked about those? And it's taught me a lot about how I did and how I should be carrying myself in the world. I'd like to believe I've been polite about it, but I'm definitely the type of person has a hard time not noticing and having my attention drawn to irregularities about people, especially on their faces. About two weeks ago, I developed a bacterial infection of my skin. It covers about half of my forehead and extends down to one eye, causing redness and swelling that makes the eye remain more closed and the other in a resting state. I was surprised at how many of my friends and strangers in public I could tell her distracted by it when talking to me. And it made me feel a little self conscious on top of my own hangups about such things. I think I've learned a little bit from the experience about what it might be like to be someone that goes through their whole life in this situation. In my case at least, it's not as simple as just ignoring the condition, but it goes a long way for people to acknowledge it and be able to accept it without judgment. Thanks for the work you guys do for keeping me company with a wide variety of topics. That is from Andrew in Utah. Thanks a lot, Andrew. We appreciate that. Yeah, sorry to hear about that, man. But I like your attitude about it and fresh perspective that's brought you. Yes. If you got a brush with fresh perspective, we want to hear about that no matter what it has to do with. You can tweet to us. Oh, wait, Chuck. We want to say Happy New Year to everybody. Yeah. Happy New Year. And Happy birthday. Yummy. Happy birthday. Yummy. Okay, so if you want, you can tweet to us at s yskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffysheno, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housesupports.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit.com." | ||
How Guide Dogs Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-guide-dogs-work | You know how when you see a guide dog leading a blind person to their destination and you think, "There goes a truly great dog?" It turns out you are absolutely correct. Guide dogs are about as special as dogs can get and it's through years of hard work. | You know how when you see a guide dog leading a blind person to their destination and you think, "There goes a truly great dog?" It turns out you are absolutely correct. Guide dogs are about as special as dogs can get and it's through years of hard work. | Tue, 22 Oct 2013 14:54:53 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=14, tm_min=54, tm_sec=53, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=295, tm_isdst=0) | 38415953 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends. You know, dating is a journey with ups and downs, for sure. But all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? And when you decide it's time to find a meaningful relationship, eharmony is here for you. Eharmony. Is passionate about creating real love for all, rooted it in compatibility. Eharmony's process reveals truths about yourself like, I don't know what you want in a relationship. And it helps you connect with a uniquely compatible partner who is right for you. Don't believe it? See for yourself. So start for free today, because every 14 minutes, someone finds love on Eharmony. You 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. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, and we hope we sound correct. Yes. What does that mean? Jerry was looking at putting the headphones up to her ears. Oh, so she's not even paying attention to basically what you're saying is we have no quality control going on right now. Well, no, we did, because Jerry had the headphones up to her ears. Okay. Now we don't. She checks in occasionally. He wakes up and says, yeah. What? So, Chuck yes? How is it going? It's going great. How are you? I'm doing good. You look well. Thank you very much. Healthy, fit, happy, sunkissed. Sun kissed. Yeah. Chuck, have you ever seen a guide dog? A guide dog guide? Yeah, sure. Guide dogs see them all the time. Do you know why? They are also called Seeing Eye dogs or used to be? Well, because guide dogs specifically, unlike the general term service dogs, are to help guide around people who cannot see. That is a pretty nice story, but it's not entirely correct. I had a feeling Seeing Eye dogs were actually part of a company called the Seeing Eye. Really? The first American guide dog training company. And it wasn't the Americans who came up with training guide dogs. It was actually the Germans in Potsdam, Germany. The first guide dog training academy was set up to help veterans that had been blinded in World War I. It was successful. It didn't really take off. But a woman, an American woman living in Switzerland. Her name was Dorothy Harris Eustace. She was very wealthy. American. Heard about this one, visited the school and said, this is pretty awesome. Came back, waited a few years before she got around to writing an article, and it was published in the Saturday Evening Post. And a young, blind whipper snapper named Norman Rockwell no, his name was Morris Frank. He heard about it, and he got in touch with Mrs. Eustace and said, I would like one of these dogs. Can you help me out? She said, not only will I help you out, I'm going to fly you to Potsdam, to Switzerland, actually. You're going to be trained with a dog and we give you $10,000 to go start the first school in America. So Morris Frank took her up on it, took the $10000 and started in Tennessee. The seeing eyed dog school. So are you saying that seeing eye dogs are the Kleenex of the working service dog world? Very apt. It's actually a brand name. Interesting. I never knew that's how I like this. And I said, nothing really surprised me. It was a good article, but I wasn't surprised. And here you go. Surprisingly kaboom, right off the bat things. All right, guide dogs. Let's get to it, eh? Yeah, it's pretty straightforward stuff, but it's neat to know the details of things. Like, first of all, if you ever see a guide dog, it's actually working and you just leave it alone in my house. It's difficult with Emily. Yeah. You're really not supposed to do that. I know, and she doesn't, but dude, she's like a five year old. I have seen her fake like she's going to look for something and just brush up her hand against the dog's head in a store, like, let me go look at the cereal. And she'll just brush up and be like, oops, I didn't mean to pet your guide dog. She's like a fraudulent for guide dogs. Yeah. Is that people who rub up against the public? Yeah, she's totally weird. She can't help it, dude. When she sees a dog, she's like, she cannot not touch it. And it's understandable, especially with guide dogs, why Emily would do that. Because it's like dogs and then five echelons up guide dogs. Right. Not only are they dogs, which are great animals to begin with, but they're dogs that actually help not only just regular people, but people who can't see. So it's like you just want to pet them and be like, here's the greatest thing on the planet. Well, and they look sad, which makes you want to pet them even more. But people, they are not sad. They are working. And they're delighted to be working. Because if they're not delighted to be working, they wouldn't be guide dogs. Exactly. They wouldn't make it through the process. That's exactly right. So that's not to say that you can never touch a guide dog. Normally you want to leave them alone, just rubs door. But if you really can't resist the urge, Emily, you can ask the handler, the guide dog owner, the person who the guide dog is assisting, if you can pet their dog that way they can say, not really. It's really concentrating now. Or no, you can go ahead and pet him. And then the owner knows that now he needs to get the dog back into his concentration working mode. After he's been petted. Yeah. Okay. That's rule number one. Okay. Guide dogs are rule number two, typically allowed anywhere the general public is allowed because if they're not, then you're saying, oh, no, only people who can see are allowed into these public areas. Exactly. Which is one of the best things about them and why Emily wants to rub up against them, because she's like, well, I'm in a library and there's a dog. This is a bonus, right? It's a great library. The thing is, since they're allowed anywhere and their dog, and because there's people like Emily walking around who want to pet them all the time, the dog is up to the dog rather than Emily to decide, like, let's keep things professional here. I'm not going to create any kind of ruckus or disturbance. So the dog has to be extraordinarily well trained to concentrate. And what it's concentrating on is a certain prescribed set of things, specifically how to take a direct route and to stay in front of and just to the left of the handler. Yes. At a steady pace. You don't want a dog that runs some and then stops to smell and eat poop and then runs again. I would say probably easily. The biggest thing a guide dog must do is have complete mastery of the intersection and the crosswalk. Yeah, that's really where I mean, stairs and cliffs and things like that are important. But the crosswalk in the intersection is when it comes down to brass tacks, that's the most important thing that a guide dog needs to know how to do perfectly. Right. The way the guide dog trainers have established the importance of this is the guide dogs are taught universally to stop at every curb. Yeah. And that's a good way to you should train your dog to do that. Anyway, I was thinking, if you can get your hands on a training manual for a guide dog, just use that. You could use that for any dog and have, like, a super terrific a one dog. Yeah, but you could that sounds like a service. Josh is a one dogs. Yeah. And fingerprinting powder. Yeah, that's a good point. And that's a good way to train a dog. Anyway, like I said, you don't want your dog pulling you into an intersection, even if you can see. But back to guide dogs, that is the most important thing. They have to stop at every curb, sit and while they're sitting. And like I said, these aren't just service dogs because there's other dogs if you have, like, epilepsy or if you're in a wheelchair. Sometimes these are specifically for the blind, but they'll come to an intersection and they work together as a unit. The dog stops and the blind person listens. They listen for traffic and they listen for traffic stopping, and then they tell the dog, all right, now we can go forward in the intersection, but here's the cool thing, and this is, I think, the coolest thing in this article about guide dogs. The dog doesn't just say, okay, let's go. The dog says, well, you're saying it's okay, but you can't see. So why don't you let me decide for sure if it's okay? Yeah. If there's a car coming, even if the handler says, Move forward, the dog won't do it. The dog will wait until whatever hazard is coming is cleared and then we'll follow the command. It's called selective disobedience. Yes. It's pretty spectacular. Yeah. When I lived in La. In my first apartment, I lived across from I don't know if it was a dog training school or if it was just a school for the blind, but all the traffic lights around me made noises. Oh, yeah. Like wake. No, that would be good. Actually, it was just like these sounds, like these ticking sounds that they knew. Oh, yeah. They knew what it meant. Or go was even better. There's one by Yumi's in my house that say, Wait when you press the button. Wait. Oh, really? And then it'll say, what street light is now red and what street you can cross, depending on where the intersection is. Is that just a new thing or is it near it's pretty new voice. Sounds pretty futuristic. No, but is it tied to the blind or is it just yeah, I think that's what it's for. Okay. Because it directs you verbally across what street you can take. Right. Wait. And it's funny because you can press the button a few times. It'll be like? Wait, wait. Really? That's kind of fun. I'm sure you've never done that, though, right? Well, what else is there to do while you're waiting for a crosswalk light? Shay walk. That's right. You can get a ticket for that in Los Angeles, by the way. It's a way of life in New York. Yeah. Don't do it in La. Another thing the dog has to do is to know how to bring the handler to an elevator button instead of elevator buttons. Sure. Yeah. Stop it. Stairs very at the bottom and the top until told what to do. Lie there quietly when the handler is sitting wherever the handler is. That's a big one. Part of being a guide dog is you just have to just cut out all of the other distractions that would drive any other dog bonkers and just sit there. Because the first time a guide dog acts like a regular dog in a public setting, guide dogs everywhere have a bad name. That's right. Well, and that's why they look sad to me. I used to take Marta and there was a guide dog frequently on the way home with this lady, and the dog would just lay down under the seat on the subway and just look so sad. But I always had to tell myself, this dog's not sad. When that harness comes off, it's playtime. Were you saying that, it was like tear streaming down your cheeks. I might have cheered up a time or two. 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 hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about Summer. What's not to like? School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where True crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah. And with so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and lighthearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of true crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night, there's a podcast out there for you to download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. So, like we said, they work as a team. It's not the handler just giving orders and it's not the dog just carrying out orders. They have to work together because A, the dog doesn't know where to go. That's the handler's job and the handler doesn't know when to go. Oh yeah. What obstacles are coming up? Exactly. Put the two together, you got a pretty great team. That's right. You have the makings of a fine sitcom. So, like you said, after hours, after they're working, when the harness is on, the dogs at work, concentrating, it knows everything to do when the harness is off. It's just like any other dog. It's belly rub time. Right. A guide dog is both a service dog and the family pet too. That's right. So really, genuinely don't feel like bad for service animals when you see them out in public. They're treated just as well and even better than other dogs back at home. And from what I understand, they're really enjoying themselves because they're like, concentrating, they're stimulated, they're going places, they're just like sitting at home all day waiting for their owner to come home and let them out for a half hour on a leash. Yeah, exactly. So there's a lot of people who believe that guy dogs leave far more fulfilling lives than the average house dog. Yeah, well, dogs, it depends on the breed. But in general, dogs have jobs, and if you have a poorly behaved dog, that means it's probably a breed that wants a job that doesn't have one, or you just got a lemon. Like, one of our dogs is really bad. Lucy's terrible. She's 13, and she's still bad. Well, she was bred to be a car dealer. We haven't taken her to Vegas in a long time. She is a cat of whoa, though. And they're herding dogs, and she needs a job, basically. She's never had a job, so her job has been to poop in the house and to eat books and furniture and stuff like that. Wait, what kind of job are they supposed to do? Well, the catahulas were herders, like, sheep herders and things. Did she herd you guys around the house? Like, does she try to make sure you're all in the same room at the same time? No. Okay. All right, so let's talk about the process of schooling a guide dog. They're usually free. They will pair people up. They're generally nonprofits who run on donations. Yeah, if you wanted to feel even better about guide dog schools, it's free. Yes. You don't have to pay $2,000 for your well trained guide dog. They will pair you as a person that can't see with a great dog for no charge. Right. In general, although there could be a lot of money in that, you start up a private one. Josh's own dogs. Yeah, sure. You could get a free one, but if you want to really give one, you have to pay for it. So the schools are set up and pretty much handled the whole process from soup to nuts, which includes breeding them. Sometimes, if they're like really great guide dogs, they might go into a breeding program afterward. I have the impression that most major guide dog schools handle their own breeding. Yeah, probably. So they arrange the puppy raising programs, which is where it all starts, which we'll get into in a minute. They evaluate these dogs along the way. They train them once they're ready. They train the instructors, they train the handlers, they match the dog with the handler, reevaluate them after a while, and eventually retire the dogs, which is very sad and happy. Yeah, which we'll get to that, too. That's at the end. But you're talking golden retrievers labs. German shepherds are generally who you're going to see because they're all whip smart and generally pretty nice, loyal, obedient, very trainable and confident, too. That's one of the number one. Again, qualities of a guide dog, is self confidence, and that self confidence is built up as a puppy. That's one of the main things in a training or pretraining puppy guide dog raising person. Yeah. I think Alicia Hoyle wrote this. She interviewed no, this is a Tom Harris joint. Oh, was it? Okay. Tom interviewed someone at a place called guiding Eyes for the Blind in Yorktown. Heights, New York, and we're going to be referencing them a lot as far as, oh, that's who we're talking about when we throw out some of these common stats. Like, the original puppies aren't suitable for to even enter the program. Like, they start weeding them out really early. They sell them as pets if they're part of that 20%. Or they may be okay for service dogs, but not good for guide dogging. So they'll maybe send them to another organization that will help people, like with epilepsy or wheelchair or something. Yeah. The ones that do make it, though, the ones that are like, okay, you're a six week old puppy, and we can tell already that you are probably going to be worth a shot. So we're going to send you into training school. Pretraining school puppy raising is what it's called with just regular people. Like, you can go out and do this if you have the time and you have the patience and you have the resources, you can actually get puppies to the point where a year later you will then turn them back over to a proper school. A year to a year and a half, depending. Yes. And along the way, you're going to be trained sure on how to raise a puppy according to the standards of the school. They're not just going to say, here's a puppy, don't screw it up. There's usually weekly, monthly, quarterly meetings with other puppy raisers where all the puppies get together to ensure they're socialized, to update things, to make sure everybody's on the same page with raising their puppies so that there's evaluations. And like we said, what they're trying to do is they're not training the puppies at all. Right. The main point of puppy raising is to start to set up how a puppy can become confident, make it feel good about itself. And I take that back. They are training themselves. They train them in the basics. Sit, stay, sure, lay down, that kind of thing. Nothing advanced, just good basic obedience. Exactly. And then they're also getting the puppies used to the idea of training for extended periods of time on a daily basis. And they're doing that by taking the dog all over the place, anywhere that they can get a dog into. They're going to take this dog to expose it to new experiences every week. Yeah. And after a certain amount of time, they'll get their little coat that says, I'm a puppy dog in training. Very cute little situation there. And that's when they can really take it anywhere they want to go. As I understand it, not necessarily well, by law you can't you're supposed to ask, right? But for the most part, it's like, yeah, but socialization is a big deal. Like you said, they try to expose puppies to at least five new experiences a week. So everything from other dogs being around to being in a shopping mall to going to Jim Burrie and having screaming kids throwing their poop all over the place? I would guess so. Actually, I don't know if I'd take a puppy to be trained to Jim breathe. It's probably like the proving ground. Yeah, they can ignore that. But basically what they want to do is develop a good relationship with a dog, which will eventually transfer to their handler. And we were talking about learning obedience, like, just basic obedience. All guide dogs are taught not with treats. Yeah. And there's a very good reason why you don't want to teach a dog with treats. Sure. Because if you have a guide dog, that's like, food is a reward. And I think a lot about food. As a matter of fact, you could say, I'm fixated on food. Is that your dog voice? Yeah. And you take that guide dog into, like, a diner. Yeah. Or a nascents that guide dogs in to have some real problems concentrating. Yeah. So you use praise and then correction through just a tug on a leash. Yeah. That's typical. Like Caesar Milan stuff. Yes. One of those two. I saw one the other day where he was training a dude. He was scared of dogs. An adult. He had grown kids. He was, like, in his probably late forty s, and he was still frightened of dogs. And it was like every stupid episode of that show, very emotional. Well, that music is pretty oh, man. Right at the right time. Wait, hold on, Chuck. Yeah. I think we should do a little public service for our listeners out there and teach them the whiz bang, a one no fail method of house breaking a dog in as little as one day. All right, let's hear it. Do you want me to do it? Yeah. My dog poops every day and eats it herself, so I've done a poor job. Buckley peace. When it Thunders, you have a Thunder shirt for him? Yeah, we call it Thunder, buddy. It helps a little bit. But if we're not home and it's Thundering, he'll pee. Do you give him sedatives or anything? No, I just clean up the pee. Got you. Okay. All right. So if you have a puppy, they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I don't know if that's true or not, but with a puppy, it's easier. I think that should be you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Comma. I don't know if that's true or not. Semicolon with a puppy, it's easier. That should be the full adage. That's the a one slogan. So you take your puppy outside once an hour, pretty much. And you take them to the same place outside, and you wait until they finally start to go. And when they go, you say puppy's name, insert it here, do your thing. Yeah. Or whatever you choose to say. And then you praise that dog like it just saved your life. And then the next time, you take the dog out again and you wait. You do that a couple of times, and then maybe by the third or fourth time, you take the dog out of the same place and you say, Puppy, do your thing. And that dog will probably peer poop on command for the rest of its life. Yeah. I say Go potty. And it works still. Yeah. Especially when it's thundering. Yeah. Go potty. He's like, Dude, perfect. And again, the reason why you want a dog that will only peer poop on command is because, again, you can't have a guide dog pooping in public because people be like, we need to legislate guide dogs. Yeah. Dog poop in a library. Yeah, exactly. This lady over here is rubbing against the dog while it's pooping. Yeah. Plus, you don't want your dog taking a big dump in front of Forever 21 because little kids at the mall will be turned off by that. So, like you said, puppies are evaluated every few months during training. And eventually, as we said, in about a year, a year and a half mark, the saddest day ever happens, and you have to take that puppy that you raised and turn them over to a school. And they did an interview with a lady who raised the dog named Sonar. Her name is Mary Container. Yeah. Sounds like she does this a lot. And she had a really good attitude. She's like, here's how I look at it. I had three kids, and I raised them and eventually sent them out into the world, so I'm going to do this with this dog. And they provide a service. And we don't look at it as losing this dog. We look at it as like, we've given someone a gift of a well trained puppy, and a lot of people will get another one right after that and start all over again. Yeah. I think also, once you prove yourself as an able and capable guide dog, puppy Razor, like, they'll keep coming back every time to ask you if you want to do it again. Yeah. And you may. 1 day, actually, maybe one day soon. Get that dog back if it gets kicked out of the program. Yeah. Because like you said, 20% right off the bat aren't even trained as puppies. Of the ones that go through puppy training and are brought back after twelve to 18 months, 50% of those will just be, like, turned down. Yes. And a lot of times, they'll offer them back to the original puppy raiser, say, hey, do you want this dog? You failed. Would you like the dog back as a token to commemorate your failure or the sweetest thing ever? Perhaps when that dog retires, you might get it back. Yeah. Usually if the person who has the guide dog yeah. The handler the handler can't because they need another guide dog after that one retires. If they can't keep two dogs keep the other one as a pet, then I think you have the first shot if you raise it as a puppy. Yeah. Can you imagine raising this puppy, giving away, and like ten years later getting it back as Kristen the lion or something? Yeah, that's right. So once your puppy has been raised and it goes to regular school, they're going to basically reinforce and train everything they've already learned and then introduced all the serious parts of schooling. Like here's an intersection, here's a cliff, here's stairs. A lot of the schools have fake intersections built so they can really do hands on training there on the campus. Right. And this is like intensive training. This isn't like whenever some burnout who lives at the school gets around to it. This is intensive training, like every day from multiple people, one of whom the dog trainer, the master trainer is actually assisted by other apprentice trainers. It's a very intensive month long training. Yeah. About six months, I think. Yeah. And that's after a year to a year and a half of puppy training. So by the time a handler gets it, it's a couple of years old. Well, not only is there so there's puppy training, six months of intensive dog school training, and then when the handlers finally matched, there's a whole month where the handler and the dog are trained together. Yeah. The matching process takes a little while, too. They don't just throw any dog with any person, just like adopting any dog. It's got to be a good personality match for you. Right. So Chuck, let's go back to dog training school. We got a little excited. Okay. We're talking school, right? So like you said, a lot of places will have their own intersections built. Simulated. Yeah. The first step before they ever get to that point is learning to walk like a guide dog in a straight line. A little forward ahead of the handler and slightly to the left. Up and to the left. And this is a big one. The guide dog has to be taught to think of the world in human size, not dogs I view any longer, but human size, because apparently they pick up pretty easily. Like, well, there's a garbage can. I need to make a wide arc around the garbage can so that the guy I'm leading doesn't run into the garbage can. But what about that narrow crevasse that I can fit through? No problem. But my blind guy is a big fatty. There's no way he can fit through there. Look at this guy. Exactly. I'm going to have to go around the block because he can't go down this alleyway. Right. A dog has to think in terms of its world like that, and that's enormous to be able to train something like that. And for the dog to be able to learn like that, that's just really my head is off over and over again. I'm just. Not even putting it back on for the rest of this episode. Yeah. The one that really knocked me out was the headroom. The dog, even though it's two and a half feet off the ground, will be able to look up and say, this guy or lady might bang her head on this low hanging beam. I shouldn't go into the sewer. It shouldn't go in there. Stay out of the sewer. So that's just amazing. Like, the dog has to look up and know how tall the owner is and gauge how low that beam is. Yeah. Unreal that matched again with the most spectacular thing in the world. Selective disobedience. Stopping at all curbs, all stairs, learning all of the commands. Go to the right, go to the left. Forward. You? Me and I watched Short Circuit last night. Yeah. Holds up pretty well, except it's just as crappy as it was when it was exactly the Fischer Stevens character. The Indian programmer is so racist because it's a white guy doing, like, the worst Indian impression at Mickey Ronnie and what's it called? I have no idea. Breakfast at Tiffany's. He played Mr. Moto or whatever, the Chinese guy. Oh, yeah, I have to watch that. That very famous racist portrayal. But anyway, they couldn't get Johnny Five to come for Alice Shed. He couldn't until she stumbled upon Forward. She's like, Come here, come this way. Walk. And he was just standing there, and she's like, Forward. And he's like, oh, forward goes forward. So guide dogs and sentient robots, you have to say Forward, too, in the 80s. All right, so we said before, 20% of the puppies are weeded out off the top. Out of those puppies who go to school, about 50% of those are kicked out of school. And then finally, once those remaining are in school, only about 72% of those graduates, so they really weed out. So, say out of 400 dogs that go through puppy training, you got, like, 140 that eventually graduate and go on to be matched with a handler. And there are a few things that will weed a dog out, even if they're pretty good, if they're, like, aggressive toward cats or something that will weed them out. So they really get the cream of the crop. Drug problem, drug problems, gone. They don't want any drug abusers in there. No. So they get the cream of the crop at the end, make sure they're compatible with their handler, train the handler with the people, and then boom, it's got a match made in heaven. Yes. In the article, Tom Harris says, like, if you're taking a first time handler, somebody who hasn't had a guide dog before, right. By the time the handler comes and you're putting it together with the dog now, you're basically in people training mode. Your guide dogs already trained. The process is training the handler in the commands that the dog already knows, training the handler how to walk and basically taking this person and this dog and teaching them how to work as a team. Yes. And the dog has this their new master. They've had their instructor for six months or more. So it takes a little while to adjust to the fact that, hey, this is my new alpha dog. Yeah. And usually it takes, I think, on average about a month. That's about the time that's set aside. And so these nonprofit guide dog schools have facilities for blind people to come live while they're spending a month learning how to work with their guide dogs. Yes. Some of them have dorms. That's pretty cool. That's very cool. And again, we should say all of this is free. The nonprofit group is shouldering all of the financial burden the puppy raisers. They're given a stipend for food. All vet bills are paid by the guide dog school. Everything that has to do with the training and the raising of these dogs is paid for by this nonprofit groups. If you're looking for a place to leave an inheritance yeah. You could do worse than a guide dog school. Yeah. Josh is a one dog school. Right. I'll give you my tax information if you email me directly. So if you want to be an instructor, it's going to vary depending on what school you're going to try and go to. But generally you have to have two to three years experience as an apprentice, supervised apprentice. And then different states have certification processes. You're probably a college graduate. Even though the job doesn't pay, it's still really hard to get this job. People want to do this. It's wait listed a lot of times, not a lot of openings. And it's a tough job to get. It's very demanding physically and emotionally. And it's a real challenge as a trainer, but super rewarding. Sure. Wouldn't you think? Yeah. And if you are interested in becoming a master trainer, from what I understand, the best route to take is to start by being a puppy raiser. Work your way up to apprentice trainer and then to master trainer. And who knows, you may just feel like topping out at puppy raiser. Anybody can do it. File an application. Has to be, you know, pass. Of course. Yeah. They got to screen you. I would imagine you I don't see how you could have a job like a regular. No, it's probably a position. Yeah. Because if you're exposing a dog to five new things a week yes. I guess you could balance the two if it was like, my work and this puppy. But even still, I don't know. I would think you'd probably get bumped off a lot easier. Sure. And they're screening you to make sure you're like a super awesome person. Right. And you're not like, I'm going to explosive to the back of my hand. So you have like, stains on the sleeveless under shirt that you wore to the puppy raising application meeting. Yeah. Give me like, four of them puppies, right. I'll train them good. They may pass you by. Yeah. Anybody can do it, I guess, is what we're trying to say. Almost anybody. Yeah. And I don't know how heavily they screen as far as, like, if you have kids or you can have other dogs, even other puppies, but your puppy has to be, I think, seven months old. And I guess the whole point is they have to deal with those distractions. Right. Anyway, bad thing. Yeah, that's exactly what the mind thought processes behind that. And like we said, they retire generally eight to ten years old, although that doesn't mean they're like, old and feeble. It just means it's probably time to get a new guide dog. Right. They are sharp mentally, typically, but they're starting to slow down a little bit and they have to be able to keep pace with their handlers. So, yeah, I think about eight to ten is the usual age that they're retired. Yeah. And like you said, they'll offer it to the handler. If the handler's like, yeah, I can handle keeping this dog and still get my new guide dog, then great. If not, they may offer to the original puppy, Razor. Or you might be lucky enough. It's another wait list deal. People want to adopt retired guide dogs because they're pretty much the best. Yeah. And you may not have as much time with them, but you're providing them with, like it's almost like taking in an old person and giving them something great in their twilight years. Right. Like just letting them whipped cream right out of the can anytime they want kind of thing. Poop wherever you want. Sure. And they're like, dude, what's wrong with you? Poop into my hand. The dog just thinks you're crazy. I remember I used to work yeah. He asked me to do things like that. I love that blind guy so much more. I can't even mention it on this, I think. All right, you got anything else about guide dogs? This is a little wackier than I thought it was going to be. Sure. Okay, well, if you want to learn all about guide dogs, you can type guide dogs into the search bar athousoforks.com and since I said search bar, it's time for Friends a message break. Hit the jingle. 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 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. Now, Chuck, it's time for listener mail. That's right. And this is Dog centric. It just worked out that way. This is from an Er doctor whose passion is animal rescue, and her name is Jane. Mjnab J-E-N-A-B. Never heard that. J-E-N-A-B. Yeah, jenab. So Jane says, I have a charity knitting site, guys, where I donate 100% of the proceeds from selling my hand ended items to an animal rescue in your neck of the woods. Actually angels among us. Pet rescue in Alpharetta, Georgia. Do you remember them? Yeah. How do I know that name either? Maybe can dogs detect death or can dogs tell when you're going to die? Or can dogs detect illness? Yeah. Remember the Chihuahua that could detect breast cancer? I feel like we talked about that organization in that episode. I think you're right. So, Angels Among US in Alpharetta, they rescued thousands of dogs and cats from kill shelters right before being euthanized and found them loving homes. Last year, my knitting site donated $5,000 to their cause, and this year, my goal is $6,000. And this is like she's just knitting, selling this stuff and giving all the money away. Knitting, knitting, knitting. A few days ago, I lost my 15 year old rescue girl, Rika. Japanese for a beautiful girl. I rescued her when she was eight weeks old, and she was with me through marriage, divorce, medical school, residency, and first four years of practice. She moved with me from Denver to Tulsa to Kansas City to Grand Junction, Colorado, to Mendocito, California, and back to Denver. Her loss has broken my heart, but it has also inspired me to work even harder to accomplish my goal for other homeless animals, including asking for help spreading the word sky. I would love it to make you both some hand knitted hats for the winter. If you think you'd enjoy them, the links to my page on Facebook and Two Angels Among US are below. You can see pictures of the hats, baby hats, dog sweaters, all kinds of things I can net. Thanks for your consideration, but more than anything, thanks for a fantastic podcast that keeps me entertained and educated. So this is from Jane. Jean AB M d. Owner of Jane's Creations. And we would like to challenge people to go out and buy one of her knitted gifts because that money is going to go to Angels Among US pet rescue. That is so cool. So go to our Facebook page, facebook. Comjanescreations. J-A-N-E-S creations, Denver, Colorado. Or just check out angelsamungaspet rescue@facebook.com angelsrescue. And let's help her reach that goal of $6,000, because that's pretty awesome. Let's do it. Let's make it an official SUSK thing. Okay. And hey, you know what? Jerry adopted her cute little dog Tuli from Angels of Mines. Going to drunk combo don't that washed out a guy dogs. Yeah, the tweaker. We have a personal connection, too. Let's do it, Chuck. Let's make it an official SYSK thing to raise some money for this. Yeah. So go to Facebook. Comjanescreations. And Jay and I corresponded with her on email. I was very sad to hear about Rica, but she's got other animals because she's an animal crazy person, just like me. It's nice. Animal crazy people are the best crazy people around. Agreed. If you want us to help try to raise some money for a very worthy cause via you get in touch with us, we're going to have to check you out, make sure you're legit, make sure you're not making money off of other people's goodwill yet. Hecky, and we get a lot of these, so unfortunately, we can't get everyone on the air. But we do our best. We try. Yeah. You can get in touch with us via Twitter at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyteanow. You can send us an email directly to stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and you can join us on our website, which is pretty awesome. It's called Stuffyoushaneau.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.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 daylights longer. And best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music my Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgueref and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're 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." | ||
Is there a scientific formula for funny? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-there-a-scientific-formula-for-funny | Recorded live at the Los Angeles PodFest, this episode of SYSK delves into the longstanding attempt to break down what humans find funny into a scientifically reproducible formula. Join Josh and Chuck as they examine just why this extremely unfunny quest | Recorded live at the Los Angeles PodFest, this episode of SYSK delves into the longstanding attempt to break down what humans find funny into a scientifically reproducible formula. Join Josh and Chuck as they examine just why this extremely unfunny quest | Tue, 26 Nov 2013 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=330, tm_isdst=0) | 41110975 | audio/mpeg | "What if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the awardwinning podcast from iHeartRadio and salesforce.org about tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, US. And global health. Listen in as host Baritoon de Thurston connects with impactful organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky. Plus inspiring individuals like Amy Allison and Juan Acosta to discuss ways to maximize our impact. Listen to Force Multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. 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. Comdealsfordtails. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Stuff You Should Know. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, this is Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and with us, as not always, is all of you guys here at La podcast. It's a little unusual. We've only done this a couple of times before. Yeah. Little south by southwest. Yeah. Comic Con a ComicCon. Yeah. And now Podcast Fest. That's right. And we've got a pretty good crew here. Good group. I can tell just by the looks of you guys. And we've got a very special treat for all of you listeners at home. We're all very excited about it. I think I'm the most excited about it. You're definitely the most excited about it. And today we're talking about chuck, as you were saying, we're going to answer a question. Is there a scientific formula for funny? And I guess we can kind of spoil it now by saying yes and not really. Right. And that was it. That's all. That's the podcast. Thank you. I do have an intro if you're interested in hearing it. Remember our Ghost episode? Yeah, that was pretty bad, so I liked it. We got a lot of crud from Skeptics. Surprised they didn't like our Ghost episode. But there was a guy, a researcher named Richard Wiseman from Hertfordshire University in the UK. Go figurey. Pudding. Yes, richard, do you remember who I'm talking about? I remember the guy. We interpreted his research into ghosts, which is basically used to debunk ghosts. We took what he found as evidence that there may be such things as ghosts, and the Skeptics didn't like that at all. He's done some other stuff, too. So he makes an appearance in this podcast as of right now, because before he was doing ghost stuff, he was doing humor research. Back in 2002, he set up a website called Laugh Lab, and he wanted to find the world's funniest joke. Really? Yeah. Not to be confused with the funniest joke in the world, the Monty Python thing. This is different. And there were 40,000 submissions, I think, 1.4 million hits. And this is prior to social media, so these are pretty respectable numbers, if you think about it. And they found the world's funniest joke. I generally don't know this, so I'm on pins and needles. Do you want to hear? Yeah. Okay. So this guy is out hunting with a friend of his in the woods, and the friend suddenly just drops over, falls to the ground, and the hunter picks up a cell phone and he calls 911 and he says, hey, I think my friend just died. We're out here in the woods hunting. What should I do? And the nine one operator says, well, first let's make sure he's dead. And so the hunter shoots his friend and he goes, okay, now what? That's the world's funniest joke. It's not mine. So it had a mixed reaction, and what we're talking about now is the world's funniest joke. And it got a couple of laughs here, right? Yeah. I think what that proves in the point of this long, rambling intro is that we pretty much can't predict what's funny, what people are going to find funny, and let's talk about exactly why that is. Truckers. Yes. Well, it's subjective, but we'll get to that later. Right? Well, we can just throw our opinions out then and be right. Well, even though there is no formula as of yet, it doesn't mean people haven't tried to find out. Dating all the way back to the first masters of comedy, aristotle and Plato, two very funny guys. They talked a lot about it, actually, surprisingly. And they basically tried to look at what compels people to laugh. And Aristotle, I think he thought that we were the only creatures to laugh. Is that right? Yeah, that was just a human phenomenon, which is wrong. That's right. Because it turns out, and this is the cutest part of the show, too, chimpanzees and orangutangtans and apes not only laugh when you tickle them, but if you go to a baby chimp, you don't even have to make contact. You can just do the little here I come with the fingers and the baby chimp will laugh. Yeah, apparently. And I did look up chimpanzee laughter. And it's not like humans make the Hehis and the ho HOS. There's more of a gasping sound. Apparently, rats do the same thing when you tickle. No, we talked about this in the What's So Funny episode. Remember? Rat tickling? There's videos of it out there. It's like a little high pitched thing. It's the cutest thing you've ever seen. Like somebody tickling a rat, and the rat is like, it's very cute. So, yes, at the very least, laughter or taking tickling is funny. It goes across species. Yeah, and we did cover some of this in the show on did we call it What's So Funny? I think so. Okay. But laughter is definitely a human thing, aside from the primates and the rats, I think. And it consists of variations of one single basic form. It's vowel like sound, repeated every 210 milliseconds. And humans can either hee he like you just did, or a variation of a ho ho, but you don't mix them. Apparently, there has never been someone that laughs, because that would be really weird. You would be messed up if that's how you laugh and your facial muscles get going. There's 15 facial muscles that contract and strain. The Zygomatic major muscle, which is your upper lip, is triggered. If it's really good, you might get the tear ducts going. I know we've all been there. And you're going to be gasping, and your respiratory system is struggling, basically, to breathe at that point. Gasping like a baby chip. Like a baby chip. So that's basically what laughter is. Babies, human babies. Human babies start at about three to four months if they have a sense of humor, I guess. And some researchers have found that we are 30 times more likely to laugh in the company of others than when you're alone. So it's definitely a social thing. And that is because I read that first, that and I was like, clearly they've never watched Portlandia or Eastbound and down alone on the couch at midnight. But, I mean, that's a good point, because when you're watching it by yourself, you may laugh, but you're not necessarily laughing off, I guess, is another way to put it. Yet while I do oh, you do, of course. But that stat, though, was that was the caveat is that's not including TV or any kind of external stimulation, like, if you're just alone and you think a funny thought or see a funny thing, you're way less likely to laugh if you're by yourself. Okay, all right. But whether you are in China or Santa Monica, wherever you are, laughter is going to sound very similar, like you were saying, and there is going to be such things as humor. It's not necessarily going to be the same thing in China as it is in Santa Monica that gets laughs. Like, it would just be dead silent right now if we were in Beijing. Are we in Beijing? The point is, humor is universal, but it's constrained by all these different contexts, like where you are not just space, but also time. Like what guys like Ben Franklin thought was funny. It just kind of falls flat today. Like turkey jokes, apple brandy jokes. What's a turkey joke? He had a couple. Okay. They weren't that good. They don't bear repeating here. But all that put together, gender differences, economic differences, all of these things kind of separate. Like what's funny from what's not funny, depending on who you are. But from Aristotle to Plato was one, wasn't he? Yeah, all the way up to Schopenhauer. Another hilarious dude. Yeah. Kirker. Yeah. Freud, who, by the way, has a great Twitter feed. Kirkardashian. Are you guys familiar with it? Awesome. It's Kirkard's philosophical musings, and he was pretty dark mashed together with Kim Kardashian's contemporary tweets. Just go check it out. It's like you will definitely follow. It not her old timing tweets. No, her contemporary tweets. Got you. I'll give you one. Okay. That's the one. Today it's worth saying. She said, hey, I can't wait until you guys smell my new fragrance coming out this spring. It reeks of the misery of modern life. That was just an average one, too. We got more than a hehe out of this guy. Right on. For me, I've actually blogged about it the other day. Short jokes to me are the best. Brevity is the soul of wit. Or as they said on the Simpsons, brevity is wit. Of course, they had to one up it. And my hero, and many writers heroes is the great Jackandy, who is a real person, by the way. A lot of people think that Deep Thoughts by Jack Andy was just some made up name. Like there's no one named Jackandy. Yeah, it's written by just one of the SNL writers. He was an SL rider, and his name is Jack Handy. And he has been sort of obsessed with creating the perfect short joke over his career. The closest he thinks he's ever come. And it's pretty good, I think the crows seem to be calling his name. Thought to call. Not bad. Jack Cany thinks that's the best short joke he's ever written. Jack Cany knows what he's talking about. So good. And it was in a McSweeney's article that I first read about this from The New York Times. They were talking about the New York Times. That writer thought the best one was. And this one is pretty good, too. I came here in peace, seeking gold and slaves. So for me, the great Jack Andy is trying to get a laugh out of the fewest amount of words I came here and be speaking. Golden slaves, five syllable set up. Five syllable punchline. Beautiful. Clean the master. For me, what's funny is actually, in my research, I ran across a real formula for funny. That was the yes part of the answer. Alcohol plus joke greater than okay, right? So it's x equals F times l plus N times O divided by P. What are those values in there? Well, P actually penalizes you because that's the number of puns that's in the joke. So you get all these points, and then it divided by the number of puns you use. But one of the formulas that builds up the funniness of a joke is how long it takes for the punchline to build and then finally pay off. So it's like pretty much the opposite of it. So even Jack Handy and whoever came up with this formula can't agree on how to make something funny or to figure out what's the funniest. Yeah, well, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it, clearly. And we've seen a lot of I know you go to see a lot of stand up comics a lot, and you're really into it. And through our job, we've gotten to see a lot, and it's really fascinating, especially when you meet some of them, to see them working this stuff out, especially if you see them more than once doing kind of the same material and the subtle changes. I think it's really fascinating. And I've been writing a stand up act for, like, ten years. How's it going? It's going pretty good. Care to do so? No, not at all. Do you have an audience? No. Okay. I don't blame you. I wouldn't have either. Yeah, I would have not even brought it up. I know. There was a writer named Deborah Solomon for New York Times Magazine. The s Chris Rock. And I'm not going to do my Chris Rock. Don't worry. What's funny, and his reply was, and it kind of says it all, is, you want to know what's funny? Is thinking about it. What's not funny? Yeah. Chuck Blue. That joke. It's not a joke. Yeah. You want to know what's not funny? Is thinking about it. Thank you for that. Or talking about it, which is what we're doing. So stop laughing, because this is not funny, apparently. That's right. Right. All so we are not the only people who have ever said, can you figure out what's funny? Scientifically? There's actually a whole study, it's called humor studies, and strangely enough, it's not taken very seriously among psychologists, although there's an equal dedicated amount of work applied to it using the scientific method. You have the International Society for Humor Studies. Really? They've been around since the 80s. They're trying to keep the flame going, and apparently ever since we started putting people into the wonder machine and asking them questions or telling them jokes, we've gotten, like, a lot more scientific basis of what's going on. We'll get into that in a little bit. Yeah, that's the fMRI or the MRI machine, the one, you know, that's our little name for it, though. But prior to this, prior to the wonder machine being rolled out, people have just kind of it's basically been up to philosophers to figure out what's funny, and they've come up with some pretty good theories. And there's a big three, I think as many I saw as many as 100 theories of humor. Oh, really? But then it's been whittled down to a big three, like, pretty much arbitrarily or else maybe these three are the right ones. Who knows? But I think these kind of hit on it. Number one is the superiority theory. Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, they all sort of focus on this dark side of comedy, and we've all been there. Laughing at someone else's expense sometimes can be quite a good time. It's pretty much like this theory would be supported by Dwight Schrute, like watching him or listening to him, for sure. And I might have told this on another show, but one of the funniest things I ever saw bless you. Bless you was in college in Athens, Georgia. I saw a guy faceplant really bad on campus one day. You're already laughing. Did you laugh? Well, I laughed at this. The dude fell, busted. Face forward. Books went spilling out on the sidewalk, and I swear to God, immediately the guy went like this and opened up a book on the sidewalk like he was reading. And I was driving, and I saw this happen, and I wanted to pull the car over and say, dude, you are the funniest person I've ever seen in my life. Because it was just his instinct to play it off like that. And that was, like, 17 years ago, and it stuck with me this day. I don't know who that guy was, but I want to meet him still. If you're out there, way to go, man. Yeah, but I don't know if I would have laughed at his expense had he not done that, because although the America's Funniest Home Video effect I'll call it kicked in the nuts joke or not, that is very much the superiority theory in action. It is. Or it is pretty much the converse theory that says the same thing but has a kind of a different take of it's called inferiority theory. It's like the person whoever came up with this is like the person who raises the last bet by a dollar on the Price Is Right. Superiority theory. How about inferiority theory? What they came up with was that we see in that guy falling. You don't feel better about yourself. You see part of yourself and him. Okay, like, you could have just as easily fallen or whatever. Yes, but I wouldn't have been cool enough to play it off like I was reading a book. I would have, like, picked up my books and ran home. Don't laugh at me. Right. So that's where the admiration kicks in. All right. 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@ibmcom this July on Disney Plus. Don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios Doctor Strange and the multiverse of badness new episodes of Marvel Studios Ms. Marvel, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series, and zombies. Three plus don't miss National Geographics. America the beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. Are we on to number two? We are. We're into release theory, which is Freud's theory, which means it's wrong. Man, you've had a bone to pick with Freud since I've known you. I like Freud. Malcolm Gladwell. I liked, see, I just started twitching involuntarily. I like Freud as a person. I liked what he was trying to do. I just think he was just kind of full of it. All right, so what did Freud say he wrote about joking? Believe it or not, this is actually his theory that I agree with the most. Probably his theory of humor is really theory in that I totally agree. It's a build up of wait for sexual energy that we release surprise in some way. Bless you. This live podcasting is funny. It's like a whole other sneaky element to it. We're getting out sexual energy, intellectual energy, whatever's, pent up through laughter, which makes sense to a certain degree. There are things that you laugh at, you can point to and say, may have been right here. Yeah. Or I think self deprecation might fall into that a little bit, too. Like taking the things that make you feel bad, making a joke about it. I've lived my whole life this way, basically. Yeah. Or anyone that listens to Howard Stern. He's been joking about his small penis for 25 years. Who knows if that's true? I think it probably is, but he's definitely made a point of joking about it for forever. 25 year joke, man. That means it's definitely true. So that's the relief theory, and I think I put a lot of stock in that, for sure. Well, yeah. I mean, it's like adding levity to a situation, and it works like you can defuse a tense situation by making people laugh, and they may even laugh involuntarily. So, relief theory. Yeah. And every teen movie in history has some dude in it that tries to get out of a fight by making jokes. Right. Which was also me. Yeah. Although I wasn't even close to getting in fights, so that's not really true. That's because you could talk your way out of them early on. Who would want to beat up Chuck, wouldn't you have to be the meanest guy in the world? You would not. You like to do much? I think Emily might want to slug at me every now and then. Yeah. Okay. So this is the last one in the big three. Yeah. Incongruity theory. Yeah. And this one's really a really big part of comedy. Forever Through Today. Forever Through Today is edited that out. Emmanuel Kant said in his tome, the Critique of Judgment, laughter is an affectation arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. So the modern version of that is incongruity resolution. Basically, you're not getting what you expect. So, like, a punchline takes you by surprise. Right. Like that classic. How do you keep an elephant from charging? Take away his credit card. Hi, again. That wasn't my joke. I'm just giving examples here to laugh. That's sort of the basis of what some say is the greatest joke the Aristocrats. Did you guys see that documentary? For those of you who don't know, there's probably, like, two of you. The idea is that a family goes into a talent agent and says they have a family act. And then the point of the joke is to the nastiest, most blue comedy you can. And it really gets out of hand if you watch this documentary, which is the point. And at the end, the punchline is what do you call yourself? The Aristocrats. And it's not so much about the punchline, but that's definitely the incongruity, right? Yeah. I think that's probably the basis of humor, is incongruous. It's an expectation you weren't expecting. Well, and those are the best jokes to me, is you think you see it coming and you get surprised at the end. Exactly. There's another name for something like that. It's called and I didn't even know this was a word till today apara proddokian. Has anyone ever heard that one person? No. No. Awesome. I just made it up. That is a figure of speech where the second part causes the audience to rethink the first part, and it has been going on since aristotle, for instance. He said on his feet he wore blisters. That's one example. Groucho Marks. I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it. That's the kind of joke yeah. The great Homer Simpson. That was unexpected. If I could just say a few words, I'd be a better public speaker. And Mitch Hedbergh, who I know you love the late, great Mitch Hedburgh. I haven't slept for ten days because that would be too long. That's a good mitch. Hedberg too. Thanks. I did some heroin before I came in. Right. Yeah. Wow. That is not funny. Actually, you know what? We're going to be getting into that. That was a perfect setup. Getting into heroin? No. Joking about things. That defy what you should be joking about. Yeah. It is like someone dying of the hair went over to it, right? Too soon. That was, like, ten years ago. Thank you, buddy. So you take the big three and you take a little bit of this and you take a little bit of that, and you put them together, and you can basically explain, like, just about any bit of humor after the fact. That's the key here, by, I guess, just mixing them up. Right. So you have, for example, the benign violation theory, which is what you're talking about. Like, it's the idea that you have a little bit of incongruity, a little bit of superiority. You mix them together and throw in a pun or two. Right. You can come up with a joke that'll make people laugh. But there's also a line, apparently. It's kind of crossed it with Mitch Headbird jokes. That's the line. And once you cross that line, then you quickly go from humor to raising the higher of an audience. Right? Yeah. They want to do yeah, you should keep a safe psychological distance, is what they say, where the humor isn't so real and the whole too soon thing is totally true. There's a certain amount of time, and it's different for everyone. And that line is different for everyone. That's why it's dangerous to be a comic who kind of skirts around those kind of jokes. Yeah. Ask Gilbert Godfrey. What did he do? He tweeted a joke about I don't even remember what it was about the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, I think. Too soon. It was like, while it was going on, he made a joke about it. And he used to be the affluent duck, and he's not anymore, which is weird. It raises a point. Like, I feel he likes the Afflict ducky. Yeah. Which I imagine paid pretty well. You know, he doesn't really talk like that. Oh, I know it's not very well known, but Howard Stern has him on a telephone message that he played on the show where he was like, hey, Gary, this is Gilbert. And I just wanted to check on the time. And I was like, no way, because he never breaks character. He's famous for always being that guy. I've never heard them speak otherwise. Yeah, it's pretty weird. Yeah, I can imagine. And on the Too Soon thing, I was watching Portlandia with Emily the other night, and they have a sketch I don't know if you've seen it, about 911, where Armison they were talking about what you were doing during 911 when you got the news. And he was like, Where was I? Heard about it. What was I doing? And he's like, oh, I was in New York. That's where I was. And he's like, and what happened? 33 planes or something? No, I know what it was. I know what it was. And I was dying. And Emily was like, I don't know. I think the difference is he's making fun of people. The absurdity of someone who would not know where they were 911, not 911 itself. Right. So that slight difference, I think, is what made it funny. Exactly. There was also a pretty good story about Groupon Super Bowls in 2011. Did you hear about those? No. So, like, for example, they had Timothy Hutton talking about the plight of Tibetans and how they are all basically just screwed on a daily basis. But they also make a really good fish curry, and you can get a Groupon for it in Chicago for like, $20. You guys are the only ones who thought it was funny, apparently, because Groupon was like everyone's like, what are you doing, Groupon? It's like their big debut. Tiffany Hunt was just like, oh, man. Right? Why did I sign? It seemed funny at the time. I was just starting to come back. Right? Yeah. Not anymore. Falcon. Or was he Snowman? Oh, boy. Which one was he? Anyone know he was Falcon? I got it right off the bat. To me. He's turkey 182. Is that who that was? I need to see that movie. All right, so where are we? Maybe let's get into the science of the whole thing. Oh, wait. Well, if we're going to do that, we should chuck, I think, maybe stop here for a message break. 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@ibmcom this July on Disney Plus. Don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios, Doctor Strange and the multiverse of badness new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series, and Zombies. Three plus don't miss National Geographics. America the beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. So now we're back. We actually do that. We beat for Jerry. That gets her attention because she's doing like ten other things while she edits us. Sorry, back. Okay, Chuck. Yes. Let's get back to it, shall we? We should with the science of it. Right? So as we said earlier with the fMRI, when you put somebody into it, it shows you where all the blood flow is. Going because it shows you where the oxygen is in the brain, and hence you can surmise what is going on, what region is lighting up when you activate it, doing certain things. And one of the things that they like to do is tell people jokes. Right? Yeah. Or have them watch, like, Seinfeld or something. Right. Which I hope you're a fan of. If you're in that study, how do you not laugh at Seinfeld? Like, what kind of soulless person doesn't like Seinfeld? No. Somebody recently I talked to said that their father didn't like it at all, hated it, and just said he didn't think it was funny. Yeah. And I said, his soul is dead inside. And he said, yes, it is. He's seen too much or something. Something's wrong. So Seinfeld and the Simpsons in one study, right? Yeah. Two pretty good picks, I would say. So what they found was that our brains actually go through a two part process. When we hear a joke, there's joke detection and then there's joke appreciation. But apparently this is what's going on in the brain. Well, yeah, it depends on the joke, for sure. But the joke detection part is probably the most important because you have to know that you're hearing a joke and your brain is priming you for the appreciation part. But first you have to figure it out. And all this is going on in the left hemisphere. The reason it all happens in the left hemisphere is that that's where we sort through novel information and compare it to experiences we've already had. So when you're hearing something like, how do you stop an elephant from charging? You think, okay, well, I've got an image of an elephant charging. I'm ready to go. Come on, what's coming after this? Plus, you're probably trying to like me. I try to figure out a joke sometimes when it's a set up punchline like that. Right. And I'll bet this is a lot about you as a person. I can't wait until they have MRIs that show what you're thinking. What, you mean, like when you head up display behind you? Pretty much, yeah. Like a thought bubble man. I knew that's what you were thinking. Also, it's a little more blue at our live ones. I don't know if you've caught that or not, but what would you think of if someone says, how do you stop an elephant from charging? I'd quickly try and figure it out. I think that's just my rider side. And then I probably wouldn't be able to and then I would hear the punchline and go, that's not very funny. Right. Well, it's not a very funny punchline. It isn't. But once you're hearing that the brain is primed, I'm sure there's some sort of Q. It didn't get into this in this article at all, but there's got to be some sort of queue that there's a joke coming for sure. Like, if you walk up to somebody and say, like, how do you stop an elephant from charging? Probably just the very rich. Right, that's funny too. And then the guy just lays down is like blindly trying to read a book on the ground. So the left hemisphere of your brain is working over time to try to figure out this joke. And depending on what type of joke it is, different regions are going to be involved. Yeah, I guess if you like the joke is in the amygdala. Well, that's the reward. So if you like the joke, right, or not, right? Yeah, okay. Yeah. Depending on the type of joke. First over here where the gears are going, like your broker's area is involved with language, so a pun is going to make that area work. And broke his area just goes, yeah, there's no amygdala pay off on that. Some people love puns, though. I don't get people like that. Our former colleague Chris Palette, he was famous for his pond. Oh, I know, yes, it was bad. I used to be like, stop. And he somehow come up with a pun from stop. So you got broke his area. A guy walks into a bar type of joke, we'll get the frontal lobe going. That's used with higher reasoning. Apparently those jokes are very high minded, typically, or whatever. What else? The frontal lobe, if you have damage in your frontal lobe, they have found that it can prevent you from understanding jokes and punchlines, which is really sad. And they apparently tend to prefer slapstick comedy more because you don't have to process as much. Which I think might have something to do with America's Funniest Home Videos. We're all slightly better. I'm not saying everyone that wants that show has frontal lobe damage, but maybe it's something you can kind of turn on and off depending on whether America's Funniest Home Videos is on. Yeah, maybe so. Did you know that two of the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000 write for that show? No way. Yes. And you can tell too, because the quality stepped up quite a bit. Oh, they write for it now? I believe so, yeah. Within the last few years they were writing. I think Josh just admitted to recently watching that show. It's true. I like that show. I said it at the variety show. I like ridiculousness too. I just like that kind of stuff. Yeah, turn your brain off. Yeah, but my frontal lobe works just fine. Everybody. Well, you're an intellectual guy, so that doesn't surprise me sometimes. I think if you're like super intellectual, you might enjoy just like super bass comedy occasionally, right? Yeah, it's true. It's a theory. But I read about this study that came up with the idea that brain damaged people can't especially frontal lobe, he said, can't really appreciate jokes because they can't find the punchline. And one of the ways they tested them was they showed him a joke on paper. And it was basically like a kid's interviewing for a summer job. And the employer says, well, we'll give you $50 to start, and then after a month, we'll up at the 75. And then the brain damaged patients were to pick out what the punchline was. There was. Great. I'll take it. When do I start? That's not really yet. That's kind of boring response. Then there was the punchline, which is, okay, well, I'll come back in a month. Again, not my joke. And then the ones that the brain damaged patients picked typically was, hey, boss, your nose is too big for your face. And can you just see, like, the person administering this test just holding back tears that they were picking that one, but that's what they came up with. You can't really get the punchline. It takes a little bit of thought. That's really sad. So when we do get a joke and get that payoff, our old friend Dopamine is what's coming into play. That reward is a shot of dopamine via the amygdala that we talked about. And it also explains why it's hard to laugh when you're blue when you're sad. I know everyone that's had a friend or relative or family member that's really down in the dumps. You try and cheer them up and sometimes it is just impossible. Yeah. Why would you get so mad? Why was I just laughing? Because you said, surely all of you have had a friend or family member who's been down in the dungeon. Did I sound like a Hallmark card? Yeah, a little bit. It just made me laugh, that's all. Okay. Yeah, but yeah, sometimes it's literally impossible to cheer someone up because the mesolimbic reward system basically shuts off the dopamine valve and you're not able to laugh. So it's like their brain is working through the joke. Yeah. But they just can't possibly find it funny because their mesolympic system is not functioning. And then you might have this sad exchange which is, didn't you get it? And they go, no, I got it. Or when they're like, that was funny. Yeah, but I think it also explains, too, when you're able to finally reopen that, and this is just my own theory, too, sometimes when you have that laugh that you really need after being depressed, and sometimes you just can't stop laughing, that hysterical thing takes over. And I think it's because you just get that rush of dopamine again, because your body craves it. Yeah, like cigarettes. And when it does pay off, you've got these special helper cells called spindle cells that just shoot it across your brain. So if you see somebody laughing, like uncontrollably, their brain is just basically like zapping itself over and over and over again until spindle cells just kind of peter out, I guess. Yeah, I guess we're at the point now where we talk about the uncomfortable topic of men and women and why some people like Christopher Hitchens don't think women are funny. Take it. Chuck Hitchens, God rest his soul, was on record in a very famous Vanity Fair article. What was it called? Why Women Aren't Funny. I think so. Which is a great way to get a lot of clicks, I guess. Yeah. And he theorized that women just weren't as funny, and I disagreed. I think my wife, for one, is hysterical. Well, here's how he explained it. He said that women don't have the same need to be funny that men do. For men, it's a tool for reproduction to attract a mate by being funny. And he was saying women just don't need that. I get that. That was pretty much the basis of his argument. So it wasn't like he just wrote down, like, women aren't funny, don't even play. Right. It was a little more thought than that. And at Washington University School of Medicine, they actually did some studies again with the Wonder Machine, and they did find some interesting differences between the sexes. Females tend to pick apart verbiage more and derive a more potent, mesolimbic reward response when there was a punchline. So I think the general point is that guys may laugh more, women laugh harder, which I've seen in action. Yeah. Because guys are kind of dopey and they will laugh at anything. Right. Yeah. But I think women pick it apart more, maybe a little more intellectual about it, but tend to get a lot more out of a joke than a man would in the end. Right. When their spindle cells go crazy, they go crazy. Oh, yeah. That's the magic formula, my friend. It is x equals times L plus N times O divided by P. I thought you're going to say chardonnay. No, that works, too. There's statistics, actually. I don't know if it proves that men are funnier. It shows that women get fewer laughs than men, statistically. So if you have a woman speaking to an audience, she's going to get well, the man is going to get 126% more laughs out of that same audience than a female speaker will. Yeah. And a female speaker, especially to an all male audience, will get even less laughs. It's science. Yeah. This is not us saying that not our jokes and this is not our position. Yes. They're turning on us. I feel it. Can you open that door? Quick exit. So again, Christopher Hitchens himself wasn't like we are saying it's not like women are funny, but I think there's tons of great female comedians. Well, he made that point, too. He didn't say tons, but I mean, he did make a point. He's saying that you can't possibly say that there are no funny women. There's been some really great ones, but I think he was saying just in general here's why. Right. So I think the reason we bring that up is there are gender differences in humor. Age differences. Yeah. Like we said it's very much based on context. Yes. So it's like age, cultural differences, gender, it all comes into play. Not everyone's going to find everything funny. National differences. Like, apparently we Americans. Everyone here American. No. Okay, we're going to let you know a little secret. Americans tend to think that irony, humor, that's not really like, mean is funnier. Yeah. Like more positive stuff. Whereas the Brits think self deprecation and mean humor is way funnier, too. Yes. Sarcasm. Yeah. So you put a Britain and American in the same room telling the same joke, one of them is probably not going to laugh unless you're a master at mixing those two things together. I like British humor. Yeah, I like it, too. It depends. Although I shouldn't say this. Well, you have to now. I don't get Eddie Isard. I know everybody loves Eddie. It's what you need to know. That's it. I'm not sure I know what that means. Apparently it's an Eddie as a reference. Oh, is that one of his bits? Yeah. Okay. That's kind of funny. Yeah. What's your name? Lance. You should just do Eddie. Izard material. Maybe it's the presentation that's bothering me. Or the dress. I'm going to give another shot now. Yeah, you should. That beasting is great. Lance Isard just got his brother Eddie extra views. So recent research on Plato and Aristotle's theories abound. The ancient Greeks claim that people laughed at malice of others misfortune. Yeah, that superiority thing. Yeah. So it goes way back. People have always laughed at people that faceplant, apparently. Or get kicked in the balls. Right. It's good old school humor, I'm telling you. Blue or they've also found that bosses, and this is kind of a no brainer, they call it the brown nose effect. Bosses tend to joke more. And if you are an inferior not inferior, what would you call it? I guess just an employee. The high man on the totem pole. What would you say? Subordinate. There you go. If you're the subordinate, then you're going to laugh more at your boss's jokes just because you're trying to get in there, you're brown nosing. Well, I saw in that same study, they were saying, like, that's possibly an explanation, but they also think that it's more involuntary rather than a strategy. Like the uncomfortable, not necessarily uncomfortable. It's almost like you're more primed to laugh at everything when you are at a low station in a given social situation. Because when you laugh, people tend to like you more. You have a sense of humor, you attract more friends. So the more friends you have, the more allies you have. The more allies you have, the higher your station rises. So they were saying they didn't think it was like an actual strategy, that you just can't help but titter nervously or you can negotiate yourself. Maybe I'm not I'm just saying other people are. And finally, the last thing I have is that they did some studies on what people do find funny and just daily life. And it's usually not jokes and it's usually not a comedy routine you're watching. It's everyday life. Apparently, only 11% traces back to an actual joke, and 72% of daily laughter is just laughing at life and the people around you on a daily basis. Right. And supposedly it's not even funny. Apparently, the average person laughs 17.5 times a day. I don't know if we said that. No, we didn't. But I wonder about that half laugh. It's just a ho. Or he wasn't so great, but we'll count it. But this guy named Robert Provine, who's a laughter humor researcher, he said that most of the stuff that precedes laughter in daily life, which is called most pre laugh dialogue, is, quote, like that of an interminable television situation comedy scripted by an extremely ungifted writer. It's basically just like laughing at this dumb stuff that's not even really funny. It's just kind of said by somebody who you want to like you. Apparently that's the basis of humor. There's the SYSK theory. Boom. You got anything else? I'm done, man. All right, so you want to give our familiar sign off here? Yes. So if you guys are interested in this kind of thing, you can find this article on how stuff works.com by typing. Is there a scientific formula for funny in the handy search bar? And since I said handy search bar, it's time for do you have any listener mail? No, I should have brought one. Well, that's it, then, everybody. Thank you very much for coming out and checking out our live podcast. We hope you learned some funny stuff, laughed a little, loved a little. There you go. Thanks. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. 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 Hardstarkk, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You 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 TECTO Pep Supplies plus and select Neighborhood Pet stores." | ||
401d7090-121b-11eb-ba6a-8bdd3d50fbdf | Short Stuff: Bloody Mary | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-bloody-mary | In this edition of Short Stuff we may accidentally conjure a deadly spirt, so look out! | In this edition of Short Stuff we may accidentally conjure a deadly spirt, so look out! | Wed, 20 Oct 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=293, tm_isdst=0) | 12519171 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, and we're joined today by our resident ghost, Bloody Mary. That's right. We just did a weird thing and recorded our ad th first. So I just had the urge to say, if you like Bloody Mary, you're going to love this Bloody Mary. You won't love Bloody Mary, because that is a scary kids game. It seems like a lot of girls do this, but I know some boys who have done it as well. I have. Where you stand in the mirror, and there are variations we'll talk about. You look in the mirror, it's a darkened room. Maybe you got a candle going, if you're lucky. And you say the words Bloody Mary a certain amount of times, it varies. Sometimes 13 per region. Right. Sometimes you turn in a circle 13 times. I've never heard of that. I would fall over. That's the Parma, Ohio method. And then, depending on how skilled you are at your incantations, bloody Mary may kill you, may reach through the mirror and pull you into the netherworlds, may claw your face and eyes out. Yeah. Or you may just die of fright or maybe nothing at all. Or she may just be standing there, glowering at you, really mad that you brought her to this mirror, but you can't do anything about it. Right? Like these kids. Yeah. Either way, you're going to go running out of this bathroom and you're going to be talking to your friends about what you saw, and we'll talk about it later. But in a weird way, like, they're correct when they say they saw something strange, right? Possibly. Okay, we'll go with yes. So what's the deal? Where did this thing come from? So that's the other thing about it. It's not just a game, but because there's, like a legend wrapped around it, and the legend is kind of evolving and changing regionally and over time, like you were saying, it actually constitutes a piece of American folklore. They're pretty sure it's American, right. And they've actually been studying it here and there, like, kind of sporadically. But the first person to actually put pen to paper about it was a folklorist named Janet Langloy. That's how I'm going with Langloy. Great last name. Look wise, tough to say. You know what? I prefer Langlois. You could say it like that. It's even harder to say. Lang Loawa. Right. It almost looks like Chami, but with an L. Oh, man. Chami confused me for the first 30 something years of my life. Why is everybody saying it like that? I knew what a shammy was, but I never put the two together. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. But this lady's last name is not Shami. It's Langloy. That's right. She's a folklorist. Yeah. And I think she sort of just I mean, it was around, but she was the first person to kind of start writing about it a little bit. And it turns out, like, because it's regional, there are a bunch of different names besides Bloody Mary. Hail Mary is one. Mary Worth is hysterical. That's a full on comic strip. It is one of the weirdest comic strips ever. Yeah. What was the deal with that? It's like Mark Trail. I don't know. At least Mark Trail was appealing to kids. Nothing about Mary Worth had any appeal to kids. They would just be like, what is this? I don't understand any of this. It was a comic strip, a soap opera comic strip for grownups. Very bizarre. Is it for grown ups? Totally. And then there was also, I think, apartment three. E was a very similar kind of comic strip. I might have the apartment number wrong, but it was like that. No, thank you. Give me Garfield. Give me Beetle. Bailey. Give me wizard of Ed. Don't forget high and lowest. Bloom county. I can do this all day. Remember Zits did a comic featuring us? Oh, yeah, of course. That was awesome. But Bloody Mary has nothing to do with any of that. But we should do it on comic strips. That's a great idea. I can't believe we haven't I knew we did comic books, but not comic strips. We should definitely check. That is a great idea. We'll wind up out here with a few more names that I like. Black Angus is another. And then why did they say Black Angus? Black Agnes. Right. So all of them are they are different names for the same spirit that you can conjure from your mirror if you do this right. And a few of those names kind of stand out. A couple of them, really. The first one. Bloody Mary. That's the one I always heard. And if you read about Bloody Mary, a lot of the people who are writing about Bloody Mary traced her to Queen Mary I of England, who ruled from 1555 to 58. And she was actually called Bloody Mary because she was a Protestant killer. That's right. She ordered the death of many Protestants to be burned at the stake and other grizzly forms of death. But here's the thing. It's probably not on account of her that we say Bloody Mary because she wasn't doing the actual killing. And then the folklore, it's really Bloody Mary doing the killing and she bathed in the blood of children and stuff like that. Right. So that doesn't really jibe. It more jobs with somebody else, a woman by a totally different name. Elizabeth Bathry, the Countess of Blood, I think they call her, who actually is reputed to have killed many peasant girls herself and actually did probably bathe in their blood. And she may actually be the most prolific serial killer in history. So there's like maybe we're looking at, like, a mishmash of different names, traits, characters, or it could just be totally coincidental. They don't really know where this thing came from. Is what I'm saying. It was based on Mary Worth, the soap opera comic strip for adults. Right. She just got really boring as the comic strip went on. She's like, no, I might as well start killing kids. Should we take a break? I think so. All right, let's take a break, and we'll talk a little bit more about some of the variations. And believe it or not, there's sort of a little real science to this one too. Okay, Chuck, you talked about variations. One thing you can do is spin in a circle 13 times. Another one is you can chat her name a certain amount of times. Another variation is where you actually prick your finger and make it bleed, and then you press fingers with the person you're doing this with and chant, don't do that, kids. It's hardcore. Yeah. And then there's also saying, I believe I saw in a few variations that you say, like, Mary Worth, I believe. Mary Worth, I believe. And that's the chant and a kind of matronly, well dressed, animated woman appears in your mirror and says, what's the bother? This is kind of thing that's done at slumber parties and sleepovers. The kids all think they see something. They get scared, their imagination takes over. But supposedly there's a little real science to this and that. In 2010, a researcher out of Italy named Giovanni Caputo did a little experiment where he had people staring into a mirror in a dimly lit room for ten minutes and write down what they saw. And out of the 50 test subjects, very robust, 66% of people said they saw huge deformations of their face. 48% also saw fantastical and monstrous things. And other people said they saw the face of a parent or the face of an animal or an old woman or a child. Yeah. And I was looking at why that might happen and apparently wouldn't. One explanation is that your brain becomes sensitized to the visual information it's getting, and because it doesn't need, it's already judged this image at nonread, and it's not food or anything like that, it stops filling in the details. And so visually, a deformation occurs in your image of what you're seeing in the mirror because you're staring at it right so long. Yes. So there actually is science to this idea where the chanting of Bloody Mary doesn't necessarily do anything, although, I don't know, maybe it puts you in something of a translate state where this happens on a deeper level or something. But at the very least, we realize that the brain stops filling in details, so a deformed version of, like, a face can see. And then you also add in our innate need to fill in patterns or define patterns and to see faces and things. So maybe we start inputting stuff in those missing areas, and it comes out all monstrous or baby like. But wouldn't you need for this effect to take place to do it for like, ten minutes and not just say Bloody Mary three times. Yes. I think that's part of the game is you're supposed to stay in there for longer than however long it takes to say Bloody Mary three times. Like, you maybe use chant Bloody Mary three times, and then you just stare until you just are scared and run out of the bathroom. You know what game is a lot more fun than that at a slumber party? How about that game where you go in a closet with someone and, I don't know, kiss in the dark? Sure. Or Light as a Feather, stiff as a Board is pretty awesome. Yeah. But I was probably more scared of kissing a girl in a closet than I was encanting buddy Mary. Right? There was this great article on this. Well, a couple of them. I found some on Penn State universities like Folklore Site. Mental Floss had something good, and Snopes did too. But in that Mental Floss article, they turned up a possible providence of this game and linked it to a Robert Burns poem from, I think, 1786, where I think the poem is called Halloween, and Robert Burns is basically giving you party ideas that your next Halloween gathering in the 18th century. And one of them is what girls can do to look in the mirror to see who they'll marry. Right. And the idea for mental flaws and others is maybe just the word Mary got kind of twisted up over the years. And that's where that came from. That's part of it. And then another part is so you're looking in the mirror and you're combing your hair and or eating an apple at the same time, and then you'll see in the mirror over your shoulder the face of the person you're going to marry, but you could also see a skull, and that means you're going to die before you have a chance to marry. And so it's possible that that and then Mary kind of turned into Bloody Mary because of the skull. That's one explanation for where this came from. There's another one from 1998 that is super 1998. Yeah. That it might have something to do with some kind of ritual for when an adolescent girl enters her mindset. Which is called what? Chuck. Monarchy. Right. That's right. That word really stuck with me over the years. Yeah, I did. We both learned that one together. And it makes sense in a really kind of figurative way. Like, the whole game is really preoccupied with blood. That's one. Sure. The age of the girls who tend to play these games kind of aligns. Yeah, it's definitely considered a girls game and like a late prepubescent, early adolescent age time frame. So that would be the right time for this game to be played, too. Yeah. And the last part of that one is something we talked a lot about on our episode about that many years ago was we're kind of like one of the only cultures that doesn't have some kind of ritual right of passage for girls entering that phase of their life. Right? Yeah. And then this kind of suggests that girls still need that anyway, even if they don't live in a culture that has it. And this stands in some really weird, roundabout way, which I just find fascinating. Very interesting. Very interesting indeed. So that's Bloody Mary, everybody, and we're one step closer to Halloween, so beware. In the meantime, short stuff is out like a bat in the night. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
86d10a80-3b0e-11eb-9699-4f8ffbf11c4e | How the Magna Carta Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-magna-carta-worked | In 1215 at Runnymede (doo dah, doo dah) the nobles and the king agreed to end a rebellion against the power of the English throne. While the treaty that emerged contained all sorts of arcane Medieval details, it also contained the seeds of Western liberty and civil rights. | In 1215 at Runnymede (doo dah, doo dah) the nobles and the king agreed to end a rebellion against the power of the English throne. While the treaty that emerged contained all sorts of arcane Medieval details, it also contained the seeds of Western liberty and civil rights. | Thu, 09 Sep 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=252, tm_isdst=0) | 46141517 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the Purdcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there somewhere. And this is Stuff you should no, the Purdcast. Did I say that? I think so. You sounded like Kristen Wiggs, target lady character. I'm not familiar. Welcome to the paired coast. Oh, no, wait, that's a different character. What character was that? I think that was Mike Myers. Scottish guy? No, not that jerk. I don't know who then I'm blanking. People are screaming at their radio. I get it. Is that well known of a character? They're Am FM radio. How is this coming through? It's like when a 50 year old podcast it's true. A 50 year old is podcasting before very ears right now. That's right, that's me. You can't deh me. Martin Scorsese running circles around the younger ones. Chuck so that's awesome. Chuck, have you ever seen the Simpsons? Oh, boy. You got one for me. Did you ever see the one about the murder house where Marge becomes a realtor? You mean a certified realtor? Yes, of course. I don't know. Remind me. Oh, so anyway, Marge becomes a realtor and I think with Lionel Hutz's realty company. Oh, boy. And it's like a kind of like a Glen Gary Glen Ross spoof is like that little subplot, but she tries to sell a house that a multiple murder was committed in to Flanders and his family back when Maud was still alive. And she doesn't tell him it's a murder house and feels like a tremendous amount of guilt and then finally like, confesses. And I don't think they end up buying the house anyway, I don't remember, but it's a pretty good one that has almost nothing to do with anything. I could have just stopped right there. Where Marge became a realtor because she's taking the realty test and Lisa comes along and teaches her how to remember things using mnemonic devices. And in one example she gives, she says you can put like something you're trying to remember to a song. Like in 1215 at Ronnie me duda duda the nobles and the king agreed. That's great. That is one of my go to references for the Magna Carta. You know what? Mine is funny enough. And that was a tortured intro. No, I thought it was great. Simpson's reference is what it was. I thought it was fantastic. Well, thank you. And I don't remember that episode and I've never heard that little jingle. It's a great vintage classic. Simpsons. When I think of Magna Carta, I think of Johnny Dangerously. The movie with Michael Keaton. The very funny spoof movie. Because at one point I think someone is on death row and they're being read fake last rights by a fake priest as they walk down the green mile. And they're just sort of making up Latin terms. And he goes, magna Carta master chargea. And I saw that in the theater when I was, whatever, like ten or eleven, and I've remembered that ever since. Yeah, it gets in your head, those two words. They go really well together. They have a tendency to stick around. And then also you get the idea when you kind of like perky little ears up about this magnitude thing, that it was kind of pretty important. People tend to put a lot of stock into it. Yeah. And now I'm looking, and I can't even see what Magna Carta. What does it mean? Great charter. The great charter, of course, yeah. And technically, the Magna Carta, what we're talking about, we'll get into the little details and everything in a second, but it's called the Magna Carta Libertarium. Right. So it's the great charter of liberties is what it really is. And a lot of people, like I was saying, they put a lot of stock into they basically say that this is the wellspring, at least in the UK and America and by extension Australia and Canada, of human rights, of civil rights, of the basic rights that every citizen has. It all kind of came from this document and that before that, there really wasn't that kind of stuff. And you have to really narrow your focus here because in this time period we're talking about around the 12th and 13th century, C E, like, England was still kind of figuring out which way it was going. At the same time, if you went to the Arab world, you would find half a million people living in some cities while there was like 10,000 people living in London. If you went to the west, to modern day St. Louis, the Kahokia Mound, civilization had like 150 people living there. China had been running a bureaucracy for a good zero years by this time. So this is new to England and the English and their descendants and ancestors around this time, this era. But if you narrow it like that, then yeah, you can make a pretty good case that for you and me and those of us born in America, you can trace your civil liberties pretty directly back to this document. Yeah. And even if the document itself, as we'll learn, wasn't necessarily honored initially or even later, it was that seed that was planted, that it had to be, at least, and we'll see later on, once it was in place, you kind of couldn't go backwards from there, even though some people did try later on, some royalty, it just didn't happen. So it sort of drew a line in the sand and said, all right, from this point forward, at least, things for any people other than not every person, but people other than royalty at least won't go backwards from here now. And like you said, they tried. They definitely wanted to. But when you lay down something like people have rights that are basic to them from the moment they're born that's a tough one to repeal, you know what I'm saying? Yes. Once that's out there, that's tough to put it back in the box. And good, just good for us, bad for despotic absolutist monarchs, though. So should we get into a little background here? Yeah, I think we should, because we got some ground to cover. Yeah. So the grabster helped us with this and I love it. You can tell when our writers are really into something by sort of how much background they give us on stuff before they get to the stuff. Yeah, that was into it. I think he was wearing chain mail while he was writing this. He may have been, but it did a great job with the set up. And we have to point out that this was a time, like you said, where there was a king that ruled the land and everyone had to do what the King said, basically. And then you had people that ruled over smaller fiefdoms throughout the land, but they still answered to the King, but they had their subjects as well. But it was a bit of a mess. Like, even though the King could kind of do what they wanted, the King usually knew, like, hey, I can't push things too far, otherwise it gets really bad for me. Right. So let me see if I can walk right up to that line as often as I can in many cases, as far as royalties concerned, and sort of push things as far as, like, ringing money out of people for bribes or quote unquote taxes, or trying just ruling with a harsh hand, but not necessarily a hand that will be so bad that the people revolt. Yeah, that was a fine line. And some kings in the history of England were really good at being kings. I get the impression that the more land you conquered in the name of England, the more people you brought under your rule, the happier you could keep the barons, the people who own the land, that kind of all collectively made up your kingdom, the better off you were. But, yeah, you still were going to need money to run things, so you're going to have to extract that stuff. So you had to just push it just as far as you could. That was a good king. There were also plenty of bad kings who would go way past the line and they could be allowed to do that because in England, kings were divinely decreed by God. Their authority was derived directly from God. So whatever they did, no matter how unhappy that made you, god said it, so this king is allowed to do it in practice. That didn't actually work out all the time. It's not like the bear like, what are you going to do? God said, right. But there was still kind of that air, that aura around it. And at the very least, even if you didn't buy into that directly. That was the custom. It had been for a really long time, and that's hard to buck. So you had good kings who still went up to the line, you have bad kings who crossed the line. And when you put it all together, more often than not, that line was being really kind of made to feel claustrophobic. And so the barons would be unhappy, and they were the ones with the power. So if you push the barons too far, they would push back, and then you would end up with things like written laws and customs and decrees that said, the king won't do this anymore. Right. And there's also a third group in there of kings that just weren't very good at their job. Yeah, I think history often they often overlook sheer incompetence in favor of this person did all these great things, or this person was an evil tyrant and some of them just weren't too good at it. Yeah. Like the day to day the Franklin Pierce of the English king. So we'll skip up to Henry I in 1100, created the Charter of Liberties, and this was sort of if the Magna Carta was the seed of liberty for people like you and me later, the Charter of Liberties may have been the precede to that seed in a way, because it was the first kind of official thing that limited the King's power just a bit. And in this case, there were other things, but it did limit the King's power to appoint church offices, guaranteed that any inheritances would be carried forth and there were no bribes necessary. So just sort of cleaned up the act of the royals in this sort of smallest of ways. Yeah. Because before it was like, if you were the King, you could be like, yeah, I don't care, give me some money if you want to be legally married, or give me some money if you want to be promoted in your church ranking. Like you could just extract money for anything. And so this is the first time where it was kind of like, okay, we won't do that. We won't keep pushing things like you were saying, it just kind of cleaned up the monarchy and limited their ability. And it was kind of a big thing. And again, that came out of a bad king that was first who had to clean up the mess left by his successor or his predecessor, William II, his brother, who had been a bad king, had overtaxed and overstepped the boundaries. And now there had to be some sort of document created to say, we won't do that again. This is where laws came from in England. Like people overstepping bounds and being pushed back on. Right. Or the king just arbitrarily deciding things. Yeah. So Henry One dies. Succeeded by Stephen I. This one was a little dicey because Steven I ascensioned to the throne was contested and resulted in a civil war called the anarchy. And the anarchy was a mess. It was a pretty brutal lawless time. And Stephen, I think he wasn't around too long, but he was quickly followed by Henry II, who ruled for about 35 years, I think right at 35 years. And this was at the end of the anarchy, but Henry II comes in and basically says, all right, the royals are back, baby, and they're going to be a bunch of reforms here. We're going to centralize our power. Things have gotten out of hand with this anarchy, and it's all under my control now. And in a way, it was good and bad. It's never great when someone assumes his absolute authority. Right. But it's also better just to have a more structured codified system than all these weird arbitrary laws that were kind of all over the place and scattered about before. Exactly, yeah. And one of the reasons why Henry II did that is because he was very much into adventure, ism he would go out of England and try to conquer more lands. And that was his big thing. Parasailing that was his thing. Yeah. So he needed some structure that he could set in place that didn't require him to be there all the time to oversee it. And some of that actually kind of benefited people in part because, like you said, it wasn't arbitrary anymore. And there were like some real reforms. Like, he set up a panel of judges that would go around and basically carry out criminal trials. Rather than just people getting away with crimes or maybe being subject to mob justice, they were trying to apply some sort of actual justice to it. Now, if you were a serf or a peasant, you could complain to the king and go over the lord of the manor that you worked on head. If he was mistreating you, that was brand new. And so there was like some good things that were set in place by Henry II. He wasn't like some benevolent guy or anything like that, but he did leave that legacy and it was a big deal. A lot of people point to his code as the beginning of English common law. Yeah, he was not a great guy. He was, in fact, a pretty brutal person on the battlefield, and he would brutal leader, and he did a good job leading on the battlefield and he loved going to war, but he would cut the feet off or the genitals from his enemies. He would lock people in the dungeons. He was known supposedly for gouging out the eyes of a young messenger boy one time who delivered bad news. So he wasn't some great guy. And he had to finance all of these travails in wars all over the place, and that cost a lot of money. So a lot of what he did when he brought all this under his order was made a lot of money and raised a lot of revenue and was kind of just squeezing every last bit he could out of these landowners, again, with those kind of fees like you were talking about, like, hey, if you're a widow and you want to remarry pay me, right? If you want to inherit some land or a title, pay me. Maybe you can even bribe me. I'm open to that. Right. Which is arbitrary in and of itself, because the person doesn't necessarily deserve whatever it is they're bribing the King for in exchange for, and that's not good. It's also in direct violation of the Charter of Liberties that Henry I had laid out. And now that there was that, now that that had been established by Henry I, the nobility could point to that and be like, you're not honoring this stuff. Like, this is something we can hold your feet to the flames over. It didn't necessarily work with Henry II because he was such a strong king, but it was something that they could point to and they could say, like, this is wrong, and here's why. Yeah. And there's something I meant to point out at the beginning that I'll bring up here that's really kind of integral to how all of this worked back then, is it was sort of a three way dance between nobility, these really wealthy, influential barons, and then the Church. And those are the three big pieces of the puzzle, that everyone kind of had to be happy among that group to a certain degree, or there were big problems. And it was always sort of that dance with the royalty to sort of make sure that they were extracting money from the Barons, but they didn't want to make them too unhappy because they said they would have revolt. But you also had to satisfy the Church, which technically was a separate entity, which we'll get to in a minute. But the push and pull among these three groups was really a pretty key thing to how everything operated back then. Yeah, and that was an excellent point, because the Church is like a state unto itself, right. It could make its own money. And this is at a time when the prevailing economic theory was that there was, like, a finite amount of money in the world. So when you were extracting money from the Barons, whether you were the Church or whether you were the King, that really hurt. Hurt more than it does paying taxes today. Because there's this idea that was it. It was like a zero sum game. Everybody was taking and exchanging from the same pot. So, yeah, if you could kind of balance all those three together, you had a pretty stable monarchy. But more often than not, it was like we were saying, people kind of push things over the edge. Henry II definitely did that with the bribery, but again, he was a strong monarch. And then he was succeeded by a couple of people that are kind of studies in contrast as far as kings of England go, don't you think? Yeah, maybe. Let's take a break. That's a great cliffhanger. Okay, who could these two people be? Laurel and Hardy. CC deville. Could it be the Hardy Boys? Like with Parker Stevenson and what's his other name? I bet you that's who it is, the other guy. Poor other guy. Learning stuff with your stuff. You should know. All right, we're back. Parker, Steve and Fred Newman boys. No, you're talking about Richard and then John. We'll start with Richard. Henry II died and his son Richard the Lionhearted inherited the throne, and he was beloved, and he did a lot of crusades as well and had a lot of great military successes and had to spend a lot of money to do so. Of course. Right. But he died unexpectedly. And then Henry II was Henry II. His son John took over the throne. And remember when I mentioned earlier that some people just were not good at their job? This was John. He was just not good at being a politician, not good at being a king, not good at getting along with the barons and the church. He was just not cut out for it. Yeah. And he's the main bad guy, I think. I wondered if Richard III was the main bad guy or the king in the Robin Hood legend and his King John. Oh, is it really? Yeah, because I remember Richard the Lionheart is, like, off fighting the Crusades and King John's running the show in a mean and incompetent way. That's who Robin Hood's fighting? And the Sheriff of Nottingham. But in real life, John was just he was not meant to be a king. He was Richard's brother. He was the younger brother. And Henry II, their father, for one, he didn't even name John after a king, and he didn't give him any land, so there was no area for him to rule. He was sent off to study with scholars. That's what he was supposed to be. So he was never bred to be a king. And he wasn't a very good one, regardless because of that or just naturally. But his first nickname among the nobility was John Lackland. Because he didn't have any land. Yeah, because he lacked land. It must have really burned him. That's pretty funny. But he was terrible. But more to the point, not only was he bad with money and he was a despot in a lot of ways too. He lost land. Remember I said the kings that were most beloved were the ones that added to the kingdom? Sure. The ones that were the most despised are the ones who lost land from the kingdom. And that was what John did. Almost out of the gate. Yeah, he was losing land to King Philip II of France. And Ed points out, and it's important to note here that England and France back then were it's not like it is today. Like, they were very intertwined. England held a lot of land in the north of France, and they were constantly kind of going back and forth about winning and taking land from one another. So you got to have to kind of und program yourself, from how you think of those two countries today, to think about how it was back then. So he was losing land to King Philip II, and Philip liked John's cousin Arthur of Brittany, and he had a competing claim to the throne. So Philip was in Arthur's court and John just wasn't doing a good job. He was blowing through money, which meant he had to get more money out of the barons than even his predecessors did. And he was not winning land with this money. So he was just going down the tubes fast. Yeah. And one thing I saw, Chuck, I just wanted to mention, the English were so intertwined with the French at the time that these kings that we're talking about, henry II, Richard the Lionhearted, John Lackland, they all spoke French. Isn't that interesting? The English king spoke French at the time. Oh, sure. If you look at any of the old movies that are historically accurate, it's really hard to make sense of any of it when people from France are sending their daughter to England to Marion. It's really confusing. And I don't know if it's about the family lines, but it is super confusing. Oh. Like Catherine the Great. And some of this comes from watching TV, I admit. But that TV show The Great is really good because I think it wasn't Catherine The Great Russian. Yes. Or she was married off to the Russians. I'm not sure if she was a born Russian. I don't know. It's all just very confusing. Oh, yeah. But I mean, that was a really good way to consolidate power and to gain even more land would be to marry, like, another royal family and just put your stuff together, make yourselves even harder. I might have gotten that all wrong, by the way, but it was off the dome, as the kids say. Hey, that's all right, man. Off the dome is pretty great. All right. So, John, I talked about the sort of three pron thing. John is not doing well. He is kicking off the barons because he's having to squeeze more money out of them. So it's like, well, surely he at least did okay with the Church right to keep that stool stable. Not true at all. Pope Innocent III was in charge at the time, and he appointed a new Bishop of Canterbury named Steven Langton, who would turn out to be a big thorn in John's side. John did not want Langton, and so he got mad and basically took his ball and went home. He took control of Canterbury, all the Church's possessions, and said, langton, you can't even come in the country. And so innocent III said, oh, yeah, you know what? I'm going to issue a papal degree that basically all Church services in England aren't valid anymore, and you can't hold them. And if it was you and me, we'd be like, sweet, we don't have to go to Church anymore. But it wasn't like that back then. It was a really big deal. Ed said this was like dropping an ecclesiastical nuclear bomb onto Britain. And that's kind of true. Yeah, because also, the Church was a huge employer in England at the time, too. So now all the people who work in the Church's jobs are like, well, are we valid? What's going on here? Do we have the same protections that we used to? It was a big deal. And, yeah, for all intents and purposes, England under King John was at war with the Church under Innocent III. And it stayed that way for a little while, and they just put John that was it. That was the last box to be checked. He was at odds with absolutely everybody and was a very unpopular king by anybody's measure. Whether you were a commoner or whether you were nobility or whether you were a bishop, you did not like King John very much. And then add to that that the guy that Innocent III appointed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and this is also, by the way, after the last Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, had been murdered at the behest of John's father, Henry II. Murdered brutally, too. I read a first person account of it. It's one of the more ghastly murders I've ever heard. But the guy who came in, Stephen Langton, he was like a progressive. He was basically writing about things that question the divine authority of the monarchy, how some people are not some people, but people had some natural rights, like, all people had some natural rights that even a king couldn't violate, like really progressive stuff. And this guy's coming into England at a time when it has one of its weakest kings in its history and basically set the stage for the Magna Carta to kind of be written full stop. What else did you want me to add? Could I have dressed it up more? Put a little fruit on its head? No, your voice went up, so I thought there was more. I was using upspeak. So you might be asking yourself kind of, what's the big deal? Because things were a mess at various points in history and there were revolts before and there was unrest before between the Church and the royals. And I was like, Why was this the big one? That kind of made everything change? And there are a few reasons for this, one of which I talked about France and England being so intertwined. John lost land, but he lost Normandy, which was a really big deal. The Normans England had a lot of land in northern France. Like I said earlier, since William the Conqueror got control of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings, and the Normans were a tight group and they were very influential in England. And then when John lost Normandy, it was more than just losing land. It was a big deal. Yeah. They started calling him John Softsword after that. Did they really? Yeah, that's his second nickname, john lack of name, John Salsaward. The Church at the time, like we said, was separate. And so they had their own set of laws. Even they didn't have to have their ecclesiastical laws. So if a church official ranifoul, they could say, no, the King isn't going to declare judgment on you. You come over here with us. We have our church law. It's probably not as stiff, to be honest. And basically John said, forget that tradition. You guys are under my rule and my decrees. And again, this just sent him further down the toilet. Yeah. And then, like I was saying, there were no toilets back then. Though, to be clear, into the privy, the bedpan. Yes. And then add to that also just the way that people thought about the monarch, like, thanks to people like Stephen Langton, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and the fact that Henry the first Document of Liberty Charter of Liberties had already been established, people were just thinking about things differently. And all of this stuff kind of came together at this vortex. And there was a point where finally John was like, okay, at the very least, I need to be in with the Pope, and basically knelt before the Pope and said, england is a vassal state to the Church again, which is a big deal. But it put John and England back in Pope Innocent the third good Graces, and they were fine again, but they did nothing to help the barons. And as a matter of fact, the barons were just as put upon as before. But now John was even more emboldened by having the full support of hope again. And so the Baron said, you know what? Forget this. Enough of this. It's 1214 and it's time for some change. So they actually cobbled together a fighting force and took London by force. They stormed it and occupied London in open rebellion against King John. It's only 10,000 people, though. Yes, it's true. It really was. Well, it's funny to think of now, I mean, like, 10,000 people living in London, but that's just the way it was at the time. So, yeah, you and I could probably take London with 10,000 people, but it's still significant to mention. Yeah. And our smartphones. It's all we need. Yeah. Look at this boom stick. Have you ever seen a dog say I love you? Well, I've got a video of it. Oh, my God. They're bowing. So, yeah, it wasn't a civil war, but it was a big deal. It was. An open rebellion. John knew this was not a good thing, so in 1215, he said, all right, I got to make peace with these people, too, so let's get together. We'll get that Langton guy that I didn't like at all. This shows you how much I'm coming with my hat in hand. Yeah, really? He can act as the mediator. The baron said, here's what we want. We'll call it the Article of Barons, and handed that to Langton. And Langton said, all right, I got to whip this into something that John is going to actually live with. And so he drafted this initial document, which included a lot of the stuff from the Charter of Liberties that dealt with a lot of the laws that were sort of on the books, but also had some big ideas like you were talking about, about just general rights at birth of humans. And they met Ashley Simpson. Where? They met where? Running Meadow. Running. Mead, june 19, 1215. And they signed over Fealty to John, and they made copies of this thing, applied that royal seal on it, and that was it. It was the Magna Carta, even though they didn't call it the Magna Carta yet. No. And I was like, Why? Running Mead? It turns out there's actually a few reasons why. Running Mead had a history of being an ancient kind of council meeting spot. It was also nice place. Well, it was a boggy meadow, which is another reason why it was chosen, because it would be a terrible place to fight a war or battle. And then also you could see basically in every direction from it, so you couldn't do a surprise attack either, even if you wanted to fight in a boggy meadow. I thought it might have been like a really nice, picturesque thing, but it was done out in the middle of nowhere where you could see everything. Yeah, well, I get the impression that it was picturesque still, as well, but that had a lot of strategic assets to it, too. Okay, well, that makes sense. All right, well, I guess well, before we take our break, let's just talk about the fact that this first Magna Carta that was not even called the Magnacard yet was ignored. John ignored it innocent. The three said it's not even legal. John was under duress to agree to this thing. And then a real full civil war called the First Barons War broke out, and John died of dysentery in 1216. It's kind of what ended the First Barons war. But this is all sort of preamble to the real Magna Carta, which we'll talk about in just a second. You should know. All right, Chuck, so let's talk a second about how the Magna Carta was applied shortly after John died of dysentery. But first you have to we should talk a little bit about what it actually looked like originally, because, like you said, it wasn't even what we think of the Magna Carta today? It had a lot of stuff in it that has nothing to do with nobody alive today. There is, like, basically the king, strong armed guy who went around and extracted money and tortured nobles if they didn't pay up. He and his cohorts are named specifically by name. They got to go. There was stuff about if you were a widow, you didn't have to marry immediately, but if you did end up wanting to get married later, you still had to go to the king. There was about, like, land, inheritance, all sorts of stuff like that, that really would have mattered to a baron, a noble person, a nobleman or a woman. In England at the time, there were concessions. But then, like you said, there were big ideas, too. But if you were like the average peasant working the land to surf, working the land in the feudal system, in England at the time, you could not have made heads or tails of this, because, number one, it was written in abbreviated Latin, which would have made it very hard to understand. But then, number two, it was also written as one long, I think about 3003, 100 word paragraph that I don't even think had punctuation in it either. It was written like it was by a mad man. Yeah. It was, like, written on a big, long piece roll of toilet paper, and that was rolled up. Yeah. If you read the Magna Carta now, it is separated into different clauses. But this was not the case at first. This happened years later. Who was the historian? It was William Blackstone in the late 18th century. Yeah. Basically said, like, I got to organize this thing. We can't put this thing in museums. It's embarrassing. Yeah. Like, people got to be able to make heads or tails of this. So that happened later on. At first, it was, like you said, just this big, long scrawl, and there wasn't just one of them. It's not like you can go to if you go to see the Declaration of Independence at the archives in DC. That's the one. That's the one copy. That's the master charger, the master copy. There were 13 known copies in 1215 of the Magna Carta, and it's not like they had one. And then they ran it through the Xerox machine. They wrote it down 13 times. They're all originals. I guess maybe it's wrong to say there isn't an original when there are 13 originals. There's not a sole original. Four of these have survived, and there are little variations because they were written by hand and transcribed, but nothing that cancels anything out. It's just sort of how somebody might transcribe something. And they're all considered for legit correct originals. I think two of them are at the British Library of London, one at Salisbury Cathedral and then one at Lincoln Castle. Yes. And then if you go research how many magna Carta copies are there today, you'll find that there's a lot more than four. And here you start to get into just how muddy the history of the Magna Carta is, because, like you said when they first wrote this Magna Carta, it wasn't exactly like what we think of Magna Carta today. It had a lot more provisions in it that had to do with the forest. And there were so many rules and regulations about how to treat the forest, how you can act in the forest. If you live in the forest, who do you go claim a grievance to? That kind of stuff. That a separate charter of the forest was created. Like, those were basically moved out and then the document became the Magna Carta that we understand it today. Right. That was, I think, in 1217, when that finally happened. Yeah, 1217. The charges of the forest has moved out. And then, little by little, this document kept getting adjusted, added to as a new king came along, they would basically be like, I love the Magna Carta, I'm going to adhere to it. And slowly but surely, over the next couple of decades, it became accepted and respected as the law of the land in England. It was a lot more than just concessions to end the civil war, the war of the barons. It became established law in England. Yeah. And just those words are very like it's easy now to sort of not think too much about what law of the land means. But back then, that was a very big deal and that this was the first time that laws came about that weren't directly from the king. It wasn't royalty just saying, here's how everything is, everybody fall in line. It was the people. And albeit, if you were a baron, you had a lot of money and a lot of political sway. It's not like it was not like these were the serfs, like slinging hay in the hay fields that had any kind of input. So we do need to point that out. But they were not royalty, so it was a big deal. For the very first time, actual subjects of the king were weighing in and successfully weighing in on what the law should be. Yeah. And there were, like, the seeds to things that would become really important later. Like the idea that a council of barons, I think 25 barons, could basically hold the king to account. And it was like the seed that eventually grew into the Parliament. There was another one. There were some other really big ones in there. One of the things that happened over time, I guess, Chuck, is it got extended to everybody in England, not just what they called freemen, which were landed nobility. It got extended to everybody in England at least by 1297, when it was encoded into law in England at the latest. By the 1400, the 15th century, it became just commonly understood that those rights, those laws in the Magna Carta, applied to everybody in England. Yeah, I mean, it was like the sacred document. And again, you kind of had no choice when you came in there. As a new king, you may try to alter and change some things, but you couldn't refute the Magna Carta at that point. It became too important, even if other laws superseded it later on, to the point where its actual laws in the Magna Carta were rendered useless in a lot of circumstances, it was a symbol. And like Ed said, it had this really powerful aura about it because it was the first laws not decreed directly from the King's voice. You couldn't go back anymore. You can only move forward, even if it was by tiny increments we're talking about this is a long time ago, and it's going to take a long time. And it points out that humanity has always been creeping towards more rights for more people, even if it's very slow and very clumsy at times. And the Magna Carta was sort of the foundation on what a lot of the modern rights that we have sort of lay. Yeah. There's a couple that are actually still in English law, part of one, the first clause, which gives freedom to the church, number 13, which basically says that towns and municipalities have the ability to decide their own matters, like electing a mayor, that kind of stuff. Right. And then the big ones, the two big ones that were really huge when they were codified in the Magna Carta back in 2015 was clause 39, which basically says that you cannot be just thrown in prison, you can't be exiled, you can't have your land taken away. None of those things can happen to you unless it's through the lawful judgment of your peers or the law of the land. They took away the King's arbitrary ability to throw somebody in the dungeon until they starved to death because they didn't pay him some bribe that he wanted. That was enormous. And that today constitutes due process under the law. And then also habeas corpus, where you can't just put someone in prison for no reason or never giving a reason. And that's really huge. And that is directly where we get that from in America and the west. And the other one is clause 40. You cannot sell and you also cannot deny or delay the rights that people have as citizens. You can't do that. So that was a big deal. And then the idea that the Magna Carta directly led to the Bill of Rights is not an understatement at all. At the Constitutional Convention, when they were thinking of whether they needed any kind of Magna Carter shout out because they had a mythical quality in America by this time, too, to kind of keep the King of England at bay, they thought, well, we're not going to have a king here. We don't need a Magna Carta. Someone very wisely pointed out, no, we don't have a king. But the government still acts at the behest of the majority of the people. What if the majority of the people trying to infringe on the rights of others? We need something. And so they came up with the Bill of Rights directly descended from the Magna Carta. So it is very much an important document, for sure. Totally still relevant. Still relevant as ever. So everybody go out and get a Magna Carta copy, maybe a poster or a T shirt, and rocket proudly. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right, well, Chuck said he's got nothing else. Then that means it's time for listener mail. I need to call this kind correction on jackalopes. I can't believe we walked right past this. Okay. Hey, guys. Longtime listener and super fan of the show. I feel like we are friends since I listen to you every day as I get ready for work and very much look forward to your conversations. So, as your friend, I can say that I absolutely love all your content, but found myself cringing throughout the jackalope episode. You see, I am the historic Preservation Officer for the City of Las Vegas, Nevada. And while the jackalope floor is not prevalent throughout Nevada, I still feel the need to weigh in a bit of misunderstanding about our southwestern fauna, the jack. And jackelopes is for the jack rabbit, of course. Very large species of hair. Not a rabbit. It's in the cute little cotton tail rabbit. The lope is for the pronghorn antelope, not a deer. You guys, these are two different families. Gentlemen, the clue was right there. In the name of antelope. How did we miss that it's not a jack of deer? I think we were so jazzed about even talking about jackal, upset we stopped seeing the forest for the trees. Maybe so. However, a pronghorn is not a true antelope even, but that's another story. And further, pronghorn have horns, hence the name, which are affixed to the skull, which, of course means that put horns on the jack rabbit, the pronghorn must be deceased as well. However, deer antlers shed annually with no harm done to the deer. You can walk in any area where deer live and find antlers on the ground. Therefore, deer does not necessarily have to die to give up his antlers. Okay, yeah, that's good. While there certainly are taxidermy rabbits and hairs with deer antlers affixed to their heads, the jackalope, by definition, is a jack rabbit with prong orn horns. I see. Just wanted to give a little general correction on all that, but in no way diminishes my love for the show. Thank you for all you do. All my best. Dr. Diana, historic Preservation. Officer, Las Vegas, Nevada. Excellent. Dr. Seabrant. Doctor. Diane C. Brant. Okay. CC. Brant. Thank you, doctor. C, Brent. We appreciate that big time. Hats off to you for that gentle correction. That was really something. If you want to get in touch with this, like Dr. C. Brant did, you can via email, wrap it up, spank it on the pronghorn and send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Bonsai Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-bonsai-works | For thousands of years people have been taking normal trees and forcing them into miniature. Learn all about the history and art of this strangely engrossing pastime. | For thousands of years people have been taking normal trees and forcing them into miniature. Learn all about the history and art of this strangely engrossing pastime. | Mon, 16 May 2016 15:39:12 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=15, tm_min=39, tm_sec=12, tm_wday=0, tm_yday=137, tm_isdst=0) | 53291953 | audio/mpeg | "Picture this, friends. You could be packing a carry on for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your city Advantage Platinum Select Card. So you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you Advantage Miles. Actually, you earned Advantage Miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the City Advantageplatinum Select Card. Learn more at citi comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. 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. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. I've decided to talk about 85% speed right now. Oh, yeah? How's it going? Well, you know, there are some weirdos that listen to us on double speed. Well, they just hurry up and get to the point, you idiot. Yeah, because they have busy lives. They can't listen to 40 minutes of content straight. It's funny to me when somebody tweets to us or takes time to write an email. I love your podcast, but I'm really displeased with the tangents you go on. Sure. You seem to talk about a lot of stuff that's unrelated. Can you stop doing that? Yeah. And I always think I don't think $72 for you, buddy. If you're being driven crazy by that, then, well, sure, yeah. Like, we would welcome you to stay. Sure. But the tangents are part of the fabric of the show at this point. There's a glue, like it or not. I think the whole thing would be decidedly less enjoyable if we were just, like, vomiting backs up. Yeah. Just business like. Yeah. Or maybe after 850 shows, we should just completely change how we do it. Yeah. There you go. That's a great idea. Hey, before we get started, though, we do want to thank Sam from Gypsons Malort. Oh, yeah. Thank you, Sam. We mentioned the unique Chicago brand Lacur on our PR show, right? Live in Chicago. Because you tried it before the show. Yeah, well, I tried it a few times. As John Hodgman said, it tastes like pencil shavings and heartbreak. This is descriptor. But Sam heard us talking about crown Royal. I was like, Wait a minute. They talked about Malorite and I didn't send him anything. Yes. Attention all of their distillers in America. You can get in on this, too. Yeah. If the makers of Plymouth gin or Leopold's Gin or Knob Creek or Pappy van Winkle, St. George's, they're a great distillery out of San Francisco. Yeah. Pappy Van Winkle. Wow. That's the stuff that gets hijacked and sold for, like, $20,000 on the Internet. Yeah. So I'm just throwing it out there. I'm picking it back up, bringing it back here and throwing it again. We're happy to drink your booze and talk about it ad nauseam. You know what else we're happy to talk about, big boy? What's that? Bonza. Yes. I don't know if I was saying it wrong, but right before we press record, you said, it's not bonsai, it's bonsai. And I was like, what's the difference? It's not bonsai. Oh, with a Z. Right. That means heads up. Right. Bonsai with an S, right? It basically means plant in tiny container. Yeah. Those are the cute toy trees that Mr. Miyagi are made of plastic? It depends. Target has some. They definitely have plastic ones. Yeah. If you search bonsai, it's one of the things that comes up immediately. It's fake trees. I think it's called, like, nearly real or nearly Natural, something like that. And it does not look nearly natural. It's like near beer. You ever heard people call non alcoholic beer near beer? Yeah, I think it's kind of funny. I probably shouldn't tell a story. So with bonsai, Chuck, we're talking, like you said, the little toy trees. And yeah, there's plenty of fake bonsai out there, but they're just kind of it's the same thing as fake flowers. Well, it sort of flies in the face of what's special about bonsai, which is that it's a living work of art. Right. It does. And a lot of people are like, well, that's just a weird, freakish tree that you've been abusing for the last several decades. Some people actually do criticize Ponti because it's like docking a dog's tail. It's nothing like that. But depending on how you feel about plants, it's the same thing. You're looking at something that's natural and literally bending it to your will. So there's an anti Pruning movement going on around the world. Maybe. I don't know if I would go that far to say it, but if you are invested in bonsai, if you do appreciate bonsai, part of the whole point of bonsai is you're creating a tableau that is a living depiction of nature. Yes. Rather than a painting, you're creating a living version of basically a painting. Yes. Well, sculpture. Living sculpture. Yeah. It's even better. Like, you can make it out of Sculpty clay. You could, but then you've totally missed the point of buying. Well, that'd be fun, too, but it's something different, right? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So we're going to talk about how to bonds I have to say. Is that a verb as well? It is now. Okay. Jerry is cracking up this episode she's reading. What is the guy from Cracks name? Alfred Newman's. Like, kind of. Yeah. He had, like, this blonde counterpart. Is that still around? Because they're sort of a different thing than they would totally. Yeah. There's this great story behind Cracked. Like, Cracked was around for decades, and it just got left to languish. Right. And I guess some fan came along and was like, hey, I noticed you're basically just waiting around for crack to die. Can I have a stab at it? A crack at it? I specifically didn't say that, but yes. And they're like, whatever, kid. Go ahead. And the guy basically resurrected Cracked in his basement. Nice. Brought it back from the dead, and now it's, like, huge. Wow. They just sold for a boatload of money. Oh, yeah. Good for them. I hope it went to that dude who resurrected it. I do, too. That's great. I don't remember how we got onto Cracked. Jerry was laughing. Oh, she was reading cracked. Yes. Right. So back to bonds. Like I said, we're going to talk about how to bondsii, which, as I said, is a verb now. But let's talk about the history of it first. Yeah. Like many things in the world, and especially many things that you might associate with Japan, it started earlier in China before it made its way to Japan, and in China, it was called well, in Japan, did you already say what it literally means? I think you did. Yeah. It means plant in a tray. Yeah, plant in a tray. In China, it was punsai, which means tray plant not too far off. No. And if you go all the way back to the Tang dynasty, there is evidence on tomb paintings that they have these little prune trees and shallow pots. Yeah, it's just like, part of the painting in the tomb. It's not, like, featured. It's just part of it kind of depicting regular life. They're like, okay, well, at least by 706 Ce. That there were people doing bonsai in China. That's ponzi. Yeah. Right. It may go back even further than that. There's a legend that an emperor, around about 206 BCE. Wanted his entire empire, China, recreated a miniature in his backyard. And they think they suspect that it's possible that that may have given rise to ponti. That makes sense. Yeah. Like, we got to make tiny trees now because the emperor wants a toy. Yeah. But then either through trade or through gifts, exchanges of state departments and stuff like that, japan does what it always did, and it got its hands on something and then took it to the Nth degrees and perfected. It, made it awesome. That's what Japan does. That's what they do. There's an ancient Japanese scroll that I found not literally in my backyard, in your attic that I found on the internet. And it says, this is around the Kamakura period, which was 1185 to 1333, and it says, to appreciate and find pleasure and curiously curved potted trees is to love deformity. Which I thought was interesting. And the article I read said, we don't know whether this is positive or negative. Right. Yeah, I think it means positive. Maybe the writer was passive aggressive. Maybe. I thought it was a pretty interesting quote, though. Yeah, for sure. Because, again, you're training Freeze to be little freaks of nature, basically. Yeah. And like a lot of other works of art at the time, it starts out with, like, monks and Buddhists, and then eventually it becomes, like, part of the rich elite and then eventually works its way to the common folk. Right. So by the, I think the 13th, 15th, 16th century, it had become, like a pretty well established hobby in Japan, I got the impression that wasn't necessarily thought of as an art form until the west saw it for the first time. So in the 17th century, Japan was getting really tired of Westerners trying to convert them to Christianity and basically exploiting them in unfair trade practices. They said. You know what? Westerners, get out. We are isolating ourselves. We're closing ourselves off the trade with the west, except for a few Dutch and Spaniards and then the Chinese, everybody else go away. And they stayed like that for a couple of hundred years. And I believe it was Millard Filmore who sent Matthew Perry Chandler Bing over there with the squadron of Navy freighters and huge cannons and guns, saying, you're going to trade with us. He said, could you guys be any cooler? You have all kinds of cool stuff. That's my Chandler. So Japan opened up basically at the barrel of America's guns. Yeah, we should do a show on that. We talked about it enough. It's really interesting, the isolationist period. Yeah. What went on there then? A lot of bonds, a lot of goldfish tending. Nice. Remember Mr Burns'famous quote, those stand up wearing goldfish tenders? I don't remember that. It's good, though. But as far as coming to the west, there were a couple of big fairs where it kind of exploded. The Paris World Exhibition of 1878 and the London Exhibition of 19 nine, where, of course, people in the west just probably flipped for it. Yeah. Because it's so cool. Yeah, it is. Oh, man, researching this, every time I would come across a new term or like a style or something, I'd go look it up. And I ended up spending half an hour just looking at bonsai pictures. Yeah, me too. It's really engrossing. Yeah. I was going to be like, all right, I'm doing this, I definitely am. But I'm going to wait. For what? Old age. So, like, three or four years from now? Yes. I think I'm going to get into it. Yes. I think it's just for me. I've got too much going on right now to do, but it's going to be a great retirement pastime for me. Yeah. I could see myself really, like, spending days and days I can see it's. Caring for these little guys. Oh, yeah. And I like tiny things and miniatures. Oh, you're going to love Bonsai. Yeah. Like the little tiny tabasco bottles that you get in room service and stuff like that. Plus, you're crazy for it. Your doll houses that you've built. My doll houses? Yeah. I don't know. Have you ever read The Dollhouse? The Heinrich Gibson place? Yeah, sure. Great. All right. Well, I guess we should talk about some of those styles in huh. Well, you want to take a break first? Yeah, let's do that. Okay. What if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the award winning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org, which is out now. Yeah. 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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. Okay, Josh, you mentioned styles, and I did the same thing you did, buddy. I went and looked at pictures, and I put little marks next to my favorite ones, like earmarked. What I'm going to try and emulate in the future, I'm very curious if we're going to do start. So, upright chokon. It's the most formal, traditional style where it is basically it emulates a strong, healthy, upright, growing tree. Yeah, I love that we take this ancient, amazing art form, and the most formal style would go meh. You're right. Yeah. But I agree. It didn't delight me. Again, what you're doing is emulating nature, but you're doing it in miniature. And part of Bonsai is using, like, tricks of the eye, force perspective, that kind of stuff. And the upright, the chokan style does that by tapering the trunk, so it's much wider at the bottom than it is at the top. To kind of give you the idea that you're looking up toward a very tall tree. Yeah. And we'll sprinkle in bits of the sort of philosophical art behind it. But the idea is that you sort of imagine a scene in your head and then you try and make it look like that. Maybe it's something from your past. Maybe it's a great tree you saw one time on a vacation. But just something that makes you feel good. Right. You're usually not like, let me just make some crazy, weird looking thing because I'm drunk. I'm going to make that tree that was next to the place where my friend got hit and killed on his bike. Now it's all about harmony. Yes. That would be the opposite of bonsai. Yes, that's right. So moving on to another style, which I did not put a check mark next to, but it's okay. Myogi I like this one. It's okay. It's a little like the chokon. It's the informal upright. Okay. So a little more style, maybe. Yeah. So the chokon is very formal, very straight. The Moyogi is overall, the shape is upright, but it can bend and twist to get to that point. You see what I'm saying? Sure. It's neat. I think it's neat. I wouldn't mind doing a mojoki at some point in the future, but it definitely won't be the first one I try. All right. It's down the list a bit. Yeah. It is the slanting. Shakan or Shaka Khan or Fukanagashi. Fukunagashi, yeah. Nice. Is that good? Yes. These are pretty cool, I have to say. That has the leaning trunk at a 45 deg angle, and the branches follow the angle of the trunk. Yeah. They're parallel to it, right? Yes. Basically parallel, essentially. Right. So they're neat looking. Yes. And that trunk is slanted in reference to the pot. The lip of the pot. Right? Yeah. That 45 deg. Right? Yes. And we should say we haven't said it, so we're talking mostly about the trees, and that's what gets the most attention. But classically and at its heart, bonsai, it's a balance, it's a harmony between the plant and the pot. Like, when you're talking about bonsai, the pot is included in that variance. It's part of it. The sculpture itself, almost the greed. And also with that slanting style, supposedly, even though I saw many examples to the contrary. The first branch is supposed to go opposite of the angle of the trunk to provide balance. Right. I think that's in the Shogun style. Oh, really? It goes the opposite. All right, Chuck. Next cascade. Pretty neat. And you just lit up like a Christmas tree. Is this yours? So the semi cascade, the Hanken guy is mine. That's the one. I'm going to try first. All right, well, go ahead and describe it then. So basically and you need a deeper pot. So most pots for bonsai are shallow. Yeah. This you need, like, a pretty deep pot for? Because the plant is basically mostly overhanging it's outside and hanging down from the pot. That's a full on cascade. And these are meant to really emulate, like, a tree that's just barely hanging on and like a rocky outcrop on a mountain. Interesting. And so the cascade is full on. Like, basically the whole plant is below the lip of the pot. Yeah. The semi cascade is where the Hankin guy right. Where there's a substantial amount of the plant is still in the pot, but it's growing over and down the side some. That's right. Or really off to the side windswept is semi cascade, I think, is another term for it. Yeah. Now I'm trying to apply psychology to why that's your favorite. Just the look of it, just aesthetically speaking. I think it's great. Next up, we have the literati or the Bonjin or bonjini bungingi. Bunjinkai. I think that's way better. Probably one of those. You think? I would ask my wife. Sure. We should just have you me in here with, like, a ruler smashing their knuckles. No, this is the one that really focuses on perspective. So the idea here is that you're looking from below to a tree that is above. Like, if you're at the base of a mountain looking up okay. Then you tailor the tree to make it look as if and we should also mention that you should look at eye level is traditionally where when you talk about perspective, if you're standing 4ft above it right. That's different. You should look at bonsai eye level. Yeah. That's why they're so frequently displayed at eye level. That's right. And there's also probably worth mentioning here that there's a definite front and a definite back to a bonsai. And we'll get into that. This one is one of my favorites. Broom. Yes, we are at the broom. So is this the one that you marked, the hoki doti? Yes. Okay. And you might look it up, people, and say, interesting. Not the most flashy tree, but there's something about it, man. It has this, like, really full kind of half dome with just a single trunk jutting up. Yeah. It's just beautiful. To me, it's like it takes the shape of an idealized, like, maple or oak tree. Yeah. It reminded me of, like, a grand oak. Yeah. I wouldn't call you flashy. You've never been known to wear, like, ID bracelets or pinky rings. I don't know what either one of those things are. You know what a pinky ring is? No. Yes, you do. I don't know what you're talking about. A pinky ring. A man's pinky ring. I know what a man is. Okay, well, I'll show you later. So next up is my absolute favorite by far, the landscape. It's when you create your little miniature scene. It's like a shadow box, which I used to love doing those when I was a kid. My older sister was into this years and years ago, she would make more like English gardens, kind of in miniature. I love that. You know what? Like those gazing balls. She would make, like, tiny one of those the focal point of the place. Yeah. So this is when you have your little nature scene. You got moss, you got little rocks. You may even have a water feature. And I don't know, man. Ever since I was a kid, I love little things like that. So is that the first one you're going to try? Well, I think I would probably have to work up to that. Okay. You're not going to just do water features right out of the gate? No, but I might. I built my own fountain once. It's not that hard. Okay. You just need a pump. Nice. Actually, China is still into banzai, but this is the stuff that they practice called Penging. Oh, really? Yeah. Very landscape oriented. Yeah. I might even put a little, like a camping thing, a little fire ring. Oh, that'd be great. With some little guys with their acoustic guitars. Right. And then Jason Voorhees is standing off to the side just watching them. Maybe root over or route on rock. This is the one I thought was going to be your favorite. Yeah. So what's the deal here? You could definitely combine this one with something like Cascade or Windswept. It's where you train the roots of the tree to grow around or on top of a rock. That's pretty neat. So it looks like it is really clinging to a mountainside. Yeah. And what they're trying to do in a lot of these cases is give the appearance of, like, an old tree. Something has been around for many years when, in fact, it may be a tree that's like a year old, but it looks like some ancient oak or something. Yeah, we'll talk about some of the techniques for doing that later. But that is largely, it seems like the initial point. Yeah. You're trying to make it look like an old tree, or you're creating a tree that you intend to live for a few hundred years and get old. The oldest one they have in DC. Like 400 years old. That's even close. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, that one's cool. You want to talk about that? Sure. So there's a white pine at the National Bonsai and Pingine Museum in DC. And it's almost 400 years old. But also, notably, it survived a pretty big event, the bombing of Piurashima. Yeah. And then it was given as a gift from Japan to the US. Why? I don't know. I guess they were like, don't ever do that again. Yeah. Take this thing to remind you. Think twice. Right. So there are many older ones in that, though, is what you're saying. Yeah, there's one in a museum in Spain. It's a Ficus. It's like, 1000 years old. Wow. There's another one that's like 1000. There's a couple that are 800 years old. And the idea is that many times these are passed within your family, correct? Yeah, yeah. Very frequently they'll be handed down as heirlooms. Right. Awesome. Now, some of the disparity between ages where they're like that one doesn't really count. It may have been, like a thousand year old ficus that somebody found out in the wild and collected and has been bonsai for 20 years. Right. So this one, I have the impression, has been bonsied and in the same family for, like, six or seven generations. So it's been, like, tended to. So it may have been kind of old when it was collected, but it's been bondive for hundreds of years. Amazing. All right. To finish up the last category, which I think is pretty cool, multiform or icada or SOCAN or kabu dachi. And that is when you have the illusion that you have more than one tree, but it's really just one tree. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So it looks like it's generally jutting out from the bottom, obviously, of the root structure up, and it looks like a couple of trees. Yeah, but it's a single tree. Some people cheat and put several trees in there. Well, you can do that. Right. Your own little forest. I guess so. But isn't that then really the landscape, the psychiatry, maybe, I think, what, are the bonsai police going to come knocking on your door? Yeah, you don't want to mess with those guys. No, you don't. They'll ignore you. All right, let's talk a little bit about what kind of plants you can use, because I did not know this. I thought there was a special kind of tree that everybody used to make a ponsi. Yeah. But in fact, it could be a tree that out in the wild is 30ft tall. I had no idea. I thought they were little miniature trees. It just grew up to be, like, a foot tall. Yeah. Apparently that's like a common misconception. I saw that during research a couple of times. The whole key is you are dwarfing a tree, and you're doing that by keeping it in a small container and keeping its roots trimmed back so that it comes to basically go against its natural processes and just stays small and miniature. But yeah, basically, any plant can be bonsai. Crazy. It is. And what I didn't realize is that most bonsai is meant to be outdoors. I didn't either. I thought it was strictly indoor. Yeah. And there are indoor varieties. Like, you can take indoor plants or plants that do well indoors and make them bonsai, and it's becoming more of a thing, but for the most part, if you're doing especially something with, like a pine or a deciduous tree or a juniper, those are outdoor plants. And your bonsai is meant to stay outdoors, except if you bring it in and use it as a centerpiece or something once in a while. Yeah. And for those trees. It makes a point in here that they have a natural yearly cycle that will be disrupted if you keep it indoors. So you may have to overwinter it to a certain degree, but you're also going to want to take these out in the winter some. But it also says that it's not like a grown tree that's covered in mulch and like super deep rooted. Right. So you can't just leave it out all winter. No. And if you do, you would want to leave it in like a cold frame or a greenhouse, something like that, where it's going to survive. Or you could also protect it with a bunch of mulch too, if you leave it outside. But yeah, it does follow a lot of its natural processes. Right. So if you're doing like a fruiting tree or flowering tree, as long as it's healthy and happy, it's going to bear fruit, there's going to be flowers. Pretty cool. Yeah, it's very cool. But you are simulating nature in that the roots are being kept shallow and trimmed. So you have to take that into consideration by protecting it from cold and from making sure it has a lot of water too. Yeah. We'll get into the specifics of care here in a minute. But you said you can pretty much use any tree. Ideally what you want to use is something, some sort of tree or shrub that have small leaves or needles and that can get super dense. So you just have sort of more material to work with for your art form. Right. How's that? I think it's wonderful. And it all starts with the roots, right? Yeah. So when you're looking for a specimen, you can just go to your local nursery. Some people grow stuff from seed. You can also take cuttings and grow them in like rooting hormone or something like that if you start from seed. That's dedication. Sure. And I will also say that if you start with a kit that has a bonsai already sort of shaped for you, that's fine. I'm not going to knock it too much because you might not have time and you might still want to tinker with it. That's a good point. But I would recommend to get your full experience and maybe start with a cutting that you kind of grow as your own little baby. Right. Or you can go to like a nursery or something like that and just say, I would like to buy this plant and I'm going to turn it into a bonsai. True. That definitely counts as well. So a really good one to start with that I found is juniper. Most junipers, they grow as ground covers, so they stay fairly low to the ground normally. So they do well being miniaturized. They're also pretty hardy plants from what I understand. Right. And they grow really well in any temperate climate, relatively temperate climate. So you go to a nursery and you. Want to kind of go already with the style in mind that you're going to go with, whether it's broom or whether it's windswept or semi cascade or whatever. Sure. Because then you'll be able to kind of narrow down the plant that you want to buy because it's already going to you're almost seeing it in there, like how sculptors say that they look at a piece of marble and they're just chipping away what was already in there all along. It's very similar with bonsai as well. You go in, you find the plant that kind of suits your needs a little bit, and then yeah, you dig down, and you want to find the first roots that come off of the trunk. And that's what's called the crown, right? That's right. And as long as those are pretty healthy looking and intact, it's probably a pretty good bet that you can turn that thing into a bonsai. That's right. And you should remember, too, that the more you want to alter the tree, the probably younger and smaller it should be to begin with. Right. Because you can only do so much. You can't take a tree that's, like, stick straight and be like, all right, now I want it to cascade all the way back down. Yes, you might be able to, but it would take decades to get it to grow like that. I would say you'd have to be a bonsai master. Yeah, you would in order to do that again, like Mr. Miyagi. But these exposed roots, it's going to give the appearance if you want to have that age look like it's an ancient tree, maybe. Ancient trees usually have these great big roots that you see sort of on top of the ground. Right, exactly. So that's a neat thing you can do with your bonsai. Yeah. Plus also what's great when you dig down to those top roots that form the crown, where the trunk ends and the real roots begin, there's going to be plenty of feeder roots above that, and you're actually going to want to trim those away, but it gives what was once a pretty short plant suddenly has a trunk now. And you're like, oh, okay, wow. I see where this is coming from. It's starting to take shape just right out of the gate. Yeah. And what you're doing, we'll talk about pruning in a bit. But how you're shaping this is with wire, either with, like, aluminum or copper wiring that you can leave on to bend the tree to your will to, like, a year. But you want to be careful and not make it too tight because it can actually cut into the tree, which you don't want at all. And so you keep an eye on your wiring. And the idea is that, again, with harmony, you don't want branches, a mess of branches obscuring one another. You want each branch to have sort of its own personality. Exactly. Yeah. So you want to talk about how to start a bonsai? Let's. Okay. So you go in, you find your plan, and by the way, we're going to kind of give you a step by step. I found a really good website called Bonsai for Beginggerss.com, and they have a really good, really well written, even though there's lots of misspelled words, but it's really understandable. Is for the number four. That's like F-O-R-E. No bonsai for beginners. Well, yeah, I don't remember if it is the number four. I don't think it is. Okay, just look it up. Sure. And if it's somebody from New Zealand writing, you found the right one. But they basically have a great step by step of how to do it. All right. So you want to buy a tree. A good time of the year to do this is to go in the spring when the growing cycle begins, and go to your nursery. And like you said, you're looking for whatever tree that fits your mind's eye of what you eventually want. And it says in here to start with your scene and work toward that. I think I would be more inclined to sort of free form a little bit over the years. Okay. Which I'm sure is fine. Right. You're going to be the bad boy of the bonsai world, aren't you? Maybe so. You never know what I'm going to do next. Exhibitions. We're in like a motorcycle jacket, possibly. So the price is going to vary depending on what kind of tree you're getting. And of course, I looked up the kits. They can be $50 to a couple of $100, depending on the kind of tree and how finished looking it is. Right. Or you can go spend ten to 20 on, say, like a juniper. There are plenty of bonsai tools that you can buy. The Internet will be happy you to take your money for that. But you can also make do with other stuff, like florist wire. You can get the copper wire you need from probably a hardware store. Yes. Pliers scissors. Scissors. Smaller the better. Sure. Because little first grade scissors. Exactly. Round in. And then you're also going to want, like, a root rake, which you can just bend a fork, and bam, you got a root rake. Boom. So you've got your plant, or where you're saying it's a juniper, you're going to dig down. You're going to basically take it out, put it on the table in front of you. You want a spray bottle of water. And take a shot of soccer. Right. Get started, traditionally. Exactly. And you get started. So you take the dirt off of the top layer all the way down to the crown. And again, there's a bunch of feet of roots which you want to trim from the trunk itself. And then you take a look at the roots, like you scrape the dirt away, and you really look at the root structure, and you say, I got to get rid of a lot of this. Yeah. And you should already have your pot at this point, by the way. Right. Because the first step is the potting. Right. And I've seen people usually especially beginners, make the mistake when they're first creating a bonsai that they go real small with the pot. Sure. You're going to go through a couple of pots in the first few years. So they say, don't be afraid to use a big pot. As a matter of fact, you should probably use a bigger pot than you think you should for its first pot. Eventually, three, four years down the road, you're going to finally come to that one pot that this thing stays in for the rest of its life. And you're going to repot it every couple of years, but you're going to repot it in the same pot. Yeah. You're going to be at a flea market, and there's going to be a golden light shining around this one pot, and you're going to say, that thing is $20, and James Brown is going to be like, Dude, you see the light. And then you'll talk them down to $14, and then up to 17, and then you'll meet in the middle at 15. Nice. And then you've got your pot. That will be a great day. All right. So you're at the roots, I think. Yeah. So when you trim the roots away I was really surprised by this. You want to trim about two thirds of the roots present on your plant when you buy it. Yeah. It even says in here, this seems extreme, but don't fret. No. And the roots, you really want to go after the bigger ones, the more established ones. You want to leave some at the top at that crown. But especially if you're dealing with a tree and it has a tap root, that route that goes, like, straight down, that's actually not as much for watering as it is for stability. And you don't need it in your tiny, little shallow pot. So you want to get rid of roots like that. Yes. You've got your pot. You want to put a little thin layer of gravel for drainage. Yeah. And that's another big thing. Your pot has to have drainage holes. Oh, yeah. Good ones. Yeah. Well, you're the lawn watering expert. You don't want a quarter inch of water over it just standing. All right. You've got your gravel down there. You've trimmed your roots, and you need your soil mixture. Yeah. This is a big one. It's a big one. And there are different schools of thought on what kind of soil. It says in here, equal parts sand, peak and loam. Yeah, I guess that's like a general generic go to bonsai. But you want soil specific to your tree. Right. Like, if you have a juniper, that's going to probably be different soil than what like olive tree needs. Yeah. And so you just need to find out about the plant that your bon dying and find out what kind of soil it likes, how much water it needs, what kind of nutrients it takes, and what kind of sunlight it needs, especially that's right. It's a big one. So you stick that sucker in there, you've got your trimmed roots, and you want to spread them out really evenly toward the edges of the pot of the container. Right. Just all throughout the container. You want the roots going down. Yeah. And I don't think we mentioned you should run a wire up through the drainage hole to support the tree initially. Yeah. This is a big one. Yeah. And this wire, it's going to support the tree. But also if you're going to bend the tree, so you're doing a cascade or a semi cascade or anything like that, you're a loop de loop. Exactly. You're going to use that wire to train it around the trunk and then bend the wire, and it's going to bend the poor plant with it, and you're going to leave it on there for like a month or so at least. But you want to keep a really close eye on it because the tree will start to grow around it, and it will be forever scarred. And as far as bonsai is concerned, you just ruined your plants. So you want to keep a close eye on it. You want to make it tight, but you want to make it tight enough so that when you bend it, it's going to bend the tree with it. Right. But not so tight that it bites into or damages the tree. That's right. And you want to keep a really close eye on it to make sure the tree doesn't grow. And then when it's done, after a month, maybe longer, this article says up to a year, but I didn't see that anywhere else. You want to clip it away like you're not going to unwind it, or else you're probably just going to break your bonds off. Right. And hopefully your tree won't go and pop back into place. And if it does, you just have to redo it again. Patience, my friend. Patience. That's right. They say in the article, patience is the best tool that you can have in your arsenal. So you get the wire sticking up through the drainage on there. That's right. And as far as the soil, you want to tap it and kind of shake the pot around to remove the air pockets, firm it around the base of the tree. But you don't want it so packed in that the water has got to go through and drain all the way through and out. Right. Well, you want well draining soil. One thing I saw was three parts potting soil to one part, like miniature gravel, basically. So the soil is going to drain. Well, apparently you do want it kind of packed, because that tree does not have stability with its roots. So it's going to rely on the dirt more than it normally would. Yeah. Especially around the trunk. Right. But yeah, you want to shake it to get the air pockets out, for sure. That's right. A lot of people also put additional gravel on top to keep the dirt in place when it's watered like that. Yeah. And it looks nice, too. So you don't want to do that and then go throw it out in the full sun all day long in July. What you want to do is start it in a shady spot for about a week and let it get used to being shorter rooted and in a weird new container and let it accept the fact that, I know I'm going to be small. This is going to hurt. I'm going to be small. I'm never going to be a big daddy. Once it gets over that and accepts its fate and it says, you know what, I actually like this because I'm going to be a beautiful work of art and get lots of care and attention. Now you can move me into the sun a little bit at a time. A couple of hours at a time, maybe. Yeah. Sir, ma'am. Thank you, master. And then a couple of hours in the morning, and then before you know it, you can have that bad boy out there. Like weathering, all kinds of weathering, normal weather. Yeah. Like it normally would. Yeah. And your plan is going to tell you whether it's happy or not happy. I think with Bunsi in particular, you're going to notice every little change in your plant because you're really concentrating on it and focusing on it. And all the rest of your plants are going to hate you. Yeah. You're going to be like, Remember me? Your spider plant is going to be, like, growing around your throat, just closing off your airway. So watch out for your spider plant. Agreed. And I should say one more thing. Took when you first pot your plant, the first watering, you should basically take it in like a tray or a pan or a bucket of water and submerge it to the soil level and just let it sit there. Are you sure? Yeah. All right. This is what I've seen. Don't like clunk it in there. Slowly submerge it in there, and that water is going to make sure that every root gets its water, and it's going to fill in any air pockets that are in there. So it's really going to basically solidify your soil and pack it in and just get it ready. Very nice. Pretty neat, right? Super neat. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. We're going to come back and talk a little bit more about bonsai care and shaping, which is where the money is. What if we could change the world? One relationship at a time. Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the award winning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org, which is out now. Yeah. Listening is host Barretonde Thurston connects with leaders and doers out there tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, global health. You'll hear from organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky, who are using their platforms to maximize their impact. You'll also be introduced to action leaders like youth activist Juan Acosta and advocate Amy Allison, who are inspiring change in their day to day lives. So join them as they discuss new ways of collaborating and taking action. Listen to the second season of the iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org original podcast, force Multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data, and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions. Faster, operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feels like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM let's create learn more@ibm.com. So, Chuck, you got your bonsai. Yes. You've moved it back out into the sunlight. It's basically accepted its fate as a smaller version of itself. Yeah. You've named it, right? Right now, yeah. Allen. Okay. Mine is Roy. So Allen and Roy, the Bondsey twins, are hanging out outside. When you first pot it. You can also prepare the limbs, too, where you're basically trimming the limbs back. So remember, there's a front and a back to it, right? Yeah. Which you should establish and stick to. Right. Typically with bonsai, in traditional bonsai, the first limb is about a third of the way up from the dirt, and it's going to jet out to the right. Second one is going to jut out the opposite direction, but it's not going to be even with the other one. It's going to be another about third of the way up. Okay. You rarely want limbs even with one another. It's called a bar. That's unsightly. Exactly. So the next one juts out the opposite direction, and then the third one is about another third of the way up, and that juts out towards the back. Right. So it gives the impression of distance, of perspective and growing out the back, balance and harmony. And you do this by you can take that same wire, different, lighter wire, depending on the size of the limb and bend them in the ways that you want. But more often than not, you're going to be creating these illusions or this pattern by trimming your bonsai. And like you said, this is where the money is. This is where when you think of bonsai, this is what I think of little Japanese people, like trimming the limbs off of tiny plants. Yeah. And again, you're striving to make it look like something larger that you would find in nature. Sure, you could get super weird in avantgarde with your form and your shape, but in general, traditionally, you want it to take a form that you would find out in the wild somewhere yes. On a smaller scale. But that's the effect of wind, of sun, of weird weather, of poor soil, of just the weirder looking the tree out in nature, basically, the harder the life it's had. And you're trying to recreate that through nurturing. It's kind of counterintuitive. But if you just stop and think about what you're looking at in nature that you're trying to emulate, you'll probably figure out different ways to do it. And if you haven't figured it out, somebody's probably been doing it for 1000 years already and you can go get yourself a book or look on the Internet to find a technique. Yeah. So like you said, with the wind, like the real tree in real life that's on the mountaintop, the wind is trying to kill it. Right. And it's leaning out over the edge of the cliff. Yeah. Like, oh, man, my days are numbered. But you nurture that in your own bonsai and you emulate that and it's I don't know. I like the idea of it for some reason. It's like a tribute almost. Yeah. It's an homage to that tree that's hanging on by a root. Yeah. When it comes to light, you want to rotate it around. You don't want it getting the same side exposure to sunlight every single day. You want to rotate it around. You want to keep an eye out for bugs and insects. Yes, for sure. And again, you're paying attention to your bonsai more than your other plants. So you're going to notice, like, if it suddenly has an insect infestation. Yeah. Little larvae, what they call spittlebugs. Black or red dots of mites. It says you can brush these away. I imagine you could smash them with a framing hammer if you wanted, after you brush them off. But I bet in the Japanese bonsai tradition, you're probably brushing away the little paintbrush, right? Like you go hit the spider plant. Hey, spiders are okay, man. They eat the little bugs for you. The spider plant. I mean oh, the spider plant. Yeah. Well, you got to watch out for that thing. It's trying to kill you and your whole family. Exactly. So that's where you need to funnel your spittle bugs. Watering is another big one, too. Depending on how hot it is outside, you may end up needing to water your bonsai like two times a day. Which means if you're into bonsai, you probably don't leave your house very much. You most likely want to water your bonsai every day, depending on, again, the plant. But most bonsai needs watering every single day and twice on hot days. Yeah. What you don't want is, as you're paying attention to it, you don't want a soggy boggy base where soil is. That's a really bad sign. That means you probably didn't put down enough gravel on the bottom or your soil mix doesn't have enough gravel or whatever mixed in to make it drain quickly. That's right, because it's tough to overwater a well draining potted plant of any type, including bonsai. True. You're probably going to be doing more pruning early on in the life of the bonsai. And once it has that general shape that you like, that's when you're doing just the subtle changes that probably mean a lot to you. But other friends that come over at happy hour, they'll just say, hey, nice tree there's, ponzi. Yes, you're out of ice. And they don't realize that the maker's broken. They don't realize all the subtle little you might clip away one half of an inch of a branch to you that makes it just perfect that other people would probably not even notice. Yeah. That's why it's your bonsai. That's right, Josh. That's why I was thinking about it. Like giving the gift of a bonsai to somebody that you've tended to for years and years and years. That's a significant gift. Yeah. And here's my daughter. Yeah, right. Well, not really, but you know what I mean. You can marry this plant. You love it so much, why don't you marry it? You're also going to keep up with the fertilizer. Again, this is almost such a generic overview in some places that I feel bad even saying it, but just go find out what the plant that you're raising needs normally, and do that. Do that. But again, you have to bear in mind that it's slightly different because you're keeping it in miniature. It doesn't have its normal root system, it needs more water than usual, and it's probably because you're watering it so much, the nutrients in the soil are going to leach out much more quickly. So you need to fertilize it more than you would just if you were growing it normally in a container. Right, right. So since you're fertilizing something more, usually the rule of thumb is you want to fertilize something weekly. Weekly. So weak ly weekly. Sure. That way you're constantly replenishing the nutrients in the soil, but you're not going to, like, burn or scorch the roots with, like, a chemical burn by over feeding it. Yeah. And again, you pointed out earlier, but I think it bears in mind repeating, the key is repotting and trimming those roots every couple of years. And like you said, once you find the pot at the flea market that you fell in love with, you can keep it in that pot forever. As long as it's the one you want to stay with, you can do what you want, or give it as a gift. Or give it as a gift. But as you keep trimming these roots back, it's going to stay that size. If you forget about it, if you're a hoarder and you're drunk and you pass out for ten years, you're going to wake up with a twelve foot oak tree in your living room. That's the story of Peppy Van Winkle. Yes, I guess that is true, isn't it? Because basically, once it becomes established to the shape you want it, you're just basically pruning it back here there, keeping it trimmed. And then when you repot it every couple of years, the whole point is to keep the root system in check. Huh? Yeah. So if you didn't do that yeah. It would die is what it would do. Because nobody water. There'd be so many roots in a pot that doesn't fit them, it'd probably look cool. It'd be growing over it, maybe. And that's basic stuff that we've been talking about. But there is a lot of advanced things you can do, too. And one of those is like, again, training it to grow over rocks. So, like, when you potted the bonsai, you would want a bonsai with really long roots so that when you're potting it, you would actually place it on a rock and then wire the roots in place to let them start to establish in the pot, things like that. There's something called gin, which is basically this is really neat. I'll bet you saw it. Did you see a lot of bonsai that had, like, dead wood exposed? Yeah. Okay. So gin is where, at the top of the trunk or at the ends of limbs, deadwood is exposed to just really play up how old this thing is supposed to be or actually is. Right. There's something called shari, which is deadwood on the trunk below. Cool. And then there's something called sabamiki. And that's like you actually get in there and peel away the bark, drill into the trunk and carve holes into it, carved like a gap into it to create the illusion that it was scarred from, like, a lightning strike. Wow. And you've got to be really careful doing that because you can very easily kill your bonsai, but if you do it right, it'll grow back and scar around it. And you'll have a pretty interesting looking tree. So that's not recommended for beginners. I would not think so. I think you'd kill a lot of plants doing that way. And again, people have been trying this stuff for a couple of thousand years now, so there's a lot of different stuff you can do in a lot of different resources out there. Nice. Yeah. Go to your local Japan town and say, Teach me. Yeah. And you know what? If the movie created Kids Lost in Translation is true, then if you're a pretty American girl, you can wander into any Japanese ceremony and they will just accept you with open arms. Yeah. That's what they're known for. Yes, probably so. Right? To a certain degree, sure. Aren't you not a jerk. Oh, yeah. Like, what did she walk into? Was hers origami or was that fonta? I don't know. I don't remember. Was it a wedding? No. Scarlet Johansson walked outdoor. There were these Japanese women doing some either bonsai or origami or something, and they were like, oh, well, come on in and let me show you our ancient ways. Yeah, I don't remember that part. Yes, it was neat. It is a great movie. I like that movie a lot, too. Isn't the legend around it that Bill Murray is actually playing himself? Like, it's based on experience Sophia Coppola had? Yes. I bet it's not too far off. And so, like, Giovanni Rubisi is Spike Jones. Carly Johansson is Sofia Coppola. Anna Ferris is Cameron Diaz. I heard that one dude is Justin Timberlake. And so this actually supposedly happens, but then everyone says, well, who's Bill Murray playing? Allegedly, Bill Murray is playing himself. That makes sense. We'll never know what he whispers at the end either, which I love. That's a great movie. I forgot about that one. Make it Santori time. She's a part of my 100% club. Sofia Copa. What is that? The directors who I made nothing but great movies. I think I've only seen that and the Virgin suicides. Great movie. What else has she made? She did the Bling ring recently. Never saw it. Really? Good. Really? Don't be turned off by the title. Yes. Because I have been. And she did the one with Steven Dorf. Oh, I can't remember where he's the actor just sort of hold up in the Chateau Marmont before Jayla with his daughter. No. Before sunrise? No. Before tomorrow. No. And she did the one let the meat cake Marie Antoinette movie with Kirsten Dunce. It was fantastic. I never saw that one either. Yeah, they're all great. I think she's top notch. Well, check them out. If you want to know more about Bonsai or Sofia Coppola, you can type those words in the search bar athoustoforks.com and since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Yes. I'm going to call this tornado miss. Already? That thing just came out today. I know, man. And you know what? I hope everyone's all right because their tornadoes, like, kind of all over the place. Yeah, I heard Oklahoma's gone. Kansas, man. Hey, guys, love the show. You mentioned tornado miss episode that I bet you would get an email from a civil engineer. And here I am. Just wanted to share an interesting fact about designing wind resistant buildings. I remember the day of the 2008 downtown Atlanta tornado you mentioned, because it was actually the last day of classes at Georgia Tech before I went home to Florida for spring break. Ironically, I just learned in one of my classes that one reason most skyscrapers are not the same basic shape from top to bottom is to alleviate pressure from wind. In the same class, professor had mentioned that one. Of the absolute worst structural designs for a skyscraper is a perfect cylinder, which is what our Peach tree plaza is that had the windows up for so long. It's a cylinder the wind whips all around and ends up hitting the entire face of the building as a giant wall of forts, rather than hitting the building at different places over time. Not ideal for a glass tube of a building. Anyway, I thought you guys would find that interesting. You are the best thing to come out of Athens in my Georgia Tech opinion. Oh, wow. I see where that was going. Keep up the good work. And that is from Scooter Shelbyn. Thanks a lot, Scooter. Scooter Shelby. I don't know about the best thing to come out of Athens. There's a couple of bands and beers and coffees and football players. No, Scooter is taking all right. Thank you, Scooter. If you want to give us high praise like Scooter did, we're always down with that. You can tweet to us at S YSK podcast. You can post cool stuff on Facebook. Comstudyo. You can find us on Instagram at syscapcast. For real. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestepworks.com. As always, join us at our home on the Web stuffyshonow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.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 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." | ||
How Personalized Medicine Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-personalized-medicine-works | Hippocrates realized that it is even more important to understand the patient than to understand the disease and now, 2000 years later, we are coming back to that way of thinking with personalized medicine. ? | Hippocrates realized that it is even more important to understand the patient than to understand the disease and now, 2000 years later, we are coming back to that way of thinking with personalized medicine. ? | Tue, 26 Jan 2016 16:40:15 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=16, tm_min=40, tm_sec=15, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=26, tm_isdst=0) | 37305029 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good, it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss, turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comsysk, and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code S YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. All right, Josh, so the first part of our winter tour is over. That was fun, huh? A lot of fun. But we are going back out this week and next to Atlanta, where we're not going anywhere. We're going down the road ten minutes from my house. Sure. Atlanta, birmingham. We would still love to see you. And you can still get great seats. Yeah. And this is a brand new show. Unless you were in San Francisco, San Diego, Austin or Dallas, you ain't seen the show. True. And it is bringing down the house all over the country. That's right. Eventually probably all over the world. Yes. And you can get tickets. Just go to Sysklive.com. It's our square space powered site. And they were powering our tour, and they're powering me on a daily basis. So we will see you guys very soon. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Joshua M. Clark. There's charles W. Wayne Chuckers. Chuck Tran. Brioons chuck Tran. I remember that. And then that one never even made sense. No. Who said that? Me. Yeah. I don't get it. It doesn't mean anything. That's why it never made sense. And then there's Jerry Jersey. Jertran and Josh Tran. Yeah. The trans. I'm excited to record this and then leave because I just quickly, on my phone saw that Billy Joel did a Dot performance in the commercial break of a talk show, and the video was up. Oh, yeah. So I got things to do. Okay, well, let's go personalized medicine, Chuck. So let's take it back. Let's take it way back. Okay. Let's talk about medicine in general, right? Are we way back machining it or no. No. All right, so there's this idea that to best understand how to treat a person, you should understand. Hypocrisy said it's far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has. Boy, that is smart. For back then it is. And I think that this is the original idea behind medicine, that we can understand the disease, but when you apply it to a person, it's going to be different than when you apply it to another person. Sure. And that is the heart of personalized medicine, is that understanding? Unfortunately, for many hundreds of years. Well, actually for a shorter time than that. But in Western medicine the idea has been that if it works for most people, it will probably work for you or that's good enough for us. Yeah, it's called a trial and error approach and that should scare you to death. Well, I get it because until the Human Genome Project, we didn't have a lot of choices as a society other than to do our best for the majority. Well, yeah, like that changed everything. It did. But even before that was what? 20 00 20 01 something like that. The Human Genome Project? Yeah. I mean, before that there were some precursors to personalized medicine. Like let's look at family histories and stuff like that. Yeah, but that's not that old. No, it wasn't until World War II that people started noticing different people have different reactions to different kinds of medicine. Yeah, there's actually an antimalarial drug that was given to troops in World War II, American troops. And if you're an African American, there is a high likelihood that you might develop anemia after you're given this antimalarial drug. But that didn't show among white troops. And doctors thought, what's behind this? And they went and looked and saw that genetically speaking African Americans were less likely to have a gene active that produces a protective enzyme that keeps you from developing anemia when you're given this particular antimalarial drug. And that in the middle of the 20th century, was the first time we really started in the Western medicine tradition thinking that no people have different reactions to different types of treatments and can have different experiences with different types of disease. Did they do something about it in that case? I don't know. I was curious. Depends on the time period in this country. Shamefully. They might have said like yeah, but who cares? Yeah, it's the same time the Tuskegee. Yeah, exactly. The Tuskegee experiments were going on. We were also infecting people in Guatemala with syphilis. Yeah, crazy, crazy stuff. So you mentioned Hippocrates more than 2000 years ago. He was pretty advanced for thinking that jerkse needs bleeding, but Zeus does not. Right? Zeus never needs a bleeding, by the way. The lightning bullet the problem. Exactly. But he was way ahead of his time to be thinking that way back then. Some other pioneers since then, I think we talked about these two reuben Ottenberg and lutvic. Hectun. Nice job. I don't know. That was not good. hectone hectoin. And I think in our blood episode, we might have talked about this. That was such a good episode. It was a really good one. I think they were the first ones to say, you know what? People have different blood types as it works, so that's why people keep dying. We're putting this blood into someone that doesn't have the same blood. So that was Land Steiner who came up with the idea that we wasn't blood types. These two were the ones owner right. Who first started to match people like, well, let's match these people. Got you. Yeah. That's a pretty good first example of personalizing medicine on the most basic level, like, let's not kill people with blood. Right? Yeah. And then, like I said, family histories and such. They finally started saying, hey, you know what? Maybe we'll look at your father and your mother and your grandparents. Right. Because if they have this disease, you might have it as well. But everything changed when the Human Genome Project came along, and all of a sudden we found out we could learn a lot more about our predisposition for certain diseases. Yeah. Because if you think about it. Our reactions to different diseases and also the same medicines that treat different diseases can be traced down to the genetic level. To the molecular level. To whether a gene is turned off and expressing a certain kind of protein or enzyme. Or whether our genes are going to allow for a tumor that expresses a certain kind of protein that can be tracked. Yeah. If you conceivably can look at a person's genome sequence the whole thing. Analyze it. And then look at what genes are turned on or off. What proteins are being expressed. That kind of thing. Then you if you also know that a certain kind of drug tracks a certain kind of tumor that's associated with that type of genome or genetic sequence. Then you can put patient and drug together under its ideal form. Dude, we should stop and just walk away. That's a mic drop statement. I don't think we need anything else. Okay. Can I go watch Billy Joel sing? You up. All right. So if you think you go to the doctor and you get personalized medicine, in a sense, you sort of are. But what we're talking about is what Josh had said, which is your own individual biology being the most overriding factor in how you were treated. Right. Your biology not just you're a human being. Yeah. This works on human beings and horses. Right. And your mom had cancer and your grandma had cancer, so you might have cancer. No, we're talking about looking inside of you to find out what your likelihood to get these things are, and like you said, matching you with the best treatment plan. Right. One of those courses of study. There's a lot of different things that really kind of fall under personalized medicine. Sure. But one of those subfields is called pharmacogenetics, right? Yes. And that is, again, if you can take a person's genome and then analyze it, you can say, well, I see the sequence right here would react very well to this particular drug. That's pharmacogenetics matching the drug to the person. Right? Yes. Which is the opposite of, hey, it works for eight out of ten people. And if you're just one of those 20%, then TS. TS. And seriously, that is the basis of Western medicine as it stands right now. It's a trial and error approach. And they don't usually stop at TS. No, of course not. They just say, like, oh, you survived that round of drugs, but it didn't work. Let's try something else. Maybe this other one that doesn't work for that. 80% tends to work for that, 20% might work for you. And then it just goes on and on and on until they finally hit upon that drug. Hopefully, that doesn't work. I say hopefully because within that trial and error period, a lot of people die. True. Sometimes that first time, that first trial results in a fatal error. And those are called ades, or adverse drug events. There are 770,000 people in the US alone. They either die or are injured by an ade. Every year in the US alone, almost a million people. Wow. 770,000 people every year. You give that person a drug and they might die. Right. And one of the goals of pharmacogenetics is to avoid ades so that you can say before you give anybody, a drug like, this won't kill you. Yes, exactly. This won't kill you. We know that because we scanned your genome. Right. We're not guessing here. We know you genetically will not die from this drug. Yeah. I think we should caveat here when we say things like guessing. And I don't want to paint the medical industry as just throwing darts with a blindfold. They did the best job they could, I think, to treat massive amounts of people in the most efficient way possible. Sure. But things are getting better now because of the human biome or the human genome and what we've learned about it. When I look about the future of medicine, it is super rosy. Yeah, I agree. Like, 100 years from now, it's going to be amazing what we're going to be doing. Maybe like, 30. We're right there on the cusp right now, where we went through a fairly dark age as far as medicine goes, where we were taking shots in the dark, figuring things out as we went along, and now we are right there at the age where we're about to just take off like a rocket and really understand health and wellness and treatment of disease. All right, well, I feel like we're on the cusp of a message break as well. I think you're right. 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 back is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs and with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 50,000 Advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on so fast in your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see. And the cityadvantage Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. You know you're a pet mom when your camera roll is all pics of your pet. At Halo, we get it because we are pet moms too. And just like you, we know their nutrition is one of the most important decisions you'll make. Halo is natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science and thoughtfully sourced. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Find Halo at specialty pet stores and online. So, Chuck, I was talking about pharmacogenetics, right? Yeah. There's actually some examples of pharmaco genetics already taking place. This isn't necessarily in the future. Like, this is already starting. Yes. I think it started in the 90s, right? Yeah. And we'll get to this later. One of the big reasons that things are cooking now, cooking with gas, as my dad used to say, is because the massive drop in cost for mapping your genome. Yeah, like massive. In fact, I'll go ahead and tease you here. The first time it was done to James Watson in 2007. That was 2007. Not even the human genome. That was 2001. Yes. 2007 was the first time they mapped the person in full. Cost a million dollars. Now you can get it done, a good one, not a full. You can't map out the entire genome for this amount of money. No, you can't. You can sequence it. You can sequence it for that's. The caveat less than $200. And pretty soon it's going to be about $50. And then from what I saw in that, I think that was like a Business Insider article. There was a dude who gave this really interesting lecture. He very strongly asserted that they were pretty confident by 2020, thanks to economies of scale, genome sequencing will cost about a penny. Yeah, they won't cost a penny. You won't pay a penny, I guarantee you that. No, but it will be. But it might be. Like $50 and someone will be making 49, 99 profit. No, I think what he was saying was if you take all of the genomes that are sequenced in a year, ultimately that's what it will have cost. It's about a penny each. Right. But it's going to pop up in different ways than what you have now. This is a pretty common thought that you will pee into your toilet and your toilet will have a genome sequencer attached to it. And when you pee, your urine will be analyzed for any changes from that morning or the night before or anything like that, so that your baseline health is monitored several times a day basis. Right. If my toilet starts telling me to cut down on my drinking, then I'm going to start peeing outside. I imagine that you can probably set it to kind of take it easy on this area, that kind of thing. And when I say start peeing outside, I mean full time. I pee outside almost every night off of my deck. Right. Sometimes you even stand up. Yeah. That's Raymond McCauley, by the way. He is the bio technology and bioinformatics chair at Singularity University. Yeah. What's their mascot? The Fighting Kurzweil. So he's a smart guy and he's the one that is saying that this is just getting cheaper and cheaper. Right. And when you look at the graph in 2007, it took a nosedive in price. Yeah, it did. He compared it to Moore's Law, where Moore's Law is like the amount of computing power doubles every 18 months or something like that. 24 months. I can't remember. And it was pointed out that genome sequencing was actually moving at a rate of five to ten times the rate of Moore's Law. That's awesome. That is awesome. As far as genome sequencing is concerned, the problem is computing power is still following Moore's Law. And here's the big problem. This is why we're not all getting our genome sequenced right now. Because it might be very cheap to sequence a human genome. It's still very expensive because it requires a lot of computing power to analyze that genome. Yeah, that's the main stumbling block is you can't sequence your genome, stick it in a machine and have it say you'll get cancer yet. That's the future. But not too far off. No, that's like Gatika. Yes, but this guy McCauley was saying probably in about ten years they will have machines like that. Yeah, which is what we need. That's the main stumbling block right now is there so much data that computers can't even keep up. So right now you could conceivably get a decent genome sequenced and analyzed for like 15 grand, which is not I mean, that's not out of the realm of the reach of everybody. You have to reach people billionaire for that. Right. The big change will come when all of us get our genome sequence basically for free. And the Holy grail in the not too distant future is to not only have a genome sequencer and analyzer in your toilet, but also you'll be wearing like a wearable or have an implantable, like a fitbit or something. Yeah. Or maybe something that's under the skin that is like fitbit, but that's analyzing everything, including your hormone levels, things like that. So you're not only analyzing your p, you're also analyzing your body in a moment to moment basis. And all this stuff is run through an app that you have on your phone that is tied in to your health records and other kinds of medical data that you control and you share with your health care provider rather than the opposite. That's another big change coming that we talked about. Will computers replace my doctor episode? Yeah. That medical information about the person is going to be wrestled away from health care and health care providers and insurance companies and placed in the hands of the individual. And that's going to be a huge change that will probably come from this personalized medicine. Exactly. One of the positive changes. All right, so there have been some early stories that have given us all hope for the future when it comes to looking at these biomarkers for potential of disease. And one of them, there was a drug called K-A-L-Y-D-E-C-O. Kalytico, I think. So, in 2012 to treat a rare form of cystic fibrosis, which is a deadly lung condition. And the FDA here in the US approved this drug basically because they found out certain people have genetic markers, these biomarkers that they wouldn't respond to other drugs treating cystic fibrosis. So they said, this is a new drug that will work for you. Success story. Right? Boom. And this is the future of personalized medicine all over the place, right? Yes. It covers about 4% of cystic fibrosis patients. So in the US. It's 1200 people that this drug was targeted for. That's awesome. Right? I'm just cynical, but you would think that so few people that somebody be like, why bother? I'll bet it costs a bunch of money. Sure, for the drug, but yes, you're right. And then secondly, it also kind of shows how personalized medicine shifts our understanding of disease too. Right. The reason these people with cystic fibrosis didn't respond to regular medicine is because their cystic fibrosis was developed. Because their genes that regulated salt and water movement across the surface of their lungs were mutated and not functioning properly. So this specific drug that targets these 4% of cystic fibrosis patients goes in and messes with that gene? Well, if you do the other 96% of cystic fibrosis patients, their salt and water movement is just fine. That's not why they have cystic fibrosis. So it changes your understanding of cystic fibrosis. It's not like you have cystic fibrosis. This is why you have it. This is how your body is showing that you have cystic fibrosis. You have cystic fibrosis, and you can have it under these different mechanisms. Right. That's what personalized medicine is changing, too. It's changing our understanding of disease itself. Same with cancer, right? Sure. Certain tumors express certain proteins, and although, yes, you have an out of control growth that makes a cancer, it really doesn't bear that much of a resemblance to this other kind of cancer. Right. And the more we dig into how people respond differently to cancer treatments and how they can host different kinds of tumors, is changing our understanding of cancer. And a lot of people are like, cancer is too big of an umbrella. These are really almost different diseases. Yeah. And I think the McAuley guy said the hope one day is to stop cancer before it even starts at such a small molecular level with these advanced I guess like a blood test. Yeah, basically, the blood test will be so advanced that, let's say you're going to develop cancer in five years. Like, we can tell that already. So let's just stop it now before there's a tumor. Yeah. Or before it gets big enough that it's a problem. Yeah, exactly. If you have type one diabetes, I think it is good news. There is a new system. It's basically an artificial pancreas device, and they are wearable and the clinical developed by UVA. And Harvard. Go Cavaliers and Crimson. Crimson. Smarties. That's Harvard, right? They're not the Crimson Tide, too, are they? No, not the Tide. They're just the Crimson. Okay. I think you guys left the part off there. Harvard. Well, they do have a mascot, I think, like John Harvard. But it's not like it's just a square of crimson, I think. So maybe they're above it. They don't need it. Crimson Knights. Crimson Knights. No. Is that Rutgers? That's Scarlett Knights. Anyway, UVA and Harvard developed this thing together, and it starts clinical trials in the next month or two, and for six months, 240 people are going to wear this thing, this artificial pancreas. This is so cool to tell your body exactly when you need the optimal level of insulin in your body at all times. Well, it introduces that optimal level. Oh, does it? How so? It's monitoring your blood glucose level. Yeah. And if you have diabetes, you have to inject insulin. This stuff, say, is connected through a port in your chest. Oh, I don't think this one particularly is. This is just a wearable monitor. Oh, it is. Okay. But I think eventually they're going to have what you're talking about. Sure. I guess I'm just getting ahead of myself. That actually regulates not monitors in the future, I think, is what you're talking about. Or injects, like, an optimal dose of regulating your glucose. Yeah. So you don't have to do it. Right. I think this is just a wearable monitor, so you could just, like, press and say, okay, how much insulin do I need right now? It tells you the exact milligrams. I guess. So you still have to like a dope go and inject it yourself, right? I think so. I don't see how it could be wearable on your arm and then also be attached to your body, like the insides of your body through an IV? Yes. I don't think that's what this is. All right. Sounds like there's two different things, but it's still monitoring exactly what your blood glucose level is. Absolutely. And it's your blood glucose, coast level. Here, go. It's personalized medicine. That's right. If you have tennis, like our buddy Aaron Cooper. Aaron Cooper. He probably didn't hear that. All he heard was a ringing. He just hurts. They're working on customizable devices that adjust the audio signal that's unique to your own ear. In other words, hey, just put this hearing aid in there. That may or may not work for you. Right. From what I understand, noise canceling headphones. Yeah, I don't like those. Well, it kind of works like those. I guess it figures out what pitch you're hearing that tonight is at, and it just gets rid of it. Yeah, I think that's neat. I do, too. And then check. There's another early example of a big win. There's something called Herceptin. And in 1998, the FDA said, yes, go ahead with this. They figured out that this particular drug worked for a specific group of people whose tumors expressed a specific protein, and it was a breast cancer tumor targeting drug. But again, it wasn't like, oh, you have breast cancer. Here, try Herceptin, it'll work for you. We believe that you have this kind of tumor because it's expressing this kind of protein. So Herceptin is going to treat this hurray for her septin. Yeah, it's neat stuff. Well, let's take another break and we'll get back and finish up with some of the obstacles in the future. 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 at City comAdventure and travel on with city advantage. 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@halopets.com. All right, so this all sounds rosy, but there are some obstacles. We already talked about one. The previous biggest one was cost. This article itself is way out of date because it said $17,000 a person, and now it's already at like, $200. I think that might be, though, with the with analysis. Oh, really? Yeah, I think that's what they're saying. Oh, yeah. Follow up on the data. Yeah. All right. So now it's down to 15 grand, roughly by $2,000. Right. So it was written a week ago. All right. But the cost of the genome was a previous hurdle. Now that's coming down. Another hurdle that we mentioned was just processing the data, and then another hurdle is just overstating the impact of the findings. Right. Just because it's a slippery slope, just because you are susceptible to something doesn't mean you're going to get it. No. And that's actually there's something called the Jolie effect. The Angelina Jolie effect. Oh, boy. I've got 8000 jokes. Have you heard about that? No. So do you remember when she did genetic testing and found that there was a likelihood that she would develop breast cancer? I thought you were going to say pouty lips. No. Okay. I think perhaps her mother may have had breast cancer. I'm not sure. But she was convinced that there was a good chance she's going to get breast cancer. So she went ahead and had a double mastectomy without breast cancer. No tumors, no nothing. She just preventively had mastectomies. Angelina Jolie did, yeah. Yes. And it created what's called this Angelina Jolie effect. Christina Applegate did something like that, too. Well, she had breast cancer. Angelina Jolie didn't have breast cancer. Got you believed that she would conceivably get breast cancer. So it just had her breasts removed and then had implants. Right. And it created what's called the Angelina Jolie effect, which is this idea that the more we know about our bodies, the more focused on all the things that could conceivably go wrong, hypothetically could go wrong, that we may take radical steps like prophylactic surgery, basically, to prevent something that may or may not even happen. Yeah. And this is a big concern among bioethicists about this kind of understanding that will come from personalized medicine, is are we going to all become obsessed with our health? Right. Well, I think people that already are this will just be the next step of that. Yeah. But I could see it could bring more people into the fold. I'm sure there's a lot of people who don't think about their health just because they don't have that kind of awareness. But if it was in their face, like, hey, buddy, here's your genome. Look at this crazy stuff that could happen to you. You may start thinking about it even if you weren't predisposed to it before. Right. But you would have to go get that done to begin with. Well, that's another question too. So right now, if getting a genome done cost 17 grand, right, should that be just the providence of the rich, or is it a human right to know what your genome says? If anybody can know what their genome says, should everybody? I predict that the answer will ultimately be yes to that. That is right. And the government will probably fund a program for every american to get their genome sequence 20 years. Another big problem is the FDA is just overtaxed. It's a rapidly moving field and they just can't keep up at this point. No, because there are a lot of new things that come along, new drugs, new devices that the FDA has to test. Well, not just that, the understanding of it as well. Sure. Like, they used to have this open database from the human genome project to where all of these anonymous subjects or genomes were just sitting out there for anybody to go and data mine. Right. Yeah. And then somebody proved that you can actually find you can deanonomize these people because, again, this is their genome and figure out whose genome you're looking at specifically. And the FDA had to shut it down, but they shut it down after somebody proved that this could already be done. So they're having to react rather than being able to keep up with the changes in the field. And that's one of the other huge, slippery slopes in the future is well, a couple of things. How insurance companies deal with this. A can they deny someone based on a biomarker? Right now, there is legislation that has been signed into law that says no. It's called biological discrimination, which is profoundly insightful or foresightful oh, yeah. For the government, sure. I'm really surprised by that one. And you know what? Canada is the only g seven country that doesn't have this protection. Really? Biological discrimination. Wow. And it's a big deal. There's a lot of people there going like, why are we the only one that's really surprised? We're canada. I predict trudeau will change that. Well, there's a big push too, for sure. And it's funny, when they voted in what was the act called? Genetic information nondiscrimination act of 2008. Right. It passed by a vote of 95 to nothing in the senate and for 14 to one in the house. Who is the one? It was ron paul, of all people. I'd be interested to know what his thinking was, I've got it. Because I thought the same thing. Here's his thinking, because it doesn't make sense that he's because he's pretty obsessed with the government. Staying out of your biz. Sure. He said uniform federal mandates are a clumsy and ineffective way to deal with problems such as employers. And one of the rubs is either you'll be denied insurance or maybe you won't get hired for a job or promoted if they know that you might kick the bucket soon. That guy can't push a broom. He's got a defect on his G 489 gene, but it says right here in his experience, he can push a broom. Genetics. He said uniform federal mandates are clumsy and effective way to deal with problems such as employers making hiring decisions on the basis of a potential employee's genetic profile. Imposing federal mandates on private businesses merely raises the cost of doing business and thus reduces the overall employment opportunities for all citizens. Huh. Yeah, I see what he's saying, but I don't know, it's kind of surprised. Seems like something you'd want to protect. Sure. But it passed by the widest of margins regardless. Yeah, that might be a record. No, I'm sure there's been unanimous ones. One of the I would like to know what those were like honoring Girl Scouts on Patriot Day or something? No, those one person is like, no, no, that was Bernie Sanders. I choked on a tag along once, never buying them again. There's another obstacle, Chuck, and it is gathering the information to get this understanding of what kind of genes lead to certain kinds of diseases so that we can treat people in an individual basis when we stumble across that same genome and a person later, you have to have a big database of genes. So where do you get it? 23 ANDME that's apparently where you go get it. It sounds like Forever 21, like a mall store. 23 ANDME yeah, they are a company now, and the leading company, I think, for the personal genome test market. And how they're making their money now is not by selling these test kits, which is $99, which supposedly they were selling at a loss. Right. So they could eventually have this database that they could then sell to whoever not whoever, but namely like pharma companies and people doing research. So 23 ANDME amassed a database of, I think about 800,000 people, 600,000 people who took the 23 ANDME test and paid $99 for it agreed to donate their DNA, their genome research to research. Right. So 23 and me said, thanks a lot, guys. Now we have 6000 individuals, genomes just sitting there waiting to be analyzed. And very recently they closed a deal with a company called Gene Tech. Gene Tech paid 23 ANDME $60 million just to analyze 3000 people with Parkinson's genomes. That's why they were selling the kits at a loss. Yes. Because they knew the big payoff was in something else. Entirely. Yes, and from what I read in a MIT Technology Review article, 23 of me, you shouldn't paint them. And I don't mean to paint them as nefarious or anything like that, but there's a guy named Charles Cypher who writes for Scientific American in 2013. He called the idea of a private company amassing a private database of human genomes terrifying. Yeah, it's definitely like the stuff of science fiction movies, for sure. I couldn't decide whether or not it was bad or not. I think what people are most concerned about is like, well, what happens in the future? What if it becomes just like Facebook, where they have the rights to sell your personal information to whoever wants it's exactly what it is. So Facebook data mines your behavior, and you get to use their application for free. 23 of me analyzed your DNA and sent you some stuff back for $99. And they're data mining your genes. It's the same thing as Facebook. It's just instead of behavior, they're analyzing genes. They're data mining or amassing a database of it for sale. But right now they're saying, but yeah, we're selling it to researchers who are out to make medicines to make people better. Yeah, you can't really argue with that, right? It's just the potential for it. You can understand how somebody could make it. It could be made very uncomfortable by that. Yeah, the evil, overlord son of the current head of 23 ANDME is the one who will do it. Well, the founder is like, twelve now. The founder used to be married to Sergey Brin of Google. Oh, really? Yeah, I think they split up. But she still is the founder, and I believe the person who's running 23 and me. Wow. Hopefully she subscribes to the don't be evil thing, too. Seriously, if you want to know more about personalized medicine, we should probably revisit this every six months, I think. Chuck. Yeah. You can type those words into the search bar@houseteporkworks.com. You should also check out these awesome episodes. Your limbs torn off. Now what? Can your grandfather's diet shorten your own life? And how blood works? Yes, blood. That was a good one. And then will computers replace my doctor? If this episode floated your boat, you will love this too. And I said, float your boat. Which means it's time for listener mail. That means it's almost time for Billy Joel duo. Yes. I'm going to call the Satanic Panic movies. Hey, guys. My wife Jodie and I just listened to the episode on Satanic Panic, and we loved it and reminisced about our childhoods. We were both children of the she remembers all the daytime talk shows about Satanic Panic. We both had no idea it was taken so seriously by so many people. For me, I always assume that stuff was just legend. Although there was a Devil's Drive street in my own town growing up that kept all his ten year olds spooked into our teenage years and it was a rite of passage when you finally got your license to drive down that street. Mostly I remember Satanism through movies and pop culture. Though given your Pinchon for Cinema tangents, we were both expecting to hear more on that topic in this episode. Too serious. Agreed. Here's my top ten list of mainstream ad satanic panic movies. Number ten dragnet. Number nine. The Golden Child. He said this one does not hold up well. I'm surprised to hear that that doesn't hold up well. Yeah. Number eight, children of the Corn. Seven witches of Eastwick. Eastwick? Six every popular horror movie in the 80s by the 13th night, Elm Street Halloween. I take issue with that. Same round. Elm street by the 13th is certainly not the end. These are just creepy killer guys. Yeah. Slasher flicks. Come on, dude. Number five, The Burbs. Yeah. Number four the Evil Dead series. No. Number three indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Ritual Sacrifice. I think he's just broadened. Okay. Number two poltergeist. No, not even close. Number one, I don't think he asked which ones are you going to say don't belong? Number one young Sherlock Holmes. I love that movie, but I don't remember much about it. Oh, yeah, there was a whole cabal. It was more like Indiana Jones's Temple of Doom. Ancient Egypt worshipping Victorian cult. That was cool. I saw it like in the last year or so. Oh, really? I remember enjoying it when I was a great movie. Where'd that guy go? No idea. I was wondering that myself. Thanks for an amazingly delightful and consistently entertaining podcast, guys. We came out to your Boston show and absolutely loved it. Happy New Year. That is from Brian Gladstein of Framingham, Massachusetts. Thanks, Brian. Thank you for half of that list you send as well. We appreciate it. If you want to get in touch with us, send us a list that we may or may not trash. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast howstepworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshadow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit househopworks.com. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that we mean your dog halo. Hello. Elevate. Is natural, science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands? 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96d88af8-440c-11e8-82c5-b39ab890538e | The Collar Bomb Heist | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-collar-bomb-heist | The collar bomb heist is the crime caper that keeps on giving. Every time the story seemed like it was figured out, another layer appeared. Tune in today to hear Josh and Chuck detail this very odd and twisty story. | The collar bomb heist is the crime caper that keeps on giving. Every time the story seemed like it was figured out, another layer appeared. Tune in today to hear Josh and Chuck detail this very odd and twisty story. | Fri, 18 May 2018 01:45:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=1, tm_min=45, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=4, tm_yday=138, tm_isdst=0) | 40377437 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. And this is stuff you should know. The True crime edition. And again yeah, we've done a few of these right. True crime is so hot right now. Hey, man, we were dabbling on the periphery of true crime when most of these people were wetting their diapers. That's right, man. That is right. I'm glad somebody finally said it. We were occasionally doing a poor job of covering true crime ten years ago. That's right. We're going to do it again. That's right. We continue that great rich history. Yeah, because true crime can be extraordinarily interesting, especially when you're talking about an extraordinarily over complicated heist that results in a man's bizarre death. Death by bizarre means and involves what really ultimately you could make a case is an unsolved mystery. Still today, even though it's technically bureaucratically, been solved, a lot of people say, no, this thing hasn't been solved yet. Homemade bombs, got scavenger hunt, got a crack dealer. Well, you got to have a crack dealer, got prostitutes, you got pizza. Yes. And let's start with the pizza. You got a GeoMetro, right? Which, by the way, I just wanted to point out ahead of time, there is no more pizza delivery car 2003 than a GeoMetro. A teal one, no less. Yeah, the thing is, it's almost like they rolled them right off the line in 2003, which is straight to a pizza place with the pizza guy inside already. Yeah. And the little sign magneted on top. Right. A little crooked. Yes. So the whole thing does start actually with a pizza guy, a pizza place, and a teal GeoMetro. And like you said, the whole thing starts in 2003 in Erie, Pennsylvania, and still is. I looked it up. There's a pizza place called Mama Mia's. Pizzeria on the nose, but fine, sure. It gets the job done right. And at about 02:00 P.m. On August 28, 2003, a pizza delivery guy named Brian Wells, I think he was 46 at the time, he was about to end his morning shift when a call came in for two small sausage and pepperoni pizzas. And the delivery was, I guess, the opposite way of where Brian Wells is going to go on his way home. But he said, you know what? I'll take this one last order. And he walked out the door at about two. And the next time that Brian Wells was seen in public again, he was entering a PNC Bank branch just down the street from his pizza place a few miles up the road, and he looked a lot different than he did when he left the pizza parlor about 28 minutes earlier. Yeah, so first of all, he was walking with a cane, kind of a funny looking cane, and then under his T shirt, he had clearly and if you've seen the footage and the photos, you can see warning, by the way, for video. Yeah. For the future. It's quite graphic. It's out there, but it is out there. But he had clearly some large boxy looking thing. It looked like he was wearing a shoe box around his neck with a Tshirt pulled over it, kind of. But in the teller at the bank's defense, could have been an artificial torso, and she probably didn't want to draw attention to it. Yes. She was being very kind. Right. So one thing I want to point out, too. There's already a discrepancy. What? We're like, a minute into the story, and there's already a discrepancy that shirt he was wearing over that boxy thing underneath his shirt said guest on it. And I've seen that it was written somehow, like in spray paint or marker or that it was an actual guest jeans t shirt. Oh, really? So either an officially licensed or not licensed, but whatever brand shirt or a homemade janky spray painted version. Yeah. And if you look, the pictures don't really show one way or another. Yeah, I couldn't tell. It looks more like it's homemade. And I looked up to see if there was a guest shirt that if I could find the actual guest shirt, it was and couldn't. So I think it may have been homemade. Okay. Regardless, he's wearing this shirt that says guests on. And he walks up to the teller, and he hands the teller a note, and the note says, I have a bomb. Get everybody who has access codes to the safe together and put $250,000 into a bag and bring it to me. I think you said you have 15 minutes to do this. Yeah. Which kind of a long time if you're a bank robber. It is. It's almost like luxurious amount of time. Like 60 seconds. Yeah. This should have happened yesterday. Chop chop. Right. So he stands back and waits, apparently grabs a dumb, dumb lollipop out of the little basket while he's waiting, because why not? And the teller says, sir, we can't get into the safe. That's just not how things work. I'm sorry. But as a consolation prize, I'm going to put $8,702 into a bag for you right here and send you on your way. Okay? Yeah. And importantly, we did not mention he lifted his shirt up and showed this teller this bomb, this what's called a collar bomb strapped around his neck. Right. So he walks out of the bank a free man, and the next time that he's seen in public is about 15 minutes later, and he's seen in public by some Pennsylvania state troopers who are on the lookout for this guy. And he's still wearing that shirt. He's still got the big bulge, and he's standing around his geometry, parked in a parking lot that is actually shared with that PNC bank and the McDonald's. And he's in a parking lot right there. So basically, he left the bank robbery and went about 100 to 200ft away from it. And that's where he was found, like a full 15 minutes later. Yeah. So these kopas, these troopers come over and he says, hey, guys, this is a bomb around my neck. A group of black men chained this bomb around my neck at gunpoint, forced me to rob this bank for them. I'm not lying here. This thing is going to go off. So the cops call the bomb squad, and I saw the family of Wells is still angry about the fact that she says they did nothing to save them, but I would be, too. By the way, we should shout out Wired magazine. Oh, yes, we really should. A lot of this came from a great, heavily researched story by Rich Shapiro from about eight years ago called the Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist. So thank you, Rich, for your work. But the dudes on the ground, I kind of remember this happening because when I went and looked at the still images, I was like, wait a minute, I've seen this footage, and it's this guy sitting on the ground with this thing around his neck, kind of just waiting, seated on the pavement for about 25 minutes. He says, very interestingly, like, did you call my boss at the pizza place? And then all of a sudden this bomb starts beeping fast, which is never a good sign. And when I was reading the story, I thought, well, that's just a ruse. But no, this thing detonated and killed him. It blasted a hole in his chest. It did not blow his head off like the Internet says. No, but it was a violent, awful death. Yes, it was, and it was pretty quick. And then three minutes after the bomb goes off, the bomb squad showed up. So he's dead. This guy Brian Wells is dead. And the whole time he was protesting, he's like, I was forced to rob the bank. Are you guys going to get this off of me or what? Yes. He said something like, did you call my boss? Because apparently he was a very loyal employee. He'd been working at Mama MIAS for how long? Like ten years or something like that? For years and years. And he'd only called in late once, not even sick late once when his cat died, said Rich Shapiro in that Wired article. So it seemed like he actually was telling the truth, that he had been abducted and forced to rob the bank and then had been a victim. I think the bomb going off really kind of put an exclamation point on his story that he was not a willing participant in this. Right? Yeah. So the cops obviously check out that GeoMetro, and it's sweet, sweet styling, and they saw his cane in there. Turns out the reason why the cane was funny looking is because it was also a gun. And it really looks a lot like a gun. Yeah. When you look at it, the bomb was clearly homemade, had a couple of different parts to it. It was this banded metal collar that he wore around his neck. It was like locked to his neck. Had four key holes and then a combination lock. Yeah, it was really locked to his neck. And then an iron box with two pipe bombs loaded up, ready to go. And then interestingly, and this will figure put a pin in this one because this will figure in the case later. It had two kitchen timers in there in addition to an electronic countdown timer. Yeah. Which was, I guess the thing that started beeping faster and faster. Yeah. And then some decoy wires. You always got to have those if you're making a bomb. Sure. But I mean, that's pretty smart. So there's decoy wires. There are apparently also stickers that said don't do it, or skull and crossbones or rat poison, whatever. Yeah, that's a good nine to five reference. I just saw that the other night. So it was a homemade bomb, but by all accounts a well made bomb, too. And it worked, which I think is one of the big questions about any homemade bomb is whether it will actually work or not. And this one worked with deadly effect. That's right. So the most important thing they found in this car, though, were some letters, some handwritten notes addressed to bomb hostage. So one of them said, I mean, these were instructions basically on what this guy should do, which further kind of cemented, like, hey, this guy is probably telling the truth. It said, Go rob this bank of 250 grand. And then very strangely outlined this little scavenger hunt, basically to where eventually you will land upon the keys in combination to get you out of this thing by going all over town and finding these various hidden notes. And at the last note, you will be able to free yourself. Yeah. The last one will give you the keys and the combination, but you better hurry because you have a limited amount of time. If you stop and think you're going to waste time and you're going to die. We can detonate this remotely and we're going to be following you. It was written pretty crazily. Have you read any of the note? Oh, yeah, like a lot of jump cuts and jump scares in it's. Like, go do this and then go do that after that, and then don't try anything funny, we're going to blow you up. You know, it has those every once in a while. And there's drawings in there of where he could find the notes and all that. So he made it. As far as the first note, which was McDonald's, it was in that McDonald's that shared a parking lot with the PNC bank. That was where the first note was. So he made it to that McDonald's grabbed that note, and that note was directing him out of town to another note, and he didn't make it that far, but when the cops caught up with them yes. So the scavenger hunt was like, you said he had gotten just to the one place. So the cops then say, well, here's what we're going to do. We're going to complete the scavenger hunt. They were like, wow, you just blew my mind. That's some great policing. Should we take a break? Sure. All right. Scavenger hunt has just started by the Kopas. We'll be right back. 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. All right, we're back. So the scavenger hunt is still on Chuck. The cops follow from the note that Brian Wells had to the next clue, and they found the next note, and that directed them to another place, even further out of town, to where they found the jar where the note was supposed to be. But the note was gone. Yeah. And they don't really know what that means. They didn't know if it was just something to keep them busy, preoccupied. They didn't know if the person who is designing the scavenger hunt got interrupted or knew that the cops were around and they were doing it sort of in real time. But at any rate, unfortunately, the scavenger hunt just kind of fizzled out because that was kind of a cool part of the story. Yeah, it really was. Like, it's one of the things that makes this just an incredibly bizarre crime. Why the scavenger hunt? It's going to keep coming up again and again, right? Yeah. So when the scavenger hunt ran out, the trail actually went cold. The case started to get cold. For a few months, the cops sniffed around Brian Wells, tried to figure out why him, what happened with him, and they went back to his place of employment and they kind of checked out the kind of person he was. Right. Yeah. And they very smartly. Said, oh, wait a minute, why don't we check out what that last delivery was supposed to be? There may be a clue there. And it was an interesting place. You can only get there by dirt road, and it was right next to a TV transmission tower in a kind of a remote wooded area. Right. And cops comb the area, found shoe prints that matched Wells. They found those classic iconic GeoMetro tire tracks that everyone recognizes by sight. But there really weren't any more clues as far as the cops were concerned at that location. So where the cops had found a dead end, a reporter and photographer for the Erie Times News went and did a little investigation of his own and saw this house next door where the pizza was delivered and said, well, I'm just going to go knock on the door. This guy answers the door, and his name was Bill Rostein. And he actually said, you can look around if you want. He's 59 years old, he's a handyman, wasn't married. He had lived there his whole life. And apparently he seemed really smart, had a very articulate way of speaking, and apparently was fluent in several different languages. And the journalists kind of did a little poking around and didn't really see much and took off. But he made contact with Bill Rothstein. He's the first person that kind of went to knocking. Right. But nothing came of it. And the cops, as far as I know, never went and met with Bill Rothstein, even though his house is right next to the delivery place where Wells was supposedly accosted. Right? Yeah. And then, like I said, the case has gone cold by this time, if a couple of months have gone by, you've got this crime, this very public caper that's captured the public's attention. A guy died by being blown up while under police supervision, and there's no leads, there's no nothing. And then finally, several weeks, a few months, I think, after the call, there's a 911 call from Bill Rothstein, and he tells the police that in his freezer he has one of those serial killer chest freezers. There's actually a body, a man's body, and that it is not someone he murdered, but he helped cover up the murder of this man, who was the boyfriend of Bill Rothstein's ex girlfriend from way, way back in the day. And now the chain of events has been set off. Right. And if you're like me and you start hearing wife of the ex girlfriend's dad's cousin, your brain gets a little jumbled. So just very plainly, he used to date this woman. This woman called him up and said, hey, I've murdered my current boyfriend. Or was it her husband boyfriend? Yes. And she said, I need your help here. I blasted him with a shotgun. And I know we tatted 20 years ago, but will you come help me out? Because they were still in contact. I guess they remained friends. I guess so. In this rack to Bill Rothstein. Apparently he thought about committing suicide. Apparently there was even a note they found a suicide note. But he maintained, like you said, with the cops, that he didn't have anything to do with anything, but most of the clean up, the clean up, getting rid of the murder weapon and then holding onto the body. Yeah, but which the reason he held on the body, he was supposed to get apparently supposed to grind this body up, and that's where he finally stopped short and was like, Jesus, I can't do this. And he said he told the cops that the reason he called them, finally, is because since he wasn't going through grinding up the body, he was worried what this woman, Marjorie Del Armstrong, was going to do to him. He's like, I dated this lady, right? She's not a nice person. And so when he says Marjorie Deal Armstrong to the eerie cops, just alarm bells start going off. Because by this time already, marjorie darmstrong was a local legend as far as criminals are concerned. She was a very bright woman who, I think, at the age of 35, back in the 80s, had been indicted for killing one of her boyfriends, shot him six times. She played that she had killed him in self defense, that he was an abuser of her, and she was actually acquitted. A few years after that, she was married to a guy named Armstrong and he showed up at the hospital with a head trauma and actually died of a cerebral hemorrhage. But there was no coroner's inquest or anything like that. And so it just was something suspicious, the second significant other of this woman to die under suspicious or violent circumstances. So when Bill Rothstein said, I'm worried about what Marjorie Dale Armstrong is going to do, to me, the cops seem to have taken it very seriously. Well, extremely seriously, because the next day they arrested her. That's pretty serious for murder. And about a year and a half later, a little short of that, she pled guilty, but mentally ill. She was sentenced to seven to 20. And then Rothstein, for his part, eventually died of cancer in 2004. Right. And so you said that he had considered killing himself and even wrote a suicide note. Right, yeah. There was something very, very odd on Bill Rothstein's suicide note. And again, he didn't kill himself, he died of cancer. He was able to actually show the cops where a suicide note was and they read it. And the first line of it, from what I understand, was this has nothing to do with the collar bomb heist or the Brian Wells murder. Yeah. It's a weird thing to put if you had nothing to do with that. Right. That's just a very odd thing to do. It's like when the cops come in and you go, there's nothing under the bed, there's no reason to look there. Right. They said, we just want to make sure your fire alarm is working. Yeah, exactly. Part of a community service. Cool, but the bed is fine. All right, so that is a very weird thing to say, and that definitely piqued the interest of the cops. But like you said, the cops convicted or the state convicted marjorie Dale Armstrong of the murder of James Roden or Jim Roden. Right, yeah. She's already in prison. And when she's in prison. Somehow this is what I'm unclear on somehow it comes up or she starts talking or something like that. That Jim rodents death very much had to do with the Wells case. With Brian Wells murder. This collar bomb heist. And that she knows a lot about it and if they'll transfer her to a minimum security prison close to Erie. She'll start talking. Yeah, she asked for the old Hannibal lecture treatment. So is that how it came up? Like she approached them? Because I'm unclear on that. I mean, I think so. In the Wired article, it said that there was a phone call from a state cop who had just met with her about something unrelated, like a different homicide. It kind of makes sense though now, actually, as we will learn, she talked a lot. Yeah, a lot. So it doesn't surprise me that another cop was just meeting with her about something unrelated. She's like, by the way, that whole collar bomb thing, I got all the skinny on that. Right. So there's a couple of things going on here. By then, by the time she calls the cops, the cops have already spoken, apparently with several informants that have shared sales with her or spent time with her in jail already, who are saying like, this lady is the mastermind of that collarbomb heist that's making you guys look bad. Yes. And eventually when they met with her about this, she admitted that she was involved. She didn't know she was involved in the plot, but she said, I knew about it. I gave him those two kitchen timers and I was really close by when it happened. And by the way, the guy who blew up with the collar bomb, mr. Wells, he was actually in on it too, and lost Theme headed the whole thing up. Right, but for Deal Armstrong, she said, but I had nothing to do with it, even though I had all these other little things to do with it. I never met Brian Wells. I didn't know Brian Wells. I had nothing to do with his death aside from supplying the kitchen timers and knowing all about it. Right, exactly. So now it's just getting weird, right, because there's the Jim Rodent murder, who she says that she killed because he was abusing her, who Rothstein said she killed over a dispute with money, but now she's saying is tied to the Wells case, which she knows a lot about, but really nothing about and had nothing to do with. So the cops are like, well, let's just get this lady to talk all we can and one of the things they got out of her was she agreed to a tour around Erie, showing them all these places where she had been, and these were all places that were related to the crime. Like, I believe she said she'd been at the pizza delivery site. I think she said she'd been within a mile of the bank when it was robbed. Like, all of this stuff, she's just like they just keep giving her this rope, and she's just wrapping it around her neck again and again and again. And then finally chuck at the end of this car ride, after she's been interviewing with the cops multiple times, giving them tons of info, what does she say? She asked for immunity at this point, after she had basically completely incriminated herself. In previous to all this, a lot more happened. There were four different informants who had come forward and said that this lady has been talking about this for a while. She very much had everything to do with it. And then a couple of months after she had started talking to the Feds, another big break came. This witness came forward and said, hey, there's this crack dealer named Kenny Barnes. That is a crack dealer's name Kenneth Barnes. And he was involved. They used to go fishing together, armstrong dealer, Armstrong and Barnes. And she sang like a canary to him, basically, and said, here's what she did. Her brother in law put him in touch with Barnes while he was already in jail on unrelated charges, basically. And so Barnes was already in prison and said, hey, I think I can shorten my time, so I'm going to try and get a reduced sentence at least by spilling the beans on deal Armstrong. Right. And Barnes's brotherinlaw, who turned him into the cops. Oh, yeah. So Barnes is like, oh, I'm in jail for selling crack. That's way different from being very much involved in this collar bomb heist. So he said, okay, I'll tell you guys everything you want to know. I'll be your star witness. Just reduce my sentence for my involvement in this. And he started talking. When he started talking, it was at Marjorie Del Armstrong's trial, which was a pretty spectacular trial from all accounts. Yeah. And before the trial, even he told his story was that she wanted me to kill her father. He was spending what would end up being her inheritance, she felt, and so she wanted him dead. And so she was doing this collar bomb heist to raise money to pay me to kill her dad. That's just the biggest face palm I've ever heard of. Yeah, for a real. Okay, we'll start Marjorie Dale Armstrong's trial after we take a break. How about that? Man, that sounds good. Okay. 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 twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast. And start taking charge of your future today. Okay, Chuck, so before Marjorie Dale Armstrong goes to trial, and remember, she's already in prison for the murder of Jim Roden, shooting him in the back with a twelve gauge shotgun. Yes. Bill Rothstein is dead. I want to call him Ace Rothstein so bad, but Bill Rothstein is dead. He died of lymphoma a couple of years before. And by the time Marjorie Dale Armstrong is brought to trial for her involvement as the mastermind of the collar bomb plot, they have to verify that she's actually mentally competent to stand trial. And that's kind of touchy, because remember when she was charged with killing her boyfriend back in, I think, 1984 and 1986, she was deemed incompetent seven times by psychiatrists before the judge finally said, I'm throwing all that out and deciding that she is competent, we are going to go ahead with the trial. Yes. They also found like \u00a3400 of butter and \u00a3700 of cheese in her house when they were investigating that particular murder. And in between 1984 and the time she was tried in the collar bomb heist, she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. So it was actually kind of questionable whether she was mentally competent to see a trial. And right as they were about to start the proceedings, I think the judge ruled that she was competent to stand trial. She was diagnosed with cancer herself. That's right. So they waited for the cancer diagnosis, her prognosis, and the cancer doctor came back and said, three to seven years. And the prosecutor said, Giddy up. That's right. So previous to this, she had gotten the indictment, but in that indictment, it's very important that she was not I mean, granted, she was the only one technically indicted, but in the indictment, it said that Rostein was definitely a conspirator. And Wells, the man who was the victim, supposedly, he was definitely involved in this thing from the beginning. Yeah, you're absolutely right. As a very important thing that that showed up in this indictment. Yeah. They said he agreed to rob this bank, he thought it was a fake bomb, and he was told the scavenger hunt was a ruse to fool the cops. And if and when he did get caught, he could say, I was just following orders. Basically, what he did right. And so Brian Walls family did not like this at all, apparently, during the press conference where the DA Aviri County is announcing, this case is closed, this is the indictment that they have. Some of Brian Wells sisters were shouting liar at her. They did not take the idea that their brother was an accomplice in this at all very well. Yeah, there's a lot of back and forth about whether Wales was in the thing from the beginning or whether or not he was in from the beginning, and then at one point wanted out and was forced to do this, or whether he was forced from the beginning. Everyone is telling a different story, and basically the trial is where we will learn, if all that is true, what really happened. So Marjorie Del Armstrong's lawyer said, to heck with caution, let's put you on the stand, okay? You've already incriminated yourself multiple times. Why not do it in open court, too? And she put on quite a performance on the stand over, like, two days, I think, five and a half hours of testimony. She yelled, she cried. She berated the prosecutor and her own lawyer. When she did mention Brian Wells, she said, I've never met the guy. I learned of his death when everybody else did on the TV news. And she stuck with her story, though, that she had nothing to do with this. She knew a little bit about it. She knew the conspirators. The real mastermind was Bill Rothstein, and it wasn't her. That's what she maintained, though, throughout the trial and even afterwards. That's right. But before she took the stand a few days earlier is when they trotted out Ken Barnes and he took the stand. And he said by the time she took the stand, he had given a different account of the story than she would later do. So he got up there and said she was behind all this. She was the mastermind. Rosteen was involved. She just recruited him. Basically, she recruited Wells because Wells needed money. And here's where the prostitutes come into play. Apparently, Wells had a relationship with a prostitute who was also a crack addict, so he would buy crack to give her, presumably, as trade for sex. He ended up falling into debt with these crack dealers and needed money, basically the plot of Boulon Rouge. And he contends, barnes said, that up until the day of the crime, wells thought this whole thing was fake, realized that it was a double cross, it was a real bomb, and he tried to run away and was tackled, and they put a gun to his head and locked him into this device. So imagine this, Chuck. Imagine being Brian Wells. And you're agreeing to put on what you are presuming is a fake collar bomb to go carry out a real bank robbery because you need money. Because you're indebted to crack dealers. Because you borrowed crack from them to give to your girlfriend. Who is a prostitute. Who you have to give crack to be with. And then you find out on the day of that this is a real bomb. And they're putting it on you whether you like it or not. Well, what a horrible turn of events for this poor guy. That's just so sad, no matter how you slice it. And then if you take his family, if you take his family's opinion that he was 100% innocent, that he really was delivered pizzas and was accosted and had nothing to do with any of this, which I take with a pretty big grain of salt, I mean, that's just as bad, but it's bad either way. Whether he was an accomplice at one point or not. It's super sad. There's a very sad thread that's running through this story in the form of Brian Wells, you know? Well, yeah. And on the final day of her trial, at the very end of her taking the stand, is when she finally said that she didn't know him, never met him, and the first time she had ever laid eyes on him was on the news that day. Right. Basically, he and Marjorie Del Armstrong are fishing. Right? They're fishing buddies. He's somebody that she would turn to, and she's finding out that her father is blowing through her inheritance and she wants to put a stop to it. And so she approaches Barnes to get him to kill her father, but to get that 250K that he says he will kill her father for, she's got to rob a bank. So she turns to her friend Bill Rothstein to come up with this collar bomb to put it on this other person, Brian Wells, who's going to carry this out. And, oh, by the way, we're also going to come up with a scavenger hunt to either throw the cops off or to actually make Brian Wells feel more comfortable, give him some sort of cover in case he is caught. And that's what we're going to go with. Go team. And Marjorie Dale Armstrong said that's preposterous. That wasn't me. Kenneth Barnes said that's exactly what happened. And then Bill Rothstein wasn't alive to contradict any of it. That's right. So she's sentenced right. She's convicted as the mastermind of this pot. Yeah. The jury took about 11 hours. And she was convicted of armed bank robbery, conspiracy, and using a destructive device in a crime of violence. That's a big one. I'll bet. I'll bet that carries a hefty sentence with it. Yeah. And she would die in prison, just like her prognosis said. I think she lasted a few years. No, they gave her three to seven years, and she lasted seven. Yeah. So she finally passed away, and that's kind of the end of the story. Even though there is a retired FBI investigator named Jim Fisher who said, I think they got this all wrong. I think that Rothstein was the guy the whole time, and he makes a decently, compelling case. But everyone's dead now. Yeah. Jim Fisher has gone a little bit down the rabbit hole, if you ask me. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of hard to tell with literally everyone having died, but for his money, he thinks it was rostein. Yeah. And so there's probably not many people who are familiar with the case who would say that it wasn't Rothstein who built the bomb. But what Jim Fisher saying is, like, Bill Rothstein was behind everything, and Marjorie Dale Armstrong murdering Jim Roden was just like a gift that dropped in Bill Rothstein's lap that he could use to make all these puppets dance, including the cops. And that the whole point of it was to create this elaborate scheme, this elaborate crime that would puzzle people for years and years to come, which is doing that, and that was the point. And that Brian Wells is going to die one way or another. Because I think the FBI said they concluded the whole scavenger hunt was a hoax and that Brian Wells was never going to survive this. Didn't they? Yeah. So this is Jim Fisher's position. But like you said, now that everybody's dead, really, the only question is just how complicit was Brian Wells? Is the last big question. That's right. And then there's one other guy who seems to god off Scott Free named Floyd Stockton. Did you look into him? A little bit. So he's the guy who was there. He supposedly handed Rothstein the bomb to put around Brian Wells neck. He was staying with Rothstein as a buddy on his couch, fleeing a rape charge in Washington. And somehow, for some reason, he got immunity and was not indicted, even though he was very much involved in this, and he got off scot free. And Brian Wells family is going nuts over the fact that this guy is out there walking free, that he was a part of this caper and he didn't see a second inside of a jail. Yeah. It wouldn't surprise me if there were more people involved, even. So, what do you think? Do you think Brian Wells was complicit? And if so, how much? Oh, man, I don't know. It sounds like I kind of believe the story that they were all in it together and he was probably double crossed. But this is just from reading about this thing many, many years later. Do you think Marjorie Del Armstrong was the mastermind? I don't know. I don't know either. Maybe we'll never know. But we might. But probably not. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right. Well, if you want to know more about the collar bomb case, you can type that word in the search bar, your favorite search engine, and it will likely bring up a very great article on Wired from Rich Shapiro. Read that. Start there. Great. And since I said Rich Shapiro, it's time for the listener mail. I'm going to go with one on emoji and John Adams. Hey guys. Enjoyed the recent podcast about the history of emojis and emoticons reminded me of a discovery I made in the diaries of John Adams that makes a historical figure who's sometimes described as a loop seemed completely charming. When the future president was about 22 years old, he made an entry in his diary in 1756 saying a cloudy morning about ten and he drew a little sunshine. Break out a warm day. He used a little line drawing in the sun that I always call an 18th century emoji. He liked a little creation so much he reused it a month later in the same diary. A misty morning, little sunshine breakout about noon on the Massachusetts Historical Society website. The text of his letters and diaries is faithfully transcribed, but in these cases, a parenthetical note tells readers that there are small drawings of the sun and advises them to refer to the scans of the handwritten page where you can actually see this. Apparently he grew out of his habit though, because his later diaries do not use the adorable little sun. Keep up the great work. My wife and I host a local history podcast for Boston. It's tightly scripted, man. He didn't tell me what it was. I would have totally shouted it out. What? I know. Big missed opportunity there. Jake, one of these days will be confident enough to have an unscripted conversation like you guys do. And that is from Jake scenarios. Okay, so everybody looks up Jake Scotty's'boston history podcast and he'll probably bring it up, right? Yeah, probably. So thanks a lot, Jake. Thanks for keeping up the good fight up there. That's pretty cool. Good story too. If you want to get in touch with us like Jake did, tell us about your podcast. That's great. You can tweet to us. I'm at Joshua mclark and at SYSK Podcast. And Chuck is at Movie Crush all on Twitter. On Facebook. You can go to facebook. Comstefishannow or facebook.com charleswchuckbryant. You can send us all an email to stuff podcast@howstepworks.com and as always, trying to set her home on the web. Stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. 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 pool site, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music my Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgueref and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of My Favorite Murder one week early on August. Amazon Music download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1236369132971hsw-sysk-aphrodesiacs.mp3 | How Aphrodisiacs Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-aphrodisiacs-work | For thousands of years humankind has pursued the enhancement of sexual pleasure and performance through a plethora of medicines and practices -- but how many aphrodisiacs actually work? Listen and find out in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | For thousands of years humankind has pursued the enhancement of sexual pleasure and performance through a plethora of medicines and practices -- but how many aphrodisiacs actually work? Listen and find out in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=12, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=71, tm_isdst=0) | 20681529 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housestepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Chuck Bryant. Welcome yourself, buddy. Welcome, Josh. Thank you, Chuck. Sure. That felt pretty good, actually. Did it? Just try it. Try it. Welcome yourself. Welcome, Chuck. How do you feel? Relaxed. Good. Yeah. It has a nice effect. It does. You know what? It doesn't have a nice effect. It depends on what you're talking about. Okay, well, I'll tell you. Okay. Spanish fly. But it turns out, I did a little research on this. I found out that Spanish fly is not even a fly. It's a type of beetle. True. And the active ingredient, it's actually crushed up. Dried and crushed up beetles powdered. Correct. Sure. It's a powder. And the reason they powder the beetles is because they're trying to get to this acid that the beetle emits when it's scared. Right. When it's threatened. And this acid actually has long been thought to create amorousness in people. But that's bunk. Correct. I can tell you the reason they thought they were aroused. They were actually confusing euroginital tract irritation. This stuff actually burns from the inside out. Wow. Yeah. And it can actually cause kidney damage. And I think convulsion is death. No. Spanish fly. You should never take this for any reason. No, of course. I'd like to do lots of research. It's, like, my thing. It is. Right. I started researching aphrodisiacs in general. True. And here we are at this podcast. Nice intro there. Thank you. I believe the word comes from the Greek goddess of love, aphrodite. Is that right? Yeah, that's what I hear. Sure. And an aphrodisiac, by definition, is an element that evokes or stimulates sexual desire. Yes. We should probably make the distinction, because I think a lot of people think aphrodisiacs are sexual performance enhancing compound or whatever. Right. Not true at all. Like a Viagra would definitely not be considered an aphrodisiac. No, but nor would Spanish fly, right? Correct. Let's talk about sexual arousal, Chuck. Okay. All right. Let's just keep it cool. Chuck, if I had a dime for every time you told me that, I would keep it cooler. Let's talk about sexual arousal. Keeping cool. Okay. Got you. So medically speaking, sexual arousal begins when we take in something through one of our senses that we find sexually stimulating, right? Yes. And then all of a sudden, the limbic lobe kicks in. Right? That's where it all starts. This is part of the brains reward center, and it's activated, and it says, hey, I'm sexually stimulated. So I'm going to send a neurological signal through the nervous system down to the blood vessels in the pelvic area, and it says, Open Sesame, and the blood vessels open, and all this blood comes rushing in. And even better, because this wouldn't do a whole lot, the blood vessels close behind this influx of blood. So the door shuts, essentially, yes. Keeping the blood well, not trapped, but well, yeah, I think trapped is fine. Okay. I guess that just has a negative implication. Right. Well, whether it's trapped or not, what you got is an erect penis. Right. And erection in women as well. Yeah. I was surprised to find this as well. The clearest actually undergoes a very similar process. And there you have it. So all of a sudden, you are turned on and basically ready for sex. But that's not it. There's other physiological responses going on when you're sexually aroused. Right. It's what I'm told. Can you fill me in on this? Yes, I certainly can. Well, your heart rate increases, and pleasure producing chemicals like norepinephrine and dopamine are suddenly released into the brain and it's go time. That's right. Yeah. So that's sexual arousal. And for an aphrodisiac to work, it would have to produce sexual arousal. Right. Right. And it could do this in one of two ways. Correct. Through the mind, like basically recreating that or stimulating that. Right. Absolutely. For instance, something that might increase blood flow to your sex organs. It might simulate feelings of intercourse. So that has the effect of creating desire. Right. Okay. Or it can also just go straight to the horse's mouth. Right. So to speak. Go ahead. Well, it can create increased circulation or increased circulatory flow in the genitals. Right. That's actually a chemical physical reaction that takes place. Right. The problem is as far as our beloved FDA food and Drug Administration sure. Yeah. Thank you for that. I was trying to come up with a peanut butter salmonella joke, but couldn't. Maybe too soon, actually. They don't recognize any compound, any chemical at all as an aphrodisiac. Right. I mean, they've done studies over the years, plenty of them, but they can't absolutely say with certainty that one thing is an aphrodisiac or not, because the libido is A, hard to define and B, even harder to study. Well, I was also interested to find out we're not entirely certain how testosterone and estrogen factor into this. It turns out that we know that testosterone has an impact on sexual arousal because men who have low testosterone production have trouble getting sexually aroused. So we know it factors in, we just don't quite know where. Exactly. And testosterone usually associate estrogen with women, but testosterone has an effect on their sexual arousal as well. Women who participated in a 2000 study at the University of Utrecht, they gave them testosterone sublingually, and they found that genital arousal increased dramatically. Really? In women with low libido. Yeah. Interesting. So they didn't report an increase in sexual arousal, but by extension, you could say. Right. Well, I do know that testosterone therapy is something that men undergo that have a low libido. Yes. Whether it's cream or I think they have injections or if they like to get in bar fights. Right. That's why they do that, too. Yes. Josh okay. So the FDA doesn't recognize anything, but there's still plenty of people out there who think certain foods, certain extracts, plants are aphrodisiacs. And this is nothing new. Like some of these ideas go really far back. How far back? Well, it turns out that the Persians were fairly randy folks, and we're talking ancient Persia, I believe, pre Kamasutra, which came out in oh, I don't know, I'm just going to go ahead and invite some viewer mail and say the 6th century Ad. Right, okay, sure. So the Persians, they had one beloved that honey was an aphrodisiac. Yeah. And apparently it has no active ingredient in it whatsoever. That could produce an aphrodisiac effect. Right. But there is an interesting little tidbit in there, isn't there? I think about the honeymoon. Yes. They would drink honey for a month after they got married, and that was called the honeymoon, which later became honeymoon. Is that right? Yes. And if you go by the lunar calendar, as the ancient Persians did, then a moon from full moon to full moon is a month. So yeah, honeymoon, it's even further back, I think. Ancient Rome. Yeah. Well, that's not further back. It's about the same time. Yeah. They were big into aphrodisiacs. I think one of their favorites was oysters. Right, yeah. Oysters usually tops the list when people are going to make a top ten list of effort. People always put oysters at the top. Sure. And one of the reasons those are a few reasons one of the reasons is loaded with zinc. And zinc, if you don't have enough zinc as a man than your sperm count and your fertility are affected. Got you. And it also has a bunch of iron, and iron deficiency could lead you to be too tired, which doesn't usually lend itself to love making, as it were. And a final reason, and I think this might segue over to something else, is that a lot of aphrodisiacs are fallacies. That is, they resemble a sex organ. Which one? Well, an oyster has been said that it resembles the female sex organ. Sure. Yeah. And I know another one on the list was avocados, or supposedly an aphrodisiac. One is my favorite. Yeah. Because in fact, I think it's known as the testicle tree in ancient Rome because they resemble the man's testicles. Aztecs. Aztecs, yeah. Okay. Yeah. They grow in pears and they're wrinkly, and that people considered avocados aphrodisiacs. Right. And that's a common theme. I know. You know, it's something that just resembles a sex organ. Carrots, cucumbers, bananas. Bananas. Figs. Figs are said to resemble the female genitalia. Interesting. So, yeah. All these things have long been considered across cultures sometimes to be aphrodisiacs. Right. It's hard for me to think that our ancient brothers and sisters were very smart when you hear about things like this. No, they were fairly superstitious folk. Yeah. I mean, it just sounds silly at this point, avocados look like testicles. So if I eat them, that will make me viral? Well, even more direct than that, they would also eat things that didn't just remind them of sex organs. They would actually eat sex organs of other animals. Yeah, that's the one I was a little blown away by. So it makes you wonder, like, how many countless and usually it was an animal that was known for its prolific copulation, maybe, right. Or reality or strength. Sure. So, yeah, it makes you wonder how many countless tiger and rabbit and bowl penises were eaten over the years. Right. And still it goes on. Today, there's actually, again, non FDA approved drugs outside of the US. That still grind up these things. I don't think anybody's dining on them any longer. No, I know. Ginseng was one of your favorites, right? Yeah. I guess we should say that there are some things out there that could conceivably be aphrodisiacs. They could produce sexual arousal. Right, right. They actually affect you chemically. They don't know if it's enough to actually I think that's where the gray area is exactly like it's there, but couldn't really have any noticeable effect. And one of those is ginseng. And there is a study that I don't remember who conducted it, but they tested men, they gave them ginseng, and then they tested them using the mean international index of a rectile function. And it was shown to increase scores. So enough said. Ginsing works. There you have it. Yes. It's a mood booster, too, right? Yeah, I think it's an energy booster. Well, ginseng up stuff. Right. Which is actually pretty tasty. Is it? A lot of the aphrodisiacs, they say it may not be a direct chemical correlation to your pelvic region, but it will do things like give you energy. And it's sort of A to B to C. If it gives you energy, then you're more likely to be aroused and in the mood for intercourse. Whereas if something SAPS your energy, you're going to be like if you get a lasagna by yourself, it's probably not going to inspire you unless you're Henry VIII or something, I guess. Right? Well, yes. And you make a valid point. It's just that science hates it when you jump from A to C. Exactly. Even if there is a direct correlation or even causation, they really like to get that be in place first. Right. But yeah. So in ginseng is not the only one. Like you said, oysters are full of zinc and iron and other stuff, and chocolate, actually, which is always associated with love and romance. Sure. It actually has phenyl ethylamine and serotonin. So these things are actually an abundant supply. And we can't ingest these things. Our body produces these naturally. Right. But we can ingest them and react to them conceivably. It makes you wonder how much chocolate you'd have to eat to really get off. Like, perhaps several goblets full josh, I think you're talking about Montezuma, who was the Aztec ruler who reportedly would drink, like, 50 goblets of chocolate a day to increase his sexual desire. I cannot believe he died from being murdered and beheaded rather than exploding chocolate. Jake, nicely done. Chuck, should we talk about smell? I think we should, because I got to tell you, if I put stock into any aphrodisiac, it would have to have something to do with smell. Yeah. It's not always food. It's not always taste. I know they say that music and exercise can be ephrodisiac. Sure. Well, yeah. I can tell you that swimming just the release of endorphins, actually, it definitely increases interest. Interesting. Is that sterile enough of a word? It is. Very well done there, Josh. Thank you. If we're talking smell. Dr. Hirsch doctor Alan Hirsch of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Center in Chicago. Yeah, that's a good center. Yeah, he did a study that looked at different smells, and as we were talking about the other day, you like to say he spent a career wafting smells under men's noses to see what stimulated them. Measuring their penises. That's right. At the same time, and he found some interesting things. Cheese pizza, for instance, increased blood flow to the penis by 5%, buttered popcorn by 9%. And then the one that really shocked me, lavender. And then pumpkin pie actually increased blood flow by 40%, which that's pretty big. Yeah, you could overcome a lot of sluggishness with that much blood and fusion. Right. But that kind of, to me, in Thanksgiving was when you eat pumpkin pie, a lot of times that flies right in the face of eating turkey and watching football and stuff in your belly. And actually, pumpkin pie didn't just have an effect on men, had a big effect on women. But the topper, the biggest one, actually, is a combination of scents that arouse women, is a combination of the horrid and disgusting black licorice flavored, good and plenty candies mixed with cucumber smell. It drives the women batty. Right. So, long story short, I keep those things in my glove compartment. A cucumber garden in your yard? Yes, actually, it's growing in my backseat. Wow. I have nothing else to say. I don't think there is anything else to say, but I do, actually I do have more to say. Okay, let's get pheromones up real quick. Oh, yeah. You're all over this. So pheromones basically have long been identified as a way that maybe we attract one another. I remember that awesome study you told me about. I can't remember what podcast it was, but they had women wearing shirts for like, a week, and then they had guys smell the shirts right. To determine their level of attraction by smell. Right. Yeah. And it was right on the money. Yeah. Well, if it was right on the money, then they really lucked out, because you need an extra sensory organ that not all of us humans have a venomo nasal organ. Never heard of it. Okay, well, basically it's like an addition to our olfactory nerve, our noses, basically. Right. And we can pick out packets of information from pheromones. I don't know if we can necessarily that's never been proven. But in the animal kingdom, it's very prevalent. Pheromones are produced and emitted through urine. Right, right. So if your dog sprayed somewhere and then another dog comes along and just can't stop sniffing, what the other dog is doing is actually determining the health of the urinating dogs immune system, really. And also determining if it would be a good match to produce offspring. Because apparently, ultimately what you want when you mate with another person, as far as animalistically speaking, you are looking for somebody with a compatible but opposite immune system so that the offspring you produce has the resistance to the most diseases possible. Well, and the same in humans. That's what the original Smell study from the other podcast is about. Right. But yeah, the problem is not all of us have that vemonal organ. But there was a study we emit pheromones in our sweat, by the way, our urine, which is good for us because we'd have a different society, if that were the case. I think so, yeah. Well, there was a study, it was kind of an informal study, and these guys sprayed pheromones on one member of a set of twin girls and popped the two of them side by side at a bar on a Saturday night right. And waited to see if there was a difference in which one was hit on more. The one that got the boost of pheromones was picked up three times more than her identical yet untreated twin sister. So the girl that was laced with pheromones. Very cool. Yeah. So pheromones aphrodisiacs. I feel like I've gotten a lot off my chest. Right. I know a lot of people believe in aphrodisiacs, but the scientific community, the FDA, as you said, does not support it. And the scientific community thinks there's also a likelihood that it just could be a placebo. If you think you eat an oyster and you're going to feel a little more inspired sexually, then you're going to eat the oyster and feel inspired. And hey, you know what? Even if you're just fooling yourself, whatever I say, the end justifies the means. In that case, placebos work. Yeah. Well, good. So, Chuck, thanks for doing that with me. I think it's listener mail time. Hold your horses, Josh. Oh, okay. It's not quite time yet. We have to give a little shout out to our blog. We have a new blog on the website, as you know, Houseworks.com. And our blog is called Stuff You Should Know. Appropriately enough, and you and I, each post once a day, we try and scour the news world for interesting tidbits that aren't quite up to par for an entire show episode, and we want to get fans interacting and kind of chatting about these things. Yeah, you can access that through the homepage at how stuff works.com, right? Yeah. Leave comments and anybody who wants to see Chuck in his famous cool guy flat cap, there is a fine, fine photograph of him on every post, actually, and yours as well. Thank you. That's a good photo of you. Yeah, well, thanks a lot. I appreciate it better than the goofy one that was renting you. Okay, now, is it listening to meal time? Yes. Let's get on with it. Josh, I think you're going to pull the train into Limerick Junction. Yeah. I like this trend. We went from high to the limerick. I don't know what's next? I don't know. In an epic poem, maybe? No, we're going to get the iliad from some listeners. Now, just a couple of limericks here. Ryan of Victoria, British Columbia. Fine. Canadian friends. Have you ever been there? No. It's one of my favorite cities on the planet. I've heard it's awesome. It is awesome. It's very cool. Everybody is very friendly. It's like a tiny city with, like, mini skyscrapers and everything. And it's awesome. It's British Columbia, too. Sure. Nice. All right, Ryan has this to say. As I wore an uncomfortable sweater, I sat down and wrote you this letter. Josh and Chuck love haikuz but haikuz make me snooze because we all know that limericks are better. Yes, that's a good one, Ryan. Fantastic. And the final limerick today is from Brendan Franklin of Tucson, Arizona. Another cool town. College town. The podcasting hosts Josh and Chuck and the cast that they host or don't suck, they tell me how stuff works. And as one of the perks, I'm no longer an ignorant Schmuck. Nice. And Brendan, we agree you're not an ignorant Schmuck. You also may be the first person on the plan to ever use Schmuck and limerick. Oh, no way. It's huge in limerickland. I'm not very familiar with them. I guess I should say I'm surprised that we haven't gotten any dirty limericks yet, though. Although now I think we can probably expect that true. I'm just happy my name rhymes with Schmuck. Yeah, well, we knew that already. Yes. So if you want to send Chuck and I a limerick, not a hi coup, or if you just want to say hi, or if you'd like to just congratulate us on making it through how aphrodisiacs work without humiliating ourselves by cracking up, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howtstuffworks.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?" | |
How do dogs perceive time? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-do-dogs-perceive-time | A dog that knows exactly when its owners will arrive home every day seems to have a human perception of time, but in fact, they perceive time very differently than we do. Find out more about how dogs view time in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | A dog that knows exactly when its owners will arrive home every day seems to have a human perception of time, but in fact, they perceive time very differently than we do. Find out more about how dogs view time in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:58:45 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=14, tm_min=58, tm_sec=45, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=260, tm_isdst=0) | 24808197 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles. Chuck. Brian Bryant. Yes. Nice, Chuck. We'll get to that in a second. Do it again. That's awesome. Chuck's Barking because this is stuff you should know. And this particular stuff you should know is entitled how Do Dogs Perceive Time? And I said in dog language just then, I don't perceive time. Dad is up for debate, my friend. Up for vigorous debate. All right, so, Chuck, let me do a little intro here, a little lead in Segway, whatever kind of spoiler parade there. What do we call them these days? What do we what? Segues? Lead ins. Intros. And, Chuck, about a year ago this month, France, Paris, France, made history. Legal history. How so? They actually used a dog as a witness in a criminal case. Did they get the dog to bark at someone? Yes. Wow. I kid you not. What? Like an intruder? At the very least. And I hope I'm not at Bangladeshi newspaper here because I found it in the Daily Mail, which is not known for satire, but it can be known for poor reporting from time to time. So you may have egg on your face. Soon we'll find out. But there was a dog named Scooby that was brought into a murder case or a hearing to see if there was enough evidence to try a man for murder for something that was ruled a suicide. And the dog barked furiously at the alleged perpetrator and they gave him a Scooby Snack. Yeah. So that was the last I heard. It was from a year ago. But there was some concern over whether the dog's memory would serve it or not because it had been two and a half years since the incident. Okay, that makes sense. And that's kind of key to how dogs may or may not perceive time. The best I could come up with. That's great. Thanks. So, what that betrays is a sense by at least the reporter and the courts in Paris that dogs have a memory. That if they have a memory, then they should be able to perceive time. Right. Right. Chuck, let's talk about this. What is time? Well, you know, my whole deal with time. I've said it before. Well, time is just abstract numbers on a calendar and hands on a watch aren't timed well. Yeah, no, what you're talking about is the human construct of time yes. Based on 24 hours, all kind of arbitrary. Seven days in a week. Well, not necessarily. Well, not here's why. It was actually kind of ingenious that we should come up with a 24 hours day because we have these things called circadian oscillators. Yes. Which are the fluctuators in our circadian rhythm, which makes us fall asleep at night right. Up in the morning, body temperature, get hungry at certain times. Neural activity. Right. The neural activity and the hormones are reactions to things like changes in temperature that are on a daily basis. Things like changes in natural light. Sure. Right. So our reactions to these are circadian oscillators. And if you put them all together, like sleeping at night and waking up in the morning, that's our circadian rhythm. But the circadian clocks actually exist on about a 24 hours period. That makes sense then. But like you said, days on the calendar and all that, that is a human construct. Yeah. So what we're trying to get to the bottom of is whether or not dogs can perceive this not necessarily the human construct of time, but of time in and of itself, which is essentially a past, present, and future. Exactly. And I know that one thing that we will talk about, and maybe we'll talk about right now is you have three dogs. Do you have any dogs? I have two dogs. What? Shut up. I have two dogs and I'm actually fostering two feral puppy rescues, which you know. So right now, do you want to get rid of those two dogs? Because we could get rid of them like that if we plug this on this puppy. Yes. We're kind of picky about who we give them to. Okay, well, how about this? If you're not a creep and you love dogs and you live in the East Lake area of Atlanta, just send us an email if you want one of Chuck's puppies. Very cute. Yeah. So anyway, if your dogs are anything like my dogs and actually my cats, too, they know when the food bell is going to ring. Sure. Actually, they start emily calls it food abuse. They start the food abuse typically about an hour and a half before they typically get fed every afternoon and in the morning we feed them pretty much straight away in the morning, so they know then. But my dog, Lucy dude, comes in the room and looks at you with her head cocked, stamps on the floor with her feet and goes and I'm waiting for her literally to one day say, Feed me one day. I told Emily if she did that one day, I would be surprised for about a second. So, Chuck, here is where we reached the bone of contention. Right. Sorry for that pun. I'm not Jonathan Strickland. Your dogs do the same thing, I assume, right? Well, no, my dogs are fed constantly. They always have food. For some reason, I'd lucked out. And they just eat whenever they want, whenever they're hungry. I can't imagine that. It's pretty cool. My dogs eat their food like it's the first time they've ever been fed. I've seen that before. My dogs, they're pretty laid back when it comes to stuff like that. Are they fat? No. Really? No, they're healthier than I am. They're healthier than a lot of people I know. They regulate their food and take on their own. It's weird. So weird. But I know what you're talking about. So the question is this do your dogs know, based on past experience, that food is coming at a certain time of day? Not necessarily like 05:35 p.m.. But say as far as the dog is concerned, when sun is low in sky over there, right. Are they Native American? No. They're like Italians playing Native Americans. Right? You think I'm dumbbell or is it a circadian oscillator? Well, that's the circadian oscillator. It could be, yeah. It could be what that is, they're using their memories of past experiences to predict the future, which is episodic memory, which is our construction of time, or is this semantic memory, which is totally different but related. Do you want me to go into this? Because this is outside research. I have no choice. Then semantic memory is all right, Chuck, let's say that you have brain damage to your frontal lobe. I do, in fact, which is where your episodic memory is located. That's the region that controls episodic memory, which is learning from experience. Right. You could conceivably learn how to play chess. Right. But you won't remember where you learn how to play chess. Right. Much like they say a baby learned how to walk and talk, but they don't remember that day you taught me how to walk. Right. They don't have to relearn crawling or walking or talking on a day to day basis, right, because they learned it. And that's semantic memory. That's like facts and rules and possibly motor movements or whatever. Or if I run into this wall, it's going to hurt my face because I'm crawling. Right. But they don't remember teaching them, like, come crawl to me, that kind of thing. Right. So, yeah, that's semantic memory. Episodic memory would be like, what did you have for breakfast this morning? At a fruit smoothie. You had a fruit smoothie? I remember what the light looked like. I remember what smelled like that is precisely episodic memory. And I should probably give a shout out to Trzantal, who I'm like just blatantly ripping off right. Now, the chess example was one of Zantull's examples of semantic memory. And what you just said is almost word for word, an example of episodic memory. You said you remember these other details. Sure. Whereas had you said, I had a smoothie this morning, I must have, because I always have a smoothie, right? That would be well, not the burping part, but if you always had it, then that'd be more like semantic memory. Okay. So we reached the question do dogs perceive time, or are these reactions that appear like they're keeping track of time some way, maybe through a circadian oscillator based on semantic memories? And there's been a lot of studies that are not necessarily on dogs but on other animals, right? Yeah. What's this crackpot's name? Roberts. No, what's this guy's name? Doctor Roberts. Yes. I have to say I'm going to take issue with Dr. Roberts. Yeah, William Roberts, he's an animal cognition researcher. Right. Right off the bat, you're taking issue with that? Not that title. Okay. Yeah. He did some studies on pigeons and primates, to name a couple, and long term and short term memory as far as remembering a sequence that they would I guess the pigeons would peck it out and the primates would tap it out and to get a reward. And they found that they have pretty good short term memory for this kind of thing. Right. That's working memory. Right, yes. But long term is reference memory. Yeah, but as far as the reference goes, they couldn't remember it that well if there was a big break in between. Right. Roberts actually wrote a very famous paper as far as animal cognition goes, where he basically said that he concluded animals are stuck in time. And I just made air quotes for those of you out there listening in podcast land. And by stuck in time, it means that they live exclusively in the present, that they don't have the capacity for forming long term episodic memory. Episodic is the key word. It is very much the keyword, because I know at home you're saying, no, I taught my dog to sit when she was one. That's not the same thing. That's what you're talking about with the baby learning how to walk. Right. But there's a lot of examples out there in nature that would kind of belief's idea that animals or dogs are stuck in time. Well, a good one is squirrels foraging food, stocking up for the winter, store for the winter, and doing it year after year after year. I believe Roberts actually addressed that and says, but they continue hoarding even when their stores inexplicably disappear, which I assume some researchers went and stole squirrels nuts and then studied them to see what they would do. I don't understand that at all. I don't either. It seems like that would make them want a horde. Yeah. So I kind of have an issue with that one a little bit, but it's possible. I'm not entirely seeing that point all the way. I don't see the point. I'm not quite sure what he meant there. But there's also one about the bananas. Right. Chuck, there were some primates that were given choices between more or less bananas. Yes. And predictably, at first, if you offered an eight, one banana or two bananas, they're going to take the two bananas. Sure. But they found that when they started increasing the number of bananas, like ten compared to 20, they would just go for the ten bananas. He thought this meant they have no concept of the future. Like, maybe I should take these bananas because I might be hungry tomorrow. Right now, I think Roberts fails to take into account social structure. Sure. Right. We know that we could use ten bananas for tomorrow. But we also have things like preservation techniques or refrigeration available. That's what I thought, too. And if you go back in time just a few thousand years ago to huntergatherer societies, or even huntergatherer societies that are around now, they don't store food at all. They forage for what they need right then, and that's what they eat. I would imagine that that would actually explain a lot of the primate decisions. There's no real reason to their society isn't set up on this idea that I need more and more to protect myself in the future. Exactly. I don't know that that necessarily means that they don't have any concept of the future. I think that there's all these other explanations out there. Right. When I read that, the first thing I thought was maybe they've never taken more than ten bananas in their life because they've never needed to. So it doesn't even dawn on them. That should be something they would do. Exactly. I guess what we're saying, both of us are on the same page here. There are other explanations. I agree. And I think one of the things I took from this article was that Roberts found it conclusive that animals are stuck in time by cherry picking some studies here. Yeah. We kind of disagree with them. There's a lot of other factors. I know that my dog Lucy is stuck in time at 530 p. M. Every day because she's always asking for the food. So I guess another problem. It's entirely possible, Chuck, that our brains just aren't big enough. But they're not as big as Robert's brain. Maybe. Did you ever hear that goldfish have an eight second memory span? I've never heard that. So I have. Right. You have a goldfish in here. I do have a goldfish here. Very cute. Yeah. Molly. She's very cute. Is named Molly. I didn't know that. Yeah. Interesting. But having an episodic memory makes it almost impossible to think about not having one. So, like, if a goldfish does have a memory of 8 seconds, does that mean that every 8 seconds all of its memories are purged? Like getting rid of the browser history in your computer? Or as new experiences come into the present. Our older ones pushed out after they hit this eight second maturity level. Right. And how do they test that on a goldfish anyway? Perfect, Chuck. Perfect segue. Here's the biggest problem. Robert's position is almost inherently speciesist. Are you familiar with this term? Yeah, this is a legitimate term. I'm not making this up. Animals have no souls. Animals don't have souls. It's impossible for a dog to be happy because that's a secondary emotion, and dogs aren't self aware enough. There's a competing explanation for all this. Species tend to rely very strictly or remain very strictly within the structure provided by the scientific method. And all his studies here, he probably came out from that frame of mind. Sure. Right. But there's another way of looking at it and that is that humans simply haven't come up with tests that are clever enough to get definitive proof that an animal can experience happiness or is aware of time, the future of the past, that kind of thing. You can take that way too far. Like after test after test after test, that proves the opposite. You could still conceivably say, well, there's a test out there that we haven't come up with yet, proves that they can. But I think that the testing that has been done is very much below that threshold. So far I don't think we have a clue what animals are capable of as far as consciousness goes because we have such a loose grasp on our own consciousness. Sure. And we certainly can't delve into an animal's brain and see what they think and they can't tell us anything. I guarantee you one thing, I bet you Doctor Roberts is not a dog owner. Agreed? Agreed. Because you have dogs, dude. And I guarantee you we're going to get tons of mail from people saying, are you kidding? My dog displays emotion every day. And I guess Caesar, that the dog whisperer might say that you're putting your human construct on the dog's friend of mine. Yeah. Anthropomorphizing. Yes. I don't know man, my dog is they're both pretty emotional. Well, yeah, Anthropomorphizing is the go to ammunition for species. And I don't mean to say that anybody who's saying like, no, animals can't be happy because it's secondary emotion and they lack that sense of self awareness required to experience secondary emotion is a speciesist. But the two often go hand in hand. And it's really interesting that there's a line drawn right now between people who think animals don't have a soul and people who think animals can be happy and all the implications that come with that. Jerry, I bet you think your dog has a soul, right? Jerry is saying yes just to give the sweetest face and nodded yes. So I feel like Chuck and I just opened a big old can of worms. So we'll see how this plays out in the emails, right? Yeah. If you want to read more about dogs perceiving time to answer the question, according to Roberts, no, dogs don't perceive time. Time is a human construct consisting of a past, present and future and dogs pretty much live in the present. Chuck and I don't necessarily agree with that one. You can go on and type in dogs perceived time in the handy search bar@housestepworks.com. Since I just said that it means it's time for a whole mess of listener mail. You are right, Josh. We're just going to call this Muppet mail and we are going to go on a little longer than usual with our mail because the Muppet podcast, I think we will all agree, was sort of a sea change episode. And plus we just want to see how long this background music actually goes for. I know. We literally got better response from The Muppet Show episode than anything we've ever done, I would say, wouldn't you? Yeah. The Henson Company twittered about it. Yeah. Heather Henson, we should say our colleague and friend Jonathan Strickland of text fame. His sister. No. He's friends with Heather Henson. And it went viral thanks to him. Yeah. That's awesome. So we got great response. It's clear that everyone loves the Muppets. And so I wanted to go just through a few of these because I didn't want to just do one quickly before we start. And we never do this, but a guy sent me an email, and I kind of touched a chord with me. So I want to quickly give a shout out for Joe to Beth in Ellwood, Indiana. Joe just wants to say that he thinks that you are a pretty cool chick. Beth. Chuck, are you playing matchmaker? Is that why you're wearing nothing but a diaper? And you have those wings on you? But Beth and Ellwood joe thinks you're cool, Chick. So do we, because she actually sent us an alien hand syndrome video, which rocked. Cool. It was good. I'll show it to you quick. Couple of things that we didn't mention in corrections. First of all, I mistakenly referred to the Children's Television Workshop as the Children's Television Network. So I goofed that one. You're thinking of home Shopping Network. I was for kids. We did not mention every Muppet movie. We did not mention every Muppet venture because no, I want to elucidate on this. We did that on purpose. First of all, we mentioned the three that were in theatrical release directed by Jim Henson. Yeah. And by first of all, I mean that's it. Right? So a lot of people said, how could you not mention Muppets Christmas Carol? And we wanted to mention everything, but we would have been sitting here reading things all day long about the Dark Crystal and other Muppet adventures. So we chose to only do the hints and ones, which, I have to say, Dark Crystal, that creeps me out still. And that was Henson, too, because I know people are going to write and say that was hinton, but get over it, right? We had a guy named Peter wrote in, and he told us about the Muppet Whatnot workshop? Yeah. At Goldman Sachs. At FAO? Yes. And you can go to New York City, and you could do it online, but I looked, and it's down right now. I think it's just around Christmas time or the holidays. No, they got bought out by Toys R US, I think. So that's down right now. But you can still go to New York. You can go to the Muppet Workshop, and you can build your own whatnot? At Goldman Sachs, it costs about $100. And he sent me a picture of he and his little cute daughter with her mum and whatnot so you want to thank Peter for that. And actually, I'm going on and on, but Peter had one of the big Fu Manchu mustaches like me. Did I tell you about this? No. I said, very cool, Peter. Thanks for sending this. It looks like you picked up a mustache while you were there. And he wrote back and said, no, I got that at the Sam Elliott Supply Center down the street, or something like that. Peter packed a picnic supper. So that is all for the corrections. Now we have a few emails. Oh, my God. Josh and Chuck. I just listened to how Muffet's worked. I'm excited to hear you talk about it because you mentioned the costume design for Miss Biggie, who happens to be my Aunt Callista. Oh, wow. If you look up the Muppet movie, you can see her in the costume and wardrobe department on IMDb. She worked closely with Henson, and I've actually seen a picture of her with Jim Henson setting up some muppets in Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas. She left the muppets, I think, when Jim Henson died, but we still see her once a year. That's from Sam. And Josh is in fact, eating a Reese's cup onto the next one. Hi, guys. Love your recent podcast. I was listening and thought I would mention that Jim Hinton studied muppetology at University of Maryland. I know this because I went to school there. And there is a Jim Hinton Studies program, and it is our claim to fame. I didn't know he went to my school until I went there. And there's actually a little bench statue. It's a bench with Henson sitting on it and Kermit sitting on the back of the bench, and they're kind of holding hands. That is beyond cute. It is very cute. And she also says that this is from Lisa that they have the rights to It Ain't Easy to Be in Green and Rainbow Connection. So their marching band actually plays that at University of Maryland. Territorps. Yeah. Go Turps. Moving on, man. Listen to this background music. Chuck is no, I know. We compared them up. It showed a 30 Rock. And Phil of Lyndon Washington has this to say I was trying to imagine Sesame Street would look like in real life. Two little boys getting their own apartment. A giant bird that sleeps behind garbage cans. A few scattered, seemingly sensible adults who really have no jobs and nothing else to do. No, Mr. Hooper at a store. That's true. Finally, it hit me while working my job as a special ed classroom assistant. It is one big government operated group home facility for special needs children and adults. Think about it. Bert displays classic asperger syndrome. They share a bedroom and obviously have some adults taking care of the rest of their house. Oscar is schizophrenic with his mood swings, and a worm is the best friend as his big Bird with his imaginary friend. Snuffleupagus. And Tommy Grover is not dealing with severe ADHD and Cookie Monster from Manic. Bipolar tendencies. And the jobless adults gordon, Susan, and Bob. So that's from Phil. Are they jobless adults or the caregivers he says are jobless adults? All right, I've got two more. Jerry's laughing at how long this is going, but I warned her I was listening to your fantastic podcast, and I had to write in, I am getting married at the Henson Sound Stage next year. Sweet. So cool. He and his wife to be toward the sound stage. It was like being behind the scenes at The Muppet Show. We were honored as the first wedding ever to be hosted there. And I asked him, I wrote a bags like, dude, what's the hookup? And he had none. He just asked. They rented out to people, apparently for things, and no one's ever thought to have a wedding plan. And he gave us some facts, but we don't have time for that. That is from Dan and of Tdfillistration.com, because he's a cool artist. So I wanted to plug that from Dan. And finally, Josh from Jake in Newport. Richie, Florida, says, I was an accident of the missed the Muppet heyday. But I was lucky enough to have three older sisters and parents who had the foresight to ensure that they taped several seasons of The Muppet Show. So Jake is a big fan of the Muppets now, and he told us this fact, which I did not know. Since Jim Henson's death, Ralph the dog has not spoken and is seldom used. It's my understanding that they do this out of reference to Mr. Henson because Ralph was his favorite Muppet. Oh, yeah. Check the swipe, the way it's here, period. Sweet old softie. So that's Muppet mail. We got hundreds of pieces of mail and good blog response, and thanks for sending. And it was a good show. Yeah. And we'll try to keep you supplied with mortgage shows in the future. If you want to send an email and try to make Chuck cry, it's not that hard. You can send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want morehousedofworks? Check out our blog on the houseupworks.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. 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 yours, your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | ||
c34eaef0-5460-11e8-b38c-33d13892588f | SYSK Selects: How Capgras Syndrome Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-capgras-syndrome-works | There is an extremely rare condition where the sufferer is convinced that everyone around him is an impostor posing as their friends and family. Learn about the neurology behind this strange and sad mental disorder in this episode. | There is an extremely rare condition where the sufferer is convinced that everyone around him is an impostor posing as their friends and family. Learn about the neurology behind this strange and sad mental disorder in this episode. | Sat, 08 Jun 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=159, tm_isdst=0) | 24367112 | audio/mpeg | "Picture this, friends. You could be packing a carry on for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your City Advantage Platinum Select card. So you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you Advantage miles. Actually, you earned Advantage miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the city Advantage Platinum Select Card. Learn more at citi comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Hello, everyone. It's me, your friend. Josh. And for this week's SYSK selects, I've chosen our episode on Cop Grass or Cop Gras. We never actually really figure it out in this episode syndrome. It's about an astoundingly interesting mental disorder where a person believes the people in their life have been replaced by impostors. And this episode contains the dorkiest line I've ever uttered. Yes. Wow. Indeed. Enjoy. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I'm pretty sure the person with me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Capgra. Yeah. I think it's KAP grass because it's a Frenchman who was the first person to describe Jerry. Just call it craft. Craft. I know. So we're all kinds of screwed up. Yeah. And I'm not going to say cop gras the whole time. So we'll just say capgrad. It's obnoxious. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. We're not in Quebec. That's right. We're in Quebec. Right? This is basically our invasion of the Body Snatchers. Yeah. Episode podcast. Yeah. Unless we do one on The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Well, it's kind of the deal, though. We're talking today about a very strange and once thought to be very uncommon and rare disorder, a delusional disorder, a delusional misidentification disorder, to be specific, where the sufferer believes that the people in his or her life, people very close to him, have all been replaced by imposters. That I'm looking at you right now, Chuck. You look just like Chuck, and you're doing a great job with the voice and everything, but I don't want to say it and I don't want to look you in the eye, but you're obviously not chuck and what's going on? I think we all feel that about each other occasionally, but imagine like that all the time. Yes. How would you just not lose faith in the reality of anything if you thought, first of all, how are they coming up with great imposters like this? Sure. Who is they? Yes. Why are they doing this? Why you? Is it just you or is the whole world imposters? Yeah, it's like there's a lot of really weighty questions involved with this and as a result science has been trying to really figure out the mystery behind it and has failed thus far. Yeah. And we already should say it's not only difficult on the person but it's difficult on the person being misidentified as well. Sure. And you don't really known hear a lot about that. I read a bunch of articles on this and only one said and don't forget, if your wife thinks that you're an imposter, it's really tough on you as well. Sure. Yeah. That is kind of overlooked. Yeah, very much so. Yes. This is actually kind of a newish phenomenon as far as description goes. Yeah. 1923, Doctor Copgraw and Dr. Ribulasol described Madame who believe that she had as many as 80 husbands, all of them the same, looking the same, but they were all impostors and she never could get close to them because eventually they would just kind of leave and be replaced by a new one. And she was utterly convinced of this. And I'm sure at the time they thought this lady is just nuts. But then the more people did research, the more they found and I couldn't find any good stats on how rare it is. I got it. I heard thousands and that means nothing. So the one I saw, it was in 2006 for five, I believe the estimate was between 1.3% to 4.1% of all psychiatric patients have capgra. And you can probably say that if that's close, then that's probably close to the general population because if you believe that the people who are closest to you in your life are imposters and you're accusing them of such, they're probably going to force you to go seek psychiatric help. So that would probably be a pretty close statistic for society at large. And where you really see it though is in Alzheimer's patients. The statistic was between 2% and 30% of Alzheimer's patients possibly suffer from cop, grass or crabgrass. Yeah, but isn't that just Alzheimer's? No, not necessarily Alzheimer's. That can be forgetfulness. Yeah. I guess this orientation, this is like pacific thing. You're accusing your husband, your wife, your son, your daughter of being somebody else, somebody posing as them. Right, okay, that makes sense. So this is different than something we've covered Faceliners before. Right. We talked about it, came up in something else, but yeah, maybe we did do a whole podcast on it. I'm not sure, but that is prosopagnosia. And this is not prosopragnosia. That's when you can see your face over and over and over and still you just don't know who it is. Right. In this case, you know, like, hey, that's Josh. I'm looking at him. I know that face. But they've done studies with skin conductance. They're basically measuring the amount of perspiration on your face right. Which is a measure of the limbic system being active, which is in turn a measure of your emotions going off. Yeah. With the idea being that if you're sweating a little bit on the face, then that is a physiological or psychological cue that like, hey, look at this picture of your mother. I will recognize that as my mother, and maybe my face will sweat a little bit. Right. If you are what's called a normal participant, if you have propagnosia, you will not recognize that picture intellectually, consciously, but your skin conductivity will go off. So that means that the emotional cue is still triggered even though you don't know who you're looking at. Right. That's the opposite of studies of Capgras syndrome. Yeah. They'll see a picture and they will not have it's. Basically like they're looking at a picture of a complete stranger. Right, exactly. But they don't have an emotional response. Here's the thing. They recognize the face enough to know, this is my dad. They are rational enough. That's the other thing, too, other than this, they're rational. Yes. It's what's called a monothematic syndrome, where you have one delusion and it's a whopper, and it basically consumes your whole life. So they're rational otherwise, and they're rational enough to say, okay, this is my dad I'm looking at, but I don't feel any kind of emotional stimulation from seeing my dad. And I should. Yeah. And because I don't, this is an imposter. That's what they think is going on. Yeah. One of the common things that people with the syndrome will say is that their soul is gone or their soul is missing. That's a different syndrome. No, that's linked to Capgra because they'll recognize oh, the other person. Yeah. Okay. The person they're looking at is, that's not my mother. I would sense my mother's soul. Right. So what they think then is that this kind of proves that we make memories two ways that are connected, that we take in stimuli. Right. Like visual stimuli. I'm looking at you, and at the same time, I'm looking at Chuck. And I like Chuck. So I'm also kind of taking note that same memory that I'm forming of the visual representation of you also has an attendant emotion. Happiness. I like you. Yeah. So when I see you again, I should feel that same thing. Happiness. Oh, I'm glad to see Chuck. That is a full memory with cop gras people who suffer that they're missing the emotional aspect and they have the recognition and Vs rama Sean drawn. I think I said his name, right? He came up in the mirror neurons episode. Yes. Just a brilliant, genius dude. UC san Diego. Aztecs, maybe. I think so he said probably what's happening then is you have a secondary lesion or secondary damage, where your right brain is very analytical and it checks your left brain, which wants to explain everything away. And if that right brain analysis is damaged, then the left brain can go to whatever links it wants to, to explain away strange phenomenon. In this case, if you have that disconnect between the sensory input and emotional aspect of a memory in conjunction with the loss of the right brain checking your delusions, then the left brain is able to go off and say, oh, well, it must be an imposter. Yeah, well, the emotional side wins out essentially as a explanation to sort of reconcile those two things. Yes. Because it's missing. It's not diluted. The person is not delusional. There's an imposter. Yeah. You know what's really weird is another one of the characteristics sometimes is it can extend to animals and objects as well. Yeah. So it's not always just people. That's my dog. But I know that chair is not the original chair. Someone came in here and replaced it with an exact replica. And they're not hallucinating, they're aware of all this stuff. Yeah. And I mean, imagine the paranoia that that would generate in you. Who moved the chair? Who replaced the chair? What's the deal? And they found that it is comorbid with things like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia as well, and other psychotic disorders. Yeah. And it's usually your spouse, too. One article I read said it's always your spouse is how it starts. Oh, yeah? Yeah. But I don't know if that's quite right. That seems a little willy nilly to say every single time it starts with your spouse. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change an industry. IBM let's create learn More@ibm.com 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 thieves 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. So let's talk about some of the explanations that science has come up with since it was first described in 1923. It was right in Freud's wheelhouse. Oh, yes. So the psychoanalysts had their first crack at it and they swung and missed. They basically said that it was repressed edifice or electric complex. Right. Yeah. And that was kind of poopooed. Pretty quickly, they were saying that you're just trying to resolve guilt about your circumstances, identifying your parents look alike. And then pretty quickly, scientists it probably doesn't have to do with repressed feelings in this case. Right. Done. Done. Everybody took his ball and went home. Yeah. He's really been kicked to the curb. Has he? Yeah. Even by psychology, they've turned their backs on them. Yeah. Psychodynamic approach. Sorry, Freudians. That was the psychodynamic approach. And that's, like we said, it's kind of been poopooed. Well, the psychodynamic approach was the one where it's repressed feelings for the approach was that you wanted to have sex with your mom. Right. So you resolve the guilt from that by saying, you're not my mom, you're not my mom, you're an imposter, so but I want to have sex with you, and that's okay. I'm in the Glen Miller version of the mood, and I feel really guilty. Again, we should say that one was thrown out. A lot of researchers think that it's a result of an actual organic cause, something physically wrong with the brain, which makes sense to me. They look for lesions, cerebral dysfunction, signs of atrophy. And like you mentioned, it is also comorbid a lot of time with psychotic disorders, epilepsy, even Alzheimer's. And you mentioned schizophrenia, which makes sense. I think bipolar is on there as well. Yeah. So other doctors say, you know what? It might be a combination of these things, like physical and cognitive causes. Yeah. Like, you have some sort of organic damage, but then you're mentally you're rationalizing it inappropriately. Like you can't accept that you're delusional because of any sort of brain damage. You're projecting. Everyone else is an imposter. That would be a combination of mental and physical. And again, it's your brain trying to explain something that doesn't quite add up in your head. Yeah. So what's clear is there's a breakdown in communication. There is somewhere in the brain. Ramajandran and his partner I don't want to just call out the star, but Hurstein and Rama Chandran did a paper in 97 that was pretty interesting. They consider it a problem of memory management, wherein, like you or I, our brain is to be, if it's a computer, like, it is a computer. Right, sure. When we see somebody or meet somebody, we create a file on that person. And then when we encounter that person again, we access the same file and then add to it. But it's the same file. Right. What Ramadhan, John and Herstin were proposing was that people who have copyrighted make a new file every time for the same person. But there has to be some sort of link between these files. I don't think that's necessarily an app description. I think they're more onto it with it's the same file. It's just missing something that the patient senses is missing a void there. And they're saying, well, I'm missing something. It's because you're an imposter and I don't really know you. Yeah, like some sort of emotional identification marker. Right. This is really interesting to me. They have studies that showed that blind people can actually extend to their voice of the person, but other times they've shown that they recognize them on the phone, but not in person. Yeah, that was a dude named DS. That Rama Shondran. So it can be both. The only modality is what they call it for his delusion was visual. Right. So when he saw his parents, his dad was not his dad. And actually his dad was pretty cool. His dad, one day, DS, was a 30 year old Brazilian guy who got into a car accident and started suffering Capgras Syndrome. And his parents started to get really worried, didn't know what to do. So his dad one day came in and declared that the man who had been replacing him as an imposter, he had sent him away to China and he would never return. That's pretty smart. I'm your father and I'm back. And it worked for a couple of weeks, and then it just went back. The guy became convinced that now the imposter is back. He had Capcross Syndrome so bad that he came to believe that he himself was an impostor. And he asked his mother, when the real DS returns, will you still love me and treat me as your friend? Can I still stay around? And she said, I don't know who you are. So this guy thought everything, including himself, was an impostor. He thought there were two Panama that he'd been to recently, thought there were two United States. Well, there were doubles for everything. And when he talked to his parents on the phone, though, he didn't suffer that delusion. It was tricky. When you say things like, dad, there's this other guy here pretending to be you. Yes. No, you about it. I don't know. He didn't hide it, from what I understand. Interesting. Which is something that's probably healthy if you have Capgras Syndrome, because there have been instances of violence with Cap Grass syndrome. Yeah. This one guy thought a robot had replaced his father, so he decapitated his father to look for the robot inside. A woman in a mental institution killed another patient because she thought that she was going to kill her daughter's. Double. So she was actually protecting the imposter from somebody who she didn't necessarily think was an impostor. It is very interesting. So as far as treating this, since it's pretty rare, there's not a lot of prescribed regular treatments. Sometimes it goes away. Yeah. Sometimes if it's like a physical brain trauma, you can reestablish that connection and things start firing correctly again and it just kind of disappears. I wonder when you come out of it, Chuck, do you feel like, wow, that was really crazy, what I used to think? Or do you feel like all the imposters have left in all of my families back now? Oh, I don't know. That's weird. Yeah. Another thing that they say if it's linked to a mental disorder, sometimes it can be helped by medication that would also help that mental disorder. But really, for most people, there is no treatment and there is no cure. I think it's just probably a long series of sessions on the couch, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, but I mean, how do you forge trust in somebody which is required to say, okay, it's me, everyone's not impostors. I have a false belief. When ultimately, the closer you get to say, like, you're therapist, the more likely you are to come to believe that they're going to be replaced by an imposter. This is a sad condition. Let's talk about some other sad conditions, too, that are similar. I mean, it's a delusional misidentification syndrome. It also falls under the umbrella of reduplicative para amnesia. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's a mouthful. So another similar one is the Fregoli System, and it was named after Leapoldo Fregoli. He was a quick change artist. And that leads you to believe that people around you are people in disguise. So not replacements, but, hey, I know that you should be my dentist, but you're really my sister in disguise as my dentist. Yeah, it's like over recognition. Like, everyone in your life that you see and interact with on a daily basis, like your dentist or somebody on the subway or whatever is actually somebody very close to you dressed up in disguise. Coachard syndrome. Yes. That is a belief that you are missing body parts or you are emotionally dead. And sometimes they think, like, my heart doesn't beat, or, I don't have bones, or I don't exist any longer. Yeah. These are people that really feel this way. It's pretty much like the psychological manifestation of an existential crisis. Like, you think your brain is rotting inside of you and, like, you're dead, you don't feel anything. What about inter metamorphosis? This one's odd. It's kind of like copyright syndrome, but it's more complete. And it's not imposters. It's people close to you switching. Right. Just your brothers now your father psychologically and physically, the whole ballot. Like, apparently you see them. Like, when you're interacting with your father, you see and think you're interacting with your brother if they've switched. Wow, yes, well, indeed. The thing about this, though, and you kind of get this from the Rama Chandra paper, which I strongly recommend reading. It's only, like, nine pages. It's pretty interesting stuff. Every once in a while, he pulls back and it's like, can you f and believe the brain? It is incredible what it can do. And when it malfunctions, man, can it ever malfunction. But he's pointing out that through these really rare cases, you can start to get a glimpse into how we form memories and how we retrieve memories and to better understand human consciousness through these very unique, unusual patients. Yeah, I'd like to think at the end of our run in 50 years, we're going to have a nice body of work on the brain for people to pick and choose from, like alien hand to capgra to how memories are formed and how you taste, and myths on the brain. Yeah, it's just pretty amazing stuff. I know. How do you taste it? I taste delicious. I think it's probably our favorite topic. Did you say 50 years? Hey, I got one for you. Have you seen the Imposter? Yeah, I think I talked about it before, too. That's good documentary. Good documentary. Go check that one out. Yeah. And you got anything else on capgra? Capgra, crabgrass, capgrass, cootegra, butter, all those things. Type them into the search bar. Howstep works.com. And it may or may not bring up this article. At least a couple of them will. And since I said search bar, let's take a message break. 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. 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 L-I-F-E-L-O-C-K comST. For 25% off your first year, LifeLock Identity Theft protection starts here and now. Listener mail. Yes, buddy. I'm going to call this one email from a former Mormon. Former Mormon. Hey, guys and Jerry. I'm listening to the podcast on marriage. I want to give you some information on Mormon marriage. Though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints no longer practices nor supports the secular act of marrying multiple spouses, men can still be sealed to multiple women. I'll try and explain sealing to you, but even though I was raised a member of the Church, the details are a little bit fuzzy because he's been out for a little while. The ceiling is related to marriage and takes place at the same time. It is a separate ordinance where marriage ensures that a couple receives all the legal benefits promised by the government. Ceiling insures all of the religious benefits promised by the Lord. That was a good preacher. Thank you. The two main benefits that I can remember are one, the sealed persons will be together for all time and eternity, and two, the sealed persons will enter into the highest level of heaven of the three levels. Okay. I found out a man can be sealed to multiple women when my parents went through their divorce. Even though they went through the legal process of divorce, they never had their ceiling nullified. When my dad remarried, he was sealed to my stepmother and to my biological mother at the same time. Later on, when my mom remarried, she had to nullify her sealing to my father because women are not allowed to be sealed to multiple men, only men to multiple women. Furthermore, my new stepfather was sealed to his late wife when he married my mother, and he still is to this day. My intentions aren't to bash the Church in any way, but the fact that men can be sealed to multiple women is a little known fact to most people inside and outside the Church. Though the Church's practice of polygamy doesn't bother me anymore. Educated, consenting adults should be allowed to be with the ones they love, in my opinion. I am bothered by the fact that they don't inform people of their policy on being sealed to multiple spouses. That's all I've got, guys, on Mormons and marriage. No longer a member of the Church, but I still find the religion and culture very fascinating. A podcast on how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints works would be amazing. And that is from Ethan Clarke. Clarke. Ethan ethan Clark is a long lost brother, and we've been asked by many Mormons and members of that Church to do one on their religion. We have a whole queue of ones that we have to do now. It's kind of piling up. It's like before we hit the 50 year mark. It's just like one after the other. The never ending cycle. We'll add it to the cycle. The never ending Cycle, starring a tray. If you want to suggest a podcast and accompany it with a story or some outsider former insider analysis, we want to hear it. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. Join us on Facebook.com. STUFFYou Know you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestephorse.com and don't press Stop yet. Go to our website. It's www. UW stuffyoushouldnowcom. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena 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." | |
How Grief Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-grief-works | You can probably name the five stages of grief - from denial to acceptance - they've become pretty well known since being proposed in 1969. But later researchers are finding that grief is rarely that cut and dried, and it may not be as widely experienced | You can probably name the five stages of grief - from denial to acceptance - they've become pretty well known since being proposed in 1969. But later researchers are finding that grief is rarely that cut and dried, and it may not be as widely experienced | Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:33:34 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=17, tm_min=33, tm_sec=34, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=94, tm_isdst=0) | 37905203 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful from the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Welcome to stuff you should know from houseupworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. That makes some stuff you should know. The podcast. Good grief. Yes, good grief. I look that up. What did you come up with? Well, it just struck me because Charlie Brown says it's where I know it from. Then I thought, Where did that come from? Because that's one of those things. And it's just apparently they think it's just what's called a Minced oath. Like when you substitute God for good gravy or good Google eve, I got you great googly moogly. Googling moogly. But then I thought grief was weird because that's such a specific thing. But then good gracious gracious is very specific, too, and, like, ill fitting. So I guess it's just immense oath. Good grief. Well, maybe good gracious came from good grace and somebody was just feeling a little buzzed on schnapps and they added gracious instead. Maybe so. Minced oats, good gravy. That's good. That's probably the funniest thing that will happen in this show. Hopefully. That wasn't even that funny. Yes, but this one's not supposed to be funny. It's about grief. And I think we should point out from the get go that this is about grief. Human grief. Western human grief. But that's not to say that there aren't different types of grief and that humans are the only ones who do grief. In fact, I have a story for you. Yeah, I got a little animal action, too. You do? That was the funniest thing in this episode. The story took place back in the spring of 1999 in Utter Pradesh State, India, specifically in the town of Lucknow, and even more specifically at the Prince of Wales Zoo. Okay. There was a 72 year old female elephant named Dominique. And Domini was hanging out in her little house at the Prince of Will Zoo when all of a sudden, she got a younger, pregnant friend delivered to her named Chempakali chambacoli was, as I said, pregnant. She was actually on maternity leave from her regular gig, where she would just let tourists ride on her back. Okay. All right. And so she was taken to the Prince of Wales to basically just have a nice, comfortable term and then give birth. And Domini just fell in love with Chompa Collie. This is so sad already. So she basically became a maternal figure. Champa Collie, they were best friends. Champa Collie would lay around and Dominique would stroke her pregnant belly with her trunk. They just got really, really tight, which is very normal in the elephant world. Yeah. So you could almost imagine that Dominique was growing excited as Champagoli got closer and closer to her due date. And then finally, she did go into labor. Champagne Le died during childbirth and gave birth to a stillborn calf. And Dominique, I guess they let her come in and hang around the body because elephants are known to grieve. Even as far as elephants go. Domini's story is a little pretty bad. She cried over the body for a while and then went over to her enclosure and just stood still for a week. Right. You're killing me. After the week during this week, she stopped eating. She got to the point where her legs swelled from basically starvation and dehydration until she fell over. And then she just laid there for what turned out to be the rest of her life, where she wept and refused to eat and refuse to drink and grieved over the death of her friend and finally died herself a few days later. And the vets tried to keep her alive. They did what they could, but they said in the end, in the face of Domini's intense grief, all her treatment failed. Jeez. No, they're buried next to one another. I had a dog situation like that similar when I was a kid. Yeah. One of my dogs died and they were best buds. And the other one just, like, was never the same and died about three months later and seemed healthy at the time. And I went out and lay down the dog house and cried nice when I was, like, seven. Devastating. That's a wonderful thing to do. That's working out your grief. Yes. But as far as the animals go, it really is pretty evenly divided among scientists who say, yes, they show all the signs of grieving, and that's what they're doing. And then others that say, no, they are not grieving, we are putting that on them as humans. Yeah, I totally disagree with that. Yeah. It's really two camps. We've talked about this before. Yeah. We've run up against this before, and I don't think either one of us have changed our positions at all. I think they grieve. But then you hear, like this one great ape was famous recently for carrying her little dead baby around for, like, three days. And other scientists came out and said, this is a long gestation period. They have singleton's. Having a kid is a big deal. And so she's carrying this baby around in hopes that it will come back to life. And it's like in a comatose state and it's a practical, adaptive, evolutionary thing that's happening. It's not grief. And then I think you're heartless. Right. Yeah. They're grieving. They took the baby chimp and made a purse out of it. That's what the scientists did after that. Well, but then for animals, I don't want to get too sidetracked, but you have to think, like, when some clearly shows signs of what looks like grief and some don't at all. Like the chimpanzee in the same arena. Like, they eat other chimpanzees while they're still alive and screaming. Well, those are the ones that back talk. Or they go off to die by themselves and there's no grieving. Or they will make like if one of them is dying, that will kill them. Right. But imagine you're an outside observer of the human species. We lose chemical weapons on one another and yet we still have funeral practices. It's interesting. I wonder why certain animals do and certainly don't, though. Yeah, it's very interesting. Well, getting back to humans, the human realm of grief, there was a man who recently was married to his wife for 62 years and she died. And on the way to her funeral, he died in the back of the limousine. Oh, really? Yeah, which I thought was incredibly sweet. And then his daughters they died at the funeral? No, they put a sign up. They decided to just have a double funeral. And they put a sign up at the wake that said, Surprise, it's a double header. And then buried him next to her, like that day. Well, I guess their family has a good sense of humor, at least. But the point is yeah. That is, they use the sense of humor to grieve or else they weren't going through grief. And the point of that whole thing is that there's no set way that grief works. Which is great, because we can say just about anything here. And still being the right. Exactly. Because psychology is still grappling to define the process of grief. And some very recent studies that you found shows that grief is not present in everyone and that everyone deals with it very differently. And there's not really any specific way to handle it. There's just some great general guidelines. And we should say grief is a very personal thing. Yeah. And I myself have experienced the spectrum of grief in my life, including family members passing away. Not to be too cold, but some are you super grieve for and some it's like well, they were very old and they had a great life and we saw this coming. And that's one of the things that's one of the types of grief, anticipatory grief, they say, is probably easier because you're working that stuff out over time and it's nothing like an accident or a child dying. Unanticipated grief. Well, completely different. Yes, it is. So you mention anticipatory grief that's like if somebody's got a prolonged illness or something like that, you have the chance to say goodbye ahead of time, maybe deal with these emotions. Exactly. And then once death actually comes, you've been prepared for this for days, weeks, months, right. Yeah. And a lot of times, maybe there isn't any quote unquote, traditional grief going on at all because you're just so prepared. Right. And it's just a matter of executing all the things that you need to do if you're the person that's in charge of that kind of right. Like you're so prepared you blow up the funeral to go to the grocery store serial killer, if that's the case. Psychologists call that kind of grief anticipatory grief. Basically the money grief, because it's about as light as you can get post death, I should say, right? Yes. And then again, I want to say that there's probably a listener out there who helped their husband or their mother through a long bout of cancer that the person finally succumbed to. That's absolutely untrue. I agree with you wholeheartedly. Again, there's no specific. Like, no one can tell you what your grief was. Again, it's personal. This is just exactly these are very broad strokes. Okay, then. Like you mentioned, unanticipated grief. Right? Yeah. From my experience, I had a friend that fell off a building and died. That's definitely the hardest. Someone young, an accident. But still. If you want to talk about five stages, I'm not a big believer that that's the case because I didn't experience all the stages at all. But again, it varies. Someone might experience ten stages. It does. But the point is, with unanticipated grief, like, you or your friend didn't wake up that morning like he was going to die. Right. But he still died and you have to deal with it all of a sudden. Yeah. And then there's ambiguous grief, which, for my money, is probably the worst kind of grief. This is the kind of grief that comes where, say, if you have a loved one who is kidnapped and you never hear from them again. Yeah. Or never felt that one, your parents abandon you as a child, or just something happens to somebody and there's no real resolution or closure. Yeah. Or it doesn't have to be even death. It can be like your girlfriend, you come home to a note on your bed and you never hear from her again. Or a wife, I guess. Yeah. Because I guess we should also say, like, grief doesn't just have to come from death. No, of course not. Grief is basically the deep and poignant distress caused by bereavement. And bereavement is the state of being deprived of something or someone. So that could be through death, whatever. Yeah, exactly. But yeah. So those are the three types of normal grief just off the top of our heads. We made those up. Right. Yeah. And you mentioned the different kinds of different stages of grief. I mean, that's just such, like, a pop trope these days. Yeah. The five stages. But it was actually new just as recently as 1969, when Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross came up with the five stages of grief that you always hear about today that any ten year old could probably recite to you, but have since been kind of deconstructed and changed in question and challenge. But these are kind of the roadmap to go through grief. Right. Yeah. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Right. And denial is just basically saying you're not true. They're still alive. Like, what you say is a lie, and I don't want to be anywhere near you because you're lying to me right now about something very horrible. Yeah. I've never experienced that, even with my friend who fell off a building like that's as sudden a news as you can get over the phone. And I'm just not the kind of person who's like, no, that didn't happen. I was like, man, it immediately hit me that had happened. And I started from there, I guess, but I didn't experience anger either. But if it might have been my brother, I might have experienced anger. You raised a very good point. There's different, I guess, risk factors, there's different elements to grief, and some of it is personal. Some of it has to do with how close you are to the person. Sure. Some of it has to do with the type of person you are. You're a pretty resilient person. If you were a very sensitive bookish type, you might have taken it a little harder, you know what I mean? Yeah. You have a very strong, tight support group. You do. Yeah. So I would say that probably helped quite a bit. I'm sure you had a group of friends that helped you through that. They were probably friends with the kid, too. Yeah, absolutely. So you went through it as a group. Yeah. Going through something alone is always hard. Even if you think you're a loner and don't want to be around anyone, you're probably not doing yourself any favor. Right. And then lastly, you had prior experience with grief. You'd throwing yourself down in the doghouse when you were seven. Yeah. So you had that experience to draw upon and to know you can make it through it. It does get better. It does go away. Yeah. So you're going to have the hardest, normal kind of grief. If you are, like you said, a loner with no support group, if this is the first time you've ever experienced grief if you're the sensitive bookish type and if you were extraordinarily close to somebody. Right, right. Yeah, totally. In fact, I used to do acting exercises in college. I took this acting class, and believe it or not, I took one acting class, and I was not very good at it. And he used to tell us to try to do, like, crying exercises and stuff. So what do you think of my brother was always to go to, like, imagine my brother had gotten killed or something. I would just like, boom, waterwork. Yes. Your brother myself cry if I thought of your brother dying. I know he's a good guy. I'm just kidding about the other family members. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM. Let's create learn more@ibm.com. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look 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. comSK and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace. Comsysk. Squarespace. All right, so anger the second one. Yes. It is pretty self explanatory. Yeah. Bargaining fascinates me. Like, the idea that you feel like you're suddenly in a position to make a deal with God to reverse the circumstances or bring the person back or take away the pain, that's just so crazy. And you think of somebody bargaining with God or some higher power, and they're, like, looking up, talking to the ceiling or the sky, and that is one of the normal stages of grief. Yeah, I just find that fast. I did that when I was young with girls. Oh, yeah? Well, I was heavy into church, very emotional kid. And girls like, you know, it was one of those deals, like, I just please, you just come back to me. I promise I'll do this and I'll do that. Yeah. But I'll clean behind my ears. I grew out of that pretty quick because I realized that it made any difference. That girl is either coming back or she was hitting the road. Exactly. And God probably had little, if anything, to do with that. That's right. He was dealing with bigger problems. That's right. After that's, depression. And this one's kind of tricky. If you go through the stage of depression, if you do, it's not necessarily requisite. Right. They're starting to wonder if possibly you're already depressed. Yeah. And if you were already depressed, that probably means you're going to maybe get stuck in the stage for a while. Or you might go through a depressed stage and then come out of it. Right. It's not necessarily but the problem with this stage is that depression is a recognized mental disorder and grief is not considered a mental disorder. Right. And yet in one of these five widely accepted stages, you go through a period where you have a mental disorder. Yeah. But it's part of a normal process. And that's basically like taking psychologists and throwing them into the thunderdome, greasing them up with chicken fat and handing them battle axes and saying, like, explain that. That's the funniest thing. The last one is acceptance, of course, when you are finally able to move on. And I found that one fairly interesting article where they charted this and they said it would look like a W. Yeah. Is that right? Like the high points and the low points. Yes. Which I guess denials a high point. And then it goes down to anger, up to bargaining. I guess if you feel like that's getting you somewhere, maybe it's an upgrade. Maybe. At the very least, it's manic, I would think. Yeah. Back down to depression and then finishing the W with a nice bit of acceptance. Yeah. And as you said, we've sort of been studying this for like, 30 or 40 years, and there was always that five stages thing, but recently they're looking more into it and they've done some studies with widowers and widows, and they found that they really oscillate wildly from day to day. Right. And it's not necessarily going to be A-W-I felt great today, and really my spirits were up and I was even laughing, and the next day they were really sad. And it just really is all over the map. Right. But I think overall, what they're finding is that on a long enough arc, people emerge from it, and it seems to be somewhere on the order of six months to three years. Yeah. And I think that the outliers are maybe six months to three years. That's such a ridiculous time frame. But I mean, like, if you study enough people, you can probably create, like, make up, like, three months to five years. Right. Totally. And then say anyone else is an outlier. Right. But that's the thing. That's why everybody is very wisely. They avoid saying things like that. So much respect for the process. Like, no one wants to come out and say, no, this is how it is. Yeah. Because you can't. And that's a mean thing to do. And actually, grief is in danger of being medicalized. In the DSM Five, one of the proposals, there's always been an exemption to bereavement with depression, like a depression diagnosis. If the person has recently gone through the process of grief or is in the process of grief, you can't diagnose them with depression. You can, but you're not going to get reimbursed for any meds. You prescribe them. Right. Well, under the DSM Five, they're taking away this bereavement exclusion so that doctors can get reimbursed. That's good. Yeah. But it medicalizes grief. It says no and now it's a mental disorder. Well, when it's not supposed to be. And it's a story slope. Yeah. A temporary disorder, though. You would hope so. Yeah. All right. Very keen insight. Nice work. Thank you. Psychology Today. Yeah. Is that where you got it? Yeah. Okay. So should we talk a little bit about dealing with it? I guess, yes. It's good advice, but it's also anytime I read something where they're like, take care of yourself and eat right next to something. Yeah. Avoid drugs and alcohol. Yes. But it is very much true. It only is going to make things worse if you wallow in this and abuse yourself with drugs and alcohol and don't eat and you don't think there's stuff all night. There's not a therapy to pouring, like, half of a 40 out on the curb for someone who's gone and then drinking the other half. Yeah, sure. But don't do that every day for, like, weeks and weeks, starting at 09:00 A.m.. Yeah. I mean, I think me and my friends got together and got really good and ploughed after we got the news about my buddy. Yeah. We weren't in there to avoid alcohol. My advice is to avoid it after one time. Yes. Okay. So in addition to avoiding drugs and alcohol, eating right and getting regular exercise, just the standard stuff. What was that also in jet lag, every time it see anything. There are some really good suggestions to dealing with grief. If you find yourself overwhelmed by a profound sense of sadness, there are things out there that you can do to make yourself feel better. You can write a letter to the deceased that's said to help. Yeah, why not? Throwing yourself into, say, making a memorial, like those roadside memorials or a video clip show, who knows? Actually, you know what? When my friend died, I did a video, see, because his family put together a website, like a memorial website, and I had video footage back then of him, and I did a little video for the family, but it ended up really being, like, a great thing for me. It made you feel better. Absolutely. Yeah. So basically putting yourself into a project where you're thinking about this person, I imagine this isn't an article. This is just me doing some armchair psychology. Sure. But I imagine it forces you to remember good things about the person. And so during this time when you're possibly a little more emotionally fragile than usual, you are being reminded of positive memories, positive things as well. Maybe that's why that would help. But it definitely does help, for sure. Because when you're going through and doing, like, a scrapbook, it's these great memories and these pictures, and you are remembering the good stuff and the life. Right. Which is, I think, how everyone wants to be remembered. Sure. It's like these great lies that we have. Exactly. You want to be remembered as a lie? Yeah. I mean, I'm one of those people that always wants my funeral to be a little bit more of an upbeat affair, as much as it can be, where some people like, no, man, I want people really sad. Right. Yeah. I want to be mourned for days. So you want the upbeat affair? Yeah. Okay. Have a party and make fun of me. Okay. But not like Gigi Allen's funeral. I have to research that one. I can only imagine what it was like. Yeah. Pretty hardcore. Pretty much. Okay. Yeah. Did they inject his corpse with heroin or no. He's buried naked, though. And he lived naked. You can do some research if you feel like, okay, man, he died, like, in a horrible way. Didn't they find him, like, murdered in an alley naked and never found the murderer? No, I think he killed himself. I thought he was murdered or odd. I thought he was, like, stabbed to death. I don't think so. He used to threaten to kill himself on stage. That was a big thing. He's like, One day it's going to happen. I thought his big thing was, like, pooping on stage. Well, he did that a lot, too. Yeah. He kept that promise, man. Sidebar on GG. Who knew Gglan was going to show up in the grief episode for real? Another thing you can do to, I guess, kind of help through the grief process is to throw yourself into a project that you think the deceased might appreciate. Yeah. Or some organization they might have been affiliated with. Right. That's what I meant. Yes. Like, if you lose someone to cancer, maybe get involved with the Cohen Foundation or one of the other groups. Apparently, Mad Mothers Against Drunk Driving was founded in memory of a deceased person. Absolutely. Killed by a drunk driver, one would imagine. Right. There's just a lot of stuff out there that you can do yourself. A lot of people pretty much immediately go to therapy, at least initially, to get a little help, to get some insights and advice. Whatever. That's not necessarily the case for everybody. And they've definitely found that therapy is not even necessarily helpful for everybody. There's a lot of people out there who probably wonder if they're dead inside because they don't grieve like supposedly everyone else does. But study after study is finding that actually, people who go through significant grief is a fairly small portion of people who experience a loss. Yeah. Didn't we have a study in here? Yeah, right here. What they do generally is they track groups of widows and widowers for a period of time and just have them remark about how they're feeling on a day to day basis. And this one was for up to five years, I think. And between 26 and 65% had no significant symptoms in the initial years after the loss. Yeah. And only 9% to 41% did. And there's a big variability there, but they said it's partially from how the symptoms were measured. And in another study, they found that about 21% experience what you could diagnose as depression after the loss, and only about 11% had trouble with it, like, couldn't shake it after six to 18 months, I believe. Right. And 10% of people who lost a spouse felt relief. These were people that had reported being unhappy in their marriage. Right. So there's that. Those are the ones that dance on their spouse is great. I guess so. And I don't necessarily think it's that cold, but there could be some mild relief if you genuinely weren't happy in your marriage. Right. And it doesn't mean you're dancing on graves and partying, but it might just be like, all right, well, now I can go move to Cabos and Lucas, like I always want to do, and hang out with Sammy Hagar. My wife hates the ocean. Yeah. And now I can do that. Right. And my wife also hated Sammy Hagar, but I'm going to go hang out with him. Yeah. They also think that men may grieve heavier, even though it's long believed that women do. But I think a study like that is sort of silly. It's so variable, like, from person to person. Right. But we say all this to point out that if you don't experience what other people would recognize as grief, there's nothing wrong with you any more than there is if you experience grief. Exactly. What psychiatry and psychology have started to pay a little more attention to is what's been termed complicated grief. Yeah. Interesting. Technically, if you go, say, several months to where your life is really interrupted, you can't sleep, you can't eat, you're having trouble focusing on anything but the death of this person, the loss of them. Yeah. You start to seriously doubt things very important in your life, maybe like religion, even if you have lost a child, like, there can't be a God, that kind of stuff. Right. Or conversely, if you can't even mention the person's name or hear the person's. Name. Basically, if your life is disrupted for many months, then basically everybody from the Mayo Clinic to the APA says, maybe you should go see somebody about this. Yeah. Because it can also manifest itself in aggression and violence, self destructive, physical self destruction, so it can complicate it as an understatement here for this kind of grief, I think. Right. So there's different kinds. If you go see a counselor with what's considered normal grief, they're probably going to help you let go of the person while still honoring their memory and recognizing them and the impact that they had on your life. But to get out there and live your own life, they're going to try to reach the same goal if you have complicated grief, but they're going to do it a different way, and they're probably going to encourage you to really form an even greater bond with the person now that they're deceased that you can nurture and hold onto and carry around with you. That makes sense to me, yeah. In this case, it's not like you can't tell a parent who has lost a child and you need to work through this and get over it. Right. And that's actually one of the risk factors for complicated grief, is the death of a child. Right. The death of somebody that you are possibly codependent on and very close to or the death of a sudden death, usually from trauma, say, like a murder or something like that. Right. Those are risk factors for complicated grief. So I would imagine that if you had a loved one who was murdered, you probably are already getting some sort of professional attention, and if you're not, maybe you should. Well, yeah. And what we're basically talking about was the difference between grief and trauma. And when you've experienced it to that degree, trauma is a whole different deal. They'd say it feels unreal, and it can be terrifying. Terror is the most common emotion. It's common if you have dreams about a deceased loved one. But if you're having traumatizing dreams about yourself being endangered, then you've crossed the line from grief into trauma and complicated grief. Yeah. Heavy stuff. It is very heavy. Losing a pet is, for some people, a very big deal. And other people, well, people that aren't into pets at all don't get it. And then some people that do have pets are just more equipped to deal with the loss of a pet and not like it's a loss of a human. But for people like me and Jerry over there, I know that losing a pet is like, equivalent to losing a family member. And the grieving process is about the same, I would imagine, if it's that impactful. And my advice is you should talk to other people who have similar feelings, because one of the things that can be toughest about losing a pet is when you talk to people who don't have pets and don't think it's that big of a deal to lose a pet, and that can make things a lot worse. Well, they say that if you do experience the loss of a pet and you find that you're grieving over it, you should go ahead with the grief. Yeah. Don't feel embarrassed or dumb for that. Go right down to the doghouse and cry like a six year old. Yeah. You got anything else? I ran across one thing. There was a guy in 1983 named Paul Rosenblott who carried out a study of, I think, like, 56 Victorian diaries of people who had experienced loss. Interesting. Grief is definitely cultural and also historically bound, too. Like, he found that the goal for these dyer is the was to keep the person alive around them all the time. Like, they would try to sense the person around them or maybe sit in their favorite chair because they could tell that they were still there in some way or whatever, and that under those circumstances, they found that grief never really seemed to ever go away, that it was something that they carried around for the rest of their lives. And in fact, one of the things that the Victorians did was they would wear black for a year, I believe. Yeah. And then dark colors after that. Especially if you were a widow on the anniversary. You wear black, too, right? I think so. And you're expected to carry around this grief for the rest of your life. And one of the things they also did that actually still around today was bereavement photography, which is post mortem photography. Yeah. We've done a thing on that. Have we? Yeah, we did, didn't we? Yeah. And we got an email just as recently as today from a woman who lost a child and had a cast made of the baby's hands and feet. Really? And she said that it was something that has very much helped her through. They don't yet. Yeah. She said it was a gift from the hospital to help them through their grief. And the hospital said, you might not want it now, but we really encourage you to have the sun and we'll pay for it because years from now, you may really be happy that you have it. And she said they were absolutely right. Wow. That's really great. Yeah. What was that email in reference to? deathAsk. Okay. Yeah. But it just happened to come in today when we were researching grief. Wow. Yeah. That's about it, I guess. Yeah. That's it. A to Z, grief. We touched on every single thing possible. What a downer. Yeah. I guess if you want to learn more about grief, you can type that word into the search barhousoforce.com. Remember I before E, except after C. Chuck hold on. Let's take a message break. 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 at IBM. Comconsulting. 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 square space. 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. Comousk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code SYSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace.com. SYSK. Squarespace. It is time for a listener now. So, Josh, you can, by the way, to jump back, look into more grief on our website. Or you could go to Google and look at pygmy goats. That helps, too. That's what I would say. All right, so now not listen to mail, Josh. Today we have administrative detail. Nice, Chuck. Well done. All right, so this is going to be an ongoing thing because as usual, they stack up well. Man, we have very busy work schedules, and we like to say thanks to as many people as possible. For those of you who don't know, administrative Details is a segment that replaces listener mail in which we read out. Thank yous to fans who have sent us stuff tokens. Yeah, anything. For example, a postcard of Raphaele from Ryan Convert. Thank you for that. Nice. That's Easter Island. Okay, jacob Ward sentence yellowstone park shirts, postcards, info, cards, hats. Oh, yeah, because he works there. Yeah, that was a pretty sweet gift. And he gets a discount. Okay. Thanks to Shanti Diva for the postcard of the monkey knots. Casey Herring send us cookies. And they were delicious. Yeah, which cookie? The delicious one. Okay, not this crappy one. We got a wedding invitation from Rachel and John Reed. Oh, yeah. Congratulations. Surprised no one has asked us to officiate. I do that. Oh, man, you just opened the floodgate. Hit safe inventor Tim Freeman, and it's a hitch safe. And that is a little thing that you stick in your trailer. Hitch. If you have a truck, pickup truck. And it's got a little key and it's hollowed out. And you can, like, put your wallet and stuff in there if you go kayaking and lock it up. I didn't see this. Well, because you under pick up. Okay. You get a trailer hitch, buddy. We'll split the hitch. Okay. Happy here? Yeah. Let's see. We got a Christmas card and postcards, plural, from Becca Evans at UCSC. All right. Justin Norman sent us an Ergoesk and iPad holder, and I'm actually using the one for the laptop on my desk. It's quite lovely. And it's handmade wood. And you can find that@woodfold.com. Yeah. That's really a sight to behold. It's amazing. It looks like plastic, right? But it's wood. Yeah. We got a Christmas postcard from Davini B, who for some reason was dressed as Wilford from the TV show Wilfred. So thank you, Davini. Laurie and Leonard sent us some yummy chocolates from Thickets in Marshfield, Wisconsin. Yes, it was lovely. We got a copy of the book Brushing the Teeth of Elvis Monkey, and a nice letter from Nurse Beth, so thank you for that. You know what? I'm going to go ahead and bust through my books here. We got. How, Colin? Why how we do anything means everything by dove Sedman. We got swing colon to search my father Louis Prima nice by Alan Gerstel, science Nearly explained by Dick Maxwell, and that is on Amazon and Kindle. The vampire combat manual from our buddy Roger Ma, who sent us the zombie combat manual. Yeah. And I imagine pretty soon we're going to have a werewolf combat manual. I would hope so. That's Rogers getting Lazy and Truncalus, which is a children's book from Sean, Antoniac and Matthew and Olive. That was sweet. It was like a graphic novel. Yeah. And they sent us some cool stickers from Eight one One Graphics.com. Yeah. So those are my books. Nice. Let's see what else we got. Another postcard from Rapid. New E from Emily B. That rhymes. Wow. Yeah. We got Trifold wallets from Trifold. Trifold from Trifold Wallets. Nice. Man. You should get paid for this. There's a dude named LARC who kind of went all over the place. And he went to Los Cabos, of course, Sammy Harry's Place, seattle, Philadelphia, Calgary, Montreal, Nova Scotia, and kind of took us with him and sent us postcards along the way. So thanks a lot, Larry. Aaron Cooper, thank you for your cool foam core poster versions of some of your best stuff. You should know. Photoshop Jobs. Yes. I love these. It's not the first time they sent those, either. Thanks a lot, Aaron. It's regular coupe. We got a nice Postagram from Michael Store. Carolyn Larson magnetic Skulls. Yeah, those are awesome. The Day of the Dead skulls of her own art, I believe. I think so. I've got her down, too. And I have her website. It is. I believe Carolynlarsonartcom. If I come across it, I'll correct myself. If that's wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's right. Okay, I got one more for now. Okay. And then you pick one more good one. And then we'll pick this up again. Jennifer Dunaway sent us a knitted tree scarf. And this is just a scarf that you go and you pick a tree and you put a little scarf on it. And it's pretty darn cute and makes the city more beautiful. Nice. So thank you, Jennifer Donnelly, for that. And then I got a nice handmade birthday card for me, specifically nice, from Svsk Army member Courtney Hoover. So thanks a lot for that, Courtney. And that's administrative details for this week, part one. As far as this list goes, we've got this for the next six months, and I am right. It is Carolynlarsenart Carolinelarsenr.com. Yeah. Get a treat. Scarf. Yeah, that's what I say. And the skull magnet. All right. Okay, let's see. If you want to tweet to us, you can join us on Twitter at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffychildnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and you can send us a good oldfashioned website visit too stuffyoushouldnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com 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 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. With Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | ||
What will happen when we reach the Singularity? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-will-happen-when-we-reach-the-singularity | Futurists have unnervingly predicted an impending moment in human history: the Singularity, when a superhuman artificial intelligence is created. What will become of humans? Enslavement? Extermination? Utopia? Find out with Josh and Chuck. | Futurists have unnervingly predicted an impending moment in human history: the Singularity, when a superhuman artificial intelligence is created. What will become of humans? Enslavement? Extermination? Utopia? Find out with Josh and Chuck. | Thu, 08 Nov 2012 16:51:24 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=16, tm_min=51, tm_sec=24, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=313, tm_isdst=0) | 37996350 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. What if you were a global energy company with 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. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charles W, Chuck Bryant. That makes this stuff. The podcast scottish? No. Okay. Just weirdness. Joshua. Chuck. I love November. You mean November. I do. All right, Josh. As you know, because of my semi virginal fresh space here, I have decided to get on the movember train for people that don't know that is, for men and I guess women. If you can grow a mustache, more power to you to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer. Yeah. So I've been asked to do this a bunch, and I've never done it. Well, I'm glad you're finally doing it. Tell us all about it, man. Well, I signed up. I've got my little November page, and then you go to that little page and you can donate money for my team of one. Right. Unless you count the mustache as a thing, and then that's two of us. Okay. So hopefully soon that'll be happening and it would be cool. I'm going to grow it back in anyway, so you might as well raise a little money along the way. You shouldn't tell people are going to grow it anyway or they'll contribute more money. No, I'm growing the goatee, but I will only grow the mustache. Got you for November. So how do people contribute to this effort, Josh? Go to Mowbrough cocharlesbryant. And that is my page. Or just go to the Moember website. They got a little handy search bar there. Type in Charles Bryant. There's one other Charles Bryant, but he is not the one with a picture of me. Oh, that's good. So when it lists the two dudes and one of them clearly has a photo of my freshly shaven face not super freshly shaven like that morning. Right via webcam. You look like a hostage of some sort. I do. So go to Mowbrau Cocharlesbryant, donate help, support prostate cancer research, and I'll be updating with Photos. And if you guys want to chime in on what kind of stash I should grow, I'll try my best. Okay. I'm kind of limited to, like, standard crumb catcher and pencil tin. What about Walrus? It just doesn't get that big. I can't do the rally fingers. I have my limits. Have you tried wax? Mustache wax? Maybe I will. That's long enough. So go to Mowbrough cocharlesbryant that's right. And you can donate to this. Yeah. Much appreciated. Movember on with the show. You got a good set up for today? I do. I'd love to hear it. Let's get to it. Sorry. Chuck? Yes? Have you ever heard of a Luddite? I've been called a luddite. Okay. Somebody who's not heard of technology. Yeah. I'm not afraid. You're very technologically savvy. You know stuff. You're not afraid of it? No, but whoever is calling you there's, actually, they're kind of incorrect that's a misconception lotites. Were not ever afraid of technology. I wish I would have known that at the time. Yeah, because you could have been, like, wrong and stupid in every single way. Actually, it was our buddy Scott at Bellido. So I'll just throw it back in his face. I'll tell them, too. I'll stand next to him and be like, yeah, no, Luddite is originally, they were a group of protesters, labor protesters, that protested between 1811 and 1816. And they wanted fair wages, they wanted better treatment in their workplaces and no iPhones. And they were known to break machines, like manufacturing machines on purpose. Yeah. They had sledgehammers that were ironically made by in one case, I think, in Manchester, they were made by the same blacksmith who'd made these knitting machines that they used the sledgehammers to break. His name was Enoch, and they say that Enoch would make these things and Enoch would break these things. Anyway, they were known for smashing machines, which at the time was like high technology, 1811, like a knitting machine. That's mind bogglingly technological. True. And so they got this reputation for being afraid of this technology. They were afraid it was going to take their jobs. That's not true. I mean. They were to an extent. But what they were directing. Their anger in their ire when they were smashing these machines was not the machine or the technology or the people who invented them or what the machines represented. But these mill owners who are misusing these machines. Who are using these machines to force people out of jobs. Who are using unskilled people who had no idea what they were doing and getting hurt and killed using these machines. So what the law they really wanted was fair labor practices. And they wanted to control these machines. Yes. That's the key to ludditeism. Machines are great as long as we're in control of them and we're smart about what we're doing. And they don't come to replace us or run our lives. So today they would probably react fairly close to the modern conception of the term lead height because it's gotten so far out of hand right. That we're actually now talking today about something called the Singularity, which is the point where the machines really do take over. Not in the very ubiquitous way that they already have today, like they're everywhere. Not that you didn't know that already, but I mean, they control things that we don't fully understand. Like the cyber war. We were talking about how the infrastructure is run on windows and valves and pipes and water treatment systems. Everything is operated by computer. Right. So what happens if the computer suddenly becomes aware and it's in control of these things and decides that it doesn't really like the humans? It sounds extremely science fiction. There was no way to carry out this podcast without that sentence being spoken. Sure. But the people who are talking about this, who are predicting this are very smart, credible people. Yeah, true. And what we're talking about then is the Singularity. That's right. The point where the technological engine yeah. Specifically, what other Singularities are they? Well, I think we mentioned there was a Singularity, which is something entirely different, and I think it's probably just to distinguish stuff like that. Okay. I don't know if there are other types of Singularity. So it's a singularity versus the singularity. Yes. So maybe the Singularity is the point of no return. I guess so. Okay, so what's your question? What did you ask me? Is this bad or good? No, I do have a question for you. Do you think it will happen? No, I don't think and this might be my narrow field of view at this point in my life, but I think that mankind will make sure that doesn't happen. Oh, man. I've got a counterargument for you from Werner Vince himself. Oh, no, I've seen the counterarguments. Okay. But that still doesn't change my mind. So you don't think that in the quest to be the top dog. To consolidate power. To consolidate world domination. Some government out there will be like. Well. Yes. We agree with you at the UN that. Yes. We have to prevent this from happening. But our scientists back at home are actually working on this one thing that's probably going to make it happen and we're going to be in charge. Yeah. I think that they would create failsafe, and I think even if they didn't, it wouldn't be so widespread that it would take over humanity counter argument too to that. Okay, if we create failsafes using our brains yes. And the Singularity is by definition, basically the birth, the emergence of an artificial intelligence. Yes. That's smarter than us. A super human artificial intelligence. That's basically what the Singularity represents the creation of. Wouldn't that intelligence be able to be like, oh, that's very funny that you came up with these fail safes. They're so tough for me to get around. I think what my problem is with stuff like this is the assumption that if computers were made smarter than people, that they would try and destroy us all and reign supreme. That's my problem with this all, is it's a very large leap to go from this computer can fix itself and maybe learn to okay, now it decides it hates us all and wants to kill us all. Okay, so I had an idea about this. I watched the video. Did you see the Ray Kurzweil video that he features? Ray Kurzweil, he's talking about the interviewer kept asking him, like, what scares you about the Singularity? What's the downside of the Singularity? He wouldn't fall for it. It's like, I'm an optimist, but I understand that there are going to be downsides or whatever, but if you look at the 20th century, our advances in technology, it was a doubleedged sword. Like, we use that technology to kill millions and millions of people in the 20th century wars, but we also use that technology to advance the lifespan by twice as long as it was before. So it's a double edged sword. And I think that's kind of a glib argument because I feel like he's leaving out a really important fact, and that is that in the 20th century, all of that technology, every single iota of it, good and bad, was deployed by humans. After the Singularity happens, we have another non human actor with motivations that we can't even conceive of at this point. Right? Deploying technology, program motivation. See, that's the argument. But no, that's the thing. Right now, our stuff is constrained by programs after it hits AI. True AI. I think AI plus plus is what it's called. It's no longer constrained by its programming. It's out of our control, literally. And that's the point that I don't think we will reach. Okay, well, then, yeah, I agree with you. But if we do reach that point, then I do fear that we have computers that are thinking the same way that Eugenesis think, except they don't have that empathy or compassion thing that stays in Eugene's hand. Or they do. They're trying to build empathy. I don't know. Okay, we totally jumped to the end of the day. Like, what are we even talking about? So you believe that they're going to destroy humanity at one point? I believe we need Ned Ludd, the fictitious leader of the Luddites, more than ever right now, because I think that there's a lot of very smart people moving in a very fast pace in a direction that I don't think everybody is aware we're going. And there hasn't been a general discussion on whether that's the best thing to do or how to do it. What are the fail safe? Is anyone even talking about that? Like, what are they? How do we get them in place? Because I think there should be an impedance to creating unfettered artificial intelligence. Yeah. Well, here we go then. Okay. Boy, that was a rant. He started yelling at me. Oh, no, I'm not upset with you at all. I hope it didn't come off like that. That's right. I like you, Chucky. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up because Adventure is around the corner and there's a card that's going to get you closer with the City Advantage Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you Advantage miles and loyalty points, and two times Advantage miles at restaurants and gas stations so your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, card members get access to built in travel benefits. For example, your first check bag is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs. And with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 50,000 Advantage Bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on so fast in your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see. And the city advantageplatinum. Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. 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. Comsssk 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. Comsysksk. Squarespace, so we're reveingge is one of the guys that thinks it is going to happen. He's a professor of math at the San Diego State University. Yeah, go Aztecs. And he thinks he wrote an essay called the Coming Technological Singularity how to Survive in the Posthuman Era. And he thinks there are four ways which this could happen. And he also points out that he thinks it will happen before 2030, which I don't think that will happen. And that's coming up. Yeah, it's like right around the corner. I think Chris Wallace is the same thing. He said 2029 is the one he's been citing. Yeah. Well, we'll see. Number one, scientists could develop advancements in AI. It's pretty easy to understand, right. Number two, computer networks might become self aware somehow. That's pretty vague. Well, he was saying in the paper that's Strickland's interpretation. He's saying in the paper, like, it'll probably be a total surprise to the people who are working on this algorithm to make a search engine better or something. And they just tweak it just slightly in such a way that all of a sudden the computer system wakes up, and you just created sentence accidentally in a computer network, and now it's self aware. Right. He's saying that's how that could happen accidentally, basically. Okay, so number three is transhumanism. Basically, computer human interface becomes so advanced that it blurs the line between humans and robots. Right. Which is probably the best case scenario for us if the technological singularity is going to happen, because we'll be on board. Yeah, well, unless the brain part is in the robot. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And they're just operating the body, the human form. But if we're indistinguishable from a robot and a human, like, if we merge so much, then what benefits one? What is it? Centennial man. By centennial, man, I think or pistorius. Remember when we did our DGA speech a couple of years ago? He was big news. Oh, yeah. And then the Olympics, he was big news because did you see him run? Yeah, man, I had not seen him run before. And it is something to see. It's really cool. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. I love the people that were like, it gives him an advantage because blah, blah, blah, and the South Africa came in dead last. No, I mean, I don't think anyone expect him to win, but I just love the snarky counter argument was, then cut off your legs below the knees if it's such an advantage. You want to win, go cut off your legs. Yeah, I forgot we had mentioned him in the transhumanism thing. Yeah, and that's before he was like, really big news as far as the Olympics goes. And then number four, biological science advancements allow us to engineer human intelligence, to physically engineer it. Right. And the first three involve computers. The singularity would be reached by, basically, advancements in computing. The last one is strictly like coming up with this super vitamin that just makes our intelligence superhuman. That would be awesome. The point is that through one of these four proposed ways, at some point werner Vince says 2030. Ray Kurzweil says 2020. 9th hans Morovec says 2050. Maybe. Well, he says that computers will be capable of processing power equal to the human brain okay. But not necessarily AI, which is an essential part of this. We have to understand how to create the human brain under certain circumstances for this to reach. But at some point, all of these things are saying we're going to have on this planet something that doesn't exist right now, and that is a super human intelligence. Whether it's an artificial intelligence, as in the first three, or super human intelligence, that remains to be seen. But the point is, once that happens, all of a sudden there's basically what amounts to a new species that just popped up on the map and it's going to take off like a rocket. Robohumans yeah. And it takes off like a rocket because it's got a rocket built into it. All of this is based sort of on Moore's Law, which is I guess we can go ahead and talk about more gordon Moore. Gordon Moore, it's a great electronics engineer name. Yeah, I guess you're right. In the mid 60s, he's a semiconductor engineer and he proposed what we call Moore's Law now. And that's basically what he was noticing at the time was or I guess we should just say Moore's Law. Is that the idea that technology doubles every 18 months? That's what he settled on, basically every twelve to 24 months. But I think he originally said like 18 months. So yeah, they split the difference and said 18 months. Yes. I think Morris has said it like it was 24 and then 18. And he feels like it's more like twelve now. Right, but it's progressing like exponentially, I guess is the point. Yeah. So anyway, back in the 60s, he noticed that he was building semiconductors and he said, you know what, the components and the prices are falling. But then he noticed instead of just selling stuff for half the price, why don't we just roll that back into making smaller transistors and selling it at the same high price? Yeah, but just getting more bang for your buck. Yeah. Can you imagine if that had never happened? Right. What if the cycle became, no, let's just make it cheaper? I don't know. What kind of differences would that have? We have super cheap, slow technology and maybe everybody just kind of beyond the pot or something like that. Real laid back, but more like, I think part of being a computer scientist, someone else would have come along. Guys, why don't we try and advance? You're doing this wrong. Yeah. Strickland points out, too, that Moore's Law is a self fulfilling prophecy. Because of that, because that mentality that you just mentioned was present. Rather than just selling a half price, let's put twice as much into it. Yeah. Right. And so since that's the drive of the transistor, is it the transistor industry that he was in? Yes. Or the microprocessor industry? That is a self fulfilling prophecy. It's a self fulfilling law because that drive is there to basically meet that deadline. They keep trying to pack more and more in so that they can satisfy Moore's Law. True. And depending on who you ask, like this article is already out of date. In February of this year, 2012 is that where we are? A team of Austrian physicists created a functioning single atom transistor. Really? Single atom, fully controllable. That's zero one nanometers. Right. And a human hair is 180,000 nm. Yeah. And this article even why I think Strickland was talking about intel, has transistors 45 nm wide. Like they're trying to get better. This one is one atom wide, and it's not like on the market or anything close like that, but it is fully functioning and fully controllable. And that is faster than Moore's Law that was supposed to hit us in 2020. And you can't get any smaller. That's as small as it gets, and we've already reached it. Right. And the problem is, what they're running up against is things like quantum tunneling. On the quantum world. When you have an electron and you're using very thin material to direct it. Right. In a transistor. Yeah. Or a capacitor, it does a little magic act. That's what's important. The transistor. Well, yeah. It just suddenly is on one side of this wall that you're using to guide it, and then it's just on the other. It basically makes it outside of your transition, like, Wait, come back. Yeah, but it didn't bore a hole through it. No, it just went through it like it wasn't there now. Exactly. That's called quantum tunneling, which is kind of a problem when you get on this nanoscale because classical mechanics kind of goes out the window and you run into quantum mechanics that has weird stuff like that going on. Yeah. But ironically, that whole size problem that you're running into that runs into quantum problems, it may actually be saved by the quantum world through quantum computing. Moore's Law, I guess that technological progress because we're running into that size problem. But with quantum computing, basically, it uses quantum states, like how you can have superpositions a bunch of different states at once to carry out parallel processes. So where traditional computers carrying out one process, a quantum computer could carry out a million processes. Right. Which makes that computer exponentially faster than anything available today, which could be what shoots us into this artificial intelligence. If quantum computers become viable and widespread, well, that's where they're headed. The one atom transistor. Part of the problem with that one is it's only operable at negative 391 degrees Fahrenheit, which is like liquid nitrogen. Gold. Got you. But they're working on it. That's where that quantum levitation comes from. It's like, really cold. Oh, really? Yeah. That's the only time it works. But it works interesting. Matt told me about that one. So, Josh, let's say you're shooting for true AI. You built yourself a robot. Your robots are great. Cleans up seems to solve problems like Ritchie, richard Butler might even be learning. Who knows? And you want to test it out to see where you're at. I know what you're getting at. What would you do? I would give that thing a Turing Test. A what? A Turing Test. T-O-U-R-I-N-G. No. T-U-R-I-N-G. Named after the father of computing. The chemically castrated homosexual. Excuse me. Yes. Did you know this Alan Turing is a British early proponent of robot science? Right. And he was chemically castrated for being a homosexual. Let's hear it. Okay, so during World War II, he was this ace code breaker for the British government, and he actually cracked the Nazi code. And after the war, they were like, hey, thanks a lot for that old chat. Thanks for helping us win the war. By the way, as you know, homosexuality is outlawed here and will be until, I don't know, 1950s. And so we're going to convict you of homosexual accident, chemically castrate you as things? Wow. Yeah. That'll happen, yes. Okay, so despite this, he still comes up with this thing called a Turing Test named after him, and it involves a blind judge. Not an actually blind judge, but, like a judge. He doesn't know who they're talking to, and the judge is asking the same questions of a person and a computer. It's like Blade Runner, I guess. Remember at the beginning of Blade Runner, he's asking the questions to Leon? And it's not quite the Turing test because he can see Leon. Right. But he's basically trying to suss out if Leon is a replicant. He's asking them questions. They all kind of touch on empathy, it seems like. You see a turtle in the road, it's on its back. Do you flip it back over, or do you smash it, or what do you do? What does Leon say? I don't remember. I think he asked him about his apartment. And he gets annoyed and he kills the guy. Is that what happens? Matt been too long. Matt says, yeah, tinkleyon kills them. But anyway, the Turing Test, if you can't tell the difference between the robot and the person, then the robot passes the test. And supposedly that's a touchstone of reaching true AI. Yeah, if you can fool a human. As far as the singularity goes with AI. I guess that's AI. Then there's AI plus, and then there's AI plus plus, which would just be like a superhuman intelligence, artificial intelligence that's capable of self aware. It's capable of using intuition inferring things like Hans Morovich was pointing out. Like, a third generation robot could learn that if you knocked over that cup of water, water will spill out and you have a mess, and your owner gets mad and powers you down for half an hour. But it would learn that after spilling that water. And maybe more than once. This fourth generation robot or something with true artificial intelligence that could infer. Could look at that cup. See that the top is open. Realize that there's water inside. And without ever having to knock it down. Could infer that if I spilled it. It would spill or if I knocked it over. It would spill the water out. Yeah. And that's Hans Morovic. And he also says you could potentially tie signals to that, like words like good and bad. Yeah. And this is all a program you understand humans are programmed to do this. This is technically all pre singularity, then. Yeah, all this is pre singularity. He's just Morbeck is talking about the one through four generations of robots as he sees it. Yeah, but if you try words like good and bad, the robot adapts, and it's conditioning. It's like rudimentially learning on the outside. It looks like if the owner says, don't do that, that's bad. The robot understands what that means, but what it really knows is it reads body language, and maybe human raises his voice, and that means anger. And like you said, anger means I get shut down or something. Right. And that's not what I want, because I want to destroy you eventually. Exactly. I will remember this. And since we're on Moribc, I guess we should talk about some of his other thoughts on robots. He thinks they're good. He does think they're good. He thinks the second generation, first of all, he thinks right now that they are smarter than insects computers are. Is that right? You think soon enough they will be as smart as, like, a lizard, and after that, they might be as smart as, like, a monkey. And then the fourth step would be humans smart as or smarter than smart. Better than, in some cases with certain applications. Better at math, for sure. Well, they're already better at math. Oh, my God. Calculators. Better at chess, deep blue. So stuff like that's happening on some levels. He thinks the third generation I'm sorry, the second generation will be like the first, but more reliable, so they work out the kinks. The third generation, he thinks, is where it really takes a leap, and that's what you're talking about. Instead of making mistakes over and over to learn, it works out in its head. Right. And then performs the task. Yes. So that's inferring inferring and that's fourth generation. That's third generation. Oh, is it? Yeah. Okay. Wow. We're further along than I thought. That's right. And he thinks also in the third generation, that they could model the world like a world simulator. So essentially, it looks around and is able to take in enough information to suss out a scenario. And if that sounds familiar, that's because that's what you do everyday. Yeah, exactly. And he thinks the biggest two hurdles will be well, the third generation is also where you're going to get your psychological modeling, so trying to simulate empathy and things like that, interact with humans. And then the fourth one, he says, Mary's, the third generation's ability to simulate the world with a reasoning program, like a really powerful reasoning program. But he thinks the two. Biggest hurdles in the end, as far as becoming more than human or as good as human, are the things that we're best at, which is interacting with the physical world on a moment by moment basis. You have to be able to adapt, like, in a split second. Humans can do that. Sure. We learn to over time. Right. So we didn't get eaten by the dinosaur. And the other one is social interaction or empathy. Are you a creationist now? Took in the dinosaur coexisted. Oh, did they not? No, sure they did in my world. And the second one is social interaction. So those are the two things that he says will be the most difficult to achieve. Yeah, I would imagine. And that's empathy. So say we have these things walking around, we have robots like that, and then they are all connected to a network, a wireless network, and they're all running off the same, like, general programs, and somehow one of them becomes self aware, wakes up, as Werner Venge puts it in his singularity article. Yeah. And that algorithm spreads throughout the network all of a sudden. So all of a sudden, all of your robots are awake. That's a pretty terrifying idea, because now, all of a sudden, these robots that were under our control are now under their own control. They've broken loose of their programming again, I think a very scary scenario. But it's also possible that this could happen pre robots. Maybe we won't have robots by this time, and it will just be like networks, like Ascension Network. That's scarier to me. How so? Because you can look at a robot and get scared of it and take a baseball bat to it, but a network just feels like in the ether, like you wouldn't know it's coming or something. Exactly. Yeah. It's embedded. Yeah. Especially with the cloud out there now. So say this kind of thing, like, scared you. What are some failsafe, like you said, or what are some obstacles that you could put up to prevent this from happening? Well, if you wanted to follow Isaac Asimov, you would build in the Three Laws of Robotics. I think we've gone over this before. Even it feels like it the three Laws of Robotics, and one of them sure. A robot may not injure a human or through inaction, allow them to come to harm. That would be a nice thing to build in there. Yeah. Robots must obey orders by humans, except where it contradicts number one. Right. That's a great fail safe. Don't do anything unless I tell you to. But you still got to worry about the supervillain. Of course. And then three. I was kind of serious. Robots must protect its own existence. Which sounds scary, but it cannot conflict with one or two. Right. I think didn't we talk about that in our TV show? Doesn't that come up? Yeah. Okay. Does that sound familiar? Yes. So I would build in. Those are three pretty good fail safes. If you follow Asimov's laws, then you probably wouldn't have a robot getting out of hand. Unless someone, like I said, some bad person built one to intentionally get out of hand. But even I think Vin makes a pretty good point. Even beyond a bad person, like a supervillain getting his hands on something and intentionally making a robot bad, especially like a sentencedient robot bad. We may reach this point through normal everyday competition. That is true. Where many countries all agree to not do this. But there's one or two that are still working on it. And they're not working toward the singularity, but they're working toward computing domination. They want to have the best machines to carry out the processes the fastest and stay viable as like a world leader, that kind of thing. And then AI just kind of happens accidentally, like we said. Maybe so. Man, I could see something like that. I will say this, that if stuff like this happens, I think it will be an accident. And I think it will be after years of selling us this stuff as a convenience. Yeah, that's how they get you in there. They don't say, hey, we're creating a robot that will maybe kill you. We say, we're in planning an RFID chip in your arm that makes it much easier for you to shop. Sure. Or we have figured out how to what is it? Opted genetics, I think. I can't remember what it's called where you take like a jellyfish, light sensitive genes, splice them into another animal's genes so that the cells are light sensitive, photo sensitive. And then you can use basically little light generators directed at specific cells or neurons or whatever to get them to fire precisely to work precisely, perfectly, every time. So all of a sudden you don't have Parkinson's anymore because all of your nerves are functioning 100%. And once we have that in there, who's controlling that? What network is that connected to? Because through that step, we've become transhuman that human computer interfaces become a little more meshed. So living a long time is really great. And we've already expanded human life by what? Double at least, right? Why not do it again and again and again. Yeah. So let's say you got to be 20% non human to get there. That's not too bad, right? You get to be 1000 years old. But the point is, we're already on this path. Technology makes our lives that much easier. So we're on this path where we're basically just messing around with computing to make it better, faster, more humanlike, right? And all we have to do is get to the point where a machine that is capable of reproducing itself becomes sentient and decides that it wants to reproduce itself. And then that machine creates a better machine and so on and so on and so on. And when that happens, evolution will become technological. It will be replicated technologically, and it will happen in this incredibly compressed time, possibly of hours or days. So it gets out of hand before we can do anything about it. It happens like that. And Cayman. Remember that guy? Yes. He's got artificial limbs that attach to your neural wiring. Yeah. So you think pickup cup with hand and your mechanical hand does it. Right. Can you imagine that? Right. It's going on right now. It comes back to that, Chris, while argument, like, yeah, technology is always double edged. Like, there's good and there's bad to it. And you may be absolutely right, but again, I feel like we are going in a direction that a lot of people don't realize we're going in, and there hasn't been any discussion about it. I think there's discussion about it, though. That's where I disagree. In the larger world, I bet you there are conferences and things like this that we don't know about. There are, but I wonder how many of them are. I mean, don't you think if you went to a singularity conference or an AI conference and said, well, hey, maybe we shouldn't be exploring some of these roads, you'd lose your funding? I would imagine. Yeah. I don't ostracize I don't necessarily think they're going to the conferences where they love this stuff. Right. But I think there are people out there talking about it just like they talk about maybe we shouldn't mess with stem cells so much. Sure. But they are not integrated with the people who are actually carrying out this work. It's not coming from within the community. And if it is? No, I don't know for sure. Okay. But I'm not reassured that it is happening, and that's where I think my fears are based. Got you. I'm not against technology. I think technology does improve our lives, but there is such thing as Pandora's box, even if it is metaphorical. Agreed. I think maybe we should close with Nico. Okay. Just two weeks ago, Nico the robot was able to recognize itself in the mirror, and I want to say it was England. And that is a really big deal because that is a hallmark of animal intelligence. Self awareness. Self awareness. A dog walking by a mirror and looking at it and recognizing itself. Nico apparently did that. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. Well, welcome to humanity, Nico. We will be licking your boots in no time. Metallic, foul tasting robotic boots. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up because Adventure is around the corner. And there's a card that's going to get you closer with the city Advantage Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you Advantage miles and loyalty points, and two times Advantage miles at restaurants and gas stations so your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, card members get access to built in travel benefits. For example, your first check bag is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs and with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 50,000 Advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on so fast in your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see. And the city advantage. Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look than Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square Space is everything to sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process, and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on Squarespace. Yeah, don't just take our word for it. Head to Squarespace.com skysk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code SYSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace.com. If you want to learn more about the Singularity, type in what is the Technological Singularity in the search bar athouseofours.com It'll, bring up a John Strickland article. John Strickland from TechStuff? That's right. I'm quite sure they've covered this several times, but we wanted to take our hand at it, so you can check that out, too. The Tech Stuff article or podcast, I'm all over the place. Let's see. I said text stuff, which means it's time for listener mail. Actually, before we do this real quick, I wanted to point out remember Jack Mead? We had an email about poor Jack Mead has caught up the podcast. Feels like he's wandering a drift in the world. We should plug the stuff. You should know, army. We often call all the fans of Stuff You Should Know Me, but there's a subgroup on Facebook that you can look up. S YFK Army. And they are the twisted uber fans who like to discuss things about the show. It's crazy. It's a nice little community, and they're all great people and very supportive, like good folk. So, Jack, go check them out if you're smart. I'm going to call this rebuke for the Star Wars podcast. Oh, man. Remember we had someone from New Jersey right in and say, it won't work. In space, because X, Y and Z this guy, I think, says that it could happen. One of you asked, I wonder what happened if a nuke went off in space. One nuke in space has potential to wipe out the entire coastal United States, is what this guy says. There are a couple of sources I found on the Internet. I only knew about it because of a book series I read called The Great and Terrible Series by Chris Stewart. It's an apocalyptic book giving an idea of what the last days on Earth could be like. In one of the later books, America suffers from a catastrophic terrorist attack in which four nukes were detonated above the US. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-01-27-sysk-prisons.mp3 | SYSK Selects: Prisons - Not as Fun as You'd Think | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-prisons-not-as-fun-as-youd-think | Most people have a basic understanding of how prisons work, but it's often heavily influenced by fiction. What's it really like behind those bars? In this episode, Josh and Chuck reveal the practices, controversies and harsh realities of prison life. | Most people have a basic understanding of how prisons work, but it's often heavily influenced by fiction. What's it really like behind those bars? In this episode, Josh and Chuck reveal the practices, controversies and harsh realities of prison life. | Sat, 27 Jan 2018 11:30:03 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=11, tm_min=30, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=27, tm_isdst=0) | 42762758 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, everybody. Chuck here. Welcome to stuff you should know selects Every week, as you know, we pick out curated episodes that were some of our favorites. And this week I'm going to go with prisons. Colon not as fun as you think. This is from August 12, 2010, and quite frankly, this could have been probably a two part episode. We may follow up at some point, but it's a really good, honest look at prisons in the United States and just sort of the state of things. And it was very eye opening for me and Josh, I remember, and it's got a good title to boot, courtesy of Mr. Josh Clark. So here we go with prisons. Not as fun as you think. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, as if you're surprised. And that makes this stuff you should know. Right, Chuck? Yes, we are here, Josh. And can we talk about prisons now? We can talk about prisons. Remember in the presidential pardons episode, I was talking about how people have been calling for President Obama to reduce to basically issue a blanket pardon for people who are convicted under the mandatory minimums for crack? There's a huge disparity. Right. And I said it was, like five to one, actually. It was, I think, 180 to one disparity. Right. Well, he got that one wrong, didn't he? Well, he did it, like, pretty much as we were recording that. Really? Wow. He signed this law, Congress was passing this law that reduced the mandatory minimum and basically, in effect, overturned the sentences of first time offenders who are convicted and were given these five years and anybody who was convicted under the old mandatory minimum laws. So there's going to be a lot of people coming out of prison looking for crack. Well, that's one argument. Yeah. That's not very fair to say. No, it's not. But isn't that kind of the way that Americans and probably people in general, view prisoners? It's like you did something wrong, so you deserve to be where you are, but just without having any real concept of what prison is like. I know. I don't want to be in prison. No. Have you ever seen the movie An Innocent Man? Remember we talked about that? Yeah. Tom Celec. Very scary scene. That was it for me. I was like, I don't ever want to go to prison, ever. But that's about all I knew about it until we started researching for this very robust podcast on how prison works. Agreed. Yeah. So, Chuck, I guess apparently when this article was written by grabbing Aki, it was, I think, 2005 is. Sure that was the latest stats he had. And he said that there were more than 2 million people in prison. Right. And it's actually decreased. Yeah, I've got 1.6 million at the end of nine. But when I look at the stats, there are all kinds of stats. One in 31 adults is in the correction system, but that includes ill, prison, probation and supervision. So they narrowed that down to only in prison. One and every 100 Americans is in prison. I know. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. Did you see what Fair State topped the list for the most number of adults in prison? That's right. Georgia. Georgia. One in 13 people. One in 13 adults in Georgia is in the correctional system. That's crazy. We live in a state of criminal. Yeah. Either that or like a real police state. One of the two, yeah. I'm not going to comment on that. So, Chuck, we should probably calm down and settle down here. Let's talk about prison. Prison is a deterrent, it's a punishment, and hopefully increasingly it's becoming a place of reform and rehabilitation. We'll talk about that a little bit. Sure. But in the US, there's pretty much three types of security levels for prison, right? Yeah. With one extra little added measure that we'll talk about. It's a big extra, though. Yeah. You got a minimum, you got medium and you've got, of course, everyone's favorite maximum security prison. Right. And minimum security prison, we're mainly going to cover maximum because that's really the most interesting. Sure. Even though I think they said, like, only 25% are in max. Is that right? Well, according to 2005 stats. Right. But minimum is more like a college campus, that kind of thing. It's like that weekend that you did orientation at the college you eventually went to. I would think that's like minimum security prison. Right. And that's definitely nonviolent offenders with pretty clean criminal records. Or maybe you've served time in a medium and you were really good and they're like, let's bump this dude down to maximum or minimum. Right, yeah. Right. Then you've got medium and that's the one that actually you would see most on, like, television shows or something. People think that's maximum, but when you see prisoners able to move around and play cards and stuff like that, that's generally medium from what I understand. Right, yeah. They have like dorm room style accommodations a lot of times with eight or ten guys to a room. Right. And like you said, the little social day rooms where they hang out and trade cigarettes. Like on Oz. Yeah, exactly. Do horrific things to one. We'll get to that too. And then, of course, the granddaddy of them all is the maximum security prison. These are the violent offenders. Guys that have escaped or tried to escape. We're going to say guys a lot. I think less than 10% of the prison population is female, so it's not like we're not trying to give the ladies their due. We know you can do awful things as well, the props to you, but we're going to say dudes a lot. And then there's a subcategory that was pretty rare that came about in 1983 at the maximum security prison in Marion, Illinois, I think not Juliet Marion. Right. Yes. Two guards were murdered in two separate incidents on the same day, and the prison went into lockdown. They call it a bad coincidence. Is that what they called it? That's what I call it. The prison went into lockdown, which is where you're in your cell all day. You can't move around, you can't do anything. You have no freedom of movement. And it remained in that state ever since. So it basically gave birth to the supermax prison. Right. Yeah. And since then, a lot of prisons have been opened as super max prisons. They're in a state of lockdown. And if it sounds a bit familiar, basically the entire prison is a series of solitary confinement. They're the whole. Yeah. They call it officially it's called security Housing Unit and shu, but everyone calls it the whole. Right. Just like in the movies. And as far as prisons go, solitary confinement and then especially supermax, is extremely controversial, right? Oh, yeah. Solitary confinement originally was created in 1830 by a warden at a prison in Pennsylvania with the lofty goal of giving a convict nothing but time to contemplate what he'd done, bad things that he does. I think anything that was supposed in 1830 is a good way to punish people. You might want to review that notion again here. So, yeah, they basically found out that actually, they don't sit around and think about all the bad they've done. They kind of go nuts. And not just kind of go nuts, they go clinically insane, as anybody would. Right. Or they go in sort of insane, and they really go off the deep end. Right. Because prison has also and still remains used to house the mentally ill at times not as much or as overtly as before. But still, you find the insane in prisons. Right. Yeah. The other problem with a supermax facility, besides the fact that it amounts to torture, psychological or otherwise, is these places are reserved for the worst of the worst, supposedly, and in any given state, there's a couple maybe of the worst of the worst. But a super max prison may have a couple of hundred cells. Yeah. You got to fill the cells somehow. So you have relatively minor offenses or convicts going into supermax prisons and killing themselves in really horrible ways. Yeah. This is a big buildup in the think. They said by the end of the decade and 30 different states had a supermax prison. Wow. And you said that each state only has a handful of dudes that even qualify. So, like you said, they get put in there. They kind of go through a zucosis of sorts, like weird behavior. Right. Like the bears walking in circles, except way worse. Way worse. This one guy in Wisconsin, he was a 16 year old car thief. Another guy, 20 year old David tracy hanged himself in a Virginia supermax, and he was 19, and he had been there for two and a half years. For selling drugs? No, he'd been there for a year, and he had a two and a half year sentence, and he still hung himself. He couldn't even make it a year. He killed himself halfway into a two and a half years sentence. Yeah. Because he was immediately put in solitary confinement. And then it gets worse. Apparently, people have been known to swallow razor blades. One guy in Indiana supermax prison choked himself to death with a washcloth. Yeah. And another guy, 21 year old, mentally ill prisoner in that same prison, set himself on fire and later died from those wounds. Yeah. The good news, though, my friend, is that a lot of supermaxes have been downgraded since then. Like, the current trend is to downgrade your supermax to regular max. So they're kind of getting the message a little bit that we really don't need this many super max presidents. Yeah. Apparently, the 90s were bad. Yeah. But there's only one federal supermax. Only one? Which one? ADX in Florence, Colorado. ADX Florence, but as you said, it's mostly on the state level. That's for, like, the really bad tax evaders, I imagine. ADX is not the kind of place you want to take a tour. I wouldn't think so. The single federal supermax is not the kind of place you want to be. So, Chuck, you, buddy, have just been popped, say, growing marijuana indoors. You're going to prison. Let's come to terms with that. There's a couple of ways that you actually get to prison, right? Yeah. And there as follows. You can take a taxi, which apparently is more routine than we would imagine. I had no idea. You can be dropped off by a friend or family member. That's what I would choose. As in, I think, the 25th Hour. That's what Edward Norton did. I have my mom take me drop me off at prison. Right. And you can also take the prison bus. Right? It's called the diesel diesel tour, because a prison bus is not like some luxury Greyhound bus liner. You know how nice those Greyhounds are? Oh, yeah, they're nice. It's not like that. It's kind of cramped and nasty and smelly, and it sounds like a locker room on wheels. Well, not just that. You go take yourself to the sheriff's department yeah. And curse your family member for not being like, really? You couldn't just take me the rest of the way to the prison? Right? So you get to the sheriff's department and you basically just wait there for the prison bus to come pick you up. And then you stop at sheriff's department after sheriff's department. After sheriff's department. Well, that's the insulting part. You're like, all right, can I go to prison? Can I just start this, please? And they're like, well, we got to make six stops in the way. Just hold on. And the bus is going to break down in exactly eight minutes. We're going to go pick up your future boyfriend first. So, Chuck, you finally get to prison, right? Thank God. Those cookies that your mom gave you have been taken away from you. I mean, just immediately. You didn't even get to eat one. They're chowing down on those, the guards are and you have a new moniker. You have a new name, a new catch all name that describes you as a newly inducted prisoner. You're a fish. Yeah. Just like in the movies. A lot of this I thought that's just like in the movies. And it is just like in the movies, because they know a lot about prison. So why would you make a prison movie that was completely unrealistic, right. When you can make the real deal and it's very compelling. Yeah, and we'll talk about movies, too. But yes, you are a fish, Josh. All your stuff is taken and cataloged, hopefully kept. We'll get to that later as well. Some of it might be lost along the way. You are allowed to bring in, like, your reading glasses and maybe a few books. No cookies, though. No cookies. Your legal papers, if you are into that. And so you're processed, right, and you're actually processed often in full view of other cons. And the fish tank. Yeah, they call it the fish tank because all the guys who are already in prison can sit there and watch. Right. But they keep you segregated for about 30 days or more, yes. I had no idea it was that long. I didn't either. They deloused you, they sprayed you at the fire hose, gave you an orange jumpsuit and threw you in there. That's what I imagined. But, yeah. No, for 30 days, you're basically segregated, I imagine, with the other fellows on the diesel tour. And you are assigned a job, most likely. But you're in the fish tank, though. Like, you're on full display, like, for 30 days. Dudes are sizing you up, getting hungry. Well, like in Shawshank, when they took bets on who was going to be the first fish to break down and cry that first night. Who won? It was that fat guy broke down and crying, and he got beat and then bad things happened to him. I always confused that in the Green Mile. I didn't like that one. No. Sean Shank was definitely better, but I often confused scenes. They were shot almost exactly the same. Agreed. So once you get out of your fish tank, you get your cell assignment, you may get your job. Right. And again for about $0.10 an hour. That's what you're paid. Should I read the letter real quick? Sure. There's actually a site on the web called Prison Talk.com. It's not as hot as you would think, but you can go to forums there and read ex cons and maybe even some current cons if you have internet access and like a minimum security talk about things on these prison forms. So I found a letter. I was digging around about jobs, and this one guy said the worst job he had was being a dorm janitor. He got paid forty cents a day. This is not by the hour. Well, forty cents a day, five days a week. There were four dorms, total of about 60 guys in each. Two bathrooms in each? Yeah. You don't want to have a salaried prison job as a convict. I'm not sure if that hit home. 60 guys sharing two bathrooms, and this guy was in charge of cleaning that on a daily basis. I do appreciate you repeating that. So he swept off in, he said he kept the dorm rooms clean. You've never seen a battleground of chaos until you've seen a bathroom after 30 guys take a shower. Mud, dirt, torn tissue, blue state soap. So I guess they get soap assigned to them. I never really thought about that. Sure. So anyway, tobacco, spit in the hangout room, garbage, cigarette butts from roll ups. Basically this dude had to clean that stuff up for forty cents a day. And he said that was the worst job you ever had in prison. And he didn't even mention the fecal matter. Well, I think that's implicit. Oh, well, I just made an explicit check. Yes. So that is one example of a prison job that you can get. And then you're off to your room, which I would encourage everyone now to walk off 8ft by 6ft wherever they are and get a good look at how large that is. And that's about the size of your prison cell. That's close to what we're at right now. Yeah, that's small. It's a little claustrophobic. That's two dudes. I don't need to admit it. Usually well, it depends. Most prison cells are designed for one guy, and then as prisons have grown increasingly overcrowded, they'll go and bolt another bunk to the wall. Right. And then voila, you have a cell for two and then sometimes there's three. Right. Whatever. Usually if it's designed to house more than one or two people, it's a dorm and it can accommodate about eight guys per cell. Right? Yeah. I mean, we could do a whole podcast on overcrowding and the issues there. That's like a very deep problem. But we'll just mention it and say it stinks combat, literally and otherwise. Right? Yeah. So, Chuck, you've got the general population cell blocks, which are all of the cell blocks aside from the fish tank and maximum security, which is also known as the hole. Right? Yeah, basically. Did you watch Oz? A little bit. I think from what I understand, that's really accurate. I'm sure it is. So there's like a centrally located guard in like loose sight or whatever. Like you can't get through this operating all the cell block doors and letting people in and out, and they have a 360 degree view. Right. Well, in each one, I thought, this is interesting. Each wing is fully staffed in case you need to lock down that wing. You've got all the dudes there. You need to take care of it. Right, and it can be sealed off from the rest of the prison. Exactly. Because apparently the riot mob mentality can spread like wildfire among a partisan population. Yes. Yeah. And you would think people try to escape, which, by the way, there's a double check. There's a stuff you missed in history class podcast about Alcatraz and the Great Escape. Oh, really? The Escape from Alcatraz? Yeah. Great movie. So if you want to learn more about that one, you can check that out if you're so inclined. But to make sure that no one has escaped at any given point in time, they do counts about the same time every day. Probably the same time every day. They just do a head count where you have to line up and they say, okay, everybody's here. Right? Then at night, they walk around and count you while you're sleeping, right? Yeah. Not only are you there, but you where you need to be. So if they say, Well, Josh, you're in Chuck cell again, you know where you need to be. So they'll beat you down and take you to your own cell. I'll be like, I need to be here. Don't you hear our podcast? The Chuck is my partner. I wonder what the good fellas that had to be minimum. Or was that just a sweetheart deal? That was a sweetheart deal. Remember when they were all in the same room, like cooking steaks? Yeah. The one guy could slice the garlic so thin it would liquefy in the oil. So great. So, Chuck, let's say you've become acclimated. You're no longer a fish. You've shanked your first guy, and you're settled in for a nickel. Right. Is shank a verb? Yeah, shank is a verb and a noun. And shiv is also another name for a shank. Right. Which is a homemade knife. Yes. Okay, I just want to get that clear. I don't know that it is 100% clear. Well, a shiv and a shank, I know, can both be nouns for the knife, but I've also heard that you can shank someone and you can shove someone. You can I think they're both nouns and verbs. Very loose in prison, hopefully for the same one. They're very understanding. Yes. With the vocabulary. Yes. So you've settled in, and you are living your life in prison behind bars, I would imagine fairly horrible. But there are bright and shining moments, and those basically consist of the trip to the commissary. Right? Yeah. And I didn't know this. You don't see this a lot in movies. All you see is the black market stuff. Right. But there is actually a commissary where you have an account where your little prison money goes into your account. They obviously don't give you cash. That wouldn't be a good idea. And you go to the commission and say, hey, whatever's approved on the list, like a pack of smokes. And People magazine, and they're like, well, that's three and a half dollars. Go work for a month, people from January 2008. Yeah. Woohoo. Sexiest man alive. Mark Harmon. And actually the debit. Each prisoner has an ID card that is linked to basically their prison work account. That's when they pay their debited credits or given credits, and then it's debited from their account when you buy stuff from the commissary. Yeah, I learned about that from Snoop Dogg. Oh, really? So that's the fancy modern prisons have it all electronically hooked up, which makes sense. But like we said, there's also a black market, which you've seen in every prison movie ever. There's dudes trading cigarettes for favors or for protection or for better books or better people magazines or whatever. And there's also visits from out of doors. Yeah, right, sure. That's how you get the bad stuff in a lot of times. Yeah. Again, good fellows. You remember Karen snuck in like, those huge bags of pills? I mean, just like in her purse or in her bra or something. They clearly didn't check her. No. Again, I think that they got special treatment. Right. And Chuck, one of the things that I would imagine goes for a pretty high price, maybe a dozen cigarettes or so, is prison wine, right? Yeah. Which prison wine? Pruneau. Have you ever seen the site where the guy eats nasty things? Steve don't eat it. No. I think it's called it is really funny. And I saw this years ago. This guy made Pruneau prison wine in his house, and it's made with fruits. It's sort of like a sangria type of thing. Then you put like, moldy bread in a sock and it's like soaking all together in a bag till it ferments. And it's, I imagine, pretty disgusting. Steve said it wasn't that bad. He drank it. He did a white and a red. He said the white smelled like rectum, but he said it tasted just like alcohol. And he said the red actually wasn't that bad at all. He was like two buck Chuck. No, he said it tasted wine, like, and got him drunk. Two Buck Chuck. Which is the deal. And so that was the deal with Bruno. Wow. I wouldn't recommend trying this at home, by the way. No, but that's the whole point. I mean, you're not at home, you're in prison, and you want to get drunk, so you make Bruno. Yes. Unless someone wants to. Like you said, with visitation, you can sneak things in if you're on the download. You're really not supposed to do that. Supposed to you get searched. No. Yes. We are talking about visitation as well now. Right. I didn't realize that visiting hours are basically like business hours. Yeah, I didn't know that either. I thought it was like one day a month and everybody came at the same time on the same day. But that makes zero sense. Prisoners are assigned a set number of visits per month, and I think the maximum number of visits you can get per month is for the most exemplary prisoner on the planet. I would imagine that that's something that they take away pretty routinely if you are being disciplined. Yes, josh and you also have to have a list when you go in of who you say can and can't visit you. And if you're not on that list, you can eventually visit. But it's going to take a long time and a lot of paperwork and red tape. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I think you have unlimited visits from investigators, your lawyer, and that's about it. Right. Yeah. But they still keep track of all that and your search coming in. The prisoner and the visitor are both searched coming in and out. Right. I don't know if it's full body cavity. It probably depends on the max level. Sure. Or your crime, I think, kind of follows you around in prison, what you did, what you were convicted of. Like if you were convicted for smuggling things in your butt, they might check you a little more carefully. Sure. And of course now, since we're talking about during visitation, like just regular visitation right. At a minimum security, remember, this is just like college orientation weekend. It looks like a waiting room. And then in maximum security, visitation is like through that bulletproof glass on the phone. It's pretty accurate. And then there's a different kind of visitation that I think everybody likes to think about, at least thinks about whenever they hear prison. And that is conjugal visitation. Right. Yeah. It's one of the two ways that you can have sex in prison. Right. Yeah. This is far more, I guess, more governmentally defended way of having sex in prison. Yeah, I'd say so. Consequently, visits actually were originated in 1918 in Mississippi as a state prison in Mississippi, where they remain in effect. But originally they were created as a reward for hard work on the chain gangs and stuff. Right. Well, and to incentivize them to work harder too. Right. And it worked really well. Nowadays, it's not used quite as overtly as an incentive or reward. It is a reward for good behavior. Or you have to be like the one who can get as many visits a month as one possibly can. Level of good behavior prisoner but it's generally defended in two ways. One is a basic human right, like you have a right to have sex even if you're incarcerated, just like you have a right to food and water and being kept clean. Sure. Right. And then the other way and this appears to be much more legitimate in the eyes of the correction system, it's a way to maintain the family bonds throughout a stint in prison. And that's what it's even officially called as the Extended Family program. So it's not just about sex. Like, you can have your whole family come over and barbecue. Well, in Canada, I think they have their visitation areas look like apartments have barbecues. They're such choices. You can have up to three family members at a time visit, or you can just have your wife, and it has to be your wife, and you have to have been married before, because that's the whole point. They don't want you to turn into even more of a deviant than you were going in. They want you to keep talking to your wife and keep loving your kids, being loved by your kids, and to make that transition back out into the normal world that much easier. Right, right. So if you're one of those serial killers and you have one of those weirdos that write to you and you marry and then you marry them, they can't come and visit you and have sex. Right, right. No. Okay. If you are gay, however, and you have a domestic partner and you are in Mexico City, Brazil, or California, you are entitled to conjugal visits as well, which is pretty significant in California, because in 2007, you could have a conjugal visit if you were gay, but you couldn't get married if you were gay. Thanks to Proposition Eight. But that was just overturned. Yeah. Yesterday. It's not over yet. No, but Proposition eight was overturned yesterday. Yeah. So that's the skinny. And conjugal visits not quite as, again, like Arrested Development, I don't think. Yeah. And they don't use it a whole lot anymore. They say it's pretty uncommon. No, there's only six states. Right. Yeah. But the one thing I thought was funny, though, that one of the rules for the visiting person is the dress appropriately, and they said on the list of rules was no transparent clothing or bare midriffs strapless attire or anything with obscene or offensive language. So your wife can't get all dolled up in her baby doll lingerie. I don't know. I think they're like, can't you just put a trench coat on like everybody else? Have you not seen the movies? Exactly. And I think it's a mixed bag on whether or not experts agree or they agree and disagree, whether or not it actually serves a really good purpose. Well, yeah. In the studies on it have shown mixed results about whether or not it prevents recidivism. Yeah. That's one bonehead word. So, Chuck, you mentioned there's another way to have sex in prison, and this is one of the reasons I don't want to go to prison, because actually, there's two more ways. Yeah. Well, you can have consensual sex with another man if you're in there. Okay, sure. Which doesn't necessarily mean you're homosexual. A lot of guys just there's nothing wrong with that. A lot of guys just. Do that because they're in there. And there is also a rape that happens in prison. That's the reason I don't want to go to prison. Just one reason. In 2007, Josh, we have a statistic from the Bureau of justice says 4.5% of state and federal prisoners reported being raped in the past year, and that is 70,000 prisoners in a year were sexually abused by either guards or other inmates. So that's all over the place, because I've seen other numbers. One 2004 study found that 0.5% even reported being raped while they were incarcerated. And then a lot of those were probably untrue. Well, that's the deal, is reported. That's the key. Like, rape goes unreported a lot. Just period. Sure. But it definitely goes unreported in prison because they don't want to be a snitch. Well, sure, but no, I think these are people who have been let out already. Oh, okay. Yeah. But then in 2003, the year before Congress created the Prison Rape Elimination Act did you know about that? Yeah. And the number they used was 13%. An estimated 13% of prisoners are raped during their incarceration, and their goal is zero. Well, yeah, and they're like you have to have a zero tolerance policy on inmate to inmate rape and guard to inmate or employee to inmate rape. That kind of thing, too, because it's not just inmates raping one another. Guards at correctional facilities have been known to be a little heavy handed and possibly psychotic themselves. Yeah. I can say this because my cousin was a prison guard for a little while, a corrections officer. Cousin Wolf. Was he a high school grad? Well, he had to be, yeah. But you don't have to go to college to be a corrections officer. No, you don't. You just have to know how to shoot a shotgun. But to be the warden, you do. Yes. Okay, josh, let's say you're in prison and you commit an offense or you're caught raping somebody under the new zero tolerance policy. Well, if you're caught raping someone or murdering someone, you would actually go to trial. Okay. For real. But if you're caught doing something a little less offensive, you can go to the hole. They can remove your good behavior time, transfer you to a scarier prison, or, like you said, limit your visiting hours. I'm sure that's a good way to dig back at a prisoner. Sure. So you can't get visits, and you get demerits called shots, and they log those to your little file. Yeah. And they take those into consideration when you're up for a parole hearing or you're up to maybe get more visitations. Anytime they're looking at your behavior, they'll look at the shots, and they follow you around. You don't want any shots. And that's official punishment. There's also unofficial punishment needed out by guards, right? Yeah. I would rather have the official punishment, I think, because just like in the movies, the guards can shake you down. They can, quote, unquote, investigate what you have in your room. What they're really doing is like, destroying the things that you've grown to depend on to keep you sane. I know. Have you ever seen Birdman of Alcatraz? Yeah. It's awful. And they take his birds away. I know. Well, and then escape from Alcatraz, they took away the one guy's paint. The old dude that painted that was like the only thing he loved. And they took away his canvas and his paints. Some jerk warden. It's always a jerk warden. Well, yeah, except Brewbaker. We'll talk about that, too. And guards can also beat you down. And if nobody sees it and no one reports it, then it's just what happens. Well, I think that's officially sanctioned. I don't think that they have to get permission to beat you down, if not permission to say, hey, this guy is getting a little ornery. So I'm going to break a river, too. But what I'm saying is, I think they have a pretty wide berth as to what sanctions the beating and grab. And ASCII put it, I'd like to I'd like to quote them here, it is not uncommon for guards to fire shotguns at prisoners whenever they see any commotion. I didn't understand that one. And I double checked, and it says, at prisoners, not just fire shotguns, like up in the air. So it's just like, hey, you guys are scuffling kaboom. Yeah, I don't know about that one. Yeah, this is indoors. So like we said, snitches are not you don't want to be a snitch in prison. It's very much that mentality that you see in the movies, where, keep it quiet, don't rat on anyone. Because if you do, then who knows what's going to happen? Well, I can tell you what's going to happen. You're likely to be shanked or shaved, which is the same thing, or rate in Shawshank. Yeah. Remember Andy's problem there with the sisters? Yeah, but he got back. That was one of the great redemption scenes of all time. I think that whole movie was great. It sure was. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I was thinking of the Green Mile. Sorry. But the funny thing is, and it's not funny to the guards, but there are way more prisoners than guards. And every once in a while in history, we've had these big uprisings where the prisoners have actually taken control of the prison. Yeah, if you work at a prison, you don't want to hear the word attica sounded out in chant form by one or even more one or two prisoners. Is that what they use now, is the signal? Well, no, I mean, that means that there's violent unrest right around the corner. I thought that was a signal, and I was like, Attica. I don't know if it's a signal. It's more like a call to arms. Got you. And all of a sudden, there's toilet paper on fire. And guys are coming at you, and it's just not good. Yes. That didn't work out too well. No, it was right. And apparently Attica Prison in upstate New York was really deplorable as far as its treatment of the prisoners went, which is really saying something, because they're prisoners to begin with and to have, like, the prisoners even know, like, you can't do this. That's pretty bad. So they took a couple of guards hostage, rioted, held them and demanded for better treatment. And the state of New York was like, okay, all right, we hear you, and we're going to store in the prison. And I think 33 people died. 39? 39. No. Yes. 39 guards and prisoners. Crazy. Died. And that was in 71. And then in 1980, there was one in New Mexico, right? Yeah. The New Mexico State pen near Santa Fe was another uprising, and that was where 33 inmates were killed and no guards were killed, but seven of them were captured and beaten pretty severely. Right. And apparently some of the inmates that were killed died from torture. Oh, really? Just pleasant. I mean, think about it, Chuck. It's bad enough to go to prison, but one of the aspects of prison is that there's an end of your sentence. Right. There's a light at the end of the tunnel if you can make it. Dying in prison is about as bad as it gets, especially dying of torture in prison. Yeah, that's pretty bad. So, Josh, let's say you don't die. Let's say you serve your time and you do get out. What goes on there? Well, you would be like 90% of all prison inmates, 90% get out. Yes. Which is one of the reasons why you want those family bonds in there, because you want to keep people on the up and up rather than prison represents a real double edged sword. Either it reforms people or it makes them worse. And a lot of that depends on how a prisoner is treated and the options given to them in prison. One of the big trends now is education as part of rehabilitation. So I think every single state prison in the US. Offers a GED course, and some of them require it for parole, which is good. Yeah. Right. There's also vocational courses, that kind of thing. Right? Yes. But once again, like in Shawshank, you can take that course and pass the test, but if you have a jerk warden, you still might get shot. You know, we should have done at the beginning of this podcast, we should have just said, everybody go watch Shawshank Redemption. We'll see you next week. Everyone loves that movie. Yes. Can we talk about the movies now? Are we there? Not quite. Okay. Chuck, there's a lot of people out there who don't think that prisoners should just be left to rot, that there should be prison reform, that there shouldn't be any rape, that Congress shouldn't have had to pass the law requiring zero tolerance on prison rape. And there's actually been a prison reform movement going around since, I think, 1790, possibly earlier than that. I don't know why. Clearly it's working if it's still in effect. Yeah. The Quakers are huge on prison reform as well. And again, you want prison reform, you want your prisoners treated in a way where there is the potential for rehabilitation. Sure. Because of recidivism. Right. Well, yeah, that's why they pay them to work these jobs, because they want to give them some semblance of normal life so when they get out, they can say, oh, well, I held a job in prison for the first time in my life. Maybe they were like a drug dealer or what have you. Right. Well, think about it. Recidivism, the highest rate is among property offenses, and that is a crime of the poor breaking into someone's house and stealing their stuff. That's what you do when you're poor. And that's got the highest rate of recidivism. So it would seem like some sort of education or occupational program would help deter that. Well, yes, but the other stat, though, that kind of makes me feel weird, is that I think 67% of people who commit crimes to go back into prison, it's an entirely different crime that they commit. Oh, yeah. That was really discouraging. I would think maybe if the guy just can't not steal TVs, he gets out and steal TVs. You would think so. At least go back to what he knows. But yeah, that's a little staggering. It is. That would shut any quicker up. And what is the rate? I can't get, like, the most recent stat, but it looks like between 50 and 60% somewhere in there from year to year for recidivism rates. Yeah. In 94, it was 67.5, right? Yeah. I think it's gone down since then. Yeah. And that's surprising because the incarceration rates have gone down, too, which is totally bucking a trend. I think they're going down. That's what you said, remember, in 2005, the stats are based on it was 2 million and change. I'm sorry, it was 2,193,000 prisoners in the US. You said it was less than 2 million in 2009. Yes, but I think that's people that are currently incarcerated, but that doesn't necessarily mean more people aren't being incarcerated on a daily basis, because I think that's true. Because of mandatory minimums, I think more people than ever are being incarcerated. So maybe that was people that had left. I don't know. Well, whatever it was, there was a 274% increase between 1982 and 2008. Sure. That's huge. And we spent, I think, $51 billion to incarcerate people in prison. In jail. Whereas I think that comes out to $29,000 per year. And remember our bail podcast? I do. It costs $250 per inmate per year for probation. How much? One $200 rather than $29,000. But these minor offenses, throwing these guys, especially like the car thief. That was in a supermax. That was 16. Oh, yeah. I mean, come on. Nonviolent offenses. You can rehabilitate that kid. Sure. With some work. All right. So, Chuck, I think it is movie time, don't you think so? Yes. Josh movies. I made a list of my favorites. Feel free to chime in. Josh. Ank Redemption. That's number one for me. The Green Mile. That's not how much. What else you got? I've got Escape from Alcatraz because I saw that when I was a kid, and it's like an awesome movie. Papillon classic with Dustin Hoffman with the glasses. Yes. And Steve McQueen. Right. It was in The Great Escape too. Also great prison movie. Cool Hand Luke was probably the funniest one of the lot. The Longest Yard, actually, that might have been the funniest one. Never saw either of them. Really? You're nuts. Bad Boys classic with Will Smith. No, the Sean Penn one about the juvy detention. Sean Penn was, like, 19 years old, and he was in juvenile detention. And then he filled a pillowcase up with soda cans and just annihilated this dude one night. Wow. Yeah. That's called a slock, by the way. No, that's when it's in a sock. Okay. I imagine this is me. It's called a slice. American History X. That was pretty brutal. Yeah, that was very brutal. Brewbaker. Did you see that one? No. That's where Robert Redford went in undercover as a prisoner to sniff out how awful the prison was because he was going to be the next warden. You're talking about the natural. Yeah. And then most depressing, definitely. Midnight Express for me. The Turkish prison one. Yeah. Midnight Run was pretty depressing, really. And Animal Factory is the one I'm going to say is the most realistic. I have not seen that one. That's the one that Steve Bushimi directed and Edward Furlong. And I think William defaults in it. It's really good. And it's called Animal Factory. So you have a pretty good idea that it's realistic. I saw a Taxi to the Dark Side last night, and it's about the US policies on torture and how we implemented them post 911. But there's a lot of prison stuff in it, like abu grave and bagram and stuff like that. It's pretty disturbing. Yeah, we didn't get into I mean, there's so much about prisons that we didn't get into here. We could do, like, three more podcasts if we wanted to, and if it seemed like we danced around something. Oh, I don't know. Capital punishment. Yeah. Didn't go there. That's coming. I can't wait to do that one. It's going to be sweeping. There's going to be top hats and people doing, like, the can and stuff at the beginning. It's going to be enormous. Yeah. I think we have the rockets lined up on that, which we do in prison garbage. Yes. So Chuck's telling me he's giving me the double wink, which means there is no listener mail, right? It's too long and too full of goodness. You know what that means? That means we just haven't gotten any listener mail, so we want to hear from you. Just type some stuff out that we would find interesting. Spank it on the bottom, maybe. Yeah. Talk it first. Sure. And send it to Stuff podcast at How Stuff Workscom. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com." | |
Josh and Chuck's Warm and Cozy Christmas Extravaganza 2013 | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/josh-and-chucks-warm-and-cozy-christmas-extravagan | It's finally here, the best episode of the year! It's time to settle in by a nice fire, wrap up in a blanket, heat up a toddy and gather your loved ones around the mp3 player to hear Chuck and Josh talk about all of the things that make Christmas so merry | It's finally here, the best episode of the year! It's time to settle in by a nice fire, wrap up in a blanket, heat up a toddy and gather your loved ones around the mp3 player to hear Chuck and Josh talk about all of the things that make Christmas so merry | Tue, 24 Dec 2013 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=358, tm_isdst=0) | 43502137 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends. You know, dating is a journey with ups and downs, for sure. But all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? And when you decide it's time to find a meaningful relationship, eharmony is here for you. Eharmony is passionate about creating real love for all. Rooted it in compatibility. Eharmony's process reveals truths about yourself, like, I don't know what you want in a relationship. And it helps you connect with a uniquely compatible partner who is right for you. Don't believe it? See for yourself. So start for free today, because every 14 minutes, someone finds love on Eharmony. Hey, everybody. 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. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast, the very special podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Charles Bryant. Jerry Rowland. And we're here. The gang is all here. Yeah. That was hardy. Yeah, man. This is one of my favorite episodes of the year. This is Halloween. Yeah. Typically, we're recording this one a little early, I feel like, but it's okay. Are you sure we can postpone? No. All right, let's do it. Yeah. I'm excited about this. I think. This is not July. We're in December. Yeah. At least we waited till December. This is a good way to kick off the season for us. Agreed. We have, like, a whole month to just feel great. That's right. That's what this is all about, Chuck. Feeling great. Yeah, that's the Christmas spirit. Feeling great. Drinking hot butter drum. Yeah, man. I'll tell you what, that put me in the mood for it. I've never had one. I haven't either. Well, I am going to this year. I think I will be joining you. I didn't know you actually put butter in a drink. Yes, I just thought it was called that because it was, like, buttery or something. Like a buttery nipple. Yeah, that didn't have butter in it. It sure doesn't. All right, but that's coming up. Yeah, let's not get ahead of our no, we don't want to spoil the hot butterm segment. Yeah, we just wanted to say welcome to the Christmas Extravaganza 2013. That's right. So, Chuck, let's kick it all off. Yeah. You ever heard of a little diddy called Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer? Did he have a very shiny nose? Yes. He did. If you saw it, you might even say it closed. I think that you could probably say that. And people, they'd agree. Yeah, I definitely have heard of this. Okay, then you might not know that that's actually based on a little poem from just a few decades ago. It's not that old. So much of Christmas stuff is very old. Sure. But our friends over at Snopes got to the bottom of the origin story of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. Yeah, well, we helped. We use their material, but they didn't get to the bottom of it. This is a real story that is well known. Okay. It's not like they cracked the case. Merry Christmas, Snopes. Yeah. All right. So, Rudolph, we're being coy. I know all about the story, but the reason I had no idea. Really? Yeah. Okay. I mean, I didn't know all the details, but I knew it was not the version. And this is why we use Snopes, because a lot of people have heard the story that it was written by someone to provide comfort to his daughter as her mother was dying of cancer, and then they sold it to a department store chain and cashed in. That's right. Not true. No. Some of the facts are there. Like, the man's wife was dying of cancer. True. He did run it by his daughter. True. And there was a department store involved. Exactly. But it's just a little off. Yeah. So let's talk about this. There's a man named Robert May, and he worked for a company called Montgomery Ward, chicago, Illinois based department. That's right. And every year, Montgomery Ward used to give out coloring books, christmas themed coloring books to kids. Yeah. They buy them and just give them out as a little promo gimmick. Right. And the head of the copywriting division said, you know what? We could save a lot of money if we just made our own coloring book. But how are we going to do this? What will the story be? Robert May, you're very good at this kind of thing of writing. Couplets for children. Why don't you get to work on this? That's right. And he stamped out a cigarette and threw down his last glass of Scotch, because it was 1939, and he was at work, right. At Montgomery Ward. That's right. And he said, sure, I'll take a stab at this. And he kind of nicked a little bit from the tail of the ugly duckling and nicked a little bit from his own childhood, because apparently he was a bit of a small, shy child on the outskirts, let's say, of the popular crowd, the fringe. And he said, you know what? I think I can use this for a story about a little reindeer who's also on the outside and on the fringe. But what's the name on Chuck? Well, this was I think we should use an illiterate name, is what he thought. Yeah. Reindeer sure. So the first name has to be begin with an R. Rale. No, he tried Rolo. Yeah. And they said, you know what? That's a little too carefree. Then they went with Reginald, and he said, that's a little too British. Yeah. So let's just go full German. Right. With Rudolph. Yeah. In 1939. Why not? Yeah. I thought that was a little odd that he turned down a German name in favor of a British name. In favor of a German name. Yeah. Anyway, I'm sure British friends find it odd, too. That's right. So then he went on and wrote the story and rhyming couplets and did read it to his four year old daughter Barbara, who loved it. I think it's funny that there were four year olds named Barbara back in the day. Such an old lady name. Yeah. And she loved it. And his boss was like, I like it, but this whole red nose thing, is this a drunk reindeer? Because the old gin blossom, I don't know if that's Christmas appropriate. Right. And he said, I don't have a problem with it, but our customers might. And Robert May suspected that it was really the guy's reservations. Yeah. So he grabbed one of his buddies in the copyright department, an artist and illustrator, and took him to the zoo and said, see those deer? Make them cute. And with a red nose. Yeah. I bet you his first reaction to it, like, you got to be kidding me. No one's going to think this reindeer is drunk, you jerk. Right, exactly. So with these drawings in hand, these illustrations of a cute little reindeer with a red nose and a normally red nose, robert May get the sign off to go ahead with this, and he produced this little coloring booklet called Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. And it was an instant success. Yeah. By the end of 1946, they had given out a total of 6 million copies. And then, of course, Licensing started to poke their red nose in there and say, hey, we'd love to license Root Off, because it's a great story. Kids love it. And the creator was like, that's awesome. Except I don't own it because I work for a company, and anything I create is owned by the company. Even though I created it, I'm not going to see any money from it. Right. That must be terrible. Yeah. And so he went along his saddened way and then thought, you know what? Maybe I'm going to, for once in my life, stand up for myself. Yeah. I'm in deep, crushing debt because of the bills that I had to pay to try to keep my wife alive, who died of cancer. It's been seven years of living under this debt. It's just me and my daughter. I created Rudolph. Let me go ask. And he went to the head of Montgomery Ward. Sewell Avery. And in what proves there are Christmas miracles, sue Ovary said, you know what? We're going to sign the copyright over to you. And he did. Yeah. It's remarkable to think that a company would revert rights to a successful thing created by a person. It's awesome, but I can't identify with how that's possible. It was a different day and age, I guess. Right. But I think also, Chuck, we look back at Rudolph and think it's just this cultural icon. Sure. I think in 1946 or 47, it hadn't blown up like that yet. It was still popular. But it wasn't until after Robert May secured the copyright that the song that we now know and love was recorded, yet written by his brother in law. Yeah. Johnny Marks just happened to know how to do that kind of thing. And Johnny Marx actually rewrote a lot of the story, a lot of the details of the story. Same with the 1965 stop motion animation. Yeah. That was the Burl Ives narrated show. It's still one of the greatest Christmas specials ever. So great. And they did take some liberties, though, which I thought this is probably one of the more interesting parts of the story, the original story. The Rudolph wasn't one of Santa's reindeer. No, not at all. He didn't live in North Pole. He wasn't part of that whole clan, and he wasn't a kid of Santa's reindeer. He had nothing to do with them. His parents weren't embarrassed by his abnormality. Now, as a matter of fact, it says in this article that he was raised in a very healthy environment. He had a positive self attitude. Yeah. He wasn't like in the cartoon or in the stop motion, man. He's just like a sad sack because he's such a freak. Right. The original Rudolph was totally fine with himself. Sure. Yeah. And the other big difference is Santa discovers Rudolph by accident. Yeah. He's just delivering gifts on Christmas night and spots Rudolph in his room from the red glow, and it happens to be a foggy night. So he's like, hey, I think I can use this kid to complete my rounds tonight. And he did. And when they got back, Santa had some words for Rudolph in the original poem by you last night's journey was actually bossed, without you, I'm certain we'd all been lost. And the great news is that may live the rest of his life quite successful and even went back to work at Montgomery Ward and seemed like he had a really good life. After that, he didn't have to work anymore, but he loved what he did, so he went back to work. Good for him. Yeah. And that, my friend, is the story of Rudolph the red nose reindeer. Chuck, we mentioned Christmas miracles in the Rudolph part. Yeah. There was something that happened last year in 2012, christmas 2012, that a lot of people said it was a Christmas miracle. At the very least, it was a sweet Christmas thing. There's a little girl named Mia or Maya? I'm not sure. M-I-A yes. And she was seven at the time, and she lived in New York City. And we're going to call her Maya. Okay. No, we're going to call her Mia. Okay. Mia had a dog named Marley yeah. Who was a cavalier King Charles Spaniel, which are very cute, adorable, sweet dogs. Yeah. And Maya. Did I say Maya or Mia? I think you said Maya. I think I said Mia, ultimately. Okay. Mia and her mom were shopping for Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve, and they left Marley tied up outside of the store they were in. And when they came out, he was gone. That's right. And thanks to video surveillance, another Christmas miracle. They saw that this jerk stole the dog. Stole the dog. Did you see the surveillance? Yeah, he picked it up and walked away with it. And it was his. The dog was clearly not happy to be manhandled by this guy. No, but it's like I'm a king. Charles Spaniel. What can I do? That's right. So this sounds like not a Christmas miracle, Josh, but it sounds like the worst Christmas story ever. Yeah. It was Christmas Eve that this happened. The girl said that she couldn't sleep that night. It was just too hard, she said, which is so sad, and she'd lost her best friend. All she wanted for Christmas was her dog back. And she got it. And her two front teeth. Right. She's that kind of kid. Exactly. So she got her dog back, thanks to a very nice lady who, that same day that the dog was stolen, was walking through Union Square, walking her own two dogs, when she noticed a man with a shivering little dog, king Charles Spaniel. And she just thought they didn't go together. The guy was on drugs, and this King Charles spaniel looked like it was too good for him, basically. Well, and it was for sale on Christmas, so she inquired. She inquired after the dog. And the guy said, I've had this dog for years. I just need some money. And I hate to part with it, but I will if you give me some money. Liar. So the lady actually coughed up $220 cash right there on the spot and bought this dog from the guy, which is pretty sweet in and of itself, but she took it a step further. That's right. She took it to the vet. The dog was microchipped, and she got it back to their owner. Yeah. The vet called the family and said, we have your dog on Christmas Day. A Christmas miracle. And within a few minutes, Mia and her mom went and were reunited with Marley. Yes. And the jerk was arrested. Brandon Bacon. Yes. That is a dog stealing Grinch's name if I've ever heard of him. Brandon Bacon. Yeah. And that is the story. Unless you have anything else no. Of the return King Charles Spaniel. On Christmas 2012. 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 homepage and enter code stuff. OK, dude. Now we're to an interesting part of the show where we're going to talk about modern day mall Santas. I grew up with what I think was the best mall Santa of all time. Oh, yeah. That's a pretty weighty statement. The dude at North Dakota Mall in the 1970s, I can't remember his name, was the most realistic looking Santa I've ever seen. Yeah, he was amazing. He was my Santa. And I will try and find some photos to post when we release this of this dude. He was great. I didn't have a Santa. He's departed. Now, were you like friends with this guy's family or something? No, but they did like a big article on him when he died because he was like, oh, he's that good. Yeah, he was known as the best fake Santa in all the land. Yeah. And he looked apart. Really looked like Santa. Not creepy, all natural with the beard and hair, like there was no fakery going on. That is nice. Yeah, he was really great. And that's a job. And you can make some decent money doing it. You certainly can. And you can also cough up a little money trying to get there. Yes. Depending on how much you want to create the illusion that you are Santa himself, you're going to have to spend some dough. A Santa suit, a good one, is going to run you about two grand. The boots themselves are going to be about $800. Yeah. Leather gloves. The white ones, $300. Don't think that hat is free. White leather gloves. Wait, what Santa have you ever seen that wears leather gloves? That's creepy. Really? You've never seen Santa wearing supple white cassickin gloves? Oh, man. We like the little white cotton gloves. Yeah, that's what I've seen too. And that's mainly to prevent germs. I think too, which I didn't know, and it's also to make your hands very visible at all times, from what I understand. Oh, really? Yeah, it's a lot. Oh, yeah. Got you. Where's Santa's hand? It's right here, see? Yeah. Interesting. The white really stands out against the red. Yeah, I never thought about that. I didn't think about it either. I read it elsewhere. Yeah. Interesting. All right, so you've laid down some serious cash. If you want a really good theatrical beard, let's say you like that white one in the corner made out of a yak hair. Yeah. Because if you want a good sand of beard, you have to go to the yaks. It's going to be about a grand to $12,000. Or maybe you can grow your own big beard. It's still going to cost you a little money to keep it, like, perfectly white. Yes. You don't want to see red in there. No, no salt and pepper. No, you want to have a strictly white beard. And that will cost you a little bit of money, too. Yeah. $600. I mean, think about it. It's like hair coloring, right? And you want to go to a good colorist. White is probably the hardest thing to color hair. Yes. And this is all if you just want one of each of these things, you're going to be spending that money. But as a Santa, you need backup wardrobe. Some of these guys have, like, five or six of these outfits. Yeah. Apparently, according to a poll by the Cringle Group, which is basically a trade industry for Santas sure. 20% of mall Santas have five or six whole suits tucked away in case of emergency. Yeah. So that's, like, upwards of 20 grand or more in investment to be a Santa. And they said in the same poll that most Santas have two at least. At least two, sure. Yeah. Because you get peed on at noon. You got to go change so you can get peed on again at three. Yeah. If the Cringle Group does anything, they conduct polls of Santa, and they found that a third of mall Santas have had a child pee on their lap. I would think that happens once a year, at least. Sure. Don't you think? Yeah, I was surprised. It seems a little low to me, too. I thought so. But it's not just pee. There's all sorts of ways that kids spread their germs. Yes. The Cringe Group said 75% of Santa's get sneezed on at least once, and 44% are sneezed on or coughed on up to 15 times a day. 15. I'll bet that's an accurate amount, too, because I'll bet you count every time. Well, it's number 14 today. Well, and there's no parent with a kid that's really sick. They're like, well, we just won't do that this year. The parents like, Nope. Right. We're going happy or not. Get out of bed. The kid also may not only pee on you, cough on you, sneeze on you. He may scream and tear on you. And we actually have a pretty great slide show on our website called 23 Photos of Terrified Little Kids on Santa Claus's Lap if you go to stuffyshadow.com. Yeah, I've got one I need to add to that. I need to find it at my mom's house and scan it. But there is one verified picture of me, classic case, screaming bloody murder on Santa's lap. Yeah, I'd like to see that. It's good. If you want to be a Santa, you might want to go to Santa school. There are many. Not many. There are a handful. But the charles w. Howard school in albion, new York, open in 1937 and it is the harvard of santa schools. It was opened by the guy who played Santa in the Macy's parade for years and years and years. Charles Howard. Yeah. And he did open it in Albion, but it was later on taking over and moved to Midland, Michigan, which is where it is now. Yeah. And it is the most adorable thing you've ever seen in your life. Is it? It really is. Okay. Like the houses on campus, like Santa Village. Yeah. All of the Santa's, they refer to one another as, like, Santa Chuck and Santa Josh. And they all have personalized vanity plates like Ho ho one and things like that. See the gloves? They also learn quite a bit of stuff, like how does Christmas terms in sign language yeah. The history of Christmas, just so you can be acquainted with the real story. History. Santa Claus. Sure. History of St. Nick. Apparently, kids ask Santa how old he is a lot, and St. Nick was born 1700 years ago, so you got to be quick on your feet. Did they say that? I guess some of them do. Others are asked whether reindeer boys or girls. That's something kids always want to know. Is that a boy or a girl? Right. And it turns out the reindeer should all be girls because only female reindeer have antlers around Christmas time. Yeah. And Santa has to describe that to the children. Yes. And Santa learns that at the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School in Midland, Michigan awesome. I saw a story I'm going to dig that up for next year, about these two warring Santa. Where was that? It was two Santas, basically. They were, I think, vying for the presidency of that group you were talking about. The Cringle group. Yeah. And I think it got really ugly. That's terrible. Yes. It was a great story that I read a few years ago. I'm going to find that and save it for next year. Yeah. So what does this all mean in terms of return on your investment? ROI, as I like to say here, that's what Santa cares about. Yeah. Can you get rich playing Santa? Are you asking me? Yeah, I will answer that. No, but you can make a decent enough living, especially if you're just working for two or three months, four months these days, with the Christmas season starting earlier and earlier and earlier. But just for this amount of time that you're kind of putting into it, you can make some sandwiches, make up to 80 more, make somewhere between eight grand and 1220 50 grand. Yeah. And in bigger cities that are nicer malls, you're obviously going to find your better Santas that make the top dollar. If you live out in the middle of Kansas and you have a hay seed mall, you might have kind of a crappy looking Santa that makes like $20 an hour. Yeah. But, hey, you got your Santa, and good for you. They all need to be supported and peed on with equal vigor. Chuck yes. We've now reached the point where we talk about hot butter drum. Yeah. Which is pretty exciting. It is. And it's all as the hills. It is as old as the hills. And this is something that taught me a lot about our history in this country, because I did not know that the United States was a huge rum producer back in the day. Yeah. Up to Prohibition. There's something called Medford rum, which is the pride of New England. Sure. There's a distiller that's like reaching the end of the distillation process as we speak. Yes, I saw that. He's about to release some Medford rum. Yeah. For the first time in a while. Right? Yeah. Well, yeah, it's like, defunct. And it's been defunct, basically been since Prohibition. Yeah. But at one time, it was basically the heart and soul of the colonial economy. And some people make the case that were it not for Medford Rum, the colonists might not have had enough dough to fund the revolution. Wow. Yeah. And I didn't know either. Back in the day, if you went north of New Jersey and New York, that was like the house drink. You went to a pub and it was rum, and it was dark and kind of funky. Apparently, the rum was not the taverns. No. Well, they were probably dark and funky, too. Well, we'll get to that. But it was definitely dark rum. It would get ahead of ourselves, too. Chuck first, let's talk about the difference between a toddy and a swing. One is hot and one's cold. Pretty much. Yeah. When you call your drink a hot toddy, you're using a redundant term. Toddy's hot, but you're not even really describing it. Well, when you're talking about whiskey, a little sugar, lemon and bourbon, that's maybe a bourbon toddy. There's all kinds of toddies. Yeah. And hot butter rum is a kind of toddy. Toddy is the predecessor to the cocktail, and basically it's booze, water and sugar. And if it's hot, it's a toddy. If it's cold, it's a sling. Like a Singapore Sling. Exactly. Let's say. So hot buttered rum is, in fact, a toddy. And it obviously was a hit back then and still today because it was cold. And back then in New England, you didn't have the insulation we have today. And you would want something to warm the belly, something maybe make you a little sleepy so you could fall asleep. And so what better to include in that toddy than a little fat little bit of butter? Yes. They had plenty of cows. They're like, hey, we got these churns, we got this butter laying around. It's really good stuff. I got a bunch of rum, got a bunch of tons of rum. And we have these hot, searing pokers in the fire, which I did not know about until this. That's pretty awesome. And I'd love to make one like that the original way, which we'll get to in a second. They said, let's throw these in a glass and drink it, and it turns out it's delicious and buttery and puts you to sleep with a smile on your face. They have no idea who the first person was to put all of it together, but by the mid 18th century, it was apparently all over New England. Sure. It was pretty much everywhere in the colonies. George Washington loves this stuff. Yeah. And over time, people have decided to kind of make it a little more fruitful than the original version. Sure. So there is a very widespread hot buttered rum recipe that includes basically, like a spice sweet batter where you whip butter together with nutmeg, cinnamon and all that stuff, and some sugar, and you replace the butter with that. Apparently. David Wandrich, who's a cocktail historian over at Esquire magazine, says that if you do something like that in parts of Maine, you'll be labeled a communist. So he's anti batter? Yes, he is. A straight up purist. Right. Okay. But we're going to tell you how to make these things. But first we should talk about the ingredients. Yeah. You want to use unsalted butter. That's a big one. And you want to use good butter, quality butter, not margarine or some shed spread. You want to use like, real butter, real nice, unsalted butter. Yeah. And the more milk fat, the better. And there was a guy who wrote the Gun Club drink book, his name is Charles Brown, and he suggested that in hot butter drum, the butter was there merely to lubricate the mustache. That's pretty funny. The author of the article we read said, no, that's not the case. The butter is an integral part of this drink. So use the best butter you can put your hands on. Yes. It kind of softens the corners, the rough edges of this rum, apparently. Yeah. Some people include cider, an apple cider, in their drink, which can be done. But the Purists point out that's just another drink altogether. Yeah, don't call it a hot buttered rum. No, it's something else. It's a hot cider rum. Right. With butter. So if you are a purist and you want to make an original OG enjoyed by George Washington hot buttered rum, how do you make it? Well, you want to get dark rum. Yeah, that is the key. Good butter is very important, but rum is really important. And you were saying that it was a little dark, a little funky back in the day, and luckily people are still making those kinds of rum today. You want some brown rum? Yeah, apparently. He says the demarera Roams from Guana are really a nice way to go. They sure are. Have you ever had that? Oh, yeah. Is it good? Yes. I'm not a big rum guy. I had a bad experience with it about 18 years ago. Oh, and you never recovered? I haven't really gone near it since. I would though. It's been long enough. The kinds of room that this guy is talking about, like anything from Guiana is like you could drink it neat, it's good. Yeah. I used to work at Mexico Grill in college and not recommending this people because it's not right to drink on the job. But we all drink on the job. Yeah, sure. We drank rum and Cokes, and that was where I drank a lot of my rum. You want one toke over the line there? No, we were good. When you work at a college bar, you'd be drinking while you're right. What was your bad experience then? I don't know. That wasn't from that. That was from Myers Rum in New Jersey. Got you. Yeah, well, Myers will work. It's a dark rum. Yes. You don't have to spend $50 on rum. No. But if you want to hot buttered rum isn't necessarily something you're drinking every night. No. So maybe this year, spring for some decent rum, you'll have it around for a while, it doesn't really go bad. All right, so what's the recipe? The recipe is as follows. Chuck, you want 2oz of good rum, dark rum, you want three to 4oz of hot water, one teaspoon of raw sugar. You know that sugar and the raw stuff? Yeah, that's temerera. Oh, okay. And then you want some really good unsalted butter. Softened? Yes. Then what do you do? Well, there's a couple of ways. If you want to go super old school, you're going to heat up your mug a little bit with some hot water. Just go ahead and get the mug. Nice and chilled or nice and warm? Chilled. You don't want it chilled. You're going to add your rum, sugar and water and about two tablespoons of that butter. That's a lot of butter. Yes. And you want to take a hot poker from the fire and plunge it into your mixture until it starts bubbling. Yeah. Be very careful when doing this. And don't use your, like, fire poker because it's covered in ash. Yeah. I don't understand it. Like, what poker are you going to use? Well, you're rum poker, you would have something strictly for the system. For rum. Yes. But let's get real. That's dangerous. Yeah. This is the modern day. So if you want to make one that's slightly less colonial, meaning it doesn't use a red hot poker to heat everything. Yeah. Get your teeth cuttle on. Pretty much. Yeah. Again, you warm like a heat proof mug with some hot water. And then you dump that out and you pour an ounce of water and some sugar and you stir it to dissolve. Yeah. Boiling water. Right. Sure. After that, you add the rum, the rest of the water, and that butter. Two tablespoons. Man, that's a lot of butter. I know. We can't wait to try this. And on both of them, you want to grate some fresh nutmeg on top. Yeah. And there's your hot buttered rum. If you want to be a communist in Maine and make your batter, basically, you make your spice butter sugar batter, and that's sort of like just your base, and you can scoop that out and add it to each drink. Right. It stands in for the butter. Yes. It's about let's say if you want to make eight servings cup of brown sugar. Man, that's a lot. Eight servings. Are you sure there's not a zero missing? Seriously? One four ounce stick of unsalted butter, softened, one teaspoon of ground cinnamon, one and a half teaspoons of ground nutmeg, and one quarter teaspoon of clove. Mix that all together in a mixing bowl. And supposedly that is eight servings of your batter, but sounds like it could go a little further. Yeah. That'll keep you up. Yeah, maybe some people I've seen use ice cream in their batter. Oh, yeah. I don't know. Even I'm like that's too far. Some might say two tablespoons of butter and a drink is too far. Some may. And I think that's the point this holiday season when you're enjoying a hot buttered rum, if your age is 21 or older, you should adjust it however you like and make it your own so that it gives you a happy holiday season. Awesome. 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. Okay, buddy, it's time to round out the Christmas episode with a reading. And we did this last year. What do we do? The shoemaker or something? Little kids in the shoes. We did some story about some magical shoes that were made overnight. Or something about clothing else. Yeah, I can't remember the name of it. It's a classic Christmas story, as is The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry, who is one of my favorite authors of all time. Yeah, really? Yeah. He makes a great candy bar, too. He does. So now, folks, merry Christmas 2013. A reading from Josh and Chuck. The gift of the match up. $1.87. That was all. And it was in pennies penny saved one in two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man in the butcher until one's cheeks burned with a silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied three times. Della counted at one point, and next day would be Christmas. There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it, which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles with sniffles predominating, while the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second. Take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad. Got to look out for those guys. And the vestibule below was a letter box into which no letter would go and an electric button for which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining TheronTo was a card bearing the name Mr. James Dillingham Young. The Dillingham had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming d. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached a splat above, he was called Jim and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della, which is all very good. Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with a powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out deli at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy gym. At present, she had been saving every penny she could for months. With the result. $20 a week doesn't go too far. Expenses have been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim, her gym. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him, something fine and rare and sterling, something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor being owed by Jim. There was a peer glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a peer glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art. Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within 20 seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length. Now, there are two possessions of the James dillingham young's in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch. That had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Dela's hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the air shaft, della would have let her hair hang out the window someday to dry, just to depreciate her majesty's jewels and gifts. Had king Solomon bid the janitor with all his treasures piled up in the basement, jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck it, his beard from envy. So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again, nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear two splashed on the worn red carpet. On went her old brown jacket, on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkles still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street, where she stopped. The sign read madame sophony hair goods of all kinds. One flight up, Dela ran and collected herself, painting Madame large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the sophony. Will you buy my hair? Asked Della. I buy hair, said Madame. Take your hat off, and let's have a sight. At the looks of it, down rippled the brown cascade. $20, said Madame, lifting the mass with a practiced hand. Give it to me quick, said Della. Oh, and the next 2 hours trip by on rosy wings. Forget the hash metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present. She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain, simple and chased in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meritricious ornamentation as all good things should do, it was even worthy of the watch. As soon as she saw it, she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him, quietness and value. The description applied to both $21 they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the $0.87. With that chain on his watch, jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Granted the watch was he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of the chain. When Della reached home, her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got her curling irons out in light of the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love which is always a tremendous task, dear friends, a mammoth task. Within 40 minutes, her head was covered with tiny, close line curls that made her look wonderfully, like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror, long, carefully and critically. If Jim doesn't kill me, she said to herself before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do? Oh, what could I do? With 180, coffee was made and the frying pan was back on the stove, hot and ready to cook the chops. Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard a step on the stair way down on the first flight and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying a little silent prayer about the simplest, everyday things. And now she whispered, please, God, make them think I'm still pretty. She cut her hair off, right to make money to buy this gift. Okay. Got $20 for it so she looks like Ann hathaway and lemon zoob. Yes, all right, but with curly hair. The door opened, and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious, poor fellow. He was only 22 and about to be burdened with a family. He needed a new overcoat, and he was without gloves. Jim stopped inside the door as immovable as a setter at the scent of a quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. There was no anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror nor any of these sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with the peculiar expression on his face. Della wriggled off the table and went for him. Jim, darling, she cried, don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again. You won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say, merry Christmas, Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice, beautiful, nice gift I've got for you. You've cut off your hair? Asked Jim laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet, even after the hardest mental labor. Cut it off and sold it, said Della. Don't you like me just as well anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I? Jim looked around the room curiously. You say your hair is gone, he said with an air almost of idiocy. You needn't look for it, said Dela. It's sold, I tell you. Sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered, she went on with sudden, serious sweetness, but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim? Out of his trance, Jim seemed quickly to wake. He unfolded his Della for 10 seconds. Let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. $8 a week or a million a year. What is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on. Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table. Don't make any mistake, Dell, he said about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package, you may see why you had me going awhile at first, white fingers nimble tore at the string and paper, and then an ecstatic scream of joy. And then, alas, quick feminine change to hysterical tears and whales, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the Lord of the Flat. For there lay the combs, the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshiped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell with jeweled rims, just the shade to wear. And the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now they were hers. But the dresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone. But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and smile and say, my hair grows so fast, Jim. And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, oh. Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull, precious metal seemed to flash with the reflection of her bright and ardent spirit. Isn't it a dandy gym? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at the time 100 times a day. Now give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on you. Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled. Dell, said he, let's put our Christmas presents away and keep them awhile. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on. The magi, as you know, were wise men, wonderfully wise men who brought gifts to the babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in the last word, to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who give gifts, these two were the wisest. Oh. All who give and receive gifts, such as they, are wisest everywhere. They are wisest. They are the magi. What did you think of that? I think it was one of the great ironic stories of all time. Well, that's all Henry. He's the master of the ironic twist. Yeah, and it's not lame at all. No, he says lamely at the end, but that's one of those words that's a little different. Now he's self deprecating. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, man. How about that combs? He sold the watch, but they got the chops. Yeah, when I was reading that, I was like, chop sounds pretty good. Yeah, it sounds really good. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Merry Christmas, everyone. Merry Christmas for another great year, buddy. And Jerry. Yes. Merry Christmas, Chuck. Merry Christmas, Jerry. Jerry says Merry Christmas too. And to all a good night. To all a good night. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Brought to you by the allnew 2014 Toyota Corolla. 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 Kilgarref 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. 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." | ||
6c867e9e-214b-487f-b1ab-ae6301083b75 | Selects: The Tylenol Murders, Part II | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-the-tylenol-murders-part-ii | The panic that began in Chicago spreads and begins to change the world. The investigation into the murders turns up leads and suspects, but still no one has ever been charged with the murders. It remains unsolved to this day. Find out the extent of what we know in this classic episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | The panic that began in Chicago spreads and begins to change the world. The investigation into the murders turns up leads and suspects, but still no one has ever been charged with the murders. It remains unsolved to this day. Find out the extent of what we know in this classic episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Sat, 26 Mar 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=85, tm_isdst=0) | 44154551 | audio/mpeg | "Hey there, everyone. As promised, it's me again, Josh. And for part two of this week's SYSK Select we talk about Johnson and Johnson's response to one of the biggest PR crises ever to grip an American company. And we meet the suspect and talk about the effects of the senseless tylenol poisonings. Hope you enjoy part two of two of this week's special Twopart Select. 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 guest producer. Josh over there. That's enough with the pleasant trees. Let's get back to it. Chuck. Tylenol murders, part two. Part two. If you did not listen to the first part, in 1982, seven people were murdered by ingesting tylenol tainted with cyanide. All on the same day. All on the same day. America and much of the world is super freaked out. Johnson and Johnson is the manufacturer. And part one of part two has to deal with Johnson and Johnson and how they handled this in a public relations sort of way. Right. Because there were and are a huge company, like you said in the episode one, they held 37% of the market share which was many hundreds of millions of dollars of Tylenol that they're selling every year. And that's in 1980 $2. Right. Which is like Gazillions now. Right. So it was a very big deal for that company. And the way they handled it is taught in colleges and PR classes all over the world as exactly how to handle a big public relations crisis like this. It's literally called a textbook example of how it's done. Yes, correct. They did a good job because as you remember from the last episode, they found out pretty sure early on that this had nothing to do with Johnson and Johnson. Right. Like it wasn't in their factory, wasn't in their supply chain. That it happened almost certainly and that it probably happened by some crazed person taking them out of the store, tainting them maybe in the store, in the parking lot, then putting them back on the shelf. But Johnson Johnson can't come out on the news and say, hey, what in us? Right. Well, at first, though and this gets overlooked and left out of the College of Business courses and the PR courses. At first, Johnson and Johnson was not in favor of a massive recall. Sure, because it looks good in one way but bad in another. And they actually didn't recall anything until Mayor Jane Byrne held her press conference on Friday calling for a recall of the tylenol in Chicago. And Johnson and Johnson did a little face palm and went yes, we're recalling all of the tylenol in Chicago. Yes, what she said. Right. So by Friday, the 31 September is the 31 in September. Was this October 1? I have no idea. I think it was October 1. Anyway, by the Friday two days after the death. Yeah. Johnson and Johnson recalled all of the Tylenol in Chicago, and that should have been enough. To them, that was enough. But this PR crisis was so massive and spread so fast, and as we said earlier, in Part one, became global almost overnight. It was not enough. Yeah. And so Johnson and Johnson, within a week of the deaths, recalled every bottle of extra strength Tylenol in the United States, which is worth about $100 million at the time, took it back to their factories and destroyed it. So they say. Yeah. Both Johnson and Johnson. Right. I wonder if one of them was like, I don't know about this. One of them said, okay, I'll take all the states west of the Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and some Wyoming, and then you take all the other states. That's a part one joke. They even got an award, the Public Relations Society of America, which is a real thing, believe it or not. They awarded them their Silver and Blue Award for how they handle the crisis. The Tylenol poisoning. That's right. Okay. And Highgrade Foods. Remember we talked about the Bad Weiners in the first episode? The ballpark franks that supposedly had razor blades but did not. Right. That still created a public relations crisis for them, even though they were just these little jerks in Detroit. And they won the Golden Anvil, which is one higher than silver, because of how they handle the PR crisis brought about by the copycats of the actual Tylenol crisis, which was, in fact, really brought about by two kids in Detroit. Right. Really? Not even copycats. Not the Tylenol crisis. I wonder where those kids are today. Probably in the Senate. I bet one of them was the guy who did our lighting at our Detroit shower. Smoke. Yeah. Guys, we did a show in Detroit a few years ago, and very famously, we still use that as the standard bearer for a bad crew. Bad. We had a guy that looked like a former Rhodey for Uriah heap that was running like a light show, basically during the middle of our podcast. And, like, smoke came out, we were like, we had to stop the show. Almost like, Dude, what are you doing? Yeah, well, the lighting was so bad that your highlighter had turned, like, brown and you could no longer see the word. And you asked him we had to stop the show. And you had to ask him to use a different color light. And his response, because Yummy was hanging out and our friend Chris Bowman was hanging out in the sound booth with the guy. His response, according to them, was, they want smoke? I'll give him some more smoke. And we got some more smoke. Like a smoke machine. Yeah, man. And people ask us why we haven't been back to Detroit. It's a big reason. It's a big reason. Not the only reason. Okay, so they won the golden anvil for the Weiner PR moves. McNeil Consumer Products, which is a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson. They actually make Tylenol? Yeah, they make the pills again. The way all the supply chain works is really convoluted. And like you said, they didn't want to recall Johnson, Johnson everything at first. They want to kind of take it a little slower, I guess. Well, sure. Because they found out the drugs were actually fine. Right. Thanks to Pinky McFarland. This is $100 million worth of stock that they were kind of feeling the pressure to recall. That's right. So they were kind of reluctant at first, especially if they were convinced that there was nothing wrong with the rest of them. They had no choice. No. That was the only way to do it was to lose a lot of money in favor of future gains. Yes. But even at the time, a lot of people were like, this is it for Tylenol. Sure. The public has lost faith in Tylenol. So when Tylenol recalled 31,000,050 count bottles of extra strength Tylenol and destroyed it all, there was a chance that not only were they losing $100 million, but that they were losing $100 million of a brand that had already lost the public trust and would never regain it. Which wasn't true. No. They didn't necessarily know that it was still up in the air. So it was basically 31 million sacrificial lambs that were killed to show the public this. Tina Tylenol is gone forever. That's right. Your chances of dying from taking extrachen Tylenol are now gone. You can go back to taking Tylenol now. That was one thing, and that was a big gesture, which is what it amounted to. It was a gesture on behalf of Johnson and Johnson. But they did other stuff, too. They started to do things right out of their reluctance. Once they finally said, we have to just go with this to save face and to win back public trust, they started to do things right. Like including, like, setting up a hotline. Sure. Putting out $100,000 reward for information. Jump change. Considering how much they had lost already. 1980 $2. Well, still, jump change it is. Yeah. And that remains unclaimed. It does. But because of all this, johnson and Johnson managed to regain the public trust and actually managed to position itself as a victim in all of this. Like, yes, there were these, which they were seven murder victims, and Johnson and Johnson, I don't think ever tried to push them out of the spotlight. But they also managed to portray themselves as the victim of a mad poisoner who may or may not have something out for them. But either way, their brand was taking a huge hit because of this, and they were a victim and were able to generate public sympathy as part of the road to regaining the public trust. Right. Which is why it's taught in PR classes. So we'll take you back to if you weren't around then, or old enough to be taking OTC pills and pain relievers. OTC is over the counter, by the way. That's right. Okay. You down with OTC? Yeah, you know me. So dumb. I love that you played along, though. I appreciate that. You could have made me feel stupid. We've been partners for eleven years almost now. Yeah. That would be one next month or this month, right? Yeah. Unbelievable. Not in that way. Okay, so here's how it used to happen. If you wanted to take a pill like a Tylenol, you would get your bottle, you would pop it open with your thumb first. It came in a little box. Sure. But the box wasn't even glued shut. No, you would pop it open with your finger, you would take out the cotton in there and you would take your pill. It was that easy. There was no tamper proofing. The cotton was completely superfluous at this time. Yeah. Cotton originally was introduced to keep bear aspirin, like the hard tablet from getting crushed in transport. And since they started using capsules and other stuff and figured out how to strengthen tablets, there was no reason for the cotton any longer, but because consumers expected it. Still, today you'll find cotton in your pills, there's no reason for it to be there, except because the companies know that you want it to be there. You would be weirded out if there wasn't cotton in your pills. I imagine the cotton lobby had something to do with that, too. I'll bet they're not they're not complaining. Big cotton, new fancy OTC bill. Should have MicroModal in there, right? It just comes with a pair of neanderthalsed into your pill pile. That'd be amazing. You're like, these have been warned. So this was a time, it was a very innocent time previous to this, where you could like and you pointed this out. I remember seeing this in grocery stores. I remember seeing mothers and grocery stores opening food products and smelling them. Yes, that's what you could do. And then closing it back and putting it back on the shelf, man. Yeah, there's a little mold in this one. Yeah, I'll just leave it for the next person. Forget poisoning. Like, they could be spitting in this stuff. It was allowed. That's just the way it was. America was innocent enough that that was fine. That's how we lived. And that sets up this Tylenol poisoning. It really shows how much of a jarring experience it was for America, because all of a sudden it's finally sunk in in a couple of days. There's something wrong with the Tylenol. Somebody has gone out of their way to poison the Tylenol in order to randomly kill people. And the reason they were able to do this is because it's easy to get into the Tylenol, to tamper with it, put it back, and no one will be any more the wiser. And wait. It's not just Tylenol. Milk doesn't have anything that keeps it tamper resistant. Neither is orange juice, neither is cereal, neither does cottage cheese. Nothing does. And America ripped out. And this is the reason why this tile and all poisoning is considered widely the first incident of domestic terrorism in the United States. Because it was terrorism, pure and simple. America was terrified. They were petrified not only to take Tylenol or any over the counter medicine, now they were petrified to drink milk or give milk to their kids. Paula Prince, the flight attendant who was the last one to die in Chicago, she had a co worker who said, like, everything looks tainted now. I was afraid to give my kids milk, I was afraid to give my kids cereal. If they could get to the Tylenol, they can poison anything. And that was really emblematic of the attitude, the shock that everybody went through. And as a result, within six weeks, Tylenol said, we got this covered. Yes. And I have a feeling they did this so fast. There had to have been this idea in place already. Yeah, it was. I saw a reference that it was and I imagine it was not done because they're like, well, it's a lot of money and why would we bother? It's not like someone's going to poison the medicine. Right. And then that happened. So within six weeks, they had a box that was actually glued shut. So if your little box had been opened, you would be able to tell yeah. That was part one of three of this tamper resistant packaging, that little plastic seal over the top of the bottle after you open it? No, the plastic is over the cap on the outside of the bottle. Yeah, like the plastic foil. And then the actual foil was over the mouth of the bottle that we all have to poke through now to pull out the cotton and whatever still uses cotton. None of that existed until the beginning of so all three of these are put in place within six weeks. Not only that, they said, you know what, we're going to introduce the capital, which everyone knows now. We didn't have them back then. Everything was a little capsule that you could literally pull apart and you could snort this island all if you wanted to. Sure. I'm quite sure some people did. I'm sure someone did. But the capital is a tablet coated with an easy to swallow gelatin. It's solid. I imagine you could tamper with it. And even I even saw, with all these things in place, they said, nothing is tamper proof. But these measures really went a long way to restore the public well, like the good feelings about what was going on. Yeah. Within about a year, Johnson and Johnson managed to win the public's trust back in Tylenol. That's hard to believe. That was really fast. But it also goes to show, like, just how perfectly they did everything from the time they committed to it on. Yeah, and I feel like I remember, like, commercials with CEOs and stuff addressing the public. He became mistaken. I can't remember his name, but Jimmy Johnson is way far away from that. But he became a public face. He would go on to 60 Minutes and he talked to Dan Rather and Ted Koppel and all those cats. He was out there showing how much the company cared, and it had a huge effect. And then in 1983, Congress got involved. They passed what they dubbed the Tylenol Bill, which basically says, if you do something like this, it's now a federal offense. A few years later, in 1089, the FDA actually established guidelines for all manufacturers of any product, really, to make it tamper proof. Yeah, because it wasn't just the OTC manufacturers that started doing this. They followed suit very quickly once Tylenol came out with it, because they kind of had to if they wanted to keep up with Tylenol. But also, the manufacturers of everything, like every product, every consumer product started putting their products in, like, tamper proof packaging style. Soap started coming, wrapped in cellophane inside the box to trap the chemicals in, I guess. But also to show, like, nobody's injected this with lie or something like that. Although lie is used in the making of soap, isn't it? I remember my fight club. It's pretty funny. Someone injected soap into the soap. All right, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the profile of the supposed mad poisoner right after this. All right. So this was a very big case at the time, obviously. Like we've been saying, it was a landmark case. So of course you're going to get psychological profiles, which we should do one of profiling, actually. Have we done that? I don't think so. It'd be a good one. Yeah, because it always seems like the trope in movies and TV, but it is kind of like that. It is a thing, for sure. It's not like they just make this stuff up. But in the end, they said, this is probably a man in his 20s or 30s who was sort of a Jekyll and Hyde type during the day. He's very ordinary. He could be in the desk cubicle next to you and you wouldn't even know it. Every once in a while, you just hear him go, yeah, exactly. But deep in the recesses of his brain, everyone he's plagued with self doubt and has an illusion that a random killing can boost his sense of self worth. Self worth, which sounds like a straight out of a movie. It sounds like a psychiatrist saying, I want to be on TV. Yeah. Listen to me. They also speculated, and this is just completely like conjecture, was that he had probably already taken his own life after the killings. That was one specific person who said that? Yes, it was, I think, like the medical examiner for Cook County. Yeah, he probably already jumped off the bridge, so don't worry about it. Don't worry, everybody. Yeah, he just threw that out there. I don't know if it was to call people or not, or maybe he's just throwing his two cent in, but I think you kind of said it earlier. I don't remember if it was part one or part two. The whole thing is blurred and become a haze by now. But no one has ever been charged with the Tylenol murders. Yeah, that's the ending. But there were a lot of suspects. Remember Tylenol set up a hotline and this Tylenol task force, 140 person strong task force investigating this, chasing down leads, taking calls on the hotline, thousands and thousands of calls that were coming in. They were trying to whittle those down into actual tips that were worth pursuing. And out of all of them, they deemed 1200 tips or 1200 leads worth checking out. Right. That's a lot of leads for a case, even considering you had 140 people working on. And I read somewhere that they started out with like 20,000 suspects or something like that and whittled it down to $400. Yeah. And sort of the sad part is as quickly as they sort of figured a lot of this out and had that 140 person task force, they almost just as quickly, within a few months, realize that we don't have a very good chance at finding this person. Yes, it became clear very quickly. Yes, they whittled that down. By the last week of October, the task force was down to 40 people. By the end of the year, it was down to 20. And it was a situation again in 1982 where you didn't have security cameras everywhere. You didn't have credit cards and debit cards creating paper trails. It was a lot easier back then to get away with something like this, to be completely unknown, to walk into a store, maybe slip some Tylenol into your pocket, go out to the parking lot and come back in and slip them back on the shelf. It's really easy. You won't even go to the trouble of buying it. Yes, I guess that's a good point. Steal it and then put it back. But people were using cash. If there were cameras in a place, they were probably trained on employees. I worked at a Golden Pantry in college and the only camera we had was directly above us, pointing down at the catch register. It was the one at Alps in Atlanta Highway. Alps? No. Okay. The one on the east side, college Station Road, I think. Okay, yeah. Very interesting job. That's the one where I got a job. I needed a job. I got a job at McDonald's and I showed up, I took the 1 hour training video and they got my uniform number. I went home and I was supposed to show up the next day and I was just like, I can't do it. I can't go work at McDonald's. And I got the golden pantry job later that day. There you go. Which, hey, man, sure. It's like, sign me up from golden arches. The golden pantry. That's like a rags to riches story. I was selling beer and cigarettes. Nice. It was pretty great. You're like, one for you, one for me. Oh, I would never do that. All right, where was I? Oh, yeah, I was a golden pantry. So the cameras trained on the register, you could come and go in a store and no one even knows. In 1982. Right. It's nothing to go on. Most importantly, no motive. That was a big one because remember, this is just a Jackie Lynn Hyde type who you'd never suspect, who is probably at the bottom of the Chicago river right. Who also is engaged in some senseless random killings of people. Anonymous poisoning killings, not even shooting. It just made zero sense whatsoever. So as we said earlier, the cops figured out within about a month, within the first month of the investigation that they were not going to have a break in this case. But that's not to say that they didn't have some suspects. Some people definitely did kind of come to the fore, but not many of them. Yeah, but these two are really interesting sub stories in and of themselves, for sure. The first guy's name was last name Arnold, first name Roger. Roger, that's right. I call him Richard. That's all right. But for good reason. Oh, sure, because you said he was like the Richard Jewel of his day, the olympic bomber who was not the bomber. Right. But whose life was ruined because he basically was implicated as the olympic bomber. Right. Same thing happened to this guy. Yeah, he was one of the first named suspects, 49 year old guy. So put yourself in the position, okay? The media is going berserk on the story. Everybody hears about it. It's a mad anonymous poisoner. And now all of a sudden there's a name and a face associated with it who's a suspect. But he's the first person named. It's like people going crazy, like trying to get to this guy to interview him. Yeah, I have my doubts about this guy. Not that he did that, but there were a lot of hinky things that they found out about him and then how it all ended up, as you're about to see. So he was a DIY chemist, the big one. There's a big thing right there into chemistry. They said he's a Jacqueline Hyde type. He's probably into chemistry. That's right. He was a dockhand at Juul foods at a warehouse west of Chicago. Jewel foods. There are a couple of different jewel foods are where the tylenol was bought. It's like a grocery store, food market. It's all checking out so far, so the cops look into him and go to his house. He has a book, a handbook rather, on methods of killing people. How to Kill People. A to Z. I don't know if that's a title, but it's a good one. He had five unregistered guns. It's a big one. He admitted to having cyanide once. Yeah, but he said, I threw it out, like, at least six months before these murders. He's like, when were the murders again? Six months before that. That's fine. And then his wife said they were investigating her and interviewing her. She was like, you know what? Actually, I did take some Tylenol and felt really sick and threw up one time. But again, it was probably due to overeating and it was just at once. That's the fact of the podcast. So, like, you can't blame cops for saying this guy is a pretty good lead. Yeah, because you can kind of start to see, like, if you add all the other stuff together and then hear about the wife throwing up from Tylenol, be like, could you see this guy toying with his wife, testing it out on her just enough to make her sick, but not to kill her, to see what happened, see if she would notice. Who knows? Right. But the cops thoroughly investigated this guy and cleared them. There's not a person associated with the story that I came across who did. I actually think this guy did it. I didn't find one person who thought Roger Arnold actually did it. But in very short order, he proved that he was more than capable of murder, because six months after he was cleared as a suspect, he was brought in for the murder of somebody else, a guy named Johnisha Stanisha, I would say. Yeah, I'm going with that too, son Slovak or something. Yeah, he was 46. He was a Chicago computer consultant. That's saying something in. Yeah, probably. So here's what happened. Arnold. There was this bar owner named Marty Sinclair who Arnold had thought had initially turned him into the cops and ruined his life, essentially. Yeah. So he goes to kill who he thinks is Marty Sinclair, and it's actually this just completely innocent, random guy who gets shot point blank. And so he, in fact, did kill somebody. He did. Because of what has happened to his life. It was premeditated murder. Even though it was the wrong person. He was definitely created an intentional homicide. He killed somebody on purpose. Mistaken identity killing, though. Right. And because of this, because it was directly related to the Tylenol poisonings, john Stanisha is frequently considered an 8th victim of the Tylenol killing. Kind of like an honorary victim in this case. But it is kind of appropriate that he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A victim of mistaken identity. It would have, like, a slightly different ring to it if it had been the right guy. The fact that it was the wrong guy, and poor dude just happened to be in the wrong bar and happened to look like the owner. It's perfect for this saga. Yeah. I wonder what Marty Sinclair thought about all that. I'll bet he was not very happy. Probably not, but probably also very relieved. And probably also guilt. Yeah. I would guess there's a touch of that. A range of emotions, I would imagine. Yeah. All over the place. So Arnold ended up serving 15 years of a 30 year sentence, was released in 99, and died nine years later. Yes. So, Chuck, before we go on to the main attraction, as far as the suspects go, I propose that we take a break. Agreed. Okay. We'll be right back. All right, Chuck. So this dude there was basically two suspects in this whole case over all these years. There are basically two people, and again, no one was ever actually charged with the murders, but this guy came awfully close, and his name was James Lewis. Or was it? It turns out it was. But James Lewis came under the attention of the Chicago PD and the Tylenol Task Force when a letter showed up at Johnson and Johnson headquarters. And it was from, allegedly, the Tylenol poisoner, the Mad poisoner. And in the letter, it said, basically, like, I've spent $50 so far, and the whole thing has taken me about ten minutes per bottle, and I've already killed seven people. I basically see no reason to stop. Pay me $1 million, and then I will stop the killings. He gave a bank account number. It said, Wire me this money. Very presciently. No, that's not the right word. Stupidly, maybe, but is it? No, it's not. So this letter has a New York Postmark, but the bank account is associated with the travel agency in Chicago. And so the cops go, okay, this seems like it was dropped in our lap, but let's go check it out. And they find the owner of this travel agency that had closed up, had gone under, and this guy is like, oh, my God, you're kidding me. It's like, no, I didn't write this letter, but I can guarantee I can tell you who did. It was a guy named Robert Richardson. Robert Richardson, it turned out, was the husband of a woman named Nancy Richardson who had worked at the travel agency. And when the travel agency went belly up, nancy lost her job and never got her last paycheck. Well, Robert Richardson was the type of guy who would fixate on this and was even more so the type of guy who would write a letter to frame the owner of the travel agency for the Tylenol murderers in retaliation for that last paycheck. He was that kind of dude. Right. And so the cops started sniffing into this Robert Richardson cat, and they figured out pretty quickly that Robert Richardson didn't actually exist, that he was actually. Somebody else. A man named James Lewis. Right. So when we joked earlier about is that his real name? And you said it was. It was. His name was not Robert Richardson, though. That was an alias. So what they found out was that Robert Richardson was a tax consultant. And this is just a strange, ironic twist. When he was 20 years old, he tried to take his own life by swallowing aspirin 36 of them. Yeah. So that's just neither here nor there. But an interesting little side note yeah. The fact that most people don't have that as part of their past. Yeah, it is interesting that it came up. So he had a pretty long rap sheet. He was wanted by postal inspectors for credit card fraud in Kansas City. He was indicted in 1978. And this one is just mind blowing. He's indicted for murder after police found remains of one of his former clients in bags in his attic. And he got let loose because it was an illegal search. But he was caught with the body of one of his clients dismembered in his attic with no good explanation, as far as I've ever heard. Yeah. Well, what explanation would be good? Well, we were playing poker and one thing led to another. Juggling swords. So his wife's real name was Leanne, the one who worked at the travel agency and went unpaid. They fled Kansas City in December of 81, and this was as. US. Postal inspectors were converging on them about this credit card scheme. Right. So they're like, just bad people, not the postal inspectors? No. The Lewis is sure. Great. So they moved to Chicago. They changed their names to Robert Nancy Richardson. He got that job as a tax preparer, but then he was fired after a violent outburst in his office against his coworkers, and then she lost her job when unpaid, they left Chicago. And this turns out this is what got them exonerated from the tylenol. Thing is, they left Chicago and moved to New York before this happened, right before the same month. Right. But if the theory held up that this person went around, most likely in one day and did all this stuff, then it couldn't have been them. No. And here's why. Because the cops had decided that it was done locally. And one of the other things that supported that local mad poisoner theory was because the cyanide ate through the gelatin capsules eventually. So I had a very short shelf life before the whole bottle just turned into a mush of cyanide powder and melted gelatin. So, like you said, it had to have been done basically the day before the 29th, on the 28th. They could not, no matter how hard they tried, they could not put James Lewis or his wife in Chicago that day. Right. They just couldn't. And for his part, James Lewis said, yeah, I wrote this letter. I wrote the letter to Johnson and Johnson framing that travel agency guy, but I did not poison the Tylenol. He was always been adamant about that. He's never toyed around with it. He's never messed around. He's never been coy. He's always been adamant that he did not poison that Tylenol. Although the Tylenol Task Force tried to trip him up once, I guess, to just get this on the record that he done this, but they asked him, like, in an interview, okay, let's say you had done it. How would you have done it? And he actually pulled an OJ. He showed them how he would have done it. Right? Yeah. He just didn't write a book about it. He just showed him in an interview. Yeah. And he defends this later on by saying it was just a speculative scenario. I could tell you how Julius Caesar was killed, but that doesn't mean I was the killer. Right. I think the answer for me would have been, I don't know, man. Yeah, I'm innocent. I can't figure this out. But he was like, here's how I do it. I've been waiting for you to ask me that. He's eventually found in New York City, he's at the public library with a reference book, copying names and addresses of newspapers, I would imagine, to send them letters, like, Zodiac style. Yeah. Because we got to say this. So the cops figured out who James Lewis was before they found James Lewis, and it became part of the national media circus. It was a manhunt. While they were looking for James Lewis, this guy was writing letters to newspapers. He called in a radio talk show. Oh, yeah. He was really relishing the fact that there was a national manhunt out for him who like, that's what I'm saying. On the one hand, you got to kind of feel a little bit bad that this guy was kind of being railroaded into the rap for these murders after his extortion attempt. That's where the feeling bad for him. You're like, oh, yeah, that's right. He totally brought this on himself. Yeah. So they held him out of the New York Public Library. He was sentenced to ten years for extortion attempt and ten years for the original credit card fraud and served 13 years and lives in the greater Boston area today. So still today, I think there are a few people who are like, I could see this guy. Maybe he could be it. Some detectives maintain that the Tylenol murder could have flown into O'Hare, rented a car, done that circuit, were driven back to O'Hare, and flown out all in the same day, the day before. But they could never put James Lewis in Chicago at all that day. Right. So he was cleared finally, although he did serve two consecutive ten year sentences, reserved 13 of the 20 years for that credit card fraud that the postal inspectors wanted him for and for the extortion letter. And like you said, he lives in Cambridge, Mass now. But then in 2009, the case, after basically having gone dormant in the early 80s, was reignited by the FBI because they worked up, they thought, a DNA profile from the capsules and they rated James Lewis's house demanded a fingerprint and DNA sample. James and Leanne Lewis fought it in court. The judge was like, no, you have to do this before leaving the courthouse. They gave him the samples and nothing has come of it. So I guess that means, Tacitly, that the Lewis's were cleared once and for all of the Tylenol murders. Yeah. And the DNA thing is an interesting piece because they still have some samples of the cyanide, I guess that the capsules have worn away by now, if it had the cyanide in there. But there was and still is hope that DNA could crack this case just like eight or nine years ago. The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Is that a two parter? No, no, just a one partner. Good podcast, though. I don't think so. That was a good episode. Sure. He grew up in Chicago and his parents were living in the greater Chicago area in 82 and he is the uni bomber. So they said, we might as well get a DNA sample and talk to him. And he was cleared. I don't think he was ever a super strong suspect. Yeah. And he probably would have admitted it. So he was like, no, this is not me. Right, so the uni bomber has been cleared. That's right. From the Tylenolmers. But the case remains unsolved to this day. I think they also have a fingerprint work up that they found on one of the bottles and that and some DNA. They're just sitting around with that. There are no suspects. Every suspect has been cleared and there's nobody on the horizon and it's just an unsolved random series of killings that happened. Yeah. They're still working on it, though. There's a police sergeant named Scott Winkelman who has been on this task force for a long time and he says he thinks it's solvable and his department did just solve a 45 year old murder case. Cold case, man. If they solve this one, that would be, I know, the biggest cold case ever solved. Who knows? But I could see maybe finding like, a deathbed letter or something one day. Maybe like, I don't know if they're going to catch someone at the bottom of the Chicago River and haul them off to jail, but I could see the truth coming out one day. I hope so for the families, because Monica Janice, she's the niece of Adam, Stanley and Teresa, she said her family to this day. This is from an article, like last year, I think, said that they have still not gotten over it. She said her grandparents have passed now, but she said literally every day for the rest of their lives, they just cried about the fact that they didn't know who did it. She grew up and has been a therapy her whole life because they were all victims. That this post traumatic stress disorder kicks in. Sure. Where she grew up, fearing that any of her family members could die at any time. Joseph Manus, her dad says that he still has dreams, like on the reg about these murders. He said he had one recently where everyone involved was in a room in the case and then two black men in suits and glasses were laughing about how they got away with murder. Michelle Rosen. She's the daughter of Mary Reiner. Right. She has dedicated her life to investigating this on her own. And she doesn't agree with the loan, the Mad Poisoner theory at all? No. This is interesting. Yeah. She thinks it had something to do with the supply chain and that Johnson and Johnson knew this and covered it up. One of the things one of the things that people who believe this point to is that Johnson and Johnson recalled all of that Tylenol, 31 million bottles, and then destroyed them, allegedly without testing any of it. So we will never know whether it was pinky had the day off. Right. Whether it was beyond Chicago or just local to Chicago. Seems like it took long enough that other people would have died in that week before the national recall was undertaken. But there was something very interesting that was a post script to all this that does undermine that Mad Poisoner theory. Yeah. It was just a few years later, in 1985, a woman in New York named Diane Ellsworth took two extra strength Tylenol capsules and died from cyanide poisoning. But they found it's just completely unrelated. Was it another copycat case? Well, or the original poisoner? Maybe a different cyanide. Right. The cyanide was definitely not the same size from the same batch. It was chemically different. But there was another bottle found around the block from where Mary Elle's Roth bought hers and yonkers that did match that cyanide. So there were two bottles of extra strength Tylenol two years later in another state that had been tampered with. The problem is, this is after the three prong tamper resistant packaging had been introduced, which means it was an inside job. Right. I guess because the thing had not been obviously tampered with. Then Tyler was never able to explain what happened. Yeah. And then within five days of her death, eight states outright banned to capsules Tylenol capsules. Right. And Tylenol, for its part, was like, we've been trying to get everybody to take caplets anyway, but they keep taking capsules, so we're making it. And then a guy wrote a book. Right. Scott Bartz. Yeah. A former Johnson Johnson employee wrote in 2011 a self published book on the title Poisonings. And he said what we were talking about earlier, he's like, this supply chain is so convoluted, basically, it definitely could have happened at any point along the way. And his idea is that Johnson and Johnson knew that it was in their distribution network and they covered it up. Self published book. Yeah. You got to note that for sure. I'm not knocking it. No, but it's noteworthy. It does. If there's, like, any hint of journalistic integrity in us that feels like we have to note that. Sure. So that's the Tylenol poisonings of 1982 in Chicago changed America. Changed the world, but definitely changed America. It was the end of some form of innocence that we still had. Absolutely. If you want to know more about the Tylenol poisonings, go online. There's stuff all over the place, and you can go down that rabbit hole and it's deep and wide. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail. This is from Jim from Brunswick, Maine. Hey, guys. I've been listening for several years and never thought I'd have a never thought a perfect time to write in would be related to synthetic farts. Remember the discussed episode we talked about synthetic farts? It's a real thing. When I was in high school, my dad came across this stuff online called Liquid Ass. That's horrible. Not allowed to curse, right? No. I can spell it out, though. Sure. Or I guess maybe you should have said, like, a asterisk. Asterisk. Yeah. There you go. Good name for a product, though. She said he found it on a joke website and ordered some. And I have to tell you, it is the worst thing you have ever smelled. I can't even describe it. It makes you want to not breathe anymore. The tiniest little drop is deadly. So of course, I took it to college with me to play pranks, and boy, did it backfire. I thought it was pretty funny putting a couple of drops in the radiator by across the hall friend's room and not even thinking about what would happen when the heat turned on. Well, the heat turned on and the whole floor of the dorm was amazingly disgusting and made us just about gag. Smell. Took almost a week to finally go away and have not used it again in the ten years since. Probably it's called Learning Your Lesson, but she still has the bottle. She's like, but I kept it, right? Just in case. Thank you for your interesting and entertaining podcasts. This is the first podcast I ever listened to, and it's still always on the top of my download list. Thanks for giving this 28 year old woman a platform on which to tell a story of synthetic farts that is not completely out of place. Signed anonymous. That is Jen Green. Thanks, Jen Green. Very brave. You'd put your name on that one especially. I wonder if you stepped up and said, that horrible smell. That was my bad, right? If you have a great story about college pranks, we want to hear about it. You can get in touch with us via our social links by going to Stuffychano.com, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. 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." | |
How LEGOs Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-legos-work | Most people are familiar with the plastic, interconnecting bricks called LEGO bricks, but what's their story? In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the history, popularity and trajectory of LEGOS -- and throw out some serious stats along the way. | Most people are familiar with the plastic, interconnecting bricks called LEGO bricks, but what's their story? In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the history, popularity and trajectory of LEGOS -- and throw out some serious stats along the way. | Tue, 04 May 2010 21:38:01 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=21, tm_min=38, tm_sec=1, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=124, tm_isdst=0) | 35562123 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's, charles dennis of you. Chuck Bryant with his hair looking mighty fine today. Is it good hair day? Yeah. Oh, it's a great hair day. Thanks, man. Yeah, you're doing great. You're feeling good? You full of energy and happy? Full my hair is happy. Yeah, I can tell. Yeah. Chuck. Josh. Hey, man, before we get started, we should plug Facebook, Twitter and your mom's cooking. My mom's cooking is great. Facebook. You can find us at Stuff You Should Know in the search bar. And we're personally interacting now. It's not a ghost writer. It's not a net bot. No. And you'll be able to tell because it's clearly our silly invoices. Yeah. And Chuck started the trend that solved a big problem of saying, hey, Chuck here because our profile picture is the album art for our podcast. I don't want people to get what we're saying confused. No, me neither. My words are my words. I don't want them to be like, I didn't know Josh was an old crotchety man. It's a young jerk. I didn't know Chuck was in a fight club. So that's Facebook, and we already had a page, but we consolidated them. If you were a fan of the old page, they ain't around anymore. No. Join the new one will. Yeah, let's get with it. And Twitter we are tweeting at syskpodcast is the name of our account and should be funny and fun, and I'm trying to follow Coco's lead. Oh, yeah. Well, I was anti Twitter until I saw Kono. Brian I think I told you that. And they're funny. And I thought, you know what? I could do that. Yeah, well, of course you can. You're Chuck Bryant. 140 characters. I can do that. Yeah, it's \u00a3160. I don't know. I will figure it out. All right. When it cuts me off in the middle of a sentence. All right. So we're done with Plugfest 2010, right? I think so. Okay. Chuck. Josh. Mr. Jake. Dylan hall. He's finally arrived. Donny Darko himself. Yeah. Much to his chagrin, he was not a member of the cast of the Fine, Fine picture Hot Tub Time Machine. Right. But he was cast in the starring role for Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time or something. Right, yeah, I saw the trailer for that the other day. As a result, Mr. Jillian hall will now have his own Lego minifigure. Well, and as a result, he's very buff now. Yes, he is. He got all jacked up for the role as the Prince of Persia. Yeah, but again, what we're focusing on here is the Lego minifigure. But is the minifig buff? It has stubble. Okay. Something of a resemblance to him, which is actually kind of a new trend among Legos. Oh, really? To look like the thing or to just be branded like that? Well, both. They started branding or working with licensed brands with Star Wars. And they were like, oh, we don't know. This kind of goes against our corporate philosophy, letting kids use their imagination. And all of a sudden, sales went through the roof and they were like, yeah, okay, so this is the way we put it. Now we let kids imaginations run wild with the added element of storytelling. So which is cool for the Lego Group, is what they're called, from what I understand is a pretty great company, to tell you the truth. And we should say, this is in no way our Chuck and I. Wilson Brimley Esque compensated endorsers. Yeah. When we do a brand name like this, don't think that we're showing because we just have chosen some of these iconic brands to cover. Because I think it's interesting. It's part of pop culture. It's part of who we are. And people seem to dig it. Yeah. So anyway, now we're not getting rich off of Legos, unfortunately. So to answer your question, they started doing the licensing branding set like Star Wars 1998. I think that was their first big hit. Indiana Jones is another big hit. Harry Potter, obviously. Sure. But it wasn't until they started until they released a Lego basketball set. They started messing with skin tone. Up until that point, if you had a Lego character, even if it was based on somebody, it was yellow. Sure. And for a while there, they were asexual. Right. They were neither male nor female. Right. In 1974, when they released the first figures, they had a neutral facial expression. They were genderless and raceless. Right. Kind of boring, but in a kind of a back handed nod to women. The female character was the first gender specific character introduced wait for it. As a nurse. Really? Yeah. For their hospital playset. Right. Because there's no such thing as male nurses. No. Right. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Well, that was better than at least they made her a working woman. And they didn't say the first one is Betty homemaker. Right. Or a homeless person. Yeah, that was a bad too. Sure. Let's start at the beginning. We got plenty of this is a stat heavy extravaganza. Yeah. Chuck's all excited. That's why your hair looks so good. Standing up in excitement. Legos, josh, like you said, the Lego Group, they employ about 5000 people. They got about 150 designers of 18 nationalities on their team. And they began way back in 1932. And I love this guy's name. I do too. Old Kirk Christensen. Yeah. And his first name is O-L-E. But we've decided to refer to him as Ole Kirk Christensen. Yes, Ole Kirk Christensen. Do you remember when we went to Tamberg and we found out one of their vice presidents name was Odd Johnny? We're like, this is the most punk rock telecommunications firm we've ever actually a very common name in Norwegian countries. Wait, let me just double check my facts. Is Denmark a Norwegian country? Yeah. We got that wrong with the Netherlands. And we heard about it. Yeah, we did. It's a podcast. Correction, we don't usually do that. So old kurt Christensen? Yes. He comes up with from Denmark. Yeah, from Billand, Denmark, which is where the corporate headquarters still are. The first Lego land is still there. That's right, yeah. He at first, Josh made things out of wood, wooden toys and things like that, little ladders. And he did so until 1960, when the warehouse burned, was destroyed in the fire. And I thought it was then that he said, it would have been a much better story if you would have said, oh, I need to work with plastic now. Plastic is inflammable. Yeah, because he started working with plastic long before that. In, I think, 1947. He plastic, not coincidentally, that's the year that his son took over. Yeah. And his son started saying, we need to monitor the plastics. It's the wave of the future. And they started tinkering around with Legos, right. Well, yeah. The first one, first thing they made in 1949 was the automated binding brick. And that was kind of like the first modern Lego brick, but it didn't have the tubes. We'll get to the construction in a minute. But it didn't have the tubes. A little interior tube, so things weren't as stable. So it was sort of like just the beta version. Right, but what was it? Yes, that's when they came up with the current design. It's called Stud and Tube Coupling System, which, like you said, we'll describe in a second. But the cool thing about it is it hasn't changed since then. If you have a brick that was made in 1958 and you go buy a set today, they'll work together. That is, I think, one of the cooler facts of this whole thing. I got one for you. What's that? The term Lego is actually an abbreviation of two Danish words, right? Leg and goat, which put together means play well, so he combined the two into Lego. What old Kurt Christensen didn't know was that Lego in Latin actually means I put together. Really? He had no idea. And I bet people think that's why he named it. That's not true. Look at you, Josh. Look at you. So, like I said was when they kind of finished the design of the modern brick and the rest is history in the they started introducing other facets to the Lego besides just the brick. For instance, the Lego technique. Technique, but not technique. It's really technique. You know what I'm saying? I'm reading between the lines. It hit the market in 77 and Mindstorms Robots made their debut in 98, and that was actually a collaboration with MIT, the technology media lab there. Yeah. In the or something. No. Late nineties, I think. They got together with MIT starting in like 84, maybe. It took that long. Yeah, I could see that. And also their designers, you would think that all of their designers have art school backgrounds or some sort of engineering design backgrounds. I would think. That not necessarily true, my friend. Well, most of their designers do have that. The company says that all designers are hired based on their hands on work and a face to face interview. Really? And you don't necessarily have to have an art background if you are a natural Lego place at designer, that's what you are. Cool. Yeah. That means you and I could go and try and do that. Let's give it a shot. We may have to. You never know. So, Chuck, over the years, you just spanned a few decades? Yeah, sure. Legos were named Toy of the 20th Century by Fortune magazine in 2000. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah. Good for them. I did, too. Did you have Legos? Oh, yeah, of course I didn't. What? No. You know what's funny is I noticed that they are only sold in 130 countries. I did a little background check, chuck right. It's not unequal access to sanitary drinking water that keeps underdeveloped countries underdeveloped. Turns out it's lack of an access to Legos. Is that what it is? Yeah. Well, they teach you how to build and construct things and play together. It's all your all thumbs today, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I was into Lincoln Logs, and because I was born in the 1930s, log cabins were how we had to do things. Back in your day? Back in my day. And then I had an Erector Set, which was pretty awesome. Yeah, I never got into erector set. Yeah, that was fun. I was kind of into it. I was like, look at all those gears and police. What is this? Yeah, and Hot Wheels. I just want to snapbox together Hot Wheel model cars. I was way into model cars. Did you? I'll bet you were. Yeah, I would get them and I would then destroy them at some point later on with Firecrackers and stuff. We're not recommending that you do that. No, we're not. It's very dangerous. So I was saying, you spanned several decades when you gave those stats. And in the meantime, people have come up with some pretty cool uses of Legos, have done some pretty cool things with them. If you go onto YouTube, yes, there is a thriller done in Legos, all 14 minutes, shot for shot. And it was clearly done in an old 16 millimeter camera. And it hasn't made the jump to digital all that well. But still, it's pretty impressive. Yeah. There's some Star Wars stuff on there I've seen. Definitely recreated. Definitely. Did you know there's a Boba Fett lego character? I didn't know that. But dude and Chewbacca. Well, there should be. Those are icons. Yeah. In, I think, 2008, lego and Kellogg's combined shared the blindingly obvious danger Award from Consumers International. Really? For producing the Lego Fun Snacks, which are gummy, fruit chews that look exactly like Lego blocks. Yeah. That's like the bag of glass from the old charity hat line, right? Yeah. Or the Super Happy Fun ball. Yeah. And so, of course, those were discontinued in 2008. Yeah. That's not a very good idea. And there was a guy out there who's actually in the article, and there's a cool picture of it in the article who created a life size replica of Han Solo frozen in carbonite. Yeah, I got info on that guy. Do you really? Yeah. He's a real artist. Yeah, he is. You can tell. Yeah. We'll get to him later, too, though. Okay. And then lastly, Chuck MC escher relativity. Yeah. You know, the steps going different. He did it in Legos. Really? It is amazing. That's impressive to me. Yeah. MCs. Sure. What? Oh, come on. Hands. Strong hands, please. You disappoint me today, Chuck. Sorry. That's all right. I'm just over it. How many times can I see that Stair thing? What? Each time you gaze upon it, you're still like Riveted, aren't you? Do you know the incredibly disordered or highly ordered brain structure requires to see things in that kind of perspective? It's amazing. It's not I'm not saying he's a dummy. I'm just tired of looking at it. Okay. I think we should talk about how Lego bricks are made. It's a good idea. Josh. They start out with plastic granules as little plastic. Yeah. What kind of plastic it is? Acra loni trial, butadine styrene or ABS? We'll call it ABS. And ABS comes to the factory. Well, we'll call it factory. It's a manufacturing facility in droves. I have 14 silos that these things are vacuumed into the silos. And all in all, a factory has close to a million pounds of this granulated plastic. Right. And all the plastic is already dyed, so they've got 52 different colors. Yeah, they don't need to worry about all that. You wouldn't want to have to color it there, too. No. I wonder where that's made initially interesting. I don't know, but I did a little background check, and ABS is actually a very safe plastic. It doesn't contain phthalates or bisphenols. Well, yeah, because kids, despite everything you tell them, are probably going to put a Lego in their mouth at one point or not, whether it's a Lego or a Lego fruit shoe. Right. I could see that meeting now. I sort of see it like, well, it's really unsafe to eat these, but they want to eat them, so let's just give them one they can eat. Right. And then after, they're like, oh, can Jerry put in a sound effective of somebody slapping their own forehead? So what happens from here, buddy, is they take these granules and they use a process called injection molding. Oh, this is machinery. Pretty much, of course. And they melt the stuff down 450 deg. Yes. They're not made by hand. Is that a surprise? At 450 degrees? Right, 450 deg. It melts the plastic, it injects it into the molds and applies between 25 and 150 tons of pressure. Right. And the cool thing is the dyes that they use to the injection molds that they use, the machining process is so precise, the most it's off is 0.2 mm, which is relatively insignificant for the kind of coupling system that Legos use. But first, let's talk about robots. I thought you're good about to drop the knowledge there on that. Okay, let's do it. You're talking about the interference fit? Yeah, that's what it's called, Josh. A tube that sticks I'm sorry, the stud sticks into the tube, but it's slightly bigger, which is key because that means it presses it apart and allows it to stay together using friction. Right. The key to this, Chuck, is you don't need any kind of fastener. It's all friction, it's all resistance. Yeah. And that was that change in design that they achieved in 1958, before it lacked the tubes. I think so the things would fall apart pretty easy. Now it's like once the Lego is stuck, brother, it's stuck. Well, until you take it apart. Exactly. But I mean, think of how many pounds of pressure you have to use to overcome that friction fit. Yeah, that's true. It's a lot like at least two. That's true. So, where were we? Pressure. They apply all that pressure, makes it into the little mold, takes only 7 seconds, then they spit it out. Cool. It goes into a conveyor, into a bin, goes from a bin into the packaging. We can get specific there, but it's not the most interesting thing in the world. I think the cool thing is they have robots that weigh the packages. Yeah, that is kind of cool. The reason when you get a Lego set, you get different bags. Right. Because these designers have said we need X number of these blocks and X number of these blocks, and they put them in different bags so that you can just throw these prescribed assortment of bags in a box. And there's your place at right. Yes. And then they have robots that weigh the bags before packaging to make sure they weigh the precise amount. Pretty cool. And if they don't, that's when humans come in. Yeah, humans come in and do a little QA along with machines. Machines perform the drop torque, tension, compression, bite and impact tests. And humans the bite test is my favorite. Yeah. Humans use a little beaker, I guess the size of a child's epiglottis may be to make sure that a piece can't choke a kid to death. Right. Because that's a really important step in this whole process. Definitely. And the bite test and one of my favorite stats, Josh, is out of every million Lego pieces made, only about 18 fail these tests. That is zero, zero two. No. Yes. Zero. Two. I see four zeros. Yeah, you said three. No, you said 3002. Nice. And the castle walls are counterclockwise. And just like you said, Josh, takes place in Bill and Denmark. But they moved a lot of their manufacturing to the Czech Republic because they were kind of losing money there and laying people off. And after the mid ninety s. And so they had to make a little cheaper. And I guess labor, whatever is cheaper over there in Czech Republic must be. I guess so that's why it's there now. So, check. They're making 37,000 Lego sets every hour. Sets, not bricks. Right. And I believe I saw a statistic that every 7 seconds another Lego set is sold. Yeah, we have some of those fun stats. We'll save the end. Sorry for jumping ahead. No, that's okay. So, Josh, let's say you wanted to build a Lego project, but not a little tiny thing to put in your pocket. A pocket model. If you want to build something kind of big and cool, okay. The first thing you need to do is well, it depends what kind of guy you are. I'm the kind of guy who just dives in and starts building. But that's why I'm not an architect or a builder. What you should do is plan it out a little bit and decide how large you want it. Because then that will tell you how many bricks you need, how long it's going to take, and that determines your scale. And from there you can just kind of move on and be creative. You could sketch it out if you want, if you're into that. Or you could use computer software. You can it's pretty awesome. Actually. There's three different types of software, as far as I know. There's Lego Digital Designer, and that's actually available for use for free on the website. Pretty cool. You can either download it or I believe you can go to LEGO.com and use it. There's also L Draw, which is basically a type of CAD computer aided design software. Right. And then there is bricksmith. That's it. On bricksmith. And people use these to do things like, oh, I don't know, create the Statue of Liberty with a lightsaber. Yes, that's a fun one. Or a scale replica of the Brooklyn Bridge or Yankee Stadium. Yes. Lego Land. I have pictures of that, actually. I'll show you. The thing I thought was cool is when Tracy for this article interviewed the one guy that you're talking about, Nathan sawaya it's sort of like real architecture and real building techniques. Like, you should stagger your bricks for a wall because it's sturdier and you can put four hollow things. You can put interior columns, and it sort of follows the same rules of standard architecture, which I thought was kind of neat. Right. And this isn't lost on Legos. They've recently released the Lego architecture series. Did you check these out? No. Dude, they have a couple so far. They have the Guggenheim. Okay. Okay. My favorite, they have fallen water. Very nice. Yeah, it's pretty sweet. And they have some iconic landmarks. I think the Space Needle is one of them. Right. But it looks pretty slick. What if I was like Frank Lloyd Wright? I'd come across this table, I see square houses, please. Yeah. And we've been trying to figure out how to do a Frank Lloyd Wright podcast. I'd say pretty far into the research process to do it. And I figured out, like, we can't do this. It's just too visual, us sitting around describing falling water. Somebody should slap us in the face. Yeah. It basically just be like, it's so awesome. No, really, it's awesome. And there's a river that runs underneath it. It's awesome. Yeah. I'm done now. Okay. If you're interested, there is a book called the Unofficial Lego Builders Guide from Allen Bedford and a publication online called Brick Journal. And you can get, like, tips on building big things there. Right. Because if you never tried, either you're a genius and you're innately able to do so, or you're going to fail miserably. Well, one guy who was interviewed for the article, who did the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster yeah. As part of his whole town, he was building out of no, it wasn't. I think it's like Chris Doyle. Yeah, Chris Doyle. He said he just starts he has a rough idea of what he wants to do, but he just goes to town, basically. See, that's what I would do. Yeah, it can be done. Yes. But mine probably wouldn't succeed. And then if you are into robotics, electronics, that kind of stuff, you can use Legos, too. Yeah. They've got new robot versions of, like, microprocessors and motors and gears. There's a guy who used Lego to create an automatic book scanner. Wow. I know. Especially if you love books and you love Legos, then booyah. There's also a CD launcher that somebody made using Legos. I saw that. That was pretty awesome, too. And then one of the other cool things I saw combines Legos with domino's. It's a mechanical and automated domino stacker. Legos. Yeah, that's the important part. Yeah, I was trying to picture that. I got it now. I'm like, no, it's playmobil, but it has water running underneath it. It's so awesome. So I mentioned Nathan. Sowiea he is one of the pre eminent Lego artists out of New York, of course. And he has a traveling exhibit called The Art of the Brick and a website, too. And he tourists to real museums. And the dude has got some serious talent. I mean, look at that. He did sorry. Night. Wow. Mosaic. Wow. He did the Iwojima statue. Yeah. Oh, he did this one. That one's the favorite one I ran across, and we should probably describe it. Yeah. It is a yellow man looking upward, and he's tearing apart his chest and inside his chest, he's full of Legos that are spilling out, and he's made of Lego. We keep leaving that part of all of this is made of Legos. Okay, all right. And then there's this other dude, Sean Kenny, and he is New York based, too. And I get the feeling that they kind of battle a little bit for supreme dominance. Well, New York Lego supremacy at least got you because both of their websites say our studio has more than 1.5 million Legos. Both of them have 1.5 million Legos. But, I mean, I could have 1.5 million Legos and do nothing with them and slap a website together. It's what you do with the Legos, not how many you own. Well, let me show you what Sean has done. He's done work for companies like Google and Nintendo and JPMorgan and Samsung, and he's been featured on, I mean, everything. You name it, he's been featured. Has he been featured on Jimmy Kimmel? No, but look at this. He did a Yankee stadium. Check that out. Wow. And I hate the Yankees. I was going to say, if I like the Yankees, I'd be really impressed. And he's a pretty talented guy, too. And he is a member of what are called the certified Professionals. And I think there's eleven of them now that Lego is actually certified, these people's professional artists or whatever. Yes. I got the impression that as he became better and better, he stopped paying for Legos along the way. And this is like, Ring, ring. I need more Legos now. Yeah, I would think so. I need green. And old Kirk Christensen is like, okay, all right, old Kirk. Should we go over some of these fun facts? Yeah, Lego fun facts. Aren't all facts associated with Lego fun? Yeah, I think so. Okay. I like this all around the world stuff, though, because every company has one of these. Wait, first, have you been on LEGO.com recently? Did you go on for this? Yeah, it was pretty awesome. Isn't it cool, like, all the little movies associated with each one? Yes. I haven't been to Legoland. Have you ever been? There? No. One of the theme parks that they actually sold, you had a Merlin Entertainment or something like that to Merlin Olsen. Yeah, his ghost made a deal with old Kirk Christensen. He just passed away recently, didn't he? Yes, he did. Very sad. Yeah. They sold those because they became unprofitable, so they kind of restructured and moved some things around. Now they're in the red, in the black and the black. Fun facts, Josh. Here we go. More than 400 million children and adults will play with Legos this year. Yes, and I don't know what year they said that was, but it's probably every year I saw the 2009 Investor Catalog or Perspective, I guess, and it said that same stat, you can put all your money in Lego. I'm going to put a substantial amount of it. They're actually privately owned. I don't think that's possible. If you built a column, Josh, of 40 billion Lego bricks, it would reach the moon. 40 billion. Had to count those zeros. I've got one. Go ahead. Lego is the largest tire manufacturer in the world. Yeah, little teeny tires. Pretty cool stats. How many do they make a year? Oh, I don't know. Do you have that stat? Yeah, I do. 306,000,000. That's what I got, too. Somebody else is in the 2009 investor perspective. On average, Josh, this is the one. This is my favorite one. There are 62 Lego bricks for every single person on Earth. Yeah, I like that one, too. Wow. 4 billion hour. That's the amount of 5 billion. 5 billion hour. That's how much people will spend playing with Legos in a year? On average, yes. Not one person. Not per person. But I mean, combine everybody playing with Lego. Right. You had a fun fact. I'm out of fun fact. I mean, there were more, but I've got one for you. Let's hear it. Remember we talked about I'm fascinated with the minifigures. Yeah. The minifigs, as they call them if you're in the know, if you're one of the eleven certified artists. Right. We talked about how they were originally gender neutral, race neutral. They were also emotion neutral, too. And it wasn't until 1989, when Lego released their oil, started releasing their pirate set, that they realized, hey, man, we might need some facial expressions on these people. And they came up with a good figure and a bad figure and an eye patched figure. What was the difference? I think scowl and smile to differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys. And from that point on, they started having facial expressions. Wow. Well, good for them. And I think I have one other yes. That was Fisher Price. We should do a podcast on Fisher Price. That was my bag. I was way into that. I liked playmobil, but I did love Legos as well. Yeah. And then chuck the minifigs. Yes. 4 billion of them on the planet. There's only 6.5 billion people. 4 billion on the planet, technically makes them the largest population group in the world. Isn't that cute? Because they're so tiny. So cute. And I think that's it, buddy. I think so. I mean, there's a lot more. We didn't cover all of it. No, there is something else. Hold the presses. You were talking about selling Legoland. They did this huge restructuring in, I think, 2004 because they peaked in 1998 with their Star Wars set. Sure. And after that they actually started losing money. And you said they were back in the black. Part of it is because of their selling Lego land, restructuring the company. But one of the reasons actually, probably the main reason why Legos took such a hit was because of Megablocks no electronics. Oh, well, I thought their patent ran out. Too. That's something to do with it. That was definitely part of it. But they think that Legos are having trouble competing with MP3 players or video games and all that, so Lego remains optimistic. Buddy, I have a little tidbit of nice Danish optimism in broken English for you, courtesy of the Lego Group. Are you ready? Yes. I quote, but the Lego Group is in no doubt that the Lego brick will continue in future to be relevant to children of all ages, period. A world of imagination and total absorption. Period. That sounds like they literally said that in their native language and then just typed it into apple fishing. Well, you know, they have my nephew Noah plays with the PlayStation game. They have an Indiana Jones Lego game. So they're trying to get a piece of that market, too. I think they got a good piece of it. They have a Star Wars game, too. I think they have more than the trilogy in Lego. Yeah, they'll be around. They're fine. I think so. Yeah. So that's it, man. If you want to see really? Honestly, I know we say this every time, like, go read the article on the site sometimes we've covered the article, gone beyond the article. This is not one of those cases. If you want to see just a series of super cool Lego pictures, a Lego brick field guide, complete with precise measurements, and just a bunch of other information that we didn't even touch on. Type how Lego bricks work, because technically, there isn't a word called Legos. It's Lego bricks. But, hey, we named ours. How Legos work? Right. Type how Lego Bricks Works in the handy search bar@households.com, and it will yield that article. Right? Indeed. Listen or mail? Not quite. Oh, okay. I wanted to give a little shout out. I had met a couple of fans this weekend. Finally. It never happens. What about the Henry Clay people? Well, yeah, but I mean sure, you're right. Okay, I'm going to plug their album. Actually, it's coming out in June. They got a new album coming out, but I'll wait on that plug. Okay. Interest. Jerry and I over the weekend went to a play of sorts. I think it's so cute you two are dating. We're not dating. Called Looking Glass alice based on Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. And Doug and Lindsay are in the show. Lindsay is Alice, and actually, there's only five people in the show, so literally one whatever percentage of the cast that is, one fifth are fans of the show. Jerry and I went with Emily with my wife and met up with them afterward in the green room, which was really green, and they were super cool. And we're going to take them out for barbecue while they're here and just wanted to thank them. Or are they still here? Yeah, it's like a six week run. Where are you going for barbecue? Well, I was going to say, like, Daddy DS, but that's my friend little dingy. Yeah, but it's really great barbecue. Daddy D is listening. Your barbecue rock. Sure. I would recommend that. Or Fox Brothers. Well, Fox Brothers is a little more the kind of place you would want to take someone from out of town. Yeah, but they're kind of into fat maths. We want to go to Fat Mats. Okay. You know, that made an appearance in up in the Air. Yes, indeed. Yeah. Okay, well, that's it for the Atlanta barbecue scene, right? And I also wanted to shout out to Emily had a craft show last weekend, and one of her fellow crafters, her name was Julie. Oh, wait, is it Julia now? I feel like a jerk. Just either Julie or Julie. Julia. She was really nice. And what she does, she has bought some of these, and I've seen other people that do this now, and I'm mentioning it because it's just so cool. Those old printing presses from the 1008 hundreds. She has several. She has resurrected these things, and they're huge. And she does like, real printing on cards. There's no computers involved. It's just those dagnavic computers. I know, but they showed pictures of her in front of this huge machine, and you crank it with your foot and it turns all these gears and yeah, it's very steampunk. But she has a website called Redbirdinc.com, and I don't know, I think you should support people that, like, resurrect. She said machines have been used in, like, 70 years when she got a hold of them. Anyway, people used to have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to use those machines to print. All right, Josh, this is a listener mail in honor of Mother's Day. This should come out sometime near Mother's Day. Well, hold on. We haven't even laid a part where we can do the music. Chuck, is it time now for listener mail? Yes. Josh setting Jerry up. So, like I said, hopefully this will come out sometime around Mother's Day because it's from Nora. Signed Nora. A mama from Missouri. Okay. Hello, fellas. While driving my oldest son to start his freshman year of college this fall, I was trying to be cool. She put cool in quotes and ignore all the mommy emotions bubbling up, so she's getting sad. Thank you for translating. Yeah. For the hour and a half drive, my son brought out his radio ipod gizmo and entertained his brother and me with your podcast, starting with the one on the Pomp schemes. Nice. You know how to say it. Clearly, we were totally involved, thought provoked, and sparked a great conversation for two. After handling the separation without too much embarrassment and upon arriving home, I decided to go for a run to help shake off my mommy blues. The inspiration came to look up the podcast and load something on the ipod gizmo thingy. While running and listening, I handed that part. While running and listening, I was struck by the whole circle of my baby teaching me a trick or two as he heads off into the world. Now I get warm fuzzies each time I head out for a run and choose my topic. That is so cute, isn't it? And I look forward to running more than I have for a while. So extra bonus. Now my youngest son looks for podcasts he wants to listen to with us on car trips. She's really excited about that. Yeah, we're bringing the intergenerational gap together. She says. Hooray for more family time with the teenagers. Who knew every time you encourage emails at the end of podcast, I think about sharing our little story. The kids would roll their eyes if they knew I wrote in, but they love what you do, too, and we hope you keep up the good work. And, Nora, mommy from Missouri, I hope your kids in college rolling his eyes at you right now. Yeah, that's what we have. But there's a tear coming down from his eye as well. Touching. If he wasn't homesick before, he is now, believe me. Well, if you work out or run or do any physical exertion while you listen to Chuck and me, we want a sample of your sweat. Put it in an email and send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Want more housesstuffworks? Check out our blog on thehouseworkworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you." | ||
02d4f052-3b0e-11eb-947e-bb8b654cf267 | POGs: The 90s in a Bottle Cap | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/pogs-the-90s-in-a-bottle-cap | Today, Chuck and Josh go down a 90s rabbit hole with another in their classic toy series. This time, they tackle the odd sensation that was POGs. | Today, Chuck and Josh go down a 90s rabbit hole with another in their classic toy series. This time, they tackle the odd sensation that was POGs. | Thu, 10 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=161, tm_isdst=0) | 46928120 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there. And Jerry's lingering somewhere out there. And this is stuff you should know. It's Pogs. That's right. This has a theme so good actually I think it's a little more extreme and in your face than that. Yeah. You know who is a big POG enthusiast is friend of the show Jesse Thorn of the Maximum Fun Network. I did not know that. I've heard him talk about it. He's the right age for that wheelhouse and I've heard him talk about it on Judge John Hodgman and with great enthusiasm I'm always like what are Pogs? I've never even heard of these because I'm an old yeah, I mean I'd heard the word before but I had no idea what really they were, what you did with them or anything like that. So a little before your time too then? Yeah, a lot after my time. I mean you had to basically be 1011, maybe twelve in the early 90s. I'll give you 13 between 1992 and 1994, maybe five. Very specific niche window. But these things were so big that it's just like if you were kidding the 90s kind of thing you played Pogs, everybody was playing with Pogs for two years and it was kind of like the definition of a flash in the pan fad. Yeah. And we should thank Houseofworks.com Mental Fllasfirstweathiest.com that was a good article. It was pretty good. And then military.com for our little cherry on top at the end. That's great. We'd like to thank the military industrial complex for the cherry on top as a whole. So you're a child of 70s, I'm a child of the 80s. We had our own thing but again, this is a thing of the with Pogs. I'm trying to think of a fad that was like big when we were young and I really honestly can't think of anything, nothing akin to this. I mean, like I want to say Nintendo, maybe the original NES but I would hardly call that a flash in the pan. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean Pogs to me represent something different because they had two functions they functioned as kind of trading cards of sorts but it was also a game. And if you're listening and frustrated already, we should say very quickly that Pogs these little circular disks and we'll get into the ins and outs of them. No, this is it. This is our one shot at explaining it right here and there was a gameplayed around them which we will get into as well but they also functioned as things that kids were just obsessive about trading like You Have a Poke John Paul POG and I really want it. So I'm going to trade you my McDonald's POG and my I don't even know what was popular in the 90s my grunt view butthead POG. Yeah, there was probably bees and butter bug. Oh, they're definitely worth. I've seen pictures of them on the Internet. Sure. That means it's real. I don't know if anybody went to the trouble of photoshopping that, but I guess it's possible we should question everything we see on the Internet, I guess. And this also crosses over with the simpsons, because, very famously, mill house traded bart's sole away for a set of pods in one episode. That's right. And it comes full circle, Chuck, because there were a lot of simpsons pogs as well. Oh, I'm sure. Can you name the character that were on the pogs that mill house traded parts sold for? Do you know? Yes. Alpha's back in POG form. That's pretty funny. So what I was trying to get at earlier was like, there was like this pogs were like a huge, huge flash in the pan fad that just burn white hot and then just went away very quickly. But the thing that makes them interesting is not so much that there was some neat two year trend in the 90s. But that they were actually based on a much older game and that was actually based on a much older game as well. And that it was just almost like the most recent iteration of this idea for a game that just keeps popping up every few hundred years and makes you wonder when it's going to pop up again in the future. Yes. Which I think is a good distinction that makes it kind of cooler and more interesting than definitely your average furby, or unless they were ancient Furby's that we don't know about. They've yet to be discovered at kettleyuk. Yeah, that's a movie. Furby was discovered. Ancient Furby's. Those things were kind of 90s, too, right? They were after our time, I think. So I don't know much about Furby's, but this is in a long line of our sort of pop culture toys, forgotten toys episodes. Yeah. Now that you mention it, we probably should have saved this one for Christmas. Yeah, we'll find something else. So we were talking about how pogs this game, these little discs that you play with, were based on a much older game, and it turns out that there was a woman who is a teacher and a guidance counselor in Hawaii at yalua elementary school in oahu in 1991 to gather round children. I noticed that you guys are playing a little rough on the playground, that dodgeball has been coated with tar and broken glass, and I'm not very happy about that. I want you guys to try something different. Let's try something that my grandparents used to play and that I played when I was a little kid your age, and it's called milk caps. I'm going to show you how to do it. She introduced these kids to this game of milk caps, and you would think it would be kind of snoozy, but I think this demonstrates just how engrossing, but also simple, the game of Pogs, actually, is that this old timey game captured these 1991 school kids attention and then just spread like wildfires. That's been put. Yeah, she's got a great name. Her name was Blossom Galbiso. Fantastic name. And this is like you said in 1991, and sadly, she passed away in 1994. So she, I guess, got to see some of the light bright burning of kind of what she brought to the forefront of the children's playgrounds. She did. I've seen interviews with her and there were plenty of photos of her. Like, people knew where this came from as it was going on. Maybe she didn't see it die off, which would be kind of really nice. Oh, yeah. Forever. That would be really nice, actually. What a way to do it would be. Yeah. She burned bright and hot and short like her creation. Do we go back to Japan or should we talk more about this and then go back? Yeah, I think we should talk more about milk caps and then take it back from there. Because she used to play this as a kid and I think she was born in 1949. So say she was playing this in late 50s, early 60s. But like I said, her grandparents, I guess, like she said through me, her grandparents had played it as well. So this game of milk caps was just like pogs. You would use these little cardboard discs, and they were called milk caps because they were actually the caps that you would get on a bottle of milk. They would use a cardboard cap to seal the bottle of milk. And then I think they would put, like, a rubber thing around it to hold the cardboard cap on. But for all intents and purposes, the cap was this little cardboard disc, and it would have, like, the dairy's name on it and the information and probably like the latest date it could be sold by, that kind of thing. But when you took these things off and you stacked them up into a pile, you could make a pretty good game out of them. A game called milk caps. Right. And we'll get to the exact gameplay in a second. But they were playing with milk caps mainly there on Maui from I'm sorry, in Oahu, from these milk caps from Maui, the Haleakala dairy who they were sending this milk all over the place. They were actually packaged by or getting packaging from a Canadian company that were actually manufacturing these caps. And they were making the milk. It was just fine. So they did a great business. They did. But then they decided to make a new drink called passion orange guava or passion fruit. Orange guava POG. And it was like it sounds it's a little mixed juice drink. It sounds amazing. It does, doesn't it? Yeah, I can't wait to try it one day. I bet it's good. So those little caps, that's where they got the name. It was passionate orange guava. So they became known as POG caps. And even though as the years trickled on, the very few years that it burned white hot, there were many other caps. It was sort of like the Kleenex. Like, everyone called him Pogs, regardless of where they came from. Right. I'm sure there's plenty of people who played with Pogs as kids and had no idea that it was an acronym for passion Fruit, Orange and Guava. I bet most kids didn't know that, but because it was that dairy what is it? I practice saying it a bunch of times because we just screwed up so badly on our Hawaiian overthrow episode. I would say Haley Kala, I think it is, but I think the accent is actually on the last syllable. Halecala. Yeah. Okay. Because it was a dairy, they were just using milk caps for their POG juice as well, because they're packaging it very similarly. But because people didn't really buy milk and bottles anymore, the POG caps were much easier to come by because everybody was drinking POG because ostensibly it was just this delicious drink juice. Exactly. So Blossom Galbiso and her young wards started, like, bringing these caps in from school and then eventually writing to the dairy and asking for them, and then eventually writing to Stand Pack, like you were saying and saying, do you have any more of these caps that we can get? Because we could use them and we drank so much POG. We all have diabetes now, but we still want to play. We just can't drink any more POG. That's right, in Stampack. I don't think I named it. That was the Canadian packaging company. Yes. Which is still around today. Yeah, I looked them up. You can buy all sorts of leads. I cannot find those cardboard POG inserts any longer. But if you want some to go coffee lids, stamp is your company. This episode, by the way, is brought to you by Stamp. Do they still have the POG juice? You can still get that, right? I think it's like, in a carton now. Yes. I could not find it anywhere. I don't know if you have to be on the West Coast to find it, but you can make your own. It's just equal parts passion Fruit guava and orange. I've also seen that's best served ice cold. I bet it's good with vodka. I saw a recipe with vodka. Yes. And then also one with aquavit and rum, which sounds pretty great. It does. And now I'm seeing it's on a big box website that we dare not name. Okay. I don't think that that is version. I think that's another company, because I saw that on the same big box website and they can call it POG. Yes. And we'll get to why. Well, gosh. Good point. Yes, isn't it? Now we see it full circle on this big box website. All right, I think we should take a break because this is too much intrigue for me to take. Good. And then we'll come back after this and talk about it's. More ancient traditions right after this. Booyah. All right, so we're back. It's early 90s. Blossom Galbiso is worried about violence on the playground, introduces these kids to this sort of antiquated silly game. And they love it. They do. But how did this thing get to Hawaii to begin with? I can tell you how it got there. I can actually tell you the date. Chuck, let's hear it. February, 1885. A ship called the city of Tokyo, spelled T-O-K-I-O arrived in Hawaii with 900 Japanese immigrants aboard looking for work in the sugar cane fields of Hawaii. And that was the first Japanese immigrants in the modern age who showed up in the late 19th century and began this huge influx of Japanese immigrants. And you might say, well, what the heck does that have to do with milk caps? And I would say, Calm down, settle down. I can tell you that, too. And then I'd wait a little while until I got to the point where I feel like you have calmed down, and then I would proceed with it's. Actually, based milk Cats is based on a Japanese game that these 900 Japanese immigrants presumably brought with them because it was that popular in Japan. That's right. It was called Menko. Menko. And it was a card game in Japan that came about in the Kamakura period from about 1185 to 1333 BCE. That's old. That's pretty old. So what happens in that game is a player puts down a card, and then their opponent tries to flip that card over by throwing their card. It sounds really difficult because it sounds like it's just one card that you're throwing. It another single card. It's way harder than POG. And if you flip the card over, you get both of those cards. Again, not like Pogs in one way and the gameplay way, which we'll get to, but Minko was very much like POG in that these little cards actually had symbols of cultural icons in Japan. They had warriors on there and wrestlers. They were cardboard later on, but I think they were like wood or ceramic or clay earlier on. Yes, when they were a game called, I think, Mangetto, they were made of clay, and they actually more resembled POG chips or discs than Menco did because Manco turned them into what looked like I think they're considered the predecessor of trading cards, these Manko cards. Right, they are. But before that, when they were little clay tablets, they were little disk shapes, and they had, like, pictures and everything on them. So they seem more like Pogs then than they did by the time they arrived in Hawaii. Right. But again, just trying to flip over a disc by throwing another disc at it. It seems really difficult to accomplish to me. It definitely does. So what the kids in Hawaii did with this game of Minko was they turned it into this Milk Cap game using milk caps, which are widely available to them. And rather than one Milk Cap trying to overturn another Milk Cap, you just stack a bunch of them together and try to overturn as many as you could. A lot easier. Way easier. So much easier that you could really get the interest of some, like six, seven, 8910, 1112, 13 again is as high as I'm going to cut off your old kid's attention. Yeah. And it probably matters about your family and birth order, because I could see maybe if you're a 14 year old only child getting into it, but if you're 14 and you got a nine year old little brother or sister, you're going to make fun of their pogs. Yeah. What was it, a Juliet never do that. You're allowed to play pogs at 14. No, that's what I'm saying. The 14 year old child. Right. Poor little Juliet. Yeah. So she's got this game going. Blossom has got this game going. Or I guess they called her Miss Galbiso. And there was a man named Alan Rapinsky who saw dollar signs. This is crazy. It is crazy, because, like we said, stan Pack was making these bottle caps in Canada, and he said, you know what? Kids are really liking this game. I'm really curious how he had his fingers so on the pulse. That's what I'm saying. He was in California, and this is just going on in Hawaii, and it's not like Hawaii and California don't communicate at all, or didn't in the 80s or early 90s. Well, it started to come over, and when it did start to come over to the mainland, it definitely started in California first. Right. But I have the impression that he brought it over to the mainland, that he found out about some hot trend that had just started in Hawaii and got in on it from California. That's my take on it. Well, you know, it doesn't help is every article I read says he somehow caught wind. Right, exactly. He might have gone out of their own business or something. Who knows? What are these kids doing throwing these bottle caps all around? Yeah, either that or else somebody told him about it and he was like, Wait, what are you talking about? I want to know more about it. He was the guy who had a real nose for potential. Like, he was the man who bought the patent for a little leather protectant that was called Trina, I think, at the time. But he turned it into armor. All he was the guy that brought the world Armor All. He didn't invent it, but he figured out how to market it and turn it into something huge. Remember that non wrinkle spray you could spray your clothes and it would get the wrinkles out. Yeah, sure. I think it was called Wrinkle Free or something like that. In the 80s, he marketed that just a bunch of interesting stuff. So he found out about Pogs. He caught wind of it one way or another. I bet I know how it happened. How? I bet he went to Hawaii. Own business is always kind of keen to his goings on around him because he's always looking for that next million dollar idea. Sure. And he saw the first fist fight breakout with these kids over a set of Pogs that they wanted to trade or a winner take all game. And he saw this bloodthirst and was like, I can make money off of that. Yeah, that and then he did the other thing he was well known for. He ran over and broke up the fight by spraying both of the combatants with armor all, and they just slipped right off of one another and couldn't land a single punch. And when they got wrinkled up, he sprayed them with wrinkle. Wrinkle Free. Yeah, that's right. Great story. Yeah, you're probably right because that is kind of what the ultimate destiny of Hogs was. And he was largely responsible for that because if Blossom Galbiso was the mother of Pogs, this guy was the father of Pugs. He was the guy who and as far as I know, they were not in any way maritally related or anything like that. They were just related by PAGs. But he took it and just introduced the world to it just as this marketing guy. And he actually formed a group called the World POG Federation. Within, I think, a year of Blossom Galbiso introducing this for the first time to her students in Hawaii, the World POG Federation had been created by Alan Rapinski and his company. Yeah. And he did something very key to the story, or in this story, kind of when you mentioned about Haleykala and the fact that they did not have great financial gain from this, it's because Rapinski saw the writing on the wall and said, hey, why don't you tell me that brand name? That Pag brand name? Because who cares? You don't care, right? You're just pumping out this juice and still pump out that juice. And they said, sure, and they sold them the POG brand name, and that was it. They were sort of cut out of, I guess, for a little while, people were maybe buying their stuff a little more than usual to get these podcasts, but they weren't like getting juice, no pun intended, from the rights to sell these things. They were, as a matter of fact, from what I can tell, I think I saw in La. Times article or something from the 90s that they got 15%. 15%. So he did cut them in. Yes. Okay, I didn't know that. So it wasn't like entirely like this La. Businessman fleeced some Hawaiian dairy farmers entirely. They were cut in. But I think the big thing is that as far as the dairy was concerned, they had no real role in this other than accepting some money and they fat checks for a few years, I guess. Sure. And that's a bit of a it was ultimately a misstep on their part. But Rapinski, he's very much credited with introducing this to the world, but he's also credited with making this thing burn so hot that it was just inevitable that it was going to last a very short time. And a lot of people kind of say that was a screw up, he shouldn't have done it like that. But I also have the impression that he knew that this thing, no matter what he did, it's not like Hogs were always going to be around, that they were the new baseball cards or anything. So I think he came along and was like, we need to get as much money as we possibly can out of this because it's not going to last for very long. And he proceeded to do that. Yeah. So he created Hogman, the mascot. Like he said. They started having these tournaments. Everybody. I mean, I was not kidding about Pope John Paul. I think they bought like 50,000 the Catholic Church pogs when the Pope came to New Jersey 1995 to give them out, bill Clinton was on one. They had Altruistic campaigns, the Dare not to do Drugs campaigns, started making pogs. And of course, the major chain restaurants got involved in Del Taco and Taco Bell and McDonald's, Disneyland, everybody. Anything that you could put on a pog because these kids are holding these things and trading these things. It was like liquid gold to an advertiser because they were everywhere and kids were fighting, like literally fighting over them. So anyone and everyone tried to get an image on a pog cap, even if it wasn't the official licensed one. Yeah, I mean, if you released a movie during the POG era, you probably made Pogs for especially if there was an alpha. There's a set of Pulp Fiction ones that are pretty cool. Really? Yes, there are. I would think that would be just on the bubble. I would think so too. But no, I've seen it with my own eyes. I think somebody could have Photoshopped them, but Jurassic Park had a set of Hologram ones that were pretty cool. I think somebody tried to sell them for a million dollars on ebay. And I don't believe they actually got a million dollars for them. People like 100%. I think that's probably about how it went. Because people want Hogs to be worth a lot more than they are and they're just not. I mean, it's too recent and there's too many of them. What I saw that seemed legitimately, like about $100 was a stupid one, which was super cool. It's like silver, shiny, kind of Halloween company. Yeah. And then it's got like the reggae colors on it and everything. It's a pretty cool POG, to tell you the truth. Yeah. I don't even know if I would have been in the wheelhouse. I think a lot of this depends on and we'll get to this in a second. Like you're playing at school some, but then the schools tried to shut it down because it's very disruptive. So then you have to live in one of those great neighborhoods where there's thousands of houses and kids are just all over the place. And as I've said before, I grew up in the woods on two acres of land with nearly another child in sight except for my brother. So I think it kind of depended on that kind of after school trading in the cul de sac thing that I never got a piece of. No, you had to play Pogs with dirt friend. The pile of dirt you named your friend. I did have dirt friends. I wasn't trying to be funny, okay? There is nothing funny about that, Chuck. No, my name Morphin. Power Rangers were another big one. Oh, of course. I'm sure those yeah, that was a big deal at the time. Very huge. And then so, yeah, if you wanted to brand the kids, this was a great opportunity to do it now legitimately. You had to go through the World POG Federation because all these things were supposedly Pogs. And if you wanted to print your own POG, it didn't matter who you were, you had to go license the ability to do this from Alan Rapinski and the World POG Federation. The problem is if you own the license the trademark to a little cardboard disc that anybody could make if they wanted to. The technology is really easy and low hanging to make these kinds of things that. Yes. It's going to be like a large business like Taco Bell who's just not going to be bothered with a major lawsuit that will cost them more than it would to license the rights to make Pogs and give them out as some promotional tool. But anybody who's even remotely interested in the knockoff market just dove in headfirst into Pogs, and the market became saturated really fast, not just with Rapinsky's officially licensed Pogs. There are plenty of those, but also just knock off Scalor. Yeah, there's a couple of staggering statistics here. It says here in California alone, at one point, hogs were selling $10 million a week in one state. And then, of course, Jesse Thorns from California. So it may have been I mean, I know they were nationwide and then worldwide, but I get the feeling that California was a real POG hotspot. That's my impression as well. But in Pulp Fiction year, 350,000,000 pods sold, so it was still going strong in 1994. Blossom Galbiso died in 1994, so she did not have to see the end of the POG trend. She went out on top. Look at that detective work. Isn't that great? And they buried her with a pog of the back of Ving Ramsey's head. That's right. With a bandaid on it. You want to take another break? Sure. Quickly, though, I want to plug since we're talking Pulp Fiction, I had Jack O'Brien son, and we talked to Pulp Fiction and it's out in the world, and it was a great discussion. That's awesome. If you like Pulp Fiction and movie conversations, check it out. And Jack O'Brien, too. Jack's the best. We'll be right back. Okay, so we're back. Hogs have burned bright. They've started to kind of fizzle, though, right? Yeah. And I kind of hinted at it. One of the reasons was that schools, they had to clamp down on this thing because there were fights over pogs. Because if you played, that meant and we'll go over the full I guess we kind of went over the gameplay. But should we? Yeah. You want to now? Yeah, I guess so. The first thing you decide is are you playing for keeps or not? Playing for keeps means that you go home with the pogs that you collect from your friends, and there's no gizzi backsies. And those are serious games if you're ten years old. You know what's funny is you just use two terms used for marbles, which bears a striking resemblance to Hogs as well, or at least the way you play marbles and some of the rules involved. Yeah. Because you collect these things as a kid, and if you have to give up that GIMP POG yeah. You're really upset that you've lost that thing. So fights would break out and schools start to have to clamp down and literally banned it in quite a few countries at one point. Yeah. Because, I mean, also, this is a game of chance. We're going to tell you how to play in a second. It'll become very clear that it's almost entirely locked. So it's gambling if you're playing for chips and these things are if you're playing for pogs and these things are coveted. Yeah. Little kids don't necessarily deal with loss like that, especially sudden, unexpected loss that they hadn't really anticipated the consequences of. And yeah, you can get in fights, you accuse people of stealing. Paul became problematic very quickly, but this was also during the same era where Bart Simpson, touting that he was an underachiever, got T shirts of Bart Simpson banned in school. So schools were seemingly a little stricter back then in the early 90s than they are today, although I can't say that they are today. It just seems strict now in retrospect. Yeah, I think that's right. And I'm going to stop the people from emailing you right now and do you a favor, my friend. Thank you. Because you said that it's basically luck. And I guarantee you there are some 30 something to early 40 something POG enthusiasts. That are really mad at you right now that had their POG technique down, that they claim was superior to their friends and that there was skill involved. Well, I appreciate emails, you're saving me a bunch of time replying to all those emails saying you are wrong, wrong, wrong. You think it does? Yeah. It is luck. So let's talk about how to play this right. So when you play POG, you need basically a flat surface and a bunch of pogs. You need at least one other person. And from what I was reading on the internet, it seemed that was usually how many people were in a pog match? There's two. One on one. All right. Each person puts up the same number of pogs and apparently the ideal stack of pogs is twelve. So each person's ponying up six pogs. Or not, I don't know that's only if you want to follow the unofficial POG in Cat Players Handbook written by Jason Page. Exactly. Who probably knows what he's talking about, at least more than I do. So I'm going with his number. So you form a stack of pogs and you get your hands on what's called a slammer. They're all faced up though. You got to say that part. Oh, thanks man. So, yeah, if you look at a pog on one side is basically what you is the design on the other side through the blank or there's minimal design on it. It's very clear that there's one side that's like the face and you said they're face up or down? You put them face up. So you've got your stack with Bill Clinton on top and the other stack with the GM on top going head to head. And that is how you start the game. Oh, is it? Okay, so my understanding was that they were all in one stack. Oh, no. Yeah, sorry. Cheap. Okay. People are so mad at me right now. So they put them up against each other, then you stack them all on one. Yeah. Okay, so you've got a stack of twelve pogs. We should probably edit and redo this whole thing. No, I think this is good. And then you take a slammer. A slammer is basically a pog shaped object that's almost like a mini hockey puck. It's made of heavier material than cardboard. So it's like glass, like a heavy glass kind of thing? Or rubber or metal or something like that. I wonder if there are restrictions on that. No, this is a free for all, man. POG was a free for all, which is why the parents just didn't get it, you know, why they couldn't stand it. So you could bring in like an iron slammer? I think so. I saw somewhere that it was frowned upon among players because the metal would often dent at least the top POG. And if that was your POG, you might be like, man, why'd you dim my POG? But other than that I don't think that there were restrictions on it, although I'm sure informally there were like, got a dented zipper. Exactly. But you would take the slammer and you would toss it down. Now, here's the part where you are referring to earlier that people were going to email in about, because it does take some technique to slam this thing down, because if you miss or if you actually don't move the stack at all, that's your turn. The other person gets their turn next. So it does take some technique to hit the stack in the first place, but then also to scatter them in a certain way. Right. And it's the scattering that's the most important part of playing POG. Yeah. And you know what, I know we're going to get emails. I guarantee you this is a game that had regional variations. It's just got to be it's one of those kids games where one playground might play it slightly different than another playground as far as the rules go. Sure, absolutely. I'm going to stand by that because I know we're going to get people that are going to contradict one another and say that their version was like how they played it was the right way. But until I read that book by Jason Page, which I'm never going to do, oh, I don't know, maybe somebody will mail it to you. So, yeah, you slam this thing down and this stack of Pogs, if you hit it right, is going to kind of scatter everywhere like you said. And then some of them will have flipped over with the face side down, some will remain face side up. And that is sort of the key to the whole game. Yes. So the ones that have landed face side up, you get to keep if it was your turn. Now, those might be your buddies pogs they might be your Pogs, it doesn't matter. Then you take the ones that are still faceide, however they were stacked up, I think you're saying, and then you put them back into another stack and now it's the other players turn. You keep going back and forth until all of the pods have been turned over and kept. And however many hogs you turned over, that's how many you get to keep. And again, whether it's your Pogs or the other person's Pogs, ideally it's everybody's. POG and then there's another variation I saw that seems to have been pretty widespread. It was the poison. POG. And these were usually like kind of a memento mori kind of thing, like scary skulls on fire, like eight ball kind of thing. And it would say poison POG. And the Poison POG. If you put one of those in the stack, if you flip that one over, then you got all the pugs in that stack on that one turn. Okay. I didn't see that. And this is another frustration because I went to some YouTube videos of like gameplay videos, and I saw several that had described the gameplay differently than the others, which leads me to think that there were variations because I saw one person say that you get to keep the pogs that are faced down and that flies in the face of everything I had heard from everyone else. Right, yeah. I think it's flipping it over from the way it was before, I don't think it actually matters. But yes, you keep the ones that you flip over, whether now they're face up or down, who cares? Right. And then I saw another where they said that you stack them, every other one is face up or down. But I didn't see that verified anywhere else either. Yeah, I didn't run into that one. Yeah, people should say like, these were Michigan rules or something, right? So you know that slammer, the heavier object that you throw onto the POG stack, you can make them out of all sorts of things and they often had different imagery on them as well. But I saw one, and I saw this in multiple places. There was an OJ Simpson one where it had a picture of OJ Simpson behind bars. He was in the slammer. So he was on the slammer as well. Yeah. That must have been a legendary slammer, because I saw that in a couple of places. Yeah, the urgent slammer. I wonder if he got a piece of that. I don't think so, man. And I don't think he's legally allowed to keep it, even if he did. And then one day he would break into a hotel room and steal the slammers. That's right, give the slammers, get him back, man. I saw a documentary on that, Robert. It was nuts. Oh, really? Yeah, I guess it was. No, I'm sorry, it was that what was that, like five part series on OJ and the murders and everything? Yeah, I remember. Was it a 30 for 30? That's it. I don't remember. No, it was just a documentary, I think. Yeah, documentary series. But yeah, they covered that robbery too, and it was just so casual and dumb. It's so casually dumb too, you know? No, really wasn't. So, let's see, I think we've explained how to play pogs about as thoroughly as you possibly can, don't you? I think so. Well, let's talk about how they finally fizzled out. Well, like I said earlier, I think the banning on the playgrounds and then the banning or at school, and then I think the US, Canada, Sweden, Iceland, Germany, the UK and Australia all banned these pieces in schools. And so that's going to put a damper on something. If you're stuck at dumb school all day and you can't have your pogs and you're just limited to the hours between three and six when mom and dad call you back to eat dinner. Okay, on the one hand, but I also saw a contemporary piece of journalism in 1994. They interviewed the founder of Trove USA, which was a big POG maker at the time and he speculated that the school bands actually increased POG sales but also probably prolonged the interest. Because if kids have been free to play these all the time, they would have lost interest that much, that much faster. I mean, I think ultimately that's what happened. It's like many kid fads, it becomes not cool. You age out of it a little bit. Sure. And maybe the kids below you aren't interested and it just goes away. I mean, I don't think there's a smoking gun here, do you? Besides OJ? Yes. I would say OJ is probably the culprit for why pogs went away. I think they said in Boys Life magazine, this is a great death. Now in the 1998 issue of Boys Life magazine, they basically said it was done and not cool anymore. Yeah. They compared it to things like what's that one where you chase a hoop with a stick? Yeah, like that. And playing marbles and all these old timey fads. They included POG among them already. Poison said in 1998. Then it probably meant it went out by 1996. Exactly. It was super out by then. So we kind of mentioned, Chuck, that Holiday did not really benefit from this. They did financially, I'm sure 15% cut of all of that, hundreds of millions of dollars that was flowing to the World POG Federation for a couple of years definitely boosted their annual revenue. I'm sure. But if you talk to most people and say, what does POG actually mean? They probably couldn't tell you. And so in that respect, a lot of the articles that I think both of us have seen about this have pointed out, quite rightly, that the dairy really missed an opportunity to become like legendary or become a part of the trend. And they were very quickly separated. Pogs became their own thing in isolation with no boost whatsoever to the dairy. Now there's kind of like this kind of retro nod to it that enough time has passed, enough people have written and talked about it that the dairy has been identified as the source of pogs originally, but it didn't happen at the time. In this kind of retrospective about it is not really probably going to help the dairy very much. Which is sad. Yeah. And you know why? Because they were a dairy. Right. Like in this one article that they spoke with this creative director at a New York ad agency that was like, this is why you really need to pay attention to what your consumer is doing with your brand. Like if they have off brand uses going on, you need to know about to capitalize on it. And look at McDonald's and they're the perfect company with this stuff and it's just like, man, they were a dairy that in Hawaii. They weren't paying attention to that and they shouldn't have been expected to, I don't think. No, and certainly not. And I think also it's one of those things where the only way that they possibly could have capitalized that is if they had taken the gamble that this is going to be an enormous ad, which would take a tremendous amount of foresight and then also would have had to have hired like a publicist, like the guy that was interviewed or quoted in that article. They would have had to have figured it out and then they could have possibly bundled it. It would have been a big deal. But also, yeah, like you said, they're dairy and that's not the way that they're thinking. But in hindsight, it's very easy to blame them. But regardless, it is a little sad that they got kind of left behind. But I don't think that they were any worse for the wear from not having been on the POG crest along with the little caps, the little meds. Should we go to our cherry on top here at the end? Yeah. Thanks to the US military for this cherry on top again. Yeah, this is interesting because I had no idea about this. And I should talk to my brother in law because he's certainly been stationed overseas. The army and Air Force Exchange Service stores, let's say, if the military is overseas in the Middle East or whatever, they're in Afghanistan and they set up these sort of temporary on base stores. They started issuing hogs, these little cardboard coins, in November 2001 because they were lighter than metal coins. You could ship them a lot cheaper overseas. And it was supposed to be like a temporary thing and it said how much it was worth, basically. But then they started having pictures on it and comic book characters and NASCAR drivers and stuff like that. They just can't resist. No, but they were essentially Pogs. And I don't see anything that they actually played the game, but they functioned as currency for American service people in Afghanistan since 2001. Until just recently. Yeah. And then this was a military.com article yeah. Where they were basically they interviewed a few people who seemed a little like verklimb that these things phased out because they were like this kind of weird little part of their tour that you just wouldn't find anywhere else in the world. And the whole reason the military adopted Pogs overseas, at least in Afghanistan, is because it's just so much easier to ship them and to chip in using them. It requires less effort to toss them into the pot. But I think $100 in quarters I saw weighs almost \u00a36 and $100 in these little Pogs weighs a fraction of that. So just in shipping costs alone, it made sense. But apparently these POG coins worm their way into the hearts of the US soldiers in Afghanistan. I love it. Yeah. Well, so long Pogs. And so long to the military reincarnation of Pogs there are no pogs anywhere now in the world at all. If you want to know more about pogs, just start looking them up on the Internet and see what you think. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this slime mold enthusiast, and it's not from you. I know there's a fellow slime mold enthusiast. I'm one of them too, now. Hey, guys, loved your slime mold episode, and I figured I should crawl out from under the leaf litter and get in touch. It's pretty good. Yeah. I got slime molds about ten years ago for a kid's lecture and started giving it away so other people could play with these funky, chilled out beings without having to fork over hard earned cash. You can draw them out on paper, cut them into portions and pop them in the post, which makes things very easy. Things kind of snowball quickly. I've now posted it to this means mailed for our American listeners. Very nice. I've now posted it to around 25 countries, ran stands at the UK's biggest science fair, giving out thousands of cultures, and I've got 3000 about to go to Milan for an art exhibition. I am even selectively breeding them. That's very awesome. He calls them his pets. He said they're much better travel than I am. He said they're fantastic things for children and adults to play with, giving it a selection of different foods, seeing what it'll go for as a firm favorite with school classes of all ages. Would you like some, guys? Yes, please. They're easy to keep. Same deal as everyone else. It's free. And there's a website here. I don't know if this is just for us or if it's for everyone. Well, let's say it and then we can edit it out if he's like. No, please don't release it. Okay? You're either going to hear a long beep, okay. Or you shouldn't. Www.tinyurl.com slime manifesto. And this has instructions in the backstory. I bet that's for everyone. The only thing you got wrong, Chuck, is that it's www, period. Yeah, that's right. And we get mad at pet ants. Are you taking a passive aggressive shot at me right now? No, it's fully aggressive. Okay, good. Thanks to everyone on your team for your brilliant episodes. My job is a microscopist. Means I'm usually alone in the dark. Your podcast goes a long way to keeping me saneish. Cheers. That is from Ian Hans portman. And then he adds this little post script. I've accidentally tasted ficerum several times. It's easy to do when a half square meter of it is hungry and gets loose in your bag. It tastes like a compost heat smells, but with the added bonus of being incredibly bitter. Wow. This is a great email, Ian. Thank you for this. Yeah, Ian, this is one of the tops of all time. Frankly. It has it all. It has something that we're already interested in it has an offer to give us something we're already interested for free. It's British, and it includes accidentally tasting a live organism. Yeah, that could creepily take over your household. Yeah. Or your body, now that you've eaten it. That's right. Well, good luck to Ian surviving the slime mold tasting encounter. I hope that you live long enough to send us some free slime mold, because I will definitely take you up on that. For sure, for sure. Thanks again, Ian. And if you want to be like Ian and be super cool, you can send us an email too. Send it off to Stuff podcasts at iHeartRadio. 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 show notes." | |
Is your employer spying on you? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-your-employer-spying-on-you | Your employer may be secretly reading your emails, watching what websites you visit and tracking your whereabouts through your phone. And because of how the courts have ruled, there's nothing you can do about it. Learn all about employer spying here. | Your employer may be secretly reading your emails, watching what websites you visit and tracking your whereabouts through your phone. And because of how the courts have ruled, there's nothing you can do about it. Learn all about employer spying here. | Tue, 17 Jun 2014 13:28:51 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=13, tm_min=28, tm_sec=51, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=168, tm_isdst=0) | 40748177 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry. How do, Jerry? How's it going? Going. I wish we didn't have to pay money for playing music, because I really wanted Maxwell's. I always feel like somebody's watching me to be a leader. You don't have to pay for your own rendition. Come in at any time. No. Great song, though. Yeah. And turns out he's right. Someone is watching. Well, he was coke to the gills, which was his thing. Was he? Did you not see the video? No. Oh, man. He's, like, looking at the blinds and everything and dancing in his living room. Yeah, he was hooked up. I was a kid. I didn't understand that. I didn't either. Yeah. He was right, though. Is the point. Cocaine or no, he was correct. Yeah. Especially nowadays, like, you don't need drugs to be paranoid. You can just be paranoid and be totally correct. Yeah. Especially if you're gainfully employed. Yes, that is true. Because what I found out from this article, Chuck, is that if it's not the NSA eavesdropping on you or surveilling you, it's your employer. Yeah. And not only that, but you have implicitly agreed to be spied on, because it is no doubt somewhere in your work contract or your work agreement that they can do exactly that. That would be explicitly agreed. You're just probably duped into it. What did I say? Implicit? Yeah. Explicit. Yeah, but, I mean, if you don't know that, you agreed to it yeah, because who reads that stuff? I know. It is the thing, like, there's a growing trend among employers to basically slide some clause into your employee handbook that you have to sign your employment agreement. Applications sometimes have them now where it basically says, I consent to being surveilled electronically in X number of forms or any form you guys can come up with. And like you said, people don't read that and they're not aware of it. And the other devious part of the whole thing about employee surveillance is that they don't, by law, have to tell you that you're being surveilled. Right. There are two states, Connecticut and Delaware, that require employers say, hey, we're watching you, and Delaware barely even counts. I love Delaware. I was kidding. Yeah. It's the screen door capital, isn't it? According to the Simpsons, I think so. We're going to Delaware. That's fine. I've done some camping at the Delaware Water Gap. It's nice. Nice. Actually, I don't even think that's in Delaware, though, is it not to look that up. It might be in New Jersey. It's in the Eugene. It's funny. Thanks, man. So I guess we kind of answered the question that this episode asked. Is your employer spying on you? And the answer is almost decidedly yes. So we found from our research that stats are really old. It seems like there was a flurry of research and discussion in the early to mid to late 90s when the internet was new and then it just died off because apparently employers won like there were ethical questions, there were legal questions like can this happen? Yeah. And everybody said, yeah, well, the court said, yeah, totally, yeah, if they're in your office and they're working on your computers and yeah, you sure have the right. I do have some stats from and this is the most recent thing I could find is about three and a half years ago, which is brand new compared to other stuff. Yeah, a lot of these things are citing like surveys done in 2000 and 2001. That's a different world back then. Even current articles are using that. Like there's just no data out there. No shame. Well, here's some stuff from a few years ago. 28% of employers have fired workers for email misuse at this point for 64% of those were violating company policies, 62% were inappropriate language. There must be some overlap because they're already over 100% excessive personal use. 26% confidentiality breaching 22%. 30% of employers have fired people for internet misuse, not email, but internet. And that means surfing inappropriate content was 84% of that like you're looking at porn at work get fired for that. And then nowadays with social networking 66% they estimate or monitoring internet connections to see what websites you're browsing on a day to day basis. I think there's ridiculously low. There's no way that that's it well, and the article points out just because they are set up to do so, it doesn't mean they are generally the one guy in the article says they would be doing nothing but looking at activity if they were really spying on everyone all the time. They say generally if there's a problem with an employee or something and someone is flagged, they will probably start paying attention. But this is all opinion. No one knows, right? Employees aren't being too terribly forthcoming. Our job is different though, because with our research we can be looking at virtually anything. You know, this stuff we've looked at online here, I can't tell you how many lists we must be on from the research. The marijuana one alone. Oh, yeah. It was like these guys do nothing but research like human trafficking and hookers and marijuana and bomb making. Yeah, it's crazy. And we're all over social media, so that's part of our job. Yes, I know it was kind of different to see the other side of it, but at the same time I was like, wow, I really feel bad for the average employee. Have you ever worked at a place where if you go on to Twitter no, I have. If you go on to Twitter or something for a minute or two, like you can get fired for that. It's weird. My chicken software job that I had before this one, the famous chicken software job, nothing on the internet is applicable to what you do. So if the boss walks by and you're just checking the Brave score from ESPN, you feel like you have to hide it real quick. Sure. Where now I'm like, come on, let me check a score. It's no big deal. And some employers don't care. I saw this one article from it was some sort of a Christian organization that ended up firing employees. And he said, I didn't care if they were on Facebook and doing that other stuff. But when they started to talk smack about the company is when they got riled up and fired people. Supposedly that's what employers are looking for is they're looking for employees that are, like you said, talking smack about the company. Divulging company secrets. Sure, yeah. Leaking information. That's probably the biggest one they're looking for. And then like grossly misusing time. Yeah. Or like sexually harassing or something. Yeah, that one makes total sense. Sending inappropriate jokes around here, like the guy in the office sending over inappropriate emails all around the office, then yeah. They're going to tag you. Right. So they aren't necessarily watching you at all times. But the system is most likely set up to where they can to where if you do something that triggers a filter or something, somebody's going to get an email, they're going to examine it, and it's going to get sent to HR if it fits the criteria. Yeah, right. Yeah, pretty much. But like you said, they could most companies are set up now with what they call continuous systematic surveillance. So if they wanted to be bored out of their mind, most companies could literally look at everything you're doing at all times. Right. While you're bad for the system, admin for that, having to watch all that. Exactly. So we said that employers don't have to tell you that they're surveilling you. As a matter of fact, legally speaking, they can lie and tell you that they're not surveilling you. And then if you bust them and take them to court, you will lose. As far back as 1996, an employee for pillsbury, right. I guess he didn't really like his job that much. Sure. He was known for talking smack, and in two different emails, which he assured were confidential, weren't used for disciplinary action and just were his own, he said that they should kill the backstabbing bastards about one group of people. And he referred to the company Christmas party as the Jim Jones Koolaid affair. And he got fired at every company Christmas party. Right. He got fired for that. But he took Pillsbury to court and was like they said that they weren't paying attention to these emails and that they wouldn't use them against me. And the court said, So what, man? It's like you said. The court has decided that if you are using their device or you're using their network on their time, that's even off of their time. Well, yeah. Especially on their time. Sure. Then they have a right to protect their business by monitoring what's going on with their business devices on their business network with their employees. Yeah, I think within reason, some of that does make sense. You don't want your employees divulging secrets or sending lured emails around to everyone and all of a sudden you're slapped with a lawsuit. Right. Which I think is what it ultimately boils down to. Some of this is understandable. I get it. The thing is though, is it's so slippery of a slope? It is. It's already just so draconian that it's just completely lopsided. Like, how do you survey your own employer? How do you do that? Shouldn't it be more balanced than that? Yes. The whole thing just let me get on my soapbox and we'll get down to press text. But the whole thing stinks of you just being indebted to your employer for giving you a job. Yeah, it just kind of has that whole mentality attached to it. Like your employer can do whatever you want. If you don't like it, you can go hit the breadline. Yeah, Rusty, I'm done. No, I'm with you, man. It's definitely like as an employee to feel like someone has their foot on your throat. There's 50 people in Bangalore who would kill for your job right now. We can get them over here. Right. It just makes me sad. It is sad. That is the state of things. So I guess we should talk a little bit about how they're spying on you and there are many ways, but there are five pretty likely ones that you probably have in your office. We'll go through them in more detail and I had a six that added a minute. Okay. Packet sniffers, log files, desktop monitoring programs, phones and closed circuit cameras. And I'm going to go ahead and say phones as a two parter because company issued cellphones as well. Right, so what's your other one? GPS. I was surprised GPS was kept out of this because that was one of the original means of surveillance in the workplace with the little trackers that they put on delivery trucks or whatever to make sure they're doing what they're supposed to do. But now it's been extended to things like employee cellphones. About 3% of companies track their employees using GPS by tracking their cell phone and then 1% track their employees by tracking their keyless entry cards. Oh, really? Yeah, man. Well, 1% thankfully. What company is that? I don't know, but it's probably a pretty pedantic company. That's not an enjoyable company, I would think it's like a highly sensitive like someone who's making you would hope so, yeah, that makes sense. They are the 1% at least. Let's dig in and let's start with packet sniffers. I love that those two words together, they're great. Packet sniffers, yes, they've been around for a while, it's nothing new and they monitor the computer network and they perform tests and diagnostic tests and troubleshoot, all sorts of things. So they're not inherently there just to root out what you're emailing to your buddy. No, it's like that's how they sort spam out from your regular stuff. Yeah. So it's not nefarious in and of itself, but it can be when it's set to something called promiscuous mode, which I thought was pretty funny too. Yeah. STD mode. And that means instead of just looking for certain keywords, they can basically look at all of it. Right. And a packet is just a piece of information? Well, it's like if you send me an email saying, hey, Josh, that might be split up into X number of packets. Right. And then my computer busily recombines it into the full email and combines the packets together and the packet sniffer, just sniffs all those packets to look for, hey, Josh, I'm going to bring a gun to work tomorrow and you're in trouble. That's a bad way to do that. You're not supposed to send a warning. You're not supposed to do that at all. Yeah. How about, let's not give advice to office shooters? I think that's a wise policy. Okay. What you would do is give advice, say, Josh, don't come into work tomorrow, because that happens. Oh, really? Yeah. With shooters, they'll say sometimes they will have warned, like, the one person they like at work. If I were you, I wouldn't come in tomorrow. Yeah. Which is when you pick up the phone and call the cops. You have a moral obligation to protect the lives of others. Yes. You don't say, sweet. I don't have to come in tomorrow, right? Crazy guy gave me the day off. Yeah, call the cops. So with the packet sniffing, they're filtered and unfiltered modes and unfiltered will capture everything. And filtered is when they're looking for keywords or any sort of specific data. Right. I would imagine the name of your company yeah. Maybe like dangerous words, like gun. Sure. Drug related words, that kind of stuff. Kilo in my trunk. Right. That kind of thing at my desk. That's a bad one with kilo. Oh, yeah. Kilo at my desk. So if something is packet sniffing, they can see what websites you're visiting, what you're doing there, what you're downloading, the emails you're sending, what's in those emails, basically everything you're doing. And you can set up a package sniffer on your computer, your system admin can set it up on your computer and it would basically just be able to see what your computer is doing, what websites are visiting, what emails it's sending. It's basically just like eavesdropping onto a transmission cable. The thing is, that kind of raises some legal ramifications, which we'll talk about later. So there's a certain way you have to do it, but if you put that packet sniffer on your server for the whole company's network, it can pick up all that traffic. Yeah. If it's right there in the middle of the action. Yeah. And by the way, if you're digging this kind of stuff, if you like words like packet sniffers and servers and kilo, then you should go listen to tech stuff, which is like an all tech, very good related podcast here@houseofforks.com yeah. From our colleagues, Jonathan and Lauren. That's right. And I bet they have covered this better than we are about to, which is why I'm saying go listen to those guys if you're liking this for the less jokey, more informative version, more pun filled. Yeah, that's true. Another way, and this is the one that's really draconian in common is a desktop monitoring software. So if you're sitting at your computer and you're typing something in, you're sending a signal throughout your computer. And there are software systems that either physically installed hard on your laptop hard, or remotely installed via a Trojan horse. Like hey, install this program because you need it. But there's also this hidden program in there that you don't need and you don't even know and it's going to track all of your activity on your computer. I would guess that if your employer is tracking you or spying on you they're not going to use the Trojan horse. It's more like a hacker tactic. Sure. But the result is the same. I mean there's a program on there now whereas like a packet sniffer is keeping track of where your computer is going on the internet. Remember that old Microsoft commercial? Where do you want to go today? Old Windows commercial. So it's keeping track of where you're going today and who you're talking to along the way. The desktop monitoring programs that's like any keystroke you make is logging and so you can be writing a note to yourself that you never save, you just trash afterwards. You never save it. So it's never saved on your system. This desktop monitoring system is keeping track of your keystrokes so it sees everything that goes on on your desktop. Yes. And when you get that company issued laptop it very likely already has it installed. Right. And again the system admin can remotely install it because you're on the same network as them and they have administrative sway over your computer. They are like Bengali. Yeah. Or if the It guy comes by and says, I need your laptop for an hour because I need to install some sort of program it sounds familiar beware of that message. No, but that impression was dead on. Okay. There are alert systems that are on some of these programs. Oh wait, hold on. Before we move on to alert systems, okay, there's that desktop monitoring thing. So with keystrokes it's picking up all the keystrokes and it's basically redirecting them to whoever is watching your computer at that moment. Right. And so maybe they have a text file that's open and it's just seeing what's being typed as it's going on or it can be saved for later as a text file and then emailed to the system admin. Right, or the same programs can intercept what's being sent to your video card or what your video card is sending out to your monitor and redirected, split and then redirected to your system admin or whoever's spying on you. And they can recreate what you're seeing on your desktop by intercepting your video card transmission within your operating system. Yeah, that's some serious spying on you. Some serious spying. And the alert system I mentioned, that's part of the monitoring software where again, sort of like keywords, there are certain alerts or maybe websites, whereas some companies just block websites altogether, like Facebook or anything they consider to be a time waster. Right, or it can be set up on an alert system where they just know that you were spending way too much time online gambling, you got a problem, which would be anytime if you're at work. I doubt if they allow for like a playoff. You get ten minutes a day to gamble online or otherwise you could play craps at your desk. Right. Another way, if you think that, hey, I delete all my stuff and I cover my paper trail, my epaper trail, you are wrong. Because you have log files in your computer that even when you've deleted something, there's a log file somewhere in your computer. Most likely that logs exactly what you have just done. Right, like when you delete that email, it's not really deleted. Right, at least initially. Yeah. And those log files can be gotten to remotely if you're on the same network again. Or they can set up some sort of program that emails log files to them, especially ones that trigger some sort of filter. And log files, those are normal, they're part of your operating system, but they can be gotten to. In other words, they can be used against you. That's true, yeah. And normally they're used for bugs or originally they were used for bugs. Oh, really? Yeah, it's like the computer tracked its own activity and then if something happened, you can go back and look at somebody who could read that kind of code, could go back and say, oh well, here's the problem, this is why it crashed. And then fix that bug. Got you. I bet desktop monitoring software is the bulk of how they're getting this information. Yeah, I would imagine that like a company that's involved in this does desktop monitoring and packet sniffing. Packet sniffing. I guess we can talk about how about this? After this message break, we'll talk about old school eavesdropping, the wire style. All right? You don't necessarily even have to be on your laptop to get spied on because your phone might be bugged. That's true. That's, I guess the simplest way to say it, right? Well, yeah, especially if you have a work issued phone or iPad or whatever, they can just totally eavesdrop on that. But if it's like your phone at your desk, there's almost 100% chances being eavesdropped on. Well, it says 12% in here. Well, another very old statistic that I still see cited today is that companies eats dropped on like 400 million calls a year. But that was from ACLU number. Right? Right. Which I find it's sad that the ACLU hasn't done any report on workplace surveillance, workplace spying, anything like that since the late ninety s. Yeah, it's 2014 ACLU. Let's get on the ball. Yeah. It's not all Nazis and klansmen. There are other issues to be addressed. You just did jazz hands to Nazis and Klansmen. Here's the thing, though, with wiretapping, supposedly federal law says you can't wiretap because you need consent from the party. But the Privacy Electronic Communication Privacy Act said they can eavesdrop on job related talk. And how do you know if it's job related unless you listen in for a few minutes first? Right, so they're protected. It's a loophole. They can listen to all your calls. Yeah, I don't know how long they can listen, but long enough to determine if you're going to be talking about work. So that's a pretty wide margin. I think a couple of minutes is routinely argued for in cases like that. And the Electronic Protection Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, says there's two types of communication and one's protected and one's not stored. Communication is not yes. Communication that's simultaneously transmitted and received is protected. Yeah, this gets hinky. And they were saying that they were basically protecting a phone call because in 1986, what could possibly come in the future to supplant the phone conversation? Exactly. So phone calls are very much protected, again, except for that work around with business where they can't tell if it's personal or business for a couple of minutes. But then emails fall into this weird category because emails are transmitted, they're in motion. So apparently you can't scoop up people's emails when they're being transmitted. But emails also have the characteristic of sitting on an outgoing server for a minute. Well, not a minute, but for however long it takes before it's sent, it could be a second. And that still counts even less while it's sitting on a server. It can be copied and analyzed and all sorts of stuff and be totally within the law. Yes. And I love the analogy in here. If that doesn't quite make sense, they drop the analogy of it's. Like if your standard mail that your mail carrier delivers to your house while they're delivering it, you can't go open your neighbor's mail, but once it sits in that mailbox, then you can go read your neighbors mail. But you can't do that, though. That's insane. No, you can't. You can't do that with your neighbor's mail. You can't with email. Exactly. And you have said quite accurately that the court generally well, they side with citizens when it comes to privacy in general, but once you become an employee, the employer has most of the poll. Almost exclusively, they've ruled in favor of the employer because the network belongs to the employer and the devices often belong to the employer. And we should say that's a trend that may be going away. There's something called bring Your Own Device movement, where companies are starting to basically say you need to supply your own computer. You definitely need to supply your own phone. Maybe you need to supply your own iPad. Perhaps we'll give you a little bit of a stipend to offset the cost of using your own phone. Sure. But that raises a lot of questions about the legality then of snooping on you while you're not on your company's network. Yeah, well, that's me. I bought my own laptop, right. Because I wanted a mac. They wouldn't give me one, so I was like, all right, I'll go buy one, and that's what I use exclusively. And then as long as you're not on the company network, you should not be subject to any kind of snooping or spying. Well, they can't, but if they do, you would have a pretty good lawsuit on your hands. But if they had bought that Mac for you, or if your Mac is on the company network, they are virtually free to look at whatever they want, right? Yeah. But when I am not at work, I'm not on the company network. That's good. So it is impossible for them to know what I'm doing. Right. But I think I would guess also, I'm not a lawyer, but if you opened up, say, your personal email account on the company network, if they had software, and I fully believe that this exists, that could just basically go in and copy all the files in your personal email right, while you're on the company network, that that would be legal. Yeah. And don't be fooled by that Https in front of your Facebook account, because that is not protecting you like you think it is. Right, if you're at work. Yeah. And it's supposed to. The hypertext transfer protocol secure. It's not secure when you're at work on the work network. No. So we'll talk about what you can do about all this in a minute. We got another message break. So, Chuck, if your employer doesn't tell you that you are being surveilled and you want to know, how could you possibly find out that kind of thing? Well, I would recommend reading the article how to Tell If Your Boss Is Spying on you in Forbes from about a Year and a half ago. Well, that's current for this topic. It is. I'm going to summarize some of it here, though, because it's a great article. They said whether or not you can tell, it depends a lot on where it's being done. They said if it's upstream at the firewall, it's going to be hard for you to know, but at that point in the stream, they're probably just going to be able to tell like what website you're going to. If they want to get more granular and poke into your emails and see what you're doing, then they're going to have to be using some sort of monitoring software. And if you want to check and see if that is running on your computer, if you have a PC, you can go hit Control Alt Delete, pull up your task manager and go to the Process tab and then look at all your process. On a mac. I just typed in activity monitor. Right, and that's where you want to end up. And so it's going to bring up these really weirdly named exe files. Yeah. Like everything that your computer is doing that you don't even know it's doing. Right. And look at the names. They say you can compare yours if you're at work. Just put your laptop next to your cubicle buddy and see if the same processes are running. If they're the same, it doesn't help you much, but if you have something running that they don't, then that might be a red flag. Well, it could help you in that, like you're both employees and you're both being surveilled at the same time. True. But it won't help you really know necessarily. Yeah, but you can also search for those names on the internet, right? Yeah. If anything stands out as something you never heard of, just Google it and see if it's spyware and then go check it out. One of the funny things though, as they point out in this article, is that spyware programs are flagged by antivirus and malware programs is malicious. So companies are making what they call whitelists so the It department knows to say, no, this isn't bad. Right. And so I need to put it on a separate list. Right. And they said in many cases those lists are public. Okay, so apparently you can tell that way. I'm not really sure how that works though. But it is in the article that I mentioned in Forbes. I bet tech stuff has a better step by step guide, but yeah, I mean, look at your processes, see what's running. Yeah. And then once you find out that your company is surveilling you, you have zero recourse against it. Yeah. And we were talking earlier, if you do look at your processes, it might have an obvious name, like what did you say? We are watching you exe. Yeah, but it might not because a lot of these are disguised. Sure, everything's cool exe, you're not being back to work. Exactly. Like I said, very little you can do if not nothing. But luckily the courts are starting to rule or have on one specific thing in favor of employees or people seeking employment. There was a growing trend among companies where they were demanding the social media passwords and login for like Facebook pages and stuff. Like that when the applicant's Facebook page wasn't publicly visible. What? Yeah. And people would hand that over yes. Of the condition of even being considered. Wow. And so some states started to outlaw that pretty quick. Which is good. Yeah. That's terrible. I mean, I don't do anything on Facebook that anyone would care about. No, but a lot of people do. A lot of people do. So if you're looking for a job, if you have a job, especially if you suspect your company is more straight laced than you are right. You just want to post everything with the idea, send every email, visit every website with the idea that you're being watched, and you have zero expectation of privacy. The courts have found when you are on a company network, on a company device, and then even beyond that, there have been instances where people have been fired and lost lawsuits as a result for stuff they did that was maybe related to work, that was not on the company device, that was not on company time or on a company network. But it was like they were blogging about making fun of their coworkers. Still got fired. Yeah. So basically, you just have to I don't know what you have to do, but it's sad. It's a sad state of affairs when even your own personal stuff, your own personal opinions done on your personal blog, like, can get you fired legally. Yeah. And we didn't even mention cameras. Oh, yeah. Most offices have cameras in their office. I know. We do. We do. Yeah. The little bubble in the ceiling. That's what those are. Yeah, that's what those are. I thought they were rain collectors. No, not rain collectors. Yeah. Companies have cameras set up to thwart office creepers, supposedly. Sure. And like, theft. Yeah. But they can also see if you're having a liaison in a copy room. Well, they can like, if you're that dumb, they can watch what you're doing on your computer. They can survey your computer, your desktop, just from watching your point it towards your screen. Yeah. This is where Josh, you've got like, four of those above your desk. Shoot. And did you read the Ikea story that I sent you? I did. It seemed above and beyond the realm of acceptability. Yeah. A woman, a twelve year employee, sort of high level. She was deputy director of communications and merchandising for all of France. I call that fairly high level. Yeah. For 24 stores. And France is their third biggest market. Oh, really? Her name was Virginia Pauline. I'm sure there's a well sad, better French way to say that, but she got hepatitis C and had to take a year off of work. And Ikea thought, well, I don't really think she's as sick as she says. And so we're going to hire a private investigator. We're going to give them her Social Security number, her personal cell phone number, her bank account details, and whatever else they need, and you go find out how sick she is. And a lot of those things were ill gotten, too, from corrupt, like, public workers, cops and stuff. So people were rightfully outraged. And I think it's in court still, because this was late last year, seeing if they broke the law by doing this. But apparently Ikea has been doing this to hundreds of employees over the course of the last decade. Right. So when you get that crappy furniture that you don't know how to put together, or the lamp ad, if you like, that ad someone posted that. It's really great. Yes. The lamp doesn't move, apparently. No, I think I said it was computer animated. It's just a lamp. What town? Spike Jones made it seem real with this. Oh, it was a Spike Jones joint. Yeah. Nice. Talented dude. He really is, man. Her was great. And I want to point out one thing. You said if you think your company is more straight laced, I would even say, if you think your company like, no way would they do this. Don't be fooled if you think it's just some super cool, hipster young company. They might be spying on you as well. Yeah, I mean, if they want you out, you're just giving them dirt pretty much. In any tech type company or anything that has any sort of trade secrets, I'm sure you're being heavily, heavily monitored. Sure. So I guess go forth and relax, everybody. Feel good about everything. If you want to know more about being surveilled at work again, go check out tech stuff. You'll like it. And you can type the keywords employerspying in the search bar houseofworks.com, and it will likely bring up this article. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Norbert the Hungarian. Hi. Guys, this is Norbert. I live in a small town in Hungary, about 40 miles away from the capital. I always listen to the podcast while commuting and love the show. I work for an It company. Hey, how about that thing? About that? Yeah. Giving email, chat and phone support for American users, mostly from New Jersey, North Carolina and Illinois. And here's the thing. I'm not sure whether it is due to cultural differences, but what I have noticed is that almost none of the users greet us. He said, Greet us, sweet Norbert, when we answer their calls or when receiving emails from them. Neither a simple hey nor a good morning. Nothing. The conversation usually starts off from their side with the long yeah. Is there a reason why this is so, guys, I also need to ask, who is this guy talking to? Who, Norbert? US? No, I'm saying, like, people who go, yes. New Jersey, North Carolina and Illinois. It's like the boss from office space. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. I also need to add to this that here we are, talking about educated people and not end users. Street people, is what he says over here in Europe. This is unacceptable. It is a sign of disrespect and ignorance. Is this normal practice in the US. Should I worry about it? You guys could answer. That would be amazing. Yeah. Norbert, here's my deal is you can sniff out sales calls and things, and I'm never friendly to those. In fact, most of those aren't even a person now. It's just a recording. Yeah, right. But if you were offering it support, if it's unsolicited cold calls, I'm not surprised that he's getting that. But if this is the company yes. He said he's giving email, chat and phone support, so he's trying to so I guess he's responding to a request. I would guess then, right. I guess the only thing I can think of, Norbert, is that maybe you're supporting them because something's not working and so they're ticked off. Maybe. Yeah. Americans get stressed out when computers malfunction. Yeah. And there's a tendency to shoot the messenger in all cultures, I think. Yeah. I think we've said yes to start every sentence in the last 30 seconds. Anyway, Norbert, I apologize on behalf of Americans, and if you ever call me buddy, I'm going to say, hey, Norbert. How are you doing, buddy? Good morning, Norbert. And then we'll just get going from there. That's a T shirt. What? Good morning, Norbert. Yeah. Have you ever been hungry? I have. You have, too. You mean? I went to Budapest. It's beautiful. That's where I went. I thought it was beautiful, too. One of the most beautiful cities around. Yeah. It was inexpensive, and the people were beautiful and nice. Museums were great. Did you go to the hospital and the Rock? No. What's that? It's this cavern system underneath Budapest that was converted in the 30s into a secret bunker and hospital and power plant to where the city could hide under the city. And it came in handy in World War II and during the Cold War. And it was a secret up until the maybe 80s. Is that on the Buddhist side? Maybe? Like until the end of communism in Hungary. It was in the Pest side, I believe. Yeah. But it's just an amazing museum now filled with mannequins dummies who are having surgery performed upon them. Some are, like, bleeding. It's supposed to take place in the context of war. There's a mannequin screaming. I didn't even know they made those things. But it's really awesome. Like, they have old timing medical equipment, and if you go on a tour of this museum, the last tour of the night is a flashlight tour. They turn all the lights out, and you're walking around with flashlights and coming face to face with these dummies when you come around the corner. It is really neat. I need to go back to Budapest. Yeah, I want to go back as well. When I was younger, so I do Europe differently at this age, for sure. Oh, yeah, sure. Were you, like, backpacking? Yeah, we did some museums, but it was also a lot of just walking around and people watching and getting drunk on Schnapp in Budapest, actually, we had the Bull's Blood wine there because it was like, a dollar a bottle. Right? Yeah. I didn't find it anywhere. I don't believe I had any. The apricot snops were beautiful. All right, so that's hungry, everybody. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck, like norbert did, you can tweet to us at Syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com, stuff you should know. Hang out with us on Pinterest or Instagram. It's Instagram Skyskpodcast, right? Yeah. And look up Pinterest. Comjustionchuck. Great. And then you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetepworks.com, and you can hang out with us at our home on the Web stuffyoustnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housestepworks.com." | ||
441b5b32-53a3-11e8-bdec-07e1aaf43611 | How Election Polling Works and Doesn't Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-election-polling-works-and-doesnt-work | Election polling had a pretty good rep until 2016. But it turns out they weren't far off even then. It's really the media driving the narrative. Learn all about how election polling works today. | Election polling had a pretty good rep until 2016. But it turns out they weren't far off even then. It's really the media driving the narrative. Learn all about how election polling works today. | Thu, 17 Sep 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=261, tm_isdst=0) | 45150553 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. And we've got the scoop. Jerry's around here somewhere. Her. This is stuff you should know. Off to a great start. She's in her office. She is. She's got this remote thing going on. Yeah, it's like the COVID special. That's right. And this has been one I've been wanting to do since 2016. The fire kind of went down on it, and now it's the fires back up again in election season, I thought, no better time than to talk election polling in this weird sort of black magic, which is really not blackmagic at all. And then you'll see, the polling wasn't even really that off in 2016. No, it was great. There was a furious we'll talk about in a second, but there was a furious reaction by the media. Just left polling and pollsters out to dry, saying, you're terrible. Your whole craft is useless. You lie to us. As the pollsters went back after election night in 2016, which, by the way, was a bit of a surprise to everybody involved. I think so. Including the president. Yes. When the pollsters went back and looked at their stuff, they said, Wait a minute. No, this is all fine. It was you guys media, you screwed up. You don't know what polling is or what it does or how to talk about it. Most importantly. Yeah. And then you public, you have no idea what's going on. You just see some percentages and you automatically lead to some conclusions, and this is way off. So it's in part that the media was misrepresenting it. Some polls weren't very good, and then the public in general just needs to be a bit more educated on statistics to understand what they're hearing. And that's what we're here for. Because I took statistics three times in college, the same course at Georgia. At Georgia, I took one of those classes. I hated it. Intro to Statistics, right? Yeah. Boy. I hated the class. The professor finally, I walked up to her on the last day of the third time, was like, Please. And she bumped my D up to a C, and I never looked back. She'll say, you have a one in four chance. And you're like, but what does that mean? What is four? If I can understand this after doing some research, then anybody can understand at least the gist of it enough to understand polling and not be taken in by bad representation of what poll results are. Yeah. So if you remember, in 2016, there were pollsters saying, I'm sorry, and I'm going to say that wrong, over and over again. You had media saying that Hillary Clinton is going to win in a landslide. She's got an 85% chance to win some set as high as 95. She's going to win the popular boat by three percentage points all the battleground states in the Midwest. She's going to win those narrowly. And it did not work out that way. And like you said, there was a fur. How could everyone be this wrong with the polling? And there's a man named Nate Silver, who everyone probably knows at this point, who has made his name as a data specialist and runs the 538 blog and said, you know what, polling is flawed. And that's probably the first thing that everyone should understand is all polling is a little bit flawed. State polling is definitely a little more flawed than national polling. But here's the deal, everybody. These polls from 2016 were not only not so far off, but historically dating back since 1972, they actually performed a little better than a lot of elections. Yeah, and the state polling, while worse than average, wasn't that far off from the average error rate. So what do you want? So there's a lot of stuff, like we said, there's a lot of post mortem that was done on the 2016 polls and what was gotten wrong and what was gotten right. We'll talk about that later. But the point is that overall, it wasn't that far off. And so the idea isn't that the polls failure, that there's something inherently flawed with polling, or that there's even something inherently wrong with the media. I want to go on record here, especially in this climate, the media is not our enemy. Like any healthy democracy needs a vital, robust, independent media is free from bias as an objective to reality and good injustice as possible. But there's also such a thing as a 24 hours news cycle, and you got to fill that. And given the rise of opinion news and pundits and basically trying to capture as much market share as possible, which is definitely the wrong track for media in general. But I just want to go on record. While we're going to be kind of beating the media up a little bit, that does not mean that the media is inherently flawed or evil or seeks to kill you and your family and your family dog. So Silver goes back and a bunch of people go back and look at history and kind of what went wrong here in 2016 as far as the polling goes. He says, you know what, we went back for the past twelve presidential cycles since 1972, and he said the polling error was 4.1. He said in 2016 that national polling error was 3.1. So technically, by a full point, it was a full point better. He said, we predicted that she would win the popular vote by three percentage points. She actually did win the popular vote by two percentage points. The state polls were the real difference maker. They actually did underperform at a 5.2 error rate. And that doesn't sound like that much. I think the overall error rate for state poll since 1972 was 4.8. So 4.85.2 doesn't sound like much, but if you're talking about a percentage of error in just a handful of swing states, that can make something look like a landslide, even though you lose a popular vote. That's exactly what happened, right? That's exactly what happened. Because you got to remember, Trump didn't win the popular vote, he won the Electoral College, and it came down to those swing states. But the fact that they were off just by 0.4 points from the average for the error rate goes to show you just how close that rate actually was, which, again, is the opposite of how it was being broadcast throughout the election. It was supposed to be a landslide. Like Hillary Clinton might as well just be like taking measurements for curtains in the Oval Office right now. It was just that set. So it was presented one way, when in reality, if you really looked at the polls and the polling results, if you looked at them with a sober face, it was a much closer race than it appeared, or then it was being broadcast. I haven't had a sober face since that night. So we should talk about the margin of error in polling. Anytime you see a poll, they talk about the margin of error. It's usually plus or minus three or four, and that is on each side. So for each candidate's poll, in other words, it could be a potential, like seven to eight point swing and still be within that margin of error. So when Trump is winning states by a zero 2% margin or a zero five or a .7% margin, that's well within the margin of error. Right? That margin of error, by the way, is just built in. We'll talk about it a little more in a little bit, but it's like there's just no way around it. To get around any margin of error, you would have to literally go through and interview every single voter in America and then compile the evidence or their data perfectly without any missed keys or anything like that. And it's just impossible. So everyone accepts that any poll is going to have a margin of error, but you want to keep it within plus or minus three points, right? Maybe four. Yeah. So, a little history of polling. We've always been pretty spellbound by polls in this country. We put a lot of stock in poles, especially the presidential race. The word straw poll, if you've ever heard that, that comes from the idea that you hold up a piece of straw to see which way the wind is blowing. So a straw poll is kind of like, here's how things stand today on something like this is the way the wind is blowing today on this matter? Yes. And they're just kind of informal. They used to take them, like, on train cars. Journalists would ask people who they were on the train with, who they were going to vote for nothing like formal or anything, but it does kind of reveal how long standing our fascination with polls really is. Yeah, it got pretty serious in the 1930s, specifically the 1936 election, where a Literary Digest, it was a pretty big magazine at the time, polled its subscribers. It's just kind of funny. Even seeing the Senate. They predicted a landslide win for Republican Alf Landen over FDR. So if you've never heard of Alf Landen, you know why? Because Alf Landen did not beat FDR. And the magazine's editor said, you know what? We didn't even think about the fact that we just pulled our subscribers and that they are wealthy people or at least wealthier on average, and they're probably going to vote Republicans. So Alf Landon was their man. Right. So if you go out even today and just interview Republicans and say, hey, who you're going to vote for? And then take that results and apply it to the entire population of the nation, you've got a flawed poll. And that's what Literary Digested but in doing so, they established this kind of they pointed out a real design flaw that now is just one of the first basic things that anybody conducting a pole gets rid of. That's right. Gallop came on the scene. They galloped onto the scene, and they were one of the first big polling companies to say, all right, we got to get this right. We got to get a representation of all of America here. So we're going to send our people door to door. We're going to go to every zip code in America. And they did that from 1935 to 1984 and got basically within about three percentage points, doing a pretty good job, but it was really expensive. So in the 80s, in the mid 80s, they switched to calling people on telephone. Yeah, that's still today. That is the gold standard is for a human being to dial up another human being and ask them some questions, and we'll talk a little more about it. But what Gallup does and what Pew does and what a few others do is it's called randomized sampling or probability sampling, which is where you basically leave it to chance that any registered voter in America is going to get a phone call from you. So what Gallup is doing and what Pew does is called randomized sampling or probability sampling, where any voter in America has an equal chance of receiving a phone call from Gallup or from Pew and being asked these questions. And it worked pretty well for a while when they moved from in person over to the phone because they were still asking people questions and they could still get their answers and harass them, which is a big thing, as we'll see about this type of sampling. The problem is when people started to use caller ID, they stopped picking up the phone as much, and so the response rate went down dramatically. Yeah. So they would call people using random digit dialing, which is a computer system where it fed in an area code and then the first three digits, and then randomly dial the last four. So you've got a pretty good start there on the random sampling. But even then they said, you know what? Women tend to answer the phone more than men. So to truly randomize it, whenever whoever picks up the phone, we have to then follow up and say we want to talk to the person in the house who's had the most recent birthday. Further randomizing. I got a kind of a laugh about this because I don't know that I've ever literally ever seen my father pick up a telephone in his life. At least growing up. For the first 18 years of my life, I don't think I ever saw him answer the phone. It's all ham radio, huh? No, he went into that, but just literally not one time, he would just let it ring if no one was around, if my mom wasn't around to answer it. And granted, it was usually never for him. No one ever called to talk to him. But I picked up on that. And my friends used to get really frustrated back before texting that I would just never answer my phone. And I always just thought it was an option. Like, when the phone rings, it doesn't mean you're obligated. It just means now you have an option, you can answer it or not. Well, technically that's true. You don't have to answer the phone, but it depends on who in your life could possibly be calling. Well, I didn't think it was rude or anything. I just thought it was literally like I'm going to hedge my bets here that one of my friends isn't stuck on the side of the road. They can leave a message, and if they are, I'll go get them. So what you're talking about, Chuck, is what's called a non response. And that's factored into the response rate, which with phone polling from 1980 until the 1990s, it was manageable. I think the response rate peaked at 36% and 1997, which is good, not bad. Now it's down to like 9% because, like I said, people have caller ID, and if some unknown numbers calling, you typically don't answer. And that actually affects things because there is a certain kind of person who answers the phone no matter what, and they are not like every single American. And that actually factors into the kind of poll you're connecting. Plus also you want like a certain amount of responses. I think out of a sample size, you want a minimum of 800 survey responses. And back in the day, when you got a 36% response rate, meaning 36% of those people you called would answer the phone and go through all of the questions and answer them fully and complete the survey. Since it was down to 9%. You went from having to call between 2000 and 2500 people to up to 9000 people now just to get 800 surveys completed. And that made the whole thing a lot more expensive. On the one hand, because it was expensive, it meant that there were fewer and fewer companies that could conduct these polls, which meant that the polls you were seeing were more and more legitimate. But on the other hand, it also usually decreased sample size a little bit because as Gallup pointed out, you can kind of fiddle with the numbers a little bit with a smaller response rate and smaller sample size. Yeah, and it also led to robocalls because of expense, because of people not answering their phone as much. And those systems. I mean, I love how Dave Ruth put it. He said they range from OK to terrible and how well they work online polls and these other new techniques. But I think we should take a break and then talk about what I found the very interesting way that they further randomized this thing from this point forward right after this. All right, so we've already talked about the fact that they've randomly called someone and then they take one further step on that call by saying, let me speak with whoever had the most recent birthday, even if it's, I guess, you're three year old. Right? And one other thing I kind of made mention to you that I have to interject dude like harassing people. If you've been picked by this computer, if your phone number has been picked, they're going to keep calling you and calling you. And that is because as a person who doesn't normally participate in phone surveys, you are a specific kind of person that you can't be left out of the population because you represent a large number of people and they want your opinion. So part of this phone standard of calling people is to call them over and over and over again to basically harass them into participating to get their answers for this survey. Because it's as important, if not more important sometimes than the people who are like, oh yeah, I'd love to answer this phone survey. Two totally different kinds of people. Yeah, absolutely. And I was totally kidding, by the way, to the listener, when I said they will speak to a three year old. They ask the most recent birthday of someone of voting age, obviously. All right, so then you've got a pretty decent random sampling to begin with and then you have to start the process of waiting, which comes in a lot of different forms. If you want an example of like a really good political poll, it's going to be paid for by a neutral source. It's not going to be like a CNN poll or a Fox News poll or Super Pac or anything like that. You're going to have a random sample of the public, which we just talked about you're going to be dialing cell phones and landlines these days. That's a big one. Also, they'll ask you if you have a cell phone and a landline and if you say, yes, I have both, they're going to adjust your response based on the fact that you had a higher chance of being selected because you have two numbers that the computer could have picked. Right. And another thing is, like you mentioned, they are going to keep calling you. The best ones use live interviewers still and then what they want to do, and this last one is really important is they're going to try to improve the accuracy of the results by waiting the response to match. What they want to do is just match a real world demographic. Age. Race. Your income level. Your education level and all of that stuff is factored in and all this stuff is weighed out because. Well. We'll talk about it. But there are many different kinds of Americans and if you want a really good sampling of different kinds of Americans. You're going to. Like you said. Have to fidget with the numbers to make it a true representative population. Right? So because even if you just get it exactly right demographically and waited, which like you said, we'll talk about some more in a second, you still have that margin of error. And again, that's that 52% plus or minus three points. And that means that it could be 55% or it could be 49%. They don't know. But somewhere between that, most of your answers are going to be the correct answer somewhere in there. That's what that means with that margin of error. And the reason that that's built in is because it is basically impossible to perfectly represent the larger population through random sampling. You're just not going to pick everybody correctly just by the fact that it's random and it's a sample. Yeah, and that's important because that's why you hear so much hay being made over a double digit lead in a poll which Biden had sort of semi recently. I know it's gotten a lot tighter since then, but when Biden was up by, I think, like ten percentage points, people were flipping out because like we said, it's plus or minus four for each candidate. So that's a total of eight. And so basically the press started screaming like he's outside of the margin of error. Everybody, nothing can beat him. But now things are back within that margin. I saw on PBS NewsHour. They interview Mark Shields and David Brooks. Brooks is a New York Times columnist, and I think Mark Shields is an independent columnist. And one of them actually said, and this is in July, america has clearly made up its mind on who's going to be the next president. I was like, this is July. Did you not learn anything from 2016? I couldn't believe that those words come out of their mind. So matter of fact, yes, it's irresponsible. And there have been studies about this, too, that have suggested that words like that, that polls that say 99% chance of winning, that this kind of stuff actually has a negative impact on the leader because it makes people think, well, I don't need to go out and vote. Everybody else is going to go vote, and the turnout might be lower than otherwise. There's also people well, there are people who dispute that. They say, yes, it makes sense intuitively and anecdotally, but we've yet to actually see genuine data that says clearly that this has this effect. But it's something that's still being studied right now, whether it actually does or not. Well, and I also saw an article the other day about the quote, unquote silent majority, and that another reason those polls were so wrong back then and they're saying are probably wrong now is because they say that there's a substantial block of voters who very privately and secretly vote for Trump. Yeah, the term for them among pollsters is shy Trump voters. They won't admit that they're going to vote for Trump, but they're going to vote for Trump, and that affects polls. I saw that. That's actually not been proven to actually exist, but I think it was a Pew. There's a really great Pew article. This stuff is speaking to you at all. Go check out Pew's key Things to know about election Polling in the US. And it has a bunch of great links that you should follow in there. And there's also sideline, they have surveys and polling, which is a guide for journalists to polling. But I found out you don't actually have to be a journalist to read it online. So if you want to go check those out, they have some great just some breakdowns of some of the stuff we're talking about, but also about how to read polls and what to trust and look for in general. And then little known fact, pew was actually originally called Pew Pew until 1976 when Star Wars came out, and they were like, we got to change our name now, guys. Yeah. Can't do it, man. It is dad O'Rama today with you. So back to the waiting thing. And by the way, we should mention that Gallup said if they wanted to increase that sample size and actually get the margin of error down to, like, plus or minus two, that they could do that, but that would be like, a literal 100% increase in the cost. So, like, everyone just please live with plus or minus three or four points. Yeah, and everybody generally does. And Dave uses this really good example. Dave Ruse helped us out with this, and he said this margin of error is best understood where if you selected 100 marbles, there's a jar of 500, 500 blue marbles, and you pick out 100 of them, you might pick out 50 of each one time. Wait, $500. What? You said 500 marbles. Oh, no, I'm sorry, 1000 marbles. I've lost my 1000. Yes, there's 1000 marbles. Okay. 500 are red and 500 are blue. Your task, Chuck, is to pick out 100. So you go to trouble picking 150 or red, 50 or blue, and I say, do it again, and this time it's 47 and 53. And you keep saying again, right? And I smack my writing crop on the desk that you're sitting at. And I do it 100 times because it gets super turned on. Yeah, I do it 100 times because Dear Leader told me to. And at the end, you get a little bell curve and basically a plus or minus four, right? So, yeah, almost all of them, this is what's, a 95% confidence interval. Almost all of them are going to fall in that bell curve. There's going to be some outlaws, there's going to be that one time where it was just absolutely insane. You actually picked 100 red marbles randomly blindfolded from this jar. That's so insignificant statistically, it's just such an outlier. But almost all are going to be in there. So when you're pulling large group of people like American voters, and 95% of them are falling within a couple of percentage points of either side of this middle, you can pretty much feel confident about that. And that is the basis of election polling, of political polling, of all polling, really, that they have this built in margin that they know exists, but everybody can live with it. The problem is when you're hovering around that 50% mark and you're talking about a two party system, yeah, one of them has like, 51% and the other one has 49%. But there's a plus or minus of like, two points. That means flip a coin, America. It means we have no idea. And some people would say, well, why even do polling? Because what you're showing there is not who's going to win. That's not the point of pulling. The point of polling is to take a snapshot of how America or whoever you're polling is feeling that moment about who to elect, about what laws to pass, about religion, about the Cleveland Indians. It doesn't matter, right? That's what a poll does. But you can convert polls into making them talk a different language and say, hey, look at this percentage. You take these polls and you convert them into something else. Now you have something like a 95% chance this person is going to win. Go shout that we'll split her and we'll split her. Goes and shouts it as loud as he can. So we need to talk a little bit more about waiting. I mentioned earlier that there's other things they do to sort of tip the scale, and that sounds like a bad term, so I guess I shouldn't say it that way, but things they do to make it equitable and a true representative of the American population for instance, African American voters make up 12% of voters. So if they did a poll and in the end they only got 6% of respondents that were African American, then they just double it. Basically, if the respondents were overwhelmingly Caucasian they would wait that down to their true representative number which is about I think 66%. Yeah, the electorate is white and if white people respond or 80% of the people that respond to white, then they're going to kick that down. And again this is just adjusting the poll to the proper weight so you have a really legitimate snapshot. And if it sounds crazy that they are using 1000 people's responses and drawing that out to the size of the voting population of America, it is. But if you're a statistician it isn't. It reliably works as long as you present it with plus or minus this margin of error. It sounds crazy as just an average Joe on the street. It does. To be like they ask 1000 people and we're supposed to know and extrapolate that and the statistician who are number wonks and data wonks would say yeah, that's exactly what that means. Shut up, that's really all you need. But it really is a testimony to the power of those statistics and that data and the analysis of them. Yeah, waiting is really important. It goes far beyond just like age political party. I think Gallup uses eight different variables. The New York Times Sienna College poll uses ten and they include things like marital status and home ownership. Pew uses twelve variables. They ask things like do you have home internet access or do you engage in volunteerism? And all of these things have been shown to be associated. So like if you're a white woman aged 65 to 75 who volunteers twice a month and lives in the suburbs, you're a very specific person where there's a group of people out there who vote like a certain way and you represent all those people with that. So they'll wait the results based on these additional questions that you're answering. They don't just ask you are you going to vote for Trump or Biden? And there's also built into that question a really important point are you going to vote? Yeah. That's a huge thing we haven't talked about. It's one thing to pull registered voters, but here in America somehow presidential elections only get about 60% turnout still man, which is shameful and crazy. But that's another podcast. So most of the really good polls drill down and to get a real good representation of what might actually happen they try to drill down to whether or not you're most likely to actually vote. Right. Because who cares what you're paying is if you're not going to vote. They generally take your word for it that you're telling the truth. Pew has nine questions that they basically use to establish that you are planning on voting. Like you're actually going to. Vote. You're not full of hot air. Yeah, I don't know those questions are, but I imagine they have to do with do you know where your polling place is? Do you have transportation? Stuff like that. I was thinking they were going to be like, are you really going to vote? Was like question three. And they just kept adding release. So you've got these people who've been called and they have answered these questions and they have participated in the survey whether they wanted to or not. And they finally done it. Built into that margin of error built into this poll, is that understandable margin of error, that just comes from the fact that it's a randomized sample, right? But what Pew and any other legitimate polling group will point out is that the margin of error is actually greater than that, that the margin of error for the average poll, according to Pew, is that it's something more like six points, right? Not three or four, it's actually six. And the reason why is built on top of that margin of error that's automatically part of the poll just by the virtue of it being a randomized sample. Are things like the person typing in the wrong key accidentally? Those kinds of things add up or that the question isn't worded clearly enough, that anybody who hears it knows the intent and knows what their answer is, that there's some sort of miscommunication involved. There's also things that they can't control for, like people who have pseudo opinions who don't want to sound dumb, so they just answer yes or no based on something they really don't care about either way, and because they don't actually have an opinion that actually weights things the wrong way. So when you add all these stuff, these things up, you have these additional errors that lead to a bias overall in the poll which can affect the outcome. But again, the companies that have the money to conduct like these genuinely big gold standard polls, they know enough to know how to kind of factor control for those as much as possible. But still, what Pew says is if you're listening to a poll and somebody says plus or minus three points, you should probably go ahead and double that in your mind. Double it in your mind, double your pleasure, double your fun, double your margin error. So let's take a break and we're going to come back and talk about what exactly they think went wrong with those state polls right after this. All right, so I think it's generally acknowledged that 26, and again, I want to say the polling was off, but apparently the polling wasn't off, but the way it was reported on was off. But what really happened in 2016, what was off was the state polling and what they think they've, like you said, gone back and obsessed over these polls since then because they were already statistical walks. But when something like this happens, they really sort of get worked into a dander and get to the bottom of it. I mean, people were calling for the end of polling. They just said it was a failed profession. Basically, Pew is like, I'm getting rich off this, man. Yeah, we can't end polling. Jimmy Pew was like, Stop talking like that. So what happened in 2016 is, they think, is that a lot of non educated white people came out in big numbers for Donald Trump. And that was sort of not a new factor because they had always talked about college education, but a new factor in how outsized of a factor that was. It had never been that outsized. And so all these state pollsters, they didn't wait it, and they didn't adjust their polls to reflect this fact that college educated people are more likely going to respond to these surveys. So their polls were just off. Yeah. And they knew that college educated people were more likely to respond to the surveys. That wasn't news to them. What caught them sleeping was that they had not picked up on the fact that this group of people, non college educated white voters, were going to go to the polls in numbers like never before and that they were going to vote for Trump. They did not pick up on that. That was brand new, that didn't exist before. Trump basically brought up a new electorate that helped get him elected, especially in battleground states like Wisconsin, in Michigan and Indiana, although I think Indiana, he was a shooting because of Pence. But this group of voters that did not exist, or this line between college educated and non college educated white voters, that partisan gulf hadn't existed before Election Day. The pollsters didn't pick up on it. And so they didn't wait those responses because they never had to wait the responses before based on college education. Yeah. So suburbs, exurbs, and especially the rural vote counted like it had never counted before. Which is obviously why you see what's going on right now, like a very hard push by the Trump campaign to get these same people out again in the way that they do that. That's the nicest way I can put it. It genuinely is the idea that it was already kind of a close race, a closer race than was being broadcast, that these huge electoral battleground states that got flipped, that was basically the reason that Trump was able to take the Electoral College. But the idea is that these voters kind of came out of nowhere and voted for Trump, and that there were some other things that happened, too, that the pollster didn't anticipate. One, that the undecided voters, people who said, I'm legitimately undecided at this point, a week before the election, from what I read, they broke hard in favor of Trump on Election Day. When they made their decision, they voted for Trump. That hadn't been predicted. That was another big one. And then one of the other things, too, is that the polls were just doing what polls do, which is sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. Polls going to poll. But polls had gotten so good in the 2000 odds that people came to be overconfident in their ability to predict and pick winners. And the 2016 brace reminded us, polling is not perfect. Let's stop pretending it is. Yeah. And a lot of it has to do with, like, we've been kind of harping on the way the media presents it. And then a lot of that has to do with just how we're conditioned to look at things like underdogs. And it's different in politics. And I remember when these aggregators, especially at 538, they had these predictive models, and they started talking about the fact that and I think the Washington Post even wrote a good comparison to sports. And if someone is a real big underdog going into like a Super Bowl or a World Series, and they end up winning, people don't get angry and go after the people who said they had a 15 or 20% chance of winning. They just said, wow, what a story. The underdog won. Right. But there are so few presidential elections, one every four years, that it's the same thing, but people just look at it differently. Trump was an underdog that supposedly had like a 15% to 30% chance of winning. Some people said one. Yeah, well, that's ridiculous. But a 30% chance of winning is a real shot at winning, for sure. Yeah, the way it's framed it doesn't seem that way in politics. No, and so that's one thing. But another thing is that we shouldn't even be talking about presidential elections with like 15% chance of winning, 99% chance of winning. That is not how we should present it. And that's not how we used to present it. We used to present it saying, like, this poll found that Clinton was going to lead Trump 52% to 48%, or something like that, plus or minus two points. And that would have shown you, like, okay, well, this is a really close race, way closer than I think, and that's that there's my information. The problem is that you can take that same statistic, 52% chance of winning, plus or minus a four point margin of error. If you convert that to a normal distribution, you come up with an 84% probability of a win. That's the problem, is that the statistics that are being, the data that's being produced by these polls are being converted in ways that they shouldn't be. And then that's what the media jumps on. That's what the public lapse up, because that is the horse race statistic, an 84% chance of winning, a 15% chance of winning. That's what we think about, that's what we look at. And so rather than realizing that actually this is a close race, 52% plus or minus four points, we see 84% chance of winning. And that's a foregone conclusion that that person is going to win. That, ultimately, is where the media and the public are culpable for this. Yeah, I don't think they were meant to be extrapolated like that to begin with. They weren't. And that polls are valuable. But I haven't looked at any polls, and partially because of the way 2016 went down, and in fact, for the past week, I've taken a complete Internet news and social media break, and it's been pretty great, actually. So liberating yeah, I mean, I literally haven't looked at a single news thing. I very sadly found out that Chadwick Bozeman passed away, like, three days afterward. Oh, wow. That's how dark I've gone. And not looking at the Internet unless it's something that brings me joy, which is to say, old Led Zeppelin and Van Halen YouTube videos. I was looking up classic Mad magazine covers of the other day. That's all I've been doing, is if it doesn't bring me joy on the Internet, I'm not doing it. That's good. And I got to break that soon because I do think you should be active and involved in the know. Yeah, but taking a break fairly regularly is definitely mentally healthy for me. But that aside, I'm not looking at any polls. I don't care what any poll says. Well, see, so I was thinking very similar stuff, too. What's the point of polls? I don't know. Okay, well, I finally found it. If you look that up on Google, there's just very little on it. But I found somebody who explained it pretty well. I thought that polls aren't meant to tell you who's going to win. They're not forecasting models, like I said before, they're meant to be like a snapshot of how whoever you're polling feels at the moment. Right. And in doing that, because you are sampling American people and these are independent news organizations typically, who are carrying out these polls, you get to tell everybody else how America is feeling, rather than the leaders saying, I'll decide how you're feeling. I can decide what you want and what you need and what you think is important. Polls prevent that from happening by telling the rest of the people, hey, this is how everybody else is feeling right now, too. And in some ways, it is kind of sheepleish where the idea is like, oh, is that supposed to sway my opinion that everybody's going to vote for this person and not for that person? That should have no bearing or impact on your vote. And it feels like that's how polls are used sometimes, but if you step back and look and see that they're actually kind of an important part of sharing what other people are thinking rather than being told what we're thinking or what to think, then they actually are pretty legitimate in that sense. Yeah. Well, I say take your polls and sit on it. Well, one more thing. We cannot talk about polling and not talk about Internet polling real quick. This is a completely different style of polling than it's ever been done before. Rather than a randomized sample, you actually just say, hey, you want to take the survey? And people click it. So it's called opting in. Opt in surveying. And very specific kinds of people take surveys on purpose on the Internet because they're new. They're really now figuring out how to wait these things or not and how to use them because they can produce legitimate data, but it depends on who's conducting the poll, if they know what they're doing, that kind of stuff. But just like everything else, the moving things online is democratized polling. And so anybody can conduct a poll now and basically enter the news cycle. That's how Kid Rock almost became a senator in Michigan for a second there. On the one hand, it's good, but it's also we're in a big period of disruption as far as polling is concerned. So for you, the polling consumer, either go like Chuck and just stop listening to polls altogether or look for things like transparency. Do you recognize the company or the name that produced the poll? Are they sharing their data? Like how the questions exactly were worded, what their population size was, how they waited, and all this stuff. If all that stuff is included, you can probably trust the poll. And then beyond that, just remember what you're looking at. This isn't a predictor of who's going to win. It was a snapshot for a very brief moment of a very specific sample of America to show how people would vote right then. And it was right then, too. This is not Election Day we're talking about. Yeah, I want to be clear. I'm not poopooing polls. They're valid and useful, but I just don't care to look at them right now. I understand. Yeah, that's my jam. Well, you got anything else about poles? Nothing else about poles. Well, if you want to know about poles, start looking around and go check out Pew stuff and Sideline stuff and all that stuff. And since I said stuff three times, here comes Rumple Stilton or Candy Man. So this is from Keeley Price, and Kelly says this hi, guys. I'm writing today not only to confess my unending love for Stuff you should know, but also to share a link to some black owned bookstores. It would be so cool if all of your listeners purchased your book. She should just say period. Comma from a black owned bookstore. Couldn't agree more. By the way, a couple of podcasters that I listen to while I wait for Stuff You Should Know have books out and coming out soon, and they encourage their listeners to support black owned businesses through the purchase of their book. It's a winwin. I don't know why it's taking me so long to think to write this to you guys. I blame it on Corona madness. But last but not least, I'll say I love The End of the World with Josh Clark and Movie Crush as well. Any chance to hear you guys talk is a chance worth taking when we get a COVID vaccine and you guys can do your live shows again, please come to Nashville. Oh, yeah, for sure. I think we planned on Nashville. Yeah, Nashville got scuttled by COVID this time around. We were going to come. Now we might not ever be able to come. No, I know it's super close to Atlanta. I'd lose my mind if I got to see you guys here. All the best. Kelly price. And so Kelly sent a link to a handy website that lists black owned bookstores near you. I made a little URL shortener to make it easier on everyone. Oh, let's have it. So you can go to Bit Lee Syskblm Nice and find blackout bookstores near you to purchase stuff you should know an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. At the very least, we like to encourage people to go to Indybound.org and support indie bookstores. I don't know if there is an actual blackowned indie book store website, but I would imagine most of the black owned bookstores are indie bookstores. Yeah, probably. So check it out, Bit Leeksskblm, go out and buy our book, everybody. You're going to love it. It's really great. And thanks for that, Chuck. And thanks for setting us up for that too, Keely. Much appreciated. We'll see you in Nashville. I guess Kelly will be the one. Like she said, losing your mind in the crowd. If you want to lose your mind on us via email, we love that kind of thing. Kind of. You can 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." | |
45ac9a9e-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-432749e2ff53 | Short Stuff: Mitsuye Endo | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-mitsuye-endo | In today's short stuff, we look at another amazing woman who has all but been ignored by history. The story of Mitsuye Endo. | In today's short stuff, we look at another amazing woman who has all but been ignored by history. The story of Mitsuye Endo. | Wed, 03 Jul 2019 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=184, tm_isdst=0) | 11529862 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You weren't about to let any cyberatch slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry over there. So it's short stuff because it's shorter. That's right. And this is one of my favorite kinds of short stuff. Kind of tailor made for a short stuff when you have a little bit of information about a great person in history who never got their due, but there's not a lot much more known about them. Right. So you can talk about her in this case in 12 minutes or so. Her and him. Yeah, good point. So it will be 13 minutes. That's right. And this is the story on the her part of Mitsuy Endo. Nicely done. I think so. I'm pretty sure too. Okay. Mitsuy Endo was born in Sacramento. Wait, where was she born? Sacramento, California. Which is an important point here, Chuck, because from being born in Sacramento, California in 1920, she was an American citizen. Natural born. That's right. She was one of four kids to Japanese immigrants and got a job working for the government. She went to secretary school and then worked as a secretary for the Department of Employment. Full blooded born American working for the state government. Right. And she was working for the state government in December of 1000, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. And the sentiment toward the Japanese in America turned sharply at that point. So much so that I believe the next year the president at the time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an executive order called Executive Order 966, which we have recorded on before. That's right. We did a whole episode on this. But Executive Order 966 basically said anyone of Italian American, German American or Japanese American ancestry is basically fair game to have their constitutional and civil rights utterly stripped from them during this crisis of wartime just because we're not sure if they might do something hinky to disrupt America's wartime effort. Right. So within just a few months of December 7, 1941, the United States dismissed all Japanese American state employees, which included Mitsuy Indo. Hundreds of people affected. And 63 of those people were brave enough to get together and challenge the firings. And they had a little backing by the Japanese American Citizens League. And they got together and they hired a very cool dude, an attorney named James C. Purcell yeah. Who was not at all Japanese, had no Japanese ancestry and whatsoever. He just saw that this was not right. He saw something that wasn't right and he decided to take on this case. And so being summarily fired because you are of Japanese ancestry, not a Japanese immigrant, but like an American born person of Japanese ancestry, that's bad enough. But under this executive order, in this kind of wartime hysteria, things got way worse for Japanese Americans, especially ones on the West Coast, because part of this executive order was basically like, hey, military, do what you need to do in the military said, well, we figured we should probably clear the West Coast of anybody like that. We're going to forcibly remove Japanese Americans from their homes and eventually into internment camps. And that's the episode we did. Yeah, Japanese internment. It was a good one. So they're basically incarcerated, she and her family, and we should point out that her brother was serving in the US. Army. That's a huge point. It is a huge point. Her family was moved. She was moved a couple of times. They were at Tuli Lake at one point, which is a very famous internment camp that I think is still around. It's like a living museum. But eventually she was separated from her family. They started by trying to keep families together, and then they just stopped doing that. And people like Mitsuy Endo ended up being separated from her family, forced into a prison. It was a detainment detention center, if that sounds familiar. Yeah, exactly. So Purcell is on the case. He's got to be in his bonnet to help these people out, and he's trying to build a case. And what he needs is to find somebody, just one person, who will step forward and who is brave enough to challenge their incarceration through habeas corpus petition, which is to say that basically, hey, I shouldn't be incarcerated and I'm officially, legally challenging my incarceration. Right. It means bring me the body. It's part of the Magna Carta, I think, where it basically says, bring the prisoner to me, the judge, and let me decide if they're being held illegally or not. We did an episode on that, too, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, we definitely did something at some point on habeas corpus. So Mitsuyendo was a perfect test case or challenge case for this to purcel, because she was a Methodist, she was a citizen, a natural born citizen of the US. Her brother was in the army, and she'd never even been to Japan in her entire life. But there's a big part of this, despite her just perfect presentation for a case like this, you had to convince her, too. And part of Japanese culture is you don't stand out, number one, you certainly don't stand out by making trouble for the authorities. So it was extraordinarily brave when she finally agreed to be the test case for all Japanese Americans who are being unconstitutionally treated by the US. Yeah, that was what did it when he said, hey, listen, this is not for you, this is for everyone, and still slightly reluctant, she agreed and saw the bigger picture. And we're going to talk about the rest of her story and Purcells right after this. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about summer. I mean, what's not to like? School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where True crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah, and with so many killer shows like Morbid, my favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and lighthearted analysis. 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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. Okay, Chuck. So Mitsuy Endo has agreed to have her case taken by Purcell on to basically challenge all of executive order 966 and the constitutionality of it. Right. And I think in pretty short order, this case was people in government knew what was going on on the federal level, and they found out who she was and what her story was. And I think early on, they were kind of like, oh, yeah, this probably doesn't look good for us. Wait, she's a Methodist. Oh, God, this doesn't look great for us. So, you know what? Let her out. She'll be fine. And just let her out, because I think we probably did the wrong thing here. But she said no. And I guess also at Purcell's urging, she stayed and turned and said, this is a societal issue. There's something much larger at play, and I want to carry this all the way to the top in the court system. Yeah. Because the government said, if you just drop this and go away, we'll let you out specifically. And she said no. That's pretty cool, man. Yeah. So she said no. And they kept the case up all the way to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court heard it and just ruled unanimously that, no, this is totally unconstitutional. What's happened to her? It wasn't so much that the Supreme Court case, their decision in the Endo case, that it closed the Japanese internment camps, japanese American internment camps. That wasn't what happened. What happened was it produced the pressure that convinced Roosevelt to shut down the internment camps. Yeah. This is fairly cowardly. I think in the end they did the, quote, unquote, right thing, but it was only because this was looming. Apparently there was inside word, and they got tipped off that like, hey, the Supreme Court is going to come down against you, Roosevelt, basically. And so the day before the Supreme Court handed down their decision, roosevelt came out and they said, oh, you know what, we're just going to end this internment thing right here. Right. And then the next day, the Supreme Court made public their decision, and Endo, which was yeah, cowardly. I think it's a pretty good word about it, but there's no way of getting around that. It was the Endo case that was the pressure that closed the internment camps. So much so that there's a law professor named Amanda Tyler, who is an expert on the case. She said that she's interviewed survivors of the Japanese internment camps japanese American internment camps, sorry. Who consider Purcell, as they refer to him, as the man who set us free. Pretty amazing. It is pretty amazing. And Endo herself is very much regarded as a hero from this, too. But she kept such a low profile that her own daughter didn't even know the impact that she'd had until her daughter was well into her twenty s. Yeah. She eventually made her way to Chicago after all this washed over. She worked as a secretary for the Mayor's Committee on Race Relations. A couple of years after that, married a man named Kenneth Tsutsumi, and she had met him in an internment camp. Like, tell me this isn't a movie waiting to be made. For sure. They went on to have three kids, and she kept a pretty low profile after that. Like you said, was not a braggart, but it was a big deal. And I think as this has come out more in recent years, she's definitely gotten her due in certain corners. I wish the story was out wider, that's one reason we're doing this. But she lived in Chicago for the rest of her life, eventually, very sadly, died of cancer in 2006, and For Sale kept practicing law right into his 80s, as a matter of fact. Yeah, that's great. So this is noteworthy still today is that law professor Amanda Tyler points out. Because there's an ongoing debate over whether the executive. The president and the executive branch has ultimately absolute power when it comes to matters of national security. Especially during wartime. Or if the courts still have a check. As the Constitution suggests that they do. Over the executive's actions. No matter what it is or no matter what the situation is that the executive can't be absolutely right. No matter what. And unquestioned by the court. Yes. And I think by constitution suggest, you mean the Constitution clearly lays out in demands, right? Well, it depends on your interpretation. Right? Yeah, I guess so. I guess that's it for Short Stuff again, chuck, nice selection. I think Mitsuy Endo needs a parade every year in her honor. Agreed. Thanks a lot for joining us. Hope you enjoyed it. Until next time, short stuff. Adios stuff. You should know this 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." | |
Can you control your dreams? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/can-you-control-your-dreams | In a lucid dream, the sleeper is aware that he or she is in a dream state. Does that mean you can control these dreams? Where did this concept come from? Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to find out more about lucid dreaming. | In a lucid dream, the sleeper is aware that he or she is in a dream state. Does that mean you can control these dreams? Where did this concept come from? Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to find out more about lucid dreaming. | Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:15:49 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=14, tm_min=15, tm_sec=49, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=174, tm_isdst=0) | 25126608 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from howstuckworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Joe, I'm flying. Chuck Bryan is sleeping right now. I'm flying. He appears to be having some sort of dream, possibly a lucid dream. I'm flying. Are you awake, Chucky? That's so lame. It was. Should we keep it? Sure. Okay. Yeah. How was your sleep? You feeling refreshed? I am. I'm feeling great and awake. And you were flying just now? I was. Were you aware that you were flying in the dream and that maybe that's a little abnormal? I was. Well, Chuck, my friend, you were having what is called a lucid dream. Wow. We should talk about that. Yeah, we should. This is podcast gold. You just happen to be having a lucid dream. So weird. And both of us have the How Lucid Dreams Work article in front of us. Right in front of us, written by Katie Lambert. Yeah. Who's actually an editor by day and apparently a Lucid Dream writer by night. Right. And we should say that we have probably gotten more fan mail requests for Lucid Dream podcast than any other I mean, literally dozens and dozens of requests for this. So we can't read down the list of names, because I haven't kept them, but this is for all of you. Yes. Thanks to all of you for writing in and saying, do it now. So we are yes. This is it. Let's just get this over with, shall we? I think so. We're going to teach you how to lose a dream so you won't ever have to. You can do it yourself, which I find interesting. Are you planning on doing this? I'm going to try it, for sure. I'm going to try to if I can remember, I get very tired before I sleep. I've heard that. Yeah. So back to the beginning, right? All right, Chuck. So while you were flying in your dream yes. The fact that you were aware that you were flying and that it was weird and aware that it was dreaming, right? Correct. Yeah. Okay. That is what makes it a lucid dream. That's pretty much it. A lucid dream is a dream where we realize we're dreaming. Right. That's the hallmark of it. Right. You're still dreaming, and you can control what happens in your dream. That, my friend, is up for debate. Oh, is it? Yes. The control part is up for debate. Will be that way. It's not me, buddy. I would never say that to you if other people hadn't already. There is a big debate, actually, over not whether or not lucid dreams exist, that it's taken as fact. True. But whether or not we can control what goes on in our dreams. Sure. Which is the other aspect of lucid dreaming. Right. Generally, did you adjust your yacht at any point in time while you're flying? You have great y'all control, do you? Really? Nice. So, Chuck, let's kick this puppy off, shall we? Okay. Are you going to kick this puppy off? You know, lucid dreaming has been around for a while. Truckers. Yes. I think they said they traced it back to the even though even before Aristotle. Right. You know what's funny is you just confused your research for body dysmorphic disorder. Oh, did I? Yeah. Which we'll get to in about 20 minutes, right? Or two or three days for you folks. Yeah. Okay. Yes. Aristotle, much further back than the 1800, wrote about lucid dreaming. He did. He didn't call it lucid dreaming, but he described it in one of his writings. And apparently Tibetan Buddhists have been engaged in trying to control their dreams. Lucid dreaming not quite as far back as Aristotle, if I'm incorrect, because I think Aristotle came a thousand or so years before Buddha, but they have something called dream yoga. Yeah, that sounds pretty cool. It does. The name alone sounds pretty cool. Have you ever done yoga? Yeah, it's pretty difficult. I found it difficult. It is. I don't like bending over. Right. Plus, I think being a slightly overweight 38 year old is not the time to start doing yoga. Well, apparently there's never a wrong time to start, but you kind of have to go in and go, I'm going to shoot a duck at some point in time. It's a young man's sport, if you ask me. It is. It requires more yacht control than either one of us are capable of. Downward dog. So tell me a little bit about dream yoga, Chucker. Josh. Dream yoga, as you said, Buddhist. Why are you giggling? That's funny. Your goal there is to probe your consciousness and basically it's sort of like enlightenment. Bring yourself to a constant state of awareness. Right? Because I mean, which is a tenant of Buddhism, just to see things as they are. But why waste all of your conscious awareness on, I guess, waking life? Why take time off while you're sleeping? So apparently dream yoga is actually like being cognizant that you're dreaming and then saying, okay, why am I dreaming about this? Or why is that dog attacking me rather than curling up in my feet? Right. So it's a goal for constant awareness. And they figured, hey, why take the night off? Let's just carry this right into sleep. Right? Because that's what Buddhists do. They have a work ethic like you would not believe, my son. How do you feel about that? About people going up to like, the mountains and just meditating their entire lives? Productive member of society or no? Oh, yeah, why not? What are they doing? That's the most egocentric pursuit a human can engage in. You think? Sequestering yourself from the rest of humanity to achieve nirvana or enlightenment. I love it. And just probably dying the moment you get it. What's the point? What have you done as a social animal, which humans are by nature. You have brought nothing to the table. You probably didn't even bother to reproduce while you're up there. Well, I think there are many paths, my friend, in that you don't have to be a contributing member of society to be validated as a human. You're a hippie. I think I'm just jealous. I would love to spend the rest of my life on a mountaintop. Oh, my God. I would get so bored. I would drive myself crazy if I had to be alone in a cave. See, that's nice. I would go nuts. All right, so that's dream yoga, which is also called nondual awareness, right? It's another name for it. Yeah, which mystics like to call it, but it's essentially the same thing. It's exploring what's going on in your dreams and trying to figure out why, which actually kind of falls into one camp of the explanation for dreams. Right. It's pretty much split down the middle between physiological and psychological. That would subscribe to the psychological camp that when we dream, we're basically our innermost fears, desires. You know how when they say, like, a drunk person the words of a drunk man or the thoughts of a Soberman yeah. Invino verratus, I think. Is that right? Well, I mean, similar concept. My goodness. Chuck, you like that? And wine. There's truth, of course. We all know that. Got you. Sure, man. I'm impressed with you right now. Because I spoke a dead language. Yes. It's not dead, though. You're going to get us some list in our mail. I know. So the psychological camp, which was spearheaded by Sigmund Freud, said that our dreams are trying to tell us something. Essentially, your mind is telling you something like, hey, you eat way too many donuts because your mother neglected to breastfeed you. Something like that. Sure. Especially along the Freudian lines because everything was about sex and specifically having sex with your mother. To Freud. Yeah. A lot of it came back to that, for sure. Although he did say sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. That is true as well. But no, to him, anything that was even slightly phallic in nature, representative phallus, and anything that was an opening or a hole or something like that was vaginal in nature. He saw the world very much in black and white. He did. And he was the product of his society, the uber repressed Victorian society. Right, true. So, I mean, his theories were kind of dated. Yeah, I guess so. And he lucid dream. Not that I am aware of. You know who did? Sure. A Dutch psychiatrist named Frederick von Aidan. He's the guy who came up with the word lucid dreaming. And he was actually very much into his dreams. He kept count of them, and he found that he flew in a lot of them and apparently that he could control them. And this is where the term lucid dreaming came from. Pretty cool. He also said that there were nine different kinds of dreams and only nine. I'd like to see that list. I didn't see that list anywhere. I know, but I could see that. Yeah. My dreams are generally kind of I can categorize in nine different groups. I find the number nine daunting. That's a lot of different dreams I have to have at night. I don't want that kind of responsibility. Right. Well, I don't think you always have to have all nine. I think that's just the broad category they would fall under. Okay. You may always have dreams that you're naked at work, which means whatever. I'm not even sure what that means. I don't either. What do you think that means? I don't know. I mean, when you go to dream books and things like that, there's usually a bunch of different conflicting theories. I used to have a dream that my teeth were either falling out or chattering and I've heard different explanations for them. Joking me. Have you had that one, too? No, it's that wow, it's that jamai vu again. No, it's not. It's deja vu. No, it's not. It's you bringing up something that's already been brought up. Have I said this before? Dude, this happens a lot. Chuck, eggs Benedict. All right, mopeda okay. I mean, come on. Chuck sorry, I have no explanation for this. So I think if you are having a lucid dream where you're in control and you still show up to work naked, does that make you a sicko? Yes. Okay. For sure. Well, check lucid dreaming and the fact that it's even a concept that's being discussed right now. The only reason we schlovez are talking about it is because of a guy named Steven Labour. Yes. He's kind of the leading researcher for this. He's a Stanford guy. Stanford man psychophysiologist. Yes. Which I imagine you get some schooling to get that title. Yeah. Probably some dark days in that man's life with that kind of title. Yeah. And he got one from Stanford, which legitimizes him to a certain extent, in my opinion. Right. He calls himself a dream sailor, which delegitimizes him to a certain extent, in my opinion. I would call myself a psychophysiologist. Yeah, no doubt. Yeah. He's the leading man in this category. And he runs workshops, actually, where he will teach you how to lucid dream. And apparently they ain't cheap. No. A few thousand dollars. Right? Yeah. And he'll also say that, and I'm not saying this guy is a scammer, of course it might be completely valid, but he says sometimes it'll take you several months of this to several workshops, right. Several paychecks to learn how to lucid dream. And you can either go to Dr. LaBarge's lucid dreaming workshop or you can just read this article because there's some actual methods of teaching how to lucid dream. Right. We're not going to do that right now, though, are we? No, I think we should talk a little bit about dreaming part of the brain. Remember I said that there's two camps psychological, right. And then the physiological sure. The physiological kind of came onto the scene in 1977, I believe. Came on like gangbusters. Well, Josh, I think before we can talk about how to lucid dream, we should talk about what lucid dreaming actually is on the not biological, but the physiological. Psychological. Yeah, that's the other camp. There's a psychological and then there's the physiological as well. We do know that lucid dreaming occurs during REM sleep, which is the fifth sleep stage, when your body is just basically motionless. Your body is literally paralyzed. Right. Figuratively paralyzed. And you don't have any sensory input as far as anybody knows. And you can't move except for your eyelids. Yeah, your eyelids. And this Stephen character has researched set up studies where they would have a pre planned eye movement. Correct. When you feel yourself falling into a lucid dream, you would signal the researcher, hey, I'm having a lucid dream now. Right. So Labour's and some of his crew hooked up some people who, I guess, reportedly had lucid dreams to an electroencephalogram and measured their brain activity, the electrical activity in their brains. And then yeah. Prearranged a signal. Did you get the impression what the signal was? But maybe it flooded or something like that? I don't know. Maybe a certain pattern of eye flutters or something. Basically, it was somebody communicating from their dream state. Yeah, they were saying, I'm having a lucid dream right now. That is super creepy and super cool. Yeah, but that's the closest that's the only evidence that we have, the only physical evidence that we have that there is such thing as lucid dreams. Right. But it actually worked, right? It did work. And that's not really supposed to happen, Chuck. Basically, our brain is supposed to be shut down. Or at least the part of the brain that is capable of sending a message from the dream world to the waking life world, where a bunch of people are standing around you in white lab coats, like watching your eyelids. Good point. Thanks. Very astute. Thanks. So, Chuck, what was that? I don't know what's going on in the actual brain that could explain lucid dreaming because we should be basically slaves to our dream state. Well, there's a doctor at Berkeley, this Matthew Walker. Matthew Walker. He's a New York cardiologist. Is he really? No, he's the director of a sleep lab in California at Berkeley. And I think this theory kind of makes sense to me. The lateral prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that deals with logic. And what he thinks is during REM sleep, this part of the brain is supposed to be asleep, but he thinks it's possible that it actually wakes up. So your dream state and logic are both firing at the same time. So the dreamer is able to kind of recognize that you're actually dreaming, right. Because if the logical part of your brain is working, you'd be like, I don't really fly. Of course I must be dreaming or I'm falling now and I'm going to die. Yes. Or another common dream. How about, apparently lucid dreams are often sexy dreams? True level of control, erotic in nature. Yeah, I have a lot of celebrity dreams where I'm friends with some of my celebrity heroes. I have them all the time. Well, not all the time. I have, like, five or six really detailed good ones a year that I'm, like, buddying around with Larry David or Gene Wean. Bow and Luke Duke. Yeah. Bow and Luke Duke. The three of us. I'm riding shotgun. I do, though. My wife Emily always cracks up. She thinks it's funny. So, Chuck, let's undermine Steven labairs. Thousands of dollars per workshop. Come on. And teach people how to have lucid dreams. Okay, let's do it. At the very least, we're going to give you a few techniques that you could try. We make absolutely no claims that this will work, so don't even try to sue us if it doesn't. But it's worth a shot. I think it makes sense. The first thing you have to be good at is dream recall. That's kind of like the set up you should do is keep a dream diary, they say, a dream journal. And keep some paper and a pen next to your bed. And when you wake up, write down what you're dreaming, even if it's in the middle of the night. And as you do that, you'll become more attuned to the process, and you'll kind of train yourself to remember your dreams. Yeah. So that's a good start. Yeah. And another good technique, I guess, is Mnemonic induction of lucid dreaming. You heard of this one, mild Miles? Yes. Blame this one of the bears'techniques. Yeah. So apparently he's giving it away. Sure. Basically what you do is when you wake up from a dream, you try to recall it important. And then as you're going back to sleep, this apparently would work best in the middle of the night. Right. When you go back to sleep, you keep reminding yourself that you're about to start dreaming. Pretty soon, you're going to dream again, and you actually want to go back to the last dream you had. Right. So you're controlling things from the outset, and then once you get to that dream again, you want to actively look for what Laborish calls dream signs. The dream sailor calls these dream signs detail. Right, right. Well, like if you have wings or you're flying. Right. So you're looking for these kinds of things, and you remind yourself that you're dreaming, and that apparently puts you in the driver's seat of your dreams and can give you lucid dreams that you're in control of it. I would have called myself the Dreamweaver. I would never call you that. Okay. And this is a little extra research. Josh, I'm going to lay on you. There's some old Mexican and Indian techniques in their cultures where you can look at your hands during a dream. Have you heard that one? No. Apparently, if you look at your hands during a dream, that's a signal that you can take control of it from that point on. But I guess you would have to be in control to look at your hands in the dream. So I don't know about that one. Yeah, but I'd be more willing to trust some, like, ancient culture practice than this crackpot out in California. Well, they have more staying power. Yeah, for sure. I'm going to try that one. I'm going to try and see if I can look at my hands, because I don't notice if I even see my hands in my dreams. My all time favorite lucid dreaming technique is called reality testing. Yes. Late on me. And it actually falls in line with the Buddhist dream yoga, where basically you walk around all day going, I'm in my waking state. I'm in conscious reality. Like, when I turn this door knob, this door is going to open, and it's just going to be regular room behind it because I can predict things because this world is based on rationality and logic. Right, right. So you basically just remind yourself that you're not dreaming all day in the hopes that when you start to dream, you will be aware of the separation, the border between our dream state and waking life. And you can carry this over and say, now I'm dreaming, right. When I open this door, there's going to be, like, an eight headed dog on the other side. Do you have to speak like that in your dreams? I've heard it helps. Okay. Yeah, good. That's how I talk when I'm dreaming, when I'm reminding myself of anything. Like, no, I've got to take the garbage out tonight. I should really not drink this evening, that kind of thing. Yeah, I know. That's a dream. Nova Dreamer. You want to talk about this thing? Yes. This is an actual contraption that the same doctor in California laborious has built, I guess. And Katie describes it as a cross between a sleep mask and goggles. So you wear this puppy when you go to sleep, and what it does is when it knows you're in REM sleep, sensors track your eye movements to let it know, and then it shines a light in your eye. Right. It's kind of like looking at your hands. Yeah. The ancient technique. But you have a reliable reminder. Right. So it shines a light in your eye and then your dream. I mean, I guess you stay asleep. I personally would wake up if someone shined a line in my eye and be like, what's that? Yeah, exactly. And so that's the signal. You know you're dreaming at the time, and you just take it from there. Yeah. Can we be done with this now? Well, I think the dreamweaver the $25,000 question. Josh, have you ever had a lucid dream? You know what, Chuck? I don't remember my dreams very often. Yes, I have. Once. Let's hear it. Do you really want to hear it? Well, a truncated version. Sure. The 22 minutes version. Yeah. I had a theme song. Okay. I wasn't actually a pimp, but kind of like in the very slangy version of the word pimp. Like, it's just kind of walking along like, what's up? Sure, my dog ran past me, but she was a balloon dog. Like a balloon animal. Cool. And that was about it. That was about all I remember. But it was one of the very few times where I was ever like, this is cool. And that, to me, is about the same as I'm dreaming. Right. I was enjoying this dream while I was in the dream. You know what I mean? Yeah. I think that's probably the closest I've had to a lucid dream. Ask me. Well, Chuck, is the time for listener mail. Chuck, tell me about your lucid dream, buddy. Well, I don't have one specifically, but it does happen to me from time to time okay. Where I'll be aware that I'm dreaming and really digging the dream and manipulating where I'm going in the dream. Where do you go? Well, wherever disney World. Wherever I feel like at the time. So where proven I'm a dream sailor, so you can't box me in wherever the high seas take me. So, yeah, I've lucid dreamt, and I also am pretty good at waking up from a dream that I was really enjoying and falling back asleep and going back into that dream. You just love to tease yourself, huh? Yeah. And I'm a light sleeper. Have you ever heard that if you tell people about your dreams, if you have a nightmare and you tell somebody the nightmare in detail, like, you won't have it again? I have not. What's up with that? And I've had plenty of recurring dreams, too. Oh, well, if you ever have a dream that you're saddled with a nightmare or something like that, the sooner you tell somebody about it, the more likely you are to not have it the next time you go to sleep. Dr. Clark Speaks. Yes, that's it for me. We're going to do a big dream podcast at some point. Yeah, we're going to do that How Dreams Work article is thick and voluminous and filled with stats and numbers, and Chuck and are drilling over it. So look for how dreaming works in the future. Absolutely. Until then, Chuck, let's do a listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this stuff we should know. And I also have a special little shout out at the end of it. Oh, really? Has nothing to do with the mail. Okay, so this is from Mason in Ames, Iowa, and remember when we talked about the carbon dioxide pipelines and how there's never been any accident deaths and that kind of thing? Right. And there's been accidents but no fatality. Wait, hold on. How did it go? Let's listen. We're talking between 1986 and 2006, there's only been twelve CO2 pipeline leaks with no injuries. And none. Yeah, none. And over the same period, more than 5000 accidents within 107 fatalities. With liquid petroleum, it sounds like CO2 pipelines are way safer, but there's a lot fewer. Yeah. Boy, that was a good one. That was awesome. Woop. Woop, indeed. So Mason says, Greetings, Joshua's and Chuck Arena. Which is a little casual, I thought. I thought so too. Mason Chuck to you. Mason. He says he just listened to the CCS carbon capture podcast. He's using CCS to impress his friends. Yeah, and he actually wrote down abbreviation, which I thought was kind of funny. I wonder if I can't say he grew up in a small town called Muleshoe, Texas, and he says that should make my listener mail readworthy already. And he's right. But he said he grew up 13 miles west of Mule Shoe and about 5 miles from my house. There was a station on a carbon dioxide pipeline that tapped the CO2 and stored it in those huge cylindrical tanks. And it was shipped on big semi trucks from that plant. She says way back in 2002, there was a catastrophic failure in one of the tanks and it actually killed a worker and injured three others. So the explosion shook all the dishes in our house from 5 miles away. That's pretty hardcore. And his father, who was an Air Force pilot, said he initially thought the noise was sonic boom from a jet. So he said it didn't result from a leaking pipeline. But if there would have been no pipeline, there would have been no accident. Yeah, well, sorry about that, Mason. Sorry we overlooked the local tragedy there in Mule Shoe. I'm surprised we didn't hear about that. Yeah. And now, Josh, for our special little shout out. What is it, Took? This is to Sully, who is how's the one of your pal? Yeah, it's a little kid. His mom wrote in, his mum Kristen wrote in from Southern California. And I know Jerry was a big fan of this email as well, and if you read them, you would be as well. And Sully Sullivan, he sounds like a really cool little kid. He's about my nephew's age eleven and years old, I think. Yeah, my cousin, my nephew Noah, who was a very cool, smart kid. And they are both big fans of Mythbusters and they're really smart and into school and stuff. And Kristin just wrote us into thinks and I'm not going to read her email, but we just wanted to say hi to Sully and thanks for listening, little buddy. Stay in school, keep studying, drink your milk, keep up what you're doing because your mom says you're a really cool, groovy kid. He loves Modest Mouse. Right on. At eleven. I mean, come on. And they might be giants. Nice. And I believe my nephew Noah is a big day. Might be Giants fan as well. Sweet. Cool kids. Yeah. I want to say hi and thanks for the support and keep listening. Yeah. Thank you, Sully. And thank you, Mason. Thank you to everybody who listens to us. If you want to send us an email describing how you build the birdhouse in your soul, you can send that to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more housesuffworks? Check out our blog on the Househop works.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you?" | ||
Chuck and Josh Bust a Few Everyday Myths | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/chuck-and-josh-bust-a-few-everyday-myths | There are lots of common "facts" that everyone knows, but it turns out a lot of them are actually false. Join Josh and Chuck as they put on their berets and suspenders and take the hot air out of some common everyday myths to make this a slightly smarter | There are lots of common "facts" that everyone knows, but it turns out a lot of them are actually false. Join Josh and Chuck as they put on their berets and suspenders and take the hot air out of some common everyday myths to make this a slightly smarter | Tue, 21 Jan 2014 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=21, tm_isdst=0) | 31845656 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from houseupworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. With me, as always, the Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Right. I am here, sir. Jerry, are you here? Yes, she's here. This is the stuff you should know. Not the myth. The legend. That's right. The legendary. We should do a show where we lost myths. We're about to do that right now. Not like a TV show where we go out and take notes and bust them and that's a great idea. Yeah. Like, we could blow certain things up if we had to. We could have, like, a little assemblage of people who kind of help us out sometime and maybe spin off and get their own shows. It's not a bad idea, huh? I'm going to wear a beret. No. Yeah, I'm going to do it. I've been thinking for years about whether or not to just go ahead and wear a beret out in public. I do. At home, very frequently. You should only wear a beret if you grow a Waltrics mustache. That would be a good look. Maybe I'll go back to classes, too. Might as well. What will you do? I don't know. I think we're onto something now. I'll just say my same affable self, but with a slightly more stylized haircut. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. All right, I think we're onto something. Okay. Let's pitch it to the bosses. Yeah. Which company? I don't know. Discovery? Yeah, that's a good idea. Okay. The Myth Dudes. Yeah, that's a great one. All right, so, Chuck, I'm going to make a million dollars. We are. You're feeling pretty good? I am. I'm glad. How are you? I'm good, too. Your Mickey Mouse T shirt is cheering me up. Oh, that's good. I thought something is I'm cheerful. Okay, good. I don't really have much of an intro for this, aside from I don't know if you know this or not, but I have a little video series that I do. It's called don't be dumb. This is virtually a podcast version of that show. It struck me like that as well, but even better than that, it is one that we're doing together. Yeah. And I think there was a couple of these you've actually covered, too, right? Yeah. Is your blood Blue in your veins? Actually, you know what? You should go ahead and cover that one. Okay. Because I think you're the expert. I've always heard I'm pretty far from an expert, man. In elementary school. That your veins, your blood is actually blue because, see, right under my arm there? My forearm. You can see it. It's blue until it reaches, like, if you get cut and when it gets oxygen right. Boom. Turns red. Yeah. And it's supposedly your veins that are blue because they're the ones that contain deoxygenated blood. Right. That's what I always heard. It's already used up from your organs and tissues, and it's enroute back to your lungs. To become oxygenated again. Right? That's not true. There's no part of again, Chuck, I'm not an expert. Are you saying David Renzo in the fourth grade lied to me? Yeah. He's a dirty liar. David Renzo, your blood, at no point is ever blue. The more oxygen it has in it, the deeper the red. But there's no blue blood in you. The whole thing is an optical trick. Right. So your skin is translucent, see through, and it really doesn't have a color. It's your fat that gives your skin its color. Okay. And fat tends to have a kind of a crazy effect on light. Like, it scatters it in all sorts of different directions. Right? Yeah. And depending on how deep a blood vessel is, that will have an effect on what color that blood vessel looks like, because some colors of light, some wavelengths are reflected better than others. Right. Okay. So if you have a blue blood vessel, it's usually very close to the surface, and that means that all of the red light has been absorbed, and what's being reflected back and kind of scattered about is the blue. That's all there is to it. There's no blue blood in your veins. It's just illusion. And your family comes from wealth. Well, that's more of a figurative thing. Okay. Yeah. I think it would be pretty creepy, now that I think about it, if everyone had, like, red streaks of veins running through their body. Yeah. I think we're just so used to seeing blue, if we saw red all of a sudden, it would be creepy. Well, you can see I mean, some veins are red depending on the depth as well. You can see some red veins every once in a while or red blood vessels, but for the most part, the ones that really stand out are blue. You don't think they're creepy in and of themselves, the blue? Yes, I think it's a little creepy. It is a little creepy. But anyway, the point is, you don't have any blue blood. It's all just what color is absorbed and what color is reflected by the amount of fat and the depth of the blood vessel. Okay. I hope some kids are listening to this one. Yeah. And if they're not here, you can go watch Don't Be Dumb on our website. Yeah. And I think most of these I did, it all goes to elementary school, and you hear from various kids or sometimes teachers. Yeah, get it wrong. All right, I got one for you. Okay. I'm going to go with the body. You lose most of your heat through your head. You ever heard that? Oh, yeah. This one goes back to apparently two things. Some experiments the army did in the 19th, 50s where they dressed up volunteers to give them a little whirl at Arctic survival. There was a special field trip. There was. And they put them in the big survival suits, super warm put them out in the cold, but they left their heads uncovered, and so most of the heat was lost to the heads. That ended up in an army training manual, a survival manual from 1970, which said 40% to 45% of body heat comes from the head that you lose. So that's true, then. It is not true. The reason they lost all that body heat through the head is because that was the only part that didn't have anything on it. Right. It's as simple as that. Actually, your head, your face and your chest are a little more sensitive to temperature change, but that doesn't mean that you lose more heat there. Right. You lose the same amount of heat, no more than 10%. Your body heat is going to go through your head because it's proportional surface area. Your head makes up about 10% of the surface area of your body. Therefore, you lose about 10% of your body heat through that. Yeah, I did the same experiment with a ski mask on and naked from the waist down and see if you don't get arrested. Yeah. Well, a few things might happen in that situation. Just stay there and wave all the it's an experiment. You're doing great. They're not going to say you lose most of your body heat through your genitals. In that case, I think, has the army been a little more swinging back in the 50s? You never know. They may have come up with that experiment, and that would be the myth. So we're not saying don't wear a tuk out in the cold. You should, just as you should wear your parka. Yes. Just bundle up. Bundle up. Buttercup, you got one? I do have one. Okay. I like this one. I know you don't, but I didn't know this mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world. You didn't know that that wasn't true? No. I think that's the one I heard early on as just like little kids love saying things like that, they also love saying that's actually not the case. I've never encountered that little kid. Yeah, I knew that kid. It was also David Arenzo. Man, that kid, he's on the ball. He was terrible. Yeah. So a lot of people are saying, well, what is it then? What's the tallest mountain? Hold your horses. It is true that Mount Everest is the highest mountain. It's just not the tallest mountain. Right. Because of the way geologists and geographers measure mountains. Okay, so from sea level yeah, that's highest. Highest is the amount of the mountain that is above sea level. And Everest has that one licked. It's the highest mountain at 29,029ft above sea level. Right? Yes. But to measure which mountain is tallest, that goes from the base of the mountain to the summit, and in this case, that's mounted Kea in Hawaii. This thing is huge. That makes it the tallest mountain even though most of it is underwater. If you took away all the water and the idea of sea level at all and just measured this mountain from the base to the top. You have a 33,465 ft. Tall mountain yeah. Which is about 4000ft higher than Everest. That's substantial. Right. But above sea level, as far as Highness goes, it's only 13,799ft high. Yeah, but I kind of feel bad for Mount a Cab because it never gets to the dew it deserves. No, because of all that stupid water. And there's another way to measure a mountain, too, by the distance from the center of the Earth. The Earth is not a perfect sphere and it's widest circumference I e the equator. And there is a mountain in Ecuador called Chimboraro, and it is a great many meters, which I forgot to write down from the center of the Earth. Wow. So if you think about just cut a mountain in half and we're able to core the Earth at the same time, you would see like, oh, this mountain is further than this one. That makes sense. It makes sense in a geographer's way. Yeah. I think also, too, although there's really not a gauge for this, but just how striking a mountain might appear. You probably should go with Kilimanjaro. Sure. Because it rises from the flat plains of Tanzania and that's like the only thing out there. If you've ever seen pictures or been there, it's pretty amazing. And it's not like Everest doesn't stand out, but when you're in the Himalayas, you're a little bit taller than your brother's next door. But Kilimanjaro is at 19340ft. When everything else is flat, it's pretty remarkable. Yeah. Just rising right up from the plane. All right, so go, mountains. Just watch what you say, everybody. Is the point of that one. Tallest, highest. Choose your words carefully. All right. This is a good one. And this is one that I think most everyone believes that the Great Wall of China is the only man made object visible from space. I did this one and don't be dumb, too. Did you? I love this one. Yeah. This one is wrong on every level. Because not only can you see other things, you can't really see the Great Wall of China. It's Dubai wrong. Right. So you can, like you said, see other things. There's also a big problem with this is the idea that you can see the Great Wall of China from space. Well, where in space exactly? That's pretty broad. There's also like lower Earth orbit is 135 miles above sea level. Yes. And apparently from lower Earth orbit, you can see all sorts of things with the naked eye. And if you have binoculars, you can really see stuff like trucks and things like that. But you can see airports, dams, you can see roadways. Cities are obviously very clear, especially at night. So there's all sorts of stuff you can see. One of the things you have a tremendous amount of trouble seeing, and that you can't see with the naked eye from space is the Great Wall of China the one thing that they say is the only thing you can see? Yeah. How about that for irony? And why, Chuck? Well, one reason is because it's made up of rocks local to the area, and so it kind of looks like everything else in the area. And it blends in just a tad. Yeah. And it's big and it's long. So you would think, I see where the rumor got started, because it's one of the great wonders of the world, and it is huge in scope. It's long. Yeah. But it's narrow. It's like 13,000 miles long, but it's like 30ft across. Right. So it's long, but it's not necessarily big. You know where this one got its origin in? Yes. And no one knew at that point. No. It was Robert Ripley. And Ripley, Believe It or not, wrote in a column that you could see the Great Wall of China from the moon. Is that what it was? Yeah. And everybody just thought it was true because everybody is so gullible back then. And it wasn't until NASA's astronauts made it to the Moon that they were able to confirm that. No, you can't see the Great Wall of China, but the Chinese didn't believe it until they sent their own people into space in 2003. They were pretty bummed, too. Yeah. You can't see anything man made from the Moon. No, that's way up there, they say. Alan Bean and Apollo. Twelve astronauts said the only thing you can see from the Moon is a beautiful sphere, mostly white, some blue patches of yellow, and every once in a while, some green vegetation, but nothing manmade at all. Right. But that's where the original version of it was. You could see the Great Wall of China from the moon. Then we went to the Moon and it was downgraded to you can see it from space. Yeah. And then now they're trying to prove, like, I think the Chinese took photos from lower Earth orbit and they were like, you see there you can make out that's the Great Wall of China. Right. But it took, like, hunting and pecking and poking around and like 100 millimeter lens, I think. Yeah. So it doesn't count if you can't see it with the naked eye from lower Earth orbit. You can't see it from space. Dang straight. Okay. I got one for you that supposedly you've never heard. Let me hear it. And we're going to get to it right after this message back. Okay. So let's talk about this one. Okay. Have you ever heard, like, on a trip to, like, an abbey or monastery, this is where it usually comes up as a kid. Like stained glass is maybe thicker at the bottom, or letted glass and windows. That glass is a very slow moving liquid. No, I hadn't heard that. And I can tell you, had I been on that field trip, I would have yelled at the docent for lying. Really? Yeah. Even at that age? Yeah. See, I would have gone, wow. Yeah. Even at that age, I would have been like, that is preposterous. Well, you, sir, are much smarter than I was at that age. It is not a slow moving liquid at all. It is an amorphous solid. I've never heard that before. Yeah, it's not a liquid. It's not a real solid. But I've never heard somebody call it a slow moving liquid and explain, like, wavy glass like that. Yeah. Well, that comes from how it actually was made back then. Yeah. Up until the mid 18 hundreds, there was a process called the crown method, where you blow the glass, flatten it out, heat it, spin it, mechan on the bottom. Oh, no. And you've got a sheet of glass, and it's pretty cheap, but it's rippled, and some parts are thicker than others. It gives you migraines when you look at nature. The windows in my house do that. Some of them, yeah. You mean I lived in a Craftsman that was like that and the wind blew right through? Yes. It's pretty weird. So the difference in a liquid and solid is all about molecular structure. Solid has arranged molecules in a crystalline structure. When you heat that up, the molecules are going to vibrate, and then it will eventually reach a melting point. When those little structures break down, liquid becomes a solid when it gets cooled. And if you super cool a liquid, it will remain that way beyond the freezing point. So glass is an amorphous solid. It's not quite as organized as the crystal, but it does not freeze, so it's more organized than a liquid. So, like, in any form, in any version of a solid form, glass is an amorphous solid. Not just when it's wavy. I think it's just an amorphous solid. We need to do one on glass. It's pretty remarkable. Yeah. We could tag team up with our mirrors. My hometown was, like, the glass capital of the world. Yes. The glass city. Toledo the glass city. Yeah. Got to be proud of something. That and Tony Pecos. So we got a few more, but I think we should take a little message break, and then we won't wrap it up. Okay. What else you got? I've got one. So have you ever heard that if you see a little baby bird on the ground, you pick it up? That's it for that bird? Like you've decided it's Seth warrant, because your stink is on the bird, and when the mother comes back, it'll smell? The fact that a humans touch this bird, it's spoiled somehow, and the bird will be rejected by its mother and starve to death. So you pretty much have to take the bird indoors and raise it as your own child. I have heard that, actually. Yeah. Did you ever do that? Well, I've told the story about when I accidentally killed the bird as a lifeguard. When I drowned it. I think I've told it. I found a bird in the pool and rescued it out. And the bird was still alive but seemingly dehydrated. So I got a straw and would get a little liquid in the straw and the bird would peck at it and drink. And I was like, man, this bird is thirsty. Because it's just drinking, drinking, drinking. It drank so much water it died. Oh, man. And it kept going back for more and I thought I was doing the right thing and the bird just quit moving. And here's the funny part. That's the story. All these kids, I'm surrounded by like twelve year olds at this pool, and I pick up the bird and I notice it's like kind of fat and bloated now. And when I picked it up and I didn't even squeeze it, water shot out of its mouth like a squirt gun. I've never heard of that one. Screamed in horror, I'm sure, because over the course of 6 hours, I drowned this bird that I took out of the pool. Man, drowned it on land. On dry land. Yeah. It's one of my great all time awful stories. I never did that. I raised squirrels before, those squirrelings. But Yummy has a pretty good story of like picking up a little bird that she found on the grass that obviously was going to die if she didn't care for it. And she's a pretty little kid and she got a hold of the phone number of a local vet and started calling them and asking them what to do. And then she'd go do what they said and then she'd call them back again and go do what they said again. And apparently her mom figured out what was going on. Stop calling this vet. So she found the number to another vet, started calling them, she called one and then called the other. And she kept pestering these people. Well, and they're trying to help, apparently, but they're also like, birds are goner, right. So they said you need to keep the bird warm. So this is at a time when microwaves were pretty and so she didn't kill the bird in the microwave. But this bird spent a few seconds in the microwave and she got it out and it was warm and she wrapped it up and took care of it and was really like stressing. Like really wanted this bird to live and doing everything she could and it just didn't work out. Man. You mean I can't wait to see her again. Yeah. We actually share very horrific stories. The point of this is that neither one of you should have touched this bird in the first place because it was probably in the middle of a flying lesson. Yeah, it has nothing to do with your human stank and the mother's rejection yeah. That's another bird was probably trying to fly and the mom was probably nearby, allowing that to happen. Yes. So you come along, you see a bird, you assume it fell out of a nest, right? Sure. And you pick it up. And two things just happened. One, you interrupted a flying lesson and kidnapped a baby bird. And two, the idea that you couldn't just put that bird back down after you picked it up because your smell is on it is totally false, too, because birds don't have a very good sense of smell. Yeah. In general, your average yard bird isn't going to know that you had your stank on it or care. No. We're not dirty to them. No. And even if we were, they couldn't really smell us anyway. So the whole concept of that a mother bird will reject her little birdling. What are they called when they're little? Like birds? Baby birds. Baby birds. Yes. The idea that a mother will reject a baby bird, I think was probably developed to keep little kids from touching them. Probably. So and interrupting a flying lesson or whatever. Yeah. So maybe we should not encourage or discourage people from saying this. Yes. But at the same time, it kind of backfired because it's like, oh, well, I touched it. Now I have to kill it in the microwave. Yeah. I have to try to take care of it to death. Yeah. And we were both had our hearts in the right place, too. Oh, sure. Except I was, like, 18. Definitely five. Yeah. All right. I've got one. And this one I actually did not know until I studied this chameleons. I've always thought changed their color to blend into their surroundings as a form of camouflage. That is not so. That is not so. They do change color, but it has nothing to do with that. It is physical or emotional changes. They're like, they may want to fight, they may want to make love. Right. It depends. But it has nothing to do with, I'm going to be green because I'm in the grass, or I'm going to be brown because I'm on your deck. No, because they're already pretty camouflaged as it is. Oh, yeah. When they change color, they kind of go the opposite of being camouflaged. And suddenly they're bright orange. Yeah. And they do that by using chromatophores, which are pigment containing cells that can move and bend and change to expose one pigment or another. And they have layers of these chromatophores that work together in the same way that pink kind of mixes. So you have a layer that's yellow and a layer that's red, and these cells will overlap, and all of a sudden the chameleon is orange. Yeah. It'll just send a signal, basically, and open up the paint can, sort of like we described in the octopus, the coolest animal ever. It's the same deal, chromatophores, but they don't do it to camouflage themselves. They do it to fight. Yeah. Whereas the octopus does do it to camouflage. Right. Yeah. So how about that? Still a cool animal. Sure. Very neat to be able to change color. But that commercial that you see with the chameleon changing color to blend in with the backgrounds is a lie. Can't remember. It's a paint commercial. Is it? Yeah, of course it is. I think you have one more, don't you? Or do you have two more? I have one more. Okay. Let's hear it, Chuck. You've got 12345 senses sight, smell, touch, hearing. And what am I forgetting? Taste. Yeah. And then the $0.06, which is the one that lets you know when somebody's looking at you even when you're not facing them. Yeah. Like eyes in the back of your head. What is that someone's? I don't know. Man. That will be understood within our lifetime. Sure. But there are actually way more senses than that, depending on who you ask. Maybe as many as 21. Yeah, I saw 14 to 21, too. And those five that we mentioned are now these days referred to as the classical senses, the OGS. But you can take, basically, human senses and lump them into two categories. You have interception, which is our sense of awareness of how we're feeling on the inside and our exteroception, which is how we sense the world around it's. Like temperature or something like that. Our sensitivity to temperature would be an exteroception sense. Okay. Whereas our awareness that we have to pee or our sense of balance would be interception. All right. That makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah. Some of the other senses that we have in the skin, we have five different types of nerve endings just in our skin. So you can sense heat, cold, pain, itch, and pressure. And you can even sense heat without touching it. So that's its own sense. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a different receptor. When you touch a hot stove is when you put your hand near a fire. Those are two separate things. I just assume that there were more of them involved to a lower degree, but it's a different thing. It's a different thing. That's really cool. Yeah. And that's a more recent finding, too, I think. Supposedly, our ability to sense that we need to vomit is one its own thing as well. Hunger or sense of hunger. Sure. Basically, there's a whole world of sense experiences that we have that we've just totally overlooked as senses. Like, I feel hungry. I'm just hungry. Right. It's actually an actual sense. Yeah. Pretty neat, I think. It is. And I bet you they're going to further. It's not like they discover more, but as they dig in, I think they find that they can break it down more specifically is what it is. Right. It's not like, oh, they just discovered you could feel fire when you're near it. They said, oh, we discovered it's an actual separate thing than touching fire, right? Yeah. You got anything else? Oh, I got plenty else, Chuckers. And if people want to hear them and see me act like a strange, weirdo, really pretty, it's one of the best things. Thanks, man. You can check out. Don't be dumb on our website. You really should watch this because I don't think you understand. When Josh says, watch me being a weirdo, you think, oh, Josh is being silly? No, he really is playing a very odd, strange character, and that is 75% of the enjoyment. Thanks, man. And then the other 25% is you learn something you're learning. Yeah. Okay, so since I said don't be dumb, that means that I should also tell you to go check out this article on how stuff works.com. Type false facts. I think we'll bring this article up. Sure, because there's a couple we didn't get to, like every top ten list. Yeah, I think we've had covered those previously, but if you want to taste it's on there. And since I said search bar, that means it's time now, friends, for listener mail, I'm going to call this anti joke. Hey, guys, just listen to the joke podcast, which is our live show that we did called is there a scientific formula for funny out at a podcast? That's right. My friend Derek and I are huge joke fans, punchers and what have you. One of our favorite jokes is actually called an anti joke. It's called that because it's so ridiculously, not funny and unexpected that the funny part comes from people's reaction. The rest of us call it irritating. Well, I'm going to tell the joke, so get ready to be irritated. Guy walks into a bar and pauses, and at the end of the bar, there's this dude with a big orange head. The guy is kind of sitting there, and the guy asked the bartender, hey, what's up with the guy with a big orange head over there? It's kind of weird. He says, oh, dude, you got to hear the story. Go down there and buy him a drink. He'll tell it to you. I guarantee it. So the guy walks over, and the dude with a big orange head says, so, I know what you're doing. You probably want to know the story behind my head here. And the guy says, well, yeah, if you don't mind, I'll buy you a drink. And he was like, all right, cool. So I've gone over it a million times. Basically, here's the story. I was walking on the beach one day. I stubbed my toe on something. I looked down, and there was an antique brass lamp. I picked it up and dusted it off a little bit, and this enormous genie pops out. It's a magic lantern. The genie says, hey, you release me from my 10,000 year imprisonment. I'm forever in your debt, and I'm going to grant you three wishes as a token of. My gratitude. And the man at the bar was like, wow, what happened, man? This is incredible. And how did you get the orange head? He's like, well, just listen. I said, all right, I got three wishes. I guess my first wish is going to want to be really rich, fantastically wealthy. The genie says, all right, your wish is granted. All of a sudden, I have rings on my fingers and a crown on my head. My wallet is full of cash. Call these ATM cards and credit cards. I got an amex black and a deed to a mansion, and I'm totally loaded. That's rich. So I said, man, this is amazing. I guess for my next wish, I want to be married to let's just go ahead and say the most beautiful woman in the world. I want to be married to Kate Upton. Boom. Kate Upton is on the beach. The genie says, Your wish is granted. The ocean's part. And there she is in her bikini, walking toward the guy with a wedding ring on. And they're married. Is that the person that the guy who wrote this joke that he picked up. No, I did. Okay. She's not the most beautiful woman in the world, but she's on my mind. So there's Kate up, then they're married. It was incredible. And he's rich, and the guy said, all right, you got one more wish. What's your wish going to be? So in the bar, the man with the big orange head stopped and took a sip of the beer, and he goes, all right, now, I think this is where maybe I went wrong. I wish to have a big orange head. That is the anti joke. That's not bad. Well, you laugh through 80% of it. Except the punchline. Well, I think, though, the telling of the joke is usually what? Right. I have to say, you are one of the better joke tellers I've ever met in my entire life. Seriously. No, really. You really are. That's from Patrick and Derek. The anti joke, I think. The punchline or the anti punchline. It's not that it wasn't funny. It just needed a little drumming up. Like, he needed to continue stories slightly more like, okay, so for my third wish, I said, I want to have a giant orange head. Okay. Rather than I think this is where I went wrong. I wished for an orange head. Right. It fell out of the arc of the story, the flow. If they had said it in the same way, I think it would have been fun. All right, well, I improv a lot of that, but I actually did read that last bit as he wrote it, so I'm not going to take credit for ruining the answer. Who was it that wrote in patrick Rodin, but it's Patrick and Derek are the jokesters. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Patrick. Thanks, Derek. Seriously, that wasn't irritating at all. It was a fun thrill ride. Yeah. If you can think of an anti joke that's actually worth writing in, we want to hear it. We're always good for a good joke. Or good anti joke. If it's pretty good, maybe we'll read some on the air. What do you think? I can read jokes. I could have a whole different podcast called the Chuck Reads Joke. Okay, well, I'll sit here and quietly while you do record those. You can tweet to us you can tweet your jokes or anti jokes to us at syskpodcast. You can send us anti jokes by posting them on our Facebook page, facebook. Comsteffyshno. You can send us an email steppodcast@discovery.com. And as always, you can hang out at our website, stuffychano.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Jack Threads has quickly become the online shopping destination for guys. Here's why everything on the site is up to 80% off. As a listener of Stuff, you should know you can skip the membership wait list and get instant access. So check it out, dudes, at signup jackthreds. Comnostuff. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will 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." | ||
758f11f2-daf4-46da-8e4e-ae8400fe5c9c | Selects: How Rodney Dangerfield Worked, Live From LA | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-rodney-dangerfield-worked-live-from-la | Other comedians cry on the inside, but Rodney Dangerfield built his entire act around his sad life. Get to know this legendary comic who was nearing 50 when he got his break, in this classic episode recorded live in LA.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Other comedians cry on the inside, but Rodney Dangerfield built his entire act around his sad life. Get to know this legendary comic who was nearing 50 when he got his break, in this classic episode recorded live in LA.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Sat, 30 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=120, tm_isdst=0) | 54647184 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, friends. Chuck here with your Saturday selects episode. This is a live one, live from the La. Podcast Festival in 2015. This is from November 18, 2015, when we talked about comedy legend Rodney Dangerfield. This episode, everybody, is notable because this is where we met Mr. Kevin Pollock for the first time when he jumped up on stage in the middle of our podcast to refill our water glasses that had become empty. And that's how we met Kevin. And now he's become a real pal, and he's a great guy and a good industry friend, and I just think the world of him. So support Kevin and the stuff that he does. He's in a lot of great movies and a lot of great TV shows right now, including one of my favorite shows on television called Better Things, where Kevin plays Pamela Edmond's brother, and the wonderful, wonderful show Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. And check out both of those if you haven't checked out Kevin's work before. And again, a long way of setting up the episode where we met Kevin when we talked all about how Ronnie Dangerfield worked live from the La. Podcast. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. iHeartRadio hey. I guess I want to say hey and welcome to the podcast. But this is a little different because this is the intro to the podcast. That's right. We recorded a live episode at the La podcast Festival. Right. And this is it. Yeah, this is it. We did one on Rodney Dangerfield. It was September 19, 2015. The Sophie Tell in Beverly Hills. Very chic, and it was a lot of fun. Agreed. We hope you guys have fun listening to it. How are you guys doing? Thank you very much for coming to our show. We do this normally, but it's usually just two of us and Jerry sitting here on Facebook while we record, like, eating miso soup. Yeah, he loves me to sell soup. And then we do live shows, too. But normally there's, like a gulf of a stage between us, and, like, you guys are right here, so we're watching you, too, I guess, is what I'm saying. She's got one of our shirts. Nice shirt. And she's the only one. Oh, I like that. Of course, there says, I listen to podcasts before cereal burned. Yes. And on the back it says, But I love cereal. We should also say hi to everybody in life. Oh, yeah. Streaming, folks. Hello. And of course, thanks to Audible and Square Space and the rest of those people don't sponsor us. Does that count as a mid role ad? Sure. Okay, cool. Check the guy with a stack of money waiting outside the door right now. Mr. Monopolies hanging out outside. You got anything to start with? I've got nothing to start with. I usually don't drink this early in the day, but on the nerves and I felt it would be fitting as a tribute to our topic, which we're going to get into. So I decided to work up a heavy sweat because Ronnie Dangerfield is known for drinking and sweating. You're basically missing the tie. It got everything else covered. Thanks. Are you guys familiar with one Mr. Rodney Dangerfield? Yeah. That's good. I'm glad to hear that. He's an increasingly underappreciated comedian. I've talked to at least a couple of people who have not seen Back to School. I know. And I was actually talking to someone who works here at the festival who said, Is he dead? And I said, yeah, that happens a lot for that. And she said, Why don't I remember that, Alan? It's no respect. No respect. That's the cool thing about the guy. Like, that was his whole stick. That was his whole hook. Right. Well, we need to start in the traditional way. Oh, okay. You ready? Very nice. Thank you. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chucker's Bryant, and we are here at La Podfest and all you lovely people, give yourself the hand. Is that better? You feel? Yeah, a little more. You guys are happy with that, too? Good. Okay, well, now we have to start over. How many people have seen Back to School? Great start. So, as we were saying, the weird thing about Rodney Dangerfield is that his whole stick about no respect was actually really close to accurate. As a matter of fact, not just while he was growing up, he had a really tragic, terrible childhood, but also as he got older and older. And even after he blew up, people just kind of took what he was saying and ran with it. He had this one story where he opened a club, which we'll talk about, called Dangerfields. So it's very obviously his club, and he was on his way up to the stage. He'd just been called up there, and on his way, some guy stops him and says, rodney, can I have your autograph? And can you also give me some more butter? And like, this happened to this guy quite a bit, actually. Yeah. So it does turn out that you will see, even after death, the guy got no respect. But as Chuck will assert later, I predict he's a comedian's comedian and very actually well respected by the ones that count. Sure. And I don't know if you guys know this, but a lot of comedians have inner pain, which is the reason a lot of them get into comedy and the reason that many of them drink until they blackout on many nights. Entertain is no secret to the comedy world, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone who was as legitimately depressed and sad as Rodney Dangerfield. He was like a crying clown. For real. He was. He often talked about the heaviness he felt every day when he woke up. He said he would wake up in every day. And there it was lingering above him was his heaviness with a capital H even. Yeah. And if you ever want to go down a YouTube rat hole, just look up some interviews with the guy on YouTube from the he does a lot of interviews with just, like, local TV stations promoting movies and stuff. And when he's out of his stick element, it's one of the saddest things you've ever seen, man. It's really depressing. He just had this air about him. You could tell he had the weight of life on his shoulders, and it all pretty much stems from his awful, awful childhood. Right? Childhood. Is this hilarious so far, everybody? So we should start at the beginning with him. He was born in 10 00 19 21 on Long Island. Not in Long Island, Chuck tells me, and he was born to a vaudevillian father who took off with one of Rodney's brothers to go hit the circuit, and that was that. I think he saw him like, once or twice a year for a half hour, an hour or something like that. Yeah. He said he saw his dad literally like, twice a year growing up. And he was born Jacob Cohen, and his dad was a juggler and a comic who apparently hit the road because of his wife. We were talking about what an awful person she was when we were going over this stuff and that she was, but the more I thought about it, she had a serious problem. It was back in the 1920s. You didn't diagnose things like they do today, right. You just ran off to the vaudeville circuit. Pretty much. But she was clearly depressed, like, profoundly depressed and sadly, completely abandoned emotionally and neglected little Jacob, he was left on his own from the time he could remember. His mom literally never hugged him once, never kissed him once. He swore up and down and never complimented him or tried to build him up. She was a bad lady. And starting probably around age eight or something like that, he realized that if he's going to eat dinner on a regular basis, he's going to have to go get a job and go grocery shopping himself. Right. So he basically raised himself starting about age eight or so. Yeah. And speaking of groceries, one of the great things that stuck out to him about his childhood, he had to get a job and after school job, he was still in school, and he lived in a fairly wealthy neighborhood, but he was not wealthy, so we used to deliver groceries to his classmates home, which is kind of demoralizing when you're like, ten. And while he was out there running around on the streets, he wrote an autobiography the year he died in 2004, and he called this chapter Male Prostitute because he was, like, ten. And he was so unsupervised that there were apparently at least one or two local molesters that were like, hey, Rodney, come on up. I got a nickel for you. Yeah. And he swears up and down that it was just kissing everybody. Don't worry. The child was just kissed by the grown man for a nickel. And it happened a lot. And he was doing it because he needed the money. Yeah. So anyway, Rodney Dangerfield, let's fast forward out of this horrible funk. By the way, we're going to pepper in some of his best jokes here and there. And I debated on whether or not to try and do it as him, because it's hard. I've already promised certain people here or there. It's hard to do that. It's hard to tell a Rodney Dangerfield joke without kind of doing him. And I took a little informal poll last night with some folks, and they're all like, yeah, you sort of have to. Yes, I think so. It's not like it's a good impression. Plus, it makes me delivering at my flat. Weirdo aspect where I'm not even trying. It all the weirder. So prepare for that, too. But one thing that he did, and that of course, a lot of comics do, is they turn that pain into funny. And he really relied on his jokes as a way to I mean, the only time he was happy was when he was on stage performing. And as soon as he left, that heaviness would come back. But he often joked about his mom. He would say, My mom never breastfed me. She told me she always thought of me as a friend, which is a funny joke. But when you know the real pain behind it, it's just like the saddest thing you've ever heard. It takes a tad bit of the funniest away from it. I've got a good parent one. You ready? Yeah. So I remember the time and this is my ride in dangerfield. I remember the time I was kidnapped. They sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof. That probably did not happen, but it gets the point across. And plus, it's funny. And so if you're one more parent Joe okay, sir. I tell you, my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio. Funny. All right, that's going over better than I thought it would. So sorry about age 15. He realizes he's actually kind of hilarious and that he has a talent for taking all of this horrible, tragic stuff and turning into funny stuff. And he started writing jokes, and he got good pretty quick. He started selling jokes age 15 or 16 to establish comedians. Right? Yeah. And he kept him he had this duffle bag. He would write jokes by hand his entire career and put him in this duffel bag. So he literally had a duffel bag full of, like, thousands and thousands of jokes. And apparently, I think you said that during a typical performance. Later, once he hit the big time, he would tell, like, over 300 jokes in a set. Like 350 in an hour. He ran into their quick jokes, but still it was amazing. But he remembered them all, and he knew which ones fit best. Like, the guy was a comic genius. Hopefully that's coming across here, or will by the end of this. Right. So he gets his big break at age 19. He's written jokes for a few years, and he's going to try this out. And he gets a job at a Catskills resort for $12 a week. Ten weeks, including room and board, dirty dancing, that kind of scene. Very much so, yeah. But he's like the up and coming comic on stage, right? Have you guys ever seen Iron Man? Meet sturdy dancing. That mash up. No, go check it out. Actually. It is so bizarre. It's one of the better things you'll ever see that has nothing to do with Rising Dangerfield. That was just an add on, basically. So he's working. He's working hard. The stint in the Cat Skills, I don't think he gets re up, but he keeps going back to the Cat Skills. It's one of his regular gigs, but on the side while he's working, he's a singing waiter at the Polish Falcons nightclub where Lenny Bruce's mom was the MC. He was an Acrobatic diver. Right. But I don't know what you're all thinking. Triple Indy? No, he did not do the triple Indy in the movie. Obviously, for those of you who have not seen Back to School, that was an in joke. Yeah. He was a diver in the movie. A competitive diver. Yes. Well, I was going to punish them for not having seen it. Okay. Sorry. Just trying to drive him a point. So in 1951, he gets married for the first time to a jazz singer named Joyceindig, and he had a couple of kids and moved to New Jersey, which we all know is the death knell for any comedian trying to work in New York. Kind of means you've given up. But he didn't give up just yet. He did for a minute, for sure. Yeah. Not at that point, though. He was still trying to work, but when he turned 27, he quit comedy and literally did not perform from the age of 28 to 41. And at 41, he was like, let's try this again. Right. Well, he and his wife divorced, so he's like, I've got a little more time. I think I'm going to go try comedy again. They actually got back together, like, the next year and stayed married for another ten years or something like that. But this time around he was like, let me see if I can figure out how to balance home life with this. I'm trying to break into comedy. Right? Yeah. And let me try and develop an act. I think the first time he floundered because he didn't know what kind of comedian he wanted to be. He tried singing, he tried impressions, he even tried prop comedy for a little while. But he also I mean, and he had these jokes about how much his life sucked. He used some of these same jokes his whole life, but they just didn't hang on them quite right because he had his whole life ahead of him and he was young and full of promise. That second time around, he was right there in the sweet spot. Like age 41 ish, little, desperate, kind of sweaty. And these jokes about how bad his life these jokes about how bad his life was or where it was going, like really just kind of hit a lot more. He adopted a persona, basically. And that definitely helped. Yeah, it was sort of him. But it was also a character. And when I was researching this, I was kind of thinking about the you don't see a lot of character comedians anymore. No, that was the sort of heyday with like Andrew Dice Clay and Rodney Dangerfield and Emo Phillips and it seemed like there were a lot of characters. But now it's just like, look at this thing that happened in my life and how funny it is. Look at all these witty observations chuck Travolt about my life. I'd like to see some good character comedians come in. I can't think of it. Are there any out there? I guess Brent Wineback. That's kind of a character. Oh, wait. What about, like, Larry the cable guy? He's total I assume he's a character. No, that's a character. He started out as a completely different kind of comedian and then adopted that persona. Yeah, but I don't count him as a comedian. He's not watching. Don't worry. No, he's not. He's writing bad jokes. Going to start a flame war with Larry the Cable Guy. I'll totally take him up on that flame war. Although he could squash me with his sacks of money. So he adopts his character. He changes his name legally at this point to Jack Roy, which was that his father's name. His father's stage name was Bill Roy. Yeah. So he changed his name legally to Jack Roy. And that was his real name till the day he died. And he was performing under that name for a while until he tried the second go and decided, I don't want anyone to remember Jack Roy. So he told this guy that was booking him at a club in Manhattan, could you just make up a name for me and put that on the I guess it wouldn't have marked on the playbill yeah. In any ad they took out. Yeah. So the guy who ran this place, the Inwood Lounge, I think came up with Rodney Dangerfield. Right. But the weird thing is he had actually lifted the name from a Jack Benny character. Like there was an original Rodney Dangerfield, and it wasn't Rodney Dangerfield. Right. That's weird. It's a giant twist of the podcast it's all downhill from here. So Jack Benny came up with this character and I think the 40s maybe or something like that, of this grade z Western hero named Rodney Dangerfield. And I guess the lounge owner remembered it and came up with that. Rodney Dangerville had no idea about this. So he's walking around, like, using this name for years. And apparently he met Johnny Carson once at one of his shows. And Johnny Carson was like, you know where your name came from, right? And he said, no, what are you talking about? Yeah, he explained the whole Jack Benny thing. And later on he saw Jack Benny, and Jack Benny wasn't like mad or anything, actually said, I really love what you did with the character, and you really, you know, you did it just right. So no harm, no foul. Yeah, they hugged it out from the very famously. So on the second go round, he was making a living doing okay, but he got his real big break in 1967 with Ed Sullivan. He couldn't get booked on Ed Sullivan, but at the time they would book other comedians for the run throughs as, like, just placeholders for dress rehearsal, basically. And so he got a spot booked on that and apparently did so well in dress rehearsal that Ed Sullivan took note on the side of the stage, which means he went like this you're funny. Right? That's how you knew I sold him and thought, you're funny, as if he just told him, to me, that's pretty good. Thank you. It works for Nixon, too. Oh, yeah, it's great. Nixon, actually, that was the result of a huge long shot. He told his agent, just get me on Ed Sullivan. And it played out, panned out very well. He ended up being on Ed Sullivan, like, 17 times or something like that. And it led to all these other late night appearances. He was on Carson, like, I think a record. He holds the record for being on Carson the most 70 times, something like that, yeah. Merv Griffin, Dino, like, all the dudes who are running late night and basically where the tastemakers for all of the comedians were suddenly promoting the sweaty, weird, coke, duck pothead, boozehound, huge pothead name, by the way, Rodney Dangerfield. Right. And he took it and ran with it. Like right when he hit in 1967, he got to work. He was such a big pothead. Actually, the original name of his biography was going to be my Love Affair with Marijuana. And he was serious. He wanted to call it that because he smoked potty. Said for 60 something years, but well, up until the day he died. Yeah, I think from like 21 on, like, he was smoking pot in ICU, in the hospital, because he had an early medical marijuana exemption long before anyone even knew what that was. He just wrote his own no one even knew what that was. But if he flashed it in your face, you didn't ask questions. So he got his big break. Actually, Carson had blackballed him for a while because he accused Carson in a letter of stealing or one of his writers of stealing one of his jokes. So Carson famously wouldn't have him on the show for a long time until they eventually until they eventually met and worked it out. And then Johnny became, like, the biggest fan ever. And if you want to enjoy yourself at home on the YouTubes, just go look up Johnny Carson on Ronnie Dangerfield on Carson. There's a lot of clips where, I mean, Carson was just like the ultimate setup dude. It just let him do his thing. Yeah. And he would laugh until he was crying because he couldn't believe that Dangerfield is getting away with saying most of the stuff he was saying on TV on Carson's own show. It's good. So he's married, he's working a lot, and he decides that he doesn't want to happen to his own kids what happened to him, which was to be neglected. So he said, you know what I'm going to do, even though no one's ever done this, I'm going to borrow a bunch of money, quarter of a million dollars, and I'm going to open my own comedy club in New York City so I can stay home with my children, Brian and Melanie, I think. Right. And it's not like he had any money right then. This is a huge risk. He's doing okay, but he had to borrow all yeah. Not that. Okay. Right. So everybody tries to talk him out of it. He goes ahead with it, and it's such a success. He has the loan paid off in, like, 18 months. Just a huge success. And this club actually became venerable in its own right. Yeah. It's still there today, Dangerfields in New York, and it had this HBO special that it broadcast out of, and a bunch of comedians got their big breaks on that show, like Seinfeld, chris Rock, I think. Yeah. Jim Carrey, what's his face Saggit. Jeff Foxworthy. Jeff Foxworthy. Fans in the room. Rita Rudner, of course. Sam Kenneson. He completely made Sam Kennedy's career, and that's why comedians love him so much, because it meant more to him to play father to these young comics and to give them their start than almost anything else. He really that was sort of his life's goal, was to seek out talent that he thought was original and really kind of boost them up. He was a huge Freudian. The whole father son thing. I wonder why. So, Chuck, where are we at? We are at Dangerfields. It is. And he decides that, you know what, I should start making movies because well, he made a few movies before that, but nothing that anyone would know. He was actually cast first by Stanley Kubrick in The Killing. The Killing, great movie. Who said, yeah, wow, yeah. Great movie. So he plays onlooker big part, and then he was in another movie. What was the other one called? The Projectionist. Yeah, it was a big part in a very small movie. He said that it was the type of movie where they went to go shoot on location by taking the subway. Which is probably true. Yeah, I think it was. But he played this movie projectionist boss, and the projection has had quite an imagination. And he was a superhero, and Dangerfield was this archvillain nemesis. It didn't go very far, but he learned almost nothing about how to shoot a movie because this is 77. And apparently his huge breakthrough came in Caddyshack. Right. He was already very much a well respected comedian. But when he shot Katie Shack harold raymond. Right, yeah. When he directed it, he said later on that clearly Dangerfield didn't know what he was doing. It was a live performer. So when Harold Raymond said, Action, rodney Dangerfield just stand there and be like, you want me to do my bit now, that's what action means. Right? Do your bit. So then Rodney would just turn to the camera and do his whole bit into the camera. He's like, Hold on, we got to get this right here. So pretend the camera is not there one. And he finally got him to do it because that was the thing that just broke them out. Yeah. And he hated making movies. Like you said, he loved performing live in front of people, and that's where he got his rush. And he once compared making movies, too. He said, when you make a kid write something a hundred times on the chalkboard and they've done something wrong, he's like, that's what making a movie is like. He hated doing all these takes. He hated standing around and waiting. It's why he didn't make it. He felt like the live audience. He compared it to a heroin addict, like shooting up. He just loved that rush. And he definitely didn't get that from movies, which, I mean, you got, like, the crew standing around looking at you, waiting for lunch. It wasn't his bag at all. It was not his bag. You found this description from Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong Torres, which I think describes him to a T. Do you want to read that, sir? Okay, so Benfon Torres, who is in Almost Famous, he had a quote. He says, Rodney Dangerfield looks like a midlife crisis. There's a surface orderedliness, he's groomed, and he's dressed like a businessman at a convention. Gray hair slick back over a haggard shades of Mayor Daily face dark suit, white shirt, bright red tie, silk stockings, shiny shoes. But the neatness gives way to what he calls the heaviness that looms over him. Life gives Rodney Dangerfield the jitters. He's in a constant sweat. He wipes his brow, incessantly, tugs at his tie, herky jerky as he recounts the horrors of his daily life. He shifts his shoulders uncomfortably and his eyes bug out of their bags. He moves the floor mike around as he roams the Comedy Store stage looking for sympathy, but all he gets are laughs. I just think that's fantastic, man. He nailed Rodney Dangerfield in that. Absolutely. And his shirt and tie, that came about because, well, he hated clothes and fashion. Yeah. Let's just go ahead and say that. I think it's time. He was a slob. He was a slob. He said in interviews how much he hated clothes, how he never cared about clothes and fashion and was comfortable in a robe, basically. But for one of his first acts, he put on the red tie and the black suit and dressed all dapper. And when it came for the second performance, he was like, well, they liked me in that, so I'm just going to wear that. And that became his stick, was this very dapper looking guy who's always very well put together. In fact, I just saw earlier today when he gave out a best makeup award at the 87 Academy Awards. Really? Yeah. And he walked up and he said, a nice tuxedo, everybody. Right. And he went underneath torn under shorts. You get the feeling that was the dead truth. Yeah, I'm sure. Probably had, like, holy underwear on that. Quite sure. Yeah. You should look at it, too, man. That's great. I will. Because he basically does five minutes of stand up at the Academy of Awards and then gives out an award. So Iron Man versus Dirty Dancing. Yeah. Take some notes and then some dangerfield stuff. Should we take a break here, Chuck? Take an ad break. Yeah. And we'll be right back after this big announcement. Folks. It's called a podcast event called The Message. That's right. Thanks to GE Podcast Theater and Panoplye, there is an eight part series out right now called The Message. And you can get it wherever you get your podcast. Yeah. And you know what? It's going to blow your collective scientific minds because it's currently rocking our world. Yeah. So The Message follows the story of Nikki Tomlin, who is a PhD in linguistics, right? That's right. At the University of Chicago. If I'm not mistaken. That's right. And she's following a team of cryptologists, which really if you say cryptology, you've really got me hooked already. Sure. They're a research tank. Tank called Cypher, and they're trying to decode a message received from outer space from 70 years ago. Yeah, it's from outer space, we think. And if you're not familiar with the story, well, then I guess you better go listen to The Message. You can get it on itunes. You can get it on any of your podcast apps. Just go search for The Message and subscribe today. Yeah. So thanks to E Podcast Theater and panopoly for pushing the boundaries of the medium. You guys are doing a great job. Go. Subscribe to the message. And listen today. And we're back. All right. I told you that would work. So he makes Caddyshack. Huge, huge hit. He's allowed to kind of just do his thing in that movie. I'm sure most people have seen that classic comedy, which Josh said would stink if it weren't for Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Murray. The rest of it is like a tepid coming of age. Dramedy sucks. Ted Knight, he was fine, but, I mean, you can watch too close for comfort and get just as much as you want, you know? I just don't think it needs to be in the movie, all right? I think it was Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield. That's what made Caddy Shack a classic little Chevy Chase. Ted. Ted, you know how I feel about Chevy Chase. My father raised me to hate Chevy Chase. Did he really? He really did. Your dad didn't like him? Oh, man. Still does not like Chevy Chase. Why? Didn't think he's funny or he thinks he's pompous ass. Yeah, something about Chevy Chase sticks in my dad's crawl and he passed it on to me. Isn't that weird? It is totally weird. That's what you get when your dad's not a vaudevillian. They pass on weird stuff like that, too. So he makes caddy shack. It was a huge hit. Now, he was a legitimate he was sought after for movies. And then in 1983, he wrote a movie called Easy Money. Has anybody seen that? Anyone? Yeah, it's actually a pretty cool movie. It's not bad. It's a little weird structurally, which kind of makes sense that he wrote it because he clearly didn't know how to write a script. He knew how to write a bunch of good jokes, though. So he played Monte Capilletti, an Italian American drunk pothead baby photographer because this was back in the early 80s when anyone of any ethnicity could play anyone of another ethnicity. Sure, because he was Hungarian born. But, hey, play an Italian guy. It's cool. So in the movie, his motherinlaw was the inspiration for Twin Beds and hated her son in law. And when she died, she said, all right, you can have all this money, I think, like $10 million if for one year you quit gambling and boozing and smoking and doing drugs. So easy money was Joe Pesci. It was okay, right? Like, the first half of this movie is just a series of vignettes to where he just completely screws everything up and your stomach is all upset and everything and you're really emotional, and then nothing comes of it whatsoever. Right. And then finally, halfway through, the plot arrives and then it gets kind of good, actually. Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. A lot of build up. Not a lot of pay off in that one. But when Roger Ebert liked the movie even though it was a little weird and said basically the movie was about watching Rodney Dangerfield, he said, Rodney Dangerfield gloriously playing himself as the nearest thing we are likely to get to WC. Fields in this lifetime. Right. And Rodney himself said, that was pretty much me on screen. That's as close as you can come to my real life in easy money. Yeah. Right? Yeah. He's a baby photographer. So 1986 is when he finally makes Back to School, which was his biggest hit. I think it cost like 13 million to make 11 million gross. Well over 100 million. Which in 1986. I mean, today that's still good money. Yeah. Today dollars, that's $150,000,000,000. It's inflation for you. Right. And this one, he had the idea I think he got a story credit of a guy, a father that goes back to school. He was a big loser in life, so he goes back to school with his son to get his degree. And he told that idea to Harold Raymond and he was like, that's good. But what if he was rich? What if he was wealthy and had it all and still goes back to school? Like, knowing what he knows now with a lot of money and riding was like, okay, that's the movie. Yeah, it's a good idea. And actually that was a huge movie when it came out. It was the 6th biggest movie of 1986. It was behind Top Gun platoon. Karate Kid Two, star Trek Four. And there's one other one that's written down somewhere in here, but there are big movies and it was like the 6th highest grossing movie of the year. And it's Rodney Dangerfield, right? Yeah. And so he has hit it big at this time and is a huge, huge movie star in the biggest comic. I think they did a survey in the late seventies, right before his movies with college students that said that Rodney Dangerfield was their favorite comic. And he was 61 years old. 58. 58 years old. Same thing, basically, was when he hit it big as a comedian. 58 years old. Right. And like, college kids are like, into this guy. And actually, if all of you seen Back to School, if that's all you've seen a variety of dangerfield, you don't quite have the understanding of what he was actually like. He was pretty edgy comic, actually, and pretty hilarious. And college kids loved him in the 70s. He hosted Sarah Live in 1980 when he was, I think, like 60 or something, 59. And he started to blow up, like, at about age 60. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Should we tell a few more of his favorite jokes? I think it's high time now to you guys. We'll go over a few of these. He has a great joke about his psychiatrist. I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me and he said I was being ridiculous. Everyone hasn't met me yet. Classic. Yeah. Let's see. I like this one. It's a little brow, but I like it. You know what class is? When you're alone, you fart, you say, Excuse me. That's class. Isn't that weird? So if you haven't noticed a lot of his jokes, they were self deprecating for himself, but also about his family. He talked about his wife was dumb and fat, and it's son, it was stupid. And even when he wasn't, I mean, it was all a character. So even when he wasn't married, he was telling jokes about his wife, which must have made it a lot easier when he went home. And I probably so one of my favorite wife jokes was, I tell you, my wife can't cook at all. How can toast have bones? And your impression is getting better as we go along. I'm drinking whiskey. Yeah. I'm not saying that all of us let's see, I've got one. Like I said, it's a little weird. And I like that in a comic. Just bizarre stuff. He was talking about the bar that he was doing stand up in that night. He says, what? A joint? I asked the bartender for a double, and he brought out a guy who looks like me. I missed those days, man, where comedians just wrote great jokes. Line set up, punchline over and over. Yeah, I tell you, I drink too much. The last time I went to the doctor, I gave him a urine sample. I had an olive in it. So good. Classic. And then another thing I've learned about Rodney Dangerfield, when you go back and listen to his stuff, he wasn't, like, mean. He was self deprecating. Even when he was targeting, like, his family, mostly nonexistent family, all of it reflected back on him and basically what a loser he was, right? And he didn't have very many mean jokes. He didn't tell, like, many gay jokes. He didn't tell racist jokes or anything like that. Which and this is like in the 70s when everybody was telling her picture, but he did have this fat joke that stuck out to me. Are you fat? Do you look at the menu and say, okay, love getting laughs from Rodney Dangerfield. Chuck, we should just do this. I was about to say, I think we have a new act. You should know one day. Talk about a rush. I got one more. Tell you, I was dating a woman. She called and said, Come on over. Nobody's home. I went over and nobody was home. Good stuff. I have a new career. Reading Rodney Dangerfield jokes. That's a whole no one's done that cover. Comedians. Oh, man. Sharknado. And now this. You're all aware Chuck predicted sharknado, right? Okay, he did. You're welcome. You got any more? You like the one about his dog? Tell that one. Okay, all right. My dog is lazy. He's so lazy. He doesn't chase cars. He just lays in the driveway taking down license plates. All right, so now we're in. That's enough. Stop laughing. In the early 1980s, he's making these movies. He won best comedy album Grammy for the album no Respect, beating out Richard Pryor, Monty Python, Gilder Radner and Father Guido Sarduce. And in 1982, the Smithsonian Institution put his red tie and his shirt in the Smithsonian. The American History. National Museum of American History. Right along with Jimmy Dranny's hat RT. Bunkers recliner and Charles Lindberg's plane. But the joke Rodney said was, you got a feeling after they left they were just going to use the shirt to wipe down the plane. Always self deprecating. Yes, Andy. And when he handed them the shirt, he said, this is a big deal. I only have two shirts. Which may have been true. And also in the 1980s. Who remembers the Miller Light commercials from the 1980s? Tastes great, less filling. That man back there has his hand up. All right. They were great commercials. It was like named the 8th best advertising campaign in history for McCann Erickson, the ad agency. And I went and watched a ton of them earlier today, and I remember them all from being a little kid. And it was weird. For those of you who haven't seen them, the premise was you would get a bunch of ex athletes and then Mickey Spileane and Rodney Dangerfield and some other random pop cultural icons at the time, and to sell Miller Light and get in a big argument about taste, great and less filling at the end. Rodney would usually come in as the ship who does something wrong to spoil everything, screw everything up for that. It was just such a weird, like Bubba Smith and Dick Bucket and baseball players. I get all that. I don't know. It was so strange. But they were huge and they really pour the weed for everybody else, so they let them. On January 1984, if anyone remembers, his hit rap single rap and Rodney, have you guys heard this? Really? It's something else. It is. And it was a big hit, actually. It was a top 60 hit, which is pretty big. Top 59. Chuck, give it its due. That means it was number 59. Yes, it was right behind Uptown girl. And it was Rodney Dangerfield rapping about being old, which sounds really bizarre now, but legitimate rappers at the time, like, say, the Sugar Hill Gang, were rapping about, like, having dinner at your friend's mom's house. So it wasn't that far off the mark for the time. Like, be nice to your family. That's what raps were about at once. The good old days. He was on The Simpsons, I think, a couple of times, wouldn't he? I don't know if he was on more than once. I think he's on twice. But in 1996, he played Mr. Burns illegitimate son Herb, who got no regard, no regard at all. I wonder why they didn't say respect, did they not? I think they were just a joke messing around. Okay. Yeah, the man himself was there. I would have been surprised if he was like, look, guys, this one thing. I don't want to say respect. Maybe not. It was just a boy that I'm trying new things here, trying to branch out, which actually he did branch out. He was actually a really creative guy. He had a live Broadway show that ran for a couple of weeks in 1988 called, appropriately, Rodney Dangerfield Live on Broadway. Exclamation point. For a couple of weeks. He wrote a romance novel called Lock in Tessa. And if you Googled the image for this, it's disturbing. Yeah, it's basically like your typical it's Fabio, basically with a woman, except it's got Rodney Dangerfield's face on it, and it's available on Audible. Oh, is it really? Yes, it is. With Rodney Dangerfield reading it. No way. I kid you not. What I joke about. What's on Audible? Well, I looked up earlier to see if his autobiography is on there. It's the only Rodney Dangerfield thing on there. It's awesome because it has the album art, too. So you get that for free with the audiobook he wrote. And I guess he didn't direct it, but he produced and wrote the movie Rover Dangerfield, the animated classic about a dog who gets no respect. And then Mr. Oliver Stone called him up one day and said, I had this role for you in a movie called Natural Born Killers. And it's about this sadistic father who was molesting his daughter, raping his daughter, and I think he'd be perfect for it. And Ronnie didn't get it at first. He was like, Why do you want me for this kind of role? He's like, you'll see? Yeah. And did you guys see that? Natural Born Killers. You can get this scene on YouTube. It's when Oliver Stone did the phony sitcom. It's how they portrayed that part of the movie. So they have a laugh track and it's really disturbing. Three layers of bizarre. Right? So it's like, Rodney Dangerfield is a sadistic, incestuous molester, but it's Rodney Dangerfield. That's the weird part. And then there's a laugh track to just throw you off that little extra bit. It is very jarring. It was pretty well done. But the notable thing about that is that Oliver Stone let Rodney Dangerfield rewrite all of his lines, and he got a lot of critical acclaim for it. But I was like Rodney Dangerfield. We had no idea. And he was like, Seriously, if you go today and just Google the Rodney Dangerfield of, you can find a whole list of things. He's such a cultural icon. That phrase itself has become a thing now. Like Petitzera is the Rodney Dangerfield of California wine or the Memphis, Tennessee City Council is the Rodney Danger field of local government. Seriously, that's the thing Avon saw guitar preamp was known as the Rodney Dangerfield of guitar preamp. Yeah, my favorite is Palladium is the Rodney Dangerfield of precious metals. Isn't that stupid? We're not making this up. So, Chuck, right about now, let's step back a second. Press pause on this and have a beautiful little message break. Agreed. So here's some more examples of the lack of respect. And here's sort of the thing. The irony is he got nothing but respect from his peers throughout his career. But outside of that, there was still just doses peppered throughout his life and examples of times where he didn't get any respect. Like when he sued Star magazine. They published a story about him being in Las Vegas and said he would drink like tumblr fools of vodka and smoke pot all day long and do cocaine, which was all completely true, probably, but he knew that they couldn't prove it, so he sued them for libel and the court ruled in his favor. Right, yeah. So that's respect. Right. So they awarded him $1 for damage to his reputation and one dollars for personal distress. Yeah. And then the judge went, yeah, he's already livestreamed, people. I realize it's archived he did get awarded $45,000 for presumed damages. And I did a little more research today on that. Apparently he flew it all on coke and weed. Apparently Star magazine showed that they didn't turn a profit, so he couldn't go after him. He couldn't appeal for more money. Right. So he tried to go after their parent company and it went all the way to the Supreme Court and they said, you didn't start the suit that way. They were now basically right. Yeah. No respect. And even in death, as we mentioned earlier, rodney Dangerfield is dead. Why didn't I know that? I have an example for you. Hold on before he dies. Okay. He was on Howard Stern the year he died. Did you watch that interview? Yeah, I did, man, that's depressing. He's 81. He's clearly like at death store, but he still has his sense of humor about him. But somebody called in to Howard Stern and said hey, Rodney, it's Bob Hope. I'll see you in 15 minutes. And Howard Stern is like, well, that's not funny. Bob Hope is dead. So they were saying like that Bob Hope was calling from behind the grave and would see Rodney Dangerfield in 15 minutes. And if you can't get respect from a caller on The Howard Stern Show, where can you get respect? So it's actually in that interview, which I said, it's like 45 minutes long and it's completely depressing, so don't go watch it. And not just because he was old, but Howard is trying to talk to him about his childhood and stuff. Well, he had just written his autobiography and really just laid it all out there. He'd alluded to the rough life that he'd had in interviews and stuff like that. But he published this book right before he died, and it was rough. Well, I think the saddest thing to me about his mom was that despite being completely neglected emotionally and getting no love at all as a child, he still wanted to be like a good kid, and he still worked to support her and apparently came home and showed her his report card. He worked hard to get good grades. She wouldn't even look at it. She just signed it without looking. And that was the saddest part, is he still sort of defended her in that interview, like, right before he was dying. And he made up with his dad before his dad died, apparently, even though he never saw him. He said he forgave them for all that stuff. Oh, yeah. Really sad stuff, though. You want to hear some more jokes? Well, actually, why don't you tell him how he died? Okay. Well, in this interview, in the same interview, he's telling Howard Stern. Howard Stern is like, he's about to go in for the should I pretend there's not a siren in the background? He's going in for surgery, and Howard Stern asks him, like, Are you afraid you're going to die? And he goes, you know what? Dying in surgery would be the best way to go. They drug me up. I go to sleep, and then I just wouldn't wake up. That's, like, as good as it gets, right? So he goes in for this very surgery. He falls into a coma during surgery, almost there. And then he wakes up. Then he has a heart attack, then he dies. That's how Ronnie Dangerfield went after that life that he had. That's how he went. He was so close to going the way that he wanted to go. No respect. You want to hear no respect? A year after he died, CNN tried to get in touch with him to get his reaction about the passing of Johnny Carson. And if you read his obituaries, a lot of them, a shocking amount mentioned that he was well known for his role in the Scout. He wasn't in the scout. I got to the bottom of that. Oh, lay it on me. He was going to be in the Scout. Okay. The role was originally intended for him and Sam Kennedy, and he didn't do it for unknown reasons and ended up going to Albert Brooks and Brendan Fraser. Okay. But it was one of those things I think we're one of those Internet neat things on the Internet where someone prints something, then everyone else just copies and paste it. So I think one person wrote that because everything else I saw was worded the exact same way. Like list his movies as the Scout, which he was never in. No, he wasn't. Thanks for looking into that, man. Sure. That's what you get when you hang with Chuck. But he did find love, again in a situation in 1993 that everyone probably thought was like, a typical gold digger. He was 61 years old, and he married a 30 year old woman who was really hot blonde in La. But by all accounts, everything I looked into, it was not that she really loved them and was great for them, and they were super happy together, or as happy as he could be. And it turns out that it wasn't that kind of a deal after all, which made me feel good. Yeah, like, for example, when he died, she made sure that his funeral wasn't until five or dusk because he always asked her not to schedule any appointment for him before 05:00 p.m.. So she made sure his funeral didn't come until after that. His funeral was a really big deal. Everyone basically came out in droves. His pawl bearers included Jim Carrey, who he took Jim Carrey on the road for two years when he was a struggling comedian and he opened for him in Vegas, and Jim Carrey's getting boot off the stage. Everyone hated him. And Rodney stuck by him for like a full two years, and Jim Carrey never forgot that. Chris Rock, Tim Allen, Larry David, George Carlin, Jay Leno, Adam Sandler and then your boy Michael Bolton. Michael Bolton, he was supposed to sing what he was, but he was too choked up to sing at Rodney Dangerfield spino. Apparently, they were really tight friends because Michael Bolton's song, everybody's Crazy with him back to School, and I guess he parlayed that into a trip to the set where he got to meet Riding Dangerfield and they became friends for the rest of their life. So Michael Bolton was too sad to sing at Dangerfield's funeral. And, you know, everybody is disappointed. I bet there were a couple of people there that were like, yeah, it's okay, Michael, we know you're upset. You don't have to do this if you don't want. Everybody will understand. That's what they said to us before we went on. So we're going to close this with a final nice little cherry on top about Rodney Dangerfield and sort of his outlook on his lack of respect when it comes to the Academy of Motion Pictures. Motion picture Sciences, yes. Is that what it's called? Yeah, as you guys call it in La. The Academy, right. He applied for membership because he wanted to be in the Academy, and he had the credentials. He was in movies, and they said, no, no, you had to be in like, at least three major roles. He had 13 under his belt by this time, including Natural Born Killers, for which he received a lot of critical praise. Right. And they turned them down like jerks. Right. He even got a letter from Malcolm roddy McDowell. Roddy McDowell. Which one is Malcolm McDowell? He's the good one. Are they brothers? I don't know. Are they? No relation. Okay. It was Malcolm McDowell. Stop saying it was Roddy McDowell and Clockwork. Or Malcolm McDowell. That was Malcolm McDowell. Okay, good, because I felt a lot better about this then. Roddy McDowell. He was in Planet of the Apes. Yeah. Okay, good. I'm glad that those two are separated in my mind because I was like, I really liked them in Clockworks. Yeah, good. Roddy McDowell, who everybody hates, wrote a letter to Rodney Dangerfield, this rejection letter that said that he had not had enough of the kind of roles that allow a performer to demonstrate a mastery of his craft. Basically, you're just playing Rodney Dangerfield, and we all know it, even though he had all the credentials to get in. Right? So Rodney Dangerfield, he's like, let's see. What year is it? What year is it? What's new? What's on the horizon? The Internet. I think I'll build the world's first ever entertainment website. And he built his own website and realized that this would be a great place for his fans to come, like, vent their anger. And it was as a matter of fact, this guy think about that. This is and his fans came on and were like, the heck with the Academy, that kind of stuff. And the Academy actually relented and said, you're in, man. You're in, Rodney. Come on in. That's right. What did he say? No, he said, thanks, but no thanks. He still has a website, Rodney.com, and if you go to that I just found this out earlier. There's a section called Jokes and had audio clips. I was like, oh, this is great. But it's not him. It's some dude reading, like, as bad as me. Really? Just saying his little one liners over and over. And it's not in front of people. It's like, dead quiet, and it's just some dude saying his jokes. It's really weird. I can't tell you how much I'd love to cover comedian idea, just how stealing from other comics is such a taboo. We just need to just get out in front of it. Just own it. Yeah, mix up a little like Mitch hedberg and rich little mine. Do a little Stephen right there in the middle. Yes, perhaps. Yes. I like it. So that's Rodney Dangerfield, everybody. That's our show. If you want it anymore, you're so that's right. Yeah, you can clap if you want it's. Cool. Hey, that was fun, right? That was a lot of fun. Yeah, we had a great time. And big thanks to the La podcast Festival for having us out. Yeah, please have us back. We'd love to. Yeah, it was really cool. We got to see other shows, and we did our own and had a nice little crowd there. Very supportive, nice, kind people all the way around and look for the next La podcast. Best coming, I would imagine, next September 2016. Hopefully we'll be there. Yeah, keep your ears up for it. We'll mention it whether we are not, because we're that kind of guy. That's right. No listener mail for me, buddy? No, but if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at S yskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseworks.com. And as always, join us at our super awesome home on the web stuffyshow.com. 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." | |
3f59ee92-5461-11e8-b6d0-eb1b766e2504 | Selects: How Auto-Tune Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-auto-tune-works | What began as a challenge to an oil engineer to make a terrible singer into a pitch-perfect one, Auto-Tune has become a ubiquitous (and, to many, obnoxious) part of the musical soundscape. Learn more in this classic episode. | What began as a challenge to an oil engineer to make a terrible singer into a pitch-perfect one, Auto-Tune has become a ubiquitous (and, to many, obnoxious) part of the musical soundscape. Learn more in this classic episode. | Sat, 02 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=2, tm_isdst=0) | 51648132 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, its your old pal Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen how Autotune Works, came out in August of 2015 and it's one of my under the radar favorites because it looks at something that's worked its way into every crevice of popular culture, but that none of us really has any idea about how it works or where it came from. And this episode is a special listener mail roundtable with us and Holly and Tracy from stuff you missed in history class. All about sexism. It's super interesting and really kind of out of left field after the autotune episode. So it's a nice combination and I hope you enjoy it. 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. And this is stuff you should know. That was great. Thanks, Bent. Do I sound like Cher? Do. You sound like TPain. T. Josh horsepoop dog. Does he do auto, too? He factors into this big time later on. Oh, wow. I don't even know about that. I've got something on my sleeve. This is kind of fun. I don't know how much we're going to do that because people are probably like, stop it right now. Oh, Chuck. I think we should do it a lot. Are you done? Yeah, I'm done. All right. We could have just auto tuned this whole thing. Yeah. You know, maybe we should maybe we should maybe from this moment forward, we should just auto tune the rest of the episode starting now. Let's sabotage our careers. You got an intro for this? Fancy intro. I think we just did it, buddy. Okay, well, let's get in the wayback machine then, my friend. Okay, we don't have to go back that far because I know where we're going. It's going to be a short trip. Let's go back to summer of 1998. Boom. You and I are in the club we're hanging out, we're drinking rum and coke you can find us in the club and we're dancing. We're getting down and grooving to share the latest jam believe it's a hot jam a hot jam that's released in the summer. It's summertime as you can tell because it's hot in the club. Yeah. And I've got all my short pants. I'm dressed like I'm out for a night at the Rocksbury. That's right. I'm wearing a see through mesh shirt. So I noticed, actually. How did you not? Oh, yeah, the third nipple really stands out. So we're in the club, we're jamming and Cher's song is on and something happens at about 35 seconds into the song and you and I are just like, whoa, daddy, did you just hear that? It changed everything. It changed the whole tone of the club. Like, the club was like, okay. And now it's banging off the hook. Yeah, because of a little something called autotune. What sounded like a little electronic glitch was very purposeful, and it was the first time the Autotune had been used in this way. So what? Josh is autotune. That is quite a setup. Yeah. Can we do the rest of the episode in the club? Yes, why not? Okay. Just keep those roaming coats coming. Okay, that's cool. So, Chuck, let me stop you for a second. Right. Okay. Because the way you described it, you made it sound like everybody was like, oh, she just used Autotune. No, everybody said, what was that? Yeah, that was awesome. Although some people were like, what was that? Don't ever do that again. Sure. But most people were like, wow. Shar just released her biggest hit of her entire career, and it's a pretty long career. She just came back like that just established her comeback, was this track, and it actually became one of the greatest, best selling singles of all time. Yeah. And I think it would have been probably a big song anyway, but I think most definitely Autotune kicked it into the Stratosphere. David, just the extra something. It became part of the talk. Everyone was talking about it. So everybody went to her producer and said, dude, how did you do that? We want to know how to do that. And he's like, Vocoder. Yeah, he lied. He lied. He lied big time. He lied in person to other producers. He lied in interviews. He lied about how he made that track because he wanted to keep it to himself because it was so huge. And it became so huge, Chuck, that at first Autotune was called the Share Effect. Yes. Even the company that produced Autotune and Terry's, which we'll talk about in a minute, called it in their instructional book, the Share Effect. They probably still do, don't they? They don't mention it any longer. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. So it was a huge deal, and this guy lied and kept it under wraps, and for many years. It was very mysterious. Yeah. Actually, if you live under a rock. Let's go ahead and play that clip of the very 1st, 35 seconds into that song where Cher says, I can't break through. Yeah, right there. Boom. Right there. Music changed from that point forward. Okay. For the worst. What this guy what her producer was saying was Vocoder. Vocoder is something that's been around for a very long time. If you've ever listened to any Pete Frampton, peter Frampton, anything, do you feel like we do? Yeah. That whole long guitar solo or whatever, he's breathing into a tube connected to his guitar, which is electrifying his voice. Vocoder has been around for a very long time. Yeah, but there's different ways of doing it. That was definitely the tube effect through the guitar, but you can also just use it to make your voice robotic, like Beck, sure. Two turntables and a microphone or Mr. Roboto with sticks. But all different ways to use it, this thing just sounded different. The share effect, it was a little different. Sure. And I wonder how this guy talks his way out of the lie. Yeah. I mean, like, if a producer is like, okay, well, show me how you did it on Vocoder. If he was, like, over here and then just, like, ran out of the room, I don't think he talks out of it. I think he's just another line music producer. And he was just like, okay, well, busted. Okay. So apparently along the way, people figured out here and there what this guy did in 1998 with Believe, and they started using it themselves, but very, very sparsely. All right, so, Josh, what is autotune? All right, I'll answer your question because I'm going to keep asking it. All right, so Autotune is a plugin originally released in 1997 for the audio editing software Pro Tools. Yeah. It's a software piece that allows you and the original intent and how it's still mostly used is to pitch correct singers voice. Right. So when you or I go into the studio to record those albums that will never release, but we just record for fun, we hit flat notes here, there oh, not me. I have perfect pitch. I hit flat notes here, there I don't perfect pitch. And everybody does. It's a normal thing. Sure. For most of eternity, music producers would say, blue Eyes chairman, I need another take. That was a great take, but you had a couple of flight notes. Give me another take. Just like that one. And Frank would finish a Scotch, put out a cigarette and say, you get one more shine head. What was the joke? Oh, you didn't even see Spinal Tap, did you? Yeah. You finally saw it. Finally. Okay, but I don't remember any Frank Sinatra. Yeah, there was when Bruno Kirby is the limo driver, he talks about Sammy Davis's book, yes I Can, and he says what they should have called it is yes, I Can. As long as Frank says it's okay because Frank called the shots for all those guys. I do remember that. Yeah. So Frank would say one more take. And this could be like, take twelve or 15 or 20. Oh, yeah. Depending on how much the person was feeling it, the singer was feeling it at the time and would be happy to hang around the studio. Whatever was keeping the singer there at the studio, as long as that was around, the singer was happy to give it one more try. One more try. Right. Like drugs, maybe. Okay. Or if they had, like, a really good candy bowl. Sure. Who knows? I got to stay for the skittles. So the editor then, or the music producer, would then take all of these different tracks and would go through and I can't imagine how awful this would be. Take the best part of this track and edit it together with the best part of that track, and we're talking, like, pre digital air. So they're splicing together tape sure. From what I understand. Yeah. Right. To get the best possible complete take piece together from many different takes. Yeah. Right. Okay. That's what they did. All of a sudden, in 1997, there's this new software that just runs through a take and says, oh, well, I see what key the singer is singing in, but this particular note is just a little out, so I'm going to nudge it into the key that the singer was going for. And now all of a sudden, one take is all it takes. Yeah. What it did was it cut down on studio time, which is super expensive, which is very appealing, because now you could churn out songs at a more rapid rate and a cheaper rate. And it was a little sort of a secret tool that they didn't intend to get out to the public. I don't think they wanted everyone to know this stuff. No. It was meant for professionals. Yeah. And basically, it was the musical audio equivalent of cosmetics. Yeah. It was invented by Doctor Harold Andy Hildebrand, and he likened it to makeup, and The New Yorker likened it to getting rid of a red eye and a photograph. Exactly. You use it just enough so that you can't tell it's there, but it makes for a more pleasant overall composition. Right. Yeah. What Share had done, or what Shares producers have done, is take this thing and used it to the Nth degree. Yeah. Supposedly, it was just a joke, and Cher was like, I love that, but that's like, I don't know if that's an urban legend or if that's fact. Well, from what I read, that her producer, she had heard some telephone effect that she was interested in using. She wanted something. Okay. And I guess the producer had stumbled upon that and played it for her. But I was like, you're not going to like this, but listen to this weirdness. And she was like, I want that. Nice. That's what I read. If it's due to her giving it the green light, then that was truly like foresight. Like a masterful move by Cher. Well, sure has a lot of foresight. You know, they say, don't doubt Share, and Share has a lot of foresight. Never bet against Share. Yeah. So when she did make that decision, like you said, it changed everything. And we can't talk enough about this, but we're going to take a break and then come back and talk more about it right after this. All right, Josh. What I found most interesting about this while researching was what Andy Hildebrand did before he did this. He was a musician. He played flute professionally since he was a young teenager. Even went to University of Illinois fighting alinai on a music scholarship. Yet he chose to work for Exxon Mobile for 17 years looking for oil. Yeah. Crazy. The two weren't too terribly far apart. Right? Well, as we will find out. So he's a professional flutist, classically trained, flat. It's a good one, from what I understand. Flout and his flute. Yes. And he went to college to get an electrical engineering degree, I think. And basically when he went to work for the oil companies, it was an oil exploration. And he figured out a program where he designed a software that when you set off an explosive charge underground, it measured the pitch of stuff, of the sound waves that were created. Right. So as they travel through rock, different types of rock adjust the pitch, basically. And this software like, analyzed the pitch that was coming through and could create a subsurface map of the rock below. And oil companies have long known that this type of rock is associated with oil and this type of rock is not. Maybe you'll find natural gas in this type of rock. So with this guy creating an audio visual map of the subsurface area, oil companies no longer had to just drill and drill and hope that they found oil. He would say, this is a pretty great place to drill because this kind of rock is there. That's right. It's called auto correlation. And it saved Exxon a lot of money. And he somehow made a lot of money. I thought it was going to be one of those things where Exxon was just like, thanks, you work for us. Here's your $45,000 a year. But apparently he earned enough money to retire by the age of 40, thanks to this innovation. And in the early 1990s, he got out of the oil business and founded it's. Like it's just a popularity contest. Yeah. He founded in Terrace Audio Technologies, kind of near Silicon Valley. In Scottsdale, California. And I think still they only have about ten employees. I think. It's a pretty small operation. It's all centered around him and his ideas. And he is the main inventor. One of the first things he invented was something called Infinity, which is a program where you could loop samples over, like, seamlessly. Apparently that was a necessary thing. I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. Think about it. We're talking like early ninety s. That was like the 808 acid house revolution. Yes, but I just didn't realize I guess he made it easier. Probably, is my guess. Yes. I think he enabled it. He enabled techno, is the impression I have. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. Looping samples together seamlessly. Well, but you can already do that. What I'm saying is he clearly found a way to do it better and more efficiently. Right. He didn't invent looping. No, he made it better. Yeah, exactly. Another thing he did was invented the microphone modeler. Modeling is a big thing in music. You can get guitar amplifiers. That model basically means imitate other amps. Right. I have a modeling amp which I don't use anymore because it's not very good. But there's like twelve different classic amps. It models supposedly. Oh, no, but he invented the modeling microphone, which means you could mimic classic microphones or like a harmonica mic and vintage mics. Like the Elvis Presley. That cool looking mic. I'm sure that was on there. Is that the silver kind of rounded rectangular one? NOL's, got one on his desk, I thought. Yeah. That's associated with Elvis Presley. Well, I mean, just the music of that time. I got you. But I always picture Elvis, you know what I mean? I can see that, yes. Have you ever seen his grandson, by the way? Quick Sidebar? No. His name is Quickside Bar. Yeah, Quick Sidebar Prescott. It's a weird name. Yeah. But Lisa Marie was his mom. Oh yeah. That was very funny, by the way. Just look him up, I think what's his name? I can't remember his name. His last name is the father's name for Lisa Marie's first husband is who she had him with. Okay. Yeah. Just look at Elvis Presley's grandson. It is creepy. Dude looks exactly like Elvis at that age. Like scary. Scary. Eerily similar. Can he sing that? I don't know. Does he use autotune? That I do know. If he sings, he probably uses Auto Tune. Probably because 90% of singers apparently use autotune. I've seen even higher than that. Really? Yeah. How about that? 90%? Admitted. Yeah. There's this thing about autotune where you deny that you use it even though you're totally aware that everyone uses it. I read an article where apparently this one producer said that he's worked with two artists that haven't used it. Everyone else has. And it was Nico case and Nellie for Totato. And then apparently later after that, nellie For Totado released a single that had tons of Auto Tune on it. Nico Case remains solid. She may be the only artist in the world who hasn't used autotune, either subtly or to the nth degree. Well, that's certainly not true. I think there are plenty of indie artists. But if you're talking, you should read this Verge article. It basically lays it out like no, everyone uses this. Apparently producers don't even necessarily tell the band that it's being used right then because there's a live function so that the monitors or the headphones that the band is hearing is being run through autotune. So what they're hearing is already corrected. So they think they just did a perfect take. Yeah. I'm just wary of any time someone says out of 20 million singers, one person doesn't. That's just very dubious claim. I don't know. We're talking music industry here. Especially when a lot of people are making their own music in their own homes. Well, that's another thing. They're not part of the pop machine. They don't have stats on that. Yeah, I'm just saying that sounds like a load of garbage to me. Okay. I'm sure more than one person doesn't use Auto Tune just one. So Autotune came about. Apparently this is the tale, because of dinner that Hildebrand was at, he was having lunch with a sales rep and the wife said something funny like, hey, Andy, why don't you invent something to make me sing and tune? And he went, Great idea. That's a great hill for you. We should have Auto tuned that. Maybe we could maybe it was maybe it just happened. And so he said, you know what? If I can tell Jed Clampett where the oil is, then I can make you sing in tune. And he did. He created Autotune. And we kind of mentioned how it works. Basically, it takes that take of a singer's song. It takes the vocals of the song, and you select what key you're singing in. And then Auto Tune goes through and makes this map of that audio, of that vocal track. And it goes through and says, this one is a little flat, this one's a little low, or whatever. And it just nudges these things into tune, into the key that it's supposed to be in. So all of the notes that the singer hits in that take are within the correct key, meaning that they all sound great. It's a perfect take, right? Well, yeah. And the key there is it's in the original tone and inflection of the artist. So you can't tell it's happening. No. And there's actually, if you look at the Autotune product demo videos, it's amazing. So there's an automatic version where you select the key and let Autotune do its thing. And it does a pretty great job. One of the ways that it does this is it adds like, millisecond pauses in between notes. There's little spaces between notes, which gives it a natural feel. There's other selections that you can make, like throat length. You can select gross. How long the singer's throat is. And you can do that note by note. So you can make the whole thing even more natural until basically what you've done is taught Autotune how to simulate a particular singer's singing style and voice so that when it adjusts that note, it does it within the same exact range that the singer would have done had they hit it correctly. It's pretty amazing and advanced stuff. Oh, totally. When normal people think of Autotune like you and me, who are not in the music biz, we think of this thing that's called the zero function. Yes. And you know what? Let's take a break and we will explain what the zero function is right after this. All right? The suspense is killing me. You're going to get us killed. All right. Zero function. That was essentially what the share effect was. That right. Yes. Go ahead. No, go ahead. No, go ahead. You just sat up in your chair like you were about to arm wrestling. I know. Go ahead. You talk about it, buddy. Well, what Autotune does in terms of the zero function is it gets rid of all of that space. And when Shares voice changes, it's immediate. Yes. All of those notes go right up against each other and it creates this robotic sounding voice. Yeah. There's no, like, rise what's the word I'm looking for? It's not like a normal vibrato that you would get right. Because in a normal vibrato, there's pauses, there's space in between the notes. Yeah. With this it's note all pressed up against each other in a compressed way. And that zero function is what it takes any spaces out between the notes and creates that robot sound. Yeah. Because I think autotune has a range of numbers to make it flow more seamlessly. And when they took it all the way down to zero, which means there's nothing there, it created that weird effect that they were like, Sharer, listen to this. It's weird. Yeah. And she was like, I like weird. It's great, baby. I hear number one hit in my future. No, you got it wrong. It's great, baby. Did you ever see him? No, that was jack from Will and Grace. Do you remember when he thought he was talking to a Share impersonator? Oh, yeah. And he's like, no, if I could turn back time. He was teaching her how to say it, how to sing it correctly. I thoroughly enjoyed Will and Grace. Oh, it's great. Good stuff. The grace holds up really well. Agreed. All right, where are we? Well, you were talking about the Share Effect, right? Yeah. And that's what it was called again. Antari has called this zero function the Share Effect for many years. And over time remember, her producer just kept lying and lying and lying? Over time, other producers independently figured out what he had done that he had used the zero function, which was a really obscure tool on a software suite that not everybody knew about. Right. So it took some brain power and some experimentation, but little by little, some producers figured it out. This one producer did a remix of a J Lo song and used it. And he, I think, was the second person to use it publicly. And for a brief time, it became known as the JLo Effect. Of course, anybody who used this without fessing up to it at first, in the early 2000s, it was called the Whatever Effect. Yeah. And there's this producer rapper down in Florida named TPain. Oh, boy. And TPain. He heard this. JLo effect. He loved it. He went on a mission to figure out what this was, and he finally apparently took him years to figure it out. He finally figured out that it was this zero effect on this Pro Tools plugin, and he started using it and just went crazy with it. Up to this point, it was used to Tweak, or it would maybe make a track of just a little weird over here or something like that. He used it as often as he possibly could. Yeah. He basically said the zero function and TPain are one and the same. Yeah. And it became known as the TPain Effect. Really? Yeah. Because when people ask him how he did it, guess what he said? Vocoder. Did he really? Yes. No. Yes, he did. And for years he managed to make a mint because the whole thing was in hip hop or in pop. If you wanted this TPain effect, TPain needed to consult at least if not produce your record. That was like ten years after the share effect. I know. People not know that he managed to pull it off for years and years and years. Good for TPain is what I say. Yes. Yeah. He apparently was like, I guess on a plane ride. Usher was on the same plane and asked to speak to him. And Ushers like, I got to get something off my chest. You really screwed up music, like, big Time was like, I made a bunch of money doing this and people seem to like it, so I'm not going to stop. Hildebrand has been vilified by many, and he said, you know what? I just make the car. I don't drive it down the wrong side of the road. It's a great quote because a lot of people hate autotune and think the worst thing to happen to music. A lot of people like it and say, when you use it for what it's supposed to be used for, it can really help out because it's not like everyone uses it all the time. I'm sure some people need it way more than others. Well, even if you're using it as a light cosmetic touch, like Kill the Brand originally designed it for, a lot of people say, no, we shouldn't even be doing that. Because if you go back and listen to things like Bob Dylan or The Beach Boys or just a lot of these original artists that didn't use these kind of effects on their voice when they sang and their recordings made it through the studio, there were still flat notes here or there. Oh, yeah. But it was their music, it was their voice, it was their vocals in these tracks, and everyone came to know and love them. But now, because everything is autotuned perfectly, even the stuff that you can't hear, it's autotuned because they're not using zero function, but just the fact that it's been run through the autotune, this stuff sounds really rough by comparison. So a lot of people are like, autotune has ruined music. It ruined music that people love for decades. Because now, by comparison, it seems rough. Well, but it also like a good ear can tell if something's autotuned. It has this weird tiny quality that it doesn't sound natural. So I think there will be blowback and a reversion back to older methods. Okay. I bet you Jack White hasn't auto tuned that's. The most purest of pure guys. No. He uses all sorts of weird vocal effects on his stuff. No, but as far as, like, I bet he has asked him, he wouldn't have been it. Apparently that's par for the course. Yeah. So, TPain. If we can get back to the history of this buy you a drink? So, TPain. Right? He's huge. Everything he drops is just blowing up all over the place. He's getting invited to consult and produce on Kanye's album, which ultimately had a lot of autotune. Every track had auto tune on it by the time TPain. Got done with it. Right? Yeah. Have you heard his queen Bohemian Rhapsody live? No. Dude, is it good? Oh, no. Oh, no. There's a video that someone spliced of him, he and Freddie Mercury. It's one of the worst things I've ever heard on a stage. I've got to check it out. It's terrible. Okay. All right. I got to see that. Yes. It's good. The TPain effect again. Yeah. And if you wanted this effect, you had to have TPain. Well, Snoop Dogg says that's enough of that. Oh, finally. And he releases something called Sensual Seduction, and it's one of the better rap videos you've ever seen. It's pretty good. Yeah. There's a star wipe in it, so, you know I love it. So, Snoop releases this using the TPain effect to great degree, but he didn't consult with TPain. TPain. Had nothing to do with this record. So Snoop kind of opened the floodgates, saying, if you guys want to use this, go use it. But what's interesting, if you watch that video, when Snoop is doing, like, the TPain effect or the autotune stuff, he's actually got a tube going to a synthesizer to make it look like he's using a vocoder. Oh, interesting. Isn't that weird? Yeah, that is weird. Like in his video. Yeah. But anyway, are you sure that wasn't a marijuana smoking device? It may have been thinking about it, but Snoop changed everything in that he took TPain. Out of the equation and really opened the floodgates for anybody and everybody to use this stuff simultaneously. JayZ was trying to close those floodgates and push all of it back in. Yeah, I think JayZ clearly jumped the shark at a certain point. You know when major ad brands are making ads using the latest and greatest that it's years late, first of all. And that means it has definitely jumped the shark. And in 2009, Wendy's had a Frosty posse commercial where a gang of office workers built it out auto tuned rhymes while searching for Frosty's. I don't remember that ad. Do you? I know, but I went and watched it. Of course. How is it? Pretty great. It's what you think it is pretty great? It's awesome. Okay. No, it's terrible. And JayZ apparently saw this and was enraged, and so he wrote a song called DOA Death of Autotune. I know we're facing a recession, but the music you're making. Going to make it. The Great Depression. Get back to rap. You t pain in too much. That's calling someone out. Yeah. Hard. Yeah. But other autotune the news was a big YouTube hit. Oh, yeah, man. That Ben Intruder song. Yeah. Let's play a clip from that from 2010. It was a local news footage from Huntsville, Alabama, of Antoine Dodson delivering is an awesome human being. Yeah. About a neighborhood intruder and someone auto tune that the Gregory Brothers did. That's right. Let's hear that real quick. Have you listened that recently? No, it's pretty great. Yeah. But again, that was in 2010, and I think that even kind of had a pretty short shelf life. Right. Unless they're still doing it. What did you say? The Gregory Brothers, the Brooklyn Soul band. Yeah. They started out doing Autotune the News, and they would take the news and just auto tune it and turn it and just produce it over produce it. And they did that with the Ben Intruder song. And that actually became the number one video on YouTube of all of 2010. I looked. The original video has 128,000,000 views right now. Yeah, it's pretty impressive stuff. At the same point now, Auto Tune has become a parody of itself. Yes. It's being used in ads. Sure. Here's the progression. Something starts out, someone uses it artistically, someone comes along and overuses it. Then everybody starts to overuse it. Then Wendy's makes a commercial using it. Newsweek finally gets around to writing an article about it, and then years after, we recorded a podcast on it, and then the thing finally dies. Yeah. And then 15 or 20 years after that, it becomes hypocrite. Yes. That's the progression. So the point that we're at, though, now, Chuck, it's not so cut and dry, man. It's not as cut and dry as Jay Z would like to have, you think? No, because he came out with this Death of Autotune track in, like, 2009. Auto Tune is still around very much. And now it's getting to the point where if, like, The Verge and I can't remember the other article I read. They're both on this podcast page. If they were to be believed, they're credible sources, and they certainly seem like it from these articles. There's this growing question of, is Autotune here to stay? Yeah. People are starting to compare it to the initial reaction that people had to the electric guitar. Sure. It was a lot different from the original guitar. And people it took a lot of getting used to it like when Bob Dylan went electric, a lot of people didn't like that. Newport but then look at what happened now with the electric guitar. A lot of people tried different stuff with it and it became a standard. Some people are wondering if Autotune is going to fulfill the same destiny. I think most people are hoping that it does not. Yes. Well, I mean, sweetening vocals is nothing new. Like reverb is a tried and true thing for years and embraced did it sweeten vocals. I thought that was always used to make it weird. No, it sort of like, gives it an echoey, like you're singing in a big empty church hall or something. But it sweetens. It it doesn't correct anything, but when I say sweetens, it it just makes it sound a little better. I got you. Reverb is a great tool. Right. The point is it's artificial. Yeah. It's not natural. Yeah. They tried to replicate, like, singing in a big empty echoey hallway with an effect, and it worked. Right. And another argument in favor of autotune that I've seen is simply taking a human voice and recording it automatically makes it artificial. Like, if they're not there in the room with you singing to you at that moment, anything else is artificial. True. So what's the problem? So, just to let people know, I put out two texts during the episode. Two musician friends. Jack White. No. I texted Lucy. Wayne Wright our buddy. Yes. Aka Jerry from our TV show. She's not answered. Okay. Which means she's used autotune. Kidding. And our buddy Joey Sierra from the Henry Clay people. Formerly of Henry Clay people, now with fakers. And he said I think there were a few harmonized OS and Oz on one of our old records where we did some pitch correcting, but that's it. I think maybe definitely. He's probably going to be mad that I said that. Thank you for being forthright, Joey. Yeah. Good guy. Sure. You got anything else about audit? Yeah, just really quick. This is from a great website. Ten artists that are essentially computer programs, they just have the most autotuned people. They have TPain Kesha, Chris Brown, Maroon Five, Black Eyed Peas, Daft Punk, Paris Hilton. Who, I forgot actually had a song. The cast of Glee. Katy Perry. And number one was Owl City, who I don't even know what that is. There's a huge outcry, apparently, among Glee fans for Glee to stop using so much autotune. I think the deal is they're like, well, these are actors, and there's a big scandal with UK's Got talent or something weird like that, where they were using a lot of autotune for the audition. That's not a very surprising list. So this has been grumpy old men. I don't feel like we've been grumpy. We haven't condemned it outright. No, nico case, she's my lady. She condemned it out. Right? Yeah. Emily and I have an agreement about Nico case. We could both marry her if she was ever available to us. She's right behind you. Oh, my God. So we have a very well to finish up your deal. Sorry, I just jumped the gun. Okay. Thank you. You don't have anything else about autotune? No, I was just teasing. We have a special listener mail with guests. Well, hold on. Let me finish first. Okay. Okay. Well, since Chuck doesn't have anything, it's the end. And if you want to know more about autotune, you can type those words into the search bar@householdforex.com. And this article, I have to say, by the way, was the most definitive article about autotune on the Internet. How about that? It's a good one. So you can go look that up. And since I said definitive, it's time for listener mail. And it's a special one, like Chuck set. That's right. Today we got a joint listener mail to ourselves and to Holly and Tracy from stuff you missed in history class. Yes. So we're going to bring them in, right? Yeah. We're going to read the email and we're going to talk about its implications. But let's start now. So without further ado, we actually have Holly and Tracy of stuff you miss in history class with us. Yeah. Hi. And Tracy, we have actually not with us. She's with us in spirit and voice from Boston. I know it's pretty interesting when it comes in through your headphones, but the other person somewhere else. It's kind of awesome. Yeah. And this is how you guys do the show now, right? Yes. We also have, like, an online we have a Google Hangout where we both are so we can see each other as well. Well, that's neat. We should have done that. Tracy in here with her little video image or like a hologram of her. That'd be pretty cool, too. That's true. All right, so I think the first thing I should do is you should have a picture of me, like our old boss. Oh, well, I do have a picture of you. I have the wallet size that you gave out, so I'll just look at that. I think the first thing we should do is just read I'll read the email here and then we will discuss like adults. How about that? What? So, like I said, I already set it up that we both got an email from a listener, and she says the following. And this is from Amanda Lyons. Hey, guys and gals. She didn't say that, of course. I just did. Well, you should read it. Okay. Josh, Chuckers, Holly and Tracy And, of course, a hello to Jerry and Noel. Yeah, I'm a social worker from Portland, Oregon, with a passion for human equity and respect, one of the original members of the SYSK Army and a more recent listener to Miston History. Yeah, I binged for about five months before I got all caught up, so how about that? I'm concerned about something I've heard a few times on the history podcast, and I was wondering if you guys would be willing to get together we are. And look into something to fulfill my curiosity. When Josh and Chuck receive corrections, they thank people for being nice and frequently ask people not to be jerks when correcting them. When Holly and Tracy talk about corrections they receive, they ask people to be nice and have referred to corrections on several occasions as hate male. My concern is that listeners may be more disrespectful to Holly and Tracy because they are women. And even if listeners are rude to Josh and Chuck, they may rein it in when making corrections because they are men. It could be completely off base. But if I'm right, I feel like the discrepancy should be addressed on the podcast to raise awareness about how people treat men and women differently and even to address people's tendency to feel protected by the anonymity of the Internet and say things online they wouldn't say to someone's face. And so, Amanda, we did talk about it via email and now we're going to talk about it like regular human folks. And Tracy really has the wealth of information because of her job and what she's been responsible for in the past. Yeah, that sounds serious. Yeah. I was part of the management team of the website for several years before I started actually being on a podcast. And for a chunk of that time, most of the podcasters reported to me. So even though I wasn't managing the podcast program, I was sort of keeping tabs on the itunes reviews for everybody. And there was a definite trend in that. The podcast that had women on them got disproportionately more vicious comments about what their voices sounded like versus the podcast with men on them, which got less of that. So this is news to me. Misogyny on the Internet. I wasn't aware that that was a thing. The most beautiful blind spot of all time. No, I can imagine. And I know, Tracy, you've pointed some of these out before. For us, it's like, yeah, we'll get hate mail every once in a while, but it's kind of easy to dismiss because even if it is directed at us, it's not necessarily directed at our gender or whatever. It's not personal. Or even if it is personal, it's dumb. It's just dumb stuff. It's easy to not take personally even when it's meant to be personal, sure. But that's me speaking as like a white male age 18 to 49. So I can imagine that when someone attacks you just based on your gender, or even worse, if they're coming after you and they don't even realize that they're being driven by this disdain for your gender, that has to make it a lot harder to just dismiss. Yeah, I was going to say, for me, I am lucky and that I really give very few dams about what most people think. Like, unless you're sitting in my lap or paying my paycheck. Like, it's great if you like me, but if you don't, that's cool too. Everybody do your thing. But eventually the landslide builds up. And it's not so much that I'm like heartbroken or traumatized, but it just wears you down after a while where you're like, why am I doing this? Absolutely. To get more of this crap. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and we definitely have we have been called slurs based on our gender before. We have been called the C word over the pipeline. Are you serious? Right. Yes. Unbelievable. Yeah. Well, and then I told you about that when we were discussing the email. In our email conversation, I told you about the person who wrote to us and said they didn't understand how I could be in the same room with Holly without strangling her. Like, that's the kind of stuff that people will write to us and be really awful. But we do get a whole lot of them that I don't think people are consciously being misogynistic, but they're talking to us and about us in a very gendered way. So people tell us that we sound shrill or that we sound bossy, and those aren't words that people would use to describe men most of the time. Well, no, because men are assertive. They're not bossy. Right. And all of the articles that had come out lately about especially vocal fry and other things that people criticize about women's voices that they don't generally criticize about men's voices every single time I read it, and I'm like, I could have written that about my job and my experience being a woman talking on the Internet. So which one hits home the most? Like, one that's just a direct personal attack, or the ones that or the person is just being unconsciously misogynistic, which to me would seem more entrenched. Yeah. To me, the second one is worse. And it's especially worse because a lot of the implicitly gendered criticism that we get is also from women. That's the hardest part for me to deal with. Yeah. When they're real specific. For example, like the person who wants me to be strangled at the end of the day, I'm like, he's working through his own stuff. I really have very little to do with this. I may have been the trigger that caused this little outrage bomb, but really, it has very little to do with me. I think almost 100% of the time that is the case. These are people who have their own gripes in life and are probably angry, unhappy people. Yes. But then, as Tracy said, when you get those ones that are like, they're not even conscious of how it's playing out, you realize how much it is a bigger sort of systemic social problem, because most of those people are not evil. They don't intend to be misogynistic. They're not conscious that they're separating the two genders and judging them differently on different criteria, as Tracy said. A little more disturbing because you realize that it's kind of like the silent creep that underlays everything. Absolutely. Well, we do get a lot of emails that are great from people who are great, and the majority of the email that we get is great. I don't want to make it sound like every person who writes to us is awful. And we talk about corrections on the episode a lot of times from people who write it in, and everything is fine and everything's very respectful. So to me, a correction is you said this person died in 19 to 18, but really it was 1927. That's a correction, and that's fine. But then we'll also get ones that are like, I can't believe you didn't even bother to look this up. You completely butchered it. I don't know why you don't even put more thought into what you're doing, because it's really important that you represent yourself well. And that's why I'm like that's hate mail. Yeah, we get a lot of those, but I never feel like those have anything to do with my gender in those cases. Absolutely. I mean, we get the same exact emails where it's just like, you guys are total idiots. Like, how could you drop the ball this badly? And it's like we basically said exactly what you're saying. We just said it slightly differently. It definitely doesn't warrant this kind of reaction. Yeah. Why do you think there is a gender bias? Or why is it worse for you guys being women, do you think? Not just in common history of the world. I know. How long do you have? But I mean, even beyond comments like, why is the Internet so geared toward hating women? What's the deal with that? Is there a general understanding or idea behind it? Lonely, angry men is my guess. Well, I think it's super complex. Right. There's no one simple answer. Like, some of it is that we have reached an age where the disparity in terms of gender equality has shrunk at the same time that a lot of people have this outlet readily available to them. So there's progress being made, but there are also the people who are still kicking and screaming as they get dragged into a future they're not comfortable with. But then there's also just a thing that, again, I don't think people are even conscious of it, where it is new for many people and even people that are younger and have maybe grown up in a more kind of old school, traditional environment, be it household or community, where they're not even conscious of why they're more upset at women. There's just something about women sharing knowledge or being assertive or being confident that just rankles them. They don't even register that it's because it's a woman. They just know there's something about that person I hate, and it's something they're just not used to, and they haven't kind of made the mental customization to oh, sometimes people that aren't dudes have stuff to say as well. Right. Do you think that same experience is extrapolatable under race as well as gender? For sure. Well, I mean, I know it is, but is it almost like a step for step, do you think? I think it's probably pretty similar models. Yeah. Well. Speaking like as a white person in a room of white people who are on the phone right now. The worst days I have ever had managing our Facebook page. Our days when we talk about something that has to do with systemic racism and we'll get a flood of similarly implicitly racist comments from people who really don't know that the view that they just put out there is racist. That's sort of the same thing. Like, a lot of people do things that are misogynist, not really consciously being misogynist, that just comes out and they're not consciously aware of it. And we see the same thing on our Facebook posts in subjects that are related to race really pretty often. So at the end of the day, when you guys get a bunch of these, say on just a particularly bad day, what do you do? Do you battle this? Do you just brush it off and be like, these guys are idiots. And whether they like it or not, they are going to be dragged into the future against their will? Do you do a combination of both? Or do you look at your status as a perennial top 20 podcast and say, clearly, who cares what they say? Because we're really good at what we do, because we're very successful. I do a combination of things. I have kind of a library of links about vocal fry, and whenever anyone writes directly to us to complain about vocal fry, I kind of send them, hey, why don't you listen to this American Life segment all about vocal fry, in which Iraglass has vocal fry the entire segment but nobody complains at him about it. So I specifically will address that. I will specifically address things that people say on our Facebook page in public because I feel like our role as a podcast about history does not include allowing people free reign to be racist in public and have that not be challenged. But when it comes to the like the email that Holly and I got that was so bad pretty recently, that was the person who was basically advocating me murdering Holly. I was actually traveling. I went down to the hotel bar and had a drink. There you go. I read a book and I tried to chill out about it. There's the answer. Booze. Yeah. Cocktail fixes everything. Well, thank you both for addressing this. Yeah, I'm sorry we didn't solve this problem here in this listener mail segment. Thank you for having us on the show. Of course, if anyone out there and Stuff you Should Know Land has not checked out stuff you missed in history class, you definitely should because it is super awesome and as are both of you. And I don't want to strangle you, but I want to hug your necks sort of way. No. Now she don't move no more. No. But thanks for coming in and we should do this more often. We should have a whole show where we just get together and do roundtable stuff we can have yappy POW wow. Party time. That would be fun. Yeah. Well, if you have something to say about all this, we're sure you will. We want to hear from you you can tweet to us at Syskast you can tweet the stuff you missed in history class at at missedinhistory you can join us on facebook comstepiesto you can join ##istryclass at missedandhistry facebook commistandhistorymakeiteasy what about email how do they get in touch with you history podcast athousofworks.com and you can hit us up at stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com and Missedinhistory.com Stuff you should know is the production of Iheartradios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts myheartradio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your your favorite show." | |
8a25049c-4a58-11e8-a49f-0327fb33a30a | SYSK Selects: Is brain size related to intelligence? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-is-brain-size-related-to-intelligence | Modern investigation into how the brain works suggests there's a lot more to take into account when comparing brain biology to intellect. | Modern investigation into how the brain works suggests there's a lot more to take into account when comparing brain biology to intellect. | Sat, 19 May 2018 11:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=11, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=139, tm_isdst=0) | 33479470 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, chuck here, and welcome to another Saturday select Stuff You Should Know episode where Josh and I take turns picking from the classics of some of our favorite episodes, because some of you may not know that there are far more than three episodes that you see at Apple podcast. We have over a thousand. So we dig into the archives, and my pick this week is from July 8, 2014. His brain size related to intelligence. I just remember loving this one. Super fascinated about the brain, as is Josh. It's one of our favorite organs, to be honest, and how it relates to intelligence is pretty interesting. So we get into all that in this episode. Please do enjoy right now. 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 this is stuff you should know. Yes, I think this might complete our brain. I don't know about that, because we've done Einstein's brain, the difference between men and women's brain. Right. And now we're tackling brain size, which is sort of sits on both of those a little bit. It does. But there's always new findings. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. If there's ever an ongoing suite, it's got to be the brain, man. It's growing all the time. It's changing shape, changing size, changing connections. You could almost say that Sweet is plastic. Plasticity, baby. Yes, that's right. You sent me something that I think we should talk about first, Chuck. Okay. This is just like a grab bag hodge podge of loosely related studies that I find that we don't really know the answer to the question, like, does a big brain mean a smarter person? Yeah, because there's a lot of different conflicting findings. Well, a few million years ago, our brain started growing a lot, and that kind of timed out with becoming smarter and using tools and things. Right. So, I mean, there's a little bit of you call it evidence. Well, yeah, there's definitely some plenty of evidence. I think that's the confounding part is that there's plenty of evidence that, yes, as the brain grows, it is correlated to intelligence. But then that's only holding true up to a point. Right. I sounded like a Soviet immigrant just then. That's only holding true up to a certain point. All right. Ya. Golf. Right? He's in Branson, Missouri, though. Did you know that? Yeah, I think he's got, like, his own restaurant or something. Well, his own theater, and I think all the theaters are food. Right. Buttery. We should go to Branson, man. I want to see what that place is all about. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's a parade of stars if it's right. Yeah. I bet your boy Ronnie Milsap is there. Yeah, if he doesn't have a place there, I'll bet he plays Branson fairly regularly. He sublets. He would play well there. Yeah, I bet. So, Branson. Yeah. How did we even get him? Oh, yeah, russian thing. Sorry, brain size. So brain size does correlate to intelligence to a certain extent, but you can point out, like, well, a sperm whale has a 17 pound brain. Sure. Holy cow. It must be the smartest animal on the planet. Well, it's not. Right. I'm sorry to tell you sperm whale fans that it's not the smartest animal on the planet. Humans are the smartest animal on the planet, and don't you forget it. We don't have the largest brains, so you kind of take that idea of, OK, well, if it's not brain size, maybe it has to do with the size of your brain in relation to your body. Then we start to get a little closer to jackpot. But even still I want to spoil it for everybody. There's no definitive answer. Yeah. But sometimes those are the best ones, because we get to explore all this stuff and we can't really get anything wrong because nobody knows what's right. I like this, then. Yeah. I've turned, you know, these yeah. Now I feel good about this because I can't be wrong. Right. Exactly. Well, I guess we should start off with a little bit about what determines what size brain you do have. And again, they don't know everything about it, but they think that genetics plays a part. They know this in part by studying twins. And identical twins have, of course, the same genes. Fraternal twins have about half the same genes. Right. And there's a greater correlation in brain size if you're identical than fraternal. Yeah. So genetics looks like it probably plays a role. Yeah. And they've done a lot of exploration into what genes in particular have to do with brain size. And they've isolated a few. One is called betacatenin. There's a hyphen in there too. Yeah, it's pretty flashy. Gene, not betacarotene. No. Catanan. Yeah. And who's coming up with the naming convention for genes? They are all over the place. Yeah. Like, you can't look at the name of a gene and be like, that's obviously a gene. Yeah. Unless there's like, a couple of weird consonants and a number and then another consonant, then you're like, well, that's a gene. But you're right. Catsinin. Yeah. That's a gene. It is a gene. And it's a gene that they know controls brain growth, because they've injected poor mice with this stuff until their heads exploded. Exactly. They fell short of exploding. But a lot of the mice died as a result of their heads growing too big. But their brains grew big and as a result of their brains growing big, they exhibited more intelligence, higher cognitive function. Right. They injected these things with a gene to your brain that made them smarter. Yeah, but like Molly points out in this article, that doesn't mean we should start doing that because these mice are dying. So you can't play God, as they say. No, but it does make you wonder, like, okay, you don't want to shoot up betacaten like before the SATS or anything like that. Right. But is there a way to kind of tamper a little less, but still tamper with that gene? Something put under your tongue and let it dissolve, maybe? Sure. Like just epigenetically just a tad bit. Maybe amplify it just a tad and see what happens. But it would cause your brain to grow because that gene is partially responsible for the size that your brain gets to that's right. As far as large brains go, yes. Like it makes it larger. Yes. If you want to talk smaller brains, there's another gene. And boy, you're right. The names are all over the place. Yeah, just convention wise. It's not like they have different names. Some are numbers and dashes. Right. They get it together, people ASPM it's an abbreviation for abnormal spindle. Like microcephaly associated. That's the name of the gene. Yeah. That's just shameful. And they say microcephaly associated because that is a condition that you've probably seen before when you're born with a small head and small brain, which probably means you're going to have some cognitive impairment. Right. So right there, smaller brain is correlated to lower faculty or cognitive function. Yeah. We should look into that morph or another podcast. From the images I saw, it looks like you remember like, the movie Freaks. Yes, that guy. I think that's so cute. The deal, I think you have like normal size nose and ears and eyes, but your actual head and skull and brain are smaller. Right. You don't look like the African safari guy from Beetlejuice. Not proportionately shrunk. Right, yeah. How do you get him down so small? Right. What was that guy's name from Freaks? I've read about him before. He was his real name? No, he had his stage name. It was like Topsy or Flopsy or something like that. And he apparently thinks superstar had the greatest personality of all time, just so lovable and was just exploited basically his whole life until that movie kind of got vengeance for him because he was a real life sideshow performer. Well, that's good. Yeah. Topsy. It wasn't Topsy. That was the elephant that Edison electrocuted. Yeah, I think it was, but it was something along those lines. Just a fun name. So check. There's another gene. This is a little more genetically sounding. EMX two. Sounds like a dirt bike, right? Or a gene. Yeah. 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Again, we're not saying like, well, these are the genes that provide you with your intellect. These are just genes that they are saying these things have to do with the size of your brain. And we also have figured out that if you mess with these genes, you may also be messing with cognitive function. Right. So we're laying the groundwork here. Everybody just bear with us. The EMX Two gene apparently has to do with the growth of the functional subdivisions of the cortex. Okay. You have different cortices. Sure. They're responsible for different things. So like in that New York Times article you sent me, the guy uses the visual cortex as an example, right. Where you get all your visual sensory input and your brain puts it all together. That cortex, that region of your brain is responsible for a fairly specific, but also very complicated task. Now, this one functional cortex that the EMX Two gene is responsible for has to do with basically sensory input and motor output. So your behavior, like if I came across this desk at you and pinched your cheeks, you'd like, jump back. I'd say, what is it, Wednesday? Right, yeah. You would make the connection that is Wednesday, your behavior would occur. So this EMX Two gene has to do with that cortex and its size. What they found is that bigger is not necessarily better. Right. If you have a lower expression of it and you have a smaller subdivision of that cortex, you're not going to do very well. Behaviorally, functionally, you won't be able to hit a baseball very well. Right. Got you. But if it's too big, if that gene over expresses, you don't get better at hitting a baseball. With this in particular, it seems to be fine tuned. I got you. So if you're not hitting that sweet spot, you're never going to hit a baseball. Right. And there may be myriad other problems, but you're definitely not going to hit that baseball. So that means you're born with baseball talent. Pretty much, yeah. Because it's genetic. And there's some people who are so close to perfect that like baseball just comes naturally to them. Right, right. Like Robert Redford. Exactly. Yeah. He really gave those lights a wallet. Yeah. He's the natural. So that's the genetic basis of it, Chuck. Yeah. And I guess we should talk some about size if it's important, because this is sort of the debate that keeps going on and on. Is brain size corollary to intelligence levels? Right. They have found links between if you have a lot of brain growth, if it's disproportionate early on, they've linked that early on being the first twelve months. They've linked that to autism. So super rapid growth, what it may do is just prevent those neural connections from happening like they should. Right. And actually that kind of links into that tethering thing I sent you, too. It does. Which we will talk about later in biology, though, there's kind of this consensus that's not the only determinant. Yeah. That has a lot to do with environment as well. I think kind of as a whole, people who investigate correlations between brain size and intelligence have totally abandoned the idea that your brain is predetermined to grow a certain way and then that's that. Yeah. Well, size wise, they've also found that if you have ADHD, if you're an adolescent, your brain might be 3% smaller than your classmate who does not have ADHD. Yeah. And your brain shrinks as you get older, but doesn't necessarily lose functionality because of the shrinkage. It's not to say when you get older, you don't lose functionality, but it's not due to the size. No, they think that it's probably mostly due to pineapple. Really? Okay. Your synapses are just kind of built up with gunk remnant proteins from years and decades of firings. And you shake that off by continuing to use it. Yes, that's one thing. But also they've recently found that while you sleep, they think now, the function of sleep, they didn't notice it before until I don't know what kind of new imaging technology they used, but they found out that there's this whole channel, like basically a sewage system that just clears out all the gunk from your brain while you're sleeping at night. That's why you are cognitively refreshed. That makes sense from sleep. And we did one on why sleep is so important. Right? Yes. I think that was in there. We've done a bunch. There's a whole sleep suite, too. All right. So one of the reasons why people are still debating whether or not brain size equals more intelligence or less intelligence is because there are a lot of different ways to measure the brain. Like, do you take a tape measure and go around it, or do you go from the middle out or do you do it proportion to your body size, which is a real measurement called encephalation quotient. Right. And if they're talking about your body size, what if you're super fat? Like there are all these different ways and no one, I don't think, has ever come to a consensus on the best way to actually do the measurement in the first place. No. And there's another really big outstanding question, is how do you measure intelligence? Like our IQ tests actually legitimate. Yeah. So when you have two parts of your equation that are both hinky, how can you come up with an answer? Well, it depends. If you're comparing species to species, that encephalization quotient actually has been proven to be pretty effective. Okay, so like, the proportion of your brain to your body size is a pretty decent predictor of your EQ, is what it's called. As a mammal. Yes, as a mammal, when you go outside of mammals, it gets less and less effective. Right. But with humans, for example, our brain is like \u00a32.7 on average. Yeah. It's something like around two to three. I've seen as much as five, but I think it's about 3% of our body weight. But it uses up about 20% of the energy, which is another measure. Yes. Like, how much energy is your brain require? The more energy your brain requires, in addition to things like EQ, you can get a pretty good idea of how intelligent that being is. Yeah. Well, Einstein's brain, remember, it was the same size, but different parts were bigger than others. Right. So supposedly that's come under fire lately. Really? Yeah. Somebody was like, these studies are terrible. You can't make these huge leaps and bounds in conclusions just from a couple of strips of brain tissue. Right. But apparently most studies have. Well, I think that's sort of like a juicy thing that people like to talk about, einstein's brain. I could see people making that leap. Right. And the idea that, like, oh, well, Einstein's brain is just like anybody else's, well, that means that anybody could be a genius. It really argues in favor of the nurture side of things. But if his brain is structurally different, well, then genius is an inborn natural thing. It's just nature versus nurture. Played out on poor Einstein sliced up brain yeah. That lived in a garage for many years, like everyone's brain. So here's the most controversial thing. When you're comparing species to species, like you said, especially among mammals, Chuck, it's easier to say, like, yes, this EQ thing works. But within a single species, that's when things start to fall apart. For instance, specifically among humans, men tend to have about 100 grams more mass to their brain than women. But if a bigger brain means that you are more intelligent, then does that mean that men are more intelligent than women? I think we all know that women are more intelligent than men. Okay, so then brain size really has nothing to do with it. At least intra species. That's what I'm saying. But there have been plenty of studies that I'm sure got a lot of people's hackles up. One guy named Michael McDaniel, who's a psychologist, basically entered the news cycle bursting onto the scene in 2005. Yes. Which is always a little bit like, who's this guy? Right? Yeah. But he came up with a study that was ready made for CNN. Yeah. I mean, he said flat out that bigger brains means you're smarter. Yes. And that ie or eg. Which one is it? Ie. In this case, men are smarter than women. Yeah, that's what he was saying. Yeah. Because he basically put brain imaging tests and IQ tests together and said, well, there's a direct correlation between the two. And again with these tests. Or they converted Sat scores of 100,017 and 18 year olds to an ICQ score, and I don't see why they even had to do that. And they found that males average 3.63 IQ points higher. But I don't know, it just seems really hinky because first of all, they use 10,000 more females than males, so that's going to skew things. And then it's an sat. Right. What does that even mean? Yeah. Which has been proven time and time again to be biased. Yeah. And then they converted that to an IQ source with some machine. It seems like some things would be lost in translation. Yes. I think it's a bunch of bunk. Yeah. I think you're not alone in the idea that it's a bunch of bunk. So a lot of scientists have said, okay, all right. This whole brain size correlating to intelligence stinks of phrenology. Yes. When you're talking about looking at it just in the human species. Right, yeah. So what is it, though? I mean, surely there's got to be some biological part or aspect of the brain that correlates to intelligence. If it's not size, then maybe it's the number of neurons that you have. Yeah. Neural connections. A lot of people have thought that that was kind of the second to most recent wave in thinking about what brain structure correlates to intelligence. Yeah. Was this the New York Times one about the tether hypothesis? This is just December of last year, so it's pretty recent. And a couple of neuroscientists from COVID, you know, they're right. They had a pretty simple explanation when back in the day, when tuktuk had a little bitty tiny brain, their argument is that the neurons were tightly tethered in a pretty simple connection pattern, and that when our brain started getting bigger, those tethers were torn apart, and it enabled us we formed new neurons and new neural pathways and new circuits. Right. That makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. It's like the brain size might have been about the same, and it was, but the neural connections were still following the primal animal connectivity, where it's like they connect in a predictable way. Right. Whereas with this untethered idea, they just blossomed out into the idea of what neural connections looks like today. Rather than following straight, predictable lines, they were all over the place. And from these new connections, new associations arose. And that gave rise to intellect, according to this. Yes. It's pretty simple. Smart. Yeah. I think sometimes the simplest hypothesis might be on target with Occam's razor, my friend. Or maybe they just speak to me because I'm a dummy. Chuck Occam. Bryan. I got tether. I played tether ball. So that is a competing explanation. Another one that I've seen says that it's not the neurons, not the number of neurons, not even the number of neural connections. It's the chemistry and the complexity of the neurotransmitters that are being conducted between these neurons. And from this has kind of come this new idea that it's folly to even say, well, humans are obviously smarter than a bottlenose dolphin, even though they're smart, because the bottlenose dolphins experience understanding of life is so radically different from humans. Yeah. You can't compare intellectual intellect. Yeah. You can't say, well, a dolphin can't talk and speak, but I can't do things a dolphin can do. Right. Or maybe dolphins are speaking to one another. Yes. Just not to us. Right. That doesn't make them less intelligent. So long and thanks for all the fish. And we're not that's a good one. And we're not like anthropomorphizing here. Basically. There is very little point, I guess. Yeah. I don't get it. To comparing the two. There's tremendous point to getting to cracking this code and understanding dolphin intellect or bird intellect, the greed. Or octopus intellect and human intellect. But to compare them, it's an exercise in futility. There's no point to it. I don't get it. I mean, compare dolphin A to dolphin B 1 may be smarter. One might have a little patchy mustache, hang out at the gas station a lot. That's not the smart one. Yeah, I think people do this to either I think they're trying to claim some either superiority of animals over humans or humans over animals. Right. And that's kind of a big issue these days. There are animal rights groups that are trying to further animal rights by getting them inalienable rights like humans have. Right. Which would really screw up the zoo system. Yeah, you can look for a podcast on that too. We did. Yeah, that was a good one. I think we landed pretty heavily against Zeus. Yeah, we did, but to each their own. But I haven't been to a zoo since then. 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 realworld skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K twelve. Compodcast. And start taking charge of your future today. What is this? Project Enigma? I thought that was pretty interesting. It was another genetic thing. It was neat, though. And this Australian researchers said, hey, we have something called Internet and MRIs, right? And willing participants. So everybody starts sending in your brain scans. Is that who proved that the complexity of the neural activity was the most important thing? Was that project that they've done? No, that was a different one. There was a New Scientist, no Scientific American article that explored that idea as the synaptic proteins that create intellect or intelligence. But the project Enigma basically found that there is a single mutation on a specific gene where if you have a C instead of T, I think you have a bigger brain. And they correlated that's it more intelligence. Yeah, but again, using the IQ test. Well, what I'm tired of are the studies that throw out the results that don't make a fun headline. There was this one from Smithsonian magazine from December of last year that well, it wasn't from them. It was from the Proceedings of the Royal Society b and Smithsonian reported on it, but it was a study of country mice and city mice. No way. Well, a bunch of animals. But they found that city mice and vol I don't even know what that is. V-O-L-E perry vols. What is that like? They're little rose. Okay. They're very sweet. They are monogamous like a bowl weevil. No, that's a bug. A volley. Like a prairie dog. You should look at prairie voles. Very cute. And the idea that they're very sweet is even better. You wouldn't, like, shoot one for being on your property? No, I mean, some people would, but not good people. I know someone who does that kind of thing. Shoots at voles. Not voles, but woodchucks with the air rifles. That's not nice. He knows who he is. But the study basically said that city mice and city voles had larger brains than country mice. And of course, that makes a big headline because people are going to try and make the point that people that live in urban environments are smarter and the hillbillies out in the country are dumber. They studied ten animals. Only two of them showed that, and some of them showed the opposite. That the I think bats and trues. Actually, the country versions had larger brains. So they don't say any of that in the study because they just want a headline that says, if you live in a city, you're smarter. Yeah, we've been addressing this lately. Like there is like a symbiotic collusion between bad science and bad science reporting that results and stuff like that, where it's just like city people are smarter than country people. Says this one study where the data was massaged. Right. Well, city person, can you go make butter with your hands? I have to say, can you farm land? No, of course not. But it is possible that there's a basis to this, whereas city people, their brains are more stimulated than country folk, perhaps, and so more neural connections, more plasticity takes place. I don't think that's true. I think there's just as much stimulation in nature as there is in a city full of people depends on what you're stimulated by. I look at Darwin. He spent his entire life living in the country. Yeah, for sure. But, I mean, we also have hundreds of thousands of years of latent inhibition built up against a lot of the stuff in nature, whereas the stuff in Times Square is relatively new, so our brain doesn't defend against it quite as easily. So hence, we're possibly more stimulated. I think it depends on what you're doing with your time. Sure. If you're out in the country sitting around watching reality TV, if you're in the city, you're overstimulating in your apartment watching reality TV. I found this other study today, too, from Germany about pornography may reduce your brain size. Another kind of sexy headline, right? Sample size of three. Yeah. And it's always self reported, too. And when you're dealing with porn and self reporting right. Look at porn. Check the box. Do you think your brain is small? Check the box. Boom. Yeah. How smart are you? Somebody called Newsweek, they cannot say that watching porn cause a decrease in brain matter, but they did say they found that the volume of Striatum, a brain region that's been associated with reward processing and motivated behavior, was smaller the more pornography you consumed. And basically where they're at is we don't know whether it's causing this or if people that yeah. They get struck dumb and they're like, oh, yeah, they're just into watching porn more. Got you. Like in Idiocracy again, that movie. Movie. There has probably been no other movie that's made more of a legitimate appearance in our episodes than that movie. Theocracy. Yeah, I think you're right. Mike judge. He's onto something. Yes. Do you watch Silicon Valley? I haven't. I know Kamal Nadjiani. Yeah. He's funny because he's doing well. Yes. Martin Starr. Yeah, it's a good show. I think it was high time that someone took on the tech industry and like a comedy like that. Leave it to Mike Judge. I know. Yeah. If there's any crusader satiric crusader. People feeling good about themselves. Right. Yeah, it's Mike Judge. If you want to know more about brain size in relation to whatever, just type in brain in the search bar@housetofworks.com and it's get lost. That's what I say. Yeah. Type in brain and just go on a trip, man. Right. That's right. Journey. I think that's the slogan for how stuff works. That's right. I said search bar is time for what? Lister mail. Yes. Okay, I'm going to call this help for a fan in need. Hey, guys, I want some help, please. My wife and I are expecting our first kid this summer, and 13 days ago, we also found out that my wife has stage four breast cancer. So we are spending our third trimester getting chemo. My goodness. I know we're going to kick cancer in the butt. We have no doubt. But we're scared and overwhelmed. Obviously. We're. Doing chemo now, then we'll have the baby get more chemo than bilateral mastectomy and radiation. We have great doctors and great friends and family, so even in the face of this, we feel very lucky. And by the way, I got a follow up more recently that says there is no gestational diabetes and the cancer is already shrinking. Oh, it's great. So things are going great so far. Thanks for not keeping us in suspense. I know I was going to wait till the end, and he asked for a couple of favors. He said, first of all, if you want to follow and promote my tumblr to keep people updated, it is http galafrikidiki gallifreekydeeky tumblr.com. He says we're huge nerds and Doctor Who fans, so that was lost on me. Some doctor who referenced, I guess. Apparently so. Does it have to do with the phone booth? Maybe that's the only thing you know about. Same here. Secondly, I'm biking 150 miles to raise money, and could you plug that? And you can go to G-O-O two J-Z-X-Q. These people don't like normal words. Well, that's one of those shortened URLs. Oh, I see. It's a goo. Got you. And then third, how about a shout out? I think that's what we're doing here. My wife is a little shy, so just use her nickname, the Mayor. That's hilarious. She wears a sash during chemo and childbirth. I guess so. I mean, I call Emily the Boss, so I guess it's the mayor. Yeah, but the mayor is like, the boss of several bosses, I would guess. Yeah. We used to call my friend Justin, who, you know, the Mayor of Atlanta, because everywhere he went oh, nobody knew him. He's a sociable fellow. But now we just call him the Manager of Atlanta, because everywhere you go, he has some improvement to that place. Like the lighting is not quite right, or the door should be over there. The kitchen is not located properly. It's Britt. Yeah. And then fourth, my wife works in public policy, specifically helping women and families get themselves out of poverty and advocating for low income workers. So there you have it, an awesome and incredible woman who dedicates her considerable talents to helping others, is pregnant and has breast cancer. Kind of hard to say no, right? I'm not above guilt tripping. So, Bob from Swartmore, Pennsylvania. There you go. People should go and check out that stuff and support your bike ride. And I hope things have continued to progress well for your wife and child and keep us updated. Yeah, and you keep me updated at the very least. If not everybody listen to me. I will. Okay. Thanks a lot, Bob and the mayor, good luck to you both. And let's see if you want to get in touch with us, whether you're a mayor, a provincial governor, who knows? You can get in touch with us on Twitter at syscast you can join us on Facebook.com stuffychnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com and join us at our home on the web stuff. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilguera and Georgia Art 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." | |
45a1fff8-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-1f68983801af | Short Stuff: Emperor Norton | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-emperor-norton | After a San Francisco real estate mogul went bankrupt, he reinvented himself as the Emperor of the United States – and became the city’s most celebrated resident. | After a San Francisco real estate mogul went bankrupt, he reinvented himself as the Emperor of the United States – and became the city’s most celebrated resident. | Wed, 19 Jun 2019 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=170, tm_isdst=0) | 13650589 | audio/mpeg | "Hey there, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry. And this is short stuff. Let's go. All right. Emperor Joshua Norton, the first, but at least one of the early great eccentrics of San Francisco, California. Yeah, it's possible he was the first, but it's actually kind of unlikely if you think about it. Yeah. But it is so funny to think about the fact that this was in the 1850s and beyond and San Francisco was still San Francisco. Yeah, I'd heard of this guy. I didn't know much about him. I just knew he was an eccentric, beloved San Francisco. But when you dig into this guy, it just gets better and better. Yeah, it's pretty great. So like you said, his name was Joshua Norton. He was born in England, and his parents traveled to South Africa to settle there in 1820 as part of a settlement scheme. And by settle, I mean show up in interlope colonized. Yeah. There you go. I didn't understand why they left or he left, but at some point, he made his way to San Francisco, I believe, for the gold rush. So I guess he probably left himself. And he made himself pretty wealthy man, pretty quick. By 1852, within just three years of arriving, he was one of the wealthy, reputable citizens of San Francisco. End of story. Yeah. He was in real estate early on, but in late December, too, there was a famine in China, and they placed a ban on rice exports to other countries. Pretty sensible. Yeah. So there was a shortage of rice as a result in the US and San Francisco, where they love their rice. It is the San Francisco treat and always has been. Right. They do a little something special to it, but yeah, it's basically right. So Norton heard that there was a ship coming to California from Peru that had, like, \u00a3200,000 of rice. He saw a business investment opportunity and said, all right, I'm going to buy all this rice, I'm going to corner the rice market, and I'm going to get even richer, which he did. He bought this entire shipment. However, a bunch of more ships came from Peru in short order. Yeah. He didn't know about those coming. No. And they had a bunch of rice, and then the prices went back to normal, and he was just stuck with a bunch of rice. And eventually, in pretty short order, I think, had to file for bankruptcy. Yeah. So he went from super wealthy San Francisco to bankrupt San Francisco from one bad business decision. Which is why you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. Right. That's right. Or all of your rice on one ship from Peru. Right. So he kind of dropped out of San Francisco society. Everybody lost track of them, and after a year or two, he reemerged. And when he reemerged, he was a little different, a little off compared to how he had been before. And one of the first things he did was distribute letters to the newspapers around San Francisco declaring himself Emperor Norton I of the United States. Right. And the story would kind of end there. It would have just been a crackpot who distributed leaflets and no one would know about it because it would have been totally lost to history if one of those San Francisco papers, the Bulletin, hadn't taken him up on this offer and printed his letter, his proclamation. And it kicked off a tradition around San Francisco of basically not just printing Emperor Norton's proclamations, but also just reporting on him and his doings and what he was up to at any given time. It was kind of it became a San Francisco media tradition. Yeah. And I guess there was just something about San Francisco even back then, where the residents roundly were, I guess, probably kind of entertained by the sky and accepted him and revered him and embraced him as one of their kind of wacky locals. Exactly. Maybe the wackiest local of all back then, probably. So he would go around town and he wore a military uniform, and even I love this even the army officers based at the Presidio there gave him some epaulets and things like that to put on his uniform. Yeah, it was pretty awesome. He wore a hat with the peacock feather. And he had a couple of dogs named Bummer and Lazarus. He sounds like this could be San Francisco 2019 as well. Sure. That Bummer and Lazarus thing, though, that is contested. There is a plaque in San Francisco. What's? The Pyramid building transamerica Trans America. There's a plaque there commemorating Bummer and Lazarus, and it specifically says they were not Norton's dogs. Sometimes, possibly, but they were definitely their own equal celebrities to Emperor Norton. They were their own crew. That may or may not have overlapped with them for Norton, but they deserve their own short stuff, too. Actually. Yeah, I'm curious about the name Bummer for back then. What that must have meant, I don't know. I don't know either. But the newspapers would also report on what they did, too, apparently. I've read an atlas obscure. There was at least one article that wrote on how they had stolen a bone from another dog like that's what you could pick up the San Francisco papers and read about. But it was part of the city's pride in every aspect of it. All right, well, let's take a short break and we're going to come back and talk about some of his proclamations and how he went about town right after this. All right. So Emperor Norton and by the way, he added the title Protector of Mexico to his name after the French invaded Mexico. Did you know the French invaded Mexico? I don't know. I did not. I don't think I did, but I don't know. There was so much invading going on back then. Nothing surprises me anymore. Just two weeks ago, it was the Dutch. Yeah, exactly. So he's hanging around San Francisco. He's got his outfit. He's over the course of his reign, I guess you could say he had some wacky declarations and some that ended up kind of making sense. He abolished Congress, or called for the abolishing of Congress. He dissolved the United States of America as a whole, which makes it tricky to be the emperor of the United States. I didn't quite see how he rectified those two. I don't think he did. Okay. He dissolves and abolished the two political parties. Pretty sensible. But then one thing he did was kind of interesting. He ordered a survey. He was committed to finding a way to connect Oakland and San Francisco, whether by bridge or by tunnel, and he ordered a survey, even in 1872, to try and figure this out, which ended up being pretty relevant later on. Yeah. He said, there's going to be a great basketball team one day over in Oakland, and San Francisco needs to have a way to lay claim on that team. Oh, that's true. He also ordered a suspension bridge be built from Oakland to Gold Island to San Francisco, too. So he was very interested in connecting Oakland to San Francisco, and that kind of was part of the kind of civic attention, I guess, that he paid to the city. He was known for inspecting sidewalks and streets and making sure they were in proper repair, and the city loved this guy. He actually once proclaimed that if you called San Francisco frisco, it was a high misdemeanor, and you could be fine $25, which these days is more than $500. So he really meant it. Right? Yeah. I love that that was even for boating back then, because it's long been known that you don't say frisco. Yeah, this might be the origin of it, actually. It's pretty cool. And like I said, the city really did love him. He ate for free at all of the city's best restaurants. If there was an opening of a show, they would save a seat for him. The city just loved him, so much so that he was once committed by a police officer, and the city just had this huge outcry against it. Yeah, I think well, they got out because the police chief, I guess, was like, you can't lock up Emperor Norton. Right. I think my favorite part of the whole thing, though, is he issued his own currency, and it was accepted. Yeah. Isn't that great? It's amazing, man. I want to be this guy, but what's neat? Well, there's just a couple of steps. You need to take their Chuck. You, too, can do that. You need to get some fox and pretty much make some money. You're already beloved, so check one. All right, so this guy, Emperor Norton, is hanging around San Francisco. He's loved he is issuing his own currency. He eats at all of the city's best restaurants. One of the things that struck me about this guy is he doesn't seem to have taken advantage of it, because when he died, except for eating for free and issuing his own money well, I'm saying he wasn't like, oh, you guys are going to take this money. Let's see what all I can do sure. With this. You know what I mean? He just seems to have kind of done enough to live comfortably and gotten by. But, like, when he died, he dropped dead at the corner of California and what is now Grant Avenue, which is between Knob Hill and the Financial district at age 61. Just dropped that on the street. And when they went to go search his room at the boarding house, he had a collection of walking sticks and canes that he would carry around with them, some hats and, like, a 2.50 cent gold piece. So he wasn't a hog. It sounds like he was very much committed to looking over San Francisco and making sure it was in good shape. Yeah. And they ended up taking care of him post mortem. Even originally, he was going to be buried in a pauper's grave. And the Pacific Club, which was a businessman's association back then, they may still be around, for all I know. Maybe they're part of the problem. In San Francisco. They said. You know what? He should be buried in a rosewood casket, and we're going to have a great funeral procession. And in 1880, January, 1030,000 of 230,000 residents attended this funeral procession. Yeah. That's amazing. Even more attended his exhibition because he was buried at the Masonic Cemetery. And they moved the Masonic Cemetery probably to make way for, like, Uber's offices or something like that. And everybody was moved to Colema, California. Well, Coleman, California, they had a rebuilding and something like I think 60,000 people showed up for that one. Amazing. Yeah. And they flew the flags at half mass. This is 50 years after this guy has died, and he was still that revered and still is today by some people in San Francisco. Of course. Yeah. San Francisco loves to embrace their local eccentrics. I love it. Yeah. So like we said, they have built the Bay Bridge. Now there is a tunnel with public transportation. So those two things came through that he was looking into. And then since then, he's been immortalized in a lot of literature and plays over the years, including Mark Twain, even, who lived in San Francisco at the time. He was clearly smitten with the guy as well. Yeah. He shows up as the king in Huckleberry Finn. That character is named after him. There's no less than three operas and a musical written about him. He's beloved. Also, there's an episode of Bonanza. This is the weird cherry on top. I think it basically tells the story of the time he was committed and released, and the character's name is Emperor Norton. It just so happens that they coincided the Bonanza timeline, and Emperor Norton's real life timeline coincide in this episode of Bonanza, which I have to see. I don't know what it's called. Well, I know that I got to see it, too. I do know that Mark Twain was on the show, even not the real Mark Twain. Obviously. It was probably Holbrook, I guess. I hope so. There's nobody who could do a Mark Twain like him or Val Kilmer. There's nobody who can do a Mark Twain like Hal Holbrook. I got nothing against Valky Wells. That's not true. Yeah, that old grudge. That time he shoved you into the street. Yeah. Shouldn't have done that, Val. I got nothing else. Nothing else over here. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Short Stuff. Short Stuff away. Stuff you should know is the production of Iheartradios how stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
a6458052-5462-11e8-b449-772dc8a7d178 | Recycling Update: How’s It Going? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/recycling-update-how-s-it-going | It’s been about a decade since Josh and Chuck last checked in on recycling and since then a lot has changed. A global commodities market dealing in recyclables has developed and recently crashed. Jump back into the fascinating world of recycling. | It’s been about a decade since Josh and Chuck last checked in on recycling and since then a lot has changed. A global commodities market dealing in recyclables has developed and recently crashed. Jump back into the fascinating world of recycling. | Tue, 24 Jul 2018 13:30:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=13, tm_min=30, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=205, tm_isdst=0) | 61928681 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast again. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles w chaz Bryant there's. Jerry. George Rome. Roland over there. And this is stuff you should know. Again. Why are you saying again? Well, before we recorded, I want to tell all of you, chuck confided in me. It's habit of concerned. Right. Can we reveal all this, or is it going to get edited out? No, we'll reveal sure. So we have done an episode on recycling again or before? Yes, this is again, this is again, from my understanding, the premise was, is what you're recycling actually getting recycled? Right. That was the basis of it. It was kind of everything. And then we just kind of went over recycling here and there. Yeah. I mean, it was year two of the show. Okay. About a half an hour in length. That was long for back then. And probably eight minutes of that covered the Garbage Patch, which we went on to do an episode just on that. Did we? Yeah, for sure. We talked about the eight minutes of the Garbage Patch something. Yeah. I mean, the name of the episode was recycling in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Did we combine those two into one? I don't know. I think I'm having some sort of weird flashback. Yeah. So here's the deal, though, folks. We're redoing recycling Updating is what it's called. We're updating with new information, and there may be some of the same stuff, but I listened to that episode, and we weren't very good at what we did back then. I'm almost positive we did a separate episode on the Great Pacific Garbage. We may have, but all of this to say is don't freak out and say you guys are repeating yourselves. Are we already there? Because no, we're not. No. This is an update. This is so important. And things have changed enough since, what, 2010? It may have even been nine. Wow. Yes. Quite a bit has changed since back then. Yeah. As a matter of fact, we've gotten better at recycling. We've gotten worse at recycling simultaneously. Recycling has turned into a huge business. We understand it more. And then there's been major colossal changes just this year to the global recyclable material commodities market that is going to change everyone's life one way or another. If you care at all about recycling because of China. Yeah. And you know what? We'll get to that, but I'm just going to come out and say it good for China. All right. Put a pin in that one. Right. We've been putting pins all over the place. I'm afraid that we have. Just pins everywhere. No, we've been going back. I don't think we've left a single pin in place, which is unusual for us because we do that a lot. And I also wanted to say that it's nice that we're all three together again. Yeah. Jerry is back again. She keeps leaving. I know, but she's back and she has a summer cold, which is the worst. That, to me is like that is a clear indication that you have been working too hard. If you go on vacation and get sick because you're like, work and then you relax on vacation and your immune system goes down interesting. You got to take it easy. You need, like, a step down vacate, like, work and then staycation and then vacation. Jerry. Jerry. Give a thumbs up. Sickly thumb. It's a little pale green. So, Chuck yes. I think also we agreed that you're going to participate even more and I'm going to participate less than the last one. Right. It was pretty funny to listen to. You should give it a listen and see if you notice. Oh, I've noticed before. Like, sometimes I'm just, like, cringing and pinching the bridge of my nose. Like, Shut up, Josh. So that is the last we will speak of that episode. And let's just pretend like we're starting a new or updating recycling. What is it? So let's talk about recycling. Yeah. The third best of the three Rs. That's your favorite one or is your least favorite of it? Well, it's not the least favorite. It should be the third option as a green human. Right. You should try and reduce and reuse first. Yes. And that's why they put them in that order, because recycling is the last line of defense. Yeah. I thought it just kind of float off the tongue a little more. I didn't realize that they had them in order. It's in order of preference. That's cool. Okay, so it is best to reduce, reuse, and then when all else fails, recycle. That's an ideal world, right? Yeah. Because if you go to a website and you look up, like, can I recycle my toilet paper tubes in the recycling bin? Can you? Sure. But if you go to Tree Hugger and all these other sites, they're like, well, you can. But what you should really do is this. And then they first find a way to not use toilet paper at all. And so you don't have those. That would be the reduced turn it into the stand for, like, a pipe cleaner tree. Well, that's everything else. That's the reuse. There are so many crafty things you can do with toilet paper, too. You can use it as a telescope, which will eventually end up in the trash. Right. If you use it as a harmonica, maybe, yeah. I can do this all day. We should, so actually, I don't think we should. So when you recycle that toilet paper tube, when you drop it into a bin out front, you may notice that you're also dropping in like glass, like your old, like, Captain Morgan's bottle or it took you eight years to drink. Sure. You drink in the room these days. I love rum. Okay. I'm not big on Captain Morgan, but I love rum. All right? It's one of my surprise favorites. I'm like, wow, I really like rum. I say that every time I take a sip of rum. Yeah, just look at my glass and go, wow, I really love Rom. And Yummy is like, everyone in the house knows you like, Roam momo rolls her little eyes, big eyes. So you dump all this stuff together in a single bin, and you may stop and be like, wait, this is crazy. How am I dumping all this stuff into a single bin? Didn't we used to have to separate? Yes, we did. But thanks to the evidence of single stream recycling, people recycle a lot more stuff than they ever did before. Recycling participation is up. You may notice, like, back in the 90s, early 2000s, they gave you like a little tiny bin. Now you get like a big old garbage can with wheels on it so you can put even more stuff in it. Hopefully, that's how much recycling participation is up. Programs all over the country, everybody's recycling. So on the one hand, it's really good that we have single stream recycling because it makes people more likely to recycle. On the other hand, it also makes us more likely to recycle stuff that we really shouldn't be recycling or using as much of to begin with. Right. But even if it's stuff that even if you're reducing and reusing, people still have a tendency to throw stuff in that recycling bin, even though it can't be recycled. Yeah. With that one article you sent called it aspirational recycling. Yes. I don't really know if this can go in there, but I'm going to do it because it makes me feel good, right? I hope so. I hope it can be recycled. So that doesn't sound like that bad of a deal, if you're like, okay, well, it can't be recycled, so it doesn't get recycled. Who cares? It just disintegrates into nothingness magically. Right. It's actually not what happens. That stuff ends up at the landfill. Right. So you're basically saying, here, recycling company, throw this away for me, will you? Yeah. And if you listen to our show on landfills, which was a good one yeah. We sort of had glowing praise for landfills, and that was, I think, in terms of in the context of, hey, if you're going to have a landfill, there really may have made leaps and bounds from the old days. Yeah, for sure. But obviously we want to do this instead of the landfill. Yeah. The ideal situation would be for us to basically close the loop on all of our materials, on our metals, on our plastics, on our paper, and figure out a way to reuse them. And now there's enough of everything and we never have to cut down another tree, we never have to dig up another piece of box site. We never have to do anything. We've got enough. And then we just have these perfect reprocessing techniques, and we just got a closed loop of these materials that would be ideal. We're pretty far from that, right? Yeah. But it is a good step in the right direction that we are recycling, right? For sure. So when you recycle, when you put that stuff in that bin, we're going to get to all this really great stuff. I just tease something that you don't even know what I'm talking about yet, dear listener. What boxite? That was one thing, but the aspirational recycling comes into play later on. So when you recycle, you put it out on the bin, and then some people come up and what looks like an old garbage truck or a modified garbage truck, except it's usually much cleaner, maybe a pleasant blue or a pleasant green color. And there's no juice usually dripping out of the back. Garbage juice. Sure. And they pick it up and they cart it off. And that begins the plastic bottle or the toilet paper tubes journey. Yes. And this is a Grabstar article. It's nice to work from one of those again. Ed points out, though, that when things are recycled, it's pretty rare that you get the same thing as the original material. So, like that soda can, that beer can may not end up a beer can. Right. Does that make you sad, that person out there listening? Well, that's what I was saying. Like, in an ideal world, it would become another beer can, right? Yeah. But we're not there yet, because when we recycle stuff, it degrades. Yeah. And that's why you can't recycle paper and think that it's going to be the next thing that you print something on. It's not going to come back like clean, lily white as printer paper. No. And that's called downstream recycling, where that office paper you printed on that you recycle ends up becoming like a coffee clutch for your coffee. And then you recycle that, and it becomes low grade, like napkin. Then after that, it just basically ends up in landfill because it can't be recycled. Then it becomes airport toilet paper. Just the lowest form of paper. Yeah. It's pretty bad. Yeah. You can see right through it. Yes. Doesn't do anything. Doesn't do anything. It just provides a false sense of security, and then your fingers go right through. Upcycling is a little different, and that's pretty rare. But that's when something is made more valuable than the original product. Yeah. And I like the example that Ed gives. You could take a hub cap and turn it into a decorative bird bath. Yeah, that counts. Good job, Ed. Hey, I'm all about that found art. Like those people do a valuable service. We should redo that episode. Remember that one? Sound art. We didn't do that. Didn't we? Yeah, we did. No. Swear. I think you're joshing. No, really? I promise. All right. I'm going to have to look that one up. Okay. Let's talk about the history a bit, though, because Ed makes great pains to point out that it's interesting that most people probably think, like, man in the 70s, in the 60s, that's what it all started. But recycling actually kind of started because of the Industrial Revolution. Yeah. And it wasn't like necessarily it didn't have green intent. Well, no, it was more like do you remember when we did the extinct job titles one, and we talked about armors, and you can't find a suit of armor from the 13th or 14th or 15th century because they reuse that stuff. That was just par for the course back then. Yeah. Like things were just too valuable to throw away. You just found a way to reuse it. And that was pretty much the way people lived for many, many years until basically the post war economic boom led to this consumer society that we live in today where it's just very cheap to produce stuff, including, like, packaging and materials, and we use it out the YinYang and we just throw it away, typically. And it wasn't until, I think, the first Earth Day that recycling came back again. Yeah. And that's when it definitely had a more of a green tint on it, for sure. Which is good at points out, too, that there were some linear here and there. I think recycling the United States really had a payday in the 90s. That's when I first remember it becoming like, this thing is a thing now. Yeah. And I've got a couple of stats here. Actually. It peaked in recent years, and this is, I believe, how many tons are diverted from the landfill. Right. So if you're going by that stat, it peaked in 2011 at 34.7. What is that? Million tons? Yeah. 34.7%, I would think. Oh, yeah, 34.7% of the 100 and whatever. What do we send today? About 150,000,000 tons. I saw different things. Like, I think that's from the EPA, right? Yeah. Actually, in the 80s, it was about 150. Now we're down to about 100. I think that's going to the 100 million tons that's going to the landfill. Yes. But our recycling is up. But I think our actual waste production overall is up, too. Yeah. More people, of course, more stuff. Yeah, exactly. But that's actually a thing that we'll talk about that recycling masks. Like we're throwing away way more stuff, and luckily we're recycling more than ever, so we're actually putting less than ever in the landfill. But if we would do that first thing reduce and then the second thing reuse, we could really have a significant impact on it without recycling. Yeah, for sure. Recycling as much. What would be your guess as to the number one thing recycled in the United States? My guess would be aluminum cans. That is all the way down to number eight. What I'm going to say rubber chickens, then. Well, yeah, you nailed it. Lead acid batteries. Batteries are the number one thing. What multiverse did you come from today? I think people understand that. They seem to have an understanding that you just don't throw batteries away anymore. What do you do with them? You recycle them. Where do you recycle them? Seriously? You throw batteries away? I just like, throw them in the closest body of water I can find. Well, they are known to float. Where do you recycle it? Like in your recycling bin? Well, no, I mean, you have to take them somewhere. Where do you take them? Like a recycling place? Yeah, there are places that accept batteries. Are you talking about little batteries? Are you talking about car batteries? Lead acid batteries? Is that a car battery? Actually, I don't know. I think that's a car battery. Okay. Yeah, I know you recycle car. That makes sense because you get a little juice when you buy your new battery if you plugged down your old one. Yeah, that would make sense. But still you would think aluminum Kansas is number eight. Yeah. Number two is corrugated boxes. Okay. Number three, steel. Number four is newspaper, and then all the way down to number eight. And nine are soda and beer cans and bottles. That is really bizarre. Yeah, but that, you know how did they say berenstein? I don't know. Not sure. But at any rate, we've been bouncing around over the last decade somewhere in the 32% to 35% range. So peaked is a percentage of waste diverted. You can't say peak, then it's been inching downward. I predict it's going to continue to inch downward and then it's going to start going up again more than the recent peak in the next ten to 15 years. That's my prediction. That be great. In America, if you wanted to know, is number five in the world behind Austria, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland as far as most recycling participation or something? Yeah. Diverting the most tonnage away from landfills. Number five, it's not good. It's okay. And numbers three through six are virtually tied. I got you. It's really austria and Germany are like 10%, 12% more. These guys will recycle anything. And then America's only city on the list. Take a guess there. I bet you know that one. I'm going to say Portland. Good guess. Seattle? Closer or further away. Somewhere in Wyoming. San Francisco is the number one city of recycling. It's the only American city to make, like, the all star recycling list. Oh, wow. So I think that means we're done, right? That's it. I'll bet we didn't mention that before in the last episode. No. Oh, yeah, we're not mentioning that. Should we take a break then? Let's take a break, man. All right. We'll talk a little bit more about landfills and all kinds of recycling stuff. All right, Chuck, I think this is going very well so far. Great. So let's get back to that process we kicked off and then abandoned. And now we're getting back to it. When you drop something in your recycling bin and the people come and pick it up, and it begins this beautiful journey of discovery, coming of age, maybe, of really coming to understand oneself. For the plastic water bottle that you sent off yes. And when it's collected, depending on where you are, it may be either collected by a city worker or a worker for, like, a private company, and it will be taken somewhere along this chain. This is a big picture, and this is something I didn't quite understand fully before, until this time around researching this article. Like that water bottle or that beer can or that toilet paper roll you just threw out, that you just recycled, you just threw it away as trash. It's just being put into a different trash stream, the recycled stream. Right. So when you do that, it becomes you were saying here, this actually has value. I don't want anything in return for it. I just want the peace of mind that it's going to have another life, it's going to stay away from the landfill. You do whatever you want with it. And it enters with that exchange into a global commodities market. Where it goes from a sorting facility to a place where it's put together with other stuff similar to its kind. Put into bails. And then sold on the commodities market to be reprocessed back into raw materials and then sold to manufacturers who use those raw materials to make new stuff. That you then buy. That then you hopefully. Ideally recycle. And the whole process continues again. That's what happens when you drop it in a bin and it goes off. That's ideally, yeah. In China, like we mentioned, is a big, I think, like the number one buyer of US. Garbage they were until, like, late 2017, ish when they said no on certain things. So here's why I said good for China. China said that they did not want to be the world's garbage dump any longer. And one of the reasons why recycling rates kind of started to climb in the is because there was a market for this stuff, right? If there had never been a market for it, it just would not have been viable. It would have cost too much to pay somebody to reprocess it. But the fact that you could sell it to somebody who could then reprocess it and then sell it as raw materials to manufacturers, that meant to have value to it. So, okay, now we've got, like, something going here. And the way that this was able to go, the reason why there was value to it was because China said, you know what? We're going to become manufacturers to the world. Give us all the materials you can send us. And one of the things they got into was reprocessing things like paper and plastic. And so countries around the world, especially in the west, in the developed west, started sending all of their trash, but they're recyclable trash to China, and China would reprocess it, make it into, like, little plastic toys or paper goods or whatever, and then sell it to the world. And because of that, recycling was able to take off while China finally said, you know what? This is not working any longer. We're actually on our feet economically more than we were before, and you guys have been sliding in a lot of your trash with these recyclable materials, and we don't want it anymore. Well, and China has not historically done a great job with their own trash. They hadn't even sorted that out, much less to be able to take on all this trash from all over the world. And we're talking hundreds of millions of tons of recyclable materials. And I saw something like 10% of that weight was just straight up trash that was slipped in with this stuff. Yeah. It says here an estimated 1.3 to 3.5 million metric tons enters the oceans from China's coastline. Right. Because it just was falling out of the recycling stream, right? Yes. Unbelievable. And into the ocean, that was how many tons? 1.3 to 3.5 million metric tons. So that's out of, like, 12 million metric tons worldwide. So about a quarter of the plastic entering the ocean was going into it from China. Yeah. That's a huge amount. Right. So China finally said, this is not okay. This is not sustainable. We're stopping. Like, we're not going to accept this any longer. We're not going to accept that any longer. And then the stuff we do accept can't be any less than 1% to half of a percent impure. Meaning, like, if we're buying a bale, a giant bale of plastic bottles, no more than half of a percent of that bale's total weight can be anything but the plastic bottles that we're buying. So this is a big deal because the world's market, since the 90s, as far as recyclable materials, has been sent to China. Like, a third of the world's recyclable materials goes to China. And China was buying it, and they said, we're done. We're not doing that anymore. And so the market just came to a screeching halt. And so what happened? All that stuff that you were recycling that was originally going to China is now just being diverted to landfills because America's recyclers, the UK's recyclers, Europe's recyclers, don't know what to do with it. The market just stopped, and so they're just sending it to landfills now. So the stuff you're recycling, a lot of people, not all of it and not everything that everybody's recycling, but a significant amount has been going to landfills so far in 2018. Yes. And this is not the old school argument where people 10, 15, 20 years ago were like, oh, they don't even take it to recycling anyway. Right. They just throw it in the trash. I know. If you believe that, then now you're saying, See there, I told you this is something new because of a new policy within the last year. Right. So this is not like that old line. I just want to make that clear. And again, the reason why that argument didn't hold before is because China was there to buy the stuff. Right. So why would you be, like, throwing away money? So that was a stupid argument. Now it's not even an argument, it's just a fact. Like, they're having to divert some of this and they're stockpiling these people who are basically recyclable material. Distributors are actually stockpiling the stuff in warehouses, hoping that the market will come back. And there are countries taking up the slack, I think. Like Malaysia, India, Indonesia. They're starting to buy more of this than they were before. But China accepted so much of it, bought so much of it, that you just can't fill that void. It's going to take a little while, and then hopefully, one of the ways that we will handle this is countries like America or like the UK will say, maybe we should start getting into the reprocessing business more than we were before, right. And start handling our own recyclables. Close that loop. Yeah. I'm all for it. Yeah. So let's talk about that loop. Let's give an idea of what happens to your recyclables when they're carted away, and let's say it just stays in country. Okay? Okay. All right. So I guess we can start with paper because that's one that is widely recycled and there's a bit of not a misnomer, but trees are grown to be used for paper. There's a couple of misnomers. It's not like people go out and cut down these great old forests to make the paper that you print on. They do this from pulpwood trees. However, a lot of times, old growth forests are chopped down to create room to plant these pulp wood trees. Right. Which is terrible. Yeah. So it is a bit of a thing. Like while they may not be making paper out of it, they are clearing area to plant the pulpwood trees to make the paper. Right. It'd be a pretty big waste of those old growth trees to just turn them into paper when you can make furniture and stuff out of them. But they are cutting them down for this paper stuff. But once that happens, it's not like they're growing the old growth forest back again, right? No. Okay, so then that paper is sorted and you're going to hear a lot of the word, sort a lot, because that's what happens at a sorting facility, depending on how heavy it is, what color. Apparently, like, really brightly colored paper isn't good to recycle at all. Or good to look at. Yeah. Like construction paper. Sure. Or like neon green flyers. Oh, good Lord. They'll get your attention. But they're bad for the environment. They're bad for the environment. A hot chemical and water bath can reduce this stuff. And that's really what you want to do, is to make this slurry, this soupy mix of fibrous, what was once paper. Then they have, like, if you always wonder, should I take my paper clips and staples off? If you got a minute? It's probably not a bad idea, but they do have magnets and things and filters to get out the glues and the staples and all that stuff. Yeah. They basically have a lot of different things along this line or the stream that can handle your laziness. Yeah. I mean, from paper clips to a little bit of mayonnaise left in the jar. A little bit. A little bit. They can handle that. Yeah, but when I was going to say, like I said in the previous episode, I'll just say it again, that stuff stinks in your kitchen anyway, so that's why you should clean it out. Right. Or stinks next to your house. Like, who wants a gross dirty mayonnaise jar? Nobody beside their house. Certainly not your local recycler. No. So they're going to get the staples and all that stuff out, generally with the magnets. But if you want to do it yourself, that's great, too. They remove the ink a lot of times chemically, or sometimes this is really interesting, they'll blow it to the surface and skim it off, bleach, that pulp. And you've got this pulpy slurry where they can then spray it and roll it into a sheet, press it and dry it and it becomes paper again. Remember we talked about making paper in our toilet paper episode? That one, how it's made that hypnotic, how it's made episode. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So what you just described probably doesn't take place in, like, your local town or something like that, that's gone from your curb to your town's sorting facility to like, a material recovery facility. Murph is what that's called. And then probably what you just described has done it like someone who specializes in paper reprocessing. Right? That's how they make their money. Right, exactly. But along the way, your town made money by not sending something to landfill, because most towns have to pay for landfill stuff. Right. So by diverting this from the landfill, the town saved money. And if it's a big enough town, it could save millions, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. And then once they entered that murph, then they started to sort it for resale to reprocessors and the money started to come in. Right. About that. Yeah. Right. All right. So what about glass? Glass is like, similar to paper in that they'll usually sort it. And again, so sorting can be done by machines in a lot of cases, but there are a lot of human beings who are employed in this process whose job it is to say, brown bottle goes here, green bottle goes here, clear bottle goes here. I really like rum. Right? Exactly. Captain Morgan. And they drop them down these different shoots, and it's a conveyor belt going past them, and they're like, kind of I Love Lucy's style. Like just grabbing the stuff and mixing it around and putting it sorting it themselves. Right. Yeah. And glass is significant because you've also heard people say that you burn. And there have been people that have taken great pains to try and prove that recycling actually uses more energy than just making new stuff and throwing it away. Yeah. And Ed is very fair about it. He points out that it really depends on your material as a whole. Recycling, I think, without question, uses less energy as a whole, from what I understand. Yeah. But if you want to break it down to the individual things, some of them are a little tougher to get your money back out of or your energy usage. But glass is one of those that has a significant energy cost savings. Right. And in some cases, glass recycling basically is just the intact bottle is being washed and sterilized and then reused again sometimes. So when you drink out of, like, a glass Coke bottle or something that may have been used because it's 19 jerk. But, I mean, if you think about it, if you could buy just glass bottles, it's probably better off as far as recycling is concerned, because they probably are just reusing the bottle. As long as you don't smash it on the ground, then sweep it up and put it in the recycling bin. Well, that's another thing that can be done with glass. Right. They might reuse it, like, wash it out, burn the label off, have it go through the whole process again so it's basically like new. Or they may smash it up into pieces and those pieces will get melted down and turned into glass again, which is another reason why the glass gets sorted. Because if you have a bunch of different colored glass mixed together, when you melt it down, it has kind of a model color that nobody would want. Yeah. So it's very important to have your green glass over here and your clear glass over here and your brown glass over there. Yeah. And I think I said on the show, they announced in our county or maybe city that they were not doing glass anymore. And so they set up the big bins in certain places around the county. That's where you and your Wino friends congregate, right? Absolutely. What a great bottle that was. Hey, you know something? You can reuse a wine bottle by putting a candle in it. Yeah. Make it into a candle holder or make it a water feeder for your plants. I've tried that before. I've never gotten it to work. What does it do? Well, you fill it up and then you plunge it into the soil. And I guess, like, the I don't think it's ever come out? It's either stuck in there or it's just poured out. I don't remember. But I was like, I don't think this is working. Interesting. Has it worked for you? Yeah, it comes out very slowly. It's not like you're going to see it go, because then you might as well just pour the water on it. No, I know. I think I left it in there for a good week or two, and I was like, this plant is dead now. It didn't work. I don't know. You sure it was water? She's like, oh, no way to put grain alcohol. That was weird. So is that good on glass? They grounded up into color? Yeah, that's like the ground stuff that they eventually melt down. Yeah. One of the neat reuses of glassycle, one of the neat things that glass can be recycled into is fiberglass. It can be extruded into fiber, aka fiberglass, meaning it's glass. It may have been your Coke bottle at one time, and now you're keeping your house. Sure. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that. I always think of, like, house insulation. It's like the Pink Panther. Right. What about steel? Steel is a big one. It's usually recycled. At least 25% of American steel is made of recycled steel. That's the law. From what? I couldn't find that anywhere but in this article. I'm interested. Yeah, he's smart. But the reason why is, number one, it's just useful to recycle steel. But also, apparently, it's very easy. You just melt that stuff down and reuse it. Yeah. And Ed mentions the giant machines that shred cars. Did you see these videos? I've seen it before. It's about the best thing ever to watch. Yeah, it's to see a minivan just get sucked into a tooth machine. It's really amazing. It feels like there's nothing that can clog this thing. No, I mean a minivan can't clog it. Yeah. The number. Man, I could have watched that stuff for hours. And steel, too. So they don't just do minivans chuck. They do buildings. Old buildings. Oh, yeah. There's something called ship breaking where, like, you know those old huge ships? Sure. Well, they get torn apart and recycled eventually. Wow. That's actually one that's not necessarily very good for the environment because there's so many, like, toxic metals, like old diesel and stuff like that that gets, like, leached out into the environment. I bet an old ship is probably one of the worst environmental disasters. It's pretty bad. Yeah. But what are you going to do? Just, like, sink it? Maybe do something with it. Yeah. So that's steel. Another one, this one stuck out to me is plastic water bottles, right? Yeah. So with plastics in general, that's tricky because if you ever get into an argument with somebody who's just hell bent on proving that recycling is actually not green because they like to rain on people's parade or whatever, they will point to plastic, and they are absolutely right. You just can't argue it's cheaper and probably less polluting to produce plastic new than it is to recycle plastic. That's how cheap making plastic is. We've got to do an episode on plastics. It's just like we live in a plastic age, right? Yeah, so that is true. It's more costly, both environmentally and, I think, economically to recycle plastic than to just make it new. But that's not to say that you just shouldn't recycle plastic. So if you do recycle, like, a plastic water bottle, one thing that I ran across that I didn't know before is screw that cap on tightly. And if you'll notice that plastic cap is a different type of plastic than your plastic water bottle, but if you throw the cap away separately, it'll just end up in the landfill, even if it's in your recycling bin. If you screwed on. The way that the plastics reprocessors are set up these days is that whole bottle goes through and the plastic is separated by density. So the stuff in the cap, I believe, floats and the stuff in the bottle sinks in whatever liquid bath they create for it and melt it and then they separate it like that. But if it's just your caps or whatever, it's not going to make it through the machine. The machines are set up to separate them, connected with your cap, connected to the water bottle still screwed on. Well, there's a commonly argued point that we now have given you the answer to. Yes. And now I think back, I'm like, how many times I've been like, well, I got to unscrew the cap and throw it in separately. Had no idea. Now I know I won't be doing that again, I can assure you. Chuck I'll check through these recycling symbols really quickly for plastic, instead of going into great detail. There is one through seven that you'll see stamped on the bottom, usually of whatever, sometimes on the side of your plastic. Number one is PE or pet. Number two is HDPE. Number three is V or PBC. Final four is LDPE. Number five is Peepee. These all have longer scientific names. Number five is like your yogurt container, from what I've seen. Yogurt containers, ketchup bottles, syrup bottles, medicine bottles, although most pharmacies ask you to bring back your script bottles. Yeah. I am so green. I just go and make a little basket out of my hands just to put the pills in here, just dump it into my hand. Number six is polystyrene, that's styrofoam. And then number seven is other and miscellaneous. That's where everything else goes. So every single one of those plastics can be recycled. This is like one of the big things about recycling. Yeah, we can recycle about 75% of the stuff that we throw away can be recycled. We recycle, what, about 35% of it. And the reason why is, in large part because there's no money in recycling. Some of those other ones like styrofoam. You can recycle styrofoam, but the process for recycling styrofoam is so difficult and expensive that it costs money to recycle styrofoam. Therefore, no one recycles styrofoam. And when you step back and think about all the styrofoam packaging out there and the styrofoam peanuts and all that stuff, it's not getting recycled. You put it in with yours, even though it has the recycling symbol, it's saying this can be recycled in theory. There's no one out there, almost no one out there that recycles it. So it's just going straight to the landfill. Yeah. The problem is even worse than that, though, and this is something I was talking about before, Chuck, at the very beginning. You put that styrofoam in there, you put enough styrofoam in there, then you might do what's called contaminating the batch where the recycled sorting center. The murph might say, it's not even worth paying human beings to sort through this stuff. There's so much styrofoam in here, just send that whole batch to the landfill, including the stuff that can be recycled. Yeah. So that's another big deal. Why we're not recycling a lot of stuff is because we're mixing stuff that can't be recycled or won't be recycled in with the stuff that can and should be recycled. And it's diverting the whole batch off to the landfill, which is a big problem, which is the best way to address that is for people like you and me to go onto our local recycling website and say, what can I actually recycle in my area? And they'll tell you, and then the stuff that can't be it feels terrible to throw it away, but throw it away, like I can tell you with experience, it's not a good feeling to throw a big piece of styrofoam away into a dumpster that's going to the landfill. But you can take solace in the fact that it's not going to spoil the batch of recycling that actually is going to the recycling center. Yeah. So our community has a styrofoam recycling day like twice a year. That's great. I'm going to start bringing my styrofoam to your house. No, don't do that because we already have loads and that stuff is recycled. But you got to look out for it. It's very specific programs that ask for your styrofoam and they do recycle it. So it's sort of like electronics recycling, right. It's really expensive to do. It costs money. So our community like twice a year again, in fact, I think it's at the same time has electronics recycling and you actually have to pay and you go and pay them some money to donate your old whatever, you know. Very ironically, I was going through stuff You Should know selects, and I can't remember what episode it was, but in the listener mail, we basically read a PSA for something called Free It Athens. Do you remember that? Yes. And it's Friday, I think is what it's called, but I looked it up, and they're still around. But you can give them at least in Athens, Georgia, your old e waste your old electronics and specifically computer stuff, and they take it, refurbish it, and then donate it to people in need, and they're still doing it. And I guarantee that Athens, Georgia, is not the only town in the country that has a program like this. So rather than paying somebody, like, a chump to recycle it, give it to somebody who can refurbish it. Well, yeah, because a lot of times this old Mac is just out of date. It works fine, and just let me throw it in the trash. Yeah. Got an old computer monitor. You can trade that to an anarchist for their goods and services. They love this thing. So to quickly finishing up on these symbols, they say, avoid three, six, and seven. Look for two, four, and five. They're considered to be the safest. Oh, really? And number one is considered safe. But that's the one that's soda bottles, water bottles, salad dressing containers, mouthwash peanut butter. It can be recycled, and it is safe. But I think they're on a mission to try and get people to use less of that stuff. Right. Especially in ed points out one of the gripes against recycling, one of the few that I actually agree with is people recycle. So they're like, I buy a case of water every two weeks, but it's fine because I recycle it. It encourages maybe for some people to think because I'm doing this thing right, then I can just keep buying water bottles, right? Precisely. That's probably the biggest argument against recycling today, is it allows for this consumer society to keep flourishing and thriving. Yes. Let's take a break real quick and come back. All right. Okay, Chuck. So all that stuff has been sorted. And depending on what it is, say, like aluminum cans or plastic bottles or something like that, it is put into these huge, enormous bails and then sent off to the reprocessors, who then do things like you described with the paper. They basically clean it, burn off any impurities, scrape off any impurities, get to the raw material again, and then turn it into small little things, like if it's aluminum ingots or if it's glass, they turn into cullet, or if it's plastic, they'll melt it down into noodles. I can't remember what they're called. I like noodles. But those are mermaids tears. Remember? That's what they break down to and fish eat them and die. And then those things go to manufacturers and they buy it. So that's the current state of recycling right now. And the last two parts where the reprocessors buy the stuff, and then the manufacturers buy the stuff from the reprocessors that has been disrupted with China coming in and saying, we're not doing that anymore. So there's a lot of things that can change as a result of this, right. If these things that actually do have value start to build up as they are in all of these warehouses and facilities, another market is going to develop because these things do have value, because consumers do want to see like, oh, this thing I'm using was made with 90% post consumer recycled material. I feel good about that. I'm going to buy this package over that package. There's value to this stuff, right. So there will be a market that develops. But will it be this continued thing where we're like, here developing country, you don't have like regulatory and safety and environmental protections like we have in our country, so take this and we can feel good about ourselves because it's out of sight. That's basically how the recycling commodities market developed in the up until 2018. It was just like, here, you take our thing and we can feel good about things, but it'll be justified. That's what I'm hoping. That's what I think is going to happen. I think that single stream recycling is going to go away. I think that we're going to have to start being more conscientious and just know what we're doing more. Because if you put the average person who recycled in the 90s up against the average person who recycles today, do you remember back in the 90s people knew what they were talking about with recycling? Yeah. And way more sideburns. Sure. But I think of my dad, he's still just a religious recycler. Now he got the bug in the 90s because there's such a good campaign, a good public campaign, and yes, fewer people recycled. But the quality of the stuff that was entering the recycling stream was way better than it is today. Good stuff. In the nineties, it was so great stuff. So depending on where you live in the country, in the United States and reckon all over the world, you might have different options for recycling. The Pew Center research study found that 94% of the United States has something available to them, which is great. Yeah, sure. 30% has curbside only, 21% drop off only, and 43% had a mix of both. And 93% of any town with a population over 125,000 have curbside pickup. Now in the US. Over 25,000, over 125,000. Oh, got you. Still a lot of America. Yes. So those are the general ways that you're going to recycle. Either at a recycling center, like a drop off center, curbside pickup, which we love buyback centers. If you've ever seen the aluminum can machines, we can collect aluminum cans, throw them in there and make some money. Right. And then that's kind of part of the deposit refund program where in the good old days when you drink a soda that you actually actually paid extra for that bottle. Right. I realized that, yeah. If it has like a five cent refund, it's called a refund for reasons, because you paid an extra nickel to drink that Coke out of the bottle. Out of the bottle. But you can always go, take it back, honey, and they'll give you your $0.05 back. Then they take that bottle, wash it out, sterilize it, fill it with Coke again. Yeah, I don't drink those. I don't drink Coke at all. But there's something about that iconic bottle that I love. Yeah, that green tinted. Green tinted? That's bright. Ribbed. No, the original Coke bottle has that really faint green. It's not green. Green like the sprite bottle. Sure. No, it's that yeah, and it's got, like it's Ribbed, and it has that curve. It's ribbed for your pleasure. It's very sexy bottle. Now, thinking about it, no wonder I loved it. He just went, should we talk about stuff you shouldn't recycle? Absolutely. Well, let's get to that. But let's talk about the criticisms. Okay. One of the ones we talked about was that it gives you and this is the one, I think it sounds like we both fully agree with that recycling gives you a false sense of, like, you're doing something for the environment. Yeah. Which you are, but not to the point where you can just be like, hey, I'm just going to buy everything, but I'm recycling it. Yeah, that's definitely true. But also, you're not fully like it's amateur hour with recycling these days where before there was less being recycled, like, only 1% to 3% of that stuff was being diverted to the landfill. Today, there's like a 50% increase in the amount of stuff that's being recycled, but up to like, 20% of that is being diverted to the landfill. Yeah. Right. So if you could just keep that number up the 50% increase over the early ninety s, and then decrease what's going to the landfill, that'd be fantastic. And you do that by teaching people what not to recycle. You should be the EPA chief. I am. Like, my pen cost me ten grand. You might actually want to protect the environment. It's right there in the job title. We're going to get some email for that. You go shoot up about politics. I heard you. This is one that we touched on a little bit, but that it's basically a zero sum game with the energy used to recycle. Okay. And like we said, it sort of very much depends on the product, but many of the most common things we recycle it is not a zero sum game. No, but even if, Chuck, you took all of material manufacturing and all of material recycling, and it turned out that it was totally evened out right. Energy wise, pollution wise, it would still be worthwhile to recycle because recycling has a demonstrably better impact on the economy. Like, there are more jobs associated with it, there's more revenue associated with it, there are more goods and services associated with it. It just has a greater economic impact than sending waste to the landfill. That's like, there's money in sending waste to the landfill. It's true. But recycling actually has way more of a positive economic benefit. So even if pollution is the same, energy use is the same, it's just shown overall recycling is better money wise. Take the pin out of that one. Yeah. There isn't a garbage problem to begin with. There is no garbage crisis. Plenty of landfill space, so we don't need to sweat it. This one you just say, can you just lean forward a little bit? And you kick them in the butt. Yeah. Technically there is plenty of landfill space. That does not mean that we should fill it as quickly as possible. Right. That's probably the easiest way to debunk that. Right? Yeah. It's just because there are space doesn't mean all right, then fill it with trash. Right, exactly. Like, who thinks that? Do you look at the ocean and go, well, we could dump a lot of stuff in there? That's just dumb. Yes, I'm sorry. You're a dumb person if you think that. I don't say that very often. No. But when I do, I mean it. Alright, so I think now we can talk about things you're recycling wrong. Okay. So again. Listen up. Everybody. Because if we can tell you what not to recycle or how to recycle things better and you can tell other people and everybody just kind of figures this out and actually becomes like primo recyclers like we used to be in the 90s. This would have a significant and positive impact on. At the very least. The amount of stuff going to the landfill. Which we can all agree is not a good thing. Correct. Okay. So throw away that Starbucks cup. That's a sad one. It is. Because even if you wash it out with water and it's clean as a whistle, you cannot recycle that. And you're going to get stared at and people are going to shoot spit balls at you even though they don't have straws anymore. You just say, Stop, I'm on your side. You don't understand. Yeah, tell him Josh sent you, is what you should say back. Don't mention Chuck. I'll take that wax. But yes, those disposable coffee cups have wax on them. It's a very fine film and you can tell by looking at them. That's why your coffee doesn't leak out all over through the paper. That's right. Because yeah, it's either wax or plastic, I think. And the problem is it's very tough to separate from the paper when they start running it through that reprocessing process. Yes. And there was a group of people at Stand Earth who did a little experiment where they actually had tagged these Starbucks cups where? Denver, Colorado. That went to the recycling bin and then they traced them. They ended up in the landfill. Yeah. With like electronic tags they were tracking just like a tag of dolphin. Yeah. Or like your child. So throw them away. I'm sorry. Okay. But don't just throw the whole thing away. You feel dressed that thing, right? You pull the coffee clutch off, you pull the lid off. Both of those can be recycled. And then you throw the cup away. Here's the even better thing to do. Buy one of those, like ten or $15 travel mugs and say, I would like my Starbucks in this place. And they'll go, okay, great. Or if you're sitting in there, I don't know. I doubt if Starbucks does this, but every mom and pop coffee shop will serve you your coffee in a big, delicious, giant mug. Yeah, I think Starbucks does too, if you ask for it. But that's the point. Like reducing the number of paper cups that you have to throw away. So much the better. Yeah, and what I do is my germaphobes might think it's creepy, but I take the little sleeve off what do you call it? Clutch. To keep it from your hand from getting warm. I just stick that back in the thing with the other ones. What do you mean? Well, I use it and I take it off and I put it back where I found it. Oh, I see. Smart. Just for the next person to use. So that's the second R. Yeah. Nice reuse. Nice. Just as long as you keep your hands clean. Yeah, I tried to poopy hand. We've talked about pizza boxes before, but it is definitely worth saying. Again, we've talked a lot about pizza boxes. I think even they say a little grease is okay, a tiny amount. I think it's best to just cut out the grease spot and throw the rest of the recycling bin. Or usually there's only grease on one side, the side where the pizza has been sitting. The other side is fine. Just tear that off and throw the non greasy side in the recycling. Throw the greasy side in the trash. I am saying go the extra mile and cut around the grease because all those corners are recyclable. There you go. Okay, and here's the other thing I said throw the greasy side in the trash. No, light it on fire. That can be composted. Sure. The cardboard box almost always can be composted, even if it has grease on it. Okay, so pizza boxes, no grease equals recycling. Right. And I already talked a little bit about food stuffs. A little bit of food stuffs is okay. But again, I just recommend taking an extra 30 seconds and rinse out that mayonnaise jar. Right? Rinse it out. If it has the oily sheen from the mayonnaise in it still, that's fine. The plastic reprocessor is set up to deal with that. If it has lumps of mayonnaise in it still, it's too dirty. Same with like peanut butter is another one. If you have a to go like plastic food tray or something like that. Sure, man. Get the crumbs out. Don't sit there and scrub it. I think this is a New York Times article points out, like, you'll actually be wasting water at some point, right. But you want to kind of get it prepped. Don't just throw it in there like you would the trash, because it's trash. And again, if there's enough stuff in this batch that's going to the recycling center, they're going to throw it away. So don't throw stuff that shouldn't be recycled in with the recycling. Yeah. We have a lot of guilt about takeout containers ordering in. That's the one thing where it's like, man, I love ordering in food. Love that Chinese delivery, but all that waste. Yeah. And like the Chinese delivery boxes, they're waterproof too, for a reason. So they're not getting recycled either. You got to just toss them. I thought something like this is made up, but it's something like 70% to 80% of plastic trash is one time use food packaging, like just some ridiculous amount. And this is the weird thing. What are you going to do? You're going to take your own dishes to the Chinese food place or your own tupperware and say, put it in this, please. People do that, do they? Sure. But I mean, you are pretty hardcore if you're doing that. So there's got to be another way. And Chuck, this is another thing we can do besides you and me being smarter and better at recycling. Just making that like a side thing. It's demanding that manufacturers who make packaging make it with this end of life in mind. Make it so it can be reused, or make it so it can be very easily recycled. Or make it so it has a minimal design rather than a bunch of like styrofoam and wrapping and all this stuff. Yeah, just the smallest little things can help. Like if you're picking up food to go and they're throwing in a bunch of utensils that you take home. Yes. Just say no. Yes. You don't use that stuff if you're taking it home. So what do you do? You probably throw it away or there's a drawer in your house with 40,000 of those things. Plastic straws are a big deal right now, too. Like cities are banning them. I think Starbucks just said they weren't going to use them anymore, so that's a big one. And plastics, again, plastic bags are really bad. Ziploc bags, bubble wrap. None of that stuff should be in your recycling. None of it. Yeah. I've seen people take a bag full of aluminum cans and throw the whole thing in there. Right. That bag is going to say, well, this whole bag is trash. Even though everything inside can be recycled, it's trashed now because it's just not worth their time to empty the bag out. The conveyor belt is going too fast. Yeah. Dirty diapers can't recycle those. That has human biohazardous waste in it. Yeah. Even if you're using the diapers that do have plastic in them, which. Is getting judgy, but I wouldn't use those either. The reason you might think you can recycle them is because well, it's plastic. I can recycle plastic. You can't recycle like eight different kinds of plastic that are in the diapers again. They melt them down and then yes, once you add the whole dimension of poop to it, it's bad news from your child who is eating plastic now. Plastic in the poop. I can't wait to do a plastic episode. It's going to knock everybody socks off. Chunk. So we're going to stop here and we'll pick this up again in eight years, okay? Yes. If you want to know more about recycling, go to your local recycling website and figure out what you can recycle and what you can and do it. Okay. And I said do it. It's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Zimbardo follow up. Hey guys. Big fan of the show and also a fellow movie crusher. Well, nice. Thank you, Alex. I was listening to the Stanford Prison Experiment and reminded me of my own discovery of Zimbardo. In high school, I took a psychology class and the teacher didn't really have a lesson plan for any day. He would periodically just put on episodes of the PBS show called Discovering Psychology hosted by some middle aged guy who looked a bit like a Star Trek evil doppelganger. The episodes are pretty elementary, seem to be designed for student audience. The hosted to introduce himself, talk about something like perception or learning for a bit and then do a Reading Rainbow esque graphic. Cutaway to a famous experiment on the subject. Fast forward to this semester. We're given some free time to research and I was trying to pick something good and I discovered the Stanford Prison Experiment. It was only then that I realized that Zimbardo was the one hosting that PBS special that I had been watching for the past month. Frankly, I was a little surprised that the guy that had the lead role in one of the least ethical psychology experiments was given. Well, let's be fair, it wasn't one of the least ethical ever. Things that have gotten way worse. But for as big as it was sure, just want to be clear there poorly put together. I'm surprised he was given a hosting role for an educational TV show targeting students 20 years after okay, fair enough. That's Alex's point of view. That is from Alex Abraman. Alex from Falls Church, Virginia. Nice town, buddy. Nice area. Oh yeah. Have you ever been to oh man, I can't remember the name of the place. They're famous for Peking duck there. Oh really? Yes. I can't remember. There's one specific amazing Chinese restaurant that has the best peaking duck you'll ever have. Wow. Try it. Alright duck, but don't bother. The rest of the food is pretty good too. But the Peking duck is knocking socks off. So if you want to know more about? Oh, no, I already said that. If you want to get in touch with us, go to our website, stuffysheno.com. It has all the links to all our social needs. And you can also send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon music my Favorite Murder from exactly right media. My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgueref and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
http://netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1215462155358sysk-anti-bacterial-soap.mp3 | How Antibacterial Soap Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-antibacterial-soap-works | Could the routine use of antibacterial soap increase the presence of drug-resistant bacteria in your home? Learn more about the disadvantages of anti-bacterial soap in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Could the routine use of antibacterial soap increase the presence of drug-resistant bacteria in your home? Learn more about the disadvantages of anti-bacterial soap in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Wed, 28 May 2008 18:32:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=18, tm_min=32, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=149, tm_isdst=0) | 5340914 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I'm a staff writer here at Household Stuff Workscom. With me, as always, is my very attractive and trusty editor, Chris Palette. Chris, how's your goatee? Oh, it's great. Thanks for asking. Let's talk about antibacterial soap. You want to? Sure, why not? Chris, should we or should we not outlaw antibacterial soap? I don't know that we need to outlaw antibacterial soap, but we need to take a second look at whether or not we should be using it in all of our daily applications. Why? Well, simply put, it's not that much more effective than regular soap. And it can breed stronger bacteria. Yeah, basically, from what I gather from the research I did writing the article, it basically provides this environment for bacteria where the bacteria that happens to survive goes on to evolve, to be resistant to the antibacterial agents. Right, right. Okay, so we've got this. Basically, we're providing a staging ground for rapid evolution, and we're making our own worst enemy. That's true. That's true. Because some of the drug resistant strains can actually be very harmful and can be fatal in some cases. One that comes to mind is MRSA, the Mrs virus, which is a type of staff. And as Rosie O'Donnell knows, staff is no laugh. Basically, MRSA is like a superstar. It's extremely resistant to any kind of drugs. And a lot of people think that Merce has been allowed to develop because of antibacterial drugs. I'm sorry? Well, yeah, antibacterial drugs, antibacterial cleaning products, which altogether make up a term that I coined in the article, the Antibacterial lifestyle. What do you know about that? Well, there are a lot of people as a parent of a young child, I've seen a lot of other parents who are trying to keep their kids away from germs, which is a reasonable concern. So they buy a lot of antibacterial soaps, they buy antibacterial cleaning products. They go to the store and pick up an antibacterial basket to put their stuff in. Or put their kids in the antibacterial cart. Yeah, because everywhere sponges, all kinds of things, and they've figured out a way to put it into plastics and blankets and all sorts of things. Countertops. I think there's a problem with that, and that is that if you raise your child in a completely sanitized environment, they're never going to be exposed to any allergens. You can't go out and sanitize the entire world. So when your kid finally goes out to play, they're going to end up as like a bubble boy or something because they haven't been exposed to any allergens and haven't been able to form antibodies. I think there's a certain level of dirt you need to have in your house to maintain health, wouldn't you agree? Well, that's true. If the germs are getting stronger by being exposed to the microbial antibacterial agents. People are not getting stronger by allowing themselves to get over being exposed to these germs. So one side is getting stronger while the other is staying in place, if you will. Essentially, we're shooting ourselves in our own feet. And there are other ways to deal with the problem, too. I mean, there are other products that are not necessarily antibacterial. We were talking about Bleach as one. Now, it's not something you want laying around on your countertops. It can leave a residue in a lot of cases, but Bleach can well, okay, maybe not all cases, but Bleach can kill microbes just by licing them, by breaching their cell walls. And they really have no defense against that. Yes, and this is where the term for the brand name cleaner Lysol comes from. To lice is to basically completely obliterate a cell. So Lysol's name means obliterate cells, which I just think is super cool. Yeah, and the reason that I brought up countertops, too, is I read about this countertop material that they have in development where it's not antibacterial because it's got a chemical in it. It's antibacterial because it has thousands and thousands of tiny little points on the surface of it that when bacteria hit it, they rupture. And so it kills bacteria not through the use of some chemical, but because the surface has lots of little points that pierce the bacteria but are harmless to your hand because you can't even feel them, which is a scientific way around the problem. That's excellent. So you get the best of both worlds, right? Well, I'll tell you what. After researching this article, I've completely given up using antibacterial soap, although I suspect that the soap they use in the dispensers, in the bathroom, maybe I'll be lodging a formal complaint. That's it for us. Be sure to read. Should antibacterial soap be outlawed? On Howtstepords.com. For more I'll this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@housestofworks.com brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 camry, it's ready. Are you." | |
4b5bbab0-f648-4234-8eba-aed3010c4d54 | Selects: What Happens When the Government Thinks You're Dead? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-what-happens-when-the-government-thinks-yo | <p>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. Learn all about it in this classic episode.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p> | <p>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. Learn all about it in this classic episode.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p> | Sat, 16 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=197, tm_isdst=0) | 37508606 | audio/mpeg | ||
null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | "Hello there, friends. It's Josh. And for this week's select, I chose our episode that takes a frank and thrilling look at what happens when the government thinks you're dead. As you can imagine, nothing good is the answer to that. Hope you enjoy. 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 Bryan. 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? Yes. I don't want to make a chinky sound every time. Oh, okay. I thought this I don't want that. I want this. Now I get it. Did you hear that? You didn't hear anything? No. 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. Yes, I remember that. But we should give a little bit of a refresher on Social Security numbers. Okay. Yeah. Here's mine. 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? 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 return. 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, like, oh, what are they going to do with this? It just annoys me. Well, then 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. 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 on Brazil with Jonathan Colton. Okay. I didn't know that one. No one slipped past me. I wasn't talking to you, but sure, 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 me 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 yeah. Just go to the Social Security office. I don't want to. It's not fun. I really don't want to. No. 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 out 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 stuff you should know right now, they know what you're saying. There's a bunch of good band names in here, but Death Masterpiece 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 Master file is what I saw. You know why? Because they don't know how to party or they get their own little weird party going on. I didn't 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 until 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 Medent. And that's like everything. And that's the one that the Deathmaster file is derived from the public version of it is the Deathmaster 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 random, 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 this. I don't know. I could not find the procedure from that. Anything other than a couple of good sources mentioned 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 doe. 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 goes as far back as 1936 or 37. Yeah. Which is surprisingly more than 100 million people. Yeah. 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 there 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 burial 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, 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 is 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, 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. So before we broke, I was talking about that Scripts 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 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. 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. Who. But they're basically saying, like, yeah, man, these names are miskeed, or these numbers are miskeed. Sometimes that happens. Yeah, pretty much. So the thing is that point 41% 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 bureau. 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 it 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 report a 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 Duboard, who apparently Mary Dubord 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 Candace Atkins just accidentally clicked deceased on a tax return on an electronic filing, and that was it. Can you imagine? No. I can't believe there's not an undo. Yeah, I was looking into that. 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. 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 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. You can be, 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. So 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 sized 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 you're trying to get a home loan or trying to get a credit card. Like anything that you can think of where a Social Security number might help. You can't get a haircut, 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've 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 it's the US. Government, it's not nearly that easy. So I guess that Chuck, that brings up what to do. Because there actually are 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. Sounds 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. So 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 script Howard News Service investigation in 2011, 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 Minutes kind of story. Like the truth of what you just have ran through me like a bolt. The Social Security Administration has finally kind of started to be responsive, and they are supposedly undertaking reforms, including having investigators try to rule 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 through 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, 34,000 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 at 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. Yeah. It was crazy. And now it's just like, I'd 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, 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, let's. 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. 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, 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 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, like, 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 like that. He organized the Utah Pradesh Retox Singh, which is the Uter 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 119, 94, 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 Persons Association and won an IG Nobel Prize for it. Not bad. We did an episode on that, too. You remember the IG Nobel, man, that was a long time ago. Yeah. 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 your 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. 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, 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. Longtime 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 and 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 to 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. Yes. I'm so glad this person wrote in, though, so you could say 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. 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 beavis. You can go on to Stephanie.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 a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My heartratio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." |
Will solar sails take us to the stars? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/will-solar-sails-take-us-to-the-stars | We have within our grasp here on Earth the technology that could make interstellar travel a reality within as little as a few decades and it doesn't require any exotic fuel. In fact, it only requires sunlight and an initial blast into orbit to begin a ste | We have within our grasp here on Earth the technology that could make interstellar travel a reality within as little as a few decades and it doesn't require any exotic fuel. In fact, it only requires sunlight and an initial blast into orbit to begin a ste | Tue, 31 Dec 2013 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=365, tm_isdst=0) | 24104632 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good, it's Criminal morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss, turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comsysk and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code S YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Brought to you by the allnew 2014 Toyota Corolla. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and Charles W took Bryant's with me. Jerry's over there, so it's stuck. You should know on a Friday. Yes. It's a sleepy Friday here. Yes. There's, like, two other people in the whole office. Yeah, I think the Work from Home program is great, and I think that apparently 99% of us utilize that on Fridays. Yeah. Kind of neat, though. I like it. Oh, it's awesome. It's nice and quiet. Yeah. You know, companies that are trying to get people to come back in. Not telework. Oh, really? Is that a new movement, the non teleworking movement? That doesn't make much sense. I'm with you. Going backwards back in time. Yes. Might as well make them drive to work in a horse drawn carriage. Yes. And wear a suit and tie on Fridays. Yeah. Good to see you, my friend. Thanks. Good to see you too, man. Are we going to sail through the galaxy together? Yeah, I've got one. I've got an intro. So about 400 years ago okay. There was an astronomer named Johann Kepler. I've heard of them. Johannes Kepler. Yeah. Take your pick. Is the s silent? Who knows? Johannes. He founded the Kepler effect. Yeah. So he also had this idea that there was what's called the solar wind, that there was a wind that blew through space, and it was evidenced by the curvature of comet's tales. You could see them just kind of bending a little bit, and that was because they were being blown by the wind. So Kepler, as was pretty much the thinking at the time, during the age of exploration when he lived, said maybe we should construct some sales, some mighty sails that can survive in outer space and just sail around the galaxy. That's pretty forward thinking. It is forward thinking. And Kepler was wrong about the solar wind. There isn't a wind in space, although there is solar wind now, but it's just some positively charged ions that hit the magnetosphere of the Earth and create the northern and southern lights. Yeah, it's not like a warm wind literally blowing through space. Exactly. But Kepler's suggestion led to just this huge, incredible irony wherein we have figured out now how to sail through space not using wind, but using sunlight. And it's been done. Yeah, it's been proven now several times, I think in 2010, Japan did it, and in 2015, a pretty major one. Is it going to set sale? Yeah, the biggest one, for sure. Yeah, it's going to literally set sail. Like 13,000 is huge. Yeah, I think ten city blocks. No, that was a different one. I'm sorry. 13,000 sqft, though, is definitely the largest one that will have been put in space. Yeah, there was one that was 10 meters square called the Nano Sale that worked just fine, that NASA launched, was up in orbit for a year and then came back down, and they were able to do all sorts of cool stuff with it. And even before then, apparently, the idea of sailing through space, this analogy between space and the oceans, is not lost on anybody who's into this whole idea. And even before the current incarnation, there were uses of solar sales, like in the Think Voyager Two, which is one of those deep space probes, was having trouble with its attitude. It was having attitude problems, and it needed an adjustment. So the controllers down on the ground turned its solar arrays and used them like a solar sale to correct its attitude worked. And then it worked enough that in the seventies remember Haley's Comet? Sure. Okay, well, that was 1986 that it came through, and we're going to be the last generation to be able to see it twice, probably. When is it coming back? I think it was 60 years or 60 years. So let's see. That would be 2054. Yeah, it'll be like 75. Yeah, we'll make it. We'll see. There was a whole NASA program that lasted about a year to rendezvous using a solar sale. The rendezvous with Haley's Comet. I don't know what they were going to do when they came upon it, but the idea of a solar sale and the fact that a solar sail will work has been proven and known since at least the 1970s. But only recently have we been launching these things and getting them to do what we want, which is travel through space without the use of rocket fuel. Yeah, because that's a huge thing, man. Rockets use a lot of fuel, and it's a constraint. It is, in fact, the weight of the space shuttle, the dearly departed space shuttle was 95% fuel. And the way rockets work in general is they expend. They shoot their payload to get them going, and then they cruise, basically. But that's a lot of payload and a lot of fuel. Right, but they're not just constantly have their foot on the accelerator because they can't towed around all that fuel. No. Well, even if they did just sit there and have the gas pedal to the metal all the way, eventually they're going to run out of fuel, too. So it's a double constraint. You have a finite amount of fuel, and you can't accelerate constantly. Plus, there's also a third one, too, that the solar cell pretty much has over a rocket. It can return to Earth, which is called deorbiting. Right. So let's talk about this. What do you need to have a solar cell? It's a pretty basic simple it really is. But it's pretty much the future of space travel. We've talked about antimatter spacecraft before. Yeah, that might have been where we'd mentioned this, actually. Okay. I definitely know we touched on this once. To put these two together, the solar sale is definitely the winner. Antimatter spacecraft requires us to be able to produce something that doesn't exist yet, which is an I can't remember. An anti proton, maybe. Yes, I can't remember. We've got everything we need right now to do this, so let's do it. What? We need continuous force from the sunlight. You need a large mirror that's really thin. We'll get into that. And you need something to launch it. You can't launch these things from the ground. They do great once you get them up there, but you're still going to have to launch it into space. Yeah. Even still, it's such a minor constraint, it's ridiculous. A scoff at its inclusion. And the reason this works is because light, it releases electromagnetic radiation in the form of protons. And these protons, even though they don't have mass photons, what is the protons? These photons, even though they don't have mass, they have momentum. And that momentum, when it hits a solar sail, is just like a little wind blowing a sail. It transfers its energy. And it's almost the same thing as a wind blowing a sail. Yeah, when you put a bunch of them together, it is very much like that. Especially if you think of wind as little discrete packets of wind. This is little discrete packets of light. And also, Chuck, when a photon hits a reflective surface, a highly reflective surface, it transfers its momentum twice. The first time when it hits, it pushes it along, and then when it pushes off, to bounce off to reflect. So it transfers momentum twice. So photons hitting a reflective surface in our space, the vacuum of space where there's no resistance, that's something that you can kind of get behind. Yeah, it's significant. And if you look at an individual photon or even sunlight as a whole. It doesn't exert a lot of force. It's something like nine newtons per square mile. Yeah. That's the reason they can't take off from the ground. Nine newtons is what you get from the sun to the Earth. Right. In an astronomical unit. Right. 93 million mile, you're going to get about nine newtons of force yeah. By the time they reach this area, that's how much force they have. Yeah. Which is the reason why you can't take off from the Earth with a Solar Sale, because you need about 1.67 million newtons of force for a lift off of, like, a rocket. They're way behind as far as lifting off from the ground. Right. And once in outer space, too, a rocket is clearly superior for quick acceleration because it can produce, like, 2.1 million newtons of thrust. And again, sunlight produces nine. 2.1 million compared to nine. But the big advantage is, again, your Solar Sale doesn't use any kind of fuel once it's unfurled and deployed, and it can accelerate constantly. And this is the big advantage that it has over rockets. Yeah. Well, that flashy rocket might blast off and shoot its payload and go zooming through space. The little Solar Sale is just kind of going about its way, getting a little faster, getting a little faster. And eventually, that rocket, though, is going to go through all its fuel, and the little Solar Sale is going to catch up to it because it constantly has its foot on the gas. As a matter of fact, there's a really good analogy in here. I guess it's not even an analogy, some sort of statement maybe, that if we launch the Solar Sale right now, it would take about eight years for it to catch up to Voyager One, which is the most distant rocket based or fuel based spacecraft in the universe, that we've launched it's toward the edge of the solar system right now. Which, by the way, did you know that all of the images you've seen of the swirling Milky Way galaxy overhead are fake? I didn't know that. We don't have any way to produce that photograph. We've reached the edge of our solar system. We have no way of looking above the entire galaxy. So all of this is what we surmised. Guess, yeah. But it's never presented that way. You think like, well, that's our photos of the Milky Way. I never thought. Right. That's impossible. Exactly. We're not even sure how many arms the thing has. Really? Yes. Wow. I just think it's a little arrogant to produce pictures like that and not say, this is an artist rendering. This is an artist rendering. It probably says that at some point. Right. I never noticed it. It's like those fake newspaper articles where you get to the end of it. This is an advertisement, right? Yeah. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year. You aren't about to let any cyber attacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create learn More@ibm.com the world doesn't need just another chardonnay. What it needs is Martha Chard. The Martha Stewart Chardonnay. That's the newest addition to the 19 Crimes family of wines. Martha Shard is a contemporary lens on 19 Crimes. It's the wine that disrupts the Chardonnay category. Brought to you by Martha Stewart. The original influencer, Martha Shard is light and drinkable with a medium straw color, satisfying the palette with bright notes of citrus and round stone fruit with a crisp, clean finish. Framed by a distinctly sweet oat character, martha stard is exactly what the world needed. And what you need is to make this refreshing crowdpleaser the star of your next party or gathering. Because Martha Shard just might be the perfect summer wine. So come on, let's work hard, play hard, and drink. Martha's Shard, available at a wine aisle near you and on 19 Crimes.com. That's one. Nine Crimes.com. Please drink responsibly. All right, so we were talking about it would take eight years to reach the Voyager, and that's like one of the big which has been sailing for 20 years. Yes, that may be. The biggest advantage of a solar sale is deep space exploration, because the problem with anything else is going to eventually going to run out of fuel. Right. And that's what this one in 2015, I think, is set to go deeper into space than anything ever, if it makes it, and probably pretty quickly. So, like, the whole advantage of this is that when the solar sale starts to pick up, let's talk about how fast it moves real quick. Do you want to does it all, but not at first. So it picks up 1 movement every second once it starts. So it's moving a millimeter a second at first. Okay. That is not fast at all. No. By comparison, a rocket moves about 56 meters a second, something like that. That's meters, right? Yeah. So it begins very slowly, right? Yes. But then it starts to accelerate. There's constant acceleration, and by the end of a day, it'll have reached 310 km/hour. See? Slow and steady. And it will have already traveled 4700 miles. By the end of twelve days, it will have accelerated to 3700 km/hour. That's fast. And eventually, Chuck, it's going to start traveling about up to 200,000 miles an hour. That's 324,000 km/hour. Basically, you would make it from New York to Los Angeles on the ground in less than a minute. That's pretty quick. It is quick. But get this. They figured out that if you use ground based light propulsion, which would use a lot of energy to direct the lasers at this thing, you could get it up to something like 18,000 miles/second. 18,600 miles/second, which is a 10th of the speed of light. And once we do that, we could make it to a nearby star in about 20 years. That's pretty good. We could make it to outer planets within a couple of weeks. Wow. Yeah. So the potential for this thing is enormous because it's proven. It uses no fuel, at least if you're using the sun, and it's the technology that could get us into interstellar travel. That's pretty awesome. So what's it made of? Well, the sale itself is key because it's got to be super lightweight and super thin. You can't just fly a big mirror up there. What NASA is working with today is something called CP One, and it is 100 times thinner than a sheet of stationery. That is crazy. I know. They worked with Mylar for a little while. Aluminum reinforced mylar, which, if you've ever seen mylar balloons, that's super thin. It's like a foil, and it's one for the thickness of a one ply plastic bag. And that was the Cosmos One that used the Mylar sale. Yeah, but basically all these sales are reflective. It's got to be reflective because the photon has to bounce off of it, and it's got to be super lightweight and super thin. And like any sale, the larger, the better. Yeah. The more photons you can catch, the more speed you're going to get, I guess, eventually. You said the one that's going up 2015 is called the Solar Sale Demonstrator. It's dubbed the sun jammer, which is after an Arthur C. Clarke story. And that, apparently, is where solar sailing was termed, was coined arthur C. Clarke. Yeah. Love that guy. Yeah. But that's the one that's going up in 2015. He was 2001 a space Ozzy. Right? Yeah. Okay. And it apparently collapses down to something the size of a dishwasher and weighs \u00a3110. You and I could lift that together. Yeah, I could lift that by myself. Wow. They pack the thing into a rocket, shoot it up into space. Once it's in space, in orbit, it gets kind of shot out a little bit, and then it, I guess, inflates. I believe the booms that hold the sales in place are inflatable, which makes them even more lightweight. Yeah. It's almost like a kite. If you imagine the supports of a kite were all just inflatable and you would just blow it up, those forms would take shape as buttresses, and then the sale would unfurl. Right. Then. You're son jamming. Yeah. Land ho. You talked about lasers. That is one of the, I guess, co fuels. Even though it's not a fuel that these things might use, if there aren't enough photons, maybe they can use lasers to continue to power these. Right, but not for launch, though. Right. Or could they use them for launch? It looks like they did launch at sun somehow. I think you could. I think it would just be slow. Okay. But I think that probably the most immediately usable method would be to launch it into space and then hit it with a laser once it's in space. Right. I also saw microwave beams have been used, too. Yeah. There's a whole other kind of competing microwave sale, but the problem is they have to be a lot bigger because of the larger wavelength of a microwave. Seems like using all these things in conjunction together is probably a good way to go. Yeah. Microwave juice. Little laser juice. Right. Little photo. Why not use whatever you can? Yeah, but the difference between just using sunlight one of the problems with sunlight is you have to be going away from the sun because that's the direction the photons are going to push. Yeah. I mean, think about that. And they've pointed out where you can go toward the sun, but you have to basically go out and then come back around and use the photons to slow you down. Right. Which just seems kind of yeah. I wonder if any of these are ever going to be manned. They could be if we can figure out how to not crush people in 18,600 miles/second speed. Well, I guess that's true, because can you slow this thing down? I don't know. That's a good question. Yeah, I don't know. The other question I had about this that I couldn't find anything on is if these things are 100 the thickness of a sheet of stationery. And I've seen gravity. So there's a lot of debris in space. Yeah. What's keeping the space debris from just punching holes right in it and just tearing it to shreds? Well, I think it's probably stronger than you would think, considering how thin it is, because it's reinforced, but yeah, you're right. Well, there's gravity, man, and, like, solid things were just blown to bits. That guy's face. Did you like the movie? Yeah, I did. I didn't go into it expecting the best movie ever, like a lot of people do. Yes. And a lot of hype that will crank. Neil degrasse Tyson we should call it angular momentum, not gravity. Right. Yeah. This is a blockbuster Hollywood movie. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. I thought it was great. If you're learning your science from Sandra Bullock yeah. You're in trouble. Yeah. You should learn it from other people, like Neil Grass. Tyson sure. The other thing that I saw that solar sales can be easily used for is deorbiting that space debris. Apparently, you can send some stuff up there, have it go into an orbit, capture a bunch of the space debris, I guess just basically wrap itself around it and then bring it down. I think the way that you bring cleaning up space pretty much, which is a danger. It's a big deal. Yeah. And I think the way that you bring solar sales down so easily is because when you don't need fuel to bring them down, and you can just angle in a certain way so that the sunlight pushes them down toward Earth and they burn up. Oh, yeah. That's pretty nifty. It is. So we may be using them just around Earth first, but these are the things that could very easily lead to interstellar travel within our lifetime. That's pretty cool. We're talking 20 years right now. It takes a lot longer than that without this. Yes. And definitely we should follow up in 2015 on the is that the Sun Jammer? Yes. Which is next year now because this is our New Year's Eve episode, isn't it? Yeah, I think so, actually. Nice. So we're already in 2014, or we're about to be, depending on when you're listening to this or when it comes out. So in just a year or more, the sun jammer will be doing its thing. Yeah. We should do a follow up on it. My money is on this one. Maglev trains. Yeah. People going without refrigerators. That's the future. Wiping your butt with cloth. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I like this one. I think the solar sale is literally the thing of the future. Yes, I like it, too, man. You want to wish everybody a happy New Year. Happy New Year, everyone. Happy New Year. And I'd also like to say a very happy birthday to my sweet wife. That's right. I always forget it's. What's the date? 30th. 30th. UM's birthday is the 30th. Well, happy birthday. Yummy. And happy New Year's, everyone, and be safe, and we sail into the future. If you want to know more about solar sailing, you can type that word in the search bar athousoforce.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for a message break. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule of their own slaves. IBM, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. It automation. 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 Chard 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 now. Chuck. It's time for listener mail. What am I going to call this? I'm going to call this from Roanoke, Virginia, just because that's easy. Death metal from Moan Oak. Hey, guys. I was listening to the episode why does music provoke emotion? Love that episode, by the way. Because music has been such an integral part of my life and everything I do. It also reminded me of an experience I had recently. Metal music has always been my favorite genre. I know this email. Did you read it? Yeah. I guess I just really connect with it. Anyway, I recently decided to try out the black metal subgenre. I guess he previously was into light metal, right? I just metal. Yeah. So I purchased Dark Thrones, Transylvanian Hunger, put it in my car CD player and started driving. When the music started, I got the strangest feeling it reminded me of Christmas. Well, it seems like the last reaction when we get from such a type of music. I think I figured it out. The music itself makes me think of icy, snowy winters, which I, of course, associate with the joy of snow around Christmas as a child. Between this and the relaxing trimalo guitars that were carrying the music, the cool breeze that I felt through the car windows and the pale moonlight, the whole experience made me feel a happiness that resembled the kind I usually get around Christmas time. I just found it really fascinating with something that I found so relaxing would probably make most listeners want to scream in a fashion not unlike the vocalist of most of these bands. It's so true that music can yield a different reaction from everyone, right? Or AEP. Anyway, I just thought you might find that interesting. And thanks for the great show. That is from Patrick Hager in Roanoke, Virginia. I think you have to say Hagar. Well, I wanted to, but it's H-A-G-E-R metal, not a R. He should change his name to Hagar with a couple of oomphs. Yeah, that's like then you're listening to Transylvanian Nightmare. What was it called? Yes, I think that was right. Transylvanian Hunger, which is Manhattan Transfer. No, that's the opposite of death metal. I got you. If you want to let us know about some strange reaction you had to something we've discussed, right? Aside from Drowsiness. Right. Yeah, we put a lot of people to sleep. Yes. I heard Jesse Thorn talking about the other day about what a backhanded compliment that is or how it always makes them feel bad. It doesn't bother me. No, it was on Judge John Hodgman, and Hodgman was like, no, man. People are saying there in a very intimate moment, you are relaxing them into sleep, right? And that's a compliment. That's how I choose to take it. Hodgman. He's got such a great perspective on things. I know. Jesse, come on, buddy. Lighten up. Yeah, if you want to tell Jesse to lighten up or if you want to tell us about some weird reaction you've had, we want to hear about it. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyouhoodnow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@discovery.com, and you can hang out with us at our home on the Web, your gateway to the New Year stuffyoushaneo.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howsteporks.com. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. The sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarif and Georgia 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, 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." | ||
c5c38174-5460-11e8-b38c-cb9c0b781737 | Selects: The Stories Behind A Few Food Fads | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-the-stories-behind-a-few-food-fads | America loves to go nuts over new food trends and it turns out that the 20th century was a boon time for them. Revisit them with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. | America loves to go nuts over new food trends and it turns out that the 20th century was a boon time for them. Revisit them with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. | Sat, 06 Nov 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=310, tm_isdst=0) | 46234739 | audio/mpeg | "Hello everybody, its Josh. And for this week's select, I chose our surprisingly interesting June 2017 episode on Food Fads. This episode has everything you're looking for in a Food Fads episode. TV dinners, Oprah drills, chills, spills. It's an odd good episode, so I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant, Jerry Jerome, Roland and Frank. The chair. Oh, Frank. He's been here the whole time. He just keeps quiet, mostly. Yeah. I don't have my hat on today, though. I know. What gives? I don't know. I'm growing the hair out, so I thought I'd just let it flow. I noticed it looks good. Why are you growing it out? I don't know. It just sort of started happening. Then I was like, my brother's got good hair, his is longer. I'm always trying to be more like him. Plus can't have a butt cut with short hair. Yeah. Plus, I mean, I've had the same short spiky hair for like 15 years. Time to mix it up. I know, man. When I started growing mine out, I was like, what am I doing? What's with this cueball crap? I'm so tired of all this. Let me just see what it looks like with a what's that quarterback's name? Joe Thien? No. Joe Thief? No. Terry Bradshaw? No. You know the one. Oh, randall Cunningham? No. Tom Brady. Tom Brady. Despite your harassment, I still figured it out. What about Tom Brady? You want his hair? I have his hair, buddy. I don't know about that. I do. Me and Tom Brady. Now. Chuck? Yes. Did you grow up on TV dinners at all? No. Really? No. My mom was and is a great cook, so she wouldn't have that. I see. Wow. Well, I did. I grew up on TV dinners and usually when a TV dinner appeared seriously, you did miss out. They were pretty amazing. When you're like six, seven years old. I've had them when you were six or seven? No, I had them like, in college. Okay. So you understand the magic of a TV dinner, right? Sure. All right. Imagine that as like a six year old. I'm sure it was magical. All of your foods in like a different little compartment, just staring at you, waiting, like, just wait, just wait. Buddy. Yeah. When you're sick, it's just even better. And when I was six, if I would get a TV dinner, it meant that my parents were like going to do something. Right. They were going to play bridge or something like that. Right. So it was like a special night. Exactly. I'd probably get to stay up late or there'd be some babysitter or whatever. It was always just kind of a special thing when TV dinners made an appearance. My parents never did anything together. They never played cards or no, man, I rarely had babysitters. I don't remember having babysitters. There was always one of them there. Yeah. Maybe they didn't trust you. They didn't like each other. I got you. They may have really enjoyed key parties. Well, plus yeah. You never know. I have a sister that's six years older, though. Oh, yeah. Guilty babysitter. Yeah. But they still didn't do a lot. I remember. I can literally just think of it a few times. They went to an Olivia Newton John concert once. They've got a pretty good track record so far. My mom went and saw Elvis, but not with my dad. Wow. On that last tour, too, man. I think they called that the Jumpsuit Integrity Tour. Hold on a second. Let me catch my breath. Yeah. What an undignified ending. Yeah. They didn't do much stuff together, so I didn't get a lot of TV dinners. I didn't get a lot of hey there's, just throw it in and warm it up. My mom was kind of always cooking for us. Yeah, my mom cooked a lot, too. But now that I'm older and look back, I'm like, pretty convenient meal. She was an Er nurse, for Pete's sake. Weird hours and stuff. Sure. But she's a great mom. She raised me very well, as everybody knows. It's a well known fact. So with TV dinners in particular, though, I have a certain amount of nostalgia for them. Sure. But apparently, like, America as a whole has a bit of nostalgia for TV dinners. There's a TV dinner in the Smithsonian, for Pete's sake, and that's like, America's greatest repository of nostalgia. For sure. Yeah. So I think we should take people on a delightful tour of the history of this wonder of TV dinners. Yeah. You sound like you're not so sure. No, I am sure. I was just joking around. I was trying to set it up as some magical experience that everyone's about to have. I feel like that's ingrained in it. So, as the story goes, Swanson CA, Swanson and Sons and is a leader in the frozen food industry. And whether or not this is legend, who knows? But it's a great story was that one Thanksgiving, they had too much turkey on their hands. Post Thanksgiving. Yes. To the tune of something like 250 tons of turkey that they didn't sell. They overestimate, which is so sad. Yeah. Thanks for nothing. Yeah. Like, we so wanted to give our life as a meal. Right now. We're just on a train. Well, yeah, that's what they did. So the story goes, they couldn't store it. They didn't have room and no freezer room to store all this turkey. So they put it on a frozen train or a refrigerated train car, as Polar Express it's called in the industry. And the trick to this thing is, in order for that train to stay refrigerated, it's got to keep moving. And so they basically were just running this turkey all over the country to keep it frozen. And cold. Right. It's like that one movie set in the future with Tilde Swinton, where, like, the train never stops, so all society is on the train. It's like that, but with frozen turkey. That's a good movie. So it's like that cross between that and Speed. Yes. So if the train ever stops, it's going to lose refrigeration. If it loses refrigeration, the turkeys all go bad. You remember that Simpsons? Which one? When Homer's trying to describe or think of the name of the movie Speed, he's like, it's about a bus. If its speed goes down and it can't speed up. And he says, it like that many times, and he goes, I think it's called the Bus That Wouldn't Slow Down. Or that couldn't slow down. Yeah, I remember that one. Very funny line. But this is real life, Chuck. This wasn't a cartoon or a joke. No. Half a million pounds of turkey on a train, and if it stopped, it would spoil. What do you happen at no, the idea that this actually happened. I know. It's so insane to me. So apparently, the Swanson brothers, Clark and what was the other brother's name? Gilbert. Gilbert. I wanted to say Clark and Gable, but Clark and Gilbert Swanson said, all right, employees, we need you to put your heads together and come up with an idea. Again, this is the legend. They had an employee contest where whoever could come up with what to do with all this turkey, I guess, would just be the employee of the month or something like that. And all the while, this contest is going on in the Swanson Company. There's a train out there in the United States of America just circling endlessly because it can't stop or else the turkeys will go bad until the swimming wind. Yeah. Yeah. So there was a salesman named Jerry Thomas. G-E-R-R. Not like our own Jeri. Right. Which no one ever gets. Right. This is the part I get. He traveled from Nebraska to Pittsburgh to where Pan American Airways had their kitchens, right? Because they were testing single apartment foil tray meals that they would serve to people. And I guess he couldn't envision what that might look like unless he went there in person, right, and steal one. Well, yeah, it was a single compartment. Right. So basically, it was just a tray that you put a bunch of food on. They were like different compartments in the tray. And he's like, I got to get my hands on one of these. Right? This is innovation. Yeah, I don't understand that either. Which is why his story smells a little fishy to me. Agreed. But this guy, Jerry Thomas, he's known as the inventor, basically, of the TV dinner, right? Yeah. So he comes back to the Swanson brothers and says, I got it. I've driven from Pittsburgh back home to wherever the Swanson Company is located. Where am I? He famously said, he said. And I've added two more compartments into this trade. So now it's a three compartment tray, and I drew two lines. I know what to do with the turkey now. We're going to basically sell it as a frozen Thanksgiving dinner. And they said, Your employee of the month, Jerry. Yeah. They say, look, you got your potatoes and gravy here, you got your peas here, you got your turkey here. None of it touches each other. I'm a genius. I'm Jerry Thomas. So this coalesce with another craze, which was television. And in 1953, there were 33 million households with television. And there had been other people that had been doing this before. Quaker State Foods in 1949 had something in the supermarket of frozen meal called under, one of the most offensive brand names ever. Yeah, the one eyed eskimo label. That's terrible. So they were selling those in supermarkets, and then in previous to that, even the Strato plates from Maxon were being served on airplanes, but not as a retail food. Right. So it had been done before. So the creation of the TV dinner well, wait, don't leave out Jack Fisher. Who? Jack Fisher? All right, what was that one called? Frigid dinners. Yes, but they're the most depressing meal ever. Because they were served in bars. Yeah, they were served in a bar. So you didn't have to leave to go home to eat dinner. You could just stay and keep drinking. Oh, man. There were some bars in La. In Los Velos when I lived there that around 02:00, a.m. The tamale guy would come around. Okay, that's different. Oh, dude, it was the best. They were legit handmade tamales. And at 155 was the perfect time to be dropping in to the drawing room. Oh, yeah. Nice. Anyway, the creation of the TV dinner was not so much that it was a brand new thing, but it was a marketing success story, because the TV, they thought, if we can build a thing around the television, then we've got something on our hands. Right. That was the key, the TV, making it a TV dinner. Right. Because all of a sudden, it was like, hey, everybody loves TV. Plus, this is something I didn't realize. It added a certain amount of, like, cachet to the TV dinner. Right. Because if you had a TV dinner, it meant that you had a TV, and if you had a TV, you were probably upper middle class sure. At the time. Right. So the idea of having a TV or dinner to go with your TV really appealed to Americans. And even to this day, it was such a great marketing coup, I guess, that people still call these, like, almost any frozen entree or frozen meal a TV dinner. Even though it was 1962 when Swanson stopped calling their products that they still made the products, they just stopped calling them TV dinners. Everybody else kept calling them TV dinner. Yeah, you were eating these in the 80s. Like, 20 years after that, Brand went away. Still calling them TV dinners and eating them on TV trays. This is another thing you missed out on, Chuck. Did you have those? Sure. So that was the whole point of the TV tray was it was a foldable individual table that you would open up in front of yourself and eat your TV dinner on while you're sitting on the couch. So you could watch TV most efficiently while you're eating dinner. Yeah. Now, they call that the coffee table. You just stoop over a little bit. Or the sink. What eating over the sink? I don't know what that is. That's a depressing way to eat. So these are actually called? That was the Brand Swanson's TV brand Frozen Dinner. And their big concept with the box, if you look it up on the Internet was it looked like it was designed like a little television. The box was the dinner itself was like the screen on the screen. And then it had the little dials on the bottom left and right corner and it looked like a little TV. Right. It was $98. And they sold a ton of them. Yeah, apparently so. Again, remember, all this came from a bunch of turkey that was about to spoil. So Swanson really cross start to an industry. Swanson ordered, like, 5000 of them initially to be made and they hired a small battalion of ladies and aprons and ice cream scoops and spatulas to assemble these things. Right. And they just had them go right down the assembly line and they sold $5,000 just almost immediately. And apparently in the first year that they were sold, they sold, like, 10 million of them. Wow. They came out with them in 1954. And by the end of the first full year of production, which I guess would be 1955, they sold 10 million of them. So they went from initially ordering 5000 of them to selling 10 million of them in a year. It just hit America just right. Well, yes. And it was at a time where women were starting to kind of reenter the workforce gave them time that they could still get that hot meal on the table because that was their job back then. Right, right. It gave women a really great opportunity to provide a stark contrast to the husband's mother. Yeah. Apparently there were a bunch of men who are like, this isn't good enough. I want my wife to cook from scratch like my mom, Dr. Freud. And if they could be like my mom in a lot of other ways, that would be awesome. Would it kill her to wear a hair nut rollers? Yeah. So apparently it didn't delight all men because they weren't on board. Would it kill her to dress me up in a diaper? We should do an episode on that sometime. That's the thing I'll tell you about to say on freud, but on men wearing diapers as adults. Yeah, I think it's called diaper play for sex play? But it's diaper centric. Yeah, we should do a podcast on that. Just that? Well, we can include it in, like, maybe a fetish one. How about that? All right. Okay. Wow, that's a weird turn all the time. It really did. Jeez, you got anything else on TV dinners that's a good way to end it? I think. No. Should we take a break? Yes. All right, I'm going to go change my diaper. We'll talk about gelatin right after this. So, Chuck, you were saying that in the last one that the TV dinner hit just right and struck America in part because women were starting to enter the workforce. Right. That was partially the result of World War II. World War II also changed things as far as food and food consumption and food packaging goes. And that apparently at the end of World War II, there were a lot of companies that had gone all in into supplying the troops food, and we're making pretty great money, but apparently we're basically caught with a large amount of supply when the war ended. And they said, well, if we don't figure out a way to get non war time America, the regular American consumer, to buy this stuff, we're going to go out of business. We're overextended, basically. And so food companies, I guess, individually and on the whole, taught America to basically eat what had, prior to that point, been considered field rations. Yeah, like Spam, if you remember that podcast. That kind of was where that whole movement was born. Yes. Spam, condensed soup, dehydrated stuff, freeze dried stuff. Like, all of this came out of basically an overstock of World War II food supplies that were intended for troops and were kind of repackaged and rearranged to be served to the American consumer. And part of that also was that same thing that TV dinner struck, which is convenient, like, hey, your husband still wants a meal, and your family still expects you to be the one to cook for them, but now you have to work. So what are you going to do? Well, we have something helpful for you. And it's called convenience food. And one of the big convenience foods that came out of the post war era, but really it's starting to gather steam before then was gelatin. Yeah. Specifically Jello as the name brand. But gelatin, the word is from Latin. gelatis, meaning Jellied froze. And it was first used in Egypt, but was really first used in cooking in France. And I think most people know this by now, but if you don't gelatin is a protein, and it's produced from collagen, from boiling animal bones. Yeah. Or hooves. Yeah. So it's gluten is basically and it can go one of two ways, I think, depending on what you do with it. You can turn it into glue or you can turn it into food. That's never a good start. No. Really? Yes. And a guy from, I think, the 17th century in France. What was his name? Peppin someone. Peppin dennis Papin. Right. Who may or may not be related to Jacques Peppin, who is great in French. He's also a cook. He was the first person to mention it in writing, I believe. And then it just kind of sat there for a while until the 19th century, when, I guess, people were aware of gelatin and that you could use it as a food. But it was extraordinarily gourmet. Like, the average person was not making jello at home. It was very time consuming. You had to start from scratch and boil animal bones to start the process of gelatin. It was the exact opposite of how we think of gelatin today. Which is instantaneous. So easy. Yeah. So in the 19th century, this guy named Peter Cooper figured out a way to turn gelatin into a powder form, a dehydrated gelatin powder. And it went absolutely nowhere for 50 years. And I was surprised to find this out. I knew gelatin was pretty old, but it's interesting how it's just kind of moved along in these very slow little fits and starts. Yeah. Like no one would give up on it. It was interesting. Which is weird because it's really disgusting, if you think about it. It should have been given up on. Yeah. And it never was. It's a very bizarre invention. It almost makes you feel like there was some sort of divine hand guiding gelatin along in its progress. Yeah. So later on in 1894, a guy named Charles Knox kind of revolutionized things when he came up with a process that resulted in a dried sheet of gelatin. And he hired salesman to go door to door to show women, like, hey, you can add liquid to these sheets. You can make desserts. You can make aspects. Which is a really gross word, I think. It is a gross thing. It's a savory gelatin. Yeah. Which will get to that. But a couple of years later, Rose Knox, which was that his wife, I guess yes. Published a book called Dainty Desserts, which is a book of recipes. And things were kind of moving along a little bit. Then in 1895, there was a cough syrup company in New York called Pearl B. Wait, is that what it's called? Pearl wait, okay. Pearl W Syrup. Wait. Right. But they weren't selling much cough syrup, so they said, all right, let's get into the food business. And the wife, whose name was May, said, let me add some fruit syrups to this stuff. And actually, she's the one who named it Jello. She came up with that name. Yeah. But they didn't succeed either and sold that to their neighbor, Francis is that the whole name, orator Francis Woodward? Yes. For $450, this person purchased the name brand Jello. Right. And he almost fell victim to the curse of Jello as well. Right. He could do nothing with it either, despite some early attempts. He apparently tried to sell it to his supervisor at work for $35, even though he paid $450 for it. So at some point, I guess, he decided to give it another go, and he hired a bunch of traveling salesmen, sent them out to fairs, community gatherings, that kind of stuff, and said, Teach the people how to make the jello. And this time, it started to stick. Actually, jello kind of hit at just the right time. Finally, I should say the world was finally ready for jello. Part of it had to do with refrigeration. Yeah, for sure. Once refrigeration is key for Jello, as we all know, and once those technologies were developed, it kind of well, it formed literally. It all congealed and figuratively. And then once advertising started taking over, like in the mid 1930s, general Foods had a very famous radio ad from Jack Benny, the J-E-L-L-O tag, which really kind of helped push things along as well. Yeah. And I noticed that at some point, they started dabbling with other flavors. I think originally they tried strawberry, raspberry, orange, and lemon. Right. And then they tried chocolate, and apparently chocolate didn't go over very well. So they were pudding, though, right? No, first they just released it as chocolate Jello. That's pretty awful. And then they thought, oh, maybe we should add milk instead of water. And that's when they came up with jello pudding, and they rereleased chocolate, and that spread like a whole pudding line, including something I grew up on, which is butterscotch yellow pudding. Oh, yeah. Man, that was so good. Except you had to get the skin off. The skin was no good, but everything under the skin was great. What was the skin? It was just, like, on top. It was the tougher layer on top. Yeah. But if you just scraped it off, you had some nice pudding underneath. Emily still loves the brown, the chocolate gelato pudding? Yeah, it's good. Yeah. She'll make a parfait like, oh, nice. A little pudding, a little whipped cream. Little pudding, little whipped cream. She knows how to live. Yes, she does. It's a special night that happens about three times a year, and I'm like, oh, boy. Part of a time. So in the 1950s, supposedly, the jello shot with alcohol was invented by this really interesting guy named Tom Lehrer, who he's a mathematician and a singer songwriter who I looked into him. He did song parodies about math and chemistry. I guess he was like the Jonathan Colton of his day, as far as I can tell, and he was also in the army. And to get around alcohol restrictions, as the story goes, he claims he invented the jello shot, which I've never had. What? They have never had a jello shot. Wow. Well, you're not missing much. They're pretty gross. Well, jello. I can't stand jello. Well, even if you like or ambivalent to Jello, it's just gross. Does it taste like tequila jello or whatever? Yeah, it's a very obnoxious taste you're supposed to use. Like, I think you replace half of the water with whatever liquor you're using. Usually people use vodka. It really just stands out in a noxious way. By the way. Tom Lehrer. I thought the name sounded familiar. He is pretty great. He wrote this one song called The Old Dope Peddler and Two Chains. Actually. You know the rapper Two Chains from Atlanta? No. Yes, you do. Oh, wait. Is he our guy? Was he the guy that judged that no, that was young jock, right? No. Two changes. He's huge, man. He did a song where he sampled The Old Dope Peddler and he, I guess, wrote to Tom Lehrer to ask for permission to sample it. Tom Lehrer had this awesome, famous response. So just read up on that. Did he let him use it? Yes. Oh, great. So he's the opposite of Don Henley in every single way. Yeah, but Jello shots are gross. Jello shots are gross. So Jello is speeding along it's, taking over America, and then they decide to come out with these savory lines. And it became and this was this post World War II thing that you were talking about when I guess they did there was this great article you sent, making and Eating the 1950s Most Nauseating jello Soaked Recipes from Collector Week. Yeah. Hunter Oakman, Stanford. And they did this interview with Ruth Clark. Yes. Ruth Clarke. Basically. It's a really good interview. And she talks about kind of this savory movement that took over. And not only with Jello. But the fact that it was a time in America where and if you look back. It's so great to look back at these old ads and these old recipe books that it was a time where the goal was to have a dinner party with this big. Flashy. Experimental and unique centerpiece food centerpiece made of jello. Well, Jello all kinds of things. We're talking about the hot dog tree, right? Yeah. It could be a lot of different stuff. And I think that's what Ruth Clarke does. She recreates this stuff, right? Yeah. And her poor husband has to eat it. But a lot of those things were Jello molds. Oh, yes. And a lot of the reason why Jello molds were so weird and so popular is because Jello put so much time and effort into publishing cookbooks. And the whole point was, all of these food companies wanted all of their products to be your entire meal. So they were putting these random products that the food company made into some really weird configurations, and they came up with some very odd yellow molds in the 50s or sixty s. It was such a sad culinary time. It was. But Ruth Clarke makes a good point. To the people at that time, like, a really well thought out, fancy jello mold was as. A centerpiece of your table was, like, the pinnacle of class enos. Yeah, but we're talking about, like, a shaped mold with lamb shank and asparagus inside of jello. A savory jello. That's, like, celery flavored. Oh, you're lucky if it was savory. Lime jello is one of the most abused jello flavors of all time. People would put tuna and stuff in with the lime jello. There's one called Perfection Salad. That's coleslaw inside of lime jello. Yeah. And what Ruth Clarke pointed out is that gelatin apparently preserves food really well, and that coleslaw that would have otherwise been inedible and runny after day three was still, like, crunchy after day five when it was put inside of a jello mold. So gross. So gross. Yeah. There's actually a great BuzzFeed article if you want to get an idea of what people were doing in the with jello molds. It's called 17 Horrifyingly Disgusting Retro Gelatin recipes. And they are gross, man. Like, cottage cheese and salmon mold? Yeah. I mean, I hate Jello. Oh, man. Like, you're waking nightmares. I couldn't even look through it. You sent it to me, and I scrolled about halfway through and just deleted through my computer out the window. The best one I see is lime cheese salad. It's lime jello mixed with cottage cheese. And then into the center of the jello mold, you put a seafood salad, sauerkraut mold. It just goes on and on. But it was a weird time. And again, Ruth Clarke has a bunch of theories. She said she can't really answer exactly why jello molds were as big as they are, but she posits that part of it was this idea that there were all these companies trying to get you to use their products, and these were just monstrosities that they came up with, and people fell for it. Like canned salmon, canned tuna, and jello. Right. Oh, my God. So that's jello molds, man. Where do you want to head next? Let's go to the crockpot. All right. That was our crockpot travel song. First of all, I have a crockpot. Same here. Is yours actually crockpot or using it as a proprietary epinem? I don't think it is a crockpot brand pot. It's a slow cooker. There you go. And I forget to use it a lot, but when I remember, I'll go on a little crockpot binge where I'll cook a few meals over the course of a few weeks in a crockpot, and they're still great if you know how to use it and how to spice things up, for sure. Apparently, at first, people didn't know, because if you're cooking a recipe, say, it's like simmering, say, like, a beef stew on the stovetop, that simmering action that it's going undergoing. It does something different to the recipe than a crockpot does, even though it's the exact same recipe. And so. At first when crockpots came out, it was first introduced by rival back in 1971, when crockpots first came out, people were like, this dinner that it's making is really gross. It doesn't taste very good. It's bland. And yet they still didn't stop using or buying Crock Pots. Well, food was more bland back then. Well, we're talking the 70s, so by the think, people were using more spices than before. I think it was more bland in, like, the maybe the 50s. Yeah, you're probably right. But that one article we read said an old recipe for chili would have, like, a teaspoon of chili powder or something. And it's like all the food just sucked because they didn't realize, like, no, man, you dumped a bunch of that junk in there. Well, you were saying back in the 40s or 50s, when TV dinners really hit, moms were starting to enter the workforce. In 1971, moms were really into the workforce. And so the idea of having a Crock Pot where you could make this meal in a one pot in the morning, throw it all in there, turn it on, and then come home at the end of the day, and dinner was ready, and you still went to work and got everything you needed to get done. Done was so attractive that, despite the fact that it made these meals, it did not taste like they should. People were still like I said, they were still buying the Crock Pots, and instead, they started to look around to find tips for how to make these things taste better. And actually, a woman named what was her name? Mabel. Yeah, Mabel Hoffman. Mabel Hoffman stepped into the fray and said, peace, children. I've got this covered. Listen up. Yeah. She wrote a book called The Crockery Cookery or Crockery Cookery no, the and it was a huge, huge hit. It was a New York Times bestseller. I believe she went on to sell about 6 million copies of this thing. Yeah. And I don't even think we said you throw the food in there and cook it all day. But the whole idea is that you put a kind of a tight fitting lid on there, and it cooks at a very low heat all day long. Right. And then when you get home from work 8 hours later or something like that, it will be done. You just serve and smile. Yeah. And thanks to Crockery Cookery, the Crock Pot in 1971 earned $2 million and 10 million, and then eventually peaking in 1975 at $93 million worth of crockpots being sold. It was a genuine legit craze food craze, and supposedly crockpot cookery. The book was America's 6th best selling cookbook ever. Right? Yeah. So this was like a legitimate craze. Crockpot cooking was a legitimate creaser. But again, there was something compared to the same recipes on the stovetop as compared to a crockpot. The flavor was just disappointing. So what Mabel Hoffman did was on a very tight deadline. Create from scratch a book, I guess the world's first cookbook of slow cooker recipes. And she did it in her own kitchen with, like, 20 Crock Pots going all day every day. She had to testing all this stuff, and she figured out some of the keys to Crock Pot cooking, which was like, you want to use way less liquid than you would use on the stovetop because you have a lot less evaporation. But crockpot keeps it in there, which is one reason why meat is so tender in a crockpot or slow cooker, because it just recirculates the moisture rather than allowing it to just evaporate. Right, yes. And then another thing she came up with was that when you use herbs into the recipe, you want to reserve some of them for right before the things finished cooking, so you can add it like a pop of fresh flavor. Yes. So once she figured this out, crock Pots just took off even more. Yeah. So they were selling a bunch of crockpots. She was selling a bunch of cookbooks. And eventually she would say, hey, I really was onto something here. So she wrote Deep Fry Cookery, Chocolate Cookery, and these are 78, 79, 77, like, kind of all in a row crepe cookery. And then eventually, in 1985, healthy Crockery. And the person who interviewed her later in life said that she was just this really great lady, very humble, and was super upfront about the fact that she like, hey, I hit something at the right time with the right book, and I kind of fell into this, and it's been just, like, a wonderful thing for my life. Yeah, it's really neat. Yeah, she sounds like a pretty cool person. So what's your crockpot recipe? Oh, jeez. I don't know. What's your favorite thing to cook? Usually some sort of, like, beef. Yeah, it just does such a good job, like making a roast or something. Okay. But yeah, that's usually when I'm cooking. When I cook in a crockpot, it's beef. All right, Josh's. Crockpot surprise. Right, with aspect. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. And we'll finish up with a bit interesting bit on Oat brand. So, Chuck yes, we finally arrived. We're just going to go forward a few years. The way back machine is in the shop, which is why I'm having to do it to the 80s. Man an Oat brand. Yes. I know that we differ on the interestingness of this one. I'm just fascinated by it, really. I really am, because it's got it all. It's got the 80s. Do you remember the SNL, the famous SNL ad for colon blow? I do. That was based on this came out of this trend. Has to do with studies. Studies that contradict those studies. Bad science reporting, the whole thing. Okay. I love it. Oats. Oat brand. Yeah, it's very important. It is. So there was a huge trend in the 80s where anything that had to do with oprah and you could sell a million units of a minute. Yes. So much so that there's a 1990 article from Tulsa World that said that there are no, I'm sorry. The La times article from 10 00 19 90 said that there were over like 300 different items available in grocery stores at the time that touted on its label the fact that it had Oak brand and people were nuts for it. Yes, they were. And this is largely due to some studies that came out that said that oat bran was kind of a miracle food for lowering cholesterol. Right. And that was like back in the late seventy s. And I guess Quaker Oats took notice of those studies and they released a thing called Mother's Oat Brand, but they sent it straight to the hippies at the health food store and didn't do anything about it. They just released a product and that was that. Yeah. And then Kellogg's came along and said, hey, you know what? What if we start telling people that our food can basically prevent cancer? Can we do that? And the lawyers said no. And the President of Kellogg said, well, we're doing it anyway. Who's going to stop us? Reagan? And Reagan said, no, I'm not going to stop you. That was a good Reagan. Thank you. And so they said, okay, well, you eat our cereal and it will reduce cancer. And nothing happened. There was no blowback, despite the fact that this had been illegal for nearly a century. And then Quaker Oats partnered with Chicago's Northwestern University and Linda Van Horn in 1986 because they had a similar study about oat brand cutting cholesterol. Right. So they're starting to say, well, Kelley didn't get in trouble. Let's try this ourselves. And they went out and they hired Wilford Brimley. You remember his ads? Yeah, I think I told the story about working with them. Oh, yeah. Wasn't he like the antithesis of what his persona was? Yeah, the word got around. They were like, it may be a short day, because that's how it goes with them sometimes. I think it was I think we wrapped it about half day because he was just like, I'm done, I'm cantankerous. Yeah, but in the meantime, when the cameras were rolling, he told everybody that eating quicker oprah was the right thing to do and it would cut your cholesterol. That's right. And then this book came out. So things are starting to build here for oprah. And this book came out called The Eight Week Cholesterol Cure by a guy named Robert E. Kowalski. And it chronicled the decline of his LDL, the bad cholesterol, just from eating an oprah and diet. And that book became extraordinarily popular. Supposedly it was one of the greatest selling selfhelp health books of all time. It just took off. And then yet another thing happened and this is the thing. This is like where the peak began, I think. The Journal of the American Medical Association April 1988 published a study from the University of Maryland where these researchers found that eating open brand could really significantly lower your cholesterol. And not only that, it does it for a 6th of the price of the expensive cholesterol lowering drugs. That's right. And people ate even more oat brand. That's right. The trend is developing. Can you see it? I think it's fully developed at this point. So everybody's going oat bran crazy. And one of the big things that they were doing was eating Oprah and muffins. But these Oprah and muffins were like, loaded with fat and butter and eggs, and so they weren't actually doing anything to lower their cholesterol because the effects would be counteracted suckers. Right. But in the meantime, people were still having fun eating lots of muffins and pretending they were really healthy. And then this Harvard study came out and it basically said, you know what? You're all fools. You're dummies. You know how it lowers your cholesterol because it keeps you from eating bacon and eggs? That's how you chump. Well, yeah. And then that study itself was attacked because they only studied 20 people, which is not much of a study. It isn't. And the people who were on the Oprah and diet were eating 20% more fat than the control group. It was a terrible study, almost like they wanted to take Oprah and down a peg. Yeah, and it worked really well. Basically, the science reporting in major newspapers and the news service reported that Oprah was the greatest thing ever. And then they suddenly turned on it and said, Oprah is nothing. And everybody dropped Oprah. If you read this stuff today, it's true. Oprah really does lower cholesterol. Sure. But it just got overhyped. Right. Because of the 80s. That's the yeah, that's food fads, man. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right, man. Well, if you want to know more about food fads, you can type those words into the search bar@howstofworks.com. I'm not going to get much stuff, so you may want to just look elsewhere. But still, since I said that, it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this Ms response, and I would like to say that we got many great responses from our Ms episode. A lot of warm thoughts from people about my friend Billy, and just really great people with Ms, people who had people in their family. We heard from doctors and nurses, and that just ended up being a really good episode. So we appreciate that feedback. But this is from anonymous listener. Hey, I've been listening to your show for a couple of years now. I want to thank you for making my commute more engaging. Listen to the show on Ms. Am I right? Home. And like to commend you for how well you handle the topic. I was diagnosed a few years ago at 19. Luckily, my diagnosis was quick due to the severity of my first relapse, and I feel like your podcast would have helped me understand and cope with the diagnosis in a more constructive manner than my initially trying to self destruct. Since then, I'm continually learning about the latest research in history. I love that you discussed Liduna and Augustus deste, as a lot of the time they don't come up in the mainstream discourse of Ms. Didn't really know any history until I wrote an undergrad history paper on Ms last year and found reading through bits of Death Day's journal to be the closest I've ever felt with a historical person. You mentioned that many tend to keep their diagnosis a secret. I'll admit that with me it's a need to know basis, and I rarely openly talk about it outside of family, friends and the support system, mainly because of the stigma of the disease, and that the assumptions circulating Ms tend to negatively alter people's perceptions of myself as an individual. Have had people approach me when I start limping thanks to fatigue and a permanently numb foot, but I'll brush it off and tell them there's nothing to worry about or it's an old injury. However, I think with time it's getting easier to talk about, thanks to resources like your podcast that are well researched and accurate. I cringe whenever someone tells me there's an easy homeopathic solution to my ailments, and sometimes I struggle with discussing Ms in an accessible way that doesn't solely rely on the clinical pathological understanding of it, and I will be sure in the future to redirect people to this episode. Thank you so much for sharing. And we said we keep this anonymous because this person yeah, this person said that's great that you read it, but if they're keeping it quiet for now, we don't want to broadcast the name. Sure, yeah. Nice. Thank you, Anonymous. Yeah, thanks, Anonymous. If you want to get in touch with us, like Anonymous did, you can tweet to us that's podcast. You can hang out with Chuck on facebookcom stuffychildnow or at Charleswchuck Bryant on Facebook. You can send us both an email. We promise to be confidential@stuffpodcastofworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyshando.com Stuffyhhno is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My heartratio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
Mirror Neurons: Are there people who feel others' pain? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/mirror-neurons-are-there-people-who-feel-others-pa | People with a condition known as mirror-touch synesthesia literally feel the pain of others -- but why? Josh and Chuck trace the cause of this condition to one culprit: the mirror neuron. Tune in to learn more about mirror neurons and neuroscience. | People with a condition known as mirror-touch synesthesia literally feel the pain of others -- but why? Josh and Chuck trace the cause of this condition to one culprit: the mirror neuron. Tune in to learn more about mirror neurons and neuroscience. | Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:12:20 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=16, tm_min=12, tm_sec=20, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=112, tm_isdst=0) | 33748791 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends. You know, dating is a journey with ups and downs, for sure, but all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? And when you decide it's time to find a meaningful relationship, eharmony is here for you. Eharmony is passionate about creating real love for all, rooted it in compatibility. Eharmony's process reveals truths about yourself, like, I don't know what you want in a relationship, and it helps you connect with a uniquely compatible partner who is right for you. Don't believe it? See for yourself. So start for free today, because every 14 minutes, someone finds love on Eharmony. Hey, everybody. 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. 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. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, chuck Bryant. Which makes this stuff you should know. Very nice. How are you doing? Oh, I'm great. You look like you're doing great. Chuck you look like you're doing great. Josh, jerry looks like she's doing about like we were doing. Yes, we're all doing the same. Yes, that's what we're doing. So, checkers. As I said right before we started recording, I've got no intro for this, but this is a listener request times infinity or so. Yeah, I got an intro. Oh, okay. Let's hear it. Just came to me. Okay. Josh, remember years ago when you were a young child watching NFL football and the quarterback for the Washington Redskins, joe thisman horrifically broke his leg. Lawrence Taylor broke his leg. It's one of the great tragedies of my life that I missed that. You did? I never saw it. You know when you were watching any sporting event and you see a knee go in a direction it shouldn't go in? Willis Mcgeehy. Okay. There you go. Exactly. When it was flopping around yeah. Did you feel a pain in your leg when that happened? Yeah, I felt some sort of discomfort. Okay. I feel a shooting pain when I see it's usually a bone or a leg going away. It's not supposed to go like a knife wound wouldn't bother me. It wouldn't make me grab my chest. Right. But that always sends a shooting pain through my leg. Really? And that, buddy, may be a mild form of synesthesia. Yes, it might be. It's my first intro. That's very good, Chuck. I think we should appropriately clap for that. Jerry yes, I clap for myself. So it just be a two person lame slow clap. There's a good clap. There's a good intro. Chuck and this is news to me. I had no idea that you were a sinister. Well, I don't know if that really counts. I kind of thought everyone felt a shooting pain when that kind of thing happened, but, you know but you sound like a developmental siniste. Born with it. Yes. People who are born with synesthesia tend to think that this is a very normal occurrence. That everybody feels this way. Yeah. That's the only time it happens, though. It's just with leg injuries well, brakes and things like that, and limbs just do things that aren't supposed to. I don't see the number three is orange. We'll get to that later. We definitely will. But what you're talking about is mirror touch synesthesia. Yeah. The first one? Yeah. Yes. Okay. You want to go into it? Yeah, why not? What are you waiting for? That's one of the highest. I did the intro. I thought that's fine when you hand it over. So I'm handing it over. Yeah. This is all reversed. I know. And it's not like mirror reversed, it's all just confusing. Alright, well, mirror touch synesthesia is a I don't know if you could call it a disorder, maybe a condition. We'll say condition. Yeah, condition. It's a condition where a person actually experiences a touch or an injury that they're observing on someone else. Right. And because it's mere touch, if, say, I'm facing you right. Which you are. Right. And your left arm gets touched, I would feel it in my right arm. Yeah. Right. And if I were standing next to you and your left arm were touched, I would feel it in my left arm too. Right. This is not supposed to happen normally. No. It's pretty weird. It is. And apparently for the, I guess, truly advanced mirror touch synesty, you can't watch a horror movie because the empathy involved is so extreme. Unbearable. It's unbearable that you feel like these things are happening to you. And there's a lot of stuff we need to point out, but chief among them is there's no confusion here. These people aren't confused. They don't think they're really Jack Nicholson getting hit in the head with a baseball bat by Shelley Duvall. Right. Yeah. They don't think that's happening to them. But they still experience this. Right? Yeah. That's number one. Number two is this is not imagination. Right. Right. Like these people aren't deluded. No, they're not. Any more than, say, a person with mirrored touch synesthesia feeling themselves being pinched when they watch someone else being pinched, that's no more a delusion than you or I being pinched experience. Right. Yeah. They're considered neurologically normal, quote unquote. Right. And we also know that they are having these real experiences because of our friend, the wonder machine. Yeah. Which has been employed to investigate synesthesia in all forms, and it shows that, for example, I can't come up with one for me or touch neurons. But we'll use the color graphene. No, we'll use the sound color synesthesia. Okay. Yeah. There's all different types. And this is another one. Sound color is when you associate sound with color. Right. So if you have somebody who has sound color synesthesia in the MRI and you play a musical note for them, the region of the brain that experiences or governs our understanding of musical notes is activated, as is the region of the brain that's associated with colors. Right. So these people are experiencing both. There's no way to separate them, and it's not an association. Like, you were wearing a blue evil kneeville jumpsuit the first time you heard a particular Bot concert. Right. Although it was you were sure. And you may associate that. So you may have a visual image in your mind of that blue jumpsuit or even that shade of blue whenever you hear that concert. This is not what we're talking about. This is a mixture of the senses in its most definitive form. Yeah. Oftentimes they say there will even be a projection of that color, a literal projection that they see. And it sounds cookie if you've never experienced it, but to them, it seems completely normal. Yeah. I think once they realize that they're sinners seats and that this isn't normal, it becomes tiresome, from what I understand. I was reading an interview with Dr. Oliver Sachs. The awakenings guy? Yeah. He's been hanging with sinister for many decades now, so he's something of an authority on it. Oh, yeah. And he was saying that a lot of them get kind of tired of it. Like, I really wish I could just listen to music without seeing all the colors. Well, a lot of people use it, too, though. Well, yeah. Creatively. Sure. Famous sinister deaths have remarked that it has helped them with their memory. I got to study on that, which we'll get to later. But we're talking about Duke Ellington. Yeah. No slouch. No. Franchise composer? Nabikov writer, actually. Nabikov. In his autobiography, he talks about how he started to realize that he was synesthetic when he was a little kid. He was pointing to these, I guess, the alphabet, and they were just colorless letters. Interesting. But he was talking about the colors of the letters, and his mother came over and agreed with them that the letters were indeed colored. Right. But she disagreed with what colors the letters were. So he came to realize as he grew older that he and his mother were synesthetic, and actually, strangely enough, his wife turned out to be a sinister Steve, too. Well, they do think it's hereditary, for sure. But get this. He also couldn't hear music. He could hear the sound, but he couldn't hear music. So he couldn't hear a high or a low pitch. Really? He couldn't hear discordant. Would he see it? No, he was a color graphene sinisty. All right, so that's two. We'll go ahead and say the other two. Word taste. Words associated with taste and taste touch. And there's all kinds of groupings of these. It's not just those. Apparently, they can be paired in all sorts of ways. And I think they said it's rare, but some people even have involved three or more of their senses, which is crazy. Right? Besides color graphene synesthesia, it's not like you just have that. You can have different types of synesthesia, and you can also have them to different degrees. So much so that researchers are coming to believe that one out of every 100 or 200 people have synesthesia. Yeah, to some degree. Like you. Right. And it's also specific to the person. So everyone's as their own. Right. Which is why three isn't always blue for every dynasty, which is why Nabakov and his mother were arguing about what colors were washed. There's another one I found, too, called time space synesthesia. Did you see this? No, they kind of referenced it in the article as far as some people even see certain months and days as shapes. But there's a psychologist named David Brang who his theory is that people can literally see time. They see it as a spatial construct. So he found this one woman in a study who was able to see the year as a circular ring surrounding her body, and it rotated clockwise throughout the year. And the current month resided inside of her chest. And the past month resided on the front of her chest. Huh. Isn't that crazy? It is crazy, yeah. And when I say crazy, I'm not being derogatory. Fascinating. Yes. Right. Well, yeah, of course. We use those interchangeably around here, don't we? Well, we tend to that. Woman can probably tell you exactly what happened on a certain day of a given year, because one of the benefits that researchers believe sinistides are bestowed with is better working memory. There's different associations. It's not just one association. You're using two regions of the brain to form memories or that are elicited as a response to music or a letter like that. Well, he did two studies. You want to hear that? I do. He took the same people the timespace is it's the time space synesthetes? And he asked him to memorize an unfamiliar spatial calendar and then reproduce it, and then he got normal people to do it. And the results showed that they could recall events in time, like light years beyond the non sinistites. Sure. And they found, on average, that Senates have about 123 different facts that they can call up about a specific event in their life, compared to 39 for your average Joe. Really? So it's definitely doubling your pleasure with the memory, double your fun with synesthesia. Chuck, you were talking about studies and tests. Dr. Sachs mentioned a pretty simple test for somebody with color graphene synesthesia. And it's brilliant and it's simplicity. Right. But you just put a piece of paper in front of them with a scattering, a random scattering of fives and S and say, pick out fives and S as fast as you can. And for a synapse, because, remember, this isn't an association. Like they literally five looks red. Are they mixed in with other numbers and letters? No, fives and S because they look similar. Okay. So the Tennessee should be able to pick out the fives and S in no time flat because it's blue and red. Right. Because it's not just a black printed number or letter that looks similar to one another. It will clearly look like this one's red, this one's green, this one's red. This one is green, green, green, red. Like a human highlighter, pretty much. That's why you use a highlighter, so it stands out. But think about this. Can you imagine trying to study do you remember back in like, 7th grade, those fat pens that have four different color inks in them? Sure. And the girls would send you love notes with one letter for each. And when they really liked you, like, each letter would be a different color, and it was just a headache, a nightmare. And you're like, I don't like you with that puffy bang thing that's all hairspray going on. Yeah, see, that was much later for me. 7th grade for me was that was still oh, yeah. Everybody was early 80s, everybody's keeping on trucking spiky Joan Jet hair. That was what was going on. Nice. Chuck, this appears to be genetic in origin. Yeah, that's what they think. Because usually more than one person in your family has it right at a time. Yeah. Old Jacob Silverman not to be confused with old Kirk Christensen. He wrote about a researcher named Sarah Jane Blakemore who was delivering a lecture and mentioned that she had heard of people who confused other people's touches for their own. Right. She's talking about mirror, touch, syntaxes. And a woman in the audience, I guess, during the Q and A session said, wait, I thought everybody felt that. Right. And was like, what is going on here? Sarah Jane Blakemore is like, let's go to your home. And they did. And she found out that eleven of her family members had some form of synesthesia. So if they think it does have a genetic basis chuck, I'm writing an article on a skin condition called epidermalysis ballos. Okay. Basically, you get blisters. Really easy, right? Okay. Researchers have determined that ten genes are in order or are in play or mutated to have epidermalysis pelosi. And that's just for a blister. Can you imagine the number of genes that have to be mutated in the specific combinations to form synesthesia? Crazy amounts. It is crazy, and we mean fascinating. Where should we go here? Can we go to mirror neurons. Well, hold on. Let's talk about one other thing first. Okay. With synesthesia, there are two types we talked about developmental synesthese who think that everybody experiences this. Yeah. Because they're born with it. Sure. And then there's acquired synesthesia. And this is most predominantly seen in people who lose their site after a certain age. Right. Or if you have a brain injury or do lots of drugs. You said drug use. Yeah. Drug use can lead to, I guess, a kind of temporary synesthesia, from what I've read. Okay. But if you go blind, apparently your brain's visual center, after it's been trained to take in visual information, it's still hungry for it. Sure. So it starts apparently, your synesthesia can just come in like gangbusters after you lose your site, even when you didn't have it before. Yeah. And you remember that movie Mask? Who could forget? Of course. Do you remember the part where Rocky Dennis is teaching his blind girlfriend colors? Yes. Cold as blue, hot as red. Right. He puts her hand under some cold water and this is blue. Heated like a rock up in a campfire and gave it to her to teach her red and teach her a lesson. Then he smacked her in the face and said, that's orange. Right. Get it right. Orange is pain. Yeah. And I don't know that a neurologist could tell you whether that was actually developing synesthesia. Right. That was Laura Dern, wasn't it? I think it was, yeah. A young Laura Durn. Yeah. And Rocky Dennis was Eric Stolts. Yeah. And Cher. Was Cher. Eric Stolts. And a lot of prosthetic makeup. Yeah. Good movie. Great movie. I love that. Sam Elliott, too. Everybody was in that. John Travolta, Tom Cruise. Beck. Beck was in it. Yeah. Well and who can forget the cameo by Liberati? I know. It blew me away. He was the mask. Yeah. That was the big reason he turned out to be not even metaphorically. No. Like, Rocky Dennis took his mask off and it was liberatchi got a classic. Are we a mirror neurons? We definitely are mirror neurons if we're not wearing Big Trouble, buddy. Oh, wait. Oh, no. Really? Yeah. Okay. Another pop culture reference is fantasia is commonly pointed to as about the closest a non synestic could come to experiencing synesthesia short of hallucinating. Interesting. Yeah. Because almost every motion and color and change in lighting is associated with a physical note. Yeah. I can't get through that thing anymore. I can't. I think when I was a little kid, I thought it was neat, but it's just unsettling. Yeah, it's boring. All right, Chuck, I believe we have arrived at mirror neurons. So mirror neurons, Josh. I didn't realize this, but they were discovered only in 1996 in Macaque monkeys. By accident. Yeah. There were these dudes in Italy, the neuroscientist at the University of Palma. And I will read their names because I love Italians. It was Giacomo Rizolati was the first one. Nice. And Vittorio Galesi was the second one. Sure. And the third one was Leonardo Figassi. I like the last guy's name the most. Leonardo feasi. Yeah, he's good. So they make a mean pasta sauce, too. So they were doing a little study on the pre motor neuron dynamics. So they ran some electrodes into a macaque monkey, like you said, to the pre motor cortex to monitor neural activity when the monkey would reach for something all going fine, they were learning whatever they were learning, eating some spaghetti. And all of a sudden, one of the guys this is how the story goes at least came into the room and reached for a raisin, I think they said it was. And the monkey was still hooked up. And they saw that his brain started firing the same as it did when he had actually reached for it. And they all went, Dorshtigatse it's a bunch of nice and all of a sudden, they had stumbled upon what one of them calls the biggest neuroscientific discovery of the decade. And he went on to say that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA has done for biology. That's very funny. Provide a unifying framework. That's funny that he said that, because that's a lot of foresight for that one single guy, because that's exactly what it's done. Oh, yeah. Big time. I mean, basically, mirror neurons are how we learn to do everything, right. Think about swinging a baseball bat. You don't just walk up and go, oh, there you go. You learn it by observing other people. Right. At the same time, you can make the case that culture other kinds of acquired learning, aside from swinging baseball bat, the theory of the mind where we can put ourselves in other people's situations to predict their behavior, all of this is accounted for by mere neuron. Yeah. A biological basis for empathy. Yes. Crazy. It is crazy. And I think also empaths people who have severe empathy, real empathy, tend to have more active mirror neurons. And people with autism tend to not display any mirror neuron activity. You understand one and you might explain the other is what they're thinking. Sure. Pretty cool. Also, Chuck, mirror neurons were just observed in humans for the first time this year. Yeah. UCLA. Yeah. And apparently we have much more robust than even the monkeys do. Right. So are you talking about the study where they had brain electrodes already implanted in epilepsy patients awaiting surgery? I did not see that one. Okay. These are the guys who showed it directly before it been observed. Its activity had been observed, like the MRI. But MRI is falling a little out of favor these days, and rightly. So we just did not release yet. Right. These guys had brain electrodes hooked up to the brains of epilepsy patients already. And they're like, hey, let's test this out. So they had people watch others do grasping motions. Right. And then they had the people do grasping motions themselves. Sure. Some neurons were fired when the person did the grasping motion himself, and other neurons fired when they watched it. But 8% fired both times. Right. Those are the mirror neurons. It was the first time they were ever directly observed in humans. Yeah. And those are the sinis. They're just regular, everyday people. Okay, let's go back to that sports metaphor. Okay. Okay. All right. Chuck, have you ever seen somebody get hit by a pitch? Oh, yeah. And did you recoil in your chair even though you're in no way in the line of that pitch? Yeah, a little bit. Sure. But have you seen other people do it? It's like, oh, yeah, that's mirror neurons at work. You're anticipating that this other person is going to feel pain. Right. You don't necessarily have to be a synapse to have mirror neurons. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, sure. Although, incycedese, it's just heightened. They're much more active. Right. And that's the theory. Right. They also found through and I love this is, like brand new stuff here in the past couple of years, which I really love. They found that you don't actually even have to see it. You can hear it like a piece of paper being torn, and they'll start firing like that. And when Galesi and Rizalati found that when they actually describe something happening in a sentence, the same mirror neurons are firing really? As if they are actually performing the action. Well, I don't know if that's getting through to people. The neurons that fire. If you would actually tear a piece of paper a tear a piece of paper happened when you hear it being torn. Right. Crazy. It is crazy. And you were talking about what was the Italian guy's name who made the prediction that it was going to be the biggest thing since the beetle ravioli. When he said that it was going to be huge, he was absolutely right. Chuck. Yes. Mirror neurons are at the center of what's being called the fifth revolution in humanity. I believe it. Will you allow me will you indulge me a moment? Sure. So there's been four so far, and we're at the beginning of the fifth revolution. The first revolution was Copernicus saying Earth isn't at the center of the universe. Right. The second revolution was Darwin saying men are just clever monkeys, even though he was 75 years after what's his face? Yeah. What's his face? I know who you're talking about. Oh, Gerta Guerte. Yeah. And then the third revolution was Freudian, who suggested that we were nothing but a bunch of drives and desires that we were unconscious of and could control. Sure. The fourth was the genetic revolution, DNA cricken Watson, who showed, like, hey, we're actually a bunch of genes. And all of that implies right. And Watson put it like, there are only molecules. Everything else is sociology. Right. And his partner Francis Crick said, it's really interesting that we came up with that. I'm going to go ahead and predict the fifth wave and the fifth revolution is neuroscience. Yes. And that's where we're at now, that we are nothing. But this is how Crick put it in his book Astonishing Hypothesis. Even our loftiest thoughts and aspirations are mere byproducts of neural activity. Right. And mirror neurons are revealing that. Synesthesia reveals that. Because think about it, Chuck. If I watch you get pinched and I experience the pinching just like I'm being pinched, that's my reality. Right. But it's not reality as everybody sees reality sure. Or agrees that reality is, but it's still just as real. So it kind of underscores just how feeble reality actually is. And this is in my mind. Well, this is what neuroscience is. This fifth revolution is undermining our conceptions and our perceptions of reality. Wow. I have a question for you. Let's hear it. There's a neuroscientist named Vs rama Chandran. Yes, I saw that guy. Okay. He has a question that he likes to pose to people. It's not his, but he bandies it about a lot. Chuck? Yes. If a neuroscientist could keep your brain in a VAT of liquid and maintain your consciousness so you had no idea you were just a brain and a VAT of liquid, okay? Apply electrical impulses so that could make you the happiest form of yourself, combined with Gandhi, Hugh Hefner, Einstein and Bill Gates. Right. And you were just as happy as you could be. And then one day the neuroscientist says to you, hey, I'm going to give you a choice. First of all, your brain in a VAT of liquid, and all of your experiences are just me applying electrical impulses like Futurama or like The Matrix, or like The Matrix, which was actually based on this thought experiment, okay? So you can either remain this happy, diluted brain in this VAT of liquid, or you can be your regular self, what you consider to be yourself. What you consider to be yourself right now. Right. What would you choose? Blue pill or red pill? Basically, I'd want to be myself. What's the difference? Okay, morpheus. No, but really, it's true. And this was around before the Worshinsky brothers wakowski whatever. Lebowski before they cinematized it as the basis for The Matrix. This is a philosophical experiment. Well, if you'd never know, you're right. What's the difference? Right. But it's not never knowing, Chuck. The point is that's what's going on with us right now, that's our conception of reality, it's just a neurological response to external, external stimuli, but none of it is real. And mirror neurons are kind of pointing that out as a big flashing light, like, buddy, if somebody can feel someone else being pinched and you can actually see the brain activity going they're not imagining it, then reality isn't real. Right. And we're here to show you. Wow. I know. I'm depressed. See, I'm inspired. What does that say about us? I don't know. That means we compliment each other. You blew my mind, literally into next Wednesday. I got a couple more things I want to hear. You know how I was talking about the biological basis for empathy? They're also thinking that this is why yawns are contagious. Laughs are contagious and moves are contagious, good and bad. We didn't do that one. Is yawning contagious to make you empathetic. I don't think they knew as much even when we recorded that, as they do now about mirror. Yeah, like you were saying, like, this is cutting edge stuff. It's been advancing leaps and bounds, like, over the last two years. Right. Leaps and bounds. And I got one more thing for you. Speaking of that, have you seen that cute little lamb where's b, the confused little lamb? On YouTube? No, but Cherry's like, nodding like a five year old. So adorable. You mean I just sit there and watch it? You'll watch it ten times. Really? Yeah. As long as little B the Lambs around, I don't care. What's real. Yeah. I don't know if I could ever watch anything as much as I watch the surprise cat kitten or the shocked gopher groundhog or whatever. He turns around. Dramatic. Yeah. I can't remember what it's called. What about the weather guy pretty much everywhere. It's going to be hot. It's going to be hot. Arthur. Arthur. Yeah, he was good, too. Yeah. Boy, that was a nice little sidebar. Have you seen Keyboard? Kitty? We should just do a whole show on YouTube stuff. Okay. I haven't seen Keyboard Kitty. Josh, here's one last thing. The mirror neurons, they think a more complex mirror neuron system developed in humans about 5000 years ago. Yeah, I remember. You know what else happened around five to 10,000 years ago? I've got everything I want to say. I can't say it emerged roughly at the same time as modern communication and language beauty. So they think the mirror neurons, once they developed to that extent in early man, the crude Panama gestures became more elaborate gestures. I like that. It's like a nod to just thought. Right? And then that became rudimentary language and then it just snowballed from there. Well, Chuck, think about this. We talked about Mesopotamia being the cradle of civilization. We started living in cities around that time, too. Yeah. And mirror neurons make us more empathetic, which is pretty much the glue that holds society together. Truly the fifth revolution. Yeah. So interesting we should give a shout out just so we don't get 1000 million emails about Richard Saitawic. Yeah, he kind of says that he's the man. He wrote a book in 93. I noticed Oliver Sacks nodding to this guy, too. Yeah, he seems like the real deal. Although his website is crude. Well, it's just you go to it and you're like, oh, man, I thought you were all. Like professional. It's not cyniste.org, is it? Cinnasete battery? But no, I don't think so. But he does have some books. One is called the Man Who tasted shapes. Yeah, I think that's the one from 93. And then Wednesday is indigo blue. Discovering the brain of Synesthesia. And he proposes that well, we should say there was another hypothesis that it's just crossed wires and that we're born like that with our neurons crossed. Yeah. And that almost all humans get it straightened out and becomes more complex around twelve months of age. Yeah, but it's just wires across. That's why baby, if you stick your tongue out a baby, they might stick their tongue out back. One other one. Yeah, we're talking about ecopraxia in the Tourettes episode. And that apparently it has to do with Marineurons as well. Right. And then one other school of thought for synesthesia is that synesthes are picking up on something that's actually there. So, like the wavelength of a piece of music also has some sort of light wavelength that people saying right, interesting. I'm going with the mirror neurons. Well, I don't think we have any choice, man. It's like evolution Freud. I don't know if I accept him as a revolution, but it's like evolution copernicus the whole shebang. DNA. DNA. But don't you feel, Chuck, that we are at this point where all the information is on the table, but we're just now starting to be able to put it together? So it's a really depressing point right now because our place in the universe is as up in the air as it's ever been. We've never been less sure about our importance or the meaning of our lives. Yeah, it's entirely possible that once we put it all together, the meaning will be even bleaker. Right. The reality will be even bleaker, but then we'll be able to grow from there. I think that we exist right now in one of the bleakest periods of humankind. Wow, that's a nice way to do things. Well, that's it for synesthesia. I think we've got more than just this one article on site, but the one we were basing this off of is can people feel the pain of others? I think if you type synesthesia S-Y-N-E-S-T-H-E-S-I-A into the handychurchbar. Howstephos.com you're going to get something, pal? Something. Maybe d l hugley. We never can pal. So check. It means it's time for listener mail. Right? Well, Joshua would if there was listener mail, but I didn't prepare listener mail today because we have just some things to talk about. T shirt submissions. Yeah, we've already gotten some pretty cool ones. We've gotten some really cool ones and some that aren't so great. But we appreciate the effort. Yes, we do. But keep them coming. We don't have the details yet. We just wanted to say we archive all emails. We archive all the emails. I have a little folder called T Shirts, and I'm throwing all the ones in there that people send in. That's so crazy. I thought of making a folder called T Shirts. Leave it to me. We're really getting some great ones, though. I would want these t shirts. Oh, there's one that I know we definitely can't produce that I really want the Magnum Pi. One. Yeah, that was pretty dope. Oh, my goodness. Pretty cool. All right, well, yeah. Okay. That's coming. And then we should plug Facebook and Twitter, too. Okay. Because we're up and running now. There's a social media site called Facebook that you should check out. And then there's another thing called Twitter that people should check out, too. And you can find us at Stuff You should know on the Facebook. You want to talk about our Facebook and Twitter stuff. And you can find us at S-Y-S Kpodcast on Twitter and follow us and sign up and become a fan. And I'm kind of digging being involved. We should put a subliminal obey right here. Despair. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Thanks for the despair, tenant. You know who you are, right? Thanks for everything we've gotten recently. Yes, we got a six pack of microbrew from a guy. That was really nice. And the 911 people sent us things about the work at 911 call centers. We got, like, hats and t shirts. Yes. Turns out 911 isn't a joke. No, it's not. Well, thank you, everybody, for listening, at least. Those of you sending emails, double thanks. And those of you who sent an actual physical stuff, triple thanks. If you want to contact Chuck or me or both of us and Jerry, too, you can send us an email, including Tshirt submissions to stuff podcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more? HowStuff work? Check out our blog on the houseofworks.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. 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. 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How Acne Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-acne-works | Over the course of our lives, 80 percent of us will experience acne. Ultimately, acne comes down to one thing, a blockage in the sebaceous gland. Learn what makes a blackhead black, and everything else about zits, in this pus-filled episode of SYSK. | Over the course of our lives, 80 percent of us will experience acne. Ultimately, acne comes down to one thing, a blockage in the sebaceous gland. Learn what makes a blackhead black, and everything else about zits, in this pus-filled episode of SYSK. | Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:52:45 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=15, tm_min=52, tm_sec=45, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=263, tm_isdst=0) | 39865848 | audio/mpeg | "Are you looking for an escape? An immersive getaway experience? Well, there's a place for all your wildest dreams. Perhaps you enjoy wrapping along the paperboy, or you believe that blessed be the fruit. Or you dream of one day smashing a glass while stealing. Who's. Ah. Whether you're sworn to Team Kim or you just want a good old fashioned, mysterious murder, there's a place that has it all. From Atlanta to only murders in the building, it's all on Hulu. So check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription is required. Terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry it's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housethoughccom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. That makes this stuff you should know. That's right? Doesn't it? It does. When we're in this room, one thing happens. Anger. I was going to say magic. Angry magic. Yeah. Get out of the hat. I haven't seen that yet. The Angry Magician. Yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah. There you go. The angry comics. Yeah, there are plenty of them, and for good reason, too. Do you remember a while back, we were writing a lot of articles that seem to share a common theme of skincare? Yeah, I remember that too. I didn't write too many of those. I wrote a lot of skincare articles. Yeah, I did. And I've learned that I'm fascinated by the skin. That's good. Yes. It turned out to be very good. Like, you don't want to take too many showers in a day. You don't want the water you use in your shower to be too hot. I learned these things definitively. Right. Also, the skin on your lips is three layers thick, whereas the rest of the skin in your face is about 16 layers thick. Wow. And they're actually translucent, which is why your lips are reddish, because it's just the mucous membrane underneath right. Showing through. Yes. Look at that. Yeah. And you don't want to lick your lips too much because your saliva contains the digestive enzyme, which starts to break down the very thin and fragile skin on your lips. Yeah, I got chapped lips a lot from licking them. Stop licking your lips. I'm constantly just I have oral stuff. Bite my nails, bite my cheeks, bite my lip, all that stuff. All that good, fun, stressy stuff. But you don't smoke cigarettes, though. Good for you. Yeah. I guess I chewed my face off instead of doing that. It's a good looking face. Thank you. Well, anyway, Chuck, I just wanted to say all that to say that I will be very interested in what we're talking about today, which is acne. I'm glad you are. I am, too. Although I never really got acne, so I'm a little less, like, enthused. It's so unfair. Look at this right here, right now. Yeah. I have a big old white head rush through my nose, it won't go away. Like, I was pressing it with my pinkies. I could pop aside. I get them. That's a tough spot, though. Josh is talking about the area right under the nostril. That no man's land. The nose kind of prohibits excess like you want. Well, it's not just that. It's very sensitive and I was pressing it and, like, my eyes are watering and it still wouldn't pop. So I'll have to have you do it. Yeah. But I guess it's Method podcasting and following in your footsteps, Chuck. So you want to talk about acne first? I guess we should talk about the skin a little bit, right. In the process of how well, let's talk about the skin. Did you like Tom's description? I did, actually. I think most people know by now it's the largest organ, but Tom takes it a step further in a very Buffalo Bill way, and he says that if you skinned an adult human, there would be enough material to make a four x five foot area. Rug of skin weighs \u00a310. I'm glad he didn't say how many skin suits or lamp shades you'd make, because that'd be really creepy. Creepy enough. So, yes, \u00a310 of skin on an adult body. Right. And then most of the skin, there's three layers of the epidermis, the dermis and the subcutaneous layer. Right. I think the dermis is the fattiest layer and the subcutaneous layer is like, the nastiest layer. Have you ever seen hair raiser? Yeah. Remember the woman, she was coming back regenerating. She regenerated from the inside out. So at one point, she's just like muscles and blood. Just above that is the subcutaneous layer. I think the epidermis is kind of gross, too, though, because it's all dead. It is dead. This is one of the things that fascinates me about skin. All the skin I'm looking at right now like that, I can see dead. Dead is disco. Yeah. You know, weird. Yeah. So, Chuck, your skin grows, like, beneath the outer layer and it grows as carotenops, with which your new skin cells yeah. And your skin is a constant, constant motion, pushing that dead skin up and up and out through the pores, where they flake off into your bed, making your mattress heavier. Right. From, like, the moment it's born, when a cell divides, it starts making its way outward. Yeah. And it takes what does it take, about a month for a skin cell to be born and then make it out to the outer later? That sounds about right. Right. To the tune of 40 to 60 million skin cells per day. Yeah. 40,000 a minute. That's crazy. Are reaching the surface. Right. And so they reach the surface and they don't just fall right off along the process. They die and they become cornified and become caroteno cites or cornea sites. Sorry. And when they reach the surface, they provide a function for a while, they mix with sebum, which is the oil we produce that I really produce. Oily skin. Yeah, and some fats. What kind? Lipids. Josh lenoleic acid. Okay. So they mix all together and they form waterproof skin that keeps out water. That's huge seed is why we don't soak up water when we walk around in the rain. Exactly. And it keeps bacteria out, which is why the skin is your first organ of resistance for immunity. That's right. So you've got all this process going on. Skin cells eventually do fall off and jump off and are sloughed off, and then beneath all that, you have the subcutaneous layer. And that's where the hair starts growing. Right? Yeah. That's where you're going to find your hair follicle, which looks sort of like just a little tube with a little rounder. And I would say it looks like a sperm. Sperm going inward towards your ear drop. Sure. Maybe. And that is where the hair begins to grow from the bottom up, and it grows out of this follicle and collects on the way out sebum, which we said was oil. That's why when you don't take a shower, your hair is going to look all oily. And actually, men, I think, have more sebum than women. And teenagers have lots of sebum. Yeah. It's almost equal for among the genders and teenagers. Yeah. Because that's why you get acne most often in adolescence, because we're taking you up through where acne starts, which is really sebum. Right. Well, I have a lot to do with it. At least the hair follicle is connected to a sebaceous gland, like you said, which is why your hair seems oily when it comes out. And so you've got this whole house of cards, I guess, just waiting to screw up. Well, they're trying to squeeze through this little pore right. Together. Those dead skin cells that migration they make, the way they get out is through the poor, through the follicle, through the sebaceous gland, right? That's right. So when you have a lot of them coming together at once, all these dead skin cells are trying to get through the same door. It's like Three Stooges Syndrome from The Simpsons. Remember, Mr. Burns had everything, but nothing could kill him because they couldn't all get through the door of his health. That's exactly right. So when you have too many skin cells, things start getting blocked and things back up behind it and you've got trouble. Yeah. I mean, that's one way it can happen. And they don't know why that the body would overproduce skin cells, but hey, it happens. Yeah. Do we need to know why? Exactly? Another thing that can happen, you can have too much sebum, like we talked about in puberty. And puberty is when that's going to happen. Most likely bacteria, specifically propion. Nice. P acnes that's found in acne lesions. And every type of acne that we're going to talk about, they're all lesions. Right. Then inflammation. Right? Yeah. The bacteria causes inflammation. When there's backup and there's bacteria, you're going to get inflammation. Yeah. Tom put it like these were different things that could happen, and I'm sure they are, but it also seems to happen like a sequence of events, kind of like all of them. You've got too many skin cells backing up. Right. So the sebum backed up behind it. Well, this bacteria loves to eat sebum, which causes an infection, which makes you inferred. Yeah, I saw it as a sequence of events, too. All right, so, Chuck, there is a very long standing debate over what is worse a whitehead or a blackhead. What's the difference between the two? Well, one is an open camido, and one is a closed comido. Do you know what a comido is? I do. It's blockage. Okay. Do you know what the word is? Camidone is plural. What do you mean, what the word is? The word is Latin for glutton. Okay. Really? Yeah, and it's named after a worm. You know how when you do populate and the stuff comes out as, like, kind of a thin, worm like tube? Well, there was apparently a worm that looks very similar to that that love to feed a parasitic worm that love to feed on humans. That was considered particularly gluttonous. So the blockage came to be called the commodore, which means glutton. Wow. Isn't that weird? And gross? Yeah. And true. Yeah. Pretty much everything about this, we're looking at acting on the subdermal level. Yes, it is gross. It is kind of gross. So, whiteheads, you might think, like, I just woke up and there's a white head on my nose. That just happened last night. Not true. It could have been a couple of months in the making before you finally see it. Like you might emily call some underground construction. When you can feel it and you know it's coming, but you can't see it or do anything about it yet. That's infection, essentially, yeah. Underground construction. Yeah. At some point, your skin cells started backing up. They didn't make their way out of the pore, and you're in trouble. So, whiteheads, anyway, have an open comido blackhead. I'm sorry? Closed comido blackheads are open, and the black that you're seeing is just melanin. It's just our skin pigment. It's oxidized. It's not dirt. The reason it's black is because it's been exposed to air, whereas with a closed tomato, there is no exposure to air. So everything stays white just beneath the surface of the skin. And you stopped me in the hall earlier and said, I can't tell the difference between a whitehead and a pustule, what I found. Because you did find something. Well, the American academy of dermatology says that it's really confusing. Don't feel bad. It is confusing. Thank you. AA. They're all lesions, but I think a white head, what we typically see as a pimple and a zip, is the pustule. Okay. Because in here. It says the ad says a whitehead is typically a raised bump that's the same color as the rest of your skin, whereas the zip clearly has the pus. But apparently that's not the hallmark of a whitehead. So I'm even more confused now. Yeah. Thank you. AAD. Thanks for nothing. Yes, because I thought a whitehead meant it was the white pimple zip looking thing. Yeah, it says here that are the same color as the rest of your skin. Okay. Well, let's go with that, though. I mean, that a white head is just pressing your skin up, so it's a raised bump. Whereas if it looks white, if there's, like, a clearly a white part, what has happened is the white head, or blackhead, has collapsed under the skin, and all that bacteria ridden sebum is now causing an infection. Right. That's what a zip is. That's right. Also called a pustule. That's a pustule. There's also a papule, and they are little, small bumps. Little, firm, small bumps. And they don't have any kind of white glory center. Right. But they do feel like sandpaper, apparently, if you rub your fingers across them. Yeah. I get, like, little dry skin bumps in the back of my arm. I don't know if that's the same thing. No, that's not. I don't think so. Okay. I'm sure it's got a name. What is that called? What's really severe dry skin called eczema. Yeah, it's a mild form of eczema. All right. Maybe I have eczema. There are nodules which are larger and hard. Nodules, the kind of thing where you mash it and you mash it and nothing ever happens, and then it comes back and comes back because you're just breaking it down, and it stays in there. Did I have one of those? That was definitely a nodule, wasn't it? Yeah, because I would be, like, off of my first, and then it would go away. First it would go, and then it would come back. That thing was there for a while. Yeah, man, it kept coming back, and then it stayed for a really long time, and it came back. And I was wearing, like, turtles neck. I brought turtlenecks back inadvertently. Flapping and then super tip nodules. Josh, you may think are sister boils, and they might look like that, but SIS have different traits, one of which is the ability to contain a trapped gas, which I thought was pretty interesting. That is nuts. And pretty awesome. Yeah. So that means that's not assist. I'll bet that gas stinks to high heaven when it's finally released. Can you imagine? Yeah, I can, baby. Acne. Yeah. What is it called? Mila. Milia. Milia. Sorry. Mila is Denise. I think the point here was you can get acne from cradle to the grave. Yes. Sadly, yes. Most people tom cited something like 80% of people get acne, and we should say everything we just said was a form of acne vulgaris. Yeah. I don't think we said that vulgaris is altin. I think for common right, most of us get it right. Eight out of ten people get it at some point in their life. He said most people. It starts during puberty and ends after puberty. For other people, like me, it keeps going on here, there, and I mean, like, I take care of my face, dude. I've got a regimen. And it's still I mean, I can imagine it would be much worse if I didn't take care of it or you over register. Simpson here. Are you over regimenting? No, I know what I'm doing, okay? I'm going to see a dermatologist soon. I need to find one, but I'm going to go see one just to make sure I'm doing everything right. Yeah. There's no other steps I can take. But I know what I'm doing, okay? Because the only reason I say that is later in the article. They point out that over washing. And I remember that as a kid. I think I went through a brief period where I got like. A zip or two in high school. And so I got out like the buff. Puff. And then neutrogena for the first time ever and just scrub the crap out of my face. Started bleeding. It started breaking out. I was like, Well, I don't get it. I'm washing my face and it's breaking out. But all these years later, I have an explanation. You're agitating your skin. Yeah, I think I just have sensitive skin. Yeah. But no, I don't use like, soap or harsh stuff on my face. I take good care of it. So, Amelia, back to the babies. Babies can get melia. It's around the eyes or nose, little white bumps. It's really common. If you're a new parent and your kid has this, don't worry about it. In fact, the doctor is probably going to tell you the same thing. Like, don't even do anything. It will clear up on its own, right, in most cases. And you can actually get that as an adult as well. Oh, really? Sometimes, yeah. It's far more common in infants and I mean, like newborns too. Right. The cause generally is that the skin cells are already dividing and dying off, but the sebaceous glands aren't developed enough to carry the skin cells to the surface. So basically when the doctor says, just wait, it'll clear up on its own, he's saying, just wait, your baby will grow and produce more sebaceous glands to handle this and that's that. Well, that's good news. It's great news. Prepubertal acne forms in children. This is basically when you're producing your androgens your sex hormones before you should be yeah, like from drinking milk. Is that what will do it, too? Probably bovine growth hormone would do it, and that is when it's pre puberty, and that's in younger children. And that's something you probably should go to a doctor about. Yeah, because I think they take it more as, like, a sign. Like, okay, you've got this other stuff coming down the pike too, like breasts and you're sick kind of thing. So it's just a big androgen dump in your body, in your sebaceous glance go, oh, we're supposed to start working now, right? I guess. And you get in a box. Timmy's only eight, right? I said six. Does it happen that young? I don't know. I'm sure it could. Yeah. I would imagine the younger, the more potentially problematic it is. That's the kid who ends up having the mustache when he's, like, in the third grade. The six year old boy with the breasts and the mustache. What did you call him? Timmy. Timmy. Actually, I have a friend named Timmy, but my other friend jim. You actually know jim did have a mustache when he was, like, in the 8th grade. Oh, yeah. It was pretty funny. Yeah. Swarthy Jim. Yes. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need, right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. So what else, Chuck? Oh, there's rosacea. This is the one that is pretty awful on google images. Really? Yeah, it can affect the nose. It's everything from just redness of the nose to horribly misshapen bumpy nose. Okay. It can get really bad. Is that the nose where you see, like, divots missing from people's noses? Yeah, I got you. It can get that bad, but it occurs in bouts. Right. So you can kind of tell that you're about to have a bout of rosacea because you find that you flush more easily. Yeah. And it's because the veins in your face are dilating more wider, I guess. Yeah. That's it triggers acne. Well, it triggers acne vulgaris or a lot like acne vulgaris, they said. And then I also got the impression from tom that it's problematic and that people suspect that maybe you're, like, a raging alcoholic because your nose looks like that, like, you have the gym blossoms, but it's really just rosacea. Yeah. And if you look up pictures of it, it looks like a gym blossom or worse. I don't encourage anyone to type in, like, pus jewels into Google Images because body parts come up that have these things on them and might not be something you want to see, you know what I'm saying? What kind of body parts they had pictures of just out of nowhere, just like feet, penises with bumps on them. I don't recommend it. Okay, well, that's fair warning if I've ever heard it. Anybody who does go Google Image. What? Rosacea, any of them, really? Then you've been warned by Chuck himself. You're a dummy if you do it, or you're on your own, at least. So these are generally the different types of acne, right. And their causes, but we missed at least one. Chuck pizza causes acne. I know. It doesn't. That was play acting. I know. And I actually did a little more research on this, and diet and acne, that's sort of been one of the old things. They say it's like eating greasy food and a lead to acne, but most doctors say that that's pretty much a myth. End of story. Yes. Although this one thing I found says that theoretically, there could be some impact. Like, diet has a direct effect on your insulin level, in that insulin is the master hormone, and it has to do with hormone production in a way. So in theory, insulin spikes could affect acne. And also things that you eat. It can affect it in a good way if you eat positively, like veggies and fruits and seafood, and potentially if you eat good foods that are rich in, like, omega three fats, like fish oil. It can be an antiinflammatory. And so part of the problem is inflammation, in theory could help with that, too, but you want to watch, like, shellfish. They're high in iodine because that apparently can inflame acne vulgaris. Yeah. So here's we say that it doesn't impact acne. We're saying it does. Right? Yeah. I just can't believe that what you eat doesn't have any impact on the function of your cells. It's got to have some impact. That's what I think genetics is another big one that I think probably it's overestimated the impact it has. Yes. The genes that you inherit from your parents and how they express the proteins that tell your sebaceous glands to function in this way or that way or whatever. Right. It's going to have an effect, but not as much as if your dad broke out a lot. You're not necessarily going to. Right. Or vice versa. Right. I don't know about my parents in acne. I don't either. It's not a conversation that you normally have with your parents more. It's like, was your dad bald? Right. That's the big question. That's what I care about. Right. As men, dirt is not going to affect if you have a dirty face. I mean, it's not great for your skin, probably, but pimples and zits happen from the inside out, so dirt on top of your epidermis isn't going to really affect that. Right. They say. And then makeup. This one? I don't know. I could see makeup definitely making you break out. Yeah. The wrong kind. Quit using that kind. Well, there's different kinds. There's hypoallergenic, which means low. Allergenic right. There's noncomedogenic, which supposedly says, like, this won't make you break out. So possibly cheap makeup. Yeah. If you have skin issues already, then you should probably be aware of the types of makeup that you're getting. If you're a young lady or if you're a dude that's into that and leaving makeup on without removing it, at the end of the day, that can definitely cause you to break out because you are going ahead and blocking the pores from the outside in, causing backups. Yes. Stevie Nicks said that on might have been Oprah. Yeah. Verbatim. I was quoting her. Really? Now, she said they asked her why she always looks so great, and she said that through all, like, even her drug days of being on tour, she never, ever failed to take her makeup off at the end of the night. Stevie Nick did drugs? Yes. Back in the day. Big time. I know. So she said even if she was on a bender, she would still manage to take her makeup off. That is pretty good. Yeah. Wow. She's a Belladonna. So, Chuck, let's say you want to get rid of the acne that you do have right there. I'm good over there's. Really? Just two things that regular old acne vulgaris and not persistent, not superative nodule type acne, but just plain old acne vulgaris can be treated with. One is benzo peroxide, and one is salicylic acid. Right? Yeah. And those are pretty much it. Almost all of the over the counter acne treatments that you're going to find anywhere are going to have one or both of those. Probably just one. And anyone who's ever seen, like, an oxy commercial has heard the word benzel peroxide. Big time. What were those pads? Were they oxy pads? Yeah. There was another company, the Pads Seabreeze came in that was like an astringent pads. I guess it was oxy pad. Oxy pads in it. It come in like a little candy oxy. Be like, yeah, I'm taking care of myself. And then you'd look at it and say, look at all that stuff. At least they did on the commercial. benzoil peroxide specifically kills the picnic bacteria, and it'll dry out your face, which can be bad. Yeah. You don't want it too much. Right. I think that moisture in your face is what breaks you out. Right. Your face being too dry can break you out as much, if not more. You want to keep your face moisturized. Cuts down on breakouts. Kids do not tea tree oil. Emily uses tea tree a lot to dry out a pimple, and that's a good natural way to do so. Salicylic acid basically goes in, and it's like liquid plumber for your pores. Like it just goes in and destroys everything that's in that blockage. And there you go. It also takes off a healthy amount of the horny layer, which is the most external layer of your dead skin cells. The what layer? Horny layer. Really? Look at you. The other thing that you can do, I mean, those are medications you can take. What you really want to do is to gently wash your face with soap and warm water. Yeah, but again, you can't just use any soap. I mean, maybe you can. If you have completely insensitive skin, then sure, maybe you can. And you'll find out pretty quick what kind of soaps you can and can't use. Well, most of the soap you get in the store is pretty crappy anyway, right? You get what you pay for with soap, especially with face soap. Yeah. It's worth the extra few bucks. Agreed. Yeah. If you're exercising, you want to shower right afterwards. You don't want to let sweat be on your skin for too long. Yeah. You got back knees. The reason back knee is so prevalent, because that part of your body is lousy with sebaceous clans. Is it head or face? Back and chest? I think so those are three areas. Yeah, because yeah. What about the butt? That's something entirely different. Those are just red bumps that no one knows what they are. Okay. They recommend loose clothing, and they recommend chilling out, not being so stressed, lighting up. Man be a type L personality, which is L, the long allele on the SLC six, a four gene, which basically creates this protein that ferries serotonin out of the synapse, basically turns it off, which is so if you have the allele, it makes you you're a more laid back person because you have more of this transport protein. If you have the S version of that gene, then you make less of the transport, meaning the serotonin stays in the snaps longer, which makes you high, strong, and kind of angry because it activates your amygdala. So type A personality and type B is actually type S and type L. Sounds like somebody just wrote a blog post. Isn't that cool, though? Yeah, that is cool. I like to think I'm an L, but I'm probably less L than I really want to admit. I don't know. Somebody posted a comment on Facebook when I put that blog post up, and they're like, not everything can be explained so succinctly. But the point of the blog post was like, this one explains it succinctly. Yeah. You just removed the comment and went about your day. Yeah, I banned him from Facebook forever. What else can you do? Let's say you got Acne check. And what can you. Do to treat it. You can take antibiotics, either oral or topical. All right. And topical meaning, like, their current event type antibiotics. What about a chemical peel? That works, too? I would think that would not be a good thing if you were breaking out. It's a good idea if you're going to do that to, again, shell out the extra money and go to a professional who can tell you now, this is the chemical peel I've done on your face. This is what's safe. This is what your skin can handle. Right. And then here's a product that will do the same thing at home. So don't go to the place where they have the ad on the subway. John's upstairs. Chemical peel and chicken processing plant and espresso. Have you ever done a chemical peel really well, interesting. Yes, I've been known to get it. You come out like is your face all red and stuff? No, it feels red, but it's more also, like, very refreshing. It's so nice to just kind of rub the back of your fingers along your face afterward, because your skin is just like what you're doing is just tearing that horny layer right off. Right. You're getting closer and closer to that new layer of skin cells. But it's still epidermis, though, right? Yeah. I think you'd be in big trouble. That's a third degree burn, I think. Right. Apparently, birth control pills can help treat acne. Yeah. If you watch the ads for them, a lot of them will say, like and prevents breakouts. Like an extra bonus. Yeah. Because it probably cuts down on the androgens which cuts down on the production of Seabom, which cuts down on pimples. I didn't know they had ads for birth control pills. Sure. Do they? Yeah. Am I living in Amish country here. Why am I not seeing these? There is this one ad I saw several years ago. Yeah. It was really weird. First they had this version of it was, like, the cartoon version of this ad, and then that one went away, and then they had a live action version of the same ad. Really? Same everything? Same everything. But for some reason, they did a cartoon version, then they did a live action version. They released them one after another, but they were supposedly in no way related. I think that company was like, just how much are you paying attention? How much TV are you watching? Yeah. And at the time, I was watching a lot of TV, so I noticed. Wow. Yeah. What about lasers? You can get them lasered, right? Yeah. And I guess that's if it's really bad, then they can actually laser your sebaceous glands. They say not to squeeze them, though, which I think is kind of laughable. What do you mean? Like, not pop them yourself? Yes, they is tom sheep pal. You can take that with a grain of salt. Yeah. Show me someone who doesn't pop their own zip, and it says in here to make an appointment with the dermatologist so they can pop your pimples. Right. Really? Well, that's the only thing, too, when you get, like, a chemical peel or a facial or whatever. It's the title. We'll pop all the zits on your face. Really? And what's crazy is, like, when you do it right, it doesn't hurt. They use gloves, I guess. Yeah, but I mean, the pressure they apply is minute, and they're doing it off to the sides of the zip. You're like, that was it. It didn't hurt at all. Like, I didn't cry at all. So it's kind of good to not necessarily go to the dermatal. Just you could go do an esthetician, and they'll do all the same things. You'll learn a bunch just by paying attention while they do it. Emily would never let me do that. Why? Because she loves to do it herself. Oh, yeah. I mean, she could have been an estimate. She has that gene to where she just gets a lot of satisfaction out of making that white snake come out. Yeah. In fact, she's a little disappointed at my lack of pimple production in life. Yeah, she would love me, actually. Yummy. Loves me. She does it a lot too. She's kind of hooked. Yeah, a lot of girls are into that for some reason. I'm glad I know Emily's not nuts. And that's a normal behavior for some reason too. I've never met a guy who's into that. Yeah, it's always girls for some reason I don't understand. Maybe they're more into skin skin care or gross stuff coming out of your skin. Maybe. So that's it, right? Yeah. 17 million people in America every day on a given day have a zip. Is that right? Yeah, I think more than that. There you go. All right, well, that's acne. Which one? Well, I mean it's acne. It's the big word. Pimples. I just like sam pimple. Okay. I don't like sam pimple. I think it's a gross word. Do you like pustule? I prefer pustule over pimple. Or zit. I don't like zit either. 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. We were featured in the comic strip Zits, remember? Oh, yeah. That was very nice. Yeah. And then you know what? I need to find out. And I don't think they're blackheads. Emily calls them seeds because it's like a little watermelon seed, almost. I know what you're talking. A little white spike comes out. I wonder what that is. I didn't find that in here. I guarantee it's the same thing. You think? Yeah. All right. I think there's a very limited amount of acne. It just happens, and it just kind of looks different or comes out in different ways, or if it sits in there long enough, hard comes a seed. I know you're talking about that. Well, that's acne. If you want to learn more about it and see some cool cutaway illustrations of the skin. Yeah, that was a good part, actually. You can type in acne A-C-N-E in the search bar@housestephorse.com. And now, friends, it's time for listener mail. If I told you to hold on 1 second, would you indulge me? Would you do me a kindness? Yes. Okay, Josh, we have an audiobook that has just been released called The Super Stuffed Guide to Happiness, available on itunes. I know you have to shell out 399 for it. We promise. We think it's worth it on itunes. You just search Superstuff Guide to Happiness, right, and it'll bring that one up. It'll bring up our first audiobook to the Superstar Guide to the Economy. You can get them both there, but check out the Superstar Guide to Happiness. It's awesome. Interviews, in depth investigation of what is happiness, what makes us happy, how do we study happiness? Great sound design. My niece starts the whole thing off with a nice quote from the Dalai Lama. It's just a great little whirlwind ride that you want to listen to over and over again, all for the price of a latte at your favorite, if you're lucky, at your favorite coffee place. You're going to have to probably go through your couch cushions to come up with a difference to get the latte. This thing is so cheap. That's true. Yeah. So there's our plug. And it's time now for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this email from an author that we actually referenced, okay? He listens to the show. Awesome. Mingalaba. Josh, Chuck and Jerry. Hope you're having a good day. About three weeks ago. I was flying from Minnesota to Yangon, Myanmar. Is that how you pronounce it? Yeah, it's Burba, Myanmar, but it's posthunta Berva. Wow, look at you. I really had a pretty surreal moment involving your podcast. After downing as much free booze as I could I was listening to episodes of your podcast trying to fall asleep over the Pacific Ocean. Imagine my surprise when I was coming out of my nap to the end of how shrunken heads work. You were finishing the story of your dentist friend when Josh said you've also received Ajuma and Other Stories by Tyler Davis, which is a self published book and pretty awesome. Yeah. I couldn't believe it. Thanks so much for the shout out from Tyler Davis. Yeah, he sent it to us. Okay. It is good. Well, I've been meaning to write an email and thank you guys for a while. We've been busy settling in. The Internet here isn't exactly the information superhighway. It's more like an Amish buggy. I'm teaching English in an international high school, and I've already taught my kids what hinkey means. I have no idea. That how do you define that specifically? I would say hinky means suspicious. Okay. So I would say stranger. Unusual. Yeah. Okay. So it could be three. There's three definitions. That's right. That's what hinki means. Hinkie is everything. It's like smurf. Yeah. What's a cuss. I had time to write you today because I'm home sick from food poisoning. Which reminds me, you should do a podcast on whether or not you can poop your own skeleton. I feel awful. You and the rest of the gang, how stuff works, keep me entertained, educated, and in high spirits. Thanks again, Tyler Davis. Yeah. Well, thank you, Tyler. Thanks for the books, too. You have yours. I think you sent us to yes. Ajiman and Other stories. Yeah, I've got it. If you want, you can go on to the Stuff You Should Know Facebook page and post an Amazon link or something like that to your book, if you like. And also, I want to take this time to correct myself. We got several corrections. A failsafe. Yes. Failsafe is not something that you put that's designed into something to prevent it from failing. Like one prong being bigger on a two prong plug. It's, I guess, parts of the design that make it so when it does fail, it fails as safely as possible. Right. So there's a bunch of different systems, maybe, that are redundant, that provide safety when it does fail. Right. One guy said the lawnmower that you have to hold the thing to keep it going. Yes. If you have a heart attack and fall over, it will cease to run. Right. That's a fail safe. You have failed, but you are safe from the mower running. Exactly. But you don't care because you're having a heart attack. Yeah. Anything else? Bread. Butter side up. Now, I think the Mythbusters are great, and I'm glad that they've had this incredible juggernaut run that they've had so far and continue to have. But yes, I don't think you can say, well, the mythbusters proved it will. Shut up. Yeah. I think you have to also include one, maybe two peer reviewed studies as well that show that this is right. Here's what I think and I was not able to articulate it. I think you spread the butter side up so it's sitting face up and when it falls off the table stomach high counter, then it only has time to rotate half a turn and it will Fallside down. If the counter were 8ft high, it might rotate fully and it butter side up if nothing to do with weight, in other words. I disagree. I just don't see how it can have nothing to do with weight. Especially if you have if one side is clearly heavier than the other and the butter spread evenly across, then it's not going to turn back over. If it does turn back over, then there was more butter on one side that caused the bread to flip over again. It's just not it just makes it's common sense. You're going to battle this one. I am. So that's why I didn't bring that one. Fail safe. I mean, when you're wrong, you're wrong. All right, boy. That was good. Well, yes. If you have any corrections, we don't want to hear about your acne. 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What happened at Kent State? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-happened-at-kent-state | On May 4, 1970, four days of anti-war protests at Kent State University in Ohio culminated in the unthinkable when Ohio guardsmen opened fire on protesters, killing four students. How could this tragedy take place? | On May 4, 1970, four days of anti-war protests at Kent State University in Ohio culminated in the unthinkable when Ohio guardsmen opened fire on protesters, killing four students. How could this tragedy take place? | Thu, 27 Feb 2014 13:25:27 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=13, tm_min=25, tm_sec=27, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=58, tm_isdst=0) | 36716540 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. And it's snowing outside, which means that the stuff you should know. Snow addition. Snow addition. Yeah, I know. And we're like, we got to record and get out of here because this is Atlanta, and snow kills us. I just mainly don't want to be locked away from the snow. I want to be able to look out the window and see it. I can now, but not as well as I'd like to. For me, it's just a traffic thing. Like, people are probably leaving work right now. People have already left the office here. Well, maybe everyone will be gone by the time I get out there. Yeah. Okay. You'll just be the lone guy trudging through the snow. That's right. Vigo Mortensen in the road. Yes. Although he was not alone, and there wasn't any snow. It was just nuclear ash. Although there was snow because Charlie staring, kills herself by going out into the snow. But that's before everything really takes a downward turn. Spoiler alert. Retroactive spoiler alert. Chuck? Yeah. Are you familiar with Kent State? Yeah, man, I've been singing that Neil Young song all day. How can you not? You cannot by having never heard it. Like me. Shut up. You know that song? Never heard it. I never listened to Neil Young. You've never heard the song Ohio? No, I know the pretender's song, but I don't think that's about Kent State. I'm shocked. Okay. I mean, you don't have to let me go young without, like how does it go? Home and form. No, I'm not going to maybe I have heard it. Ten Soldiers and Nixon. Okay. Yeah. I didn't know that was about Ohio. Four dead in Ohio. Yeah. Okay. I had no idea. All right. I didn't know what that song was about. I was just like, oh, Neil Young. Really? Yeah. Oh, man. Get ready to hear it. I'm sure. All right. I'm used to it by now. You're bulletproof. Well so you are familiar with the Kent State shooting? Sure. May 4, 74 students were killed. I believe another eleven were injured. Yeah. Including the one was paralyzed, like, some pretty severe injuries. And this is a big deal. That would be a big deal in and of itself. If it was just some sort of campus shooting or something like that, it would be a very big deal these days. But what made the Kent State shootings, for those of you who aren't familiar with them such an enormous deal was that the shootings were carried out by National Guardsmen. They were Americans firing on Americans, americans on one side of the equation, firing on protesters on the other side. And it was one of the darkest points in American history, modern or otherwise. Yeah. I think what's so upsetting is it was random. That guy's coming at me with a bottle or a brick. Shoot him. It was random shooting into a crowd. Right. That's the kind of thing that would happen in countries under dictatorships. Not here in America. But it did happen here in America, and not just at Kent State. There was another similar incident just ten days later that we'll talk about as well, that gets overlooked. But yeah, it was a very dark moment in American history, and it came out of the tensions over the Vietnam War initially. But I think it was more than that. It was also, we should say that's the kind of obvious thing that led to it. But also, there was a real tension also between the establishment and the anti establishment and the people in control. And the people who were in control students, elders. There's just a lot of tension between two sides. And the dividing line, the obvious dividing line, was the Vietnam War. Yeah. And I think if you are not of that generation, you may not know the full story. You might know that four people were shot in a protest, and that's about it. Maybe even if you're from that generation, you may not know the full story, but we're about to tell you. Okay, let's take it back a little further than 1970. All right. Vietnam, a country which had won its independence from France in the 50s. Have you ever seen? We were soldiers. Yes. It's almost like a snuff film. It's one of the most graphically violent movies I've ever seen in my life. But it's about that transition from France leaving Vietnam and America coming in well, just initially serving as advisers and then becoming embroiled in the war. I forgot all about that movie. Yeah. In Apocalypse Now, there are some deleted scenes of them meeting up with a French family in Vietnam and, like, having dinner. Really? Yeah. And I remember when I heard about that, I was like, Why were they French? And then I did a little more homework on it. Oh, yeah. If you eat Vietnamese food, it's very clearly, like, French influenced. Well, most food is, but yeah, sure. So, anyway, in the 50s, they split between Communist North and non Communist South Vietnam, and America didn't want Communism spreading throughout Asia. No, we had a policy of containment. Yeah. And so Richard Nixon, when he won the 68 election, part of his promise was something called Vietnamisation. It's kind of an awkward word, and that meant to transfer the combat duties from our soldiers to the South Vietnamese. That sounds familiar, doesn't it? It does. But what happened was at some point he said, you know what, in 1970, in April, he said, I want to send our soldiers into Cambodia. And that caused sort of a firestorm because it was a bit of a reversal of what he said he was going to do. And it really embroiled us in the kind of the middle of things. Well, yeah. He escalated the war in Vietnam, which is already a very contentious issue in that it was a war, but also it was a war that Congress never openly declared war. So that's why, historically speaking, it's referred to as a Vietnam conflict. Right. And so Nixon gets elected partially because he's saying, I'm going to get our boys out of there. We're not going to let the Communists win. We're going to prop up the Vietnamese, but we're going to get out of there. Instead, he escalates things by invading Cambodia, where the Viet Cong were stationed, and that led to immediate protests. That was April 30, 1970, that he announced that we had invaded Cambodia. And the next day is when the first protest takes place at Kent State. Yeah. And Kent, the article points out that it was not the most likely place because it was a little more blue collar than, like, say, Ohio State nearby. The Ohio State University. Man, I'm sorry. That is so stupid. Sorry. OSU Alums and fans and students. But it is stupid, and everyone outside Ohio State thinks it's stupid. They take a lot of pride in that. V I know. Which I think just kind of fans the flames of derision. Yeah. I can just start saying the University of Georgia. That makes a little more sense. Does it? Yeah. What's the difference? The Ohio State University. The University of Georgia. So if it was the University of Ohio State, that would make more sense. Yeah. A little more to my ear. I got you my ear right there. See it? It's very nice. Thank you. At any rate, Kent State was a little more blue collar, and you wouldn't think there would be, like, protesting, but there was protesting at schools all over the country. And you can read between the lines here. Kent State had a lower hippie population than Ohio State. Yes. Can we just come right out and say it? Right, but there were protests there. There was a protest on May 1, and it was a standard war protest. Yeah. Three days before the shooting and was kind of when things got kicked off. Right. But these kids were still pretty good. They were at school holding a protest in the Commons, I believe, which is the Aka, the Quad, or like the big grassy area between in the middle of campus. And they said, you know what? This went pretty well. Let's take the weekend off and we'll meet back here Monday and have another anti war protest because we're really steamed about this. And everyone said, okay, let's do that. And for tonight, let's go out and hit the bars in Kent, is what they did. Yes. The first one, they buried the Constitution as a symbolic gesture. Oh, yeah. Thanks. And the second one, they got drunk. Right. Not at the protest, but later that night. Right. So that Friday protest is when they buried the Constitution. Yes. This is like a real protest, not just walking around. There's like, stuff going on and there's symbolic acts. It was a real protest. Yeah. And if you combine alcohol and protesting, things might get a little rowdy. So bonfires broke out, they started throwing bottles at police cars, breaking windows. It's probably a little rowdy. I mean, that's a riot when you set bonfires in the streets and like, throw bottles at police cars that you have just basically said, we've drawn a line in the sand. Where are you going to do cops? That is one way to look at it, for sure. The mayor, Leroy Satrum, said, this is an emergency situation, people. I need to call the governor, James Rhodes, we need some help. I'm going to close the bars, which isn't going to make anyone very happy. No. And it had an exacerbating effect, apparently, because that meant all the people who weren't rioting in the streets, who were busy drinking in the bars, were now suddenly in the streets, too, and joined the protests and aka the riots. Right? That's right. And the police were called in. They used tear gas and said, go back to your dorm rooms, basically get back on campus. And that was Friday. Now we move on to Saturday. Yeah. And the mayor is obviously a little jumpy. He's hearing rumors circulating that there's going to be another scene from the night before is going to happen all over again on Saturday. So he calls the Governor of Ohio and he enters the person who, in my opinion, is single handedly responsible for what happened at Kent State. So the National Guard arrives. There were about 1000 protesters that actually burned down an ROTC building on campus, which is a pretty bold move. And they didn't find out who did that exactly, but they did cut fire hoses so they couldn't put out the fire and basically burn it to the ground. Yeah. The protesters set it on fire and then cut the fire hoses like they wanted that building burned. And apparently that's when the National Guard shows up, like an hour or so later, right? Yeah. And they broke everything up, obviously. And then come Sunday, you've got about 10 National Guardsmen and you've got Governor Rhodes arriving and holding a press conference and kind of flaming the fire again by calling the protesters the worst type of people that we harbor in America. Yeah. He compared them to the Brown Shirts. Mussolini's Brown Shirts. Yeah. The Communists. Pretty much anybody he could think of that would be disparaging. That's who publicly at this press conference compared him to. And you mentioned that on Sunday morning, the National Guard was on campus kind of keeping order and everything, but apparently the relations between the Guardsmen and the students were pretty amicable. Like, people were chatting friendly, like there was no tension. It was just kind of like, hey, I'm 19. Hey, I'm 19. I'm a student at Kent State. I'm in the National Guard. Let's hang out. And it wasn't until the governor showed up and held this press conference that things took a very sudden turn for the worst. And it wasn't just the Brown Shirts. Calling them the Brown Shirts are the worst element that America harbors. But also saying, I may also declare martial law. Yeah. And that I may message never quite got through. And there was some confusion as to whether or not that actually happened. And basically, the National Guard believed that that had happened. And they took control of the campus and said, we're running the show now. And not just the National Guard, but the university officials, too. The people running the university said, oh, well, Marshall Law is declared. And they knew that there was a protest scheduled for the following day Monday. So they printed a bunch of flyers and pamphlets saying, hey, your constitutional rights have been suspended because the university is under Marshall Law, so all assembly is banned, so don't protest. And that kind of fell on deaf ears, I guess you could say, come Monday morning, because the students showed up to protest. Yeah, that definitely didn't work. By noon, there was about 3000 people, about 500 actively protesting, another thousand just there to be supportive. Right. And because it's a college campus, about 1500 people just checking it out. Yes. Stopping on their way to class or whatever, like, what's going on? I would have done the same thing, probably. And we should say also our buddy stuff they don't want you to know. Host and sometimes producer Matt Frederick. His parents were students at Kent State, and they stayed home that day. They did. They were like, there's some bad stuff that's going to go down. And they were right. So the article points out it was less an anti war protest at this point, and more of a protest of the draconian occupation of their campus. Martial law by the army, which is not even real, which is just a misunderstanding. Yeah, pretty much. So the general Canterbury says, you know what? This rally is over. Drive me around in a jeep. Give me that bullhorn. Let me tell everyone to go home. Because that'll work. Yeah. I mean, let's go back to where these tensions came from in the first place. It's establishment versus anti establishment. And establishment is the type to stand in a jeep and be driven around with the bullhorn telling people to disperse. I don't know if there's ever been a message relayed via bullhorn that doesn't fall on deaf ears. Yeah. It has the opposite effect. Unless, like, I guess in FEMA situations, if you're trying to organize people and stuff, that helps. But I always think of stuff like this. The general riding around the jeep, yelling at people to go home, people saying, no, you don't understand why we're here in the first place. So they started throwing rocks at the jeep. Not surprisingly, well, tensions at this point. This is day four. Yeah. I think, though, I'm not justifying. No, I know you're not at all. But I think it's really easy to kind of choose one side or the other, especially once you know the outcome. But I don't think it should be overlooked that people are throwing rocks at this dude while he's driving around on the Jeep. People have burned down a building. People have rioted in the streets of the town, the college town. These are real huge events that scared the pants off of the people who were running the town, the state, the country. Yeah, absolutely. To say that they were unprovoked is historically inaccurate. Yeah, I totally agree. Not justifying, but I think a lot of people might think the story is people got together to protest, and the army came in and shot them. Right. Yeah. And it was either the protest at fault they shouldn't have been protested, they shouldn't have burned down that billing, or it was entirely the National Guard's fault. And whatever historical event you're looking at, it's never just one side or the other. No, it's always great, and you have blinders on. If you think otherwise. You should write a history book called It's Always Gray. Josh Clark's history of America. I'd buy that. Thanks, man. All right, so where are we? They were throwing rocks at the general. He, at this point, ordered his troops to load their weapons, get the tear gas going. He said, they threw rocks at me. You guys load your weapons. That's basically what happened. Not because his feelings were hurt, right? Yeah. Although I imagine they were. I guess no matter who you are, I'm sure people throw rocks at you. I take that personally. So the National Guard came in. They pushed them back past the commons, over a steep called Blanket Hill and into a parking lot of Princess Hall and a practice football field. Then, basically, the guardsmen found themselves cornered by a fence, retreated back up the hill. When they got to, the top, 28 out of the 70 turned and began firing their guns into the crowd. Yeah, well, not all of them into the crowd, we should point out. Most into the air or the ground, actually, although some fired directly into the crowd. If they all would have fired directly into the crowd, there would have been a much higher blood count or body count. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. And, I mean, the protesters were about a football field away from them, and the fact that they started to walk up the hill and then turn and shot made it not just an attack of Americans on Americans, but a surprise attack of Americans on Americans. Yeah. I would say the students were definitely did not expect bullet retaliation. It took about 13 seconds. Four students were killed. Allison Krause. Not the Allison krause, obviously. Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Shirt and William Schroeder. And it's all tragic, but even more tragically, short and Schroeder were just walking to class. Yeah, that makes sense. They weren't even part of the protest. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And like I said, nine people were wounded and one dean collar was paralyzed. Yes. Go ahead. So the shots, they shot into the air and into the ground, but also into the crowd. And over about 13 seconds, they fired between 61 and 67 shots. I think that could be categorized as a hail of gun fire. Yeah. 13 seconds, 60 shots. What is that? That's, like, a lot of shots a second. That's true. And just from 28 guns. Yeah. And apparently there was a professor named Glenn Frank who did a lot to quell the crowd and did talk them into not escalating this thing any further. Right. So this article really kind of glances over this guy's role, and it wasn't just him, but he was the head of the faculty marshall, whose job it was to basically keep an eye on the protests. We're like the university's liaison between the university and the students, the protesters and this guy and his crew basically single handedly prevented, like, a massacre because they saw very quickly that if they didn't insinuate themselves between the guardsmen and the students, the students were going to be like, holy God, they just fired live ammunition on us and they're standing right there. Let's get them. They would have attacked. The consensus is the students would have attacked out of anger and that the guardsmen most definitely would have fired again when being attacked. And this faculty member and his team saw what was about to happen and slid in and was like, Wait. They first spoke to the guardsmen and said, Stop firing. We have to go talk to the students. Then they went and spoke to the students for 20 minutes and got him to calm down enough to stop provoking or did not provoke or advance on the guardsmen in retaliation and saved a lot of lives, probably. I wonder if there's a Glenn Frank statue on campus. There should be. I agree. So they closed school not for the day or the weekend, but for the rest of the semester. And a lot of colleges did the same. As far as shutting down? Well, because a lot of students went on strike and the universities were forced to shut down in the following weekend, 100,000 people went to DC to protest. Neil Young news to Josh. Wrote a song about it. So, Chuck, let's do a message break, shall we? Sure. Okay, so the shooting just happened, that the crowd has been quelled, the dead and wounded have been taken away in ambulances, and now we reached the aftermath that's immediate and otherwise. Yeah. President Nixon wasn't super compassionate. He had earlier been overheard calling them bombs. This wasn't in his press release, obviously, but it definitely got out in the press. Did not bode well for his reputation. And he said, when descent turns to violence, it invites tragedy. That was the official line. That was the official line. Which is pretty cold that's the President like, you get what you pay for. Yes, very much. His vice president, Agnew, said it was predictable, also not super compassionate now, considering these were Americans that were shot and killed, two of which were just walking to class. He called them a bunch of scared kids with guns. The National Guardsmen. That was Ray Price, the speechwriter for Nixon. Yeah, which is true. So basically the whole thing is gray. It is like they probably were scared, for sure. I think that's fair. I think also, though, it's one sided too, like he's not saying and then also the other side, we're a bunch of scared, angry kids with rocks. Yeah. The only way, and you can't even remove the grade, but you'd have to find out each person who shot and what their motive was. Right. Because some were probably scared out of their mind and reacted. There has been some people later on that said that some got together and decided to do this, some of the Guardsmen. Right. So when they had been pushing the crowd back onto the practice football field, apparently while they were loitering there, there have been allegations that a couple of the Guardsmen said, hey, when we march back up the hill, we're going to turn on fire. Right. It's never been proven, but more than a couple of historians have leveled that accusation. There was also immediate word that the Guardsmen said that they were acting in self defense because there was a sniper on one of the rooftops and that they were being fired on. They found out that there were audio recordings of this, and that was quickly changed to, well, it was self defense because these people were throwing rocks at us. Yeah. There was a presidential commission, obviously, and they concluded it was, quote, unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable. And then an FBI investigation found that the Guardsmen fabricated their defense and that they were not in true danger. Right. That was FBI. So the presidential commission and the FBI investigation both said this shouldn't have happened and it's on the Guardsmen. But that wasn't the mood of the nation for the most part. There was a Gallup poll that was conducted shortly after, and the majority of Americans said that it was the protesters fault for protesting. Yeah, I mean, it went to trial too. It wasn't just like, oh, well, this happened, and it's super sad. And in federal trial, it was dismissed because of what was called a weak case by the Guardsmen. And then the grand jury in Ohio put the blame on the university officials and the protesters and not the Guardsmen. And then there was a civil trial in 1979 settled out of court, where the victims and families got a collective sum of $675,000. Collective sum meaning. I guess that was for all of them, right? Yeah. They'll split that and apology was ever issued. They did issue a sign statement expressing regret. You want to hear it? Yeah. So this is the sign statement that came out of the civil trial that the Ohio National Guard released to the families of the victims. In retrospect, the tragedy of May 4, 1970 should not have occurred. The students may have believed that they were right in continuing their mass protest in response to the Cambodian invasion, even though this protest followed the posting and reading by the University of in order to ban rallies and in order to disperse. These orders have since been determined by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to have been lawful. Some of the Guardsmen on Blanket Hill, fearful and anxious from prior events, may have believed in their own minds that their lives were in danger. Hindsight suggests that another method would have resolved the confrontation. Better ways must be found to deal with such a confrontation. We devoutly wish that a means had been found to avoid the May 4 events, culminating in the Guard shootings and the irreversible deaths and injuries. We deeply regret those events and are profoundly saddened by the deaths of four students and the wounding of nine others which resulted. We hope that the agreement to end the litigation will help to assuage the tragic memories regarding that sad day. I don't apologize. No. Sort of like, we regret hindsight being 2020. We might have should have done something differently. Right. Saying we regret, instead of, I'm sorry. It's a big flashing light. Yeah, it's a big difference. And for many years, the university itself wasn't quite sure how to handle moving forward. In memoriam and otherwise in, the officials at Kent State failed. They tried to, but they tried to commemorate it just once every five years instead of every year. And everybody who held the visuals like, well, then you have nothing to do with this. And they kept showing up every year. Right. I'm like, what are you going to do, call in the National Guard and remove us? Yeah, they went do. In 1979, there were hundreds of arrests because the university tried to bulldoze the place where it happened to build a gym. That didn't happen. And it took all the way up until 1998 to keep cars from driving over the spots in the parking lot where the students were killed. Right. Then finally, in the mid two thousand s, the university finally reversed position and just kind of goes with the flow. And in 2013 they opened a visitor center that is all about commemorating this event as a historical event. But also I get the impression from the description of the visitor center kind of the spiritual aspect of it. The spiritual aspect of tragedy is that just last year wow. Now the university, they say, is the nation's leader in courses of nonviolence and democracy and peace studies and conflict resolution classes were all established. So they are trying to lead the way forward and at least being a symbol of peaceful protest. Right. And people are still trying to figure out what happened. There's still lots of debate. Oliver Stone unsurprisingly favors the theory that the government placed a sniper in these protests and that there were government plant agitators who pushed the protests over the line. And this idea is supported by the fact that there were policies by governors and the president to crack down on dissent on student anti war protests. So there definitely was a policy that was like, if you want to get dirty, we'll send our goons to beat you up. But a lot of people think that the presence of a sniper is totally unsupported. But then a cassette emerged fairly recently that's an actual audio recording of that day that says supposedly you can hear the phrases get set, point, and fire, which means that this wasn't a surprise knee jerk shooting, that there was an officer commanding the guardsmen to shoot. Yeah. And also, with modern analysis, they think that there may have been shots fired before 70 seconds before the guard has been fired. There's a Kin State student named Terry Norman who is a photographer on campus taking pictures. And he also had a handgun, a loaded handgun, and he denied that he discharged it, but he has been accused of triggering this by firing shots. And I think they found audio evidence that there were shots fired, and they think it may have been Terry Norman. Wow. That kicked it all off. And can you imagine carrying that around? No, I could not. And then, Chuck, a lot of people say that Kent State was the beginning of the slide toward Watergate for Nixon. This is like the beginning of the end for him. Yeah. And then we should also talk about what happened at Jackson State, because race relations in this country are so messed up that everybody talks about Kent State, where four white students died, and no one talked about Jackson State, which happened ten days later, and two black people died. Black students. Yeah. And could have been a lot worse. Like, they basically riddled a dormitory with a hail of gunfire. Yeah. So ten days after Kent State, at Jackson State University in Mississippi, they were also carrying out anti war protests, but there were also protests based on racism as well. And when the students were doing a lot of the similar stuff, a lot of the same stuff that was happening or had happened at Kent State, they were rioting. They had burned a building on campus down. And when firefighters came out to put out the flames, they started to get worried that these protesters were going to harm them. So they called the cops. Well, the cops came out, tried to disperse the crowd. The crowd didn't disperse, so they opened fire. And like you said, they riddled the building that served as the backdrop to this protest with bullets. Something like 460 rounds hit the building alone. There's no telling how many went on the sides or anything like that. 460 rounds? Yeah. They said every window was broken on every floor with bullet fire. Right. On a crowd of students. Amazingly, only two people died. Yes. Philip Gibbs. He was a pre law major and a father of an 18 month old son. And James Green, he was 17 years old and he was a high school student walking home from his job at the grocery store. Which, again, the fact that he's not involved in any way and still died makes it so much worse. Yes. And this one also, I don't think we pointed out, started out because of misinformation. There was a rumor that the mayor, Charles Evers, and his wife had been shot and killed, assassinated, basically. Oh, yeah. It was not true. A relative of Mega Evers. Right. Yeah, he was his brother. And so that's kind of what sparked everything, in addition to the anti war protests. Right. And it was very much about black and white. Well, yeah. So this is a historically black college. The cops had just opened fire on a bunch of students. Twelve people were hit by injured by gunfire. Two were killed. And the ambulances weren't called until the police picked up all of their showcasings and left. And then the National Guard came in. Yeah. And then after that, the police denied they even took part. I'm not sure how that panned out. How can you deny that you shot up a building? So it was Mississippi in 1970, historically black college. And you probably never heard of Jackson State. That's very honest. Even so, we started researching this. I hadn't heard of it either. And there was only one source we used that made reference to it. That's how I heard about it. So that's great. Just fantastic. That's what happened to kids. State. In Jackson State. In Jackson State. You got anything else? I got nothing else. There's got to be a better ending of this than this. I mean, these things happen, but there has to have been some lesson learned. I think so. It hasn't happened since. Yeah, that's true. I wonder we should do one on the battle for Seattle. They didn't fire live rounds at that, though, did they? I'm pretty sure they didn't, but we should do one on that as well. Yeah. My friend John was there. Agitating. Is he a black shirt? No, he had these funny protest signs that reference The Simpsons. I can't remember. Or Black Block. That's what it is. He got the pictures. Really? Yeah. Well, I have to interview him then. I don't know that it would yield much information. Fine. I think he was just goofing around. I got you. All right, well, if you want to learn more about Kent State, you can type in that name into the search barhousofworks.com. And we also encourage you to go look up Jackson State as well. And let's see, since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail, right? Yes, sir. I'm going to call this prison guard wrote in. Hey, guys. For the most part, I found the episode on capital punishment pretty even handed and interesting. However, I couldn't help but notice a bit of venom in your voices whenever you mentioned prison guards, especially in incidence of an inmate taking his own life with a razor blade while he's being observed on Death Watch. The implication was that the guard on duty negligently gave the inmate a razor in order to encourage him to take his own life. We implied that, did we? No, it wasn't implied. It was more just like, what kind of thing? Why did that happen? Right. As a former prison guard that worked on death row, I have to tell you that couldn't be further from the truth. It's a civil right for inmates to have access to razor blades. For hygienic purposes, I was required to allow an inmate on death row to keep the disposable razor for 30 minutes, despite the fact that he had nearly killed another inmate and murdered a prison official with a razor blade while serving his sentence. I'd imagine an inmate, even on Death Watch, would have similar rights, but I can't confirm through experience, guards that worked on death row weren't allowed to serve on Death Watch. This is because it was feared that we form an emotional bond to the inmates set for execution. It might cause a scene. So, yes, prison guards have feelings and can have empathy for others. Pop culture nearly always portrays guards as heavy and villains and even smart portrayals of prison life like Orange Is the New Black, as every prison official character, as a comic book mustache twirling villain or a mouth breathing idiot, it's a hard job and should be respected as much as other high risk civil servant careers. A little disappointed you guys continued this trend, but I'm used to it, so don't sweat it. So that is from Craig, and he let us off easy, even though he feels like we insulted his job. Well, thanks, Greg. I think he did exactly what we were kind of searching for right then. We were just disgustedly confused. Yeah, we're disgustedly ignorant. One of the two. Yeah. I will say that he's probably right on the money. As far as movie portrayals, it's pretty one note if you're a prison guard in a movie in general. Unless it's The Green Mile and that movie has problems of its own. Or Oz. I never watched Oz. What? Yeah. Oz is the show that kicked off all the shows you love and binge watch. Now, the idea of binge watching a show began with a show like ours because there was nothing like it ever created before. It all started with us. The Wire, the Shield, house of Cards, oranges, new Black, everything. Every Breaking Bad. All of them can thank us. You can thank us. You should go watch Oz, man. Thank you, Oz. It's good. Great, man. This one is something. I feel drained a little bit. Emotionally exhausting. I'm still not happy with the ending. I feel like we could have ended a lot better, but I'll have to think on it. All right. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can hang out on our Facebook page, facebook. Comsteno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and you can check us out at our website, stuffyhoodnow.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, 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 Hardstarke, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. New episodes of my favorite murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
A Rigid, Sterile Look at Kissing | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/a-rigid-sterile-look-at-kissing | A majority of human cultures practice kissing in one form or another. But why do we kiss? Is the behavior instinctive or learned? In this episode, amateur philematologists Josh and Chuck take a look at the biology, sociology and pyschology of kissing. | A majority of human cultures practice kissing in one form or another. But why do we kiss? Is the behavior instinctive or learned? In this episode, amateur philematologists Josh and Chuck take a look at the biology, sociology and pyschology of kissing. | Tue, 23 Nov 2010 18:35:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=18, tm_min=35, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=327, tm_isdst=0) | 31547225 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Charles W. Chuckle Bryant is across from me out of kissing distance. And I guess that makes The Stuff You Should Know the non kissing edition about kissing, which is every single one of our shows thus far. Bobby Farms came close. Yes, you're right. I have the urge to make out. Remember I took my shirt off? That's right. Yeah. And you're like, I'm not doing this. Well, that quelled my urge to make out. I'm like, oh, really? Yes. Switch you want? And you're like, no, put it away. Hey, man, it's been a big month, and we're at the end of it, aren't we? Yes. October. October has been nutty. I know. We've been on the TV twice. Twice? Yeah. Remember Good Day Atlanta? Yeah, we were on TV twice. Yes, we were. Went to New York, to DC. To DC. To South Carolina. Well, one of us went to South Carolina. Yeah. More on that later. And this is the end, Chuck. This is the last work related thing we have to do this month. You know what stinks is October is my favorite month and always has been, and I don't feel like I really got to enjoy October this year that much. Yeah, I've had December like that for me. I love Christmas time, the holiday season, and I've had a December like that, and I was like, Someone owes you. That's how I feel. The universe does. Universe owes me in October. Although it's not like we were I mean, we had a lot of great times in New York and stuff. It's not like it was an awful experience. No, but I know what you mean. Like, you have a certain month out of the year that's dedicated to certain things, and if you don't pursue the certain things, then what's life worth? Exactly. But here we are in November almost, and we're getting back to normal, or at least whatever the new normal is. Yeah. So I'm excited. Me, too. You're excited. And we're talking about kissing today, right? This is a very hard, clinical look at the science of kissing. Yes. Which, by the way, we should say the scientific study of kissing is called philematology. P-H-I-L-E-M-A. So we're philematologists for the day. Yes. So let me go ahead, Josh, and then just start out clinically saying that anthropologists no one knows for sure why we kiss to begin with. There's some theories, though, and one of them anthropologists came up with was that back when we were evolving humans, that mothers would regurgitate or not regurgitate, but they would chew up their food. That's regurgitating. I thought regurgitating was when you literally threw it up. Okay, you're right. Yes. Okay. But the mothers would take their newborns and they would chew up their food to then place like a bird would into the baby's mouth. And that evolved even once the kid learned how to eat into just affectionate caretaking. Right. And it was a way to reassure the kid. It was something that the kid, I imagine, would had come to associate with pleasurable, close feelings right. That survived spitting food into your mouth. Well, exactly. But that's the learned behavior idea. Right. And one big flaw with it there is and it is are you setting me up? You're pointing at me. Yeah. The problem with that is there are some cultures, indigenous cultures today that still do that with their food, and some of them do not kiss until Westerners came along and they were like, hey, you should try kissing. It's rad. Right. And the people kissed and they went, this is rad. Right. And that was that. But since not all of them do that, then that's not proof. But it kind of lends itself to saying maybe it's not alert behavior. This makes sense to me. But also it makes me wonder if behavior evolves. Right. Isn't it possible that it doesn't always evolve over the same timeline in all cultures and all locations? That's what I thought. It didn't necessarily prove something. But it is a big flaw that people can just pick apart, like so many scabs. Right. What about the other side of the coin? The other side of the coin is that it's instinctive. And there's a lot of evidence that kissing is instinctive. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom, you see, like, tigers. Nuzzling. That's so sweet. It is. Apparently snails, Rob and Hannah, which is super cute. Have you ever seen it? Yes, I have. Like the slow motion. I think Discovery actually had some of that. Or maybe it was that movie Microcosm. But it looks really lurid when you see two snails combining themselves. Yeah. Wow. When you see it up close, it's like, oh, my God. This is a clinical and sterile look at things. I think birds touch beaks. Yeah. And it's all over the animal kingdom. In a lot of cases, what you're seeing is a smell. They're scent glands located in the face. Sure. Of some animals in that area. I think cats have that. Yeah. So when you see two tigers, knows the they're like smelling one another pheromones or some scent, that's pleasurable. But the point is, while they may not be kissing as we know it, they're still engaged in pretty much the same behavior. That establishes bonds, that reinforces trust, and that shows that you are close to that other animal that mate or that can folk. Yeah. Didn't you have something on the bona bo? Yes. I thought you were telling me something about that earlier. I wasn't. You weren't? No. You had me confused with someone else. Well, these things kiss like crazy. They do. And they kiss regardless of sex, regardless of status in the pack. Is it a pack? Of apes. The family, the tribe. I think it's a family. Well, I mean, trust me, we're going to get emails. They kiss all the time, though. They do it to reduce tension after a fight, to reassure each other, the social bonds, and for no reason at all, you know, the reduced tension after a fight. Do you know who that reminded me of? Ronnie and Donnie Gallion. Yeah. Remember they get to make up after a fight? The world's oldest conjoined twins. It's a very sweet story. They're still with us, aren't they? As far as I know. Oh, goodness, Chuck, their birthday just happened. They'd be 58 now. That's right. We need to check in on them. Not that they know who we are. We're just the creepy guy who followed them home from school. All right, so there's arguments for and against, we should say. Part of the problem with saying that kissing is instinctive is it's very difficult to prove and the fact that about 90% of all cultures across the world kiss. So if it's instinctive, what's up with the other 10%? Well, I think they found some cultures in Asia and where else? South America. South America, but I think Africa. Right. And they said that while it's not completely conclusive that they do not kiss, some of them may not think it's appropriate to share that with the white dude that got off the plane that's asking them about it. So maybe they don't kiss and tell, but generally everywhere I look said 90% of all cultures kiss. So that's what we're going to go with. Yes. And in a kissy face culture, which is most of them, as we've seen, I found, Chuck, that people spend as much as two weeks out of their lives kissing. Really? Which you want to hear something depressing? That's about as much time as we spent waiting for red lights in our lifetime. I wonder how much time is spent kissing at red lights. I don't know. It's a great question. I was wondering how much more we would kiss if we spent less time at red lights. Yeah. Like if maybe it would be like three weeks in one week or something like that. It's a good point. So there are people, as we said, Phoenixologists, who study the science of kissing, of kissy faces, ness, and one of those groups is the Kinsey Institute, named after the famous sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Yes. And they've basically found that there are three factors that contribute to the experience of a kiss, right? Yes. And they are biological, psychological and social. Yeah, psychological. There's a couple of factors within that. Sub factors. It depends on how you're feeling at the time and how you feel about the person of how it's going to affect you. Obviously you've heard the expression like kissing your sister. If you're being kissed by someone you don't want to be kissed by, you're going to have a completely different reaction obviously, than when you're being kissed by someone you really want to kiss. Sure. And your emotional state at the time you're being kissed has a lot to do with it as well. Right. There's a lot of physiological processes that your body undergoes when you're kissing or being kissed. We'll talk about those in a little greater detail in a second. And then there are social factors like how your society views kissing. Is your first kiss going to be this magical experience in society? Sure. You're probably going to be looking forward to it. So much pressure. Right. Is kissing extremely romantic or is it kind of middle of the road? Is it taboo? All of these things are going to have an effect on the psychological impact as well. So there's sociology, biology and psychology living in harmony on the lips of all humans. Yes. And 90% of all. We should point out that that's not just for loveydubby kissing, that's actually for all kinds of kissing. So like when a mommy kisses your boo boo, those three factors are still taking place, obviously, just in a non romantic nature. Right. Different context, different sensations. But still there's three different aspects to all kisses of what you're saying, no matter what kind of kiss. And they all kisses amount to something positive. They're all meant to reinforce some sort of positive feeling. Right. Like love reassurance. Right. Or reassurement. reassurement or romantic budding sexuality, all those things. Right. When you place the word budding at the beginning of sexuality, it just makes it so much more awkward. Right. Isn't that weird? Budding sexuality? It's weird. Well, because it implies everything that it is, which is youth. I don't even know what's going on. It's budding. Right. That's what I think, at least. I guess Chuck reached the point that we should talk about when people started kissing and we should say historians, anthropologists, psychologists, no one has any idea exactly when people started kissing because we can't even say whether it's instinctive or learned. Right, sure. But the earliest accounts that we have of kissing come about 3500 years ago and it's described it's not that word isn't used, obviously, but what people are taking as a description of kissing appears in these ancient Vedic texts out of India, right? Yes. Sanskrit. Yes. I think they're in Sanskrit they called it sucking face. Back then it's evolved into kissing. After that it started becoming a little more prevalent, like art and literature. Right. That kind of thing. Like in a little text that might sound familiar. Aka the Kamasutra aka penthouse letters. Don't you find it funny that the book on sexual positions was written 3000 years ago or more? No, 6th century Ad. What I find funny is that no one's really improved upon this tome. They pretty much wrote the definitive book on sexual positions and sexuality. I just find it interesting. But they also cover kisses, all kinds of kisses in the Kamasutra. Right. And that was a long, long time ago. Right. It was written standardized in the 6th century Ad. But it had been passed down orally for centuries before that. Right? Yes. So they think that probably they're not saying it originated in India, but this is where the earliest accounts are. So kissing originated in India. Well, and they think that the anthropologists think it's a learned behavior, think that Alexander the Great learned about it in India when he invaded and was like, this is awesome. Let me go take this back to Greece, and that he did. I remember hearing a long time ago that kissing I don't know where I used to get these backs. I think it was the same place where I heard that Genghis Khan killed 1.8 million people in an hour. But they said that kissing was located only in the Mediterranean up until 500 years ago, and that it is a symbol of our urge to cannibalize one another. Not true. I don't think that's true at all. I don't either. So we're in the Roman Empire now, and they kissed a lot. They kissed as greetings. They kissed their ruler's hands. Sign of respect. Right. It was out of respect. And they came up with the three categorizations of kissing. I know the Romans really like to categorize things. Love. Different types of love. Yeah. This one, there's osculum, which is a kiss on the cheek. There is Basin, which is a kiss on the lips. And then there's see if you can guess this one. Civolium. Yeah, that's that kind of kiss. Yeah, that's a deep kiss. And it doesn't necessarily say anything about the French variety, but I think that's just sort of implied. Right. And historians also suspect that a lot of the kissing traditions we still hold today in the modern era were founded or originated in Rome. Right. Yeah. Like, there's a kissing to seal a wedding, to end a wedding ceremony. You may now kiss the bride. Apparently, if you made out in front of a bunch of people, like you were married, that meant you were married in each room. Like that. Whoa. I know. Yes. Do you know how many people would be married today? Lots of people. A lot. And divorced. And married. And divorced, yeah. And also, since you said the sealed thing, the sealed with a kiss, we generally think of, like, a love letter sealed with a kiss. But back then, they used to seal legal documents with kisses. Right. Which is a little weird to me. Well, it kind of points out it was weird to me, too. I'm thinking it points out how seriously people took kissing back then. Yeah. It was relatively new, and this is a big new thing. Or if I should say, the learned behavior proponents are correct. It was relatively new. And they're like, this is very important. It's very sacred. Right. And speaking of sacred, it played a big role in the Catholic Church, there was this thing called the Holy Kiss, right? Yeah. The Osalom passes. Yes. And the Holy Kiss, basically, they thought you were transferring your spirit. Well, the Holy Spirit. The spirit of Christianity. When I say the spirit, what is that? Your spirit, you said? Yeah. No, the big one. Okay. The Trinity, the dove. And unfortunately, the Protestant Reformation killed, like, everything else that was fun. Killed the Holy Kiss as well. Well, not just that. It also gave rise to articles like this, because, in fact, writing a very sterile scientific article on kissing is a very Protestant thing to do. It's a very Protestant activity to engage in. Yes, you're right. I never thought about that. But, yeah, it went from, like, the Christians, the early Catholics kissed one another at Mass. That was the holy kiss. And then in the 13th century, the Church was like, no, kiss this board instead. And they call it a pax board or peace board. So everybody kissed that. And then the Protestants came along and they're like, no kissing. Everybody just stare forward. Not even the PAX board. No PAX board? Really? There's no more kissing. And then in Catholicism, it finally just basically went to the Pope's ring. That's what's kissed now is, the Pope's ring. I went to a church conference when I was a teenager, and they were playing music, and it was a big sing along type of thing. And they said something about one of the guys says, don't stomp your feet too rhythmically, because that's a little too close to dancing. I remember that distinctly. Made a big impression on me. Wow. It was like Footloose. Wow. Yeah. And you were valid a lot, didn't it? You were Val. No, it started dancing. I started breaking dancing. That's Val. Oh, when did his name and footlease. Yeah. My buddy is working on that remake right now with Zac Efron. No, he's not in it. He was first tapped to play it. No, it's a bunch of unknowns. Okay. And Dennis Quaid. Okay. He's the preacher. So let's talk about a little more non fun, sterile things like the orbicularis auris. Let's do that. The orbicularisoris. Well, yeah, there's certain muscles that use when you kiss, and in a very standard no frills kiss, the puckered kiss. That's the obicularis auris at work. That facial muscle. Yeah. But if people kiss like that, if they did, we would not reproduce. So there's a bunch of other muscles involved, one of which well, several of which actually tilt your head to the side, because apparently about two thirds of people who kiss so two thirds of the 90% of humans who kiss tilt their head to the side. To the right. To the right, specifically, yeah. And apparently we develop a preference for this in utero. Isn't that weird? Yeah. And it seems so natural to me. I just tilted my head to the left, and I can't imagine going to kiss my wife and tilting my head to the left. Well, one of the problems is, since everybody's tilting to the right, if you tilted your head to the left, you'd go in with the same angle, too. That's so awkward. It is awkward. Like the teeth knock. That's when you know things aren't going to work out. The teeth knock? Yeah. If that's happening early on, I think it depends on the reaction, really. Well, you can laugh it off and stuff. Sure. That's huge. But you should also kind of sort of have that chemistry. I think innately, a teeth knock is not a deal breaker. Wow, you are pretty tough. Wow. That's why I didn't date much. That's funny. I was turning left and knocking teeth. You're like, Look, Leslie, I'm very sorry, you're a very nice girl, and I like your parents a lot, but your teeth brushed against mine in one of our early kisses, so this can't go any further. Yeah, I'm tough, so I got married at, like, 36. Okay. No teeth knocking. No teeth knocking. Kids, do you want to cover those muscles? It's a lot of boring names. No, but I'll tell you what they do. Other muscles move the lips around, so instead of just puckering, I just use several muscle groups. There's also ones that pull the corner of your mouth down and lower your lower lip, like the depressor angula auris. Apparently, if you hear the word auris in reference to a muscle, it's a facial muscle that is involved in kissing. Right, right. And then, importantly, I would say the geneaglossus styleoglossus palateoglossus and hyo glosses, all those muscles operate your tongue. If, as Tracy Wilson, who wrote this article, puts it, if you decide to use it right. If you're from France and that's how you kiss, those four muscles are going to control your tongue. Right. I was kind of surprised at first it was those four muscles, but when you look at the tongue, it's extremely malleable and there's all sorts of like you can roll your tongue and make clovers out of your tongue, and it's very specific controllable piece of your body. Digit. Is it a digit? I guess. Have you ever seen a tongue outside of the mouth? What do you mean? Like a surgically removed tongue? Not a human one. Gross. Yeah, I saw one at the Atomic Bomb Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. The guy whose tongue was taken out turned, like, black because he was exposed to radioactivity. And I've seen two this was one of two tongues that I've seen completely removed, but there's like, soft palates attached that spreads out and back. Really? It's really interesting looking. Crazy. Yeah. You don't want to see a tongue outside of a mouth. Well, especially one that was bombed. Right. I'm sure that didn't help. No. So obviously, Josh, too, what happens when you kiss is like everything with the brain. You have to have the nerves from your face sending messages to your brain telling your brain what's going on. And that stimulates a lot of things like dopamine and serotonin. Oxytocin is becoming an increasingly that's a big one. Important neurotransmitter. What's the deal there? Well, it creates feelings of affection, attachment, loyalty. They think that love, in a lot of ways, especially intense, early romantic love, resembles addiction. So there's a lot of dopamine that gets released when you see the person that you're attracted to, but then over time, it turns into long lasting companionship, love that's actually toasting it at work. And it's also very big in milk production as well. So that's very strange that I would have done that. But it forces milk production, and it's also transferred from mother to child through breastfeeding. So it promotes feelings of attachment through that as well. How about that adrenaline, our old buddy with the fight or flight that we haven't talked about in a while. Hey. Adrenaline and all sorts of natural endorphins make that euphoric feeling come alive. And not only that, it actually increases your heart rate and your blood starts pumping more and you're getting more oxygen to your body just from kissing. Even if you're, let's say lying down. Lying down. If you're in a prone position, let's say, and you're kissing somebody, your heart rate is still going to increase as if you are exercising. Right. I think you're prepping for physical activity relations. I think so. Thank you. So we mentioned the one study, and I know we looked at this when you did the webcast about the smell. Yeah. This fascinates me. I want to believe it's correct because it's just so it's elegantly simple. Yeah, but I think you should take it. This is yours. Well, I think the situation is you can reproduce with somebody who has a different immune system. If you reproduce someone with different immune qualities that you have, it will produce a more robust, healthier child. Right. Because your kid is going to have your immunities and your husband's immunity or wives or reproductive partners immunities combined. And apparently you can sniff this out, supposedly. Here's the big problem with that. Like, what you're talking about and what this theory is based on is pheromones. And from what I understand, we've been shown to have an organ that at one time was capable of detecting pheromones. But that most humans, not all humans. Most humans aren't capable of using this nasopharynxal organ any longer. We'll just call it the appendix. Okay. That's actually supposedly where I think some sort of antibodies go to basically hide out and generate backup and then go back and fight, really, infections and cancer and things again. I knew they were kind of thought they had figured out the appendix for a while. You don't just go removing organs willy nilly just because we don't realize what they're for. It's like knocking pluto off the list of planets. Exactly. So are you done with your smell? Thing there, though. I'm done. Okay. It was yours and I hijacked. I apologize for that, Chuck. That's all right. There's been some recent studies in the past year that just I'll throw out a couple of stats from the University of Albany said that 59% of men and 66% of women report that after feeling attracted initially to someone, that the attraction ended after the first kiss. 66% of women? That's weird. You think about the I'm telling you. No, but it's like the immune protein idea. Like, maybe these people had similar immune proteins and they found that in the kiss. And we're like, yeah, man, I'm looking for a more robust, less weekly child. Right? Yeah, that's a good point. And the same guy who did the professor at Albany that did that study said that he also thinks that because saliva has testosterone, the fact that men prefer, like, sloppy kissing and conceivably a more wet, saliva ridden kiss means that they are trying to transfer testosterone into the woman's mouth to trigger a sex drive. I don't know. Like an awful lot of conjecture. It's an awful lot of conjecture. And another recent study in England, and this is like today, I read this, that apparently heterosexual males in England don't mind kissing. Yeah. Apparently it has to do with their football culture, right? Yeah. They said they interviewed 145 college and high school students, all of them straight as an arrow, and 37%, they had engaged in sustained kissing with another dude and didn't think it was a big deal. And 95% of athletes said they kissed another man, compared to 80% of non athletes. So they theorized it starts on the old soccer pitch. That's Gordon Ramsay's impact clearly. Is it? Yeah. So, hey, are you swinging Brits out there? Good on you. And Chuck, I think that we should remain faithful to this article and end this podcast on kissing with some of the diseases you can catch from kissing. Go ahead. There's, of course, mononucleosis. The kissing disease. Mono? I've never had mono. I have not either. That's drywall. I don't know if that counts. Maybe we hit a stud. Yeah. There's herpes simplex one, aka cold sores meningitis, which is nasty stuff, but apparently you can there's an outside chance you can catch it. Kissing. They think that some of the bacteria that causes gastric ulcers can be transferred from person to person via saliva and kissing. And there is apparently one case recognized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention here in Atlanta, Ga, USA, that one case of HIV has been reported that's been transmitted through kissing. Wow. That's a downer. That's how kissing works. Well, that means there's like some two open source at the same time in the mouth, right? HIV and AIDS first. Really kind of hit the public psyche. It was like, can we sit on toilets? We all just shoot ourselves now what are we going to do? And kissing was a big one. And then as time went on, I remember somebody saying, like, the stat was you'd have to transfer a gallon of saliva to have a good chance of HIV or contracting HIV from somebody through kissing. And you're like, yeah, but I'm sure you're right. I'm sure that it was through from sore to soar or something horrible like that through kissing. One case. All right. I'm just thinking about open source kissing. So if you want to read an article, read more about kissing and possibly decide to never kiss again after reading it, you can type in Kissing in the swing and search bar@howstepworks.com homage to the British. And since I said that the British, that means it's time for a listener, right? Are they coming? They've already been here. This is from Sarah, and it's about jealousy. And like you predicted, Josh, we've had a lot of people write in and said, I agree with Josh. And a lot of people said, I agree with Chuck. Yeah. Healthy it is. So with that in mind, Sarah has to say this. I have to agree with the notion that a small amount of jealousy is not only normal but healthy. So she's in the Josh Canada. I'm not talking about telling your significant other that they can't go here, can't go talk to that person based on jealousy and calling that showing your love. I'm talking about having a twinge in your gut when you see or hear something that is generally a threat. If you don't have any fear about your partner ditching you, does that suggest that you don't care if your partner leads you? I say no. Or does that mean you're not realistic? Maybe. So say there's a bad day when you were a pet and that handsome guy at the farmers market smiles a little too big at your wife and you see her, in fact, that makes her feel pretty. If that doesn't affect you at all, doesn't cause a little something in your gut, then does that also mean that you'll miss the opportunity to think, hey, maybe I should do a little something to make her feel pretty? This is a great point. This is an excellent point. And if you do keep missing those opportunities, maybe you'll end up taking things for granted. I've expressed and appreciated very small showings of jealousy. Husband doesn't want to dance at work parties, so I say, fine, and I dance without him. He sees a good looking guy come to dance near me and he suddenly feels like dancing with his wife. That is okay with me. Or when, let's say my husband has a grocery store girlfriend, the cute checker who smiles at him, especially I've playfully shown a little more PDA than usual when this happens, and I know he gets a kick out of that. So Sarah. I'm down with that. I just don't call that jealousy. That's jealousy. I don't think so. I think jealousy is. A palpable fear of losing somebody. And I think that there's just that these are different degrees. That degree is where I draw the line. And I don't call this jealousy. I just call it playful marriage shenanigans. Everyone, I would like to announce something. Mr. Charles W. Chuck Bryant is now a convert to jealousy in a relationship. There you go. Thank you, Chuck. And that was very nice of you to select that letter rather than one that was like, Josh is wrong. And here's why. That's coming up on the next one. Just kidding. Thanks a lot, sir. I appreciate the email is very thoughtful and well informed. If you want to send Chuck and me an email that's thoughtful and well informed about, say, your first kiss, wrap it up, send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. The Housetofworks.com iPhone app is coming soon. Get access to our content in a new way. Articles, videos and more, all on the go. Check out the latest podcasts and blog blog posts and see what we're saying on Facebook and Twitter. Coming soon to itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?" | ||
How Human Trafficking Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-human-trafficking-works | Despite worldwide prohibitions, slavery still exists. Slaves are forced or coerced into prostitution or made to work in deplorable factory conditions. Yet there's still debate over how widespread the problem is. Learn about modern slavery in this episode. | Despite worldwide prohibitions, slavery still exists. Slaves are forced or coerced into prostitution or made to work in deplorable factory conditions. Yet there's still debate over how widespread the problem is. Learn about modern slavery in this episode. | Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:41:16 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=15, tm_min=41, tm_sec=16, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=24, tm_isdst=0) | 33405884 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Across from me is. Always is. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And that makes us stuff you should know. Not bush league. No, we've been doing this way too long. Not bush league. We're pioneers, man. Are we? Probably. We're, like, riding the coat tails of Adam Curry. That's right. Long, supple Dublin coattails of Adam Curry. Yeah. I'm happy to be on them. Sure. He's great, man. I'm not making fun of him at all, of course. Well, don't make it sound like I am. You're not one of those guys who just said something like, uncool to be ironic and have it be cool? No, and I'm glad you brought that up, because I posted a Kenny G song on our Facebook page, and I wasn't trying to be ironic. I wasn't trying to be cool. It's a good song. Yeah, it's as simple as that. Like when you go see Dolly Parton, it's not to be ironic. It's because you like Dolly Parton. Exactly. All right, thank you. Just want to clear that up. Same goes for Ronnie MILSAT, by the way. He's class act. Yeah, one of mine and newbie's friends. Adam was like, who's that cat that you listen to who's always wearing the sunglasses? He's country. And yumi was like, Ronnie Milsap. He's like, yeah. I was like, he's blind, man. That's why he's always wearing the sunglasses. Adam. Adam. Adam. Adam, who is engaged. Congratulations to him. Yes. Congratulations to Adam and Sarah. So, Chuck, that's human trafficking. Yeah. We might as well have gotten the light stuff out of the way, because this will be another joke free podcast. I don't know about joke free. We don't pull off joke free very well, but this is heavy. It's one of our heavier ones up there with, like, homelessness sure. And an off requested. Yeah, this one's been asked for a lot. We're finally doing it. Yes. And human trafficking is not to be confused with the movie about raves from the 90s called Human Traffic has absolutely nothing to do with one another. Human trafficking is basically another term for modern slavery. And apparently I want to bust out an unquantified stat. That's my forte. Yes. There are supposedly more slaves in the world right now than there ever have been. That is true. I looked that up just to be sure, and I did not get a number. But they said there are more. Well, I think they said more than 12 million is what the UN says. The State Department said in 2010. In their report on human trafficking, they cited something like, so the US and the UI guess are using the same number? Looks like it. That's a lot of slaves and very sad. Okay. I think everybody has a pretty good understanding of how West Africa became the slave capital of the world from about, what, the 16th to the 19th century. Okay. I think into the 20th century, they commonly cited because I think some of Southern Europe was still using slaves after the US. Issued the Emancipation Proclamation. All right. But here in the US. It's like, well, that must have ended slavery everywhere because it was issued by the US. Sure. Not so, but we understand West African slavery. It's been studied. We've discussed it before. Modern slavery takes just as insidious, but it takes different kinds of forms. Right? Yes. It's not just being captured and then transported to work on a farm or a plantation, although that still happens. Right. And it doesn't necessarily mean even being transported across any sort of a border. A lot of us human slaves or human trafficked peoples are Americans. Yeah. You want to paint a story? A story in the intro. I thought this is pretty good illustration. Yes. This was written by Molly, our old friend from Smithy, who has gone on to, I hope, greener pastures. Yes. She's at Emery U. So Molly wrote this, and it's a good one, and she gives a little story here at the beginning on how this might work. Eastern European country. A woman might see a billboard that says they come to Paris or New York City to work as a waitress. She doesn't make much money. She doesn't have a lot going on. Paris. Yeah, exactly. Let me go. Promises of something richer in another land. So she calls this number. She's told, hey, for just, like, three grand, which we may even front you, you can pay it back when you get here. Right. We'll bring you over, and you can get this great job and start a new fantastic life. Once she gets here, however, she's not taken to a restaurant, but she may be taken to a brothel, let's say. Right. A lot of times women and young girls are sex trafficking as opposed to labor trafficking. Yes. We should point out actually, the FBI says, I think the majority of girls and women are from Central America and Asia, and most boys and men are forced into labor, but an increasing number of boys and men are working in the commercial sex industry. Oh, yeah. Molly kind of made it sound like I think she's the pronoun. She almost exclusively when she talked about sex trafficking, but there are plenty of men and boys in that, too. Yeah. So anyway, she comes over, she's forced to work in a brothel as a prostitute or in porn or some other kind of sex industry, and basically is either blackmailed or coerced or beaten or drugged or all of the above. Never is paid back or I'm sorry, she's never working off the money, but basically, she's just there forever. And also, even if she is working off the money, she may also be charged room and board in the brothel, which is probably about the biggest insult you could ever lay on somebody. Hey, we kidnapped you and forced you into prostitution, and we're charging you for this room that we're making you perform sex tax in, and the prices just go up and up on the room and board, so you're really not paying down your loan to get over here. Plus, and we have your passport, so good luck getting back anywhere. Right. She may also be funneled, I guess, into labor trafficking. There's two kinds of human trafficking. There's sex trafficking and labor trafficking. And obviously, sex trafficking gets the most headlines because the idea of sex slaves is just mind boggling. Sure. Labor trafficking is far more prevalent, though. Yeah. Somebody who entered the same situation may end up in a restaurant in Paris, New York, but as, like, a line cook who's not really getting paid. Apparently, the restaurant industry is rife with human trafficking as well. Atlanta is. Did you know that? No, I didn't. Atlanta is one of the most major hubs in the United States for human trafficking. Did you get an idea of why? I don't know why, but I know that Grady Hospital here in town has recently stepped up efforts to recognize victims when they come in as patients, because one of the biggest issues, Molly points out, is recognizing them even though they're in plain view. We have probably come into contact with somebody at some point in Atlanta, whether it was the bus boy or the quote unquote migrant worker you see working on a farm. Are you trying to tell me that you're being trafficked right now? No. Blink once if Jerry has a gun to my head. Right. We'll get into the problems of why this isn't just an obvious problem, but let's talk a little more about the two different types of trafficking. You talk about sex trafficking, which can be very lucrative for the trafficker. Sure. The trafficking where the traffic is not making any money whatsoever is being fed. Whatever is a slave, the traffic her. Molly used Bulgaria as an example. In Bulgaria, the average annual salary is about $2,600 US. In a year. That same year, a sex slave can make about $23,500 for a trafficker. Wow. Yeah. Also, if you're diverted over to labor trafficking, you may end up, like we said, in a restaurant, a mine. Agriculture is a big one. Matter of fact, there's this group called Sweatfree.org, and a lot of the anti sweatshop groups, pro union groups, and anti human trafficking groups all kind of form this Venn diagram in the middle that has to do with sweat labor. Forced labor. Right. And there's this group called Sweatfree.org. And if you ever want to shop with somebody that a company that you know doesn't use sweat labor, so you can't possibly be using by buying a product that is made of forced labor, you can look up their shopping guide, but they also released a hall of Shame. Every year and the 2010 hall of Shame. Shamed. Ll. Bean, ginbury and haines, really, for using us back cotton. And apparently the Use becky and government mandates that children as young as seven have to be forced to harvest the cotton in the fall rather than go to school. And a lot of these kids are, like, shuffled off to remote areas away from their homes. That's human trafficking. That's government mandated. You know what really shocked me is that sometimes these people are sold to wealthy individuals yeah, this one was awful. Who actually just use them as housemaids and housekeepers and cooks. Respectable people. That's probably where sex trafficking and labor trafficking collide. Yeah, I'm sure, depending on the house you end up in, but yes, I'm sure. Did you see? Taking delivery? I did. Obviously, I'm sure that happens, but in that movie, it was a very high end operation going on. It was, but where the girl ended up was like a mine camp or something like that. Or the place. There was just ropes with sheets hanging over that made this one room into smaller rooms or whatever. But Liam Neeson had a very particular set of skills. Luckily, he was able to rescue his daughter. Yeah. When did he become an action hero? What was the first one? Was it the Clone War One? But I agree. All of a sudden, Liam Neeson, well, Dark Man, many years ago, he was oh, yeah. But that didn't like, launch him into Action Movie Guy. But now yeah, he's an A one butt kicker at this point. Yeah. Good for him. Yeah. I like that movie actually taken. Yeah, it was pretty good. Pretty enjoyable. It was just I couldn't get past the fact that we were watching Liam Neeson do this stuff. Give me Daniel Craig. I can believe him. All right, let's get back to it, shall we? Obviously, if you're a sex slave, aside from just the trauma of being forced to perform sex acts, like, a dozen times a day on strangers, they're obviously at risk for STDs violence from their jobs or pimps, pregnancy, forced abortions, sterilization. Forced sterilization, like a host of awful things which all add up to immense emotional trauma. And if you are in labor slave, you are basically facing probably the worst labor conditions that the person can come up with. You're not protected at all because you're not going to stand up and say anything. And why, Chuck? Why would somebody endure this kind of life quietly? Because there's a big discussion about how many slaves, how many traffic people there are in the world, because we really don't know. And a lot of people think that they're hiding in plain sight. Why? Well, because they could be drugged, like, a lot of times in the sex industry. I read cases in Oregon and Seattle where they would get them addicted to crack cocaine. Yeah, I remember in the Homelessness podcast, we talked about that florida labor camp that had a little company store and these homeless people were living lives of basically invented servitude. Right. Blackmail might be another one like, hey, look, we've got these pictures of you. Now we're going to send them to your family. Yeah. In that particularly insidious, very voicing. A woman in the prostitution taking pictures and then using those pictures to blackmailer. Yes. And Molly points out a lot of times, they may be from a country where it's never like, that's a great thing for your family, but they may be from a country where it's all of a sudden the family is outcast from their village and great shame is brought upon their family name, and they don't want that. Or like we said, they may not have if they had travel documents to begin with, they snatched those. They may not speak the language. So what are you going to do? Plus, also you've got the threat of violence almost always or actual violence. So yeah, there's three terms that basically legal definitions almost always used to describe human trafficking and how it's carried out. It's force, fraud, and coercion. And force is, like you said, drugs. The use of drugs. Well, maybe they're kidnapped outright. Right. Sleep deprivation, food deprivation, physical abuse, rape, and then even having guards guard you. I guess that intimidates, but it also implies the threat of violence as well. So that's force. There's coercion. Yeah. We kind of already covered fraud, which was getting someone here under false pretense. Right. But I think probably one of the ways you talked about the billboard. Right. And the girl calls herself. There's also a lot of human traffickers that will go to poor families and be like, hey, you love your kid, right? Get your kid over to America where they're going to get an education, and there's people over there that sponsor kids and your kid can go live with them. Family is really nice. Your kid will be educated, come back and take care of you in your older years. Don't you want your kid to do that? We'll take them for free. Right. The family doesn't realize that once they find out that this is all fraudulent, they already agreed to letting the person take their kid. They don't realize that under any law, that's invalid immediately because that agreement was reached under fraud or deception. Well, and they're probably not anywhere where they can legitimately get in touch with them anyway. I doubt if they do that, then give them the real address while they'd be staying. Cell phone. Just call me. Exactly. So basically the kid is not technically kidnapped, but virtually kidnapped. Yeah. And coercion was also blackmail. Yes. I get the idea, too, that a lot of these threats are empty threats. But the traffic, he doesn't understand that. A lot of times I doubt if they would take the time to send their family a photo in their village back home. It's just an empty threat that they don't know that they're not going to follow through on it. Right. Or they might follow through on it. Yeah. Because of all of these things, though coercion, physical abuse, drugs, shame, guilt, all this stuff comes together, like you said, to form some serious emotional psychological problems for the person who's been kidnapped and forced in his life and is held in his life. They got, like, no power. Right. And they were probably not very empowered to begin with, or they wouldn't have been coerced into that kind of situation. Right. Well, that's a big debate that's going on. It's like, how can you ever eradicate human trafficking if you don't first eradicate poverty? Yeah, that's a big question, too, which will probably never happen. So you have these people. You have just people who are not in a great state. And when we encounter them, normal people who are not being enslaved encounter them, we might just look right past a lot of really obvious signs, because, number one, they're keeping their mouth shut, which is probably the biggest problem of all. But number two, we may also see them a victim as a criminal because they're involved in criminal acts. It wouldn't really dawn on us to think, well, wait a minute, maybe they're being forced into these criminal acts. Well, Molly's examples were great. Like, you see the teenage girl on the street that's obviously a prostitute, and you may turn your nose up and say, look at that girl, she's trouble. Or look at that migrant worker in the field. I bet he's an illegal. Shouldn't even be in this country working. You might be looking at victims instead of criminals. Right. And that's a society at large. But apparently, law enforcement is not very well trained to recognize the human trafficked. That is true. I went to the FBI site, and they said that's one of the biggest things that they're working on is educating local law enforcement officers. Like when they bust a prostitution ring, don't just throw them all in jail. Like, investigate it on a case by case basis. Right. So you've got victims who are too scared to talk. You have society, society and law enforcement that immediately deem some criminals. So you have this idea that there's a really big problem out there, but no real idea of exactly how big it is. Right. So here's where the numbers kind of come in. Like we said, the US. And the UN say that there's about 12.3 million adults and children worldwide right around the world. Yeah, but the problem is that in 2009, there were only 4166 successful trafficking prosecutions. Yeah. I went to the FBI site, and they started the Human Smuggling Trafficking Center in 2004, and they were touting. I'm not saying they're not doing a good job, but they were touting. In 2004, they had 86 investigations going on, and they doubled that by 2009 to 167. That's 167 investigations. If you've got what they say, about like 15,000 in the US alone, well, that's another number that's hotly contested. So in 1999, apparently Congress heard that there was 50,000 slaves that were brought into the US every year. And apparently that came from CIA estimates. Right. That really kind of got the charge going against human trafficking. That number is just incredible. Right? Yeah. Especially just coming into the US. Alone. Yeah. So that got everybody on board, including George W. Bush. Sure. Got some laws enacted. There's the which one is it, Chuck? The one we passed in 2000. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Yes. And then that same year, the UN passed the Palermo Protocol. So that was like a big moment for human trafficking. Right. Or I should say combating human trafficking. And then the numbers were downgraded in 2004 to something like think even those numbers are high. Right. Then a New York Times Magazine writer named Petermandessman he wrote an article called, I think, the Sex Slaves Next Door or the Girls Next Door. I can't remember what it was called, but in his article, it just created this huge firestorm. It was like one of those twelve page long articles. And he was doing a lot of really good investigative journalism. There was this interview with this one girl who had been sold from Mexico at age four and had been living as a sex slave ever since. And people started digging into the article and we're like, wait a minute, this sounds a lot like urban legend. Some of the details about how people are coming from Mexico into the US. Are kind of spotty. Like, if they're going by boat, there's really no good place to land in the US. Right. There is a lot of problems with it. And he even said 10,000. So he had the lowest number so far. And even that has been torn apart. And part of the problem that was raised by Peter Landisman's article and its reception is that if you inflate the numbers figures too much and then it's shown that you're off big time, then it comes across as hysterical and alarmist. Right. But if the numbers are too low, then you risk not being able to generate enough interest to really do something about the people who are enslaved. Right. And it's hard to pinpoint it, period, because if they knew, then they would be doing something about it. Right. Only 27 states, and that's the latest number I have. It may be more, but I saw 27 states have anti trafficking legislation. Is that it? Yeah. That's crazy. So, I mean, the rest it's technically legal, or surely there's laws that you're breaking. Yeah, I don't think it's legal, but it's not just trafficking specific legislation. Got you. Yeah. So we're kind of it seems like we're at a period where we realize that there's a real problem, but we don't know how big it is, and we don't know what to do about it yet. One guy, Nicholas Christoph. You read New York Times? Sure. Smart guy. He did something in 2004 that was pretty amazing. Yeah. He decided to purchase the freedom of two Cambodian prostitutes. Yeah, he went to Cambodian did it, too, which is very controversial because, as Molly points out, it still perpetuates the idea that you can buy and sell a human life. Even though he was doing it for the good, it's still sort of playing ball in a way. Yes. And a lot of people say it doesn't do a lot of good anyway because these people aren't prepared for the quote, unquote, real world. So one of them did kind of escape that life and the other went right back to it. Yeah. The one that he paid more for, $203, she went back to it, and she was very reluctant to come out in the first place. She kind of dragged her feet. And even her owner, I guess the madam that ran the brothel and literally owned this woman, was like, you should really take this man's offer and leave right now because this is never going to happen again. She went back. Wow. Because she was institutionalized, as the way to put it. She didn't know if her village would accept her. She didn't know if her family would take her back. She's very shamed. And this is the life that she was used to. It's like red and shawshank. Yeah. Or Brooks. Yeah. Brooks was institutionalized. Yeah. He's the one who hung himself. Right. And Red thought he was until he found all that money. Yeah. Go buy some milkshakes. So, yeah, he paid $203 and $150 for those two women. But, yeah, it makes sense. Like, if you pay money to free somebody, then, yeah, you're putting a value on that and you're saying, yes, what you're doing is legitimate to some degree. Well, maybe. If nothing else, this move got a lot of attention because he did this. Right. But the question is this, that Peter Landesman article was all about how there's all these sex slaves in the US. But almost all of the action that he describes takes place in Mexico. Nicholas Christopher to free sex slaves, he didn't go into New Jersey or Portland. He went to Cambodia. Right. So the question is, how big is this in the US. And elsewhere? Is it a big problem in the US. We have no idea. But we're starting to kind of shape how to take this on, thanks to groups like Anti Slavery International and Free the Slaves. Right? Yes. And the Polaris Project, too, is another big one. Yeah. The State Department says they have what's called a three P approach prevention, Prosecution, and protection. Prosecution is a big one because until they start really hanging these dudes up by their toes as an example, then they're not going to be dissuaded so much from trying to traffic these girls and boys. It's a big one. And men and women. Yeah. So you got to prosecute these people, let it be known, plastered all over the newspapers to kind of dissuade folks. Right. Protecting the victims is a problem, especially when a cop just looks at them and sees a hooker rather than a victim. Yeah, exactly. So like you said, I guess the FBI is figuring out how to train local law enforcement to recognize signs, and there are some pretty easy signs if you can, I guess, gain the trust of somebody you suspect is being trafficked. Right. There's just a few questions that you can ask, and if you can get honest answers out of them, you're like, oh, you are a modern slave. Well, that's the tough part, is getting the answers right, but asking them where they work, maybe what they're getting paid, who they live with, are they free to come and go as they please. Yeah. What did you say? How much they get paid, where they sleep, what kind of sleeping conditions are, what they ate last or the day before. Right. Is another good one. Yeah, those are great questions. And then if you come up with some suspicions, there's actually groups that you can call. There's the National Human Trafficking Resource Center that has a hotline that's open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's 188-837-3788. And they start to get the ball rolling. And apparently the State Department, especially under Hillary Clinton, has really taken the ball and run with it to combat human trafficking. And the US. Issues travel visas, TVs to people who are found to be trafficked. So they're saying, hey, we won't even deport you. Yeah, you're not going to be arrested, victim, or if you are arrested and we find out you've been trafficked here, you'll be okay after that. Well, the DOJ has a hotline too, 884-28-7581 and polarisproject.org is a great place to visit. You mentioned them in how the Underground Railroad work really fast. Yeah. Remember they're named after the North Star, escaped slaves used to follow Benjamin Skinner, an author, wrote a book called A Crime so Monstrous in 2008, and he said, educate yourself. So hopefully we're helping a little bit right there. Secondly, write your congressman, your local elected official, be the guy that stands up at the town hall and says, yeah, I get what you're saying about the electromagnetic pulse, but what do you want to do about human trafficking, right? Exactly. Or find out if you're one of the 27 states or one of the 27 -53 23 states that does not have legislation on the books and get in touch with your congressman, who probably won't be in office by the time the next election rolls around yeah, wait until after November. Get in touch with your new congressman and say, hey, why don't we have legislation on the books? This is ridiculous. Yeah. And so educating yourself, figuring out what I guess harassing your local politicians and then supporting advocacy groups like Sweatfree.org Free the Slaves, anti Slavery International. That's right. Yeah. That's what you can do. Or just keep your eye out. Don't be so judgmental when you see that person who you might think is a nefarious criminal. You never know. Yeah. And I'm sure there's people out there who are going to be like, well, I mean, if we make a big deal of this, then everybody's going to say I'm a slave when they're really a criminal. I think that's unlikely. I think so, too. And if you start doing something about human trafficking, or you already are, we want to know about it. So I'll call out again if you'll remind me, Chuck, because sometimes I forget. But for listener mail, call out. How about we say, let us know what you're doing to fight human trafficking. Okay. Yeah. Or if you were one of the people that requested this over the years, then you probably had a good reason. So let's hear it. Okay. Aside from the fact that it's a good cause. Yeah. So if you want to learn more about human trafficking and read a very good article by Molly Edmonds, you can type in Human Trafficking, trafficking in the search bar housetofworks.com. And that will bring this article up. And I said howstofworks? No. I said search bar. And that brings up listener mail. I'm going to call this Josh's choice. You picked this one out because it has my name on it. I didn't have a computer all day. I did my research on my iPhone. So thank you, Apple, for allowing me to do my job. You shill. Hey, did you see me over there? I better get at least, like, an iPhone cover case or something. All right. This is about earthworms from Susan in northern Minnesota. I just listen to your podcast on Earthworms. I must say I was disappointed that you minimize the damage that Earthworms are doing to our northern forest. We did point out damage, but I guess she didn't think we did a good enough job, right? Yeah. I actually didn't mean to take this one out. It was between us and the dental implants, but we'll go with this. I'm volunteering for the University of Minnesota. Go first on monitoring the Superior National Forest and have come across large sections of the forest that are heavily damaged due to the worms. The forest dust that you mentioned has several other uses other than to host seedlings. It also acts as mulch, which keeps earth cooler, holds in moisture and decomposes and creates soil. Yeah, when she mentioned that, it reminded me that drying the soil out is a big problem because of the eating duff or the leaf litter. Not drinking duff because that's great. Yeah. I've seen the roots of the large trees exposed, which is called girdling. This stresses the trees and puts them in jeopardy, but it's also really pretty. A. Person can view large sections of the forest that are completely bare as there is no vegetation at all. The worms can move about 3 miles per year, which leaves a large path of destruction. To date, there is no successful method to rectify or reclaim those areas of our forest. I am from northern Minnesota, which is a large tourist area. 3 miles per year is way longer, farther than I've run across in any other. Oh, really? Resource. Yeah. Think about it. That glacier, that ice sheet that killed all those worms and basically drove them south, they've had 10,000 to 20,000 years to make their way up. If they can move 3 miles a year, they'd be all over the place. That we wouldn't be seeing this invasive species problem right now if that were the case. Well, maybe. The Minnesota worms are lightning fast. Yeah, they have a little jump in their giddy up. She finalizes this email Josh by saying the slow destruction of our forest is putting our whole economy at risk. That is Susan C from Minnesota. So sorry if we minimized it. We certainly didn't need to. I didn't think we did. Okay. But apparently we didn't like really? We didn't dissect a live earthworm during the podcast. We didn't show his friends what would happen. Well, thank you, Susan Seat for that one. And thank you to the other guy whose email I was going to choose to put printed the wrong one. Yeah, I think he had a fellow toothless guy like me. Yeah, he's going to give you props for coming out. Coming out? Taking the 2000 on the Internet. If you don't know what we're talking about, you have to see this. We have a video podcast now, too, that you can subscribe to. Indeed. And one of the things that we do is a little game show where we teach one another something in 60 seconds. And Chuck taught me about dental implants and showed me his toothless grin, showed the world, which is pretty awesome. So if you want to see that, you should type in stuff you should know dental implant into your favorite search engine or in the search bar, howstep works.com. It should bring up that video. And if you want to tweet to us, you can at syskpodcast. If you want to join us on Facebook, go to facebook.com stuffyoushouldnow. Remember, we want your emails on human trafficking. You can send those to stuffpodcasts@housetuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The House of Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime 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." | ||
Should you not eat gluten? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/should-you-not-eat-gluten | Since gluten is found in rye, wheat and barley grains, it's a near-ubiquitous part of many diets. So why do some people avoid this common protein? Tune in as Josh and Chuck break down the concerns surrounding gluten. | Since gluten is found in rye, wheat and barley grains, it's a near-ubiquitous part of many diets. So why do some people avoid this common protein? Tune in as Josh and Chuck break down the concerns surrounding gluten. | Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:13:04 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=18, tm_min=13, tm_sec=4, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=4, tm_isdst=0) | 28062275 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant with his freakishly big fingertips that I just noticed. I don't know what you're talking about. That's a toe. I'm looking at it now, and it didn't look any different than any other fingertip I've ever seen. Hold your hand up. That is big. It's on the middle finger gives me an advantage. I met a girl once who actually had I can't remember, I think she wore out, like, her fingers from typing or she broke it or she did something and she actually had that splint like this, like her middle finger sticking up. I was like, I envy you. Right. You can get a splint and do that and just tell people. I could. I'm very lazy, though. Chuck sure. So, Chuck, how are you doing? Great. Good. You're getting ready for Christmas? Yeah. This is our last couple of shows here before we break, and actually this will come out in 2011 and people are going to go, what? Yes. Mind meld. But this is what's really going on in our world right now. Yes. Chuck. You remember Norman Borlaug? Yeah. Nobel. This is unique. Yeah, he was great. Nobel Prize winning, I guess. Agriculturist botanist. He was responsible for the Green Revolution, which, ironically, the people of the Green Environmental Revolution like to point out as, like, the scourge of the environment. Yeah. Because basically what Borlog did in the think the there was a lot of famines predicted. Apparently up to a billion people were predicted to die because the agriculture had reached its carrying capacity, which is the number of people it can support. Sure. I think without any help whatsoever, agriculture can support a couple of billion people. Something like that. Okay. All right. And we'd reach that point where we were about to and everybody was about to be in big trouble. And then Borlag steps in just at the Nicket time, goes down to Mexico. Basically forces wheat to evolve super quickly so that you have these high, high yields over very small areas. More output. Exactly. But like, 70% more output. Yeah. And literally saves about a billion lives. That's what he's credited with. Amazing. Well, the problem is he's also credited with creating these really intensive agriculture techniques that pollute watersheds from intensive fertilizer and pesticides. These things don't just grow on their own. Like it requires a lot of intensive farming. Right. I didn't know if there was a downside to his work. I know. It's kind of weird to think about it. Yeah. He's actually kind of a whipping post for the environmental movement. And he just passed away this last year, right? Yeah. Within the last year, too. Yeah. I think it was last year, maybe 2009, but yeah. So he's been vilified unfairly, in my opinion. For creating a lot of ecological problems. I think when you say that you missed that he saved about a billion lives. Sure. But there's also possibly one other thing that he created inadvertently with his green revolution, and that is what we call celiac disease. Interesting. Yeah. Because think about that. Well, think about this. Okay. Celiac disease, which is an allergy or an autoimmune disorder that results from an allergy to gluten. Yeah, but it is an autoimmune disorder, though. It's not a food allergy. It's an autoimmune disorder brought on by a food allergy. Okay. But a study, I think, from 2009 found that gluten allergies, or celiac disease, is about 4.5 times more common now than it was 50 years ago. And a lot of people suspect that it's because wheats become such a staple crop right. That it's found everywhere. Since we're more exposed to it than ever, thanks to this green revolution, we have started to develop this disorder because of it now is borlags. Obviously, it wouldn't plan, but was his technique of making the wheat more yield, high yield, did that actually increase the amount of gluten? I would imagine so, because there's just more wheat. More wheat. But I think also what's behind it is weed is everywhere, because in the west got you. There's so much of it that we just use it for everything. Right. Because we'll see in a minute it shows up in some pretty random places yes. That you wouldn't notice. Well, you could put some wheat and water and drink it. Well, yeah, wheat water. Right. Also called beer. Wheat water. I'm going to order one of those next time we go to a bar. Yeah. Can I add some kind of wheat water? I'm going to order firewater when you order wheat water. Okay. Well, that would be whiskey or something. And firewater liquor whiskey. Yeah. So, Chuck, let's talk about celiac disease. Let's talk about gluten. Let's just lay it out on the table and see what happens. Man yes. I mean, it's all over the place now. I would say there's some controversy because a lot of people are jumping on gluten free diets because, like Gwyneth Paltrow said, she lost some weight, so people are using it to lose weight, which is not twodimensional she's a sheet of paper. Yeah. So let's talk about the small intestine if we want to absorb what's going on here with this podcast. Nice, Chuck. It's a fun guy. The small intestine absorbs nutrients. That's what it does. Thanks to little villain in there. Yes. If you have celiac disease, that means the lining of your intestine is destroyed to the point where it's not doing that job, and the nutrients go straight through to your poop. Right. And that's pretty much it. Yeah. It's just as straightforward as that. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of twists and turns along the way, obviously. Well, one of the not exactly straightforward we absorb nourishment. In the small intestine. Right? Yeah. So one of the side effects of Celiac disease, of an inability to absorb the nutrient gluten is malnourishment, which also happens if you've had a significant portion of your intestines removed. Malnourishment is often a result as well. Yeah. And that can lead to potentially anemia osteoporosis. Bad things. Very bad things. And malnourishment just isn't good, period. So a lot of people think, well, Celiac disease is an allergy to wheat. It is. But like you just pointed out, you can get malnourishment, you can develop malnourishment from it. And it is also an autoimmune disorder where the body is warding off something unnecessarily. Right, right. Like your immune system is not functioning correctly. Yeah. What is this? They said that 95% of sufferers have one of two historompatibility leukocyte antigens. Right. So what I take from it is that's what they search for when they do a blood test for Celiac disease. Right. So I think what happens is we're exposed to wheat. Right? Yeah. Our body mistakes the gluten. Actually, in this case, in celiac disease, our body mistakes the protein we make ourselves or the enzyme we make ourselves, that breaks down gluten as a foreign invader. Yeah. Gluten is a protein. Have we even said that? I don't know. Gluten is a protein. Yes, it's a protein we should say naturally occurred protein. Yeah. Found specifically in wheat, barley and rye. Yeah, right, okay. That's okay. But the weird thing about Celiac disease is our body's not even warding off the gluten. It's warding off the enzyme our body makes to break down the gluten. Okay, so it's all kinds of confused. Yeah. Right. So we're introduced to wheat. Here's some gluten. Our body produces an enzyme to go break it down. Our immune system goes, whoa, whoa, what's going on? Forms antibodies that are developed just to destroy these enzymes that break down gluten. Right. So then anytime we're exposed to gluten again, these enzymes are produced, our immune system mounts, the defense unnecessarily, and therefore, as a result, the gluten is not broken down, it passes through the stool or the poop, as you said. Sure. And we're malnourished because the villi just basically lies down on the job or is destroyed altogether. And about one in 133 people suffer from it. But it is under diagnosed because it can mistake you can mistake it for irritable bowel syndrome. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the bowel symptoms. Right. You can have an upset tummy irritable bowel syndrome. You can also have chronic diarrhea, which is one of the worst kinds of diarrhea. Yeah, I would say the worst. You can lose weight even though you're eating just a normal diet. Right. Foul smelling bowel movements. Yes. What is that all about? It means your poop stinks bad. Yeah, but I mean, doesn't it always? I think that this is like, even in the notice in the realm of poop, this is bad. Like dad poop, except without the tang of shaving cream also mixed in with it. Right. It's funny, there's a break, like when you're a little baby, it's like the worst thing on Earth. And then I remember being a kid specifically and going to ask my dad a question, and he would just open the door and I would be like, oh my Lord, what is happening in there? I know, I wonder what it is. So I would say that your poop smells best between the ages of like two and 30. Right. So if you're ever going to have to smell poop, do it during those ages. Right. This is going downhill fast. There's also some non bowel related symptoms or excessive gas. We didn't say that. Oh, yeah, that's a big one too. Right. The non bowel related symptoms are like muscle cramps, joint pain, irritability and depression, which I think actually are probably comorbid with smelly poop. Yeah, you're just like, oh God, I can't take this. One unmistakable sign is well, not unmistakable because it could be other things, but a skin rash known as dermatitis herpetiformis. And that's like blistering and itching on the elbows and knees in your butt. Yeah. So if you get that going on, you may want to get that looked into. And then part of the big problem with celiac disease, like if you go to a doctor and say, my poop smells really bad, I often have chronic diarrhea, I'm irritable and gassy, and I have joint pain and I have this rash, the doctor can be like, you have celiac disease, you may also be asymptomatic. And this is where it's a problem because if the symptoms are not too terrible, like, you can deal with it and you don't even really think about it, or if you're asymptomatic entirely, your small intestine is still being ravaged by this autoimmune disorder that you have. Yes, you may not feel terrible, but it's wrecking you. Yeah. You're going to become malnourished. You're at risk for osteoporosis and all this other stuff as well. Well, one stat that's in this article I think Molly Edmunds wrote this, right? Yes, she did. Of stuff mom never told you and our chief medical correspondent. For every person that is diagnosed, about 30 people have it and are undiagnosed. Yeah. That's huge. That's huge under diagnosis. So they think they're just gassy and fatigued and irritable. Right. One of the problems, one of the reasons why it's so under diagnosed is a lot of these symptoms mimic other better understood diseases like cystic fibrosis. Yes. We mentioned IBS and Crohn's disease, which I thought was interesting, which I think is related somehow. You usually have to take out part of your intestine for Crohn's disease. Okay. So Molly suggests to be your own advocate, which is always a good idea because a lot of doctors will bypass that. But I bet these days doctors are hearing more and more from people saying, I think I might have celiac disease. Right. And a lot of people have Celiac disease. And the idea of gluten and eating a gluten free diet, which as it stands right now, is the only treatment for Celiac disease, is eating a gluten free diet. As more and more people become aware of it, I think a lot of people are starting to adopt that. Sure. Not only because of Celiac disease. A lot of people consider it to be healthier, that possibly gluten is responsible for the widespread depression, aches and pains, murder rates. Like everything that's wrong with the world, it can be traced to gluten or casein, which is, I think, what is the responsible party for lactose intolerance. Right? Right. A lot of people are eating what's called gluten free case and free diets. Right. Well, you can have a gluten sensitivity without having celiac disease, so that's important to point out. Without having full blown celiac disease, you can have a sensitivity to it. But the things that I've read say that if you don't have a sensitivity to it and you're not celiac disease, then there's really no reason to avoid it. And a lot of it is sort of the fad now. Yeah, it is. But it makes you wonder sometimes the mob mentality is correct. If you do think you have celiac disease, though, and you're considering adopting a gluten free diet, hold off and actually go to the doctor first if you want to be properly diagnosed, because once you adopt a gluten free diet, it's going to mess with the results of the blood test. Yeah. You can actually show a false positive for celiac because you're avoiding gluten in the blood. No, it won't show up. Oh, no. I thought it said you can appear to have Celiac disease. What I took from it is that it won't show up because your body is not producing the antibodies that they look for in the blood test, because adopting a gluten free diet is so effective that your body starts healing itself pretty quickly. Am I wrong? I don't know. It just says it can distort the blood test. It just messes with it one way or the other. Right. So if you want to be diagnosed with Celiac disease, if you think you have it, go get diagnosed and then adopt the gluten free lifestyle. And that is the good news, that you're going to stop experiencing symptoms within a couple of days, possibly a week or so, and then your small intestine will begin to repair itself and function correctly. Yeah. Because it's really just the gluten that your body's reacting to. And if there's no gluten hey, yeah, they call it disease. I guess it qualifies, but to me, it's more of a condition. If you can just quit eating gluten, it will repair itself, although it's uncurable. So I guess it is technically a disease. And we talked about diets. Right. The gluten free case and free diet is actually a lot of parents of autistic kids, which, by the way, I checked with the guy who has an autistic kid and he said it's cool to call them autistic autistic rather than people with autism or both. Oh, really? He said he thought it was he'd been doing it for the last 20 years, so that's just his opinion. Right. But at the very least, he won't be offended. Okay, good. But there's a certain amount of logic to feeding kids with autism, a gluten free case and free diet, and basically the logic behind it is that kids with autism over produce certain peptides that break down these things. OK. And for some reason, this process in the brain treats these compounds when they're broken down as opiates and cause kids to behave differently from other kids, which apparently explains autism. And it's not vetted enough. There haven't been enough studies, apparently, to prove or disprove it. But there's a lot of parents of autistic kids who are not feeding them gluten or casein. Wow. Well, we're just learning so much about autism now. We need to do that as a podcast at some point. Oh, definitely. Because all the controversy around the shots that kids get causing autism and stuff like that. Yeah. And it still remains even after that one doctor who basically started that whole thing was completely discredited. Yeah, well, there's just so much cynicism and suspicion toward the establishment. Right. So we'll do autism. We're promising that. So we were talking about the fact that gluten products are lousy with stuff these days. It's obviously if it's in wheat, barley and rye, it's going to be in any kind of baked good with this stuff. Crackers, pasta, cereal, bread. Sure. But it's also in some weird things. Not weird things, but it's weird that it's in these things. Right. Like salad dressing is so weird. Yeah. Salad dressing, soy sauce, peanut butter, ice cream, pudding, lipstick and toothpaste, beer, obviously. Yeah. Vitamins and envelope adhesive. Yeah. Which makes me wonder, is that what killed Susan from seinfeld? She had like, a really heightened gluten allergy, perhaps. So, yeah, it's in all those things, obviously, anything made with flour. So you might not think about soup, like a chowder or a gravy that's sticking with flour. I wouldn't want to live if I couldn't eat gravy. Really? Yeah. You wouldn't want to live a gravy free life. Either that or my bowel movements would stink because I would not stop eating gravy. What's the point? If you can't eat gravy, what's the point of eating anything? Yeah, I'm with you. You do the dark brown gravy or like the light brown anything. I prefer brown gravy. Like, dark brown, like KFC. Yes. But I will eat any gravy. Really? All right. The other good thing about the fact that gluten is all over everyone's radar now is that if you do want to live a gluten free life, it's a lot easier now too, because there's tons of products now that are touting being glutenfree. Including gluten free beer. Yes. Do you know the brands? I was curious about that. No. Interesting. No, but there's several out there. I think Terrapin, one of our breweries from beloved Athens, Georgia, has a gluten free beer. Really? Yeah. I think that several brands have started to produce gluten free beer because really all you need is some sort of starch to get things going. Yeah. It doesn't have to be wheat. You should conceivably use rice. There's also a soy vodka. That's awful. But it's out there and you had it because think about it. Gluten vodka is often made from grain, and you're in big trouble with whiskey vodka. I have had it. It was one of the few shots I've ever given back in my life. Really? Now when you give it back, you spit it back at the bartender. No, I grabbed two and I did one and actually caught the girl who was handing them out attention and put it back on the tray with the little tattoo back in the thing so bad. What was I going to say? Josh? Oh, if you're eating out, you're going to want to talk to your waiter or chef. And a lot of trendy restaurants these days have little gluten free sections, too, because everyone thinks that they have celiac disease now. Right. Well, and not only that, there's a lot of people out there who, like you said, think it's healthy. It's kind of a fad. So there's strength in numbers as far as consumer ship goes. Oh, sure. And apparently between 2002 no, 2004 and 2009 and five years, the amount of gluten free products on the market increased 74%, according to the Nielsen Company. And they know what they're talking about. Well, they want to make a buck. Well. Who? The Nielsen Company. Not just people that make products that you consume. They want to make a buck. So they know that gluten free is a big deal. So they slap gluten free on there and obviously remove the gluten. Not saying they're lying to everyone. You know, Mellow Mushroom has a gluten free pizza. Oh, really? Of course they do. Molly points out that one thing you can do is instead of to try and avoid gluten, just look at a list of safe foods. It might be easier just to think in the realm of vegetables and fruits, nuts, dried beans, milk and soup, yet clear soup, no gravy, dairy. And by the chuck, I want to correct myself. Corn, rice, soy. Retail sales of gluten free products have increased 74%. Not the number of products on the market. Okay. Retail sales. But still, I think that that's directly proportionate to the number of products on the market. Also josh potato and quinoa. I like how you say that. How should I say it? I think that's right. Okay. Instead of quinoa, I've always said, chuck, what happens if you are a Catholic, you're in big trouble, aren't you? Yeah. It's made with wheat, and they're not going to bend on that, right? No. The Pope Catholic Church has actually issued a ruling pope scary. The new guy Pope, yeah, you're right. He looks creepy. That's the reason. Okay. I'm glad you said that. The Catholic Church issued a ruling on the presence of gluten in the communion wafers and said that the true Eucharist bread must be made with wheat. Right. Apparently there is a young girl whose communion was nullified by the Catholic Church because she received her First Communion as a low gluten wafer, which the Protestants have come to embrace. They said that didn't count. They said she's not a Catholic. Like, there are several rights to Catholicism. There's baptism, first Communion, first tenants, confirmation, marriage, and last rights. Right? Yeah. Man. And she can still rattle that off. Right. So one of her, I guess, points of Catholicism was literally overturned, hers, personally by the Catholic Church because she had received a low gluten wafer. And they wonder why Catholicism is losing its members, because they're basically saying to her, we're forcing you to have stinky poop little girl. We don't care if you can die from this. Well, it's only one little wafer, though. Well, the problem also is the Protestants have embraced low gluten wafered, but low gluten doesn't mean no gluten. Right. So there's kind of that, too. People with severe celiac disease can still have a pretty bad reaction to a convenient wafer. And check. This is a big deal. It's not to you and me, but to devout cascades sure. Who have celiac disease. This is a big deal. Yeah. It's a very important right for them. And it is very disappointing that the Church came out and ruled, like, sorry, roll with the changes a little bit, which is weird, because the Church has been known to evolve over time. Like, there used to be such a thing as purgatory. Not anymore, according to the Catholic Church. Right. But the Eucharist has to be made with wheat. Interesting. It is interesting. I think we said the word gluten enough now to where it sounds funny to me in my head. Yeah, it sounds very northern. Midwestern gluten. Yeah. Gluten, like Schmorgasbord or something. Do you have anything else? I got nothing else. I mean, I could keep talking for a while. No, I just say, if you think you have a gluten sensitivity, you should go see a doctor, get your blood test. I think after the blood test will even do a biopsy of your small intestine, I guess. And if you're a heavy smoker and you're not sure if you have a gluten sensitivity, ask a friend or loved one who lives with you. They'll tell you, oh, because you can't smell. Got you. And if you want to learn more about celiac disease and whether or not it's plural, you can type that in C-E-L-I-A-C in the handychurch bar@housestepworks.com. It'll bring up a very interesting and concise article by Molly Edmunds who manages to marry Greek mythology and autoimmune disorders of the intestine. Pretty. Definitely. Really? Yeah. In the intro? Yeah. Since I said handy search bar, that means that it's time for listener mail. Yeah. Josh, I'm going to call this a couple of emails from the same girl. Okay. First kiss stuff. And then there was an update. Yes, sir. You'll see what I mean? From Alison. Yeah. Guys, you asked for a story about a first kiss. I think I have just the one. If you hold on to the cheesy parts, you'll see how it all comes back to you guys. Is this the girl who had her first kiss at 27? No, I already read that one. Yeah. I thought this was a follow up. No, this is difficult. When I was 18, she was a late bloomer, too, because she was 18. Okay, too late bloomers. I interned for a summer in Paris, staying at an international House students in turn. She wasn't allowed to leave Paris. That's what she said. Okay. I met the most wonderful people there. Two English brothers and an Irishman became my particular friends, and we decided to go on a weekend trip to Venice. In a turn of fortune, our last night landed me alone on a dock in Venice with one of the Brits that had shyly been flirting with me for months. It may have been pheromones. It may have been that our teeth did not smash together. But my first kiss led to my first love. Wow. We have been together for two years now, all of it long distance. On a return vacation to Italy we took last winter, the Brit introduced me to stuff you should know. I've been hooked ever since. And as sad as it may sound, you guys helped us stay connected by either sharing of our headphones lol to your podcast as we traveled, or listening separately before we go to bed and ocean a part only to discuss the newest episode in the morning. It's very sweet. Here's an update. She sent me an update a couple of weeks later. The Britt and I actually broke up for a few months, with his career about to start in London and my graduate study starting next year in New York, and a few other complications. However, he said he's made a mistake and he's trying to win me back. He's even willing to move to New York for me. Sweet. He's just waiting for me to decide if that's what I want. And I've been giving him a hard time as I make up my mind. I quote directly when he said, listening to Josh and Chuck at night before I go to bed without you is torture. That is really sweet. This guy's pretty cool. It read a different way. Listening to Josh and Chuck, his torture I told you that you guys play an important part in our lives. To make a long story short, I want to give him a second chance. He's the love of my life. Would there be any chance that you could read my email and perhaps let him know that I am still those wow, I just got chills. Chuck. So nameless Britt. Allison says she still loves you. Sounds like you're moving to New York, buddy. It's like the big Apple's calling your name, my friend. So if you had a secret I'm sorry, not so secret. Kiss on a dock in Venice with a girl named Alison. Then we're talking to you because she didn't give a name. He's calling Britt. Maybe his name is Britt. Maybe Britt from Craig. Britton? So that's it. Wow. And she sent spud me a couple of times, like, are you going to read it? Have you not talked to him? Why don't you talk? Refusing to contact him until it comes out. It's weird, but I hope they don't actually I hope he doesn't move on because he doesn't hear from us because we didn't publish that. Right. Well, I can't even think of something to call for. That was really sweet. If you've ever been on a boat that started sinking, we want to hear about it. Yes. Hopefully the Brit will be flying actually to New York rather than sailing that will be sticking to steamer ship. If you've ever been on a boat that started sinking, we want to hear about that story. You should probably just go ahead and put it in an email and you can address that email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseupworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The Houseepworks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you." | ||
c3e32df0-5460-11e8-b38c-2b2960d232ab | SYSK Selects: Will Computers Replace Doctors? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-will-computers-replace-doctors | With savvy and health-conscious people taking control of their wellbeing through apps and sites, technology is meeting the desire for individuals' responsibility for their health. But is the day coming soon when doctors will be obsolete, replaced by computers that read our health-related data to treat us? We explore these questions and more in this classic episode. | With savvy and health-conscious people taking control of their wellbeing through apps and sites, technology is meeting the desire for individuals' responsibility for their health. But is the day coming soon when doctors will be obsolete, replaced by computers that read our health-related data to treat us? We explore these questions and more in this classic episode. | Sat, 04 Jan 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=4, tm_isdst=0) | 34285706 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, its me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen will computers replace doctors? It's an episode so dated, I still wore a Fitbit when we recorded it. No, but seriously, it is a really interesting episode, and even though we recorded it years ago, the stuff that we're talking about still quite hasn't come to fruition. So sit back and enjoy this peek into the future. 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. Our guest producer. Noel is here. Yes. Jerry needs a buffer day from her Christmas break. You can't say that. Sure I can. No, she's at home on her buffer day in the freezing cold. Because we record these somewhat in advance. We are in the midst of the polar vortex. Yeah. Everyone's just talking about how cold it is. We're back here. This is our first recording after the holidays. It's literally freezing cold out. So welcome back, buddy. Thanks. Welcome back to you, too. Even though this will be, what, like, late January? It'll be a balmy 16. Atlanta. I think the end of January is when this one comes out. All right. Well, happy New Year. Happy New Year. To you too. And happy holidays to you. Thanks. Chuck. Yes, sir. You're feeling good? You loose? Are you ready? I'm loose. So you see this? You've seen this before? Yeah. Your Fitbit. My Fitbit. Is that buzz marketing? Not really. It's just a really good example. I like Fitbit. I'm not necessarily loyal to it or anything like that. They don't pay me money to mention to get invites with podcasts. Sometimes I'll just be like, Stop staring at me, fitbit. Yeah. But no, I like it. I'm happy with it. I pointed out, though, because it's part of this to me, and I don't think it's over. Confirmation bias. It seems like there really is a growing desire among just average, ordinary people to be able to track their health, their well being, their activity, and to do it easily. Yeah. We have tools now that make it like, that thing super convenient. Yeah. And Fitbit is not the only one. There's, like, Nike FuelBand. There's Jawbone is another really good one. There's others like that track your galvanic response so they're able to put that together with respiration and heartbeat and come up with a pretty good assessment of how many calories you're burning at any given time, which is like kind of a Holy grail with this kind of thing right now. There's others that track your sleep. There are apps out there that let you track your mood. There's sites like Quantified Self, which are basically like people trying to push wearable technology like this further into the future. There's entire websites like Sharecare.com that are dedicated to health information and health support. Yeah. Self advocacy. Yeah. It seems to me this desire to kind of say, hey, this is my health, this is my body. Yeah, I want to know more about it. Totally. I don't want to necessarily cut out doctors, but I want to decide if I should go to the doctor if it's time or not, and I want to use data to do that. Yeah, I imagine I frustrate a lot of doctors because I'm one of those obnoxious people that goes in and it's like, well, here's what I think I have based on my research. There's nothing wrong with that. That is what you're an informed patient. That's true. That's exactly what you're supposed to do. And if you're getting on your doctor's nerves, then go see another doctor. Yeah, I agree. I actually am in search of a new GP right now for those because and others you got on his nerves. Other reasons, too. Oh, really? Cold hands? No, like poor bedside manner. Never seen the doctor. Like, here's my intern from Emory, which is great. I love them getting experience, but I would like them both to be in there, not just like, smell you later, and the doctor leaves. Well, that's another thing, too. It's kind of like, okay, let's just lay it out on the table. Here what you've just mentioned and what I was talking about. If you put it all together, the medical field physicians in particular are currently in the beginning of what's possibly a really pickle of a state for them, I think a transition period. Yes. But they may be transitioned right out of existence? In large part, yes. Some may, for sure, depending on who you talk to. There's like, this whole question now, what is the future of medicine? And more specifically, in the case of this episode that we're talking about, do human physicians factor largely into that future? Yeah. And the answer is, I don't know. Yes, depending on who you ask. Like I said, there's this one guy, Dr. Kent Bottles, who he feels that GPS might go the way of the Dodo and be replaced by diagnostic computers, maybe with avatars. Then there's other people. Like Farhad Manju. He's a technical writer. His wife is a pathologist. He thinks, no, the GPS are the ones that are going to be in business. The specialists are going to be out of business because computers are really good at specializing on one single thing, not maybe so good at a general practitioner thing. Right. So there's lots of opinions out there on how much they'll be replaced and who might be replaced. Right. As Rakline wrote a column, he basically said, no, we will still need humans. Sure. But we mainly need humans to communicate to the other humans and facilitate the interaction between the robots and the humans. And we already have those. They're called nurses or nurse practitioners. Yeah. Ezra Klein is the one that thought that a computer avatar might have a better bedside manner than a doctor. Well, let's give that one example. There's an example I kept finding while we were doing research for this and it's actually in the article on how stuff works. There was a medical kiosk during a panel called Man Made Mines colon living with Thinking Machines. When there's a colon in there, you know, it's serious stuff. Yeah. And it was at the World Science Festival in 2011. And basically this computerized avatar interacted with a woman whose baby had diarrhea. Right. And the woman said, hey avatar, my baby has diarrhea, what are you going to do about it? Yeah. And the avatar said, well, tell me all the symptoms and all this stuff. And the avatar decided that the baby's diarrhea, while present, wasn't severe enough to warrant immediate medical attention. So it went ahead and made an appointment with a human doctor for later on that week. And the mother said that she preferred the treatment by the avatar to the real life nurses at the hospitals where she lived in New York. Yeah. So it is possible to create computers with better bedside manner than, say, your GP? Well, at the very least, it'll be consistent. And that's one of the things that I'm not poopooing doctors or nurses. There are many great ones, but I've also had some pretty bad experiences in emergency rooms and with doctors and nurses, with a computer, at least it's a consistent they're programmed to display empathy no matter what. They're not too busy and they're not having a bad day. Exactly. So they don't have any prejudices against you personally or anything like that. Their computer. They don't hate diarrhea. But humans respond to even programmed empathy, even synthetic empathy from a computer. I could see that a little bit. I've dove into the gaming world enough to know that the realism of an avatar can be convincing. And it's not like you think, oh, it's a real person, but it helps to put a human face on it. Exactly. Literally. Yeah. I saw a reference to a study that found people who were being treated for anxiety disorders tended to share more about their experiences and themselves with an avatar than with a human psychiatrist. That's interesting because they're not embarrassed to tell a real person. That makes sense. I might open up more to a computer. Right. So we've got that part like bedside manner. It is possible that we can create machines now and are creating machines now that have at least equal, if not better bedside manner than some physicians. Okay, so bedside manner one of the big things that doctors bring to the table. Check computers have that. Yeah. It's different now than it was in the old days. I feel like just the whole quality of personal care has gone down. It's not necessarily a doctor's fault. There's a lot of reasons to place the blame, but it's not like when you were a kid and you feel like you had your family doctor who knew you maybe even gave birth. Not gave birth to your health. You're my son. Yeah, exactly. Just invested. Like, you got to stick with the same doctor if you want that kind of care, I think. Right. And there's another benefit besides bedside banner that comes with that kind of care. That kind of personal care is an awareness of your medical history. Yeah, sure. Not just that, but oh, well, your dad died of congenital heart disorder or something like that, so you may be at higher risk of it. Totally. Just that kind of awareness has been typically lost, too. Even though we have medical histories and they're in our charts and they're in our files, an intimate knowledge of a patient's medical history is pretty much lost in today's modern practice of medicine. Yeah, that's another thing that computers could conceivably top doctors on, which basically falls under the umbrella of diagnosis or diagnostics. Yeah. There's two sides to this. There's diagnoses and treatment and some programs. A little bit of the history this goes back to the 1970s at the University of Pittsburgh. They developed software to diagnose problems. Mass General, since the 80s, has been working on their DX plan, which provides ranked list of diagnoses, whereas what's, the computer the Watson. Watson who won a jeopardy. Yeah. That's more based, it looks like, on treatment options than diagnosis at this point. Well, yeah, but they said I don't think they want to leave it alone with diagnosis yet. No. And to do its thing. There's already something out there for diagnosis that's meant to support physicians. From what I understand with Watson, if there is a doctor of the future, it's Watson. Yeah. He has a lot of advantages over not just human doctors, but other artificial intelligence healthcare machines, I guess, that you could clumsily call it. He has a knack for natural language. So let's say there's, like, a structured formula or formulaic type of language that the medical field is supposed to use, right? Yes. Okay. Health records don't always necessarily contain that language. They might contain natural language, which is really confusing for computers to take in and absorb. Yeah. Humans can pick up on meanings of things that robots and software cannot. Right. Like inferences. We might be using sarcasm, although there's probably not going to be any sarcasm in your medical records. Yeah, but, like, figurative language and stuff like that. Computers language is a big part of the problem. More to the point, with the diagnosis, patient says he feels like he has a hive of bees in his stomach. That might mean something to you or me, but to a computer, it's like, don't follow a bunch of bees or something. Right. Watson has the advantage of saying, okay, well, there's a sensation of bees in the stomach. There's not actually bees in the stomach. So let's figure this out. Right. Then Watson or anything that he eventually becomes will be able to go through medical records current medical research, the patient's medical history, diagnostic tests that were done, blood work, instrument test, and put it all together and then spit out a list of diagnoses with different confidence level. So the one at the top is the one that Watson says is he is 98.97% sure is what's wrong with this patient. And as a diagnostician, that's pretty impressive. And that's using all the available data that's available also to human physicians, but they simply don't have the time to take it all in. Yeah, I think some research said that 80% of doctors spend less than 5 hours a week reading medical journals a month. A month? Yeah. So these things can read thousands in seconds. So it's sort of a matter of efficiency, really. And if doctors don't have time to read all this stuff I know we looked into this one, sort of a savant diagnoser. Is that a word? Diagnostician. Diagnostician, yeah. Dr. Daliwal in San Francisco, he's sort of legendary for diagnosing things to the point where he does it on stage is almost like a parlor trick. I would love to see it. I would, too. They give him 45 minutes and a bunch of symptoms, basically, like, really confusing because they're trying to stump them. Right. And generally he comes out on top. But he even uses a program, a diagnostic program called Isabelle. Right. That's the one I said earlier that's already here. Yeah. So doctors are using these to help themselves out. But he says that he's never had Isabel offer a diagnosis that he has missed. Right, but he's like the dude, though. Yeah, and he also admits it. He's like, I'm a freak of nature. Right. Go ahead, quiz me. Exactly. He also reads like case histories, like, for fun, that kind of stuff. He's not really he's not a normal physician. He's a complete and total outlier, where if every physician were like this guy, then there probably wouldn't be this conversation going on right now. Yeah, you're right. But most physicians aren't. And it's not just with current medical research that they're just not aware of because they haven't had time to pick up the lancet the last few months. But it's also their training, too. Like, if a doctor is in practice for 20 years, the human brain tends to create habits because it likes to expend as little energy as possible. It's trying to be as efficient as possible. And I think the same thing happens with medical practice. You're trained, you understand. You come out of medical school with a lot of book learning, and then you put it to practice, and you kind of find your niche. And along the way, you forget a lot of the stuff that you haven't done in 20 years or haven't learned about in 20 years. So it's not just current stuff, it's old stuff, too. And if you feed the Physician's Desk Reference into Watson or one of his compatriots, all of that knowledge can be quickly indexed and researched to try to spit out a more accurate diagnosis. Yeah, I think that's a great idea. It's like partnering up with computers, not necessarily replacing, but what they're doing with Watson is very much moving toward replacing doctors in that sense. Well, here's a scary stat. One in five diagnosis in the United States are incorrect or incomplete. One in five. And a lot of times it's not that the doctor is a jerk or not any good, but like you said, they just maybe haven't seen these cases that were written about in some obscure medical journal that the computer has scanned and indexed. Right. And Dollywall doctor Dollywell himself at freak Diagnostician Dollywood? Yeah, pretty close. Which is a wonderful place, by the way. I know you love Dollywood himself. Says a lot, even with me. A lot of it is intuition, and intuition can be wrong. That's a criticism, though, of computers as doctors. They lack intuition. There's kind of even larger than this computers replacing doctors conversation going on. It's kind of a conversation or a debate over whether intuition or data trumps one or the other, which one is the right way to go. Yeah, this one stat, too. It says, according to an expert. I'm not sure what that means. It sounds kinky, but they said only 20% of the knowledge of physicians use to diagnose is evidence based. So that means 80% is intuition. Yeah. Which also jibes and dovetails with that one in five being wrong or one in five being right. I like the idea of intuition to a certain degree, for sure. Yeah. But there's also got to be, like, data backing it up. Sure. Right. So in your perfect world, and it sounds like we still have physicians, but they go back and double check themselves using a program. Yeah, but I could also be down with simple what do they call it in here? Something based diseases. Rules based chronic diseases. Yeah. Like minor things that are pretty easy to diagnose. Well, they're not even necessarily minor. We just understand them so fully true that we say type two diabetes is going to behave and present itself like this. Yeah, but I wouldn't mind going like, it seems like once a year I get like, an upper respiratory infection. It's been three or four years in a row, and I know what the treatment is, I know how it feels. It would be great to go into a machine and have them take some stats and blow into it and hear my wheezing and give me a steroid shot and a Z pack and a breathing treatment and send me on my way. That's always what clears it up. Would you care if it was a robot no. That gave you that shot? Not at all. Yeah, but I definitely would want more personal care if it was something what if it was a robot with a nice avatar, sexy avatar. Maybe just a friendly one. Yeah, that was a little it would touch your forearm here or there. Yes. Well, that might be a little creepy. Oh, really? Yes. If it was an old timey doctor who gave you some Epicac, if you had diarrhea, send you on your way. Right. Drink a Coke, but it wouldn't send you on your way, give you Ipicak, and then it wouldn't let go of your forearm. Yeah. So strong. Well, surgical robots, that's the thing. I mean, we're kidding around, but they've been performing they've been performing robotic surgery since the early eighty s doctor assisted until 2010, when they were in Montreal. They performed the first fully robotic surgeries when they removed a prostate with a fully robotic surgeon and a fully robotic anesthesiologist. Dr. Mcsleep. Dr. Mcsleep, yeah, and that's the real name. The robot surgeon was DaVinci, which is like the basically gold standard for robotic surgical surgical robots. Yeah. They had 2013 350,000 robotic surgeries performed in the US. So it's big. It is. But the DaVinci is a doctor basically sitting in a little looks like an arcade game, and using robotic arms to mimic his or her movements on more microscopic levels. Right. So the robot has more precise movements and makes smaller movements than the doctor. What's the opposite of telescoping? Like going downward in scale, whatever that is? It's taking the movements of the doctor and reducing them in scale. Let's call it reverse telescoping. Reverse telescoping, those movements, which is a pretty awesome achievement in and of itself. The doctors being fed 3D graphics of what the robot is seeing and just kind of working from there. What we're moving towards, apparently, is fully roboticized surgeries. I was talking to Joe McCormick from Forward Thinking, and he was saying that there's something called the Raven Four, I believe, and basically you just say, this is going to be a gallbladder surgery on a six foot six male age, whatever. And here's the Cat scan of his abdomen. So go remove the gallbladder and you press Enter, and the thing goes in there and removes the guy's gallbladder. And so that's fully robotic, like fully autonomous robotic surgery. Like, you press a button and it does it. You're not actually controlling a machine that does it. Exactly. Yeah. The machine is doing it at your behest, but you're not controlling it. And we're right on the cusp of that, and apparently it's already happening. Yeah, but there are some issues. I looked into it and found that a lot of injury reporting and robotic surgery is not being reported. It's substandard. And this woman, Sheena Wilson, had robotic surgery for Hysterectomy in 2013. And apparently this intuitive surgical system, there had been a bunch of injuries that she didn't know about, and she had her rectum burned badly and said, if I would have known that this system had these issues, I would not have elected to take part in it. So there's a lot of under reporting. The FDA, they have no authority to force a doctor to do this. And apparently there's every reason and every link in the chain not to report these things. And the FDA not enforcing this kind of thing, not enforcing reporting is ridiculous. Yes. You know, the thing is, things like that happen. And there's under reporting with human surgeons as well, not just robotics. It's like, overall, apparently, surgical injury and accident reporting is not compulsory. Yeah. And here's a few points, though, counter points, I guess is one, it's not always the robotic component of the surgery that was the cause. Yeah, that's a good point. A lot of times they say they don't know about this until, like, a lawsuit is filed. So it could be weeks or months later. What, the physician doesn't know about it or the patient, the FDA might not get a report on it, and like six months later, you file a lawsuit. And that's how it comes to light. But the FDA is definitely concerned and are supposedly working to improve this faster. Very concerned. They're very concerned. And another problem too, in that same article, a lot of these robotic surgical systems, you still have to have the correct amount of training. And the feeling of some experts is that or at least this one guy, Enrico Benadetti, he's a head of surgery at the University of Illinois, Chicago, says a lot of it just comes back to training. Some of these doctors aren't getting adequately trained in these machines enough to perform the surgery. Yeah, like what happens when I do this? Oh, that happens. It's not good. I've got another alarming stat for you, too. Before that, let's do a message break real quick. Okay. Tell me your alarming stat. All right. John top considered a study that found as many as 40,000 patients die in intensive care each year in the US. Due to misdiagnosis. 40,000. Man and another study found that system related factors like lack of teamwork and communication or just poor processes were involved in 65% of diagnostic error and cognitive factors, and 75% with premature closure is the most common, which is basically just sticking to that initial diagnosis and not being open minded to other second opinions. Yeah. So there's this thing called anchoring bias that was in that New York times article. Dr. Dalawal, the guy who created this program that's now around to support diagnostics, where a physician will say, I think it's this, but let me put in the symptoms and ask Isabelle, which is the name of the program, and it's named after the guy who created the program's daughter. Oh, man, that story is rough. Yeah. When she was three, took her to the hospital and the doctor said, well, she has chickenpox, and she did indeed have chicken pox. But that's all they looked at. Yeah, they completely missed a pretty nasty case of necrotizing fasciitis, which we've talked about before flesh eating bacteria, and she almost died from it. It was disfigured from it as a result. So her father, who is a money manager, said, I'm going to take whatever computer programming skills I have and put it toward this program. Isabel, which is meant to say, yes, you're right with this diagnosis, I agree with you. Or, have you considered these other diagnoses? Yeah, and he said, like, had Isabel been around and his daughter's doctors consulted it, they would not have missed the necrotizing fasciitis. Well, it makes sense. As an assist, there's this company called Lifecom that said in clinical trials that if you use a medical diagnostic program as an assist, those engines were 91% accurate without using exams or imaging or labs even. Really? Just symptoms. Yeah. That's crazy. That's really, really good. Yeah. Like, that's A. That's a low A. It's still an A. But as an assistant, I think it's kind of a no brainer, don't you think? Oh, yeah. I think so. I don't know why all I can think of is possibly worrying about feeding the beast that will take your job. Sure. Or just having too much of a caseload to take the time to double check your work on a computer would be the only reasons why doctors aren't using that. Well, the smartphone is becoming a potential self diagnoser. There's all these cool things on the horizon that you can use your phone for. There's one called Alive Core, which you can take your own ECG test. Yeah. And potentially, for the cost of getting one ECG in a hospital, you could send a year's worth of daily ECGs. You took yourself to your doctor. Right. And then you carry all that info and all of your other medical info from all of your apps that will eventually be integrated into one or two apps that will probably come preloaded on your iPhone in the next couple of years. And you've got your medical history right there. Yeah. Most of these require a little clip on, like something called self scope. That's like you clip it onto your little camera lens, essentially, and it's like, what are the little magnifiers of the lights that doctors use to look in your ears and eyes? Yeah. Looks like one of those clipped onto your iPhone. And it produces you can do imaging for skin moles and rashes and ear infections. They have one called inetra that you could potentially give your own eyes, get your own glasses, prescription done. That's neat. And then you just order it online, the information to some website, and they send you your glasses. And then this one called Adamant that smells your breath. It smells gases in your breath. And it could detect, like, lung cancer even. Yeah. Apparently you have real metabolic changes to the smell of your breast when you have different types of cancer, not just lung. Like, bees can detect breast cancer. If you breathe into, like, this special glass sphere with bees around it. They can be trained to detect lung cancer, and they come back with the correct results a lot of the time. Wow. So a lot of these are on the horizon. They're not, like, in heavy rotation yet. No, but it's pretty neat. All of them reveal this idea that no one cares about your particular health and well being more than you, unless you're one of those dudes who doesn't really care than your wife does or your mom. And we probably cares more about me than me. Right. But the point is, the doctor, the insurance company, the hospital, while they're all in the field, because they do care about your health, of course, they can't possibly care about it more than you or your loved one does. So the idea of giving you the ability to keep all of that information yourself and easily hand it over to them, or potentially down the road, a computer version of them, I can't think of any better revolution in medicine right now than that. Agreed. I think it's pretty exciting. Yeah. I think we're going to live into the triple digits, buddy. Yeah. And I think there will always be a need for doctors and nurses. I don't think anyone will be wholly replaced, but a little robot assist. Yeah. Not bad. Let me make one more point. All right. So you've heard of genomics. Yes. There's also this thing called protonomics, which is basically your protein version of your genome. And it's all of the proteins in your body that you have that you're manufacturing that you're losing, and all the changes and fluctuations in them. And the idea is that you can get a full workup of your proteinome and your genome, and eventually you can add that to your medical history as well. What your EKG readings been over the past year, any weight you may have gained or lost or anything like that, what your breath smells like, metabolically speaking. And not only have your current state of health, but personalized your version of that, personalized down to your genes and proteins in your body. So a treatment could be specifically tailored to you. Well, that's going to be really tough for a human physician to do that on their own, to top that. Yeah. The amount of data available already is overwhelming. Human doctors, when you add this other kind of stuff on it, it's just pulling away from them more and more. Yeah. And medical record keeping is I know there's been issues with that in digitizing that and keeping up with medical records. And if you could be yourself advocate and keep up with your own medical records right. It might be kind of nice. Yeah. So I feel like we answered the question, which is, yes, no more doctors. I don't know. I think in the future, I will always have humans to interact between us, I think, because we're always going to want somebody. To yell at or be like, what is this robot doing? Or can you help me? This robot gave me some epic act and won't let go of my arm or burn my rectum. Yes. We're always going to need humans. I don't know what we need. Physicians. And if we do, will they be super specialized, like just the supreme court of physicians? Yeah, who knows? It's pretty exciting. But we will see this change one way or another in the next 15 years under my prediction. It's happening. Yeah. Okay. Good. Chuck. Yeah, man. Kick off the new year. Yes. Really? If you want to learn more about computers possibly replacing doctors, you can type those words into the search bar. Howstofworks.com? And since I said search bar, that means it's time for a message break. Okay, so what do we have? Listener mail time? Yeah. I have one called I'm going to call it fight club. Okay. Hey, guys. Just finished the podcast on deep refrigerating. I think I'll keep my energy star certified fridge. Thanks very much. But Josh did mention something about eating weeds and asked somewhat rhetorical question, what are weeds anyway? Just plants we say are bad. It reminded me of some of today's common noxious weeds, how they got their reputation. Not so long ago, lawns were perfect blends of Bermuda, Ryan and Kentucky bluegrass. They also included many types of clover, dandelion, and other, quote, weeds. In fact, many seed mixtures specifically included white clover, as it makes an excellent cover in soils where more common grasses won't grow in steps. The Scott fertilizer company post world war II America housing tracks were popping up all over the US and new suburbia, and Scott was encouraging returning GIS to take pride in their new lawns and to buy their products to do so and to wear extremely high waisted pants. Right. They produce fertilizers, weed killers and other lawn care products, some of which had a curious side effect, killing many leafy greens that came up to the point that were not considered weeds at the time, including white clover. Instead of reformulating, what they did was what any red blooded American corporation would do. They redefined what was a weed. White clover made that list as the dandelions, when in fact, both are still in use today in cooking and medicines. Would you call that a noxious weed? No. So thanks for that guy, and thanks for all the knowledge I've learned. And have a great 2014. And that is from Robert Paulson. Oh, yeah, Robert Paulson. He's a sharp dude. That's why I called it fight club. Remember that? Oh, yeah. I think I made a joke to him about that once on Twitter and he never responded. Yeah, he writes in a lot now. Every time I see his name, I think. And his name is Robert Paulson. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Robert. Paulson. We appreciate you. If you ever shot in the head in the commission of a robbery, we will dispose of your body. Yes. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck, and you have a name that you would like us to poke fun at, bring it on. You can tweet to Usysk podcast. You can post your name on Facebook. Comstuffyshono. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com, and then, of course, go visit our website. Make it your homepage. It's the coolest place on the web. It's Stuffyoustknow.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 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." | |
432aee72-53a3-11e8-bdec-e78c79be91c9 | How Coyotes Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-coyotes-work | The coyote truly is wily. Even after a century-long attempt to drive them to extinction, this close relative of domesticated dogs not only hung onto survival, but actually doubled its range and expanded its population. Coyotes are here to stay. | The coyote truly is wily. Even after a century-long attempt to drive them to extinction, this close relative of domesticated dogs not only hung onto survival, but actually doubled its range and expanded its population. Coyotes are here to stay. | Tue, 10 Mar 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=70, tm_isdst=0) | 43451104 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, Vancouver. Hello, Portland. We're going to be in your cities sunday, March 29. Monday, March 30, coach that's right. And this is Portland, Oregon. Since we've been to Portland, Maine, we need to specify now. Oh, yeah, that's right. But that'd be weird to go go from Vancouver to Portland, Maine. But, yeah, we can't wait. We've been to both these towns. They've always been kind to us. But we are performing in larger venues this time, so we need you to come out and support us so we don't feel like dumb dumbs. And you can find out all the information, including where to buy tickets@sysclive.com. 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 your other host, charles W. Chuck Bryant. There there's Jerry Rowland, our producer. This is stuff you should know. Coyote Edition. So how are we going to pronounce it? I mean, it's Coyote, but Coyote is kind of fun. But you could also pronounce it Coyote. Coyote. Sure. There's a lot of ways. Yeah. So I say Coyote, but I don't think that that's technically correct. You think it's Coyote? Maybe coyote. I think I just swallowed my tongue. There's a lot of good band names in here, by the way, I noticed. Oh, yeah. Call them all out. Well, I'll call out the first one right away. Genus Canis. It's pretty good. Okay. Coyotes are members of the genus Canis. Yeah. And canis includes all dogs. Yeah. Jackals dogs, wolves and dogs. That's why I said dogs. I know, but there's so many great dogs that you just got to say it twice. Well, I don't want to short change the jackals of the world. Who likes jackals? Nobody likes jackals. That's right. Screw them. Right. Save them once. As a matter of fact, let's go back and beep out the second time we said that name. But, hey, one thing about this, about a family, Canada, which all dogs belong to, it's a really old family. Sure. And it's native to North America. So, like, all those jackals, if you want to talk about them somewhere that made it outside of North America yes. They started here. They didn't come from anywhere else. They started in North America. Coyotes. North American is apple pie and granny and baseball. And dogs. And dogs. That's right. We've done a lot of episodes that are dog related over the years. That's right. And I still haven't knocked out the one that I really want to do, which is the first dog, like, the first domesticated dog. That'd be a good one. They made that movie, but I'm not sure if it had any truth to it whatsoever. Train spotting. When that stuff happens, do you just say the first thing that comes into your head? No, first thing that came into my head was never cry wolf. But I was like, that makes too much sense. Oh, I remember that movie. That was a good one. Yeah, that was a good one. That was when we were kids, right? It was a Disney jam, but I think it was, like, a little was it scary or there's something about it that made it, like, groundbreaking for Disney. I don't remember what it was. Yeah, I remember, too. And then that terrible looking call of the Wild thing is out. Now, why can't anybody do an animal real stuff? It's driving me crazy. Have you seen these Spectrum ads with Ellen DeGeneres on them? No. Apparently they're just using CGI. Ellen, because Ellen I was making a joke. It's the weirdest makeup I've ever seen that actually makes her look CGI. But it looks so much like that. It seems likelier to me that it's a CGI. Ellen. And I don't understand why. Surely not. Prove me wrong, world. Well, I'm thinking now, if I'm Ellen and they say, hey, we want to shoot a bunch of spots with you, we'll pay you $5 million, or we'll pay you three and a half million for your image likeness. You could stay at home. I would stay at home. I would travel. You would? Sure. That's true. A million and a half bucks? Yeah, it's a lot of dough. I would travel. Plus, also, I mean, like, her spots in these Spectrum commercials are so small and limited that it couldn't possibly take more than half of a day per spot. Yeah. And when you're a big star like that, you can dictate it. You can be like, sure, I'll do it. You've got me for 2 hours. Right. You have to pay for the teleportation. That's right. So, yes, they call the wild thing to stop. Everybody agree? Stop. Yeah. Of course. Maybe Harrison Ford was so stoned, he didn't even realize it wasn't a real dog. God bless them. All right, so back to coyotes. The scientific name is Kenneth latrans. Barking dog. Sure. Boy, they make a lot of noise. We'll get to that. There are 19 subspecies. Generally, it has to do with their range, but sometimes it can be bigger or smaller, different kind of coats. And one thing we will learn throughout this whole thing and we need a Tshirt that says, this is dang it to the coyote cannot be stopped. No. Boy, do they persevere. There's probably no greater survivor maybe currently alive on Earth that's a mammal at least than a coyote. Yeah. I mean, we will see. There have been efforts over the years to extinct them on purpose. Like a coyote holocaust. Yeah. And the coyote just trots away with that signature bounce and gives it the finger good luck. And has actually expanded the range and swollen in population despite an effort to drive them purposely to extinction. Yeah. A well funded really? Yeah. At different times, too. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. Yeah, it really is. I feel very bad for coyotes. I do, too. One reason I wanted to do this one yeah. Is because there's coyotes in Atlanta. There's coyotes in every major city in America, almost. Yeah. And there's coyotes around yumi's in my neighborhood, and that means it's momo's neighborhood, too. Sure. And so Yuumi went off on this like she found out about that and just started learning everything she could about coyotes. Like, we need a new fence. We got to get a coyote vest for momo, which she now has some of the spiky things. Yeah, she looks adorable in it. They work for hawks and things, too, right? Yeah. I think they're one in the same predator vest. Sure. But I think it's called, like the brand name is a coyote vest. I think we know a lot about coyotes because they're in our neighborhood, and the more we learn about it, the more it's like I hate them in that they would take momo if they had a chance, but I also do feel bad for them, too, because they are just trying to make their own way and live there, just being a coyote. Right, exactly. I mean, Emily and I saw coyotes in our neighborhood, in La. In Igorok, on walks, and we saw them we see them in Atlanta. We saw one a few months ago at night that looks very sick and was alone. But we will dispel some myths. Not every coyote you see alone is rabid. Not every coyote you see during the day is rabid. And we'll get more into this, but if it weren't for people, coyotes would be out all the time during the day, right? Yeah. They're not nocturnal by nature. No, they're not. They're dirty or naughty by nature. Well, they may be the ones that live closest to humans in urban areas or suburban areas, have actually adapted their behavior and become I don't know what you call it. I guess they are nocturnal, but they're most active at dawn and dusk. Right. But they're definitely not diurnal where they're active during the day and sleep at night like they normally are. They've actually altered their behavior. This is just one of the many coyotes are like, fine, we'll change to stay alive. That's right. I think another urban coyote was another band name I thought was good, and I actually looked that up. And of course, there's an urban coyote band. Oh, is there? Yeah. Speaking of urban coyotes, they actually caught one in metro Atlanta recently very rare, all black coyote named Carmine. Wow. And they trapped him, the big ragoo. Interesting. But I mentioned that trot that's how if you're out walking at night or walking your dogs and you see what you think is the dog, and there's this little signature bouncy trot, you're like, oh, no, that's no dog. That's a coyote. That's a coyote. Yeah. All right, so back to coyotes in general. They are wolflike, but they have more narrow snouts. They're not quite as muscular and grab, and ASCII helped us put this together. He wanted to point out that they're bigger than foxes, which I thought was funny. Seems obvious to me that they're bigger than foxes, but maybe not everyone knows that. Well, the first coyote that was spotted by Anglo Americans, which was the Lewis and Clark Expedition, they thought it was a fox from afar. And then when they shot one and got up close, they're like, oh, it's kind of wolf. Yeah, they don't look like foxes at all to me. No, but I guess it was like staying far enough away that they couldn't tell. Who knows? People were much dumber back then. They were all smoking opium on that trip. I also would like to acknowledge stuff you should know first. Okay. We had a mid show producer change, right. Jerry started out the show about eight, nine minutes ago. She said, the heck was this? She's had it. Gerry had to go do a call and said, Josh T stepped in. Welcome, Josh. Never happened before. No. Thanks for doing that. I wonder who's going to finish up the show. I don't know. A little pecking bird, perhaps. Okay. Acted like he didn't get the reference. The dipping bird? Yeah, the dipping bird. So coyotes bigger than a fox, smaller than an elephant. Sure. Their nose to tail, body length, usually about two to 5ft. Yeah. They basically look like somebody took a shrink ray on a wolf and just dropped it by like 30% yeah, 20 to \u00a350. Their fur, brown, tan, kind of gray, kind of modeled. And that's a coyote. Yes. They eat mammals mostly, but we'll also there are omnivores. They'll eat berries, if there's a lot of berries. Oh, yeah. They love fruit. They love figs, apparently. But 90% of their diet is mammals, supposedly. Here's the thing. If you're just kind of like coyotes cool, whatever. They're related to dogs and they're all over the place. I want you to just, first of all, listen this episode, but then just start, like, researching coyotes. You will be astounded and amazed at every turn. Coyotes like fruit. So do you know what coyotes do? They climb trees and balance on branches so that they can get all the fruit that they want. Look it up. Look up pictures of coyotes climbing trees. They take small animals like dogs out of the backyard so coyotes can jump over fences 6ft or under and squeeze through slats of pickets three inches or wider. They also dig under if they need to. All sorts of crazy stuff. A coyote will say, hey, lizard, come here. Your lunch. Yeah, they'll eat lizards. Well, so they'll eat just about insects. Yeah, they'll eat insects. They specialize in rodents, small mammals, rabbits, that kind of thing. But they will eat just about anything. And one of the things that hastounded me the most is and I know we're hopping all over the place here. That's right. And I want this to just devolve into, like, here's a cool coyote effect, but it may hey, that's all right. They engage in this social behavior called fission fusion, where they're totally fine hunting alone, living alone, but they're also totally fine hunting impacts living impacts, depending on the kinds of resources available. So if there's, like, deer in an area, a coyote can't take a deer down on their own. But a coyote, if there's deer available in the area, they'll get with other coyotes in the area. You see that guy over there in a pack? But normally they just hunt by themselves when there's, like, say, lots of rabbits, because all it takes is one. But depending on the food available and the resources available, and how many other coyotes are in the area, they'll come into and out of these fluid packs, depending on basically the situation, like what you got to do. Yeah. Here's another thing. Like we said, they eat small rodents and mammals usually. But if you're an elk, like, with a head cold, watch your back, because that coyote knows it. That's true. And he knows that you're not feeling well, and he might come at you with a buddy or two and feast on you for a few days because of that fusion. They've entered that fusion mode, and now they're hunting in pack here's. One thing you don't really need to worry about is coyote attack on yourself. It has happened, but it's very rare. One of the most astounding things I've ever seen is a coyote that was sneaking up on a little kid playing in their driveway. Must have been in California or something like that. And the family cat comes tearing around the side of the house. At the moment, the coyote is about to pounce on the kid and jumps onto the coyote. I've seen that one pushes off of the coyote. The coyote takes off the cat saved the little kid's life. Yeah, I saw the most amazing thing I've ever seen. I saw one just from last night. A group of a pack of coyotes was fended off by a cat, and someone caught it all on their house camera. You don't mess with cats, man. Now, I know they're vicious. Yeah. In that one, if you watch closely, you show me that one of the coyotes all over the cast. She's basically watching animal snuff movies for a while, research. I'm like, you have to stop this. It can't be healthy for you. But she'd just be sitting in bed with her knees pulling her chest, like they're not going to get mad. But one of those coyotes, to get out of the way, the cat just jumps right up on this five foot wall right next to it, like a vertical leap up onto the wall. Like it's not even like it's nothing. But yes. Cats don't mess around with coyotes. It's pretty amazing. So they live usually only about six to eight years in the wild. They have seen them as old as ten or 15, but I kind of wondered about dogs and like just a dog in the woods, a feral dog that never was claimed, if that really was a short lifespan as well. Probably kind of curious compared to a domestic dog, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. If you are a coyote, you will choose your mate for life, which is very sweet, unless that mate dies and then they are allowed to go out and find a new mate. Socially, it's okay. Yeah, but they mate for life. They raise their young together and the young grow up really quick. They usually have about litters of I think I saw six on average, but it can be as low as three. I'm sure it can go even lower than that, but it can get up into the teens. Yeah, if they need them. And this is why coyotes have proven utterly impossible to exterminate. Thankfully, we stopped trying to do that, but for a very long time we tried to, and we'll talk about that more later. But the reason why it proved impossible is because coyote mothers basically change the number of coyotes they have in their litter, depending on how the population is expanding or contracting. And they do this. One of the ways that they figured out they do this is that coyote howl, where you hear a coyote howling nearby, and then some other one is off in the distance, and then another one even further off. They figured out that they are basically taking a census how many you got? And the lack of a response will actually trigger a hormonal change in female coyotes who are reproductive age. And they will have more pups than they would have if they got in a response to their call. Unbelievable. We'll talk about their families in a SEC, but they raise their young and dens. Sometimes they will make their own den, but a lot of times they will take over the den of another animal and renovate it, make it their own, usually expand it, make a little bigger, but a little macrame. Yeah. Maybe add a steam shower, perhaps. Oh, nice. You never know. They return to their dens if they can, year after year, if it's available. And sometimes you will find them in weird places, though, like a drainage tunnel or in the crawl space of a house or something. But those are obviously urban coyotes. Yeah. So their territory actually can be really big, it can be really small. It depends on how dense their food sources are. Yeah, they're really flexible with how they live their lives, like in every single way, shape or form. So much so. We talked about the fission and the fusion social structure. It's just this fluid social structure in the pack. The basic unit of coyote society is the family. The mother and the father, the two alphas, and then their offspring are betas. Yeah, this gets really interesting. And their offspring, again, depending on the resources, they may stick around and help raise another litter. Those are called helpers. They may stick around and basically just mooch. We call those slouches. Yeah. Slouches are the ones who come home from Appalachian State, spend a lot of time on the couch. Right. But they're there. They're in the pack. Right. But it just says here they're not contributing in any way. Basically. Yeah. And then some betas, depending, like if food starts to get scarce or whatever, some alpha's will be like, you need to go. It's time for you to go. Find your own territory, your own range. Go be a loner, go find a mate, just get out of the basement. Basically, yes. But other times they might be allowed to stay depending on the food sources. And that's where that fusion and fission kicks in. That's right. All right, maybe we should take a break here and we'll talk about loaner coyotes right after this. All right, we're back. And we were talking about the pack size, how it can shift depending on the resources. There are also loner coyotes. Maybe they're a beta. They got kicked off the couch finally. Sure. Or maybe they are an aged out alpha. And like I said, if you see a coyote by him or herself, that doesn't mean maybe I should say itself doesn't necessarily mean they are rabid, because you get on these Facebook neighborhood pages and there's coyotes sightings and people lose their minds and give out a lot of bad information. It goes both ways. People are either like, say, kill them, kill it, kill it with fire as fast as you can, or else other people are like, well, I've been feeding it for the last couple of weeks. It's nice. It likes to come play with my dog. Right. Or it's out during the day. It's rabid for sure. Right. Or it was by itself. So it was rabid. There haven't been big outbreaks of rabid cavities in many years. Yes. Apparently they made a concerted effort to eradicate rabies among coyotes. And so not just coyotes, but I think mammals in the wild in general. And so they started basically dropping vaccines, dropping wolfens bait, basically, but vaccinated. What did you say? Wolf bait. I don't think that's a widely known term. My buddy Eddie used to say that for farting. He's dropping Wolf Bay. Okay. He might have made that up. So imagine if that was vaccinated. That's what they were doing. Okay. And wolfe, that's good stuff. I got to say, it's nice having Josh T laughing over there. Not Jerry's. Just permanent lack of care. Right. No idea. So they actually managed to largely get rid of rabies among coyotes, from what we understand. Yeah. So maybe we should talk about the beginnings. Go ahead. I was going to say, but they do definitely carry distemper, and they can carry rabies. It's not to say, like, there are rabid coyotes. It's just not a big problem. And one of those Facebook commenters I quoted saying likes to come play with my dogs. That actually happens. Coyotes are known to play with dogs. That's how Carmine, the rare black coyote, was trapped. He made friends with a Great Pyrenees in Smyrna and was playing around, and they finally set up some traps in the yard, and he fell for one of them. Those Pyrenees are beautiful dogs. They really are. But that Pyrenees hopefully had distemper vaccines because just playing with the coyote, it can get distemper, and it's not something you want your dog to have. No, not at all. So let's talk a little bit about the beginnings of the coyotes. They were, or at least what we think is that coyotes and wolves and then now extinct, other kind of dog basically were around, and they were sort of the starting point for what are coyotes and wolves, but they were apparently much more like coyotes than wolves. So they generally think that coyotes were sort of the OG, evolutionarily speaking. Right. I saw also that there's a line of thinking that they descended from red wolves whose range still is over the southeastern Texas. I think there's still a few around today. But however they started, it happened anywhere from, I think, 2 million years ago to 300,000 years ago. Coyotes evolved, and again here in North America. This is their home continent. But as they started to evolve, the ones that first came along were bigger and heavier than the coyotes we know today. But the problem is they were in direct competition based on their size with wolves. Right. And wolves are and have always been much more aggressive hunters. They don't tolerate other aggressive predators in their range, so they'll go after a coyote. And so this is really interesting. Over the years, just from living with wolves, coyotes apparently started to shrink down in size so that they could fill an ecological niche that had been left open. Rodents and rabbits, which wolves don't care that much about, wolves want to take down, like caribou and elk, and they hunt in packs exclusively. They don't care about rabbits. Right. So that left the rabbits to the coyotes, and coyotes kind of shrunk in size and started going after that. And then one other thing that happened to Chuck was that meant that because they were confronting wolves, the coyotes that were more aggressive and went after wolves or went to go fight wolves when wolves are around, it would die. They died out. Yeah. Which left just the timid ones. Right. Yeah. So coyotes that's why you won't fight in coyotes that are super aggressive these days, because in order to survive the Wolf challenge, it's another good band name. Yeah. The wolf Challenge is an amazing band. Yeah, that's not bad. There's a lot of wolf bands, though. Wolf parade and wolf mother. Wolf Mother. Yeah. Other wolves. Yeah. That's not the name of a band. Other wolves? It might be. Could be, yeah. So those are the ones that stuck around. And like we said, coyotes, that's just another example of how bad they want to survive these days. They are listed as a species of least concern, which means we don't have to do anything. Nothing. No conservation efforts whatsoever. The only conservation effort that has been hung on coyotes is that there is a law that says we are not allowed to drive them to extinction, which is a reversal of the original policy, as we'll see. Should we go ahead and talk about that? Yeah, let's. So, yeah, there was a policy when was it? In the 19th 30s, starting in the 19th century, I think. Okay. Where they basically said a lot of it was sensationalist journalism, but basically, the coyotes were the scourge of the earth, and they will kill every chicken and every sheep and every cow on your property and your horses, and we got to get rid of them all. Yeah. So basically it was a response to Anglo American ranchers well, actually, any American ranchers moving westward farming cattle and sheep and all that, and they were just being predated on by wolves. So really, they went after wolves first. Right. And they were really successful at almost driving all wolves to extinction, because wolves hunt and pack, and so if you kill enough wolves, they don't have enough wolves to hunt in that pack any longer, and the remaining survivors starved to death. Right. So they really worked at getting rid of wolves, and it was really effective. Coyotes were less effective, but the coyotes started preying on the prey that the wolves were no longer around to prey on. So they went after coyotes, and they went after them big time. They killed hundreds of thousands, millions and millions and millions of coyotes over the years. Yeah, with, like, sponsored I think they said, congress, give us $10 million for the next ten years, and we'll take care of them all right about the same time. So that was the biological survey? Yes, it was 1928, the eradication methods laboratory of the bureau of biological survey. They basically said, we're going to start coming up with strict nine pills and, like, little misters that shoot cyanide in the coyote's face. And they were lacing carcasses with all this poison, and they were killing off all sorts of other animals, too, but no one cared because everyone hated the coyotes so much that they just didn't care how many other animals died just as long as we were getting rid of the coyotes. But around that time, biologists started to be like, wait a minute, I'm not entirely certain it's a good idea to get rid of predators or any kind of animal that we find a nuisance that's probably not the way we should be doing things. Yeah. And it also coincided with sort of an anti poison movement where people were like, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't be putting poison all over our forests for just any old animal to die if it comes near it. Yeah, and that was around the beginning of the 30s, but the government said, no, we're getting rid of coyotes. The ranchers interests are above the coyotes interests. Yeah. Big money talking. Right. So not only did they poison them, they would shoot them from airplanes and helicopters. And still today apparently killed tens of thousands of coyotes by shooting at them from helicopters. Like taxpayer funded programs do that. Yeah, they definitely are still culling coyotes, and coyotes are still giving them a little skinny paw. Middle finger. Right. So by the 70s, Richard Nixon apparently banned the use of poisons. Had no idea about that. Look at him sign the endangered species act of 1973. And that gave the coyotes enough breathing room to basically say, okay, we're not going to go extinct. But here's the thing. Because we were so successful at wiping out wolves, the coyotes, which have been limited almost exclusively to the southwestern United States, served to spread. And where the wolves had once been, coyotes started popping up in places they had never been seen before. Yeah. Southeastern United States. They've been spotted in Central America at this point. They were found in 1940 on the apostle islands in Wisconsin, which is, at least, from what I could tell, half a mile swim from the mainland. Amazing. And apparently they're pretty good swimmers, too. And then they started to move into the suburbs, and then they started to move into the cities. And now today, there's a guy at Ohio state named Stanley Gert who specializes in studying coyotes in Chicago. Downtown Chicago wow. Has hundreds of coyotes living in alleyways and crevasses and all sorts of places right out of sight of human beings. And they just come out at night, and they've learned how to navigate traffic and just basically stay out of sight. If you just type in urban coyotes to your favorite search engine and looked under images, there are pictures of coyotes, like, in the middle of strip malls and with casinos behind them, and they're just everywhere. Yeah. I'm surprised I haven't seen one in Times Square at this point. Wasn't it in heat where they show that coyote, like, crossing the street or crossing the highway? I haven't seen it so long. I'm pretty sure it's in heat. Good movie. Yeah. Should we take another break? Let's do it. All right. More coyote speak right after this. So just to point this out one more time, if you remember from our lyme disease episode, we concluded that if we hadn't wiped out wolves, ticks wouldn't have been able to take over and expand because the deer population wouldn't have exploded. That's right. There would not be coyotes in Chicago right now if the wolf population was stable in the United States or North America. Yeah, And coyotes also were able to live in and are able to live in urban environments, whereas wolves could not. Oh, no way. So they really were basically like, hey, we'll go where the wolves won't go. We'll eat what the wolves won't eat. We'll hunt by ourselves because the wolves can't. Right. And look at us. We're going to thrive. Yeah. And without wolves, there's nothing to keep them in check. To keep their population in check. No angry Facebookers. That's it, basically. So that whole eradication campaign has been put to the side. There's definitely still lots of coyotes that are killed every year. Yes. I think between 2006 and 2011, they killed more than half a million coyotes legally. I saw that there was a half a million that are killed a year still. Yeah, like 1 minute every year. Wow. I've also seen 35,000. I don't know if it's just certain divisions are responsible for half a million or maybe certain years. They ramp up the efforts more than others. I don't know. But there are definitely still a tremendous amount of coyote deaths. But as we've seen, coyotes have been extremely successful in the face of this extermination campaign just by reproducing, depending on the local population. If you're a rancher, you don't have to be a part of some program. Like you're taking care of things in the rancher way. Right. Which is traps, guns, poison. Yeah. There's no laws protecting coyotes whatsoever. Again, the only law, as far as I know. I think it's part of the Endangered Species Act that says we're not allowed to drive coyotes to extinction, but that's it. You can kill a coyote. The only thing keeping you from shooting a coyote, like in city limits or gun ordinances, basically, yeah. You can kill a coyote any way you want, but here's the thing. Put a pill over its face, go visit in the hospital. But the thing is, what they're starting to figure out now is because they're so successful that you don't actually want to kill them, killing them has this ripple effect through their society where they start reproducing more, stronger. And here's the other thing. If the coyote is still not if it's not acting aggressively towards humans, if it hasn't started to take pets, if you just know it's in the area but it's trying to keep its distance, you may actually be better off with that coyote. Right. Because if you get rid of that coyote, another coyote is going to move in, and that coyote might be much more aggressive than the last one you just got rid of. Yeah. If you got a decent neighbor, maybe that's good enough. So that's kind of like the idea that's dawning over people with coyote management is coyotes aren't going anywhere. Right. We're staying put. And the best you can hope for is one that keeps us distance and is afraid of humans. Yes. Which is generally what's going on in urban areas. Right. When we're talking about ranchers, the reason they're doing this is not just because they hate coyotes, is that they lose a lot of animals due to these predators. It just sounded so mean, these predators. It's hard to get good stats. But the USDA said in 2015, there was self reporting, which you always got to kind of wonder of 33,000, a little more in change of adult sheep. 84,000 lambs lost to coyotes. And again, that's self reported, so take it with a grain of salt. But they do lose a lot of animals and chickens and things like that. Right. I've gone on my soapbox before about keeping your cats inside. Not going to do that again except to say keep your cats inside. Yes. If you have, like, you're on the fence about keeping your cats inside, just watch some of the videos that you may seen. Yeah, cats being taken. Do I want my cat to live several years longer? Right, because the statistics show that outdoor cats don't live as long. And not just that, not just with cats, too, but also with dogs. If there are coyotes in the area, and there's a really good chance there are, no matter where you live in the US. You should not leave your small dog in particular outside unattended. Yeah, you basically let them out, hang out with them and then let them back in. You definitely don't leave them out at dusk or dawn by themselves or overnight. That's right. We said that you don't need to worry too much about being attacked as a human. There were a couple of kind of grisly cases, one that's just very difficult to even talk about, frankly. In 1981, a little three year old girl was dragged from her driveway in California and the dad did rescue her, but she died as a result of her injuries from that fracas. In 2009. There was a really strange thing in Canada where a 19 year old woman was stalked and killed by at least two coyotes while hiking in the middle of the day. And this is apparently the only adult human killed by coyotes on record. Yeah, the only explanation for that that I could possibly come up with is that she was around their den. It was around their pup raising time. Right. Say spring and summer is a pretty bad time to be around a turf. They get real defensive of their turf. Yeah. And then thirdly, that those were mated with wolves. Interesting, because when the coyotes will mate with dogs, they'll mate with wolves. It's not like super widespread, but it does happen in producing koi dogs and coy wolves. But the koi wolves in particular can be much more aggressive than your standard coyote. Yeah. So I wonder if those three factors played a role in it. Probably. It was definitely an outlier. I mean, it's sad no matter what, but that girl also, she was like an up and coming country singer, like, on the verge of breaking out Taylor Mitchell. Yeah. Wow. So they say, like we said, that these Kill Coyote programs don't even work that well. And there are statistics to back up the fact that nonlethal methods of cowardice control are more effective, which we're talking about scaring them like wind chimes and air horns. They're really skinny and jumpy, so if you make a lot of noise in front of a coyote, they're probably going to bolt. Yeah, it's called hazing. And anytime you see a coyote around your area, really anywhere, just be a good neighbor. You want to haze them. You don't know my house. Do not just let it happen. Don't just let it pass by. Like you need to take that opportunity to haze them to keep them feeling insecure. Right. The more secure a coyote feels, the more audacious and brazen they're going to become coming into your yard, trying to take your dog or your cat. So you want to haze them every chance you get so that they know to stay over there. This is their turf. This is your turf. Right. So you have an umbrella. You want to open the umbrella. This says to pick up your small dog. Oh, yeah, sure, right. I've also read you don't want to do that because you make yourself small when you do that. And when you're hazing a coyote, you want to make yourself as big as possible. What do you mean you make yourself small? When you squat down to pick up your dog, you seem smaller than you do standing up with your arm spread well, but do it very quickly. Well, the better thing to do is keep your dog on a nonflexy lead, like a straight leash. Anyway. It's no more than like 6ft in length and just pull it back close to you while you're waving your arm and shouting at the coyote to go away. Yeah. And I also thought it was funny that Ed pointed out that even if you have a big dog that could kill a coyote, is someone going to say, like, oh, I think you can take them. Go get them, Zeus. Yeah, maybe not. Some people would. No, you never know. Have you seen those Irish wolfhounds? Sure. They're like the largest dogs. Yeah, they're wolfhounds. They're, like, bred to take on wolves so they could take on a coyote. I can see having that temptation be like, yeah, my dog really could take on this coyote. Maybe. Oh, no. That was Dingoes that I petted in Australia. Of course they weren't coyotes. Not North America, but Dingos. They weren't dogs either. They like foxes. No, they look like dogs. But when you're around them and this was at a place where you can hold koalas and stuff like that, it was obvious that it's not a dog. No, they're wild dogs. Right. Well, I don't even think they're wild dogs. Or maybe they're totally related, but I just remember getting the sense scotty and I both did. My friend that was with me, whom, you know, there was a certain the way they carried themselves. And just like you're not a dog. It literally is a dog canis lupus dingo. So it's a subspecies of dogs. Yeah, but what I'm saying not a dog. Like not a domesticated dog. Yes, I got you. So wild dogs. Yeah, you just tell the difference. And I'm sure the same is true with coyotes, because koi dogs, like you said, are things look at that cute little dingo. Koi dogs and koi puppies are super adorable. And technically, you can raise one and even a full cowdy. If you get it as a puppy, you could have it as a pet. But a really bad idea. It's not a good idea because they are coyotes, and the coyote is going to coyote. It has happened. There are you see those eccentric people out there that have, like, a pet coyote? It's the thing, but it's just not a good idea. They're unpredictable. Yeah. You don't want to get a cat companion for them in the United States. The coyotes image has really gone through some weird transitions. Early on, I had a really bad reputation. It apparently was made way worse by Mark Twain when he wrote Rough in it in 1872. Really? There were a few pages dedicated to how lowly a coyote is, and everybody was like, yeah, we hate coyotes from that point on. But that actually followed in partially this view that had been around for ages that native Americans had of coyotes. Not necessarily that it was a lowly animal, but that it was a trickster. Kind of like a bare rabbit type. I think so. But then he was also in some groups, like the creator God, the creator deity. There's all sorts of different roles that the coyote played in Native American mythologies, because there are so many different native American mythologies. Right. But it was very prominent in southwestern tribes mythologies and very frequently is a trickster. Very frequently. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. I don't have anything else. I don't believe I do, either. If you see a coyote haze, it really shouldn't kill it. No. But make sure that it's kept on its feet and insecure. That's right. Your pets will. Thank you. If you want to know more about coyotes, go look up a coyote standing in a tree, and that will really set you off. Since I said that it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this grisly trigger warning email. It has to do with our body under the bed episode. So if you're not into listening to this kind of stuff, tune it out. Hey, guys, listen to the body into the bed episode. And I was reminded of a similar awful case in Jacksonville, Florida, where I live. In my neighborhood, an eight year old girl, Maddie, disappeared while playing outside one afternoon in your yard. Her yard. Long story short, her neighbor, Josh Phillips, who was 14 at the time, was playing with her and accidentally hit her in the head, she said, with a baseball bat, injuring her. I looked into this. Apparently the story was she threw the ball, he hit the ball and the ball hit her in the face. Oh, man. She started bleeding and crying and this is me talking now, not the email. He freaked out because his dad was an abusive alcoholic and he was afraid his dad was going to come home and see what he'd done, so he panicked. Back to the email. He ended up killing her to keep her quiet and stashing her body in the cavern beneath his waterbed on the second floor of his house. In the eight days that follow, a massive community effort ensued to locate her and Josh, her murderer even participated in this, handing out flyers. He slept in that bed for seven nights over her body. Police had even searched the home several times. And the odor in his room was attributed to many pet birds in cages. He had and a typical 14 year old boy funk. Not a bad band name either. She was discovered when they searched it's a terrible band name. 14 year old boy punk. Typical 14 year old boyfunk. Yeah. No, I just think boyfunk. Maybe none of that's good. I take it all back. All right. She was discovered when they searched the home again and noticed a stain on the ceiling on the floor below his room. I thought it was a blood stain, but I looked it up. I think it was a leak from the water bedded stain. Oh, thank God. And that fortuitously led to finding her. He remains in prison, which has always been a big debate here when it comes up for parole. How old? I looked it up. I think this was in 98 and he was 14 then. Wow. He's been in prison the whole time. Yeah. And it's a very tough thing because his father was an abusive alcoholic. He reacted because he was afraid that he was going to come home and find him out and freaked out and hit this girl with a baseball bat, put her under the bed, and when he found that she was still making noise this way gets really bad. He stabbed her like eleven times and killed her. Oh, dude. So it is just a sad, sad, tragic case all the way around. That is from Mary. She said, I love the show and have my husband hooked now, too. She said, the trauma and emotions of those eight days is something I will never, ever forget. I'll bet. Yeah. Very tough case. I don't know if thanks is appropriate, Mary, but I can't think of anything else to say. Yeah. I don't even know why I decided to read that. That was really caught my attention. Yeah. I can see how it chuck. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Mary did, don't. If you want to anyway, 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 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's. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
How Whaling Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-whaling-works | Despite its embattled status as brutal and illegal, commercial whaling is a tradition that dates back 1,000 years and served as the economic engine of the Industrial Revolution. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the whaling life then and now. | Despite its embattled status as brutal and illegal, commercial whaling is a tradition that dates back 1,000 years and served as the economic engine of the Industrial Revolution. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the whaling life then and now. | Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:39:54 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=14, tm_min=39, tm_sec=54, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=108, tm_isdst=0) | 33855180 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporxcom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I can't believe we're doing this again. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Doing what again? Yes, the show. Yeah. Did you think we were done? I'm so tired, Chuck. I'm discouraged to know that you hate Tom Petty. Oh, I hate him. Mr. Petty, I'm sure you're a genuinely nice guy, but I can't stand your music. Oh, I love Tom Petty. That's great. I hope you love him enough for both of us. I do. That's fine. I'm not surprised, because you don't take a lot of that sort of classic rock stuff. That's not true. Born and raised, 38 special fan, buddy. Are you really? Okay? I like plenty of classic rock. Except Led Zeppelin. I don't hate AC DC. I just don't really whatever. What else don't I like? Wait, let's do this the other way. Here's the classic rock I do like. Okay. The Doors. I just switched. Did it? Yes. Jim Morrison does that to me. Let's see. I guess that's about it. The Doors. Yes. I used to like the Grateful Dead, as you know. Sure. But I don't anymore. Well, this has been a scintillating start. You want to record over this? No, I think this is good. So, ahoy, Chuck, ahoy. We're going to be talking like that a lot. Like scurvy sea dogs. Yes. Not pirates. Scurvy sea dogs. Big difference. That was a Scotsman. They sailed. They definitely did. I have an intro. Let's hear it. And it was a gift from you, so thank you for this. Oh, the news recently. Yeah. Good. Let's talk about that. So the Japanese were very sad when they came back to Japan from Antarctica and said, we only caught 267 whales, which is way less than the 900 we plan to catch this season. Catch and kill is what you mean. Yeah. They left Japan in December and came back very recently at the beginning of March because whale season was virtually over in Antarctica, even though there's a couple of weird things here. Yeah. Antarctica is one of the places in the world where whales are protected internationally, supposedly. And number two, whale hunting is outlawed. This isn't like GB Year Zero, where you can just go and whale commercially. Right. Instead, it's 2012, and Japan still managed to kill 267 whales. Now, for people who are fans of whales I'm a fan of whales. Isn't everyone? No, he's like, stupid whales. They deserve it, I'm sure. Whalers. No, I think they just have an industry that they're trying to keep going. And I want to clarify, when we say whaling, we're talking about whale killing expeditions, not whale watching expeditions. Just to clarify to people like my wife. Sure. So the Japanese whaling season ended prematurely. Right. They packed up their harpoons and went home, thanks to the efforts of a group known as Sea Shepherds. Known as Sea Shepherds? Sea Shepherds sell seashells by the seashore. They're described as a militant environmental group. Have you seen their boats? Are they the ones that are painted like death from above style? They have the logo Jolly Roger, Skull and Crossbones, but one of the bones is a trident, and the other is like a shepherd's hook. That's pretty cool. But even cooler. It's painted on the side of boats that look like batmobiles. Yeah, that's the ones I've seen. Yeah. Pretty cool. I believe they have a show on our parent mother company, Discovery, who keeps us warm in her embrace and suckles us from her teeth. Whale wars. Yeah, that's got to be it, right? Yeah, that's them. I've never seen that. Don't say that. I love that show. I see that every night. I love that show, too, and all of its commercial sponsors. So they show up, they say, we're going to throw our ropes in your propellers, and we're going to launch stink bombs at your boat to thwart your whole operation. Right. And the Japanese retaliated using water cannons, throwing harpoons, grappling hooks, bamboo spears, like digging it out, out there. Yeah, but what's crazy is the Sea Shepherds, they came out on top. I mean, there were at least 600 and change whales that didn't lose their lives this year. And the Japanese said they call them saboteurs, not activists. Yeah, but because they were harassed the whole time. So it's working. That's a huge victory. Sure. But whaling, I'm putting us out there, dude, because I think for most of our listeners in America, there's a lot of sympathy for whales. This is in a whaling country, although there is wailing in the US by Indigenous groups, alaska way. Oh, really? Are they grandfathered in? Yeah, there's about 300 a year, roughly. They take about 300 whales a year, or no, I'm sorry, less than 100. I feel like a jerk saying that's not bad. But compared to the old numbers, that's really not bad. Right, exactly. Which I'll get to. Right. So I think there's a lot of sympathy for whales. Yeah. Apparently in Japan, even the younger generation, they're having a hard time talking them into being on board, even though Japan, which we'll talk about, is skirting some of these laws to continue to whale. And Japan is a whaling country, has been a whaling country since the 17th century. So, yeah, the idea of killing a whale has gotten more and more stomach churning over the year. Agreed. So let's talk about how to do it. Okay. Should we go the history first? I didn't talk to you about this beforehand, like we normally do. Sometimes we do. We never do. Yeah, we can talk about history. I think that's a good idea. Okay. Where did whaling start? It started in Spain and northwest Spain and southwest France by the Basques. Well, that's commercial whaling. Oh, well, you're talking about just Nanook of the north out there with this harpoon. Sure. Yeah. Indigenous folks. Yeah. Or Santuk of the south. There's good whaling down Antarctica way. Well, it still is. Yeah, but not just them. The Norwegians have long been whaling cultures. Same with the Icelandic. Yeah, true. Russians in Iceland and Norway. Right. They're still at it. Yeah. Norway not so much these days, really, but they're at the very least, getting a little more aware. All right, so getting back to the Basques, the first commercial whaling operations as early as 1000 Ad in the Bay of Isca. And then, of course, everyone else saw what was going on. Jumped on board England in North America in the early 1600s. Japan, 1675. The US. Finally off. Nantucket 1712. So this article kind of skirts over some really big stuff here. Like, it basically goes from Nantucket to Venfoin. And when you jump make that jump, you leave out the entire golden age of whaling. 150 years. Yeah. So when you reach Nantucket, you encounter and there's this awesome Kim Burns, like, two part series on whaling. If you're ever interested. It's definitely worth checking out. I like Kenny Burns. You like this one. But Nantucket became, like, the whaling capital of the world. Sure. And thereby also became the commercial engine of the world because whale oil came about at a time when the Industrial Revolution hit, and whale oil was to the world what fossil fuel oil is today. Yeah. Pre petroleum. It was petroleum. Yeah. It literally is what the world ran on and what we lit artificially our world with. Right. That's right. So New Bedford, specifically in Nantucket, were like, what Saudi Arabia is today? And whales out there in the ocean were basically like floating pieces of oil rich real estate that anybody with the ship could go claim. Is that why that area is still so dollar heavy? Probably. Is that what got them going to begin with? Oh, definitely, yeah. And from like, 1750 to 1850, it was, like, one of the richest places in the world. Wow. Yeah. So you can't quite skip over that. No, it's definitely worth mentioning. That's right. Those cold Atlantic waters up there, fertile ground for whales, I imagine. Yeah. And they started out by just harvesting whales that washed up ashore, but would have been a nice way to just keep it that way. It was, but then the Industrial Revolution hit, and they're like, oh, whale really burns. Well, we can make candles out of it. Right. If I dab some behind my ears, I'll use a perfume smell. Like a stinky whale. Right, exactly. Yeah. But it is in perfume and cosmetics and stuff like that, right? Yeah, it is. I think it probably still isn't some in Japan. All right, so are we ready for Sven? Sure. The Norwegian pioneer, Sven Foyn, which is a great name. He launched the first steam powered whaling ship in 1863 and then invented a little something that really changed everything, called the harpoon cannon, which is pretty awful. You harpoon a whale by hand up until that point, and then all of a sudden you could shoot a harpoon with a cannon that would explode inside the whale. Right. Crazy. Vin Foynne is pretty much single handedly the reason why we have such depleted and endangered whale stock today. And I guess it didn't mess up the whale too much with the explosion. Hopefully it was over because prior to that, killing a whale is very difficult when you are hand throwing a harpoon. Right, sure. And that's how they did it. Yeah. So you had a bunch of guys in little tiny boats, like all throwing spears, not necessarily harpoons, because the harpoon was used to tow the whale back once it was dead, but like a spear. And the only way to kill it was to steer it in its gills. Right. So that eventually it was stabbed enough that it would aspirate and choke on its own blood. Awful. And it took a while, and it would swim about pretty heavily for a little bit. It's called a flurry. And then it would just go on its side, thin up, and that's how you knew the whale was dead and you harpooned it. And all the whale boats towed it back to the boat for processing. So hopefully that explosion just killed it immediately. But I'll bet it didn't. Yeah, but at the very least, it must not have messed it up for harvesting and processing, or else I probably wouldn't have done it. Well, you mentioned the threshing about very dangerous job back then. Definitely. I imagine it still is to a certain degree. Sure. But back then on those little boats, a large whale, much larger than your boat, thrashing about, it's going to capsize you. You could drown. You could slip on the boat with the blubber and the blood everywhere. Yeah, because, I mean, well, think about this. You have a whale ship, right? And that's where everybody lives and stays. But to go hunt the whale when you're actually killing the whale, you're in a whale boat, and that's basically like the size of a row boat, and that's what you're in with a whale. Like, get off of me. Get exactly. So lots of dudes died. And then there's the disease, of course, going to exotic and gross ports of call, tuberculosis. What else? Yellow fever. Malaria, pretty much, I would imagine the whole Gambit. The whole Gambit disease. Yeah. Scurvy. Rickets VD. Let's get real. Yeah. And like you said, Sven had a direct hand in leading to the depletion of the population. And starting in the early 1900s, things really started going south for the whale numbers wise. Do you want to rattle off a few of these? Yeah. This is Ben Foiene, everyone. This is Ben Foynes work. I believe this clearly at his feet in 184 whales were killed off of the South Atlantic island of South Georgia. Right. Right. Within ten years, it jumped to 184. Right. Within ten years. Just blue whales alone, 1738 were killed. 4776 thin whales and 21,894 humpbacks were killed in that same area within one decade. Yeah. And that's just in that one area. And also, you'll note that blue whales and fin whales used to be out of the reach of any kind of whaleship. Yeah. Were they too fast? Yeah. And they could outmaneuver and outrun any ship that was chasing them until Sven introduced the steam powered whaling ship. Right. So it was just the sperm whales at first, is that right? Right. And sperm whale also, by the way, is what they were looking for, mainly because sperm whale was the best oil available. It burned the cleanest and the brightest. And sperm whales also had something called spermachetti, which is like this waxy substance in their head that you could use to cut the whale oil into candles. That worked really well. It was just, like, the best stuff. It was also way more valuable than regular whale oil. Yeah. How much did they produce? I had this year, they had, like, 25 to 40 barrels. And there's like, a whale oil per whale. Per sperm whale, yeah. And then the barrel is 31 and a half gallons. Yeah. I did the math somewhere. Oh. 260 gallons per sperm whale. Yeah. And they would use every part of the whale. We'll at least give them that. It's not like shark fin soup where they cut off the shark fin and then dump the shark back in the water. They would try to use every part of the whale for sustenance. So I guess we're going back to the beginning again, which is, why did they do this to begin with? Because they couldn't grow veggies in a lot of these places. So whale was like what they subsisted on decided on subsisted subsisted on subsided. Happened after they ran out of whale. Exactly. So it's got a lot of protein, iron, niacin, vitamins A, DC. Yeah. It's, like, good stuff for them. Right. And they figured out early on that they could burn the blubber, too. Right. To light and heat their igloos. Yeah. Make sleds. It would help. Making sleds and tools. Yeah. Out of baleen whale's teeth. I guess I should make air quotes. Teeth. You can use it for all sorts of stuff. Imagine bones, too. Yeah. This is back in the day, though, like before, commercially. And there's a long tradition of using all parts of the whale, but there's a huge difference between even a massive commercial enterprise like the ones that were launched off of Nantucket that required sale power and hand thrown harpoons and then steam powered boats and harpoon guns with explosive tips. There's a big difference. Yeah. Huge difference. And then the global demand also just kind of changed everything, too. Yeah. Japan, post war post World War II, they relied a lot on Wales for food. They were pretty poor at the time after the war, trying to put the pieces back together, and whales were a big part of that on the school lunch menu up into the even. Although it's not supposed to taste very good, is it? It's supposed to taste it says in this article, like, either reindeer or moose. Yeah. That's the guy from Slate tried it. I guess that's what he had to say. Yeah. And it's not heavily spiced out of tradition. Right. That is in Norway, Iceland and Alaska. Okay. Yeah. In Japan, they spice the heck out of it. I guess. So I'm sure they serve it as sashimi, which would mean that they probably don't. Yeah. There's a lot of sh funme tongue twisters in this one for me. You aren't? No, we'll persevere, so we're no longer running on any kind of our economy doesn't run on whale oil any longer. No, we're now raping the earth of petroleum, but at least it doesn't have babies. Yes, true. Babies. So why are we still killing whales? Well, in Japan, they have a loophole under Article Eight of the International Convention of the Regulation of Whaling that says that they are allowed to kill for research purposes. Technically, anybody is. Yeah. And Japan is the only one taking them up on it, saying, yeah, this is for research. Yes. But that is disputed. Yes. Because, really, the only use these days for whales is meat. Right. So Japan, through this International Convention, they're not the only ones who can use whale hunting for scientific research as a reason to kill whales. Right, right. But yeah, they're only criticized for it because there are other techniques that other countries use to study whale populations that don't require the whale to die. Well, I don't get that to begin with, because what they're studying is what they're trying to prove is that there are actually more whales than people are saying. That's one of the things. You're saying one of the other things, and I should say that my source for this is greenpeace. Right. But they were saying that Japan routinely uses study samples of populations of, like, 500 whales from the same area, which is a terrible way to study, like, a species. Right. And they are examining their stomach contents to find out about whale diets. Okay. And then they'll say, oh, well, these whales eat a lot of salmon, and salmon is a very commercially important fish, so we should kill more whales. Right. If you look at the Australians, they study whale diets, too, but they track whale feces, and they also study whale habits by keeping them alive and get more data. By keeping them alive by just tagging them. Yeah. And they're one of the countries that's come out hardest against Japan and condemning them. Right. Yes. The Australians were like, good. I'm glad you guys made it back safely and early from your whale hunting season this year. Exactly. So the Japanese are very much criticized for exploiting this, but under international law, they can do this. And I guess the provision that allows scientific whaling says if you catch and kill a whale for scientific purposes, you have to use the whole whale. Sure. So they're saying, well, we've got to sell this as food. Right. That's a huge loophole, because it's basically like yeah. If you say, here's the study we're carrying out. You can just conduct commercial whaling, which is what they're doing right now. They already were processing. Is that what you said earlier? They were already processing on board before 1925? Yeah. So what happened then? Did it just the factory ships made it even easier. They were just more outfitted with it. Yeah, they were kind of like DIY processing whales beforehand. But they were definitely doing it during the golden age off in Antucket, where you would capture a whale harpoon it all of the guys who just been fighting this thing for, like, hours would row it back to the ship, and they'd attach it with chains to the ship and then start skinning it, like, layer by layer. Yeah, they said it's like peeling an orange skin. And they would carve it up into blanket pieces. There were a ton a piece. Yes. Some guys died from that. That was one of the ways people died, was getting crushed by, like, a slab of blubber. Oh, sure. A ton of whale blubber falling on you. That's not a good way to go. And then they would haul these blanket pieces up and then divide them into what they call horse pieces. My guess is that was about the size of a horse. Sure. Probably could still kill you. I imagine you die going then they would boil out, extracting the blubber, the oil from the blubber. And this is all done on board, like, with big iron pots and stoves. Pretty gnarly. Yeah. And there's blood everywhere. There's oily blubber everywhere. So one of the great dangers of the job was slipping on deck and falling overboard. I don't think that the waters around the ship while they were skinning the whale weren't just infested with sharks. Yeah. So that was a very dangerous part, too. So once they had the oil extracted from the blubber, they would actually go ahead and put it in the casks, stow it down in the hole, try and clean up the mess. Even though there really is no cleaning up that mess. No, apparently not. And then they just start over again. And like, a whaling expedition, dude, was years long. Oh, really? They went for years. They just go out there because they could do this all aboard their ship. And would they just live on the whale the whole time? They usually have provisions. I'm sure they would stop in Tortuga and pick up some provisions and some VDS or whatever beans and venereal disease with their whale and then go on their way. But they would be away from home for years at a stretch. Yeah, it was a crazy life. All right, so let's flash forward a bit. Factory ships in 1925 were introduced, which really ramped up the killing. And 60 years in the 60 years following that, more than 2 million whales were killed in the Southern Hemisphere. Yeah. So that's when people, countries, the League of nations specifically set up and said, you know what? In 1931, we should put together some sort of legislation to regulate this. It's pretty cool for 1931, if you think about it. Sure. 26 countries got on board, except for Japan, Germany and Russia. Then five years later, they established the International Agreement for Regulation of Whaling, and again, Japan said, no, thanks. And that year, there was a record high of 46,039 whales killed in the Antarctic alone. It still is the record. And they've tried these different things over the years, but basically what I gather was there was never any enforcement. No. The IWC has no teeth. They have bailened. That's it. So they can't do anything. That was off the cuff. Was it really? Yeah. Okay, well, then they can't do anything. Like, you can sit there and make up regulations all day, but Japan can just say, no, we're not going to do it. Iceland can be like, hey, that would hurt our economy. Sorry. We understand that you feel for the whales, but we're whaling, so what are you going to do? And they say, oh, yeah, we forgot. There are no sanctions that we can carry out against you. We're going to see whale police. We can condemn it. Yeah, there's no whale police except the Sea Shepherds. But they're rogue. Yeah, they do a good job, apparently. Whether or not you agree with their methods is one thing, but they certainly made a difference this year. Flash forward again to when they banned commercial whaling altogether. Again rejected by Japan, Norway and Russia yeah, but in that convention, there was that loophole for scientific research. There's also, I think, always been exceptions for indigenous groups, too. Right. But the big loophole was the scientific whaling one, and that's the one that they continue exploiting, because everybody's like, we're not doing any commercial whaling. We're just issuing scientific whaling licenses to these commercial whaling out. Now, early, you said the United States still does. Is that just indigenous peoples? Yeah. Okay. And there was something I couldn't find out what happened, but I saw this chart of whaling, and since 1986, this had an impact. Oh, yeah. The convention, that treaty had an impact because if you look at overall total kills, or they call them catches, it's declined just tremendously since then. It says 31,000 since the band was put in place. Yeah. And then I saw for 2009, around 800, 900 killed for the world that year. Yeah. Compared to 46,000 in Antarctica alone, which is pretty crazy. The key is whether that number can be kept down in pace with if that can outrun the decline of whale population so that there aren't any extinction events before wailing just ceases or before the stocks can be stabilized, refurbished. Yeah, I think there's, like a real definite, like, race against the clock thing that's going on right now with whale populations. If I remember correctly, it must have been when we did the Swim with the Whales podcast. I think I remember something about the way they reproduce or reproductive cycles really long, so they have a hard time reestablishing. It's not like they're having little whale pups every year or two. Yeah, so that probably has something to do with that. And I think they stick around, like, with their parents, too. They raise and nurse their young for a very long time as well. They're just, like, deadbeat from the basement couch, waiting around, listening to Pink Floyd. You like Pink Floyd? Oh, yes, I do. Okay. There's two. I do. Thanks, man. The Doors in Pink Floyd. Very nice. So what does the future hold, Mr. Clark? Well, not being a prognosticator myself, I don't feel comfortable predicting the future, but I don't know, man. I'm surprised by the news report that you gave me, like, that the Sea Shepherds were having that kind of effect. I figured that they would be a nuisance, not an effective activist, militant group. Yeah, well, they produced it up a couple of years ago, too. They rammed each other, supposedly. Yeah. But I got the impression from this article that it was like, all right, I'm on board your vessel, and I can't really do anything. And they're like, well, we can't do anything either. That encounter was a representation of just what the IWC does with whaling. It's like, there's nothing you can do, really. Right. No one's able to do anything that has a real impact. But apparently they figured it out. So what happened was in 2010, they claimed the Japanese ship rammed the Sea Shepherd ship, sinking it. And so the dudes from Sea Shepherd went aboard the whaling ship, and that's when they just said, we can't do anything, so let's have a tickle fight. Pretty much. He was going to make a citizen's arrest. Come on. That's like, one thing. If you don't carry it out, you don't tell anybody. You're going to do that, right? Like, I'm going to make a citizen's arrest. I was going to he should just tackle them or something. I'll bet that that was all over Discovery Channel, too. Yeah, probably so. So anything else? I don't have anything else other than to say. If this is important to you, pay attention, because there's always I think they met just last year about this. Again, it's like an ongoing battle to keep these regulations in place. I've got another one. Let's hear it. If you root for Wales, you should check out the story of the Essex, which inspired Moby Dick. It's the only known ship to have been sunk, apparently purposefully, by a whale ramming it. Wow. A whale rammed it, turned around, got speed, and rammed it again and ended up sinking the Essex and sent, like, the 20 crew members on this horrible journey where they were adrift in the South Pacific, and they avoided islands that were close by because they were afraid of cannibals. But in their attempt for South America, they began to starve and resort to cannibalism themselves. Wow. Yeah. The Essex. That's an ironic twist, isn't it? I've never read Moby Dick. Do you believe that? I do. I have not read it either. Really? Yeah. Well, we need to get that done. Okay. Let's go read Moby Dick right now. Chuck okay. While we read Moby Dick, you should learn more about whaling. You could type that into the handy search bar HowStuffWorks.com. Which means it's time for listener mail. Josh I'm going to call this good organization in Austin, Texas, which we were just at. Yeah, we were. And this is sent from Patrick, who is at our variety show that we threw. He said, Great show, guys. I was pleasantly surprised with the quote unquote acting in the pilot by you all, and I look forward to tuning in later. Quote unquote acting is accurate. Exactly. He's involved, though, with a new nonprofit, and I told him he would plug it. Retreat. R e lowercase capital T-R-E-E lowercase t. See where we're going here? T-R-E-E-T retreat. Okay. Not T-R-E-A-T. They plant trees. Okay. They are a colitiscover, epic group of bicycle and tree enthusiasts with strong backs, sharp minds, and big hearts who volunteer to replant communities. The group formed in response to the battle of Wildfires that took place during the summer of Aught eleven. Wait, you can't say eleven. It's on bullets in, isn't it? Yeah. So embarrassing. Just outside of Austin, Texas, during two days in January, retreat America planted over 200 trees and put 80 miles on their bikes. They're heading back to basketball for another round of tree planning, march 23 through 25th, which is right now. So by the time this comes up, that will be over. Yes, but you can still support them by going to facebook. Comretreatreat with two E's. America. It's a brand new group. They're trying to spread the word. So just a little awareness is what they're looking for. And they have some mandates here. One is to plant as many donated trees, native trees, as possible for homeowners affected by natural disasters, to harness the spirit of volunteerism that exists in everyone. Harness it and beat it with a stick. Number three, enliven communities socially and economically in the aftermath of disasters. Number four, stimulate stewardship and invigorate a local desire to rehabilitate the damaged land stimulated with the stick. Number five, spread proper tree planting and care techniques. Number six, foster appreciation for an involvement in Aberraculture. How many demands do they have? They have one more. Encourage the use of bicycles within the urban environment. Finally, we get the bicycles. So, Patrick, you all are doing great work. Austin is one of our favorite places now to visit and retreat. America, you should support. Go check them out. You're a bike person or a tree person. Nice. Or if you hate trees and you love your car, then there's probably an organization for you dude. We should also give a shout out to the contest winner who we met and hung out with. Yeah. Caleb. Caleb. Did he sign or release his license? We'll just say Caleb W from Dallas. Yeah, he came out he won the house the first Facebook contest, and he came out, hung out with us. We went out to lunch, took him on a tour of the office, took him out for a very nice lunch that resulted in food poisoning for me. I'm sorry to hear that. And it was very tasty, though. Yeah. And I followed up with him. He did go to the King Center after he left us. Yeah, he was keen on that. Yeah, he'd been studying the life of Martin Luther King and was excited to go visit. We told him how to get there, and he went and he went to the King Center and his original house that he lived in. Yes. It's like all in the same area in his church, I think, as well. So, yeah, he checked it all and he said it was really cool. That is very cool. So, Caleb, we're glad you were here. You were a really nice dude. Yeah. You really were. It really could have gone a different way. And we were very fortunate that you were the winner. That's right. So congratulations to you again. Let's see. Chuck whaling store. Do you think anybody has one? I doubt it. All right, let's find out. Let's hear your whaling story. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook@facebook.com stupidtimelinefacebook. Comstuffyshoodnow. And you can send us an email at stuffpodcast@discovery.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, stuff from the Future. Join House of Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you?" | ||
How Medical Marijuana Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-medical-marijuana-works | Some quarters of the medical establishment endorse it, others abhor it. The DEA is cracking down on it, but the Veterans' Administration supports it as a treatment for soldiers. Medical marijuana is indeed a contentious issue. Learn all about it here. | Some quarters of the medical establishment endorse it, others abhor it. The DEA is cracking down on it, but the Veterans' Administration supports it as a treatment for soldiers. Medical marijuana is indeed a contentious issue. Learn all about it here. | Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:21:01 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=15, tm_min=21, tm_sec=1, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=117, tm_isdst=0) | 32642273 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. This is Chuck. Chuck Bryant, who seated across from me. Hello. And you put the two of us together, you get a podcast called Stuff You Should Know. Like It or not. Exactly. How are you doing? I'm well. I'm glad. Chuck, we're going to talk today about what I think is a pretty important issue. Medical marijuana. We've spoken before about the potential health benefits of plenty of other drugs. Ecstasy, LSD, psilocybin, mushrooms. Yeah, I feel like it's high time. Did you do that on purpose? No, sadly, no. Interesting that we did. Medical marijuana. This article had a couple of those little pines that I thought were one strain of research. Yeah. That one in particular, man thought he was so funny for getting that in there and just, like, freaking the man out. So where do we start? Do you have an intro? No, I don't have an intro. I feel like the subject itself needs no intro. Sure. It's using pot marijuana for medicinal purposes, and apparently there is a pretty extensive body of research showing that it does, in fact, help. That 730,000 people who have grave diseases and illnesses aren't really just faking so they can smoke pot. Right. That this stuff is helping. There's a lot of diseases that Jacob Silverman lists that medical marijuana has been shown to help with. Do you know what they are? Can you recite them in alphabetical order? Well, I have two lists. Okay. The list in the article says nausea, especially chemotherapy, nausea, loss of appetite, chronic pain, anxiety, arthritis, cancer, AIDS, glaucoma, Ms, or multiple sclerosis. Yes. Insomnia, ADHD, epilepsy inflammation, migraines, Crohn's disease, and, if you're terminally ill, to improve your quality of life. Sure. This is a list on the sign outside of the Kush Doctor at Venice Beach, California. Okay. And there's a lot more things on this list. Yeah, I noticed. Do you suffer from they also include in here, sickle cell anemia, psychiatric disorders okay. Basically anything. Autoimmune sleep disorders. And it says, I think, either sleeplessness or too sleepy. Does it say that? Yeah. Well, it lists about 20 more things, and then at the bottom, it says, or any chronic or persistent medical symptom. Right. Anything. My fingernail hurt right now. So that's what the Kush Doctor will and that is an actual I'm not just making that up at Venice Beach. I saw the picture. It says Kush Doctor, and you can go in there with your little card and get you some pot. So what you just got at is the heart of this problem. Like, there is plenty of legitimate bona fide medical research that shows that marijuana does help ease symptoms. It does a special double whammy on people who are nauseated and don't have any appetite, which is a terrible symptom of several diseases. Sure. Cancer, AIDS. So you have this part of the medical establishment saying, yes, pot health. And then you have the drug warriors, the DEA, lots of US. District attorneys, plenty of the square Americans saying, no, it's a drug. And there's going to be plenty of guys like the Kush doctor who are just going to sell it to anybody they can and use any medical marijuana laws that you enact as a shield to operate criminally from behind. Yeah. Don't take that drug, take these drugs. Yes. So for a long time, the medical marijuana idea has been taken up by states. It's been a state rights issue also, but the federal government apparently was the first ones to ever legalize or sell or supply legal medical marijuana from a program that ran from 1970 to 1992. They kind of petered out in the states, starting with California, really took up the cause for a while. That did not sit very well, especially during the Bush years, that did not sit well with the federal government. And the feds used to routinely raid legitimate medical pot dispensaries that were operating within the letter of state law. Right. Because federal law supersedes state law. So the DEA can read you anytime they want because according to the federal government, pot still a drug. It doesn't matter what your state says. Right, right. With Obama, he came into office saying, you know what, I'm not going to waste the resources of the DOJ on cracking down on legal pot operations. Yeah, that was in 2009, the Ogden memo. Yeah. And things really launched after that. Like more states passed legislation and more dispensaries. Like in La. At the time after that passed, they say there could have been up to 1000 dispensaries in La proper, but then they counted and said, no, it was more like $600. A whole lot. Yeah, but what happened recently? Well, the head of the DEA, a woman named Michelle Leonhardt, was shellonhearted. She was appointed by Bush and Obama reappointed her. And shortly after her reappointment, she rewrote the DEA's position on medical marijuana, saying like, no, it's a drug and we're going to go after it. And let's see, leon Hart, with the help of the district attorney us. Attorney? Yeah. By last name hag. I can't remember her first name. Melissa Hague, maybe she started basically prosecuting or sending the DEA to medical dispensaries and everything just totally changed. It just went backwards by years when it looked like it was all about to change. Yeah. And the media, and especially the liberal media, have held Obama's feet to the fire and they're like, dude, what is up with this reversal? And isn't this probably just election year campaign strategy? And they're like, no, it's not a reversal, really. It's sort of the same as it always was, really, but not really. No. Apparently Chuck and I both read a really good article called Obama's war on pot in Rolling Stone. It's very thorough. Yeah. But there has basically been a step up in the way that medical marijuana and the people who use it and prescribe it are being treated by the federal government. There's been 100 rates so far, at least 100 rates carried out under Obama's watch. So if it keeps up with his pace, then he will be worse than Bush as far as medical marijuana raids. And this one guy, Rob campier, who is executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, said that Obama is the worst president on medical marijuana. Crazy. It is just totally crazy because that's not what he said during the campaign. And I don't know when he was turning, one of the residents of Colorado that was campaigning hard to keep this going against Obama, even though he voted for him, said he needs to watch it because, quote, medical marijuana is twice as popular as he is. Yeah. So he says he's already lost that boat. Right. No matter what happens. So we'll see how this shakes down. Yeah, man. All right. So California has been studying this since about 2000 in earnest. They were given about $9 million to do genuine medical research on the effectiveness of marijuana for different, usually pain causing and nausea causing diseases. And it's always been hard to do these studies, though, because the federal government, if they're going to give you money, they're going to regulate, like, where the pot comes from. And this, at the time, was at UC San Diego. They would only let them get it from one place, one source, and then they would visit them. Federal agents would in the Medical Cannabis Research Center to verify that it was kept in a vault that was bolted to the floor. So they want to come by and make sure they're smoking joints and playing ping pong, I guess, which, I mean, I guess if you are kind of hung up on testing with medical marijuana, that's cool. That's your right to drop by and make sure that everything's secure and it's not being. Yeah, I'm not looking at the federal government started, like the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms sent a letter to firearms dealer saying it's illegal to sell a firearm to a person addicted to marijuana. So if you are receiving medical cannabis, you just had your Second Amendment right strip from you. Right. Banks are worried about getting prosecuted for money laundering by dealing with dispensaries, medical marijuana dispensaries. So now it's starting to go to a cash only, ie, more dangerous business, more prone to robberies and tax evasion. It's just like, definitely going backwards. Huge steps backwards. It's crazy. And by backwards, I should say, if you're pro medical marijuana, sure. Let's talk about why pot might help. Okay. THC is in cannabinoid in marijuana, and that's what makes you feel high. And it's also where you find your medicinal properties. They're all locked in there together because we produce our own cannabinoids in the form of endocannabinoids naturally. Yeah. So we have endocannabinoid receptors, right? Cannabinoid, yeah, cannabinoid. I like the way you said it's, kind of pleasing phenomena in our body. And when they receive something, when something is receptive to them, they release things like pain relievers, reduced anxiety. It has a whole lot of effects on us. Yeah. Mood, memory. Sure. Appetite? Well, it has a negative impact on memory, I think. Well, it regulates these responses, right. Whether or not they make you sleepy or hungry or not. With some diseases, this combination of introducing THC to the Endocanna I can't say it correctly endocannabinoid receptor, results in increased appetite, results in lessen muscle spasms if you have multiple sclerosis, or if you're quadriplegic, results in just a greater outlook or sense of well being if you're dying. All these things that have been studied and documented is actually working. I got one for you. Yeah. They did a study in mice that showed that the cannabinoids may protect against development of certain types of tumors, both benign and cancerous. And not only that, listen to this. It appears to kill only the tumor cells and may even protect the healthy cells from cell death. That is some pot. That's pretty rad. That's all I'm saying. So on the other hand, you've got people saying, okay, all right, I'm going to take the medical establishment at face value and say, yes, THC hits your endocannabinoid receptors and alleviates a lot of symptoms of certain diseases. Right. Can we just not come up with something that doesn't get you high? Right. And some drug companies have been like, yes, we can. And they introduced shiny black pills called Marinol, which is synthetic THC. Josh. I have had a Marinol pill. Really? Did it alleviate your symptoms? It was a very mild thing, to be honest. And this was many years ago when I was living in Los Angeles, but, yes, I've had a Mariner pill. Did you get it? From Dr. Cook? No, I didn't. But it is funny how you just pointed out, because I kind of debated off arrows. Like, should I say that I've had a Marinal pill? We're like, well, yeah, it's an FDAapproved drug. Like, you can say that, but you can't say, yeah, I've smoked pot, and not get the cross side stairs. Sure. It's just interesting. Yeah, it is. I guess that's at the heart of all this. It's kind of like this synthetic drug that you can get through a prescription and go to your pharmacy and they'll give it to you. You can have that. But this drug grows in the ground. Right? Yeah. That actually works better than this other drug, the synthetic version of it. Supposedly, the big complaint against Marinol is that it's a synthetic THC, but it's lacking some really important parts. Yeah, well, and it absolutely is lacking. I mean, chemically it's lacking, but you can't have that. And I'm really reminded of this. This is where witches and doctors came from, from the struggle of, I guess, the Middle Ages to where science was really starting to kind of come about. And to basically maintain a foothold or create a foothold for itself over Western society, it had to get rid of its rivals, which were traditional healers who very quickly became witches and outcasts and were ostracized as backward and possibly even evil. So don't go to them coming to me because I'm the guy with the beak on who can protect you from the plague. Look at you. Arthur Miller. But isn't that kind of analogous? Yeah, I think so. That's very astute, Josh. Thank you. There's also sativax, which is a pain reliever, and it is actually an extract of real marijuana administered by spray. And I think they have that in England, Spain and Canada. And it's in trials here in the US. Yeah. So that's not synthetic, it's actually an extract. Yeah. I'll bet everybody who uses it goes, I don't feel any pain, but I might as well just use this. What's the stuff you spray when you have tonsillitis? Cepacol. Yeah. I might as well just use Cpacol. That's not the one I was thinking of, though. What is the other core? Septic. Yes. So, like you said, most experts agree that Marinol and Sativax actually, in clinical trials, show to have less of an effect than actually the marijuana plant itself. Right. But the DEA points out this is legal. And they make a pretty good point here that Marinol is the THC. What morphine is to opium. Yeah. You might need morphine. We're not going to tell you it's okay to go smoke opium for your pain. Right there's. Morphine. Go use the morphine. It's legal, it's regulated, it's taxed, and it's not going to get you landed in jail unless you get your hands on it illegally. Yeah. So the feds are the ones who are definitely blocking this right now. I should say in a lot of states. There's 18 states, including D. C. That have laws on the books that say, yeah, man, we've got legalized medical marijuana to some degree. Yeah. In Oregon is the kingdom of the medical marijuana. I thought California was. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, there's probably more dispensaries and things like that, but in Oregon, you are allowed to possess up to 24oz of what they call usable marijuana. I always just did a spit tape. I know. Or 24 plants, six of which can be mature, 18 of which can be immature, which means they're like flowering budding plants. They wear jean jackets, so Washington right behind them. You can possess 24oz or 15 plants. And not surprisingly, there are no state in the Southeast. And Michigan is the only state in the Midwest in these Bible Belt areas. You're not finding any pro marijuana medical marijuana states going on and insert your own Detroit joke here. Yeah, we don't have to read through just all those other hippie states, plus Iowa and New Jersey. Yeah. That's so surprising. I suppose New Jersey have them. Maryland. Yeah. The thing is, though, is a lot of these, like you said, a lot of them rush to get laws on the books. Delaware, I think Delaware just wanted to be like, oh, Maryland City, remember us? We're really a state. But a lot of them have backed off like Rhode Islands. Governor Lincoln Chaffee is a vocal supporter of medical marijuana. Really? And a big critic of the federal government for using goon squad tactics to fight it and basically overrule state law. Right. But even he's back down because federal prosecutors have been like, hey, don't make us come after your state employees who are running these dispensaries because we'll put them in jail. Right. And they can do it. 34 states, Josh, have laws passed that recognize marijuana as having medical value. And I think New Mexico is the first one, actually in 1978, even before California. However, you know how these laws go. It's like the gay marriage laws. It's legal and then it's repealed, and then it's legal, and then it's repealed. And you can do it here, and now you can't. So there's been a lot of back and forth over the years with states sort of on a roller coaster, duking it out with the federal government. Yeah. Interesting. So let's talk about California. Let's take California as a state. Yeah, I love that place. I love California. So California, I think they were the first state with legal medical marijuana, right? I think so. I think it's prop 215. And they said, hey, if you have a doctor's recommendation, because we should point out there's no doctor that can legally prescribe marijuana because they get it. Exactly. If you walk into your local drugstore, they'll be like, Get out of here. We got Marinol. You want something there. But we don't have any pot. So a doctor can recommend it. In a state where you have legal medical marijuana, it can say, I, Doctor Feelgood. I, Dr. Kush, say that Chuck Bryant suffers from glaucoma, and to relieve the interocular eye pressure associated with his condition, I recommend that he used medicinal marijuana. Right. And then that's that sign, dr. Kush. Right. And you, being a medical recipient, would keep that letter on you at all times. Sure. Depending on if you were in California, which also passed a supplemental law saying, you know what? You can lose your doctor's note or whatever, so let's just issue ID cards to people who have a doctor's recommendation. If you have an ID card or a doctor's recommendation, you can grow and you can buy pots and possess yeah. And ostensibly use it. You know what senate bill that was? Yes, I do. Can you believe it? I could not believe it. In 2003, they passed Senate Bill 420 in California, which stipulated the cards and that you could have 8oz of usable marijuana, six mature plants or twelve immature plants. 420. That's crazy. Is that the 2003 bill? Yeah. Okay. Apparently even more than that, the state said by the way, let's take this down to the county level. You counties, if you feel like you want to expand upon this, go ahead. So some counties have been like, sure, what county? Like, Humboldt is one that definitely expanded the amounts that you can have in the situations in which it's not. Okay. Boy. I had some Humboldt Fog two days ago. What cheese? It's cheese. But it sounds like marijuana, doesn't it does. And now that you mentioned that, I think I've had that before, too. Yeah. Humble Fog is a really, like, yummy blue cheese. And we got some at the store down the street. But I laughed, Emily. I was like, it always cracks me up because Humboldt Fog sounds like one of those marijuana strains. It definitely does. Yeah. You got me with that one. You're like, you can't say that, Chuck. So California also has what's called a caregiver law. Yeah. A caregiver is somebody who basically takes care of you if you're sick. Right? Yeah. In California, a caregiver can also refer to a person who supplies medical marijuana to people who have doctor's recommendations. Right, right. It's like your grandmother has glaucoma. She doesn't know where to score. Right. So you could be her caregiver and get this for her, or you can be the guy who's growing it for her. Right. Did you ever see the Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry got pot for his dad? He got medical marijuana for his dad because I think it was glaucoma and he smoked with them and showed him how to do it and everything and went in the bathroom and freaked out. It was pretty funny. Yeah. And the whole buying process, it was the guy from Lost. Hurley from Lost was the pot dealer. Haven't seen it. It was really funny. It was good. Oh, yeah. Did you ever see the Mr. Show sketch about medical marijuana? Yes. The pharmacist who has the brownies. Yeah. And he always wants to play, like, the music he recorded on his four track. That was a good one, too. Well, it's funny you mentioned that, though, because at some of these dispensaries, you can buy things like brownies and butter and cookies and smoothies. Yeah. Because not everybody wants to smoke pot. Who has medical cannabis? Exactly. Okay, so you have a recommendation, you have a caregiver that you go to. Yeah. And the caregiver, this is where it gets really cloudy. The feds don't go after patients. Even during the Bush years, and now, which is worse than the Bush years, they've never gone after patients. It's basically don't go after the patients. Caregivers used to be protected. But because caregiver is also basically synonymous for pot dealer in medical marijuana states. If you are one of those caregivers who's really like spending you live with your elderly grandmother and you're taking care of her and she has medical marijuana that she takes. And you go get it for you're in jeopardy now. Too. Because a lot of these operations have gotten very big. And though they may be bona fide and legitimate right. They may not be making any profit, which is part of the law. They are considered caregivers rather than, like, dispensaries or anything like that. So that's what's clouded the issue. That's where a lot of the protections for regular people who are caregivers are being stripped away. It got out of hand and it was people like Dr. Kush sprung up and all of a sudden there were dispensaries that weren't co ops, where you have actually members growing the weed for the co op. Right. They say weed instead of marijuana. Medical weed. Yeah, medical weed. Supposedly a lot of them were buying it illegally, making profit off of it, and kind of screwed it up for the legitimate ones. Yeah. It is a cloudy issue. That's where we're at right now, basically. It sounds like some there were either some groups who just want pro or decriminalization of marijuana altogether sure. Who are using this issue to just force it through, hammer it through, or probably more realistically, they were just a bunch of hot dealers who found, like, a lot of very easy customers by supplying these co ops. Yeah. Americans, by and large, if you believe polls are in favor of medical marijuana for people who really need it. CBS News did a poll last year. 77% of Americans thought doctors should be allowed to prescribe it for serious illness. And there was a Gallup poll in 2010 that said, do you favor or oppose to allow medical marijuana just to reduce pain and suffering for people with disease? And 70% were pro, 27% said and 3% said, no, absolutely not. Wow. So it's pretty low percentage. It is. And again, we're pointing out this is for people who need it for their disease, not to be confused with pot legalization for recreation. Two different things. Did you know that the VA in 2010, I believe, said that recommended cannabis, medical cannabis, for soldiers returning home? What? For PTSD, I believe. PTSD, I'm sure all sorts of other things. It's a legitimate course of treatment for soldiers returning from the front lines. Wow. Isn't that crazy? It's interesting. Yeah. And speaking of la, they hit their peak in 2009 with what? They said, anywhere from 600 to 1000 dispensaries. And they said, you know what? The city said, this is getting way out of hand. Like, you've got a strip mall over there with three medical marijuana dispensaries in it. That's kind of ridiculous. So they ordered 439 of them to be closed. And I think what was the it was only dispensaries that registered with the city after the council adopted the moratorium in 2007, were allowed to operate. So about 130 of the 600 roughly were allowed to stay open. Wait, they were registered after the moratorium or before? It says after, which this doesn't make any sense. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. It's like the most unfair law ever. This is from the La Times, too, but now people are filing lawsuits and such on patients rights lawsuits and stuff like that. It's a wild ride, man. It's interesting to watch. I like to see anybody who can use the help of something like medical marijuana be denied it and suffer. Well, and that's the point of one of the attorneys. He's like, why should we treat them any different than the Vicodin patient or the OxyContin patient? They did do a study, too, when they closed down all those hundreds of dispensaries about crime, and it was a Rand Corp. Study, and they found that crime went down with the dispensaries, and crime went up when they closed them. But it was a pretty hinky study, admittedly. Really? Yeah. They only looked at ten days before and ten days after, and it was within three tenths of a mile of the closed facility. There was a 59% increase in crime and 24% within 610. It was a pretty hinky study. Basically, even the people that are for it were like, come on, you need to do a better job than this if you're going to study crime. Well, I will tell you this in that Rolling Stone article. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union estimates that 2500 jobs have been lost since the federal crackdown starting in the beginning of 2011. Well, 2500 jobs in this economy, that's unconscionable. Yeah. All right. Do you have anything else? No, I don't. Let's do a follow up on this in five years. Good idea. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I don't either. If you want to learn more about medical marijuana, you can type those words into the search bar. Howstep works.com that's? M-A-R-I-J-U-A-N-A-I believe. And since I said handy search bar, it's time for listener mail. Actually, I did have one more thing. Brownie Mary, you ever heard of her? No. She was a famous medical marijuana activist in San Francisco, this elderly woman who would make brownies for people and really went to the mat for people in need. Her name was Mary Jane. That was her real name. Mary Jane. Really? I can't think of her last name. Why did they just call her that? I don't know. Brownie Mary? Because she delivered the brownies, I guess. Brownie Mary or Brownie Mary? Jane? That's much better. She always laughed about her name. Supposedly. She was like, hey, I guess I was destined to do this. For those of you who don't know, Mary Jane is a street term for marijuana. If it's okay, Josh, I'm going to call this. It was just sort of a weird email from a dude in Minneapolis hey, guys. I was just listening to the Mexican wrestling podcast, and you called for something to knock your socks off. I thought I'd share this with you. Please take a moment to aim your feet away from anyone's face, unless they want a knocked off sock up in their grill. Are you ready for this? I was an anthropological expedition. I was on one into the heart of the darkest Iowa, researching archaeological and cultural leads regarding a Mayan prince who fell out of favor and may or may not have traveled up to Mississippi in 1270 BC. Setting up a kingdom in exile somewhere around the current town of farmersburg. Ancient texts also hint that he appointed a monkey as his head of agriculture, which was particularly interesting to me because I think monkeys are hilarious. Anyway, I was excavating near Farmersburg, their single stop sign, when I was suddenly surrounded by a street gang. They all had switchblades, so you knew they meant business. Their leader threatened me by saying, I only need to touch you once, like touching the wings of a butterfly. Then you're dead. To which I replied, actually, that's a myth. You can touch their wings without killing them, as long as you don't break the veins. Clearly a reference to our show on irdescence, right? Or now, was that part of iridescence? Yeah. Okay. In this manner, I opened up a dialogue, and we discussed briefly butterfly anatomy, the difference between cumulus and cirrus clouds, and the way the sun works. They were so impressed by my knowledge, they not only let me live, but they gave me a gift certificate to Applebee's, honorary member of their gang, the Lords of Lepidoptery. This is the study of firefight. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you and share first hand. Knowledge is truly power. Yours and nerditude Matt from Minneapolis. Did you verify that? I don't think it's true at all, but I think it's hysterical, and Matt took great time in crafting a very clever email. Okay, yeah, of course not a monkey head of agriculture? I don't know, man. Maybe that part is true. The Mayans were awfully rich, and they were, I guess, in Iowa. Yes. Well, let's see. If you want to take the time to craft a very clever email that captures our attention, we are always happy to read it. Well, you can tweet it to us. If it's really short tweet to syskpodcast, hit us up on Facebook@facebook.com stuff you should know. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcasts, stuff from the Future. Join House Deport staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you." | ||
http://netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1215462786022sysk-nazi-war-criminals.mp3 | Are Nazi War Criminals Still At Large? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/are-nazi-war-criminals-still-at-large | After the close of World War II, Nazi war criminals fled Europe and attempted to hide under assumed identities. Some may still be at large. Learn more about Nazi war criminals in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | After the close of World War II, Nazi war criminals fled Europe and attempted to hide under assumed identities. Some may still be at large. Learn more about Nazi war criminals in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:20:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=18, tm_min=20, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=121, tm_isdst=0) | 4759961 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkcom. Hi, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and I'm a staff writer here at Howard Stuffworkscom. With me, as always, is my very attractive and trusty editor, Chris Paulette. Chris, how's your goatee? Oh, it's great. Thanks for asking. So we wrote this article about whether or not Nazi war criminals are still at large. And the Simon Wiesenthal Center, this group that's dedicated to rooting out the last of the Nazi war criminals who may or may not be still alive, has launched Operation Last Chance in a last ditch effort. But while I was researching this, Chris, I found a lot of stuff that I couldn't fit into the article. One of the things that stuck out to me the most was the Masad, you know what the Masada? That's the Israeli Secret Service, right? It is, yeah. Now, they have been chasing Nazis for decades and have been fairly successful at it. They found Klaus Barbie. They also found Adolf Eichmann, who was pretty much the engineer of the Nazis Final Solution of exterminating all these supposedly unwanted races. But I also found something very interesting. The Mossad actually engaged in employing and hiding some wanted Nazi war criminals, which I found startling. You know, this group that's dedicated to rooting out for conviction or at the very least, for trial, not to war criminals having employed one. The guy they employed was this doctor who actually came up with the idea of mobile gas vans, right. So that the Nazis wouldn't have to shoot the Jews any longer to kill them. They could just load them up in these vans and carbon monoxide was put into the vans and whoever was inside was killed. And the worst part was, these vans, they looked like Red Cross ambulances, which is just about as bad as it gets, don't you think? Yeah, I think it's also a violation of the Geneva Convention, I'm quite sure, but I think pretty much 97% of what the Nazis did was in violation of the Geneva Convention. They weren't pretty much out the window from day one. Yeah. Not about following the rules. Well, you said, too, in the article that they weren't the only ones who had employed some of the former Nazis. Certainly not yet. Who else? Even the American government, I think you said the British, too. Basically, if they had something that they could use, the governments could use that they were willing to take them on. I know a lot of the nuclear and rocket scientists, too, were very important for them to grab before they could be tried, I guess. Definitely Project Paperclip. It was an actual secret project undertaken by the United States government to poach as many Nazi scientists as possible. Some of them were war criminals, some of them were lesser known, lesser involved people. But a lot of people argue that we wouldn't have made it to space first had it not been for former Nazi scientists like Vernon von Brown and some of the other guys like him who really helped on the American rocket team. That's amazing to think about, that they would be exonerated simply because of some of the other things that they could bring, so maybe they could make some positive contributions. And I think also, from my understanding, the Americans did undertake a process of determining just how involved a certain person was, at least the US government. I think with the CIA it was a different matter. I think they used whoever they felt could help them no matter what involvement they had. Do you know anything about that? Honestly, I don't. I haven't done nearly as much research as yet. Well, let me tell you, Adolf Eichmann, who, like I said, was finally captured, he was actually kidnapped in Argentina by the massage. He was used by the CIA as a West German agent. And they knew who he was, they knew what he'd done, and they were still using them as a secret agent in West Germany. Amazing. Well, that's it for are there still nothing more criminals at large? You can find out more about it on HowStuffWorks.com. Thanks for listening. 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." | |
How El Nino Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-el-nino-works | El Nino may mean "the little boy" or "Christ Child" in Spanish, but this weather phenomenon really means crazy things for Planet Earth. We're talking rain where it's typically dry and drought where it's usually wet. Learn why today. | El Nino may mean "the little boy" or "Christ Child" in Spanish, but this weather phenomenon really means crazy things for Planet Earth. We're talking rain where it's typically dry and drought where it's usually wet. Learn why today. | Tue, 01 Mar 2016 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=61, tm_isdst=0) | 34048353 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles W, Chuck, Bryant and Jerry's over there. And we got this guy. M el Nino. All other tropical storms must bow before El Nino. Yo soy El Nino. For those of you who don't abla espanio. El nino is Spanish for the nino. That was the late, great Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live. Back in the winter, early spring of 97 98, when all anyone could talk about was El Ninja. Yeah. I thought you were going to select to play Wave of Mutilation by the Pixies. Is that about El Nino? It's in the lyric I've kissed mermaids, rode the El Nino. Oh, yeah. Walk the sands with a crustacean. I never realized that's what he was saying. Yeah, but riding the El Nino is sort of as you'll see, it's not a way. It's wrong. Black. Francis, you were wrong. Charles. Can we call him Charles? No, Frank. But in the pixies, he was Black Francis. Yeah, he's back to black. Yeah. Frank Black. Frank Black, man. I saw him. And you and I are both lifelong Pixies fans, obviously. But I saw him do a solo show. May have been with the Catholics, even in a tiny little bar in La. When I lived there. Well and I couldn't figure it out. It's at, like, 75 people. I was like, Why are you playing here? And why aren't there a thousand other people trying to get in here illegally? Yeah, he's 8ft in front of me. We're okay, but, man, those albums are great. Not door busting great. I think the Catholics albums are really good. Really? Oh, yeah. I like to play these numbers. Well, okay. Anyway, great show at the Mint in La. Rodie el Nino. Yeah, I know exactly the line you're talking about, but I never realized rodio NinJo, right. He pronounced this thing oddly. Maybe you thought he yeah, I don't know. I think that it was like ninja or something like that. Or maybe he didn't mean the weather phenomenon. Maybe he meant he got on the back of a small boy and rode around. Or the horse or the Christ Child, maybe. Because if you live in Spain or Spanish speaking country and you turn on, say, the Weather Channel, they will say things like, well, the Christ Child is going to be way worse than the last time the Christchild came around. That's what they say. Because El Ninja, we should say when it's capitalized, means the Christchild. That's right. If it's lower case, it just means the boy in Spanish, but uppercase the baby Jesus. Yeah. And I never knew this until we researched this in Peru. The Spanish colonizers coined that term when they discovered this phenomenon themselves around Christmas. Yeah. So how about that? Yeah, it was pretty cool, I guess. And we should mention, historically, this is nothing new. El Ninja. No, they written record state back to 1525 and Vanuatu again, of course. And there's geological evidence that dates it back. Possibly, if you like. Harvard science. Go Harvard. As much as 124,000 years. Because some scientists there, or one in particular, examined annual deposits on Indonesian coral and said, hey, I think this is this coral looks like it was affected by El Nino. Right. 124,000 years ago. I also saw they found evidence that a very early Peruvian culture collapsed because of the climate change brought about by El Nina. Oh, interesting. Based on some like, the disappearance of some certain mollusk varieties. Yeah. Pretty cool stuff. So nothing new. We should probably tell people, if you don't know what El Nino is, what El Nino is, do you want to? Sure, I do. Like I do with lots of things I don't understand. I go to kids science website. Yeah. I found one that said I was like I was reading this article three times, and I got to the bottom and it said, Fifth Grade Earth Science Module. I was like, man, it really helps. And that's just a tip from us to you. If you're a dumb adult, then go look to kids websites. Fifth grade is about right there. All right, so here's the deal. Temperatures, world global temperatures depend a lot on the ocean, and the ocean weather period depends a lot on the temperature of the oceans. Right. So if you have a warm ocean, you're going to have more rain in that area. Right. And then the Pacific Ocean near the equator or the equatorial region, where it's warm. Where it's warm, you're going to have the sun baking that water on the surface, making it warmer. Right. And then the rain, that water heats up the air right above it. That air rises, taking some of the moisture with it, and it rises up, meets cooler, drier air in the atmosphere. That water vapor condenses and turns into rain. There's your tropical thunderstorm. Boom. So that's part one. Right. And then in the Pacific specifically, there is a patch of warm water that usually gets blown from the eastern Pacific to the western Pacific, usually like clockwork. And when that happens, everything's normal. Yes. These are trade winds, and they blow usually pretty consistently, but not always. Sometimes they don't blow as heavy, and sometimes they change direction. Yeah. So if the trade wind isn't blowing this warm water, the rotation of the Earth on its axis actually pushes the warm water toward the east rather than toward the west. That's correct. And when everything's normal and the trade winds blow the swarm water to the west in the wintertime, the rainy season comes to places like East Asia, right? Yeah. And then western Peru, the eastern Pacific, it's kind of confusing. So just refer to a map as we're talking. Yeah, that would help, actually. It's normally dry and cool. Right. But if the trade winds aren't there, like you say, to push that warm water along that warm water stays right where it is, off of the coast of Peru in the eastern Pacific, and all the weather in the world starts to change. This is what's called El Nino. That's right. And El Nino is not something that just affects that one region out in the middle of nowhere in the ocean. Right. It affects climate. Well, not climate, but weather all over the world in the US. What you usually see, and we'll talk more about this current El Nino that we're in, because we're in one yeah, 20 15, 20 16 winter. But typically in the US. It's going to mean cooler and wetter weather. In the southern part of the United States, warmer weather. In the upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest and Alaska, fewer hurricanes, more typhoons. Right. Globally. Fewer Atlantic hurricanes, more Pacific Typhoons. I think aren't they one in the same, like a hurricane and a typhoon? It's just depending on where in the world they are. I don't know. I think so, yeah. I'm pretty sure it depends on what you call it. I guess we're going to find out. All right. I'm sure around the world in Southeast Asia, where it's warm and dry, in places like Australia, it's going to be well, warm and dry. Right. It can be dangerously dry, yes. South conditions. Right. It will get drier than normal because the rainy season isn't being brought over there by the trade winds that year. Exactly. Southern Africa. Warm and dry. Central Africa wetter. And then South America is sort of all over the place, depending on where you are from. Dry in the Northeast, in the west and south. Right. So those are what El Nina will mean when it happens. Usually the thing is, this happens every two to seven years, supposedly, and it's actually only in fairly recent times, since the early eighty s, that science has really sat up and paid attention to this, and it was because they got caught off guard by one. But throughout the study over the last 30 something years, we still don't have any idea what causes the trade winds to stop. Basically, some years that produces El Nino, and that's a huge mystery and one that really if we could solve that, if we could figure it out, then we could probably predict El Nino even further out, which is, as we'll see, would save lives. Absolutely. Well, why don't we take a quick break here and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the process. All right. So you said every two to seven years? Yes, I did. El Nino comes on stage and takes a bell, since we are the pixies. Seriously, if you haven't seen that Chris Farley bit, just go watch it. It's hilarious. He's got like Carmen Miranda armbands on his shirt. It's great. He liked to take his shirt off, didn't he? Yeah, he did. He got laughs. So, Chuck, we were talking about how El Nino affects the weather, not just around, like, eastern Peru or making it dryer in Southeast Asia or Australia. And the reason that it affects weather around the world is because of the jet streams. There's a bunch of them, and basically, the jet streams are where the stratosphere and the troposphere meet. And it's just to put, really, even less than fifth grade science. Second grade science. They're like rivers of fast moving air in already moving air. It's a jet stream, basically, up in the atmosphere, and they're basically like conveyor belts around the world. Yeah. They move from west to east. Right. And they push things like warm air and cool air and high pressure and low pressure and fronts all over the world. And when these things encounter other fronts that are already there, they form weather. Right. And it's weird to think of weather as the lack of something, but having, say, cool, dry weather, that's still weather. Usually think of weather as an event, like a thunderstorm or tornado or something like that. But weather can also be unusually dry or unusually cool weather, too. Weather is just however it is right now is weather. It's very mellow. And the jet stream, because of its massive power, can affect thousands of miles away, things that you wouldn't think might be affected. Or affected. Yeah. And so depending on where you are in a jet stream, jet streams are characterized by troughs and ridges, right? Yeah. And if you're underneath a ridge, things usually tend to stay warm and dry. And if you're under a trough, it's usually cold and wet. So like you said, in an El Nino, the southeastern United States usually is sitting right underneath a trough in the jet stream, which means it's colder and wetter than usual, right? Yeah. Well, that's why, because of the jet stream, people blame it on the El Nino, and the El Nino started the whole thing. This weather wouldn't be happening. But the reason the El Nino is distributed throughout the world is because of the jet stream. So it's this very extraordinarily complex system working in concert with one another to wreak havoc. Yes. For the most part, el Nino, we said every two to seven years when we get one, and climatologists and weather people and meteorologists. What else can I call them? Weather bugs. Weather bugs. They look at patterns, and you can't just say any time, like, things are heating up a little bit at El Nino. There are specific conditions. They look in particular, you can say that, but you'll get shouted down. Oh, sure, yeah. You're a meteorologist. Yeah, they love shouting. They look at ocean temperatures, mainly in the Pacific, and when they find a zero nine degree Fahrenheit or zero five degree Celsius rise in the water, and then the conditions start to sort of act like we're talking about before with the wind, they say, all right, let's take a look at this and start charting at everybody. And everyone gets real excited in the office. And what they need is five overlapping three month periods for that to be officially classified as El Nino. Right. Otherwise, it's just like you said, weather. But it all starts with the sea surface temperature is what they call it. Staying warmer, being warmer than usual. Yeah. And right now, we are officially in the strongest El Nino on record yes. At a 3.1 degree rise Fahrenheit and its peak. Wow. And like El Nino conditions start at .9 degrees. Yes. And we're at 3.1. Yes. And one of the we'll talk about some of the other big ones, but the one in 97, I believe, that Chris Farley referenced was that peaked at 2.8. So this is officially the strongest. Although it's not really having the same result as what you would imagine as the strongest. Right. So you would guess and you wouldn't be shouted at in the meteorological conference if you guessed this but warmer, warmer sea surface temperatures should lead to worse weather conditions. Drier. More indonesia wetter in the southeastern United States. And it's just not happening this time. Well, it is, but not to the degree that they thought it would. Right. But not even to the degree where, oh, this is just slightly worse than it was in 97. It's actually not nearly as bad as it was in 97. Even though the sea service temperature is higher. Yeah. And they can't explain that either. No, they can't. And they're blaming it on climate change. They're saying it's climate change is definitely doing something. What exactly, we don't know. Right. And again, the whole thing dates back to the whole study of it dates back to 1982 83 season. Right. Yeah. That was when meteorology was in its infancy. Right? Well, not exactly, but sort of because they had an El Nino year then and they thought, hey, I think what's going on is this volcano in Mexico, El Chichon, erupted and that's wreaking havoc everywhere. That's got to be what it is. Yeah. They later were like, oh, wait a minute, things are normal now. It wasn't the volcano. What could it be? And the reason that it really got their attention is by the time the El Nino conditions ended, there was like $80 billion worth of damage worldwide. Property damage, I think. And something like 2000 people had lost their lives. So it really made these meteorologists sit up and take notice. And so agencies like Noah started to drop buoys in the Pacific Ocean. They started using weather balloons to study air temperatures in the area and really started tracking the whole thing to see what was going on and to notice any changes. And that's when El Nino study really started in earnest. Yes. And there's also we should mention La Nina, which is what's known as a Sister to El Nino, appropriately titled. And that is when the trade winds actually picked back up and are stronger than normal. Right. And the fact that it's capitalized suggests that it's the girl Christ child. Right. I guess maybe el ninja. La ninja? Both capitalized. I don't know. A little odd. And each of these phenomenon are about nine to twelve months long, develop in the spring. They peak in the autumn or winter, and then weekend in the following spring and early summer. Right. So like right now when this El Nino, when they finally were like, all right, we're getting another El Nino, everyone in Southern California was jumping up and down because they're in the midst of a long drought and they thought, we're going to get tons of rain like we did in 97. Yeah. And it's going to really help fill the coffers. And it just hasn't panned out that way. They got a lot of rain in January, but nothing compared to 97. Right. California really angered God when they elected Schwarzenegger. Is that what it was? Yeah, you would pay. And Chuck, I think you said la Nina doesn't always follow El Nino. I don't think so. Well, it doesn't always follow El Nino. It's not guaranteed that when you have El Nino, you're going to have La Nino. Right. But Lani is basically the opposite. The trade winds not only blow the way they're supposed to, they blow even more than ever before. And it's really crazy dry where it's supposed to be it's really crazy wet where it's supposed to be wet. And then there's a period in between, a neutral period where nothing's freaky. That's called regular weather. Right. And if you put all this together, el Ninja, the neutral period, and La Ninja, you have what's called the El Nino Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, which if you are a weather bug or a meteorologist, this is probably how you refer to El Nino as the El Nino Southern Oscillation. Yes. Very nice. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. Okay. All right. So we talked about some of the effects on local weather in different parts of the world for El Nino, but that is not the only issue we talked about. It wreaking havoc. It's not just, oh, it's raining a lot and it shouldn't be, or oh, it's super dry. Like devastating effects, billions of dollars in lives, loss globally all over the place. So 1997, 98, the Chris Farley one, let's just call it the Farley. Nina, by the time that was over, I think you said earlier, $33 billion in damage. Oh, I thought it was like 80 billion. I'm sorry, I exaggerated. Maybe it would be 80 billion today. No, I was talking about the early 80s when I said 80 billion. I see. Now it's 8 billion. I was eight billed out wrong. So please go ahead. That's still a lot of money. So 33 billion in damage for the 98 one half a billion in California alone. And it's a big deal. If you're an island in the Pacific, you rely on that rain for life, for fresh water. Yeah. Wash your hair. Sure. All that jazz. So food crops, they're going to suffer. Well, yeah. Drought is really bad for it, but also too much rain, too, can actually ruin crops. It also has a tremendous effect on property as well. Oh, yeah. I mean, if you live on the side of a hill in Los Angeles right. You might slide off of that hill and into the ocean below. Yeah. Where was that one? There's a place in I think in the yeah, in Peru. There was a place in Peru that normally gets about six inches of rain. Oh, yeah, that one. Yeah. And for the 1982 83 El Nino, we got 11ft. Yeah. You can't normally get how many inches? Six inches and go to 11ft and not have serious damage done. Right. And for those of you not in the US or Liberia who weren't just like, wow. Normally it's placed in proof, gets 15 rain, and they got 3 meters of rain that year. Wow. Now everybody's duly impressed. Fisheries are also affected. This is one that I did not know anchovies love that cold water off the coast of Peru, but when that cold water is not there, they say, I'm swimming to where it's cold. Right. And so fisheries either scramble to make up for that in other ways, or if they get warning like they get now, they say, hey, why don't we fish for something that likes cold water and like, shrimp, a little baby krill and shrimp. Shrimp. Because you can do a lot of different stuff with shrimp. I don't know if you know this. Oh, boy. Would you like me to list them off? No, Bubba Gump, don't. It also affects just the health of individuals. Disease carrying rodents and insects are going to be more prolific in the wet weather. Malaria is going to increase when it's unusually wet and warm. Right. And when it is unusually wet and warm, things like diseases tend to spread a lot more easily. Sure. Mosquitoes breed very easily. Yeah. Which would account for the malaria. Right. Three fold. Right. Did you say threefold increase in 1997? I did not. In Peru, there was a threefold increase in malaria in 1997 because there were just that many more mosquitoes biting people. Yeah. And that's wet conditions. In 1997, Indonesia had 24 million acres, or 7.7 million ha like that sure. Of unchecked forest fires. Yeah. That's devastating to the region. Well, yeah, and it was because, again, they're expecting a rainy season, and instead they got a drought. And Indonesia in particular got well, it got screwed over by nature. Okay, I'm just going to come out and say it. Absolutely. Because they had the warm conditions from Southeast Asia pushing into there, that area, and then well, they're in Southeast Asia, but the majority of Southeast Asia got warmer than usual conditions, and then Australia had drier than usual conditions, and these two conditions pushed together and overlapped and made a Venn diagram, and the center of the Venn diagram fell directly over Indonesia. So Indonesia was like, we didn't elect Schwarzenegger. What's going on? And it burned? As a matter of fact, yeah. 24 million acres. It's unbelievable. Southern California, it's not over for you yet. They said that there could still be some rough storms into March. But you're not going to solve your drought problem even if it was a strong El Nino, you know? Right. Or if the strong El Nino led to, like, massive amounts of rain. Well, supposedly, also when you get a lot of rain too, it's really dangerous because if you've been through a drought, like, too much at once. Yes. Because tree roots during a drought come back up toward the surface because they're trying to get all the water they can. So these trees have shallow roots, so an influx or deluge of water just goes right underneath the trees, and they fall over. Yeah. That happened in Atlanta a few years ago, I remember. And I may have even told the story of the guy who got killed in front of my house. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. I mean, 30ft in front of my house, a tree fell on a guy's truck hitting that freak. I know. And I think about that every time we have massive amounts of rain for days and days at a time, and I start to see trees down when I'm driving. I start to look around and pay attention. Not that there's much you can do. No, I mean, maybe if you saw a tree falling, you could jet out of there, but you got to go the right way. It's true. Yeah. A tree is a large swath. Yeah. There was an actress in Chicago. She's on TV. I don't remember what show, but she was riding her bike and a tree fell over and killed her. Tree falling over and killing you randomly is like your number is up. How can you think of the universe as being that random? It almost is. Like I know. Like fate showing its hand. Yeah. You're sitting at a stoplight and a tree falls on your car and kills you. Then that's definitely or physically moving past a triana bike and it falls over. The timing is that perfect that it kills you. There was some movie where one of those disaster movies where these large towers were falling and people were trying to outrun it by going, like, north or the same direction. I can't remember what it was, but I just remember thinking, like, just go left or right. It's the same thing as, like, don't go into the house. I know. No reason for you to go into the house. They're movie tropes. I get it. Yeah. Do you have anything else, sir? Yeah, so we talked a little bit about climate change affecting El Nino. And the general consensus is that, yes, it is going to affect El Ninja. It's already affecting El Nino, and unsettlingly, it's affecting El Nino in ways that are wildly unpredictable to the current models we have. Right. And there's this blogger on Climate, gov named Tim Deliberto. I'm probably overpronouncing his name a little bit, but he likens the ENSO to the light. And like a dining room is controlled by a dimmer switch. Right. Yeah. And actually, because it's kind of complex, there's a bunch of different dimmer switches, but all of them control this one light that is and so okay. And he says climate change is like this Brady kid that comes in the room and just starts messing with all the dimmer switches. It's going to affect the lights, but in all sorts of different ways that are really tough to predict. And he's basically saying, like, we were caught with our guard down in 1982, and we did a lot to make up for that. And now it's so great that we can tell farmers in Peru go plant and dry areas going to have a great crop this year. Or go fish for shrimp. Right. Which is basically magic. This is what their shaman used to do a couple of thousand years ago, we're now doing. Right. Which is pretty cool if you ask me. Agreed. But now we're caught with our guard down again, apparently, and we're going to have to figure it out. Right. And by we and they better hurry up. Yeah. In the prevailing thought that just things beyond unpredictable are just going to be more severe. Yeah, but actually that doesn't make any sense because it's less severe this year, even though the service temperature is warmer. Yeah. It says to me they don't know. My whole takeaway from that story is that's my kind of dining room because I love dimmer switches. I love dimmer switches, too, man. If something will stand still long enough, I'll put a dimmer switch on it. Yeah. I've got them all over my house because why not have a dimmer switch? I don't know. Why just have a dumb switch. It's like, I can only be this bright. On or off. Take your picks. Lim yeah. I mean, this is 2016, for God's sake. Yeah. So we have an Amazon Echo, and I don't know what that is. It's like the thing you talk to. It's the robot that eavesdrops on you while you're in your house. Sounds neat. And it can't control lighting yet, but it's like right there. And I can't wait. I can be like, turn the living room lights to 30%. What's the purpose of this thing? I've never heard of it. At its core, it's a wireless Bluetooth speaker that responds to voice commands. You can see commercial for that. Yes. You have a house robot, as John Hodgeman says, that is going to become sentient and kill you. And your wife and your sleep, probably, but not for a few decades. Okay, good. And in the meantime, she's just eavesdropping on us and feeding everything we say to the NSA. Wow. I did see a thing the other day where I can't remember which brand of TV, but one of them came out and said, hey, you know that new smart TV? It's actually always listening to you, so watch what you say. Yeah, no, everything that has the capability. Well, your phone like, if you look at apps and you're looking at the permission that you give apps on your phone, go check it out. It'll say, yeah, we have access to your microphone. We have access to your video. And you're granting them access, which means they can go in anytime or all the time and eavesdrop on what you're saying or watch you through your camera while you don't think that it's on. I tape over my laptop camera, at least. Yes, that's smart. But your phone is very have you seen Citizen For? Not yet. Oh, Chuck, it's been sitting there on my TV. You need to see that. It's very enlightening. For sure. They talk about that because apparently when Snowden came in the room, he took everybody's phone, took the batteries out, and then put them in the mini fridge in the room. It was like, now we can talk. Wow. Yeah. And he didn't realize he was talking to human cyborgs that were recording everything with iCameras. No. Well, actually, they had a camera in the room, which is the ironic thing. And he knew he was being filmed. He just, I guess, wanted to control the flow of information. Well, if anyone out there wants to hack into my laptop, I will untap it for you and you will be subscribing to the most boring TV show in the world. I thought you were going to say you'll take them on a wild ride. No, truck sweeps the floor, chuck cleans out cat poop and forgets to put in a cat litter. I think it was an Internet roundup. We also talked about there was, like, a Russian website with nothing but links to baby cameras and security cameras around the world. That's right. People who have poorly protected cameras. Well, yeah, because I think the thing with the baby cams is they give you a password out of the box, but you're supposed to change this, and if you don't, then it's easily hackable. They're hackable anyway. Dude, I read stories where, like, a lady went into her kids'bedroom with a camera and heard someone talking back to the kids in Russian. Yeah, it's like yelling at the kids. Every parent's worst nightmare. And that's one reason I don't have a video baby monitor. Yeah, and usually Russians yell at babies through baby monitors worse than usual during El Nino seasons. Bring it full circle. If you want to know more about El Nino, type that word into the. Search bar@howstepworks.com. And since I said, Christchild, it's time for listener mail, I'm going to call well, you know, first we got a couple of quick corrections. Oh, yeah. Milk does a body good. It does. Skim milk does not have high fructose corn syrup. Serve. Yeah, I just got that one wrong. Yeah, it was awful. Tough comment, but I have thought that for a long time. And I'm trying to think of where I heard it, and I don't remember. I do not remember. It was either, like food ink or fed up or some documentary about food, or I just confabulated it, maybe. Sorry for that one. It happens. There is some additive, though. I stand by that. I can't remember what it is, but it's not HFC hcp and AJ Hackett. Boy, are we sorry. New Zealand. Yeah, sorry, guys. The inventor or one of the forebearers of the bungee jump was definitely not Australian. No, it was Kiwi. And I've been both places, so I know the difference well. And you're the one who said it, so you sir, I apologize to New Zealand, and to make it up, New Zealand, we're going to come do a show there one day and it's going to be free. Actually, that's not true, because we have to actually pay for the trip. Yeah, but I'd love to do a show there. Let's do it. If we go to Australia, we got to go to New Zealand. Oh, man, they'd kill us if we didn't. Plus, I just want to yeah. New Zealand is beautiful. That's what I've heard. All right, so on to listener mail. This is just kind of a neat thing. That's what I'm calling it, a neat thing. Okay. Hey, guys. One year ago today, I proposed to my now wife. So I guess she said yes using a custom New York Times crossword puzzle. Oh, yeah. That sounds like something you do. And it was entitled Stuff You Should Know. I worked on the puzzle with The New York Times puzzle creator that's so cool. And even got the official layout from The New York Times Magazine staff, the hotel staff where we were staying that night swapped out the puzzle in our New York Times crossword that was to be delivered the following morning. Twelve to 15 of the clues were tied to our relationship, including the title of the puzzle from the finished puzzle. The phrase, I thought it said, you will marry me. That would be creepy. Will you marry me? Was spelled out in the bubbles. So creative. Yeah. My wife Hannah and I bonded early on through your podcast, and it has remained a wonderful constant in our relationship. So thanks so much for being great and, in a way, being part of one of the best days of my life. The day I proposed to my wife. That is neat. Three exclamation points. I've attached some of the photos from that day. I looked at it, and the guy is telling the truth. Yeah, his story checks out. You Guys Are Great. Adam In Chicago. PS. We saw you perform live at the Athenium theater here and really enjoyed it. Keep up the good work, guys. For exclamation points. So he thinks we're doing a better work than he enjoyed his own engagement. Yeah, and he also said you guys are great, too. Exclamation Points. So I see where your priorities lay. Adam In Chicago. Yeah. We got six exclamation points combined. Adam and Hannah. Way to go. Hope you guys stay married forever and listen to us as part of your long lasting flavor agreement. Yes. Legal Agreement. Well Put, Chuck. We just really deflated that due to the moon. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at fyskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffysheno. You can send us an email stuffpodcast@housestepworkscom. And as always, join us at our home on the web the super cool, super awesome James Brown of websites stuffyshireknowncom. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtstepworkscom." | ||
45baabd9-5751-451a-a46f-aede00e4b3b5 | Selects: Some Movies That Changed Filmmaking | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-some-movies-that-changed-filmmaking | <p>An estimated 50,000 films were made worldwide in 2009 alone. Many are surely clunkers, but in this episode Chuck and Josh talk about the ones that emerged throughout cinema history to change the course of all movies that followed. Get your popcorn and lean back while you enjoy this classic episode.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p> | <p>An estimated 50,000 films were made worldwide in 2009 alone. Many are surely clunkers, but in this episode Chuck and Josh talk about the ones that emerged throughout cinema history to change the course of all movies that followed. Get your popcorn and lean back while you enjoy this classic episode.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p> | Sat, 30 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=211, tm_isdst=0) | 54884406 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And since it's summertime, it's movie time imo. So I've chosen our super interesting 2015 movie talk episode. Some movies that changed filmmaking. You don't have to be a Cinema file to enjoy this episode episode, so don't be scared off. And there's a part right around the beginning of Listener Mail where we talk about making a movie podcast that I now wonder was possibly the seed that Chuck's Movie Crush podcast sprouted from Maybe, which, if you like this, go listen to the extensive Movie Crush catalog anywhere you get your podcast. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy 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, A-K-A. Siscal and Ebert Save at CILC. And Jerry's over there. I guess she's Jean Sallot. That's the stuff you should know. Triumphant. I don't know why that tickled me so much. Because Jean Salad is a funny looking I guess Jerry's not. I'm just picturing her with a big afro and a mustache and, like, a tweed jacket and bad opinions about movies. Jean Shellett had a look for sure. He's around, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Rip. Both Cisco and Ebert. So sad. I know. Have you seen the Roger Ebert documentary? No. I've heard nothing but good things. Really good. Very touching. Yeah. What is it? Something life like mine. Life with me. Life on top. Life itself. Life with thumbs. Life itself. Life itself. Life with thumbs. It was really great. And I watched it on made the mistake of watching on a plane, and I was just like, My allergies are acting up. Yeah, I was watering. Because of your allergies? No, because I was sad. I was crying. Do you want me to say it? Yeah. Crying on a plane. I was confused there for a second. That's better than when I watch other movies that are on my laptop that are, like, bad violence or nudity or something. I'm always just like oh. And I kind of lower the laptop, and it's like, I didn't realize this was in here. And the lady next to me is just like, you disgust me. Yeah, because I want to be sensitive to people around me. I'm not one of those jerks. It just lives in my own bubble. It's like watching some sex scene on planes. You're like, elbowing the lady? No, I hate it. It was so embarrassed. It happened to me a couple of times. I'm like, I needed to start going PG on movies. Yeah, you just look for, like, airplanes. JuD apatow. Am I right? He's unpredictable. Yeah. All right, so, Chuck, this is your episode to Shine man. Is it? Yes. You're a movie guy, too, though. I like movies, but I almost consciously don't let myself watch movies on a film aficionado level. Right. Because it's pure enjoyment. Yeah. I don't ever want to see the individual shots and just be like, oh, well, that could have been better. Whatever. And just miss the movie as a whole. Yeah, I saw somewhere in the middle of that. I try to let go, but our video producer, director Casey, is pretty bad about that. Our buddy Scotty, who shot our TV show, he's the worst. Yeah, he's just a camera working out lighting in that scene. That's awesome. Hey, Scott. Hey, Casey. They're all in here with us in spirit. And hey, this is the last show in the studio. Yeah, last episode in the old office, the Murder Room. Couldn't feel more neutral about it. I actually feel less than neutral. Less than zero. It's weird. That was a good movie. Thank you. Great shots. I say thank you as if I directed it. I not only directed it, I also played Andrew McCarthy. Yeah. I'm ready to get the heck out of here, man. Can't wait to get in that new office. Yeah, it's going to be good. Tiny, little, dedicated studio. Whole new world. All right, let's do this. Okay, so, Chuck, films, you've seen one or two of them in your time? Sure. Have you seen any of the ones in this list? I know you've seen a few of them, but have you seen, like, some of the early ones I've seen? Well, we'll just go piece by piece because I have not seen Battleship Patenkin. Okay. But I do love Mandy Potenkin. It's a little different. Yes. In spelling, pronunciation, meaning, the whole thing. But it's close, I guess. But we're talking, of course, about films that change filmmaking in some way or another. And the first one on the list is from Battleship Potemkin. That's hard for me to say. Which is not the first movie, by the way. The first screen movie was Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, which is 47 seconds long and the most boring piece of celluloid anyone's ever put together. But it was the first. That's right. This was many years that was a full 30 years before Battleship Patemkin. By the time 30 years had passed, like, we were doing, like, narratives, and there was banning and all sorts of great stuff. And Battleship Patink fell under both of those umbrellas. It was a narrative story. It was a silent movie. That's right. But it told a pretty clear story. And it was a bit of Russian propaganda as well. Yeah. It tells the story of a 19 five uprising where there were Russian sailors, basically. There was a mutiny aboard a ship. And then the bad guys, the Cossacks, came in looking for revenge. Yes. 19 five. That would have been rising up against tyranny. Would have been rising up against the Romanoff monarchy, I guess. Nice. But it was made so this is a time when Lennon and Trotsky and all those dudes were running around trying to do the great experiment. Yeah. And it ends up turns out that the Battleship potemkin was banned in some countries. Some countries are like, we don't want this rusty propaganda. Right. But Russia itself later on, banned it when Stalin came to power because he was a self aware dictator. Was that the deal? Yeah. Okay. He knew this could be a metaphor for rising up against my dictatorship, so I'm going to just ban the city even though it's Russian propaganda. Well, filmatically I need to bring the history, by the way. filmatically speaking, it was a landmark film because of the montage, most notably the Russian or Soviet theory of montage, which is basically that your impact is going to come from juxtaposition of shots and not necessarily a smooth sequence of shots. Right. And it should be rhythmic. Instead of necessarily being tied to the story, it was like a rhythmic series of shots. And this one is popular. It was the Odessa Step sequence as one of the five acts. And it is huge because it has been aped and mimicked and mocked and homaged, probably more than more, but a lot of times in film history. Well, yeah. The montage is like a go to editing technique, right? Yeah. Well, the montage in general, but specifically the Odessa steps. Okay. There are two notable parts in that sequence. One is the it's basically a big charge on these grand steps leading up to a building and a big battle in Odessa. Odessa, Texas. And there's a part of it where there's the old baby carriage going down the steps. What's going to happen to the baby? And it sounds tired because we've seen that in The Untouchables. Notably, I did not find it tiresome. Naked Gun 33. And a third. Everything is illuminated. The Great movie by Leaf Shriverer that was from directly from the Odessa step sequence in battleship Patampon. The baby carriage. Yeah. And the old shot in the eye through the glasses. Oh, cool. That comes from this movie, too. They're the first ones to do it. Yes. And you've seen that in Woody Allen's love and death and bananas. And of course, the Godfather. The great sequence where most Greens getting the massage and he looks up and puts on his glasses during a montage. Yeah, exactly. Whole sequence. Yeah. Because there was an assassination on the steps as well. Oh, yes. That was definitely the double. Who was that? That was Francis Ford Coppola. Oh, yeah. He was clearly aware of battleship Patemkin. Clearly. I was trying to think of other examples of montages and the only thing I could come up with was the 18 building something. But that counts as a montage, right? Yeah. It's like, in some way, related shots that are kind of put together that a little bit transcend, like tell a story in itself. Like Rocky training for a fight. Yeah, that's another good one. A lot of times it's set to music. Yeah. I love that. It's the only one you can think of in the great movie. Brazil, too, has the shot through the glasses bit, as I like to call it. So that's Battleship at Damon doesn't one of the Nazis and Raiders of the Lost Ark gets shot through the glasses. Maybe. That wouldn't surprise me. It's been off homage battleship to Tempin. It made a pretty big splash in 1925 and 1926. The following year, the next movie on the list. It wasn't his first, but it really solidified, I think his stardom, Buster Keaton stardom. Yeah. The General. Rightfully so, too. Yeah. He was one of the great well, some people call him the greatest stuntman to ever live. He's done some stuff that I think earns him that. Yes. This is back in the day, too, where he was legitimately risking his life. Like, very famously, where he's standing on the street in front of a house and then the whole front of the house falls over him and the window just goes right around him. I watch that again today. I can't believe he did that. There's actually a half of a second where his arm jerks up because he's startled as the house finally makes its way into his peripheral vision. And it has to be one of the most dangerous things that human beings ever done on film, I'm sure. The whole time before that was like, we did the math, right? You did the math. Do the math again. Do the math again. Show me the math. Show me the math. Because that's all it was. It was math and measurements. Right. But, yeah, he could have been squashed and killed very easily. And he had a lot of faith in everybody who was pulling off the stunt with him. He had to just stand there. That was his whole thing. He had to just stand there. And his bit was that he played it straight constantly. He was a stone faced actor. Yeah. Deadpan. Yeah. He kind of started that whole thing because his big I was about to say rival, but I guess just contemporary charlie Chaplin, while similar in some ways, was completely different because Chaplin was constantly mugging for the camera and asking for the audience sympathy. Right. Raising his eyebrows. Yeah. Like, look what's happening to me. Come on. Come on. Whereas Buster Keaton, he had that deadpan look the whole time. Yeah. It would go from a house falling around him to jumping on a train or something like that with just the same blank facial expression. Yeah. And the reason this is a highly influential film, The Generals, because it kind of showcases the best of both the amazing stunts that would be mimicked throughout the years and built upon and then the deadpan style that influenced everyone from obviously, Bill Murray is one of the great deadpan actors of all time. You can count the number of times Bill Murray even smiles in a movie on, like, two hands. Sure. Much less like apes or laughs or anything. Michael sarah's mentioned in here. And I'm like, I think he might have Bill Murray beat, as far as deadpan actor goes. Yeah. Well, Zach Galifian, actress, is on the list. He's super deadpan. Yeah. Leslie Nielsen, of course. Amy Poehler, I think, is a woman that's a very deadpan has a deadpan style. Jason Swartzman. Yes. But people say this all is a direct descendant of Buster Keaton's work. Yeah. And if you think we're overstating this, go watch any Buster Keaton movie. You'll be thrilled and delighted. And if your attention span has been shredded to ribbons by the Internet, just go on to YouTube and type in Buster Keaton and it will bring up all sorts of clips of his awesome stunts. Pretty great. You will be thrilled in a maze, I promise. Yes. And I think I made a note here, by the way, that we have a Fatty Arbuckle retraction to make. Remember when we called him out as the rapist to Murderer? I didn't say murderer. Well, we said rapist, at least. Right. But we were taking the test by fan. He was acquitted of all that stuff, and apparently he didn't do either act. And his career and life and family name were ruined forever. So he was evidently done a grave misjustice. And we sort of cavalierly just still called him that today. Yeah. I need to look into it more. All right. So next up we have the Jazz Singer. The 1927 edition. Not the Neil Diamond one. No. And there was one in between, too, with Danny Thomas, I believe. I like Neil Diamonds. It's good. I never saw it. Do you ever see it? No, it's not bad. But this is the original from Allen Crossland, and it is notable because it was the first feature length movie that was at least 25% spoken dialogue. Right. Does that make sense? Yes, it's totally new. Yeah. It wasn't the first talkie because they had short films that were talkies. And there was a movie the next year I'm sorry, in 1928 called Lights of New York that had 100% full spoken dialogue. But The Jazz Singer had a mix of music and spoken dialogue. Right. The first Big Daddy feature link film to do so right. With substantial dialogue. Right. Yeah. And they did it in the most roundabout, difficult way that you could possibly do it, which is to record the audio and the soundtrack, but the dialogue and the music onto vinyl records, probably wax records. Really. And then the projectionist had to sync the record up with the film strip. So everything was in sync. Yeah. It was a device called a Vita Phone that Warner Brothers sunk about half a million into this company called Western Electric, who invented it, and it was actually physically connected to the projectors motor. So while they did have to sync it, it was a physical connection between the phonograph player and the projection. Real, I guess. And it went on to gross three and a half million dollars for 1927. Man, a lot of dough. That's a ton of dough. That's like five $6 million today. At least. Yeah, at least. But was ineligible for the best picture because they were just like, you can't compete with the rest. It's not fair. Oh, wow. Because everything else is silent and everyone's going to vote for you. Yeah. So that changed the whole game, for sure. We will continue on with our awesome and grossing list right after this. So, Chuck, if you'll notice, the first three movies in our list, the first three films that changed everything happened in 1925, 26 and 27. Things were changing fast. They really were by leaps and bounds. But you can also make the case that there was a lot of new ground to cover. So just about anybody who did anything new that was noteworthy. Yeah, it was a big innovation. Harder to innovate these days. It is. And if you'll notice on the list so the earliest ones were like technical editing innovations. Now, starting with Citizen Kane from 1941, we start to get into innovations and storytelling, which is a lot more nuanced than doing your own stunts or using a montage or something. It's figuring out how to tell a story in a much less linear narrative fashion. And Citizen came as one of the early ones to pioneer a non linear narrative. Yeah. You saw this? Yeah. Okay. I didn't see it until it was probably like probably about 15 years ago, but, like, way later than you would think. I would have seen this as a big film buff. I saw it in college in a film class. Sure. Yeah. If you sign up for a film class, you're going to study Citizen class. Exactly. Pretty much. I finally found out where Rosebud was. Don't ruin it. I won't. But it is a landmark film in every way. And it has often been top of best films of all time lists for great reasons. One of which, like you said, the nonlinear narrative was a really unique thing at the time. Although flashback wasn't brand new, it was the first time it had been this extensive and effective in the story. Yes. Because it's substantial enough that it really cuts up the flow. Oh, yeah. It's not like a quick flashback and they come back and the actors, like, staring off into space to transition back into the present again. It was all over the place. Yeah. Some of the more concrete cinematic landmarks. One was using deep focus. Director of Photography greg Toland legend. He had used deep focus before on a movie called Long Voyage Home. But it's all over the place in Citizen Kane. And that basically means if you see a shot where something very far away is in focus in the shot, basically where everything is in focus, the background and the foreground are in focus. So you can press pause and look around exactly. Like you're sticking your head into a box. Yeah. That's called deep focus. And it was brand new. As far as Citizen gain goes, it's how extensive it used it. One of the other things was off center framing. It was a big pretty common thing to just enter whatever the main action was, either the character or the object. And Citizen Kane had a lot of things where the main focus of the scene, the character, maybe even off screen, which was really weird at the time. People didn't know what to think of it. Right. Expressionistic, lighting back then, everything they just lit it. They're like, make sure everything is well lit. Auto premature. Also. Like a big pioneer with that. Yeah, I think so. With Dial in for Murder, I think he directed that. Was that Hitchcock? I think that was Hitchcock. Okay, well, auto permit or directed. Stuff like that, though, right. He used moody lighting and chat and stuff a lot. I probably messed that up. People are going to be dialing for Murder. I think it was premature. Okay. But Orson Wells, of course, I don't think we even mentioned that, too. Wrote, directed, and starred and produced and I think even edited Citizen Kane. Yeah. I just assumed everybody knew that. Yeah. He came from the theater where you create a mood with lighting only certain parts of the stage. So he brought that into the movies, and it was very evocative and set the mood well. And people are like, man, why are we lighting everything all bright all the time? Look at Citizen Cain. It really worked. Yeah. A couple of other things. One of which I know you will appreciate, sir, is that he pretty much invented the wipe. Oh, the star wipe. Not the star wipe. But it followed. Yeah, the star wipe followed. Okay. Which I know is your favorite transition in cinema, star wipe, because it almost makes a sound, you know. By the way, I want to say you're right. Dallan for murder. It was Hitchcock. Oh, is it? Yeah. Okay. What was premature? Did you look that up? He did. One called Laura. The man with the golden arm. It's not who I'm thinking of. I'm thinking of a director named Otto who directed in, like, the he directed moody movies, like Murder. Movies. Filmore. Yeah, filmore. That's exactly what I was going for. And I don't remember who it was. Maybe his name was Auto. Film noir. He's French. And then one final thing. Of course, you could study Citizen Kane for a week in a film class. So this is an overview, but the low angle shots people didn't use a lot of low or high angle shots back then. It was kind of just shot from straight on. And Morrison Wales even dug out cut out the floor a lot of times to get the camera lower. And for the first time, we saw ceilings in view in a movie because quite often things were shot on a sound stage where you don't have ceilings. And he wanted those low angle shots. So they used fabric most times to act as a ceiling, but very effective shots from below of Orson Welles, as it wasn't exactly William Randolph Hearst, but it was an approximation of William Randolph Hearst. Right. It's a very effective low angle stuff. But now we take for granted all these things. But there would be no Pulp Fiction in that nonlinear storytelling. If there was no well, maybe somebody would have done it. Maybe. Eventually. But he did the first and that's why it was innovative. Exactly. It's Fritz Lang that I was doing. Yes. There you go. Fritz Lang, metropolis and M. Just M. That's okay. Yeah, it's all making sense. Then I get confused. Yes, but you were right there. Fritz and Auto are not close. I mean, they're both German, but that's about it. Yes. But you know the difference between M and dial. M just a telephone. What's up next, Chuck? Breathless, one of my favorites. So I am going to rely on you mostly for this one because I looked up what the French New Wave really did, what it accounted for, and all of the essays I found were hard to they were dense, and I didn't really understand. I understood that the French New Wave changed everything and that a lot of the movies that I know and love today are the offspring of the French New Wave. But I still didn't get exactly, specifically what the French New Wave did then. You're going to allow me to summarize this. Yeah. No brush. Well, for me, the French New Wave basically ushered in an era of what now I think most people might associate with indie filmmaking. Okay. Like handheld camera work and what some people at the time considered amateurish camera work, movies where maybe not a lot seemingly happens. Nothing grand happened, which was the case in Breathless. A lot of people didn't like it at the time because it was like not much happens. The two leads in the movie, Jon Paul Belmondo's and Gene Seaburg didn't show, express a whole lot of deep love. And there weren't these big moments of love and affection and these huge action sequences. And it was described as flat by a lot of people. And I think a lot of indie movies do that. Just kind of show life as it happens. Yeah. So without Breathless, we wouldn't have, like, bottle Rocket, maybe. Wes Anderson is definitely a big French new wave guy. Yeah, for sure. But God, John Lew Gord, who directed it in Truffle and some other French new wave forefathers were film critics at first. Oh, yeah. And they decided as a group, like, we want to look at cinema in a new way and do something different. So they went and started making their own movies. That's like James Fennemore. Cooper yeah. The guy who wrote Last of the Mohicans. Oh, really? Yeah. He apparently used to complain that nobody wrote good books anymore. And so I think his wife or something said, well, why don't you do a big shot? And he did. And the books he wrote really weren't so great, but he went and wrote them, and he wrote a bunch of them, too. One of my favorite far sides ever is The Second to the Last of the Mohicans. It's just a line of Native Americans and the second to the last one, they're online, facing away. He just sort of turning around and waving, I guess the camera Gary Larson's hand, so Breathless is notable for those reasons. It kind of kicked off the French new wave. But the use of jump cut editing, which we see so much now, it was the first movie, and it was very jarring at the time to see jump cuts in a movie. Yeah, I bet. And that's when you're showing, like I guess the best way to describe it is multiple shots of the same subject or thing from different angles. Right. It's like you indicate the progression of time or movement or something by just cutting quickly rather than focusing on somebody walking down the street for five minutes, you cut a couple of times, and all of a sudden they're just closer to the camera and then closer and closer, and then they're past the camera. So jump cut. Yeah. Or even something as simple as like you're going to leave the house. So you go and pick up your keys and you put on your coat. Instead of showing all that, you come out of the bedroom. Boom, you're putting on your coat. Boom. You're putting the keys in the door. Right, exactly. You're just showing the highlights of this progression of stuff where that would otherwise be boring to watch, the whole thing. But it also is used to create tension, too, because it's jarring. I guess it's probably why it creates tension. And Scorsese famously used it in Goodfellows at the end when Henry Hill is trying to sell some guns. Cocaine sequences. Nero. Yeah, he's coke to the gills. Right. And he's, like, trying to sell some guns to Nero, but they don't fit the silencers and the helicopters following him. He's got the sauce going. And all this stuff is being represented and compressed in a very short amount of time by the use of jump cuts. Yeah, very effective. And for budding filmmakers, it's a great way to hide mistakes of things you may not have gotten that you thought you got. Jump cutting is a really easy way to just sort of hide your errors. I did a lot. In other words, when I was making the shorts, I realized in my head I was referencing the shot in soul taker. Have you seen that mystery science theory? His last name is Estevez. It's Martin Sheen's brother, and he is a soul taker. And he's next to this guy who's a soul taker. You just have to see this. But anyway, they're walking down the road in this jump cut, like has this progression of them. Right. It's so unnecessary. But it's like a great use of jump cut. You could tell the director was like, I can't wait to use a jump cut. And that's what she did. She used it on but go watch the MSC Three K. It's a good one, man. Did you see every single one of those episodes? No, I still run across them that I haven't seen. Yeah, nice. Hey, and the shout out to Bill Corbett, who I know is a listener. Oh, yeah, he is, isn't he? I don't know if he's gonna hear this one, but the great Bill Corbett. So take care. Next, we are going to move on to Federico Felines Eight and a Half. Have you ever seen this one? No, I haven't. Now I understand why it's called that, though. Yeah, it was one of the first, although not the first movies about movie making and starting. The great Marcelo masteryani mastroyani from Ladulchavita Amuse of Fellini's over the years, too. And this one really kicked off the surrealist filmmaking and sort of saying you can play around and shoot a dream sequence where the guy's in traffic and then he leaves his car and floats up in the air and is being pulled down to the ground on the beach from a rope tied around his ankle. Just like, go nuts. Yeah. And successive filmmakers did go nuts. Like Gandhi did. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Oh, yeah. He's hugely influenced. Darren Aronofsky did some weird stuff here or there. Yeah. David lynch and Terry Gilliam, of course. Yeah. Just basically surrealism is what I'm taking Fellini introduced into this. Yeah, for real. And besides the surrealism, that opening sequence of Eight and a Half where the director he's the director in the movie Guido, is stuck in traffic. It's really claustrophobic feeling, and that's why he floats away and escapes that traffic jam. But that was directly mimicked in, like, REM Everybody Hurts video. Oh, yeah. And the beginning of the movie falling down. Do you remember that? That started with the traffic jam. Yeah. Michael Douglas just left. He doesn't float. He gets like, an oozy. I saw that again the other day. Most of it hold up. It's weird. It alternately felt way ahead of its time and also very dated because the stuff that Michael Douglas is doing felt way ahead of its time. But then there was I just forgot about that whole weird subplot with Robert Duvall retiring and he had this wife that was him pecking them and like this retirement party they were trying to throw. I forgot about that, too. Yeah. It was just so unnecessary and felt really weird and out of place. The other day when I was watching it was there like a jump cut. Montage where he's putting on his watch. Gold retirement watch. No, but then to the Barbara Hershey is in Venice at home with a daughter, and he spends a whole day coming there to grab them, basically. And the whole time she just keeps calling the cops. Like, I know he's coming and no, he's coming. And I was watching the other day, I was like, freaking leave. What are you doing there? Yeah, that's a movie character thing. That's just bad writing, bad directing. When you just walk right past the ability to leave, you missed a huge step. Where were we? Falling down. Yes. I think that pretty much sums up eight and a half. I think so, too. Falling down. Boom. So, Chuck, we got a little more left. We got more films. Is this making you want to watch films? Yeah. Me too. I feel like eating ice cream, watching a film and scratching from Poison Ivy lately. Yeah. And burning this office down. You know, if that happens now, suspicion is going to fall on you for saying that. That's alright. We'll be right back after this. Alright, so we're back with our awesome jingles, which, by the way, we have to thank John Bagan Begin to begin. He even emailed with the pronunciation in his name. But the original guy who did our first jingle ever, Rusty Matteus or Metallos man, I'm not good with the pronunciation. Well, anyway, Rusty, who's banned the Sheepdogs, are on tour right now. Just because his work was so original. We contacted him and said, hey, we got this other guy who's done, like, covers of your work. Can we use these? It's like totally match it up. And John's been making awesome versions of it ever since. Yeah, they're both great and talented, thanks to you both. And go check out, I think what did you say? They're on tour, right? Yeah. The Sheep Dogs. Yeah. Go check out the sheepdogs. Yeah. In a town near you. Yeah. All right, let's finish with these two in reverse order. Okay. Toy Story was a big one. Hugely innovative. Big landmark, though. Huge. And again, it's one of those things where now almost everything about it seems pedestrian or what it did. It's still a great movie, I'm sure, but the innovations that it undertook just seemed pedestrian. But at the time it was totally groundbreaking. Game changer. It was the first CGI movie, all CGI movie ever that was enormous. Oh, yeah. And I remember at the time seeing it and just being like, wow, this is the future of animated films. What's the best all CGI animated film you've ever seen visually? Well, I haven't seen a lot of them these days because Emily doesn't like those. So I probably wouldn't be the best person to ask Holly from Stephanie Toddy's in history class. She'd probably be the one to ask for my money. Have you seen the adventures of Tintin? Oh, yeah. That was amazing. Mind blowing. Yeah, I saw that on your recommendation and really liked it. Yeah, the story was great. The action was great, the characters were great. But the CGI computer animation is, I think, possibly the best ever done. Yeah, and that's a bit of a different style than, say, like up or The Incredibles. It's not nearly as cartoons. I think it's the motion capture. I think that's what they did for that. Oh, yeah. With up, it would strictly be totally just animation, right? Yeah, but I mean, they're both animation, right? But yeah. Man, Tint, that was really good. It was good. I was surprised how much I like that. But up was good, too. And Toy Story was good too. But all of these things came as a result of the ground that Toy Story broke absolutely. In 1995. Like you said, what seems like a common thing today, you don't see cell animation anymore. It's almost I know. I kind of miss it. I totally miss it. Like, the new Mickey Mouse is all weird and CGI stuff from our generation should have just been discontinued. And then you just come up with all new stuff. That's CGI strawberry shortcake. Not supposed to be CGI. It just all looks weird now. Yeah, I wish there would have people would have done a little bit of both still, because I think sell animation. Like, I think The Iron Giant came out after Toy Story and they did sell animation and that was great movie. I haven't seen that. It was really good. You'd like it? It was a movie for grownups. And Toy Story sort of laid the way for that because it was one of the first movies, I guess, cartoony kids movies to really have a lot of dialogue that flew over kids heads that adults got a little nod in the wink. What, Toy Story? Yeah. Not like dirty humor, but it's not like fits the cat. No, but a little on tundra here and there that adults might appreciate. The kids won't understand. Right. Those are the best jokes. And now we have best animated feature in the Oscars, which definitely came straight out of the original Toy Story because movies started being considered before they created its own category, up and Toy Story Three were actually nominated for regular Best Picture. And I think everyone was like, oh, we need to get them their own category because we can't have an animated movie when Best Picture can't. Well, up would have come after the best animated picture category came out. Oh, really? So that kind of goes as a testament to just how amazing that movie is. Yeah, that's right. It was still up for best Picture. Oh, it was both. I don't know if it was up for it probably was up for best Animated as well. But it was definitely also up for best Picture while there was an animated category. Yeah, I never considered that. Bam. That was a good movie. Yeah. Sweet. So I got nothing else in Toy Story. Well, then what about the last one? Yes. 2001 A Space Odyssey. Quite a film. You sent this essay on Criterion, I think. Criterion.com? But the Criterion Collection, it was written, I guess, in 1988. Even though it says posted in 1988. Like, there wasn't an Internet to post it on in 1988. Maybe it means posted, like, in the mail. Maybe. But I realized, like, I can read film essays about Stanley Kubrick's work all day long. Yeah, me too. I love that documentary. Room 2272-3724-6232-3724. Seven. You know, the one about the Shining conspiracy theory. Yeah. The number of the room is amazing. I can't remember, though, I read a bunch of articles, I think 237. I read a bunch of articles around the release of that documentary which were basically like, film essays on The Shining. I read this one amazing one from several years ago about Eyes Wide Shut, how it's like a masterpiece of sociology. I love studying sociology. A lot of people hate that movie. Yeah. And then now this, like, 2001. I'm sure there's tons out there to consume but I can just read that stuff all day long because that guy was so just amazingly detailed as a director. Yes, I agree. I can read more about his work, critical essays on his work than any other director. Right. It's just unbelievable. It's almost like it's its own genre. It is Kubrickian. Yeah. It's got a word named after it and well, it should. So 2001 a Space Odyssey 1968. Blue mines back then blows mines today. One for just the amazing look and the technical achievement. It ages really well. I mean, if you see a movie from 1968 about outer space, it still looks like the future. Yeah. You don't expect it to hold up well, but it totally does. So much so that a lot of the George Lucas and Ridley Scott were just like, It's done, right. Like, we might as well give up. Yeah. George Lucas when Star Wars came out, said star wars is technically comparable. But for my money, 2001 is by far the better movie. Yeah. Everyone is sort of intimidated, I think, by how talented Kubrick was. Well, plus, also, you have to take into account that he made this movie at a time when other scifi movies were just pure schlock. Oh, yeah. So not only to make the movie in this way this visually amazing and amazing with an audio soundtrack and just totally innovative. It also took, like, that mindset is completely going a different direction that everybody else has as well. Yeah, of course. I think about Ridley Scott saying that. And then he goes on to make Alien and Blade Runner. After that, he helps Prometheus, man. People like Prometheus. I don't care. It's a cool movie. No. I liked it too. Okay. The big flaw to me was and I'm sure it's like, part of the subtext or the context or one of the texts, but the engineer coming back to life are coming out of hibernation after however long and just immediately, like, inflicting violence on these pea brained humans who are showing him no threat whatsoever. I just thought it was a little it wasn't explained well enough, I think, for my taste. Yeah, I think I agree with you, but when I'm watching a Ridley Scott movie, I just assume if I'm missing something, he has an explanation for it. I'm just not catching it. Yeah, I know what you mean. I think I read some stuff about how it tied into the alien canon and realized I need to go see it again with all this knowledge that I wasn't really thinking about. And maybe I'd like it more, but I haven't done that yet. So back to 2001, it was also notable for being bookended, basically with 30 minutes of silence on both ends of the movie. The first 30 minutes. And when I say silent, I mean no dialogue. Right. And the last 30 minutes have no dialogue. Yeah, the last line comes like, a full 30 minutes before the end. Yeah. And over the 146 minutes, there are only 40 minutes of dialogue in the whole thing. And that's why when people compare something like interstellar and call it Kubrickian, I just want to smash. Did you not like interstellar? Not really. Oh, I liked it. I was super let down. Despite McConaughey doing Waterson in the Future, I still liked it. I even liked him in it. I liked a lot of the parts of it, but to me, it's anti Kubrickian, because every ten minutes, they're explaining everything that's going on over again. That is another thing. Just like Inception, ellen Page's entire character was written in to explain what was going on every ten minutes. Yeah. And I felt like interstellar was the same way. It's like Christopher and Allen needs to just trust his audience a little bit, like Kubrick did, and say, Figure it out or don't. Yeah. I'm not going to stop every ten minutes just to explain everything. Here's what's going on. Remember, if you didn't get it right, here's what's going on again. Well, I think if they are labeling something like interstellar as Kubrickian, right. One of the ways that you can interpret that is that he rooted his 2001 in science fact. Right. So, like, the stuff that the astronauts are dealing with and the things that are going on and the conditions of space, it was all factual. Whereas with interstellar, same thing. They went to really great lengths to do what they could to make everything scientifically factual. Aside from the fact that the idea that you could go into a black hole and then come back out or something like that drifting in space, that's not going to happen. But for the most part, interstellar was scientifically accurate. So maybe that's what they meant when they called it Kubrickian because you're absolutely right, they did explain a lot and went to great links to explain a lot. Whereas with 2001, you just watch it the first five times, like, what just happened? Yeah. And apparently Kerry Grant had that same reaction as well. That was Rock Hudson. Rock Hudson, that's right. Yeah. The original screening that Roger Ebert was at in La. Rock Hudson just left and said, can somebody tell me what the hell that was about? Yeah, and it wasn't even over yet. Well, the reason it has science fact and not science fiction is because Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, who wasn't actually a book that was made into a movie, it was a movie, a book made after a movie, and they collaborated on both. And they went to Carl Sagan, of course, of Cosmos and said he said, you're going to make billions and billions of dollars. That was pretty good. Was it? Yeah, it sounded a lot like them. They went to Carl Sagan and said, hey, we want to portray these extraterrestrials. Maybe the starchild is they turned Dave into the starchild. Are they humanoids? What are they going to look like? And Sagan was like, they were very unlikely to be humanoid. So Kubrick did the smart thing and was just like, well, we just won't show them. Right. At all. Instead of making a fool of myself like signs and making some dumb looking aliens oh, man, let me just not show the aliens. Very smart move. Yes. Getting back to the story of 2001, although I think the village is underrated, I can stomach that one. You like the everybody like the $0.06. Sure. I guess that was it for him. I loved Unbreakable. Unbreakable. Yeah, that was one where, like yeah, I think it was maybe even better the second time. Yeah, I still like that movie. But he also made that lady in the Water movie, and the one with Marky. Mark the people jumping off. Four brothers? No, Three Kings. Is it the one in the elevator? No, he just produced oh, I know what you're talking about. The one where people like jumping off the buildings and stuff inexplicably yeah, I didn't see that either. I couldn't get through ten minutes of that movie. So 2001, back to good movies, had a three part structure, but not a conventional three act structure that you might be used to in movies, which is why it confounded people like Rock Hudson, they called the movements. The first movement was the dawn of man sequence with the apes with a monolith. And he has that great part where he throws his little bone tool up in the air right. And then it morphs into well, not morphs, but it may be as a dissolve into the spinning and outer space. It's called a match cut. Yeah, match cut. And of the rotation of what we now know was a nuclear warhead, because I read that little article, 20 things You Didn't Know about 2001. I didn't know those were nuclear warheads, necessarily, in outer space. They made it a little more vague. Initially. It was going to be more explicit, and they were going to explode it in outer space. Right. But he said, no, it's a little too close to the ending of Strangelove. Strangelove. Yeah. So let's not do that. Yeah. Probably a good choice. Yeah. But as a result, some people have taken it to mean that Match Cut was supposed to show how far humans have come from using a bone to murder somebody to satellites in space. But if you know that the satellite is actually loaded down with nuclear warheads, that match cut demonstrates how little humans have changed from using a bone to murder somebody to using satellites to murder somebody. The motif is still the same, and it's murder. Yeah. He was going for some deep things. Lot of metaphor happening. Yeah. I mean, supposedly in every single shot, because they started out as a still photographer. Right. Yeah. Supposedly every frame of a Kubrick movie. There is nothing that isn't unintentional in place there by him. He did a lot of his own set decorating. Yeah. Like the pencil holder on the desk in the office of the guy at The Shining Hotel was where it's supposed to be. Right. And if it has a picture of a goat head inscribed on it, that means something. Right. It's not accidental. Yeah. Although we'll say room 237, which I think may have been the point, is a little bit like, these people are crazy. Not like, oh, man, I just see what they're saying and all this. Right. I was just thinking, These people are nuts. Right. It was just kind of enjoyable to hear their interpretations of it. Well, and I think it was a comment on obsession and fandom. More so than the Shining, for sure. But I thought some of their ideas were interesting. Totally. I said room two two seven, didn't I? Like, one conspiracy theorist. Like, Mary, wasn't room two two Seven like a sitcom? Yeah, it was just called two two seven. Okay. Got. You remember with Jackie, she'd be like, Mary. Oh, okay. That's what my impression was. What did you think I was doing? Well, I wasn't sure what you meant. Being a weirdo. Yeah. Okay. The second movement was, of course, the how sequence, the computer, the how was it? The how 9000. Yeah. Really creepy. And how ended up being a lot of people's favorite character, even though it was just a voice. The supercomputer on the Discovery ship, remember? He's like, what are you doing, David? It's so creepy. I had the Mad magazine spoof of 2001 when I was a kid. It was great. Yeah. And then the third movement is when Dave moves on to the next stage of human development with these extraterrestrials that you only hear. And basically it's when it comes full circle, and the third movement is the one that has almost well, it's really just the second movement that has dialogue. Some of the alternate titles for 2001 journey beyond the Stars, terrible Universe. Not bad. Yeah. Okay. Tunnel to the Stars. Not so great. Planet Fall. That sounds bad. Sounds like a James Bond movie. And then how the solar system was won as a play on how the west was won. Yeah. Which, like, movie geeks would find that appealing, but everybody else would say that he ruined everything. Yeah. And Kubrick, this is the last thing I have. He was so obsessive with protecting his material. I don't think allegedly. I think he did have all the sets and props and miniatures destroyed after he shot it so they would never be reused, which is a common thing at the time. Yeah. Like, hey, we're doing a space movie. Go get that space ring from Stanley set. Yeah. Let's reuse it for Planet Fall. Yeah. He also destroyed all of the footage that didn't make it into the original theatrical release. Destroyed it's. Gone. Yeah. So they wouldn't, one day after his death, recut it, which they invariably probably would have done. Yeah. He's a smart man. Yeah. We should just do a podcast on Kubrick. Okay. I'm down for that challenge. A-B-A dude. One of my heroes. Yeah. Cinematically. You got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to know more about movies, if you like this one, you probably also love our exploitation episode. Exploitation Movie Episode Fun One. What else have we talked about movies in Cannonball Run that has a lot to do with the movie? Yeah. Our James Bond episode. Yeah. We've had a few of these, and people always respond to these. You guys should have a spin off to do an old movie podcast. Sure. Maybe one day. Maybe. Remember, if you're looking for any of these, press control f or Apple f in your web browser and search that way on our podcast archive page. You can also search for this article on how stuff works by typing movies in and seeing what comes up. And since I said how stuff works, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this mike, could Dupont really clear something up for us on Scientific method? Okay. Hey, guys, it was great. Well, actually, he doesn't say it was great. I think I just made that up. Hey, guys. Your scientific method podcast has a consistent misuse of what a scientific law is in relation to the working of the scientific method. It appears that you believe that a law, e. G. Newton's Law of Gravity, is then held in higher esteem than theory. That eventually a theory matures into a law. I think I probably did think that. Because of politics, right? Yes. Bill becomes a law. Right? Exactly. He says, when in fact, theory is considerably more robust than a law. A law is a mathematical model that describes observed behavior does not answer the why. Right. Theory does answer why something happens. Did we not say that? I thought we did. I knew that. I remember finding that out from the research. I just can't believe it didn't come out of my mouth. He claims we did not. And I feel like I'm learning this, so I definitely did not. Okay, go ahead. But you may have. For example, Newton's Law of Gravitational Attraction describes the action of two bodies that can be used for pretty much everything. It is perfect for describing what happens but it cannot tell you why the two items are attracted or drilled down to the underlying mechanism. Yeah. Law is, like, much more succinct. It just is what it is. Nor is the law even universal and could not be used to explain the paraalian procession of Mercury's orbit burn. In comparison, Einstein's theory of general relativity was eventually used to solve the mercury issue. Oh, yeah. The mercury issue and the standard model along with the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson my CERN can answer the why do these two masses attracted to each other? A question. I think what you mean is, why are these two masses attracted to one another? Mike, it's pretty teleological theory is considerably more developed and richer than a scientific law which is more of a tool that is applicable to a wide range of applications. Keep up the good work. That is Mike Dupont. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for that. Of the Valley Forge. Dupont. I think so. Have you seen Fox Catcher? Oh, no. I've heard it's good. Is it good? No. Oh, really? I don't think so. No. I've heard it's kind of slow. It's beyond slow. Really? Oh, yeah. I can understand why the Academy loved it. Sure. A lot of people, I'm sure, do like it. I was not a fan of Fox catch. I think people generally seeing, like, a turn by an actor like Steve Curl doing something really different, they're knocked out by that. No. I still can't believe you didn't like Birdman. No. Spoiler alert for people who have not seen Birdman, the following conversation is full of spoilers. Yes. What didn't you like about it? So I thought Michael Keaton was good. Okay. Who plays his daughter Emily Blunt. So who? That is Emma Stone. Emma Stone. Excellent. Okay. Edward Navy. Pretty good. Okay, so the acting was fine. Who is? Naomi Watts was in it. Yeah, she did great. Okay. So, yes, the acting was fine. Sure. The acting was fine. I thought the photography was amazing. Yeah. The whole seemingly one take thing kind of knocked you out. Probably. I didn't even pick up on that. But, yes, it did for me, the juxtaposition of the story which was pretty boring and realistic in everyday life even though it was about a Broadway production it was still about the everyday life of it. Sure. Against the surrealism that's, like, threaded and embedded throughout the whole movie. I didn't like that. Okay. It was like choosing one or the other. Man. Got you. It irked me. And then just that one part with the critic where Michael Keaton tells off the critic. I saw Michael Keaton did a wonderful job, but just the whole point that it was in there of, like, the director using Michael Keaton's character to tell off all the critics he's ever wanted to tell off in his movie, I just thought it was pretentious, and I thought it was kind of clumsy in that sense, too. And it was enough that it tainted it. Yeah. And then the ending I did not like the ending at all. At all. That will ruin a good movie, because it completely went contrary to all the other stuff that he went out of his way to point out was fake or fraudulent or not real. And then all of a sudden, it is. What? Yeah. No. Choose one or the other. The director refused to make very important decisions, and I think that that ruined the movie. That is a very well thought out criticism, I think. Thank you very much. Sure, man. That was the end of listener mail even, wasn't it? Yeah. Because now I'm not like, Josh is weird. He didn't like Birdman. Now I'm like Josh. Didn't like Birdman. He has good reasons. Thank you. I like, justifying my opinion. Don't we all? So if you want to get in touch with Chuck and I, or Jerry, who I apparently just spoiled Birdman for, you can contact us via Twitter at s YSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffyshonow. You can send us an email, the stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffieshow.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. 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." | |
b8aa6a4a-3620-11ea-938d-5fc27a22bc62 | Short Stuff: Poe Toaster | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-poe-toaster | For at least sixty years a mysterious person (or persons) showed up at Edgar Allen Poe’s grave to toast the master on his birthday. No one ever found out who this legendary figure was. | For at least sixty years a mysterious person (or persons) showed up at Edgar Allen Poe’s grave to toast the master on his birthday. No one ever found out who this legendary figure was. | Wed, 28 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=302, tm_isdst=0) | 13483821 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and it's just the two of us, just a couple of honcho's, couple of ombres, just doing our thing, rattling off facts, super speedy manner with a limited amount of time. So this is short stuff, so we don't want to waste time with long intros right. Saying unnecessary things. Right, exactly. So the poetoster, huh? Is this the beginning of our spooky content? Yes, it is. If that's okay with you. Yeah, it's our favorite month. I love October. I love Halloween. I've been sitting on this one since last year, actually. Have you heard of this guy before? No, obviously, I didn't just ask Chuck. Everybody, if you sort of egg ground Poe, we're talking about a corollary to the Poe legend. Everybody knows about Poe. The master author, the creator of the short story, believed to be the first person to ever write a genuine detective story. Edgar Allan Poe. Everybody knows about him. We're not talking about just him. No, but we are talking about his dead body. Yeah. Which Poe would love. Oh, he would totally love it. He died, and he probably would even love dying under mysterious circumstances. There's no way he did. He was probably like as they were dragging him out of the street, he was probably like, this is so great. Well, he was 40 years old. This is in 1849, and he was buried in Westminster Burying Ground in Baltimore, where he made his home. And it was kind of not a big deal at the time as far as paying tribute. He had an unmarked grave for a while. Finally, a relative stepped up and said, can we at least get his name carved into something? He just showed up with a stick and carved it in the dirt. But, yeah, he was still fairly obscure enough that he was able to first be buried in that on Mark grave. But some local academics started to recognize the man's genius, and they actually held, like, an early Go fund me to create a monument for Pose grave, actually. And they were successful finally in 1875. That's right. So they had a monument carved. He was actually moved. It was dedicated on a space a little more befitting, one of the great authors of his time, and they exhumed and moved the body. And about ten years after that, his wife and his mother in law were buried along with him, which is sort of key in this story. Right. And hopefully he wasn't like a Fred Flintstone type, where that would have really bothered him to have his mother in law so close by for eternity. Instead, I have the feeling that it was a very sweet gesture sure. So that you would think, well, that's it. That's the most you could possibly say about Pose remains laying in the ground at a grave. Not true. That was the case from about 1875 to 1840, 1949. I should say. And then allegedly on that year. The centennial of his death. He was visited by somebody who came to be known as the Potoster. A mysterious stranger who showed up at his grave on his birthday. January 19 every year. Dressed in an all black suit. A white scarf. And a big black wide brimmed hat to cover his face and created this ritual out of whole cloth that eventually attracted the notice of people in Baltimore. Yeah. So what would happen is this man presumably would show up with a bottle of Cognac and literally toast PO and leave three red roses along with that bottle. And this would happen sometime between usually midnight and 06:00 a.m.. So it was even led more to the creepiness of the whole thing. Right? Yeah. And no one did anything about it. No one said, hey, grab that guy and let's see who it is. Get rip off that hat and expose him. Right. It's Roy Cohn. So what happened was well, first of all, we should address the Cognac. No one was exactly sure why he toasted with Cognac, even though I read very quickly on the Internet that PO loved Cognac. Wasn't in his stories. Yeah, he supposedly loved it, but couldn't afford it unless someone else was buying because he didn't get rich doing this. Right. So, yeah, a lot of people are like, well, he should be using a Monte auto because obviously the cask of a Monte auto is one of his great stories. I don't know why he would be using Cog. Apparently now we do know why. You just solve that mystery for me, Chuck. Thank you. What about those roses? So he would leave three roses on the grave, like you said, and people have come to believe that that's a gesture to give a rose to each of the people who are buried beneath that monument. Poe, his wife Virginia and his mother in law Maria. So that one's probably the likeliest explanation of that. Should we take a break? I think we should. But first we'll reveal the identity of the Pot toaster after this. How's that for a cliffhanger? Pretty great. So I totally lying on the cliffhanger. No one knows who the Potoster is as far as we can tell, and we certainly don't. So there will be no revealing. We just wanted to keep you tuned in. Well, there is one guy who claims he was the Potoaster. In 2007, a 92 year old man named Sam Porpora claimed it was him. He was a former ad exec, and he, in 1960, was made historian of Westminster Presbyterian Church, which was apparently in disrepair at the time and kind of just full of people getting drunk and not treating the graves with respect. So he claims he did it as a promotional thing to sort of raise money and publicity. And it was he and his tour guides, this gentleman, Jeff Jerome, who is the curator of the pomuseum. I think his quote was, there are poles big enough in his story you could drive a Mac truck through. Yes, but I couldn't find those holes. I looked everywhere, and I couldn't find him specifically saying why he did not think it was him. Well, so Jeff Jerome has kind of become like the de facto historian of the poetoster because he ran the Poistorical society for a while, or the Pomuseum. I'm sorry. And a lot of people put a lot of weight into what he says. He claims that he had worked out a signal with the PO toaster so that the potoster would signal him and let him know that he was the real deal. Because over the years. There were what are known as photos. People who pretended to be the potoster after the thing kind of became a big deal starting in the 70s so that Jeff Jerome at least would know it was the real article. But he swears up and down, and most people believe him, that he has no idea the actual identity of the podoaster. The only interaction he'd had with the pod toaster is that pose grave on these specific nights over the years. Yeah. And I wonder why Sampler would come forward and claim to be such so late in life. And they even asked him that in this article, and he said, like, why he came forward. And he went, I don't know. Yes, that's not a very good that's a big hole in your story right there, too, to not have a motivation. Yeah. If you're somebody who starts out and here's the thing. This whole pot toaster thing became kind of a caused celeb in Baltimore. In places outside of Baltimore, people would show up and there'd be little groups of onlookers who had watched this thing every year, and like you said, very coolly. Never tried to find out who it was. They just respected it and watched from a distance. So it kind of became like this cool thing. But this guy was doing this for decades before it became a cool thing. So of course there's some sort of motivation behind all this. And people who do stuff like that have a motivation behind everything they're doing. There's some larger meaning or something to what they're doing. So, yeah, I don't believe the protocol would have come forward just for I don't know. Well, I mean, he said why he did it. He didn't say why he came forward and admitted that he was the pot toaster. Yeah, I don't buy that category. Who knows? I buy it. Okay. I think it makes sense as a former ad guy, but at any rate and he was on the scene as well as the historian of the church. Right. So anyway, I think there's a lot of credence there. But at any rate, the gentleman, whoever it was, would leave these notes occasionally. And one note in 93 said the torch will be passed. It said in quotes, to be read in creepy Vincent Price voice when read out loud. And then in 99, there was one that said the toaster had died. And there was a theory, and I think Jeff Jerome buys the theory that the torch was passed to his sons because they kind of did a they were sort of lackadaisical about how spirited they were with their efforts. Let's just say that was a really diplomatic way to put it. Yeah. Sometimes they would show up in street clothes, and from what I've gathered, like, the minimum criteria for being the potoster is that all black suit, white scarf, and a huge hat. There's a certain amount of dapperness that needs to be brought to this. And showing up in, like, jeans and vans and like, Counting Crows T shirt. That doesn't cut it, buddy. Although the crows counting ravens, maybe. Baltimore, maybe. One of these notes, though, that supposedly was left by one of the sons, if you buy that theory, was a prediction of the Super Bowl in 2001. Pretty lame house that the Giants would beat the Raven. So if it was his sons, then I totally see how Jeffrey Rome would be like, they're not doing a great job. Exactly. So finally, in 2009, I guess that's ten years. Yes, ten years after the torch was passed, after the original potoster died, allegedly, they just stopped showing up all together, and they didn't show up in 2010. Eleven. And then finally in 2012, when they didn't show one more time, jeff Jerome said, well, I guess I have as much clout as anybody. Being the curator of the Poem Museum, I'm going to officially declare this tradition ended forever. Yeah, but not so because he turned on his heels four years later and in 2016 said, you know what? Let's just throw a big party. We're going to audition potosters. And this is where the story really gets disappointing to me. I wish they would have just let it die. It's this mysterious, weird thing. Is it the raffle? Yeah, they have a raffle. They have a poemed cake that you can win. Hundreds of people, they toast apple cider. And I don't mind them honoring PO, but I think they could have just divided it and not made it part of the PO toasting thing that came and went. Yes. I have to agree. I like the idea of what they're doing. I like the toast with apple cider, but I think maybe hold it at the local library or something, because it really smacks of the kind of event you would hold at a local library. Yeah, and it's during the daytime. I don't think we mentioned which I mean, if it's not between midnight and 06:00 a.m., then just get out of here with that. True. But it does give the Pod toaster an excuse to do some day drinking, of cognac, once a year at least. Or apple cider. Yeah. Supposedly the PO toaster does drink cognac. Still in that tradition. Yeah. So, did you say that they held auditions for the new potaster? I did. And the new potoaster plays the violin, though. Added a little extra flare. Yeah, maybe what's going to happen is they're going to hear about this and then make us honorary posters, and we're going to be way into it. Yeah, right. Exactly. I'm going to wear a Counting Crows T shirt and I'll learn to play the violin. All right, so that's it, everybody. The potoster. This is one of those legends where I hope we never, ever find out who it was, because I think that's wildly appropriate in this case. Okay. Ad executive. Well, since Chuck said add executive. That's the secret word for short stuff. To be ow. 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." | |
dc88417c-1f05-4487-ae6e-aea000dbfa4d | The Myth of Absinthe | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-myth-of-absinthe | Absinthe makes you hallucinate and possibly even have a seizure, right? Nope. It's all a part of the myth of absinthe, which is really just a bitter tasting liquor with a bad reputation.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Absinthe makes you hallucinate and possibly even have a seizure, right? Nope. It's all a part of the myth of absinthe, which is really just a bitter tasting liquor with a bad reputation.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 26 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=146, tm_isdst=0) | 48424405 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And Jerry's here as well. And it's the three green fairies coming to bring you madness and delirious. Possibly a seizure. Yeah. On stuff you should know. I wish Jerry would put, like, some sort of twinkle effect in there. After I say stuff you should know. To just nod to the fairy thing. Yeah. Okay. Well, you know, she's listening. She is. And she's furiously scribbling notes in my imagination. Yes, only in your imagination. That's right. She's really stirring me, so yeah, that's right. Man, it smells nice. So, Chuck, I mentioned green fairies because that is a nickname for what we're talking about today, which is absenth. We've gathered here today to talk about this thing called absenth. Dearly Beloved. That's right. That's right. And this was my pick. And Livia I think this is Livia right. That helped us out with this. I believe this was a Grabster pick, which Chuck, I'm glad you said that, because this makes this week a Grabster trifedka. Is it the grabster? Because it seems like one I was just talking recently on the show about how certain topics fit certain writers, and this certainly fits Grabster. Not that he's a big absent head, but oh, if he's anything, he's a huge absent head, but it just feels like an ed thing. But for some reason, it was spaced like livia spaces things. I'm almost positive that it was absent. I'm pretty sure that it was absent. It was the grabster. No, I'm sorry. So it was Livia. You're right. Wow. Hey. Comes off like a Grabster article. For sure. It does. At any rate, this idea came to me not too long ago, because I definitely didn't see the movie again, but I saw that scene from the Johnny Depp Jack the Ripper movie that I can't remember the name of. From Hell. From Hell. Where Johnny Depp is in the bathtub and he's maybe because that trial is going on or something, I don't know. And he does his absent ritual, which includes supersizing the effects by do you remember what he does? I've not seen that one. Okay. It's okay. It's fine. Yeah, I remember hearing that. It was just fine. Yeah, it was good enough. But he does the and we'll talk a little bit about the sort of ritual of how you prepare absinth, but one such ritual is to light sugar on fire and let it drip through a slotted spoon into the absenth, which is not recommended for a number of reasons, obviously not the least of which is alcohol and fire mixing. But what he does is he drops Laudin. Is that what it is? I think so. Alcohol and opium mixed together. Yeah, some sort of opium from a dripper bottle, dropper bottle, and he drops it on the sugar, then lights that on fire. That's pretty hardcore. I guess. That's the way they did it back then. The other big movie moment that I know of is in that Boslerman Mulan Rouge, where you and McGregor and John Leguizamo and some other pals are all drinking Absent. Then they see the green fairy. Kylie Minogue. I forgot about that. Have you seen the trailer for his Elvis movie coming out? No. It looks so good. I can't wait. What a great combination. I think the only one who could do maybe a better Elvis biopic is maybe David Lynch and Boslerman might have him beaten. This one, it looks awesome, man. And the guy they got to do, it just nails the body movements and like all the way up to the Vegas Elvis, just stone cold. Was it Peter Sarsgard? No. Is that you think you play him? No, he's out of my mind. Because we're going to talk about wormwood in a second. And I was like, man, wasn't that like a series on Netflix? And sure enough, it was directed by Errol Morris. Oh, I remember that. Was it called Warmwood? Yeah, it was about the MKUltra program. Some of that, yes. It was really good. Okay, I think we've covered everything movie wise, right? Well, so far. Okay, so the reason that I brought up wormwood is because it is this main ingredient in absence. If you make Absent, which, by the way, if you don't know what we're talking about, absenth is a type of liquor or liquor, I guess it's usually made from a neutral grain spirit. If you really want to get kind of authentic, you would make it from grapes, distilled grapes, and then you kind of process it like you would if you were making gin. You take some botanicals, distill it together, and then the resulting stuff that cools down after you evaporate it is Absent. And to make Absent, you have to have three main ingredients distilled with the liquor, fennel, anise, and then wormwood. And wormwood is the big, tricky key to the whole thing that has caused a lot of problems and misconceptions over the years. That's right. A lot of myths there. Absenth is obviously known for its very bright green color before you have gone through your ritual, because it kind of changes the color a little bit. But that comes from reinfusing. After it's distilled, reinfusing it with more of those ingredients. You don't have to do that. There is such a thing as clear or white absent. But if you really want to have the absence experience, it's got to be green. Yeah. Why isn't this absence green? Take it away, Garcin. That's what you say, right? Nice wrap. That was very postmodern of you. Thank you. So that essential ingredient, wormwood, has been known to humanity for thousands and thousands of years. The earliest reference, written reference to it, comes from the Ebbers Papyrus, which dates back to, I would say something like about 3500 years ago, something like that. It's possibly earlier than that. And that was just the first written reference. So we already knew. We, being humans, knew about wormwood long before that. And up until the mid 19th century, it was always treated as like, basically a medicinal plant. That's right. This is sort of one of the heydays of medicinal plant use and all kinds of supposed cures ills being cured, including, but not limited to if you have stomach pains, if you want to get your menses going, they say it could be hypnotic. They say it could give you a pick me up if you retired. What else? If it wasn't something you didn't want to drink before then knowing that wormwood was used as an insect repellent and an antiseptic for cleaning up bacteria ridden mouth might do the trick. Right. And also one of the longstanding uses for it has been as an anti helmetic, which means that it's a dewormer. And apparently when you ingest wormwood, it actually stuns the worms that are attached to your gut lining enough that they let go and you poop them out the other end. And it really does work. The modern investigations of worm would have verified it is an effective dewormer, and it also has an appetite stimulant, too. So as we'll see, it became an apertif, which you drink before you eat. And that makes a lot of sense, the little wormwood in it. But in German, there's a little tiny facts here. There in this episode, it's one of those which I love, but in German, wormwood is called vermouth. And that might sound familiar. Vermouth is a fortified wine that contains wormwood, among other things. Did you know that? I did know that because I love vermouth. I do, too. I still didn't know it. I also know that modern studies even show that it can aid digestion, which gives credence to the old saying, absent makes the farts grow stronger. My goodness. So first of all, I know that wasn't off the cuff. It's just not possible. You want to hear something terrible? I made up that joke in my head years ago. Did you really? And I've never had the opportunity to drop it. You're in a chicken processing plant thinking that you're like, I need to get a job where I'm really public facing, so I can share this one. Well, it's a punchline. It's not a joke. I thought of that punchline, and I've long tried to create a joke that would just take hold and spread around the world. You just did that. Just spread around the world like this. Boslerman Elvis biopic is about to. Let me ask you something, though. Have you ever had Malort? Yes. Which is just such hipster ridiculousness, but yes, I have. So Malort, for those of you listening, that's a pretty good descriptor, I guess it's a liquor, or a liquor made from wormwood. It is very popular, almost exclusively in Chicago and Jepson's Malort. And it is kind of a hipster thing, like you get a PBR to all the way with the Malort back at any hipster bar. But that was something that at Max Fun Con, which is the podcast network, maximum Fun has this summer retreat they do every year, where John Hodgman and I do our pub trivia thing, which has now ended. But traditionally, John would do the bidding, pass around bottles of Malort and everyone would drink it. And that, my friend, is a taste that will stay with you for hours. Yes. Because wormwood is a really bitter casing something. Wormwood has a compound in it called absenthin. And absenth itself is a Greek word that means undrinkable. Basically, that's how bitter it is. The Polish apparently have a saying called bitter is wormwood. Right. And this stuff, absenthen, that gives wormwood it's bitter taste is so bitter. Chuck that 1oz of absent, then if you could extract it from the wormwood and you came up with just 1oz of it, if you poured it into 524 gallons of water, mixed it up and then offered someone a cup of that water, they would be able to detect the bitterness. Wow. Yeah. I believe it wormwood oil. Well, we might as well go ahead and get into this a little bit. Wormwood oil has a substance in it, about 40% to 60% of which is a substance called thugoan. And since time and memorial, when people had absent, they used to talk about the fact that you would have hallucinations and seizures. So this is one of the big myths that we're going to bust, is that's really not true that Suzone can cause seizures? And we know why. It's a GABA inhibitor and it's going to block the receptors that lead to these convulsions. And they've even done tests of pre 1910 absent recipes and found it's about the same amount as today. And I saw one article that said it's basically about enough thug that you would find from sage in a box of stovetop stuffing, which has long been known to give you hallucinations and convulsions in addition to being very delicious. Yeah. So there's just not enough in there. Thujone does come from worn wood oil and it does cause seizures, but there's just apparently trace amounts and it's even restricted by law how much you can have in it. Right. And it's the same thing as, like, if you ate a kilogram of salt, it would affect you physiologically in some terrible ways, like you would just have to drink so much of it. And then also because wormwood is so bitter that even like, the staunchest wax bearded hipster in the country could probably not drink enough wormwood to bring on a convulsion or hallucinations. No. So that's just a big myth, the fact that we'll get into the history of it, which is pretty interesting, but it's all basically because people were getting blasted on alcohol. Right. But like you said, since time and memorial. People have said, like, this wormwood stuff, it'll make you trip. That was enough to attract some artists, bohemians, writers, poets around the turn of the last century, particularly in Paris, to the idea of absence. We're not quite there yet, but once we get there, bear in mind all of this is wrong and made up, and it makes an entire basically, the Impressionist art movement really cringy that they were all just self diluted into thinking that this stuff was, like, causing them to hallucinate and maybe get a little mad. And all this stuff, it's really just kind of uncomfortable to look back on now. It really is. So, Chuck, let's say we take a break and then we'll come back and really kind of dig into the history a little more. Let's get our shovels out and get ready. Stuff you should know, josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know. Okay, Chuck. So I mentioned earlier that wormwood was long considered a medicinal plant. And there's a story that goes that a doctor named Pierre Ordinaire, who was hiding out from the French Revolution just across the border in Switzerland, in a town called Covet, Switzerland in particular, that Dr. Ordinaire was looking for a way to make wormwood palatable to create a medicinal elixir, and that is how he ended up coming up with absent. That's right. That's how the story goes. Like you said earlier, if you want the real, authentic kind, use grape spirits, because distilled grapes is how it started. Now it's just sort of like any sort of distilled vodka type base, like white lightning. Why am I tripping over all that? I don't know. It's almost like I didn't want to say it or something. I know you really don't like that white lightning, do you? No, but back in the day, it was distilled grape spirit, and it did have the worm wood because that's what he was trying to make palatable. And he did, it appears, add a bunch of botanicals to make it taste better. The star, and he's probably in it. Licorice. I see Livia also mentioned the fennel and the hisop and parsley coriander chamomile and spinach, which is quite a mixture. You take a little sip of absent, then your friend would be like, you've got a little spinach in your teeth, right? That is a really strange sounding mixture. Especially parsley would throw the whole thing off. Have you ever had, like, a greens drink, like, fresh juice? The moment they put parsley in, it turns immediately south. It's horrible. It's horrific. Please leave parsley out of everything. Drinkable. Okay. Yeah. We go through periods where we juice a lot at the house, but I know we've never added parsley because you're sensible, Celery. It's like, okay, you're getting a little close to messing this up, but then once you had the parsley, it's awful. It's punishment from that point on. So you want to leave the parsley out whether you're making juice or absence. Okay. And you said one thing, melissa. That's actually lemon ball I saw as well. What did I say? Melissa. That's another term for lemon ball. I'm just saying it's not like you were incorrect in saying Melissa. I didn't say Melissa. I said hisop. I thought you said Melissa in there as well. Sorry, it comes up later, then. Okay. You said? Did I say Melissa? Am I driving you mad? Like the green ferry of absence? One of us is on absence right now. So that whole story about Dr. Ordinaire coming up with this. Chuck is possibly wrong. Because at the end of the story. Dr. Ordinaire turns out to be this kind. Benevolent man who leaves his recipe for absenth to the Henry Ode sisters. Who were his housekeepers. And they go on and start making this stuff and sell it to a guy named major Henry Danielle. Dubbed. And probably make a tidy sum from that. But some historians have said no, actually, it looks like other people might have been making this stuff before him, including the Henry Ode sisters. So it's possible that Dr. Ordinaire actually stole this from them. Yeah, and it was also a time where this was the golden age of medicinal elixirs. So who knows? Everyone was experimenting with different recipes for stuff, and I definitely think we can't say for sure that it was Dr. Pierre Ordinaire. No, it is a great name, but somehow Major Dubier did come into this recipe and started making absent, and he had a daughter named Emily, spelled like your wife's name. Oh, yeah. And Emily married another man, henry Louie perionood and paranoid. Sorry, I was adding an extra syllable in there. Peranude was the son of another family that had been making absent, and so the dubiads and the Perineudes got together and became basically like an absent making dynasty along the Swiss French border. That's right. And what was the last name of that other family? Well, Pernoud finally changed their name to pernod, P-E-R-N-O-D which is a very famous brand of licorice flavored liqueur that was once absent, that had the wormwood removed and became pERKone. That's right. And they're now, I believe there was a merger in the mid seventies with another beverage brand, and now they're a huge sort of liquor company that owns I think they own seagrams, they own a couple of other vodkas. They own lots of stuff. And you can see that green per no on any liquor store shelf. And if you're not an aficionado, you've probably always wondered, is that absent? Or what the heck is up with that bright green stuff? Well, as we'll see, it was a stand in for absinthe, which had become kind of popular, taste wise after it got banned. That's right. In the absence. Absence, man, you're full of it today. You're just full of lickety, splits and vinegar. I've never heard that term. I just made it up. Okay, so we're still not at this point where absence has become an actual popular drink. Really, honestly, so dubious was like, I want to buy this, but I think you're wasting it selling it as a medicinal. I think people would actually like to drink this. And he was right. But it wasn't until it was used extensively as a medicinal with the French army, who were sent off to North Africa by Napoleon in the 1840s, I believe. And we're given absence during their stay to fight off malaria. The absence became popular because those French soldiers came back and said, hey, have you guys tried this absence stuff? Like, they gave it to us as medicine, but we love drinking it regardless. And the French army was popular enough at the time that whatever was fashionable with them became fashionable with the rest of France as well. That's right. So they bring the taste of absent back. At first, it is expensive, and it is basically people with money, sort of the higher class that are drinking absent. And then even early on, because of its reputation as a hallucinogen, artists were into it, trying to get inspiration for their poems and paintings and things like that. And things change, though, starting in about the when there was an insect, the phylorexara. Phyloxara. There you go. We're adding letters all over the place today. Yeah. So the insect phyloxra, it really france, as everyone knows, is most famous for its wine growing and this devastated grapes in France. And that was a bad thing for the wine industry because that just meant, obviously, when something like that happens, wine is going to be more expensive. And so absent came along and said, hey, we can make this with anything. We don't need grapes, we can make it with cheaper stuff. And all of a sudden, absent is cheaper. And all of a sudden, the people drinking absent became just sort of the working class because wine was so expensive all of a sudden. Yeah, because the French said, we got to drink something. So they replaced their wine, which is now ridiculously expensive, with much cheaper absence. But the thing is, Chuck, is absent is a spirit. Wine is not a spirit. So wine definitely contains alcohol, and you can make wine with more or less alcoholic content. But one of the things about absent is it's one of the highest proof liquors on the market. Yeah, I didn't know that. It frequently hits 60 to 70, up to 80% alcohol. So if you get a really high ABV or high proof absence and you pour yourself a glass of it, 20% of that is not alcohol. The other 80% is pure alcohol. So that's a really big switch. That's a huge switch over from wine. Drinking a couple of glasses of wine at dinner and drinking a couple of glasses of absent at dinner, that's a big difference. Yeah, I guess I should have asked, have you ever had absent? Like just straight up absent drink or not cocktail, but absent? Yes. Yummy. Got me a little bottle of St. George absent. I think they're out of San Francisco. St. George? Yeah. They make really good gin, too. And little spoon, a little slotted spoon. So I made this absence here there a couple of times. It's fine about yeah, all right. I've never had it. I meant to get some and try this. I'm going to try it after now that I know the whole deal and how to do it. But I can already tell that it's not going to be like something I'm going to drink a lot of. No, I mean it's tasty. You definitely want to dilute it with water and sugar water in particular, as we'll see. It's neat that there's like a ritual to it. It's fun to kind of learn the ritual, make the drink like that, following this kind of ritualized and then never do it again. Procedure. Yeah. The problem is when you want like a second one or something like that, it's like, oh, we got to go through this whole rigmarole again. So it's one of those things then you just crack a beer. When was the last beer you had? You don't drink beer at all anymore, do you? Oh, yeah, sometimes. Once in a while. It's not frequent or anything, but last beer I had was probably a few months ago, but I don't drink it much anymore. I miss it. If you want a beer and you have a beer, it can be really satisfying under the right conditions. Yeah. And I think what I do with beer now is it used to just be beer, beer, beer when you're younger or when I was younger, but now I treat beer as like a treat that I have every once in a while, and I'll have one, maybe two, and that's it. And I kind of think back, I'm like, man, how did I used to drink? Like, a lot of this. That's just a lot of liquid. Yeah. A lot of burping, a lot of your pants falling down. I mean, like a lot of weird stuff happens when you drink a lot of beer. Yeah. So anyway, back to absenth. Where are we? Okay, it is now the working class is drinking it, they're loving it. And advertising, what we know is like modern advertising is just starting to be a thing. And in France, they went a few different directions, kind of like with any beer now. And you can kind of say the same thing. Some of it was patriotic, like they would adorn it in the colors of the French flag. Some of them are even called things like patriot. And then they had the sexy ads with sexy ladies drinking absenth. And so that could be a Budweiser poster. But the thing that they don't do on a Budweiser poster is they also advertise it as a hygiene product. Right. Because, again, remember, this whole thing started off as a medicinal elixir, so they could still kind of lean on that because it was close enough in the recent past that people recognized it as such. Got worms, drink absenth or got bad breaths, drink absent. Imagine swishing it around in your mouth. Wow. Yeah. It's probably like a mouthwash, I guess, a little bit. It's like, you know, that old timey licorice flavored toothpaste. I imagine it'd be like that. Yeah, probably so. We should also point out this is mainly in Europe. It never really took off in the United States around this time, except and of course, Frenchinspired New Orleans. It was pretty popular there. Yeah. But like you said, in Europe, it was very popular, especially among artists, in particular, bohemian artists. And there was a real transition going on in the late 19th century, very early 20th century, the OTS, as you call them, where art was getting a little more rebellious, a little less stuffy. And the old guard did not really like this very much, but the new guard said they cared not. And one of the things that they were interested in was changing, altering their perceptions. So they used opium, they drank lots of booze. But there was this idea that, in particular, absence could change your perceptions of the world and life and yourself in ways that nothing else could. Again, because of this super hallucinatory wormhood that if you drank too much, it might drive you mad. And so they adopted absence to kind of fuel this transition to a much more rebellious type of art or movement of art. Yeah. And I think I didn't quite get what you meant earlier about looking back on it. It is kind of gross and embarrassing because they were just getting plowed on liquor is what was happening. And they were writing poems about it, and they were painting paintings about absinthe. And Mane had one called the absence drinker. And it was a portrait of a man named Coldette who was just sort of a street drunk who was dressed up a little fancy. And that was a big scandal because you weren't supposed to paint portraits of people like that. And Van Gogh drank a lot of absent. And Picasso had a sculpture called The Glass of Absent, and there were poems written about it in stories, and it was all fake. When you look back, it was nothing but getting plowed on liquor. Yes, exactly right. And to give an example of how uncomfortable it can make you, bodelair, who I always think of with what was that bomb Vivant that John Levitt's played on SNL? Kind of a dandy. The one I'm an actor. Maybe I just remember him invoking Bodelear Bodelear. And this is who he was talking about. Was Charles Bota Lair. Who was a very influential poet of this time. Who really liked getting wasted and he in particular thought that getting wasted on absence was amazing because. Quote. Neither wine nor opium equals the poison welling up in your eyes that show me my poor soul reversed my dreams thronged to drink at those green distorting pools. Absence, when really it was just high proof liquor. That was it, everybody. That was it. Yeah. He could have been about hunch punch. Exactly. Like, college freshman wrote similar poems inspired by Jim Morrison and Hunch Punch. Yeah, exactly. Hunch Punch really does get on top of you pretty quick, too. I never had that stuff if it's well made, you don't even taste the incredible amount of high protein. Yeah, it's crazy. You're like, how is this being hidden? But it does, I guess because it's a neutral spirit. But it's wow. And for some reason, there's always, like, an entire garbage can full of it. It's never, like, a small amount. Nobody ever makes, like, a nice cocktail of Hunch punch here and there. There's a garbage can. It's a very dangerous thing to do. Actually, in retrospect, I have a theory about absence, and I haven't really seen anything about this, but I think the mere fact that it was this bright, bright green, I think if it would have been a clear or brown liquor, it wouldn't have taken hold like it did. I think there was something about that color that just sort of entranced people. I think you're totally right. And the point that shouldn't be mistaken is that in some way, shape or form, absent, even if it was a mythological concept, when you really get right down to it, did fuel some really creative art at that time. I mean, we're talking about menet. Dega van Gogh. All these guys were, like, fueled by absence. Like, it really did have a huge impression on the art world, even if they were kind of self diluted. Yeah, the Oscar. Wild quote. Of course, every Oscar Wild quote is pretty great. But he liked the stuff, and he said, after the first glass of absence, you see things as you wish they are, after the second, you see them as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are. And that is the most horrible thing in the world. Which just means you're plastered. Yeah. Another one that we could not just not shout out, though, was pretty much the head cheese as far as getting super plowed on absence goes, which is Toulouse La Trek, henri delouse La Trek. You love the stuff. Very famous with pastel portraits. Very famous. Just kind of hard living, hard drinking French dude from the era. And he apparently loved absence so much that he had a walking cane that he carried. A couple of shots of absence poured into hollowed out walking cane with them everywhere he went. That's a nice party trick. So it was really something like everybody was really getting plowed on absence. Remember a lot of. Working class French people replace their morning, afternoon and evening glasses of wine with morning, afternoon and evening glasses of 80% liquor absence instead, and this is starting to make a lot of people worried. There was a temperance movement in beginning in 1872 in France, and it was not gaining traction. And then absence really started to come along and a target began to emerge. And Chuck, I say that we take a break and then come back and talk about how the ban on absence began. Let's do it. Stuff you should know. Josh and Shawn. Stuff you should know. All right, so you teased that the temperance movement in France didn't take at first because him was France. I'm sorry for teasing. The French love to drink lots of wine and other things, God bless them, but absent has started to grow in popularity and they zeroed in and said, all right, here's our chance. This stuff is the devil's juice. And we can really have a way in here if we target absenth as a thing. And then wine makers, which is sort of weird, got involved in the temperance movement in a way when they said, yeah, absent is terrible, and it's not like cognac, which is really sort of highfalutin alcohol made from distilled grapes, but this stuff is really bad stuff. It's cheap and it's petty and it's for the lower class. So we're going to join up in the temperance movement ourselves to help get rid of it. Yeah, and it worked really well. I mean, they had a common enemy absence, and then what was really kind of helped along, or helped the entire thing along, were a couple of things. One was a psychiatrist named Valentine. Magnaart, magnan. Magnan. Sorry, I printed this on draft setting, so I can't see very well. And we'll come back to Magnan Magnart in a second. But what really kind of shocked the nation's and in fact the world's conscience about just letting absence flow freely was Jean Lafayette murder of his entire family while he was about as drunk as a human being can be. Right? But not so much on absent, which is the irony here. This was in five, and as the story goes in court, they say he drank five liters of wine, six glasses of cognac, two crim dance just because a coffee with brandy, I guess, to sober up. And then but 2oz of absent gets in a fight with his wife, his pregnant wife murders her with a gun, and his two and three year old daughters amazingly horrible domestic homicide case, then tried to kill himself, survived it and basically spared the death penalty because they said he was in the throes of absenth madness. And it worked. Yeah. There was a different psychologist from Switzerland named Albert Mayhem and he said, no, this man was in the grips of this absence madness, even though he just had 2oz of absent throughout the whole day. But the fact that he had had absenth, and absenth had this reputation, he was able to seize on it. And so that really caught the attention of everybody that if you drank absence, it could drive you to murder your own family. That really made a lot of people reconsider it. And then either before this, full 30 years before this, there was a psychiatrist in France named Magnan, Valentine Magnan. And he, I guess, was part of the temperance movement as well. And he had conducted some studies where he got his hands on wormwood and just basically kept giving wormwood oil to dogs until they'd finally start having convulsions and seizures. Right. And then he published a study saying wormwood oil gives you convulsions and seizures. It doesn't really matter how much wormwood oil you drink. Just the fact that wormwood oil was in absence made it questionable, made it dangerous. And so these two things Magnan's pretty much made up study and Jean Lafrey's horrific crime came together to give that strange bedfellow joint movement between the temperance people and the wine industry a huge target on the back of absence. And they went after absence full bore. And it did not take very long after Jean Lafrey's crime for absence to start to get banned around the world. Yeah, they made up a name for it even. It was called absenthism instead of alcoholism. And I think the murder was in. He, by the way, Appears died by suicide just a few days after he was put in jail, just to put a button on that. But that was in Switzerland. Banned it in the US. Banned it in 1912. France finally gave in in 1915. And then that is when in 1920, we mentioned that Per no started making Per no anise, which is now just known as Per no as that substitute for absent in. There's a ban in a lot of different countries. Not all countries, apparently. The UK never banned it, but I read that it was partially because they were just ignoring things that have to do with French tastes. For real, the checks never banned it. So you could go to Prague, which was also the center of Artsy intellectual bohemian vibes. In fact, I think Bohemia actually is in that area. So they would definitely have an original claim to that. But for the most part, if you wanted to get absent, it was very difficult because it could drive you mad, it can make you kill your family. And you mentioned it a second ago, absentism the Syndrome, which was a collection of maladies, everything from hallucinations, sleeplessness, tremors, convulsions, madness, from drinking absence. And in retrospect, historians say this didn't exist. Like what this person was describing was excessive alcohol use. Like all this stuff you can get from drinking way too much high proof alcohol, which is what they were doing. So in addition to this kind of moral panic about it making you kill your family. There was an accompanying made up syndrome to give like a veneer of science to the moral panic as well. And it was so effective, Chuck, that absenth was banned for over 100 years in some places. Yeah, I mean, it took the liquor industry and distilleries basically beating the drum, saying, we want to make absent, we want to make this probably highly marketable, super hopped up liquor again. And they said, all right. The EU started lifting the ban in the late eighty s and eighty eight France. It was sort of in a gray area, basically, but they finally removed the law against it in 2011, I believe the US. Was 2007, when the Alcohol, Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau said, all right, well, here's what you can do. You can distill this liquor, you can call it absent, but it's got to be through Jones free. It's got to have less than ten parts per million. And if it's coming across the border, if you're importing it, you can't import something labeled absent, or any bottle that shows like people tripping or any kind of hallucinogenic effects on the bottle. Right. Which just underscores the government's preoccupation with controlling citizens perception of reality. It's really strange if you step back and think about it, it really is. So you can get absent here today. In Switzerland they have one of those man, I can't remember what it's called, but where in champagne there's rules about what qualifies as champagne and anything that don't follow those. Something about Appalachian, I can't remember, but Switzerland has something like that, and Covet is kind of I saw it described as the spiritual home of absence. Okay, so you can get it, it's widely available today, and there's some really good craft distillers making absenth all around the world. And if you do get your hands on it, and you do say, like, I want to try this, there is a pretty interesting ritual involved. And absent is typically drunk, at least with water and sugar. And the way that you combine those two things with absinthe is kind of where the rituals start to kick in. That's right. And firstly, you should look for absent that is not made green with some artificial coloring. You don't want that. You want something that's like genuinely colored from the post distillation process of infusion. Yes. So once you've got your hands on some good absent, there's different ways you can do it. There are cool little things that look good on your bar. I've seen some, they look sort of like these clear vases with a little spout on one side. But you don't even need all that stuff, really. All you really have to do is pour, and you don't even need sugar. I think sugar helps the taste. But if you want to what is it pronounced? The louis? That's what I think. Yeah. L-O-U-C-H-E. If you want to create the Loosh, which is this sort of cloudy effect in your absence. All you really have to do is dribble ice cold water in your absinthe. So you pour just a little bit. You don't need much, like an ounce, maybe 2oz if you're really going for it. And then you want to mix about four parts ice cold water, just dribble it in the little flat spoon on top. If you want to get into the ritual, it can be a little fancier, but I saw people online that literally just sort of held a glass of ice cold water high above their absence glass and just sort of dribbled the water in. Yeah, those drippers, though, are really cool. They look like a virus, almost like three or four legged virus that sits atop your glass. And then there's a tray beneath it that you put the sugar cube on, and then you just pour the four or 5oz of cold water into the reservoir above the tray, over the glass, and it drips it onto the sugar at a steady rate, which drips the sugar water into the glass of absinthe below. And they're very pretty for the most part, like that Bella Park. Perry, look at your bar. Yes, it's really cool. I could see how people get into this kind of thing, too. But that loose truck, there's a really cool legend about it. So the Loosh is created when the water dissolves some parts of the alcohol, but not some of the oil based plant stuff. And rather than just separating oil and water, it separates out enough to just kind of create this vapor cloud. And there's a legend, I don't know if it's true or not, that at the per node distillery, there was a lightning strike that threatened to blow up, I guess created a fire that threatened to blow up thousands of barrels of absence. So the workers were dumping it out as fast as they could into the nearby river, the Duke's River. And there was a local theory that the Dupes river fed another river through an underground channel. And when the other river showed a Louis a couple of days later, that confirmed that theory, which is pretty neat, although not necessarily a fully documented story. That's a good story, though. And the Lucia is cool looking. Like, admittedly, if you've never seen it, what you start out with with absence is sort of a see through, very bright green thing. And the Loosh, once it gets cloudy, it ends up looking kind of almost like lime juice, sort of a cloudy, lime juicy look. And again, it's mostly water. And there is that fire method where you light the sugar cube on fire and then extinguish it with cold water after it drips down and melts into the thing. But I saw that a this is not a good idea for a lot of reasons, because the danger of fire, if you're in a bright room, you might not see that light blue flame and go to drink something that's still on fire. And it's usually, or historically, was a way to disguise, like, really bad absent. And if you have good absent, then it's not something you need to do at all. Right. The best thing, in my opinion, that you can do with your absence is use it to rinse a glass that you're about to make a sazerac in. Yeah, I've heard of that. Oh, man, it's good. A good sazarak is oh, my gosh. I like a sazerac. I don't think I've seen one being made at, like, a bar. It has come to me at the table, so I don't know if they've done that or not. They most definitely have. If they're making anything approaching an accurate Saturday, I guarantee they have for sure. You just put just a little bit in, like a quarter ounce or less of absence, and then you turn the glass kind of on its side and twist it around in a circle on its axis. Yeah, I guess with y'all control, maybe. I'm not sure. And now your glass is ready to have the Casaret port in. Or if you really want to get fancy, they sell little atomizers, like those perfume atomizers that you can put absent in and just spray it on the inside of your glass and it should stick to the sides. Yeah. When I get a I love my martinis, but I like a martini with a little vermouth in there. Not much I like them dry, but I do like a little actual vermouth in there. And it annoys me when asked for a dry martini when they just put the vermouth and swish it around and dump it out. I'm always like, Come on, just a little bit. Yeah, that's like a bone dry martini. Yeah. Or they don't even like the thought of vermouth isn't even an option. It's just straight up gin. I'm like a martini supposed to have a little vermouth in there. Yes. You might as well say, Can I have 3oz of gin, please? Yeah. Cold gin. That's basically what I have with a little olive brine. Yeah. So you got anything else about absence? Nothing else. There are plenty of cocktails out there that have a little absence in there, if you're into that, but I'm going to give it a try. I'm going to see what it's all about. Some have a lot of them. I saw the Necromancer. It's equal parts absinthe, ballet blanc, St. Germaine, and lemon juice with a dash of gin. St. Germaine is green, right? No, it's kind of a goldish color. It's elder flower liqueur. Okay. It's not green. You're thinking of chartreuse. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of. Which is another difficult thing to find recipes for, actually. Yeah, I got some of that stuff on my bar now, and it remains largely untouched until you go digging. I think that's another one that started out as a botanical medicinal remedy, too. Yeah, well, that's it for botanical medicinal remedies, everybody. In particular, absent. And if you want to know more about absent, then just check it out, see what you think. You should be over 21, though. Just COA. And since I said just COA, it's time for listing or mail. Yeah, don't do the fire method. Just don't do it. Agreed. No need. All right, this is Simpsons reference that we missed. I always love these. And this is from Lauren, Andrew and Homer, believe it or not. Hey, guys. Just listen to the wonderful episode of Postmodernism. So, forgive me, this has already been pointed out to you, but I couldn't believe that no one, especially Josh, made any reference to the classic Simpsons episode Homer the Mo, in which Mo transforms the tavern into a swanky club called M. Right? Do you remember that one? Yeah. There is a great scene where Homer and the other longtime patrons are questioning Mo about some eyeball art on the wall. And after some attempt to get the guys to understand it is pomo, he finally describes it as being weird for the sake of weird, and they all get it. This definition has been what I think of when I think of postmodern art for my entire adult life. So I thought I'd share. Again from Lauren, Andrew and Homer prince's. Actual name pretty great. Thank you for that. Thank you for waking us over the cold, for missing that one. But it is pretty obvious, and we should have thought about it. I didn't make research. Yeah, I guess so. Still hurts so bad. But if you want to make us hurt so bad, you can get in touch with us, like Lauren, Homer and Andrew. And if you want to make it hurt so good, get in touch with John Mellonkamp. It's my last joke. That wasn't a joke. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@heartradio.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." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-09-06-sysk-animal-testing-final.mp3 | How Animal Testing Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-animal-testing-works | The use of animals for commercial and scientific testing is a quietly controversial topic. That we humans have advanced as a species because we use animals as literal and figurative guinea pigs is undeniable. But do we have the right to do that? | The use of animals for commercial and scientific testing is a quietly controversial topic. That we humans have advanced as a species because we use animals as literal and figurative guinea pigs is undeniable. But do we have the right to do that? | Tue, 06 Sep 2016 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=250, tm_isdst=0) | 46342972 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Hey, 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. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is sponsored by Squarespace. Whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, a professional blog, or an online store, it's all possible with the Squarespace website. Go to Squarespace.com and set your website apart. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. This is stuff you should know. The podcast, not the least of which is membered by Jerry. That was exciting. I have a bad cold. Yeah. My brain is not functioning quite right. Yeah. But this is not the old days where you have the six weeks of cold. Right. Hopefully this will be just a couple of episodes. That's right. Bear with us. Yeah, bear. But to make up for it, I have all my teeth, finally. All right. It's just this constant pendulum. That's right. Swings from one of us to the other. Got all toothed up yesterday. Feeling good. The eight months is over. Like, click your teeth together for everybody? I'm afraid to. Okay. You're depressed. Yeah. I got to treat them very carefully. And I got fitted for a bite guard, so when I grind my teeth at night, it doesn't keep happening. So things are looking good. Everything's coming up Chuck. That's funny. Jimmy has a bite guard, too. From grinding her teeth? Yeah. So two of the most significant people in my life grind their teeth. Both grind their teeth. Does she bite her fingernails? But I don't. Does she? But her fingernails? Yeah. I take out my stresses on my body. Yeah. Those are short nails. Do they hurt? Do they just ache? No. Because sometimes if I overdo it, they do. When I cut my nails, and I file them a little too short. They just ache for a day or so afterward. Yeah. To have it. I've always done it. Yeah, like, since you can remember. Yeah. I wore that bitter polish for a while when I was a kid to try, and I just chewed right through it. I was like, oh, so bitter. Still must bite. I kind of like it in a weird way. The part of me that hates myself loves that taste. So weird. Well, Chuck, let's talk about another habit. Okay. A habit that humans have had for a very long time, and that is the habit of using animals as models for humans, as stand ins for humans. When we want to test new things, find out new things about ourselves. Yeah. Like, will this kill me? Let's put it on an animal. Right. Does the heart or the lungs actually pump blood around the body? Let's cut a dog open and find out. Yeah. We've been doing it for a very long time. Yeah. And this article came with its own intro story, which was pretty interesting, I thought. Yeah. We haven't done one of those in a long time. That used to be, like, a standard aspect of this. Yeah. Now we just babble. Yeah. We just share what's going on in our lives, our days, pretty much. Sorry, everybody. It must be a real letdown, now that I think about it. Should we do this, though? Sure. All right, well, let's go back in time, back to 1937. There was a company called a pharma company called Se Massing Gill out of Tennessee, and they had a great almost want to say wonder drug that was an antibiotic that worked really well in its powdered form. And people started clamoring and said, we love this stuff, but it sure would be great if we could put it as a drop under my tongue instead. Right. I like liquids. I'm not big on powder. Sure. Like that weirdo Richard Petty who just takes goodies powder like me. I love that. Dude, that's my go to. Yeah, it's got caffeine. That's what helps. Yeah, for migraines, too. Oh, really? Caffeine is a big one. Yes. Emily can't do them, but I couldn't either. It's my hangover cure. I see. Did I say that out loud? You did. Yeah. It works wonders. I thought Bloody Mary is where your hangover no, I'm not a hair of the dogger. That's what it was invented for. You now? Yeah. All right. I'm getting a self check. I apologize. So they decided we need a liquid form of this what was the name of the drug? sulfanyl. Man. I just had it. Sulfanylamide. Yes. Or sulfanylamide, I think. Sulfanylamide. Okay. That's how I would say it if I were in Tennessee. In well, they had a chemist named Harold Cole Watkins who went to the lab and said, all right, let's dissolve this stuff in something called diethylene glycol. Diethylene that one, I know, worked pretty well. So they added a little raspberry flavoring to make it palatable, and they said, It smells pretty good. Tastes pretty good. Looks pretty good. Let's sell it. Yeah. And they did. They sold a bunch of it just, like, one month after mixing up a batch of the stuff. They had 633 shipments all over the country. Yes. Because there was a huge demand for this. I mean, like, sulfanylamide was already an established drug. The idea of it being in some sort of palatable form that was gangbusters, raspberry liquid. Everybody had syphilis that they needed to take care of back then. And this kind of thing would help that's. Right. And if it could be a pleasant experience, well, then great. And then that was September when they made their first shipment, right? Yes. By October, middle of October, october 11, to be specific, a group of doctors in Tulsa contacted the AMA, the American Medical Association, and said, we think there's something really wrong with this new Mascul products, which they called sulfanylamide elixir, or elixir of sulfanylamide. We think it's killing people, actually, and killing them in one of the worst ways imaginable. Yeah. It wasn't just sleepy time now. It was a pretty bad death. Right. You're riding in agony. You're probably peaking your guts up. You're dying from being poisoned. Yeah. So the AMA got a hold of some stuff, and they said, you know what? The actual drug is fine, but the solution we mix it with is the culprit. It is pure poison. Yeah. Who knew? Nobody knew. And the reason why no one knew is because Madison Gill and Cole Watkins, harold Cole Watkins and his group of chemists were not obligated to test this stuff out. Yeah. Well, people knew, though. That was the one frustrating thing, is there were studies out that said this stuff was poison. Right. And I guess they just didn't read them. Right. They didn't research the literature, which is a big deal. Sure. But they also didn't test it out on human or animal ahead of time. And again, they just looked at the appearance, the smell, little bit of the taste. But no one took a full dose of this, apparently, and people died. I think 100 people died in 15 states in about a month or so before they could get the shipments back. I think the FDA, the barely born FDA this is one of its first actions, was going and getting this stuff. Yeah. And the president of the company said, we haven't broken any laws, because I guess there weren't laws on the books at the time. And the head chemist very sadly killed himself because of this. Yeah. Like the story goes from bad to worse. Right? That was pretty Japanese of him. Yeah. Do we do a full episode on that? On suicide? On Harikari? But it had another name, too. Right. Sofuku yeah. Did we do that, or did we just mention it? I'm sure we just mentioned it. Okay. Yeah. I think in the Japanese stragglers and probably the Samurai and the revenge one. Yeah. Boy, it's hard to keep track these days. Oh, yeah, it really is. So this led to Congress in the US. Enacted the FDA Cosmetic Act, which said that, you know what, you need to test these drugs on animals, and that there and sort of started, at least in the US. The official decree that you can and should do this. Right. But it's been going on a long time before that, right, buddy. Galen, who we talked about before well, even further back than Galen, if you look at the Greeks, at least as far back as about 500 BC. The ancient Greeks were using animals for testing, poking around, figuring out how the human body works. And there was this idea that there was an analogy between all animals, that humans shared a lot of the same physiology of all animals, and there was a great disagreement among the Greeks in particular about whether that was true. But it didn't stop guys like Aristotle and Era systratus yeah. And hypocrites as well, from basically poking around inside live animals, which is where the term for animal testing came from. The other term is vivisection. Right. Vivisection is cutting something open while it's still alive. Yes. Specifically, an animal. Right. No, you can vivisect humans. Oh, can you? Yeah, because that's section occurs after death. Right. Vivise section is like cutting open. I think technically, surgery would be. But the idea behind Viva section is that this is just for experimentation, not like, Let me heal. That Oregon right there. Right. Which, by the way, go back and listen to our human experimentation episode. That was a great one. I remember that one. So flash forward a bit to second century Rome, where our friend Galen, who we just talked about him in a podcast, our live stuff in UK and Ireland. That's right. Which hopefully people will hear soon. Yes. He was a medical specialist, and he said, you know what? I'm going to do a demonstration in the public. I'm going to rent a hall. Watch this. Yeah. Basically, I'm going to get this pig. Watch this pig. And I'm going to prove that we are all a bundle of nerves by snipping certain nerves of this pig. You want to see them not squeal anymore? Watch me snip this nerve. Right. And it was all planned. And this philosopher is a pretty popular guy. He had punch and cookies out. He was really excited for this day. A philosopher that was in attendance named Alexander Denisinus yeah. Demasinus one of those two. He said, you know what? This is BS. Doesn't prove a thing. And in fact, none of these demonstrations prove anything, because that's a pig, and we're humans. Why are you bothering? Right. And apparently the Romans had adopted from the Greeks the idea that empirical evidence didn't really prove anything. Even if you don't, if you saw something, it doesn't mean it was true. Right. Which is a weird philosophy I'd like to understand a little more. I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that. Sure. But that's just, like, such a completely radically different paradigm from what we have now. The paradigm of science we're seeing is indeed believing that it requires empirical evidence. Used to be the opposite. Yeah. And that was Alexander's big objection, like, hey, man, you can cut that pig's nerve all day long. And sure, I saw it ensure it had that effect, but it doesn't prove anything. And Galen was like, I hate you. I hate that idea. I hate Aristotle. Yeah, I'm leaving. Because Aristotle was apparently somebody who said, I've poked around in a pig or two in my time, and I've concluded that the heart and that the brain is the center. This idea that a nerve connected to the brain can control anything is hogwash, if you'll forgive the pun. Yeah. Aristotle is just a big dummy, the dumbest of them all. So Galen did, in fact say, I'm leaving. He said, I'm taking my medical bag, and I'm going home. And then everyone there was like, oh, I really want to see this pig gets cut apart. Please don't leave. He said, okay, you guys, I'll do it. You twisted my arm. Came back in, performed the experiment and the demonstration. And this was one of the first recorded examples of experimenting on animals for science. Yeah. So the ball was rolling. Yeah. And I don't know if Galen hadn't done it first, and he obviously hadn't done it first, because he came a few hundred years after Aristotle who had done that. But if Aristotle hadn't done it, eventually somebody who was curious enough would have grabbed a dog or a chicken or something and just cut it open and started looking at what was inside. Yeah, for sure. Like, it would have happened. But these are the people who are recorded doing it first. Go forward in time a bit to the late 19th century, and there was a microbiologist from German named Robert Koch, and he got some anthrax, he got some blood from cows killed by anthrax. Right. Started looking at it under a microscope and said, you know what? Something in there looks funny to me. That might be the anthrax. So let me take that and put it in a mouse and see what happens. The mouse died, and he said, I'm onto something here. I'm pretty sure that was the anthrax. Yes. It was a big deal. Again, using an animal to experiment in order to further human understanding and protect human health in life. That's right. Those are the biggies that people have used animals for. Yes. And that was actually, like, medically. Let me try and cure a disease. Yeah. Not like the early guys. What does this do? What happens if I sever this. Yeah. But I got my ancient Greek impression. The point I was trying to make, I guess, was later on in the 1915s people started, and notably this Russian, Dimitri bellyf started using research on animals, not necessarily for curing diseases, but to study behavior. Right. Yeah. We talked about them in our animal domestication episode. Yeah. So he had the great idea for these cute little silver foxes. He's like, I might like one of those as a pet. Sure. I have a niece who would love one of those. Man, have you seen those fox videos? Yeah. Where they cry and walk around crying or calling or whatever. Yeah. And they shake their little tail when you scratch their belly and I don't know if I've seen that one. Oh, it's very cute. They make sort of like a little chirpy purr and wiggle their tail and wag their tail and it's just like oh man, you're the perfect combination of dog and cat. Yeah. Foxes are pretty cute. Yeah. We want to tame them. Well, that's exactly what he did too. And he thought, I know that domestication usually takes many years, but let me see if I can do it in like 2025 years. Right. And Chuck, speaking of behavioral studies, one of the most famous of all, using animals as pavlov's dogs. And I was researching it and I had no idea pavlov didn't just like ring a bell for his dogs to make them salivate. Right. He surgically altered his dogs. He went and got their salivary glands and put them on the outside of their faces so that he could collect saliva samples more easily. Wow. And he created remember that cow in Athens that had a porthole in it? Yes. Same thing for the dogs. Wow. So that he could collect gastric juices, digestive juices for samples as well. So what you're saying is that he was a crazy madman. Wow. So I think the larger point here is that humans have been just grabbing animals or even breeding animals for the sole purpose of using them to understand things a little more. Right? Yes. Whether it be cutting them open to see how anatomy works, to using them for medical experiments to determine that anthrax is actually bloodborne and can kill you to behavioral studies. Right. Yeah. And we should point out that it worked. He was able to weed out and by weed out, I mean by call we mean kill. And by kill we mean probably break their necks. Yeah. I think that's one of the big problems with this talking about this stuff is so many euphemisms are used. Yeah. Like you just demonstrated. Yeah. So what he did was he was able to weed out the foxes that weren't his tame and eventually he ended up with a fox that was by all accounts domesticated. A nice little pet. He said, Dimitri, I love you. And it's not just animals that are cute that we can tame animals on what most people would say are roughly the lower end of the spectrum as far as life is concerned, are very frequently used, like Nematodes fruit flies. Sure. They come into use largely because they have some similar processes. Like if you're studying a very ancient process or a very ancient part of the body, like insulin regulation, you're going to find it throughout the animal kingdom. It's going to be pretty widespread. Okay. So the idea is if you can track insulin regulation in a fruit fly, you could conceivably extrapolate those findings onto a human. Right. And a human's insulin regulation. And the advantage of a fruit fly, or Nematode, is that they're really easy to breed. Sure. And they reproduce very quickly. There's a lot of them. So if you're like Dimitri Belayev and you're studying foxes, it took him 25 years to go through 20 generations. It would take you roughly a month, I would guess, to go through about 20 generations of fruit flies. So therefore you can track mutations much more quickly. Sure. Much more inexpensively. So the fruit flies, Neumatodes, other again, lesser life forms have been used extensively in medical testing as well. They count. They qualify. It's a live organism that's being used for experimentation purposes. Yeah. And it kind of depends on what your aim is, what your goal is to what animal you do use, because you can't just use any animal for anything. And here's a fun fact. I did not know that the armadillo is an animal that can actually get Hanson's disease, aka leprosy. We talked about it in the Leprosy episode. I don't remember mentioning the armadillo. I am scared to death of armadillos now because of really? Oh, yeah. When I see it, I just look at them like leprosy. You don't hug them any longer? No. And, like, you'll see them on the side of the road hit by a car or something like that. Texas. I always double check. Well, here in Georgia, too. Yeah, a little bit. I always check to make sure that my air recirculator is on when I pass them by, that the leprosy didn't walk into my car as I drove past the roadkill. Wow. I was damaged by the leprosy episode. Well, they actually have the perfect body temperature to allow study on vaccines for leprosy. And speaking of, by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just found out last night that koalas carry chlamydia. Really? And transmitted sexually and can die from it. Oh, man. Yeah. And are actually partially endangered in some ways because they have chlamydia. Think about that next time you want to hug from that cute little critter. Right. Well, they'll tear your face off, too. All right, let's take a break, and we're going to come back and talk more about the different animals used and why. 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They love all their customers the same. Join at and T for the best deals on every smartphone and with choice of plans. And after you're signed up, give your mother a call. She misses you. Eligible plan required. Offers vary by device. Restrictions may apply. See at and t comdealsforditals. Chuck, before we get back to it, I want to say this episode and the other one that's coming out Thursday oh, yeah, there's a sweet. Yeah. And they're kind of done in conjunction with these guys, Joe and Tim, who run a site called Primerstories.com, and they do seasons. They're like animators, web dudes, and it shows. They know what they're doing. And they've basically taken they'll take essays. I wrote an essay. Then they take it and they break it up into chunks, and they animate it. Right? So as you're scrolling down, you're reading, but you're also experiencing the art, the animation that really kind of brings out the ideas of each one. It's a really neat site. They contacted us after our San Francisco show last year, right? Or no, early this year. And they said, hey, do you want to do one of these? And I went and looked, and I was amazed. I said yes. I totally do. So you can go check out the SAIW at. Primerstories. Comsysk. And that one is the one we're releasing after this one, correct? Well, it ties into both. It's kind of this essay about humans changing attitude toward animal rights. But it was fun to do. And they're cool. They're cool, dudes, for sure. And I like what they're doing. This is their fourth season. Nice fourth season. Nice plug. Nice work. Thanks. All right, so we were talking about using different animals and how if it's a fruit fly or a nematode, people don't get their hackles up too much. No, it's true. If it is a rat or a mouse, people start getting their hackles up a little more. And mice are very famously used a lot. 90% of our genes overlap with this mouse, specifically this one, which is it moose mice, meese genus mice. So that's the one that they use most often that has the 90% overlap. And their cell structure in Oregon organization are basically the same as ours. So they do a lot of testing with these mice as a result. Everything from disease and stuff to genetics to behavioral they kind of run the gamut, right? Yeah, for sure. And from that point up, they tend to, I think, run the gamut. Some are a little more specific than others, like Beagles apparently. Really come in handy when you're testing prostate cancer or muscular dystrophy. Both. Yeah, because they can contract those or develop those. So they make great animal models. Yeah. These cats, because their sight and their hearing and their balance. I have to ask, how are you feeling right now about this episode? Well, what do you mean? Like, about the topic. Because you're holding it together really well. You mean I'm not crying yet? Yeah. I've checked my emotions out of this one. Okay. I think this two part suite will get points across. Sure. I'm just relying on that. I'll get weepy later tonight. Do you remember the secret of NIM? Yeah, sure. I had forgotten what the secret was. I don't think it ever dawned on me what the secret really was. And I went back and was reading about the those were mice, right? They were rats. Rats, yeah. And the secret of NIM. Well, we probably shouldn't say. Would that be a spoiler? Yes, I think so. It's like the spoiler. Like it's in the title. What if the secret of NIM was that Bruce Willis in the dead all along? You know what I think was an even wait, is that a spoiler? Yes, I think it was years ago, at least. If you haven't seen the $0.06 by now, save your email. Go see the others, though. A lot of people haven't seen the others. I saw this 16th. The one Nicole Kidman. Oh, yeah. That was good, man. That was great. Very atmospheric. Moody film, that one. And the orphanage. Yeah, another good one. Yeah, fantastic. I think the orphanage is maybe even the better of the two. Yeah. So monkeys, primates well, non human primates, we should say, specifically the macaque monkey is used a lot because there's a lot of them and they're widely distributed and have a robust population. So they made a lot of advances in neuroscience, thanks to the macaque monkey. And then there's some animals that will just do because they contain flesh like pigs. And goats are used a lot in what's called live tissue trauma training, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's used to train battlefield medics in the military and the Coast Guard, apparently. And the animals anesthetize deeply to, like, surgical plane levels and shot or blown up or just weird stuff done to it to simulate a battlefield trauma. Wow. So that medic can do what it's called live tissue trauma training. So they can save a life on the battlefield. Yeah, but then they euthanize they kill the animal afterward. But yes, on the battlefield. That's the whole I mean, that's the whole point. And they're saying there's no substitute for that. Well, which is sort of what the scientists and doctors say. Well, we'll get into all that. Okay. One thing we should mention, though, is that if you look for labels that say, this was not tested on animals, it's sort of like the whole free range chicken myth. It's not exactly what you think it is. Right. Well, free range chickens doesn't have to have, like, a porch attached to the structure. They don't even have to have access to it. You just have to have the door open so they can leave if they want. I got you. But you have people have images, I think, of these chickens running around the field, the idyllic countryside. Yeah, but they don't they're in the barn where the food is, and they kind of don't leave, but the door is there. So they're technically free range. Unless something has changed. When I worked in the chicken industry, that sad year or whatever it was, I would guess absolutely nothing has changed. Probably so. But if you look for labels, say cruelty free or not tested on animals, it may not mean what you think, because technically, there is no oversight on a label like that. And it could mean that we did not, in the final product of this, cosmetic tested on animals. We didn't test this rouge, but all the raw ingredients that went into this from our suppliers were tested on animals. Right. Or back in the they tested the same ingredients on animals, and there's no need for us to test them again. So now we can say not tested on animals, even though lately right. These things were tested on animals years back. And actually, China has changed things recently. The west was getting further and further away. I think the EU banned imports of anything that had been tested on animals, cosmetics wise. Oh, wow. And China has gone the opposite direction. It is mandated that anything imported into China, cosmetics wise, must have been tested on animals to kind of reset things here in the west, because there's a lot of Western companies, like, I want in on that Chinese market in China saying, well, you got to test your, like, the whole thing on animals before it comes in here. Right. Interesting. So here's the deal. Over the 20th century, we've made a lot of medical advances. Life expectancy, this kind of a neat stat has gone up about three months per year in the 20th century, largely due to stuff like this testing for disease. Well, yeah. People who are advocates of animal testing say that would not have happened maybe at all had we not used animals and life expectancy. Was extended three months a year from, I think, like, 1840 to 2006 or something like that. That's nuts. Every year. And that was advanced by finding things like antibiotics and vaccines and all of the things that not just extend the human life, but make the extended years more enjoyable as well, more healthy. And that's a huge rallying cry for people who point to animal testing and say, this is necessary and has to continue. Actually, there was a 2011 poll of biomedical researchers by nature, which is no slouch of a scientific journal, and they found that 90% agreed with the sentence, use of animals in research is essential since 2011. So that sentiment isn't going anywhere. No, I think that's probably pretty much accurate today. On the other side of the coin, you have animal rights activists, and even if you're not an activist, just your average Joe on the street or Jane might say, you know what? This is unethical. It does a lot of harm, it's wasteful, and there are better ways to do it. In fact, some people say it's not even doing the job that it should be doing. For instance, they can cure cancer in mice, and we have been able to do this for a while, can't cure it in humans. Of the 85 HIV AIDS vaccines that were tested successfully on primates, they don't work on humans. And one of them may have even made humans more susceptible to it. Yeah, so there's two very strong sides to this argument. The FDA has said that nine tenths of all drugs and development don't work in humans after they worked in animals, because you just can't tell. Right? And actually, I looked that up. It's a little bit of a fallacy. It's more like 94% fail in clinical trials. But that's all pre clinical trials, not just animal testing, but also non animal testing, where it passed the first stages. When it made it to clinical trials, 94% of all drugs failed to work or actually harmed humans. There's another side of the coin, though, too, Chuck. How many sides are on this coin? It's like one of those hundred sided dye that you see in DMV but never know how to use. Yeah, there are probably a lot of drugs out there that harmed animals and were shelved right then, didn't make it into clinical trials, animals were harmed. They may not have harmed humans and actually could have cured things. Interesting. So there's people saying, no, we need to be testing on humans because we're using this for humans. Right. That's what some protesters against animal testing would say. And then another thing that I saw is that you tend to think like, okay, well, it's advancing science, so I can't really get in the way of that. Right. But one of the critiques of that argument is not all the science is good, that's being done. And like a lot of animal lives, if you agree that animal lives are valuable, but that using an animal life to advance scientific understanding, to protect human health and life is worthy. It's a worthy use of an animal. Then you would also probably agree with the idea that wasting the animals life in scientific testing is unforgivable, right? Yeah. So there was a survey in 2009, Poso. S. One, Proceedings of the Library of Science, one, the Journal of 271 animal Studies, that found that 41% failed to even state a hypothesis or objective to the test. Wow. 30% failed to describe the statistic method used in the study. 87% didn't randomize, 86% didn't use blinding. And those are basic scientific efforts that you have to make in any experiment. Right. Those are very basic, which means that those things were wasted. Which means those animals lives were wasted. And the suggestion is that a lot of publicly funded science is just not very good science, and it's wasting the lives of the animals involved. Well, that's sad. I'm starting to get emotional. Okay. All right. Let's take a break then, and we'll come back and talk a little bit about our old buddy Charles D. Chuck Darwin. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively, complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? 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Five G may not be available in your area. For coverage details, see att. Comfivegforyou. Visit www. Dot att. Comcallprotect for details. All right, so I teased everybody with Charles Darwin. Oh, is that who you're talking about? Which is what I do every Halloween. I dress up as Charles Darwin and tease the local teens. What are you going to dress up as for our show in DC on October 29? I don't know, but I'm glad you mentioned that, because we're doing a show at the Lincoln Theater and we're turning it into a Halloween ball. It's a Halloween bash. Not even a ball. Yes, it's a wrong above the ball, including a reading of a Halloween story like we do just for their ears only. Yes. Plus, we'll be dressed up. We're encouraging everyone who comes to be dressed up. Maybe I'll go with Charles Darwin. And as far as I know, it's an all ages show, but it could get spooky and our shows do get a little blue, so just FYI, you've been warned. So Charles Darwin, who I may dress up as, I'm pretty sure I know what I'm going at, I'd rather not reveal it at the time. He was kind of in on this game a long time ago, and he loved animals, but he also wanted to study animals, but he also wanted to treat them humanely while he studied animals. Sounds like Charles Darwin kind of approach. Yes. So there was like, people are actually starting to get in trouble for some of these things. In 1874, these scientists were actually put on trial for torturing dogs because they wanted to see how absent and alcohol affected their nervous system. So they cut them open and exposed them to these liquids. They just doused them in, is what I'm taking from it. I have no idea. I guess so they're actually acquitted, but it sort of brought things into the front of everyone's minds. And Darwin people were saying, let's not do this at all. And Darwin stepped in and said he was a little more moderate and said, you know what? Let's craft a bill here in the United Kingdom where you can do this, but do it humanely. And that resulted in the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. Yeah, it was pretty great. It was advancement. It was. But the UK actually has long led the way in the west for animal rights. Even before that, as we'll see, they were trying to protect animals, as we'll see in the next episode. That's right. And then a little later, in 1954, the University Federation of Animal Welfare said, let's get these two dudes a zoologist and a microbiologist, Russell and Birch, and just do a lot of research, guys, and come back with some findings that we can use. And, boy, did they. Yeah, there's a lot better that we can do in protecting animals. Scientists are typically dumb and can only remember things through alliteration so these guys came up with the three Rs, right. Something that could be put on a PSA poster. Yeah, the three Rs. I'm just teasing about the scientist thing are replacement, reduction and refinement, right? Yes. So your first goal is to find a replacement of the animal. Is there any alternative to the animal in this experiment? Yeah, like an ascension animal with a worm, perhaps, instead of a mouse. Right. Or if you can find a willing robot that fits the bill. The second one is reduction. You want to reduce the number of animals used to the absolute minimum. You don't want to have any spare orangutans hanging around. You want to know how many you're going to use. And those are the ones that you can kill. Correct. And then finally refine, which means and this is sort of the opposite of what you were talking about with those awful stats that you said, right? Like, let's refine this and at least get your technique down so well that the suffering is minimized to its bare minimum as well. The waste is reduced. Yeah. And that was 1959 that Brussels and Birch released the three Rs. This is 2009 that that one study I cited was conducted 50 years later. So, Peter, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, we've talked about them quite a bit on the show. They are down with the three Rs, of course, but they say, you know what, that's not enough. Though we have a lot of studies that show that they are way better ways of doing things these days than using animals. With the computer modeling that we have now and software and humans. Yeah. And they've figured out techniques using stem cells to grow organs or organ sells or like, say, skin cells in vitro and then exposing them to the chemicals you want to test. And then not only will you have your reaction or non reaction, you'll also have it with like a human cells. So it's not like, oh, it messed this rabbit's face up pretty bad. We'll just assume that it will mess up a human skin as well know, this stuff really burned through that human skin tissue that we synthesized. So now we know for sure not to give it to humans. Right. There's also something called because a big objection to that is well, it's a group of skin cells in vitro that doesn't really replicate, these really intricate interplays that make up organs and systems of organs. And there's a company out called I don't remember what they're called, but their invention is on a chip. Oh, wow. It's amazing, dude. I watched this video about it last night, like on a Tortilla chip. I wish it's the only way it could be better if you could eat it afterwards, but it'd be pretty messed up if you did. So it's like a USB stick size module. That's the word I'm going with. It's transparent. And say, the lung on a chip has some branching stuff, and inside there is a layer of lung cells and that replicate and simulate human lung. Right. So you have human lung cells growing and arranged in the way that they would in the human lung. And then this device allows you to pass air over the top and blood over the top and introduce bacteria and introduce white blood cells and study what they do. So you're replicating the function of a human lung on this little thing, which is all simulation. It is, but it's a real simulation. It's using real lung cells and they're functioning like a lung normally would, except you don't have to say here inhale this we'll just pass this antibiotic across the lung cells and it'll treat it like the human lung would. It's amazing. And then, yeah, if you could eat it afterwards, eat the human lung cells with some guacamole, you'd be like, the circle of life is complete. Well, that's sort of one of the big points, though, that Peter and a lot of organizations use, is that we're so advanced now with our computer modeling and these simulations that actually are better ways than it's sort of archaic to experiment on an animal like these are not only cruelty free, but it's smarter and better. Right. That's the argument they make. Yes. The statistics cut both ways. If you look at Peter stats, they're like animal models are predictive it's in this dismal range for human outcomes. And then the people who are in favor of animal testing say, well, these computer models are actually the ones that have dismal results. Right. So both sides, I guess it's just too new. Maybe it's unproven. Yeah. But there does seem to be a movement afoot in biomedicine to replace, as much as possible computer models or animals with computer models. Yeah. Some of the other things that animal rights groups lobby for are things like, well, how about you just do like, CT scans or MRIs, you're actually harming the animal. Or this thing called microdosing where you actually give humans just very small doses of these medicines that won't be enough to hurt them if things don't work out. But you could tell if it's going to be effective or not. Yes, it still produces that reaction on a molecular level. It's just not going to have a system wide toxic effect on it. Yeah, that's pretty neat. There's some change, but at the same time, there's also some digging in on both sides as well. Like, for example, with that live tissue trauma training, there was a movement to replace any live animal with a dummy or a mannequin or something like that. And the people who are proponents of using animals and live tissue trauma training say, man, there's something that can happen to a battlefield medic during combat, and that's called freezing. When they're presented with a human being with a major trauma, they can just sit there and freeze and freak out because this is the first time they've been exposed to it. One of the aspects of blowing the leg off of a pig is that this person is having to work on a pig. And yeah, it's a pig, but it's a live pig. Right. It's not a recession. Annie right, exactly. And maybe they made the person care for the pig for like, a week first, so that has even more well, I just made that up, but you could see how that would like that would be tough to replace. That's a tough one to argue with, but I think ultimately the question is raised, chuck and this is what we're going to address in the next episode, is probably the largest question of all and is do humans have or have humans ever had the right to use animals for our own means? Right. And we'll talk about that one on the next episode. Oh, that's a nice cliffhanger. I think so, too. Well done. Do we have listener mail this way? Yeah. And you know what? Not only that, we have a two part listener mail. Awesome. That has its own cliffhanger. Man. All right, well, let's get to it. So if you want to know more about animal testing, you can type that word in the search bar. HowStuffWorks.com? And it will bring up this excellent article. And since I said search bar, it's time for part one of listener mail. That's right. This one was so robust. It's an unprecedented two parter from not Ivan, but Yvonne. Will he grow up to be a good man? I hope so. No, that's Levon. Oh, yeah. Well, the El silent. Those weren't the right words anyway, but it's adorable. All right, here we go. First off, guys, got to say you're not only my favorite podcast, but you're also my ten year old son's favorite podcast. Listen to every episode at least twice. How about that? And my son is also a big fan of your TV show. And the animated shorts, boy, they're in deep. Well, however, my beautiful fiance is not. In fact, there have been times when I will be sitting next to her and she's reading a book, and I'll have my headphones listening to the podcast so I don't disturb her, and I'll burst out laughing like a crazy person. In her words, this crazy end quote behavior of mine is directly related to listening to you, too. So thanks for that. Anyway, one of the reasons are right is to call your attention. You said on the sugar it powers Earth podcast in 2014. Chuck said, one day we're going to re record a show and not realize it. We're going to hear about it. You managed to do it. You probably heard from someone else by now. But you have covered the topic of customs twice. Yes. The most recent one in August 2016, the previous one in September of 2010. Don't get me wrong, both were great. But I honestly think that both of you legitimately forgot. I was waiting for either of you to acknowledge it the second time, and that never came. And Yvonne, you are right on the money. It's true. Josh emailed me and said, hey, buddy, guess what? We've done this. It finally happened. We released it. And at first I was like, shoot. But then I thought, you know what? We got a nice bit of trivia. Now it's bound to happen. And now people have it's almost like an Easter egg, right? That listeners and fans can say, like, you know which one they did twice. You're true fan. You know. You know, it's weird, though, at no point during the research and recording of the Customs episode was I like, this sounds really familiar, or did we talk about this? Nothing. No point whatsoever. No. So that might make the first Customs episode the least memorable episode we've ever done. Perhaps. So, part two, you can look for in the second part of this suite coming out from Yvonne, wherein he made a list of all of our band names over the years. Why? He also made a list of your puns. I am not punny. I take issue with that. I'll talk about it in the next episode. Great. That's a great set up if you want to get in touch with us, like Yvonne and what is his son's name, did he say? He didn't say. But Yvonne and Son. Yeah, they sound like a funeral home. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast or hang out with me at Joshmclark. You can hang out with us on Facebook@facebook.com, stuff you shouldn't. And check out Chuck at Charlesw. Chuck Bryant and me at super. Josh Clark. Both on Facebook. We're on Instagram. We're on social media that hasn't even been invented yet. Plus, you can send us an email to Stuffpodcast at how stuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web, the newly updated stuffyouhow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-09-30-sysk-most-peaceful.mp3 | SYSK Selects: What was the most peaceful time in history? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-what-was-the-most-peaceful-time-in-hi | In this week's SYSK Select episode, there is a lot of debate about whether pre-agricultural humans existed in a more harmonious state than we do today. Did we slip out of Eden when we began to build large scale societies and pay the price for technologica | In this week's SYSK Select episode, there is a lot of debate about whether pre-agricultural humans existed in a more harmonious state than we do today. Did we slip out of Eden when we began to build large scale societies and pay the price for technologica | Sat, 30 Sep 2017 16:01:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=16, tm_min=1, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=273, tm_isdst=0) | 27459609 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You weren't about to let any cyberattacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create learn More@ibm.com you know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopeet.com. Hi there. It's me, Josh. And for SYSK select this week I've chosen what was the most peaceful time in history. Which originally came out in March 2013. There's a big discussion about Stephen Pinker and if this kind of thing floats your boat, check out Reality Denial. Steven Pinker's apologetics for Western imperial violence, which was a Public Intellectuals Project article. Makes kind of a good companion piece to this episode. At any rate, enjoy it. It's a good one. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. This is Charles, Debbie, Chuck, Bryant. We're being very professional. And this is Stephanie. Are we? I just decided all we're saying, Josh, give peace a chance. Me and John Lennon. Nice. And the follow up, I think, to that line was if it doesn't work out, kill someone. But then Yoko said you should take that part out. Thank God for Yoko. Yeah, that's what I always say. Well, I think that was a nice little intro, Chuck. I just made it up. Goes off the cuff, clearly on the fly. Have you ever heard of the group vision of humanity? I have. I wonder where groups like this get their cash, because this is kind of they make a social statement, but are they selling ads on their annual report? What's going on here? I don't know. They may be an NGO, I guess. I'm sure they are. I think it's valuable research. I agree. Because it brings into focus, like, what we're going toward, I should say. What they do is they use 23 different indicators and crunch some numbers from all over the world to determine what is the most peaceful countries on Earth. And it's fairly predictable. The top and the bottom, sort of what were you surprised by? Did you look at 2012? Yes. Okay. We'll go ahead and go over the top and bottom ten and then we'll talk about surprises. How does that sound? It sounds delicious. The number one most peaceful country was Iceland. Yeah. And then you got Denmark, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Austria oil and Slovenia. Finland and Switzerland are the top ten most peaceful countries. I could have guessed all those. Maybe not austria. Oh, yeah, dude. They're like super chill, very peaceful people. Got you. Anything in Western Europe basically is very peaceful these days. Yeah, I mean, Western Europe typically is very peaceful, but it's the most peaceful region, according to this list, in the world. Okay. I feel like I found that, ironically, was surprised by one. Okay, so I picked Austria. All right. I was surprised by I'll go with Slovenia. Yeah. I don't know much about Slovenia. That's why I'm surprised. Yeah. So the worst is Somalia and then Afghanistan. Sudan, iraq. Republic of Congo. Here's where I was surprised. Russia. I was too. Russia is just slightly better than Congo, as far as peaceful countries go. Yeah. And slightly worse than North Korea, and then the Central African Republic and then Israel, and then Pakistan is the 10th worst. I was also surprised by Israel, and then once I thought about it man, that really stinks. Yeah, I was surprised by Russia. Yeah, I was too. And this one tends to fluctuate a little bit more depending on these little civil wars that crop up in some of these countries. Because, like, a place like Syria had the biggest fall. They fell 30 places in a year. And then Sri Lanka rose 30 places because their civil war ended. Right. Yeah, man. If you want to change big time in this rating, start or finish a civil war, 30 points right there, one way or the other. So, yeah, I think the United States tends to rank pretty much somewhere in the middle. Easily about the we were 88 in the UK was 29. Just that's another notable that is very notable country or region. And you could probably guess one of the things that one of the reasons why the UK is higher than the United States is because I think one of the indicators has to do with access to guns, aka. Ease of access to weapons of minor destruction. UK's access against is far more restricted. Number of jailed inmates for 1000 people, military capability. Hey, US has got that in aces. Yeah. Well, what is England, though? A potential for terrorist acts. Yeah, I take that to mean, like, maybe being a target for it. That's what I took it as. Yeah. And then some of the other indicators they use are number of homicides per 100,000 people. How you get along with your neighbors, country wise. Number of deaths from organized conflict, respect for human rights, and number of heavy weapons. So not just guns and things, but Scud missiles and bunker busters. That's the global peace index. And again, it's vision of humanity. And NGO's annual data that they crunch together, which is pretty sweet. And there's just like a little cheat sheet that we're working off of. But there's a whole publication that really goes into depth, if you're interested, and they pretty much have a lock on what the most peaceful country in the world is. Yeah, but the question still remains what is the most peaceful time in history? A lot of people ask that, and there's been several candidates, probably the most readily identified as the PAX Romana, which means the Roman peace. This gets a lot of press, at least. Yeah. Thanks to an 18th century historian named Edward Gibbon who wrote the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Pretty light reading. Yeah, I'm sure. And Given was the first to really say, hey, there's this thing called the PAX Romana, or he's the first one to popularly write about it and actually try to date this period. It was about 150 years, and it started 180 years. I'm sorry. Yeah. Well, they rounded up to 200. Yeah, 200 years. Thanks, man. He puts it at 27 BC is the beginning when Octavian, who is gayeus Julius Caesar Augustus, the great nephew of the stabbed one Julius Caesar. Right. And he was like, you know what? I'm in office now, and I know all we've always done is just conker, conquer, conquer, conquer, spread the Empire. We got enough junk now. Can we work on what we have and just, like, quit conquering and work on our infrastructure and just being more peaceful and getting along with our own land bounds? Right. Making our people happy. Yeah, we've got a bunch of people. Let's start focusing on them. And it actually had a really big impact. Their popular rebellions dropped off pretty quickly in the Roman Empire. No, they point out. But I get the impression that they were a lot more frequent and widespread than they were during the Pakistrumata. Yeah. There are these things called the Gates of Janice, and they were built by the second Emperor of Rome. I can't remember his name. Yeah, I looked it up, too. I can't remember. He built these things and left them open. And while they were open, somebody noticed, like, Rome was at peace, and then another emperor later on closed them and Rome was at war. And these gates would stay open or closed for hundreds of years at a stretch. Mostly open for hundreds of years at a stretch, because they were always at war. Yeah. And they became the symbolic, I guess, kind of indicator of how Rome was doing right then as far as war and peace went. Yeah. And so during the Petromana, the Gates of Janice were ceremonially closed and stayed closed for a couple of hundred years, which is a big deal. Yeah. It was opposite of how I thought it would be. I thought you would close them during times of war. I couldn't get to the bottom of war. It was definitely symbolic. But is it symbolic of Rome had troops out there that they need to leave the gates open for? Maybe, or if the gates were closed, room was focusing inward rather than outward. See, you thought much more about it. I just thought if you're a war man, you better close the gates, guys could come in. Exactly. There's also something called the Araposis, the altar of peace that was built during this time as well. Yeah. And then the whole thing came in, thanks to a guy named Commodus. Yeah. He was more into conquering. Yeah, he was Marcus Reelius'son and Marcus Raeius was a really great general, we should say. During this time, during the Pox Romana, like you said, there were still some popular rebellions. There was one in Hispania, which is now modern day Spain and Portugal. There's a border between the Roman Empire and Germania, which is modern day Germania. And then also during the PAX Romana, rome invaded England and subjugated it. So depending on who you were, the PAX Romana could have been very violent. You may have come to a violent end, but if you look at the Roman Empire as a whole, this is a very peaceful time. And Rome was pretty much running the world at the time, so you could say was the most peaceful time in world history. I think, compared to how Rome usually was, it was pretty peaceful. Yeah. But it wasn't all like you said, daisies and honeybees. Did you know I had no idea where I was going? Did you? That was good. Where you ended up hazy's and honeybees. Yeah. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? For all their days at the dog park and nights sleeping in bed. Your bed. Yes. We mean that kid your dog. Halo Elevate is natural 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. 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. You know vomitorium? Yeah. That's a popular misconception. Oh, really? That's not true. No. Romans actually didn't really use feathers to vomit up their meals. A vomitorium was like a place of ingress and egress into a forum or coliseum or something like that. It's basically the place where everybody walked in. They called it the vomitorium. So all those stories about eating to excess, binging and purging are not true, as far as I know. The purging part is a misconception. Interesting. Yeah, they definitely went to excess, especially followers of Bacchus. Yeah. I mean, can you believe it? Can you imagine? I'm just going to eat so much like lamb and beef and drink meat until I can't move, and then I'll throw it all up and I'll do it all over again. Right. And it'll honor the god that I follow, which is why I follow this. Have sex with, like, 18 people at once. Ancient Roman that place was a party. Rodney McDowell, huh? Yeah. And Helen Mirren, a young was she in that? Yeah, she was in it. And naked. Crazy. Quite a bit. Never saw it. Caligula yeah, it's really not very good. Well, it's just long and dull, and you expect way more than you get as far as, like, when I was a kid was, like, the dirtiest thing ever. Oh, yeah. And then you watch it now you're like, oh, God, what a bore. Is that right? It's like Clash of the Titans without the good. Fighting without pants. Yeah. You're Jaded Bryant. Uncalegula. I am. All right, so that is the Pox Romana. We put it up for consideration, and we're striking it down. That's the sound of it being stricken down. Up next, we have a time that you might not think was the most peaceful, and that was the time of Genghis Khan. What? Genghis Khan, who? We talked about murdering, like, a million people. 1.8 million people an hour. We put that on the rest. Yes, we did, but we should probably go over it real quick. The reason he was known for killing 1.8 million people in an hour is because in just one particular city, Nishapur, he had his people sack it, and then he went in and said, cut everyone's head off and stack it into a giant pyramid. Everybody's. Man, woman, child, baby, dog. You got your head cut off and stacked. That was Genghis Khan's orders. Gengis. That's how you say it. Okay. I saw the thing at Fernbank. They kept saying Genghis Khan, so that's how I'm saying it. Not Gengius. No. Okay. Genghis. Well, I'm going to go with Genjiscond. Genjis. Kahan. All right. So, sure, there was a lot of conquering of people. When you're bringing together the Mongol hordes, you got to do some killing. But apparently, once all the killing was accomplished, or not all of it, but enough of it, he was like, you know what? I think now we really need to take care of folks. Yeah. Kind of like and protect people. Who started the PAX romana the great nephew Octavia. Yeah. Octavius. Octavius. Yeah. It was very much like, okay, you're under our control now, which means you're now protected by our laws. Which was good for a lot of people, especially the Mongol hordes that he basically brought under his kingdom, I guess. Kingship, whatever. And some of the innovations that Jengas Khan came up with were things like freedom of religion what? Yeah. Women's rights. He devised the postal system. Not the first, but he devised the postal system. Yeah. Sort of like the Pony Express that we talked about. They had stations and horses, and they would go from station to station delivering mail. And if you listen to the postal service episode, you know, that is something that is intended to create culture, spread information, share information easily. Kubla Khan, 200 years after Jenga Khan, he established a system of printing presses 200 years before gutenberg a sublicon, it's pronounced. So there's a lot of really great innovations as far as promoting individual and human rights, and they protected these things using really strict punishment. So much so that there's a very old legend that a woman or old legend that a woman could walk from one end of the Mongol empire to the other about a million square miles, holding a sack of gold and be just completely left alone. That's awesome. It is, because you were going to be punished pretty severely, but a lot of people would point out if the state doles out capital punishment or physical punishment, pretty easy. Pretty strictly. And can you say that's very peaceful? Yeah. And can you say it's peaceful even though, like, millions of people potentially were killed in order to establish that huge area of land? I guess afterward, maybe, but we're going to say no on jingiscon. So no to the poxromana, no to Jengas Khan's mongol empire, founded around 1200 Ad. When then, Chuck? I am going to put up a vote along with our buddy Steven Pinker that says, right now, my friend, are the most peaceful times in world history. Man, that is crazy. Chuck, just think about it. During the 20th century, we had two world wars, countless civil wars. Yeah. We've had genocides, terrorism. We've had a lot of lynchings. Sure. Lots of death. Like violence. How can you call it homicide? Patricide Matricide. Yeah. Brother and sister side. That's Philia side, is it? I think so. Okay, so, yeah, there's a lot of killing going on, but evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, I think we talked about before, haven't we? It's kind of really familiar. Yeah. We talked about him in emotion and art. He said that music is auditory cheesecake. That's right. He said, you know what? Things seem violent now for several reasons. One reason is because of media coverage, and you hear about everything and you're inundated with it. So if you watch the evening news, it's violence upon violence upon violence. Right. He says if you go to the hunter gatherer days, where you think they're all hunting and gathering, 20% to 60% of the men died at the hands of violence, compared to 2% of men today dying at the hands of violence during the 20th century. Yeah. Even with all the wars, all the genocide, a lot more people, a lot more dudes, of course. So take that into account. But compared to, like, the Middle Ages and times like that, much more peaceful and less violent today. He makes the point that hobbes. Thomas Hobbes. Yeah. Not Calvin Hobbs, which is what I always want to say that he was correct. And his whole idea that life was brutish, nasty and short before government. And he points to times of, like, anarchy or a failed state, like in Guinea, Basal or Somalia, where you have huge escalations of violence. And he said the rise of the state and the state monopoly on violence, which means the state is the only one that can execute somebody, has created this way for people to get redressed for wrongs against them. Yeah, at least. And the government does it for you. You don't have to go kill that man. And then he doesn't come kill your family and blah, blah, blah, and back and forth. So that was one thing, one reason why we've gotten more peaceful. Yeah. He thinks technology, which makes a lot of sense, has a lot to do with it, because we are connected now like we never have been in world history and connected to other countries. And this is me talking. I think people fear what they don't understand, and there is a better understanding now than there ever has been. There's not as much fear, and people oftentimes react from fear of violence. Yeah. And what a guy named Peter Singer came up with is called the Expanding Circle. It initially started with your family and then clans, tribes, whatever. And as we got bigger and bigger and societies got bigger and bigger, the circle of who was okay in our book expanded more and more until it was like one culture warring with one culture. But then as we came to understand other cultures a little better, that circle got bigger and bigger. Until now, not only does it include basically all humans, but other species of animals as well. Like, they're okay, maybe we shouldn't kill, maybe we shouldn't eat. Octopi right. Because they're intelligent. And we know they're intelligent because we understand them a little more. We've gotten closer to them. We've been hugged by them. That's a good point. And he goes on, Pinker does, to talk about health care. It's sort of along the same lines. Not only are we better at saving people, but it also has given us more value about saving people. And just the notion of saving human lives through medicine has increased or decreased violence. That one kind of, like, didn't quite click with me. It seems like super for me. If you're going to die at 30 or 35, that would make life even with no chance of reviving you if you fell in a puddle. Yeah. That would make life more valuable in that sense. Whereas if people are walking around like, well, a doctor could probably fix them if I hit him over the head with this lead pipe, it might make people a little more prone to use a lead pipe on somebody. I don't know that lead pipe eaters. Think about that stuff. Well, but think about this. Let's say we got to the point where you had a 99% chance of being fully revived and restored within a couple of days after being shot. That medicine advances. To that point, I'd be shooting people all over the place. Exactly. So that's my point. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? That seems counterintuitive to me, and I've been trying to wrap my mind around it. And I'm also really worried that I've just given myself away as a complete sociopath somehow by not understanding that. No, that one didn't hit his home as much with me either. I also want to say, too, with the government monopoly on violence yes, the government used to have a monopoly on violence in other areas as well, but they didn't have the companion of protecting individual and human rights like we have today. Right. To where it's not just like, yeah, kill them for next to nothing. Like Pinker points out that during the Middle Ages, when violence peaked, by his estimation, stuff that the government would find someone for today, you would be killed for. Yes, that's good point. Right. He also makes some good points about things like the United Nations, like the cooperation between countries these days is unparalleled. The EU sharing responsibility for international conflicts, teaming up with other countries to go peacekeep, I guess, or conquer, depending on which way you want to look at it. Common currency, I guess it was a lot more violent back in the day when you had everyone trading different things. Sure. Common currency would sort of bind people together. Yeah. At the very least. Different currencies, maybe promote a sense of otherness too. Yeah. And group out group stuff. I took an anthropology class once. I don't know if I've talked about it before. It's the first one I ever took. Great class. And the instructor challenged the class to go a full day without using any in group or outgroup language. Like us, them, we, they. Wow. I bet that stuff. It's impossible. You can't do it. But just paying attention to it, trying just for a day really kind of brings out how much you see other people in other groups is different in other. Right. And that's not necessarily a good thing. No. I would like to strive to be more open minded and inclusive like that. I would say try that then. Yeah, I think everyone should, though. I agree. You got anything else? No. There's a pretty cool thing called Steven Pinker on the Decline of Violence by Ethan Zuckerman. I can't remember the name of the site it was on, but if you search that, it'll bring it up from 2007. And it sounds like Stephen Pinker was preparing his notes for Angels of Our Better Nature, that book he came out with where he argues we just talked about it's. Pretty cool. Little primer, a little brief rundown of it. Yeah. I love Pinker, and if you want to read this article, you should. You can type in Peaceful history in the search bar howstop works.com and it will bring it up. And I said search bar, which means it's time for word from our sponsor. You know you're a pet mom when your camera roll is all pics of your pet. At Halo, we get it because we are pet moms too. And just like you, we know their nutrition is one of the most important decisions you'll make. Halo is natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science and thoughtfully sourced. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Find Halo at specialty pet stores and online. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change an industry. IBM. Let's create learn more@ibm.com. It is time for a listener mail. All right, we're going to call this more on condoms in New York because you just can't get enough of that. Apparently in one of our podcasts, we talked about the fact that you find condoms just playing around in the street in New York. And I was kind of like, where are those coming from? And we had one dude right in that worked for the ferry. I think that all that stuff gets washed out down there and what do they call them? The Coney Island white snakes or something. Like Coney Island, like whitefish yeah, I think whitefish white snake. Yeah. So this guy Aaron listened to that and he has a theory here about New Yorkers. Generally, we tend to engage in otherwise private behavior in public. For many of us, privacy is hard to come by. Remember, this was the birthplace of the tenement. The whole family is living in one room. Unfortunately for some, this remains a reality. For most people, however, even living with one's family in separate rooms or roommates in a cramped apartment means little privacy. Going outside doesn't help. It might in the suburbs, but here in New York, there are always people walking around everywhere all the time. Once in a while, I will see if I can find a place where there's no one around and no one can see me. And it's pretty tough. Some people adapt to this reality by blocking out reality, so to speak, pretending as if no one is around. That's why New York has a reputation for having a lot of crazy people, because a lot of us talk and sing and laugh and gesture to ourselves. I believe this goes on all across the country. It's just that everyone else does it behind closed doors. I like what he's saying here, by the way. I totally agree. Yeah. So while some people merely talk to themselves in public. A few people engage in more vulgar behavior, from picking one's nose all the way to having sex. Not only have I witnessed three separate acts of public sex in my youth, I engaged in public sex three times. All of these acts witnessed and engaged and occurred in public parks, and all except one occurred during the daytime. Personally, I remember trying to minimize the chances of being seen somewhat, but not too hard. If someone saw, they would be unlikely to a know me or my girlfriend or B, do anything but ignore it and keep on walking. Which is the great thing about New York. You can really do anything, and you'll be completely ignored because no one wants any part of that. So that is exactly what I did. Guys, as a witness, I hope this helps explain why your chances of stepping on a used condom while out on a stroll is higher in New York City than anywhere else in the country. It is certainly the wrong way to dispose of condoms, to be sure. And that's because we're a bunch of self centered, selfish people for whom littering is a way of life. Please don't judge us for our public sex, Aaron. I like Darren. Thanks, Aaron. What a level headed approach to explaining things. Yes, I like that sort of armchair psychology about stuff like that. Yeah, that was armchair dr. Ruth. Yeah, that's all I got about that. Good for you, Aaron. If you want to explain something that we've talked about and couldn't quite get to the bottom, too, we're always happy to cross all of our t's and dot our I's, if you will. You can tweet to us at xyskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffiestoe, and you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. But wait, you should first also join us on our website. Our website. Chuck yeah, lots of cool stuff there. It's called STUFFYou Know.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 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 world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | |
452fd162-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-4b178f158373 | Short Stuff: Dolphin Detectors | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-dolphin-detectors | They don’t actually disarm mines, but navies around the world use dolphins to find and tag sea mines so humans can disarm the mines themselves. But even if it’s safe, is it ethical? | They don’t actually disarm mines, but navies around the world use dolphins to find and tag sea mines so humans can disarm the mines themselves. But even if it’s safe, is it ethical? | Wed, 05 Dec 2018 14:33:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=14, tm_min=33, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=339, tm_isdst=0) | 14293064 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. There's Chuck, there's Josh. That's me. And there's Jerry over there. No time to talk any further. Let's get started. We're talking about dolphins. Are you going to do that every time? As long as I get a laugh out of you, yeah, I will laugh every time. Well, then every time it is because I'm laughing. Because then we do this, and it takes more time than it does. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. Maybe I will stop doing that because I really do feel, like, pressed for time. Like, you can see I'm perspiring across the top of my lip. Hey, let me try Josh Clark intro. Okay. Hey, Josh, have you ever seen a dolphin? Yes, I have, Chuck. As a matter of feeling like it does, it's kind of exhilarating. Yeah. Especially when you know that the other person has seen or done or whatever. Yeah, you're in the club. So we've both seen dolphins. We have. And I knew about this. What we're talking about here is the fact that the US. Navy uses dolphins to find unexploded underwater ocean mines. Right. And I knew about this, but it was kind of cool just to see how exactly this works. It was well, also, I think a lot of people have the impression that the dolphins are there. Like, they're sweating themselves. They're wiping sweat from their brows. They're disarming these mines. Right? Yeah. My flipper can't even hold these pliers. Right. Or was it the green wire or the red wire I'm supposed to clip? But it's color blind. Right? That's not the case at all. They don't actually disarm the mines. They don't even really get that close to it. What they do is they go find mines for the US. Navy. It's not just the US. Navy that does this. Apparently, Russia captured Ukraine's dolphin patrol in Crimea in the Crimean War recently. They use Dolph Lundgren. Right. He can't swim. Terrible joke. He sings like a stone. He does. He looks like he would be a swimmer. Does he? No, he's got too much, like, muscle, which, I mean, it sounds counterintuitive, but yeah, he does look like he would sink, for sure. Yeah. So what do you say? Russians use them. I'm sure other people do, too, right? A lot of people do. And again, they're not using them to disarm the minds. They're using them to find mines. And the reason they use dolphins to find mines is because there's no technology that we have that comes even close to rivaling a dolphin's ability to find something in very murky water with a lot of loud acoustic noise, and that may be disguised to look like something else. And mines fall under all three of those categories. Yeah. So what a dolphin does, and we'll get to how they do it, but they are trained to do this specifically, just like they would be at stinky old SeaWorld with, like, fish as their row board to do their little tricks, but they learn to search for these mines, find one, and like you said, they could be, like, 50ft away. It's not like they have to go knock on it or anything like that, and it probably wouldn't explode anyway. So they go find one. They swim back to the boat and ring a bell or some sort of signifier that they've worked out. They set off a firework, they shoot a flare at the captain, and then the human says, all right, good job. Your work is not quite done, though, because all you're doing is saying, there's something down there. Now, here is an acoustic transponder. And you go take this, he puts it in his little fist, and then the dolphin swims back to the mine. And now they have transponder. So they actually know where it is now. Right. And then they come back and they get the fish, which is really what they're kind of after. If you remember our SAR Dogs episode, it's kind of a thing like they're after a fish. They know if they go do this, they'll get a fish. And people think dolphins are smart. They're dumb because they don't realize there's fish everywhere in that ocean. So, Chuck, how would a dolphin do this kind of thing? Why is a dolphin so vastly superior to anything that humans can come up with, technology wise? We humans are pretty good at coming up with technology, frankly. That is correct. But we use sonar, and they use sonar. But they've been using sonar a lot longer than we've been using sonar. That's the point of this article. That really is sort of it. Dolphins have been around way longer than we've been using sonar. And that's their chief. I guess it's sort of a communication device. Oh, yeah, definitely. They communicate, but it's also the way that they see, I guess, is the best way you could put it. They see what they're well, they don't have ears. They see with what we normally might think of as things that we might hear. Yeah. And that's why it's so tough to kind of wrap your head around what they're doing. But if you think about it, if our vision is nothing but a bunch of electrical impulses stimulated by light, that forms, like, a mental conception of an object in our brain, that's exactly what dolphins are doing, but they're doing it with sound. They're shooting out like kind of thing, and when it comes back, it tells them about that object, and it forms an impression in their brain, just like we do visually. They do orally, but not through the mouth. I mean orally. A U orally. Well put. Yeah. And supposedly, they are so good at this kind of echo location that they can tell the difference from 50ft away between a BB gun pellet being dropped in the water and a kernel of corn being dropped in the water. Yes. Which is, again, now we're starting to reach the point where it's like, okay, now I see why they're so much better than our technology. Yeah, I can see that. If you put a BB in a kernel of corn next to each other 50ft away, I can do that. I can see that. But if the visibility underwater sure, I could. All right. If the visibility underwater is, like, 2ft in front of your face, you couldn't do that. A dolphin could, which is why they come in handy. Right? And so we talked about echo location with bats before, and I feel like it was something else, but definitely with bats. That was one of our great longform episodes. Probably whales episode. Yeah, probably so. But dolphins use the same process. They use their nasal passages, and they make that little clicking sound that you did so well. Thank you. They send it to the forehead, and that focuses the sound into, like, a beam that shoots out into the water. That's step one. Yeah. And then what happens after that? Well, after that, because it's echolocation. It works just like with the bats, things bounce off and come back to them. In the case of bats, it's mosquitoes and things like that. Or stupid humans with tennis rackets, it bounces back to the dolphin as that echo, and then they absorb that into their jaw like a tennis racket. Oh, no. Poor dolphin. Poor dolphin. And this part is kind of gross sounding, but there is what Jane McGrath referred to as a passage of fat in the jaw, and that's just really just a conductor that conducts the sound to the inner ear of the dolphin, and then all the nerve impulses get going, and then the brain starts firing. And like you said, just like we see something, they can say, wow, that thing is around like a BB, or It's Colonel shaped like a corn kernel. Or they go, hey, it's a sea mine. That thing is going to blow. I better go to the Navy, or, that's a fish. I don't even need to go back to the boat, right? I can eat. So, Chuck, let's take an ad break, and then we will come back and we will talk about how not everybody is super hip with the idea of using dolphins in war. Okay, we're back. And like I said, not everybody is really happy that the US. Navy is using dolphins. Actually, I should say real quick, Chuck, I want to fit this in. Oh, I shouldn't have even said I wanted to fit it in. It's using a valuable time. So the Navy started using dolphins quite by accident, I guess. In 1960. There was a study where they started paying attention to dolphins. They started to study them, like I just said, and they were trying to figure out if they could learn anything from dolphins to make torpedoes more, I guess, aqua dynamic. So that they can move through the water for you. Sure. So you look to a dolphin. Right. And they didn't learn anything for torpedoes, but they were like, wait, these things are super smart, and they have amazing echo location. Maybe we should figure out something else for them. And they put them into use. Pretty shortly after that, they started training them. They said they're pretty smart, but here's the hitch. They don't realize they're surrounded by fish in the ocean. They think they can only get them from this stupid bucket on the boat. It's also possible they're just really lazy. No. Maybe I can go to a grocery store, but if I was laying on the couch and someone dropped by and dropped food in my mouth right. Exactly. All over it. Yeah, that's a really good analogy. I get it now. All right, first of all, we already said that they don't disarm them, and they don't even get that close. So you might think that even animal rights activists would be like, hey, this is fine. They're not getting close. Even if they did, like I said before, they're not going to explode because they're meant to explode when the ship hits. It not any octopus kind of floating by, because that would defeat the purpose of putting a mine in the ocean. Right. So you would think, like, all right, what's the harm then? But it turns out there actually is quite a bit of harm that could come about. Yeah. Because if you have a trained team of dolphins that you're using in one place. Say. The Atlantic. And you suddenly need them over in the Pacific. You got to get them from point A to point B. And those dolphins may not be acclimated to the Pacific. Especially if it's like the Northern Pacific and it's super cold and they're used to the middle Atlantic. Where it's relatively warm. Right. Yeah, that's one thing. Another thing is transporting them there alone is an ordeal for the dolphins. Yeah. I mean, anyone who has ever seen a whale or a dolphin or a big shark wrapped up in that sling being lifted out of the ocean into a plane or something into a tank right. It's just like it looks awful. Nothing about that makes it look like that. Any of those animals are psyched that that's happening. Right. Air travel is designed for humans, and it's a nightmare for humans. Right. Imagine what it's like for a dolphin. Yeah, it's good point. It's a lot of stress on their body, and it might sound hippy dippy, but on their emotional well being, on their Earth spirit. Well, we've talked about zukosis. It's a real thing. Oh, yeah, for sure. And I would imagine that if you want to drive a dolphin insane, there are worse ways to do that than putting it on an airplane, taking it for a ride. Absolutely. And they were going to use some dolphins as part of a dolphin sea lion team. Sea lion or seal? One of the two. I think we'll sea lions do this as well, for sure. Then it was a dolphin sea lion team. There are naval teams made up of sea lions and dolphins that work together that not only discover mines, they're also trained to discover, like, underwater saboteurs divers, swimmers who aren't supposed to be there, that want to blow up a military station. And the dolphin will go find the guy, go tell the sea lion. The sea lion goes and puts an ankle cuff on the swimmer. Shut up. I'm not kidding. And they're tethered to a boat now. So the sea lion goes and arrests the guy, and then they both go tell the Navy that you got someone on the line. So the dolphins doing, like, some trick in front of the guy, and he's like, wow, I know I'm supposed to plant this bomb, but that's pretty neat looking. And then he looked down, and he's like, again, dolphins. And then the sea lion and the dolphin high five. Yes. But then they were going to set up a patrol in Puget Sound in Washington State. There's an army port there, and they were going to have set up patrols. And I think some animal rights group said, no, not on our watch. And to raise public awareness, they started knitting sweaters for the dolphins who are going to be transported to the cold water. And it worked for a little while. I think that they have those things now. Yeah, I'm sure there's a work around. So that is dolphins disarming mines, which they don't actually do. Correct. The dolphins find the minds, and many people are still not too supportive of that. Right. Yeah. Because they're innocent and they have no idea what's going on with the war. They don't know what they're being used for. It's a moral quandary, for sure. Yeah. The one thing I couldn't find really quick before we go is what minds are disguised as. One thing I saw the only thing I saw was that they can be disguised to appear like ripples in the water. And I'm like, how would you do that? And then I realized, oh, on sonar, it would look like a ripple in the water. So I think they were talking about disguising them. I'm sure they do visually as well, but I think mostly on sonar is how they try to disguise them. Interesting. Yeah. I would love to meet the person who's like, I know how to disguise the mine as a ripple in water. Right. Yeah, that makes more sense. I was thinking, like, they would make it look like a big floating kelp mass. Yeah, so was I at first, and they might, but I couldn't find anything like that. That was the only thing I found. Very nice. Nice. Well, if you want to know more about dolphins disarming sea mines, hang around in the sea, see what happens. And in the meantime, get in touch with us. You can send us an email to stuff. Podcast@housetopworks.com." | |
Why do leaves change colors in the fall? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-do-leaves-change-colors-in-the-fall | Ah, autumn - arguably the most beautiful time of the year, thanks to the vibrant colors trees put on display as they close up for the winter. Ever wonder why and how trees change color in the fall? Chuck and Josh have it down pat and explain it here. | Ah, autumn - arguably the most beautiful time of the year, thanks to the vibrant colors trees put on display as they close up for the winter. Ever wonder why and how trees change color in the fall? Chuck and Josh have it down pat and explain it here. | Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:00:25 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=18, tm_min=0, tm_sec=25, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=332, tm_isdst=0) | 22249313 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, buddy, if you don't mind if I plug my movember page real quick. Please do. I am growing a mustache this month for November for for cancer research, specifically male prostate cancer research. That's right. And you can donate to my team, which would be pretty cool because you get a free podcast, and it'd be nice to throw a little money toward cancer research in the name of my stash. Chuck's being nice here. Give him some money. He's growing on facial here to help a charitable organization engage in really important scientific research. That's right. And you can go to Mowbro Cocharles Bryant and that's my page. Or just go to the November site, type in Charles Bryant in the search bar and look for the picture of me. There's only a couple of us out there, Chuck's, wearing a red shirt. That's right. Yeah. So what is that again? That's Mobro Cocharles Bryant. Yes. Thank you in advance. Yeah. That's nice, Chuck. All right, let's get to it. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, chuck Bryant in audio and video. Chuck, we're just hanging out, doing some recording, doing our thing. I guess this is episode number 5,000,082. That's right. Yeah. Before we get started, I wanted to point out, Josh, that on the way in, about 20 minutes ago in the parking deck, I saw what was probably an $80,000 Mercedes with a license plate that said Rush Van. Oh, yeah. Have you seen that? Yeah, I'm trying to figure out I've seen it many times. I'm trying to figure out are they talking about Rush? I think so. Rush Limbaugh. Yeah. The first time I saw, I was like, all right. And I was like, oh, I wonder which one. Jeez. Now I'm doubting myself. And I know that was Rushed the band, which I thought, well, it's obviously a guy first of all, it would have to be. And it's obviously a guy that's some sort of CEO here in the building, because maybe his car was pretty sweet. Yes. But also, consider this. It doesn't have a reserve spot. Yeah, that's true. It could be a lease. Rush Limbaugh fan. I don't know if you would say Rush do people call him that? I would have put L-M-B-H fan FN no, people would definitely call him Rush. All right. Yeah. He could also love that drug that used to be legal called Rush that you'd buy at head shops in, like, the 80s. Maybe he just loves that. Yeah, he stocked up on it. What is that stuff? Is it I have no idea eradicated or did it convert into something that we like PCP? Something we know by another name? I don't know, but, boy, we're segwaying already. But this is a short one, so I guess it's all right. I did see an Internet thing yesterday where this artist took every drug you could think of and drew a self portrait. It was pretty interesting, I got to say. Like, from the weird, fun psychedelic mushroom one, too. Which one was it? That was just horrifying. It was just like fuzzy scribbling methamphetamines. No, that one was pretty scary, too. But that was one that was just like blue. It's probably roboticin. No, but he did do that. He drank off syrup. You should do none of this, by the way. Right. People? Even if you are an artist, you know, who makes the best art? Clean, nonaddicted human beings who get high on a nice spring day. And they're not getting high during that spring day. They're getting high from the spring day. That's what I meant by that. Sure. Let's talk about days. Let's talk about fall instead of spring. Yeah, that's a great autumn. You want to autumn is my favorite season, Josh. Same here. As it is a lot of people, because here in Atlanta, which is like, living in the middle of a forest, an urban forest. It is. It's like the most heavily wooded state in the Union, I understand. Is it really? That's what I hear. Well, this article here gives a lot of due to New England, which there's no slouch, obviously, but Georgia and the Southeast, man, the Rockies, they moved over the Blue Ridge Mountains. Just gorgeous smokies, like vibrant reds, yellows, orange. It's just, like, unbelievable. I saw an article, I think it was on MSNBC Today Show article, and it was like places other than Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine that are good for I hate this word. Leaf peeping. I thought that was made up, and I had to look it up, and it's not. Yes, it's real. Yeah. It's the most disgustingly folksy word I've ever heard in my life, but that's what it's called. If you go and look at leaves as they change color, you're a leaf peeper. No, you're not. Some people would call you that. I think you have to associate with that thing. Like, you might have a T shirt that says that, like peeper at work, or leaf papers do it with their eyes open. Nice in the woods. Yes. So, yeah, if you are into that kind of thing, some people might call you a leaf paper, and you probably are a veteran of New Hampshire's, Vermont, and Maine's autumn. But like you're saying, the smokies are nice. The Appalachians are nice out west apparently has some really good leaf peeping. Oh, yeah, utah. Sure. Yeah, utah, Colorado and Arizona may be in the right spots. Probably. Yeah, probably northern Arizona. As long as you have some sort of maybe like an elm, a good maple out there, it's going to be worth standing and gawking at for a certain period of time. If you go a little further up in Idaho, you're going to hit the Snake River. And if you hit the Snake River, you're probably going to run into a Native American of the Shoshoni tribe. This is like their central location, or it was their ancestors street, the Shoshonee. If you ask them, especially if you ask them a few hundred years ago, I'm sure why the leads turn color, say, like red or yellow, they would tell you a little story about the great bear. Yeah. You've heard this one, right? I have. Do you want to tell it? Well, apparently the lore says that the color came from above and after they killed the great bear in the sky, which is why for a hunt for the pelt got you. The blood splashed down and turned the leaves red. Yes, Chuck, which makes a lot of sense, except there's plenty of times when you see a tree that's turned bright yellow. What is that? What's to explain that shashoni? Well, they would say that it comes from the bear's fat splashing out of the pot when they are cooking it. Yes. Which is, I thought, a little gross. It is, but it's practical. Sure. Yeah. So that's one explanation for why leaves turn color. And after reading this article, I found that time isn't 100% sure what's going on there. They have a pretty good idea, but they're not 100%. Especially when it comes to turning red. Yeah. You can't crawl inside of a leaf. You can't walk up to one and ask it. Right. Well, you're red. Yeah. Like the walls of this room. Yeah, these walls talk back and they say disturbing things, but you're right, they don't know for sure, but they have some pretty good guesses. And it all starts with photosynthesis and chlorophyll. Yeah. Do you remember Photosynthesis? I looked it up to refresh myself. Yeah, that's one of the neat things because it's one of the very first science things you'll learn as a kid. Yeah. Like that word has been with me since I was a tike. Yeah. Chlorophyll, photosynthesis, and go ahead, get the first grade version. Okay. Well, chlorophyll is a pigment and plants, it's green. And it's green because it reflects or it absorbs red light and blue light. And so the only light that's left is green, and that's the light that we see. It doesn't absorb that. So since it's a pigment, it can absorb light and do crazy things with it. And in the case of a plant, it converts the light energy into chemical energy in the form of adenosine, triphosphate, ATP. Wow. So what's just happened is it's captured light and taken that light and turned it into a chemical. So it's stored energy, which is pretty cool degrees a little further down in the leaf, you take a little water, you got the ATP, combine it with some CO2, and then all of a sudden you get glucose. And if you have glucose what were you going to say? I thought you were going to say chicken pot pie. You have the beginnings of a good chicken pot pie. Like you can't make a chicken pot pie without ATP. Yeah. That's just the start. So you have all this glucose and you're ready to make some chicken pot pie. Before you make that, the plant is going to use it to fuel cells. It's food. It makes its own food. Right. That's pretty neat in itself. That's photosynthesis. So photosynthesis is carried out in the presence of lots of light. Right. And during the right kind of weather, when there's a lot of light, summertime. Yes. Summertime comes to an end, though. The days start to go a little shorter. That's right. It gets darker earlier. Yeah. Air dries out a bit. Yeah. And the plant says, you know what? I'm kind of dumb making my own sugars for a while. I'm going to just live off my fat like a great bear in the sky. That's right. And so it stops making chlorophyll. Yeah. And chlorophyll is not the only thing going on in the leaf. Obviously, you have your green, but there are also other pigments, like keratin and xanthapil. Xanthe means yellow and Greek, and that is what gives carrots and egg yolks their covers cover their color. Their cover. It's a cover color. The shell gives it the cover. Sure. Yeah. It's what gives it the color. And they're always in leaves, and they also help absorb the sunlight. They're not the star that chlorophyll is, but they do transfer chlorophyll for photosynthesis. Right. They help, yeah. And so the plant always has, I guess, keratin and what is it? Xanthyl. Xanthil. But it doesn't always produce chlorophyll. So when it starts producing chlorophyll, the Xanthaphyll and the carotenes go, hey, look at us. I think it's always chlorophyll, right? No, it's just stops and chlorophyll. But it's always there at some point. Or are there some leads without Clara Phillip at all? No, it depends on the time of the year. Okay. That's what I thought. Right. So the plant will stop producing chlorophyll and the carotenes and the Xanthyll will take over. But yeah, I believe that there's always chlorophyll. Every plant has an ability to make chlorophyll, right? Yeah. For photosynthesis. I think so, because that's how it eats. Yeah. So you've got the red or you've got the yellow and you have the orange leaves explained. Bam. There's no chlorophyll any longer. That's right. We should probably talk about that period of hibernation. What goes on? There's another step that goes on. Yes. A couple of things happen. The leaf is going to form a layer of separation. Jennifer calls it corklike cells at the base of the leaf. I like that. Seals it off from the tree. It's like a little stopper, I guess. And then the tree stops producing the chlorophyll and well, that's pretty much it. Like, no more chlorophyll. We've got a barrier between, I guess, the end of the branch and the leaf. Yeah. So the tree doesn't dry out when it loses all its leaves. Exactly. And here's where we get into the red, where the red comes from something called pigment called anthocyanin, and that is a flavonoid, flavonoid family. And depending on the PH, it can be responsible for reds, purples and blues and all sorts. It's like what makes a plum purple, for instance. Yeah. Or grape. Or grape blueberry. Grape blue. There's more than 300 distinct anthocyanins. Right. And apparently they're really good for you, like loaded with antioxidants. Yeah. That's probably why blueberries are so good for you. Yeah, well, exactly. It's a superfood. But one of the things I found that said that it's one of some of the strongest physiological effects of any plant compound on the planet is found in the anthocyanin. Nice. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Well, not all plants produce anthocyanins. Not all plants that do produce anthocyanins produce it all the time. I try to get a list of just trees, but I'm sure it's out there. I just couldn't find it. I would say a lace leaf Japanese maple that will be at the top of the list. That was for having it. Yeah, sure. That's all I got. Okay. If you are a leaf peeper, or you're somebody who others might call a leaf peeper, it just sounds so dirty. I know, it's a terrible word. Any kind of peeper is just I don't know. Sure. Taldry. Yeah. Because exactly. If you are into looking at fall leaves, we'll say that. Thank you. Then you probably know that some years there's really great reds, other years there's not. I felt like last year we didn't have that many. Yeah, it seems like. I don't remember seeing reds for a while now. Agreed. And science is not 100% certain what's going on. But what they think happens is anthocyanins are created by a plant to recover sugar during times when there's a period of stress that the plants going through. So if you have a very wet summer in the autumn, you're probably not going to see any reds. If you have a very dry summer into autumn, you will usually see reds. And the reason why is because apparently these sugar stores in the leaves are just kind of dry. They're dried up, they've turned into SAP. So the plant produces antheanis to go in and recover it, to get it all loosened up so it can suck it back out into its trunk before those corklike cells cut it off. Yeah. It's sort of like there's a timetable and they know that they're going to be cut off from that supply soon. So it just really tries hard there at the end to get every last bit out, every last bit. And the anthocyanins are a red pigment, so when it sends it into the leads, that's what they think is going on. They said that the best predictor that they found for a nice, brilliant red display in the autumn, as summer turns into autumn, warm, sunny days. So there's lots of sugar production going on and then cool nights that slows down the ability of the tree to suck the sugars that were produced that day out of the leaves. So there's a bunch stuck in there and dry, too, right? Yeah. That's kind of what we got going on now. Yeah. Hopefully we'll see a lot of reds. I think my favorite the reds are nice, but I don't know what tree it is. But it's one particular tree that has those yellow, like it just glows. Oh, yeah, man. It's just like, so yellow. It's blinding. It's a type of maple, is it? I think so. There's a couple there's one that really glows. That's a maple. And then there's another that's maybe the oak. I can't remember. I've seen them. I feel like we talked about this. Am I having deja vu? Yeah. The time we went leaf peeping, we talked at length about this. That's right. Yeah, I forgot. We brought our little flask of apple cider. Walk through the woods. It was a heck of a peeping trip. That's right. So I guess that's pretty much the end of it. Science has explained the yellow and the green and the orange and the red. Pretty sure about the red. Pretty sure about the red. Yeah. They're not 100% convinced. Yeah. I wish I had something else to add, but I think this is just one of those that this fall you can tell your friends, you see that tree? You know what? It's red. Well, that's what we're doing here. Yeah. Also, if you are into looking at leaves as they change color in the fall, if you're one of those people who doesn't well, some people, like, get in their car and drive places. Yes. But who is just like, Shut the shades. I don't want to see that stuff. People who hate Art Rush fans. Right. Depending on the kind of rush they're talking about. If you are into that, though, there's an app. If you also are into smartphones and you own one, you can download a free app called Leaf Peeper. I'm not saying this, but it's Peepr and it's free. And it's like this color coded map of the United States by region in the area, and it shows where leads are green, turning moderate, peak fading, and gone. So you can kind of track the leads as they oh, that's cool. Yeah, it's pretty neat. And you can take pictures and post it to your favorite social media site. Well, I think I was going to call for that anyway. I think if you live in a place that you think rules the Roost, post your pictures on our Facebook page. Yeah. And I will do the same. We will do battle georgia against the world. Okay. Because I think we have some of the best. You're going to go do some Leaf Peeping, some pictures and leaves? Sure. It seems like something you should do, like wearing shorts and hiking boots and nothing else. You're leaf peeping. Yeah, I mean, Emily and I will usually try and take one drive up in the mountains, you know, maybe pasties while you're leaving peeping. I can't wait for the video that's show off. Let's see if you want to learn more about things like leaves changing color. I love stuff like that. I love Earth science. Yeah, me too. I love science, I think is what it is. I've grown to love it. Yeah, you can type in Earth science in the search bar@houseschools.com and it'll bring up stuff like this. And I said stuff like this, which means it's time for listener mail. This is an oldie but a goodie. It's about Sherpas. Wow, that is old. And I think now is a good time to point out that I'm not sure if Sherpus has fallen off the list, but if you get our material from itunes, you're only going to get 301 three one, but we have many more available. And if you type in your favorite search engine, like Google, let's say, Stuff You Should Know, RSS feed, it will bring you to a page with all 450 plus shows. Yes. Or you can listen right there. Or some people use like, Stitcher or like, there's some other various podcast apps that list the whole thing, right? So we've been getting asked lately like, hey, what about the sarcopenia? Where's that one? Or where's this one? They're all there in the vault. That's right. Stuff You Should Know. RSS all for free. So, yeah, get them, get them all. Collect them all. All right, so this is about Sherpas. And if you have not heard that one, it's an old one, you should go listen to it. Did you like that one? That was one of my least favorites. Oh, really? Yeah. All right, don't listen to it. Josh does not recommend guys. I recently listened to the Sherpa episode from A Way Back and found that I had an interesting story regarding Sir Edmund Hillary's ascent. I was born in Canada, but my mother and her family are all from New Zealand. Oh, yeah? My uncle, Alan Saras, lives just north of Auckland currently, and it's one of the most interesting people I know. He made his career in sports photography, primarily for horse racing. He got a start in the field, thanks to Sir Ed. This is the story as told to me by my uncle a little over ten years ago, when Hillary was training for his ascent. He could be seen from time to time hiking on the roadside, all decked out in his climbing gear in order to be used to the weight or well used. One day, my uncle then in his mid 30s, passed them, stopped them, and said, can I take your photo? Sir Ed, already well known locally, was happy to oblige. My uncle never distributed any of the prints. Was he wearing like, a camisole or something? What? He didn't distribute the print, right? Oh, no. I don't think he's anything like that. I got you. So you just held on to him. But when word came back that Hilary had succeeded and he sent, my uncle rushed to develop as many copies of the photo as he could. My uncle never distributed any of the prints. Weird. Yeah. But when word came back that Hillary had succeeded in his assent, my uncle rushed to develop as many copies of the photo as he could. He stuffed them into envelopes addressed to many of the world's newspapers, along with a note asking for whatever recompense they felt the photo was worth. That like that's a great business model. Just send pictures and say, hey, give me a little something. Right. Hey, Rupert Murdoch. What's his bhana system? Many papers ran the photo, though, and there were no photos. As there were no photos of the ascent available till after Hillary had descended and his own photos were developed, my uncle died bitter and penniless. Thankfully, the strategy worked for my uncle, and he became well known for sports photography nice. In the 1950s and 60s in the first thing. That's right. He is now 97 years old. In no way has slowed down well. In fact, he has just finished a book on his career as a Naval Intelligence officer in WW Two that is due to be published next year. Cool. He was also a successful track and field athlete in New Zealand, winning a silver medal in 1938. This guy sounds pretty awesome in what are now the Commonwealth Games. Yeah, that's fantastic. We'll plug the book when it comes out. Yeah, for sure. Send it. I could not stop thinking about this story while listening to podcasts and purpose. Yes, I tried to track down a copy of the photo, but have been unable to find it. Best regards, Anthony Zellermeyer. Well, thanks a lot, Anthony. Yeah, it's a great letter. Keep going. Seriously. Wow. If you have a family member that you're very proud of for a good reason, for like, eight good reasons, we want to hear about that person. Also, don't forget Chuck's call out like he's putting the SmackDown on your neck of the woods. It doesn't even have to be in the United States. Europe has got some great leaves. Asia has some great leaves. Basically anything that's above or below the tropics, you're probably going to have some good leaf color with falls. Like in Japan. Yeah. Over there, they just call them maple. We want to see pictures of your hometown trees showing their greatest colors. Right. Also, if you're a member of this show and you try write in and say hi, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffysheanow, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Com." | ||
Can it rain frogs? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/can-it-rain-frogs | If you've seen the movie Magnolia, you've seen what it looks like to rain frogs. While there are reports of frogs, fish and even squid raining down that are questionable, science has figured out how it can - and does - rain frogs sometimes. | If you've seen the movie Magnolia, you've seen what it looks like to rain frogs. While there are reports of frogs, fish and even squid raining down that are questionable, science has figured out how it can - and does - rain frogs sometimes. | Thu, 31 May 2012 15:17:42 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=15, tm_min=17, tm_sec=42, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=152, tm_isdst=0) | 24071175 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always. As Charles. Also be Chuck Bryant. And this, friends, is stuff you should know. Bob, it's raining frogs. Hallelujah. Yeah. I got a lot of those during the search for this. Oh, really? Yeah, during research for this, it's Raining Men references. Yeah. Kept coming up, and I didn't see any predictive search. Really? Yeah. And then there's a lot of raining different things mouse pads out there available. Oh, really? Yeah. Eretailers, like Etsy and Zazzle and stuff like that. Basically, if you type something in, zazzle will be like, we'll put that on a mousepad for you. Oh, sure. And there's an adorable umbrella out there, a see through umbrella with frogs all over it. That's cute. Are they splatted? No, they're not. They're actually it didn't show up there in this article. There's triplets holding them. Wow. Yeah. Three times the adorable. So, Chuck yes. I ran into a lot of descriptions of crazy stuff happening over the course of history here on planet Earth. As far back as I can see, there was a guy named Ethanaeus. He lived in the fourth century BC. And he was a traveler and writer, and he mentioned that in the area that is now Dinar Turkey, it frequently rained fish and frogs. Frequently. Okay. And not only did it frequently do it once, it rained frogs for three days there, he said. Wow. Yeah. And so much so that the villagers had to leave because they were just inundated with frogs. They poisoned the water whenever they tried to cook. There was, like, frogs, and there are frogs everywhere, and it was raining frogs. Sounds like the ramblings of a fourth century BC. Greek madman. Right, sure. Okay. I will say that. But what about Bergen, Norway, in 1578 and 1579, when it rained supposedly yellow mice and lemmings? It rained lemmings. Supposedly. Now, that's been widely discredited. Okay, but what about Memphis, Tennessee, January 1877? It rained live snakes, some as big as 18 inches long. And this one was reported in Scientific American. Yeah. Pliny the Elder, which is the name of a beer as well, I found out. An IPA, even. Nice. First century Ad. Reported rains of flesh, blood, and wool. Yeah. Wool. 1073, Kansas City, Missouri. Rain and frogs. Australia, raining fish. Yeah. Acapulco raining maggots. EW. Yeah. Tadpoles. Jellyfish. And Tasmania jellyfish. Yeah. That's scary. Yeah, pretty scary. The one of squid, that's BS. It was some guy who found a single squid. Yeah. So what we're talking about, all these are documented cases of it raining crazy stuff. It's rained blood before, supposedly. Really? It was an algae, but it did in India and Russia. Right. And the people in Russia found that they had the biggest crop yield ever, thanks to the blood rain. Weird. Wow. Yeah. But all these are documented cases, and you can, for the most part, throw a lot of them right out the window. Like the lemmings one in Bergen, Norway, is just a lie. Other ones, like, there was a report of rain, I believe, in London, somewhere in Great Britain. So it's London or the rest of Great Britain like that, where some guy, some doctor came out into his garden and there was a bunch of frogs there. And the day before it had been dry and he had a high garden wall, so the only way they could have gotten there was rain. So it rained frogs in Great Britain that year? There's a lot of stories like that. People are just stupid. Right. I did notice that, that a lot of the stories were people didn't actually witness it, but they just assume there's tadpoles all over my car. So it must have rained them. Exactly. That's not the most illogical conclusion. Even one of my personal heroes, Charles Fort, threw his goofy hat in the ring. 48 Times is the greatest magazine ever created. Charles Fort said that there was something called a Super Sargasso Sea that was suspended above the earth, and every once in awhile it would dump some of its contents in the form of rain on the earth. And that's how you got raining frogs? Yeah. That was from The Book of the Damned. Yeah. And by damned, he meant excluded, I found out. Yes. I didn't realize that. Yeah, I didn't either until today, too. Boy, the snakes one, that wasn't Scientific American, man. Live snakes, foot and a half long, raining. I caught a snake the other day in my yard. From the sky? No, no. I was just doing the weeds and I saw and he was a copperhead. He was oh, wow, those are deadly. But I picked him up like Steve Irwin, and Emily was very impressed. So bad. Then I took him across the street and displaced him. Displaced him with extreme prejudice. No, I did the trick and I snuck it behind him and I grabbed him behind the head right. And took him away. A poisonous snake popped his head clean off? No, he was fine. Field dressed him and ate him on the spot. He wasn't that big. You're going to get some mail for letting a poisonous snake go in the neighborhood. It was already in the neighborhood. I just moved him to an empty, open, wooded land. But you didn't exercise extreme prejudice. Am I supposed to kill them? That's what a lot of people are going to say. That's crazy. So anyway, there's a lot of crackpots and kooks and dummies out there who say that it's rained frogs. It's rained squid. That squid one just irks me. Yeah, it's rained a bunch of crazy stuff. People not named PT. Anderson. Yes. Which, by the way, I finally saw. There will be blood yesterday. Day before yesterday, you had never seen that? No. What do you think it was? A lot. Okay, that's just one word review. A lot. Two words. It could be two. Yeah, it depends. The crazy thing is we're finally going to get to the point here. It actually has rained things like frogs before. That's right. This really has happened. Not just people saying, oh, there's a bunch of frogs everywhere. They couldn't possibly come from anywhere else but the sky. There have been people who've reported frogs specifically falling from the sky in the middle of the storm. And it's true. It happened as recently as 2005. Yeah. Was that the Serbia where people there was a big old storm and people saw and heard frogs raining down from the sky, hitting their roofs and basically, apparently, like you were saying, PT. Anderson and magnolia. What he depicted is probably a lot what something like that would look like, I would imagine. So there's an explanation for this. Oh, it's not the end of the world. We're going to go into that. It's not one of the plagues, biblical plagues, although we'll get into that first explained by French physicist Andre Marie Emperor in the early 19th century. He said, you know what this is? This is a water spout. It's a tornado that forms and then goes over the water. Becomes part of partially water. And it picks up these little light things from as deep as 3ft. 3ft for a big one. And picks these things up because they're obviously lighter than it might not be picking up like a great white shark. But it'll pick up a little fish or a little frog or a tadpole. And then as it dies out. It spits them back out when it gets over land because it decreases in what? Pressure? Yes, for filler. Since you just explained the whole podcast, let's talk about how water spout forms. Okay, so you've got two kinds of water spouts. You've got tornadic, which is just like a tornado, and it starts with a vertical clockwise turning column of air that eventually goes down. So it's cloud to surface. Yeah, those are really scary ones. Sure. And they're associated with storms. There's another kind called a fair weather water spout, which can whip up on a sunny day and they go from surface to sky. But in both cases, a water spout is an example of warm air forming a low pressure area, which is formed by low rising air. And as it goes up, remember, cold air comes in to fill the void. That's right. And those two things interplaying, the low pressure, warm air rising and the cold air dropping. High pressure dropping form a vortex, which creates section in the middle, in the low pressure area, the difference in pressure. And that's how you can suck something up to 3ft beneath the surface. Right. Or if you're a tornado, you might suck up a dog or cow or a cow or a car. We didn't do how tornadoes work. We just did what's it like in the eye of a tornado? Yeah. Which is pretty awesome. It was good. Are we done? I don't think so. Sometimes it's just a few dozen frogs. Sometimes it's hundreds. Sometimes it's thousands. Sometimes it's pieces of animal. Sometimes they're frozen solid and hail and all that is the water spout got high enough into the atmosphere that it reached an area that was beneath zero. Sometimes it's not just animals. Sometimes it's tomatoes. Or coal. Or coal. There's a guy in Manassas, Virginia, who got a frozen 10,000 deutsche mark note. Really? Yeah. Wow. Frozen. Was this after they converted to the Euro? I don't know. You can still trade those in a bit. Oh, I'll bet. I'm sure. Are they completely out of circulation, I wonder. I hope not, for this guy's sake. Okay. So frozen is one way that they come down, which would be kind of really interesting if a frozen frog landed on your car. Right. Shredded, like you were saying, because of the violent wind speeds. Right. Yeah. One thing that always kind of sticks out to me, and I'm sure the answer is because it's just not the case. But why is it that it's always just one species? I know you're going to say that. Well, an answer. Well, I don't have an answer because I wanted the same thing. There is a professor at Washington University that says it just makes sense because they're similar size and weight. They might be all hanging out together at the one point where this thing goes down. Yeah. That still didn't explain it to me, though. I mean, if a water spout goes down over water, it's going to be spitting out fish and frogs and whatever else, and it's almost always reported to be one thing. Yeah. It's like it's raining frogs or it's raining fish. And fish supposedly are the most common rainbow to be raining. Rains fish in Australia every day. Yeah. It's like they're like of course, but yeah, why they're not mixed together or why they're not reported to be mixed together yeah. Is the weirdest thing. It is weird. There's another professor from Southern Illinois that theorizes that it's not just water spouts. He said it can be any kind of unusual updraft. Anything like at a speed of 60 miles an hour plus can pick up light objects and deposit them elsewhere. So not necessarily just a waterspout, although it has been observed by bona fide people. Okay. Like this one professor in Louisiana in 1047. He worked with the Department of Wildlife. He was eating breakfast and he saw an average of one fish per square yard raining down. That's a significant amount of fish, depending on the size of the fish. Like people say fish. Are they talking about guppies? Are they talking about crap? Are they talking about did you say crap? Is it crappy? Crappy? Are they talking about swordfish? Those are really dangerous. Yeah. When they rain. Yeah. No, I mean, I think they're light because that's the whole point. Even an updraft from a water spell to 200 miles an hour isn't going to be picking up great white sharks. Right. That's a movie for you. Reigning sharks. Yeah. What about Piranha Prana? Two. They flew and made it on the land. Right. Oh, the original Piranha two. Yeah. Yes. Not the new piranha. Three double D. Is that what it's called? Yeah, I know. So I guess Occam's Razor teaches us that in this case, the simplest explanation is that this is Satan's work. Okay. A water spout forming, supposedly, and just picking up things and then dropping them over land. Right, okay. Right. And raining frogs explaining it, I guess, is part of this larger trend that's gripped the scientific community lately, which is explaining biblical phenomenon phenomena. Yes. I thought this is pretty interesting. You dug up this article on the biblical plagues. Yeah. The ten plagues of Egypt, one of which was frogs. Yes. But it didn't rain frogs. A lot of people think that it's supposedly rain frogs. No, what supposedly happened was apparently it's like where Dinar and Turkey is now. They were just overrun by frogs, I guess. I can imagine there was another horror movie from the 80s about that. It was just about giant frogs and lots of them. Right? Yeah. It was like the birds, but with frogs. And a frog can be kind of unsettling when it's staring at you, especially if it's surrounded by thousands of its companions judging you. Yeah. And they'll kind of get all over everything and they'll get under foot and you'll step on them and things get slippery and mucky real quick. And that was one of the plagues of Egypt. It wasn't the first one, though. No. So should we explain this away? Yeah. Again, it's in vogue right now to explain away the plugs in. The cool thing is these researchers figured out, or they suggest, that all of these things were linked. It was a series of events, of amazing events that became what we know as the ten plagues of Egypt that eventually caused Pharaoh to say, hey, Moses, you guys can go back your stuff and leave. Yeah. Yes. You dug this up from The Telegraph, one of my favorite publications. And Richard Gray, the Correspondent Telegraph. You can tell he's the science correspondent. Yeah. Look at that hairline. So they have some evidence that what kicked this whole thing off was a climate change, a climate event that happened way back in the day. There was a city called Pie Rameses on the Nile delta. Right. It was abandoned about 3000 years ago, which they think this explanation works in concert with that abandonment of the city. And they said that there was a dramatic shift in climate toward the end of the second rain of Rameses. Rameses. Rameses. Rameses. We had a goat named Ramsays by the way. You can't just say things like that. Sure I can. So they found that the end of the rain coincided with a warm, wet climate and then switched over to a really dry period. And that was not good news for the Nile. No. It kicked off the first plague, which was the Nile turning to blood. So how did that happen? Well, the Nile supposedly dried up and became kind of this muddy, mucky, slow moving mess. Sure. No longer vital and prime for this type of algae that we know was around back then. It's still around today called Burgundy blood algae. That's right. And basically it sucks the life out of a mucky area, which would have caused the second plague. Frogs. Right. Did you say the name of the first plague? The river turns to blood. Yeah. Okay. So frogs suddenly infesting where the people were living because there's no place to be in the river. Yeah. Right. It suddenly turned lifeless. Right, right. And so now the frogs are everywhere. They're everywhere but the river. Which would have led to the third, fourth and fifth plagues. Right. Third and fourth. Third and fourth. Yeah. Which were flies and lice. Yes. All of a sudden, the frogs aren't around to eat these things, so you're going to have a lot more lice and flies. Yeah. Okay. So far, so good. Yeah. Now what? Well, after that, while everybody's itching and swatting and trying not to slip on all the dead frogs that they've stepped on, the following plagues were diseased livestock and boils, which are going to have if you've got lots of flies and lots of mosquitoes spreading disease. Spreading disease. Okay. So that's okay. I mean, it makes sense, but that's not like oh, yeah. Of course. Right after that, we have the 7th, 8th and 9th plagues, hail, locust and darkness, which they think was coincidentally caused by the eruption of a volcano at thera on the islands of Santorini, which happened 3500 years ago, and which they found evidence of in Egypt. Excavating some locations in ancient Egypt. They found pumice volcanic stone from the thera volcano. Yeah. Because there are no volcanoes in Egypt. Yes. How could there be promise. Exactly. Well, they looked and they said, oh, it's from Santorini. Wow. It's kind of big. So you have this volcanic eruption, huge volcanic eruption. The ash mixing with the clouds over Egypt would cause hail worth writing down in the Bible. Boom. And then it would have also created locusts because it would have raised the humidity and the temperature. Right, right. Which locusts love. I thought that was a little tenuous, but it still made sense. I did too. But then the darkness, volcanic ash blotting out the sun. Yeah. Which we've heard could happen. Ever heard of a nuclear winter? That's right. Same thing. And so there you have it. All the plagues explained, sort of, except for the last one, Josh. This one didn't seem to be connected to anything. It was kind of freestanding, if you ask me. But the 10th plague was the death of the firstborns. The first born sons, I should say yes, in Egypt were suddenly dying mysteriously as a plague. And I think that possibly there was some sort of grain fungus that killed the firstborns, who would have had first dibs on food. So they would have been the first to die. I thought that was a little hanky. A couple of these were a little hanky, but I thought it was interesting to read, for sure. But, I mean, yeah, they weren't going to be like, hey, we're going to get front page exposure in the telegraph by saying, we've explained eight of the ten plagues of Egypt. You have to go for ten. Yes, sure. And you got to fudge. Apparently, if you are a researcher looking to get media coverage. Oh, we don't know if they fudged. That was not the greatest link. Well, that's it. That was a weird, weird episode all over the place. We talked about raining frog that was based on an article on the website. Can it really rain frogs? It can, but I have to say that just a little bit of skeptic in me says I would have to see that one to believe in me, too. In the meantime, I'll just watch Magnolia very frequently. If you want to learn more about frogs and rain, you can type those things into the search bar@houseoffworks.com. And it's time weird for listener mail. That's right, Josh. We're going to call this it's a family affair. It's a flying family stone. That's right. Hey, guys. I'm a 24 year old stay at home mother of two wonderful children. My husband is a marine who has been deployed to the middle east for just over a year. Okay. You may be interested and somewhat surprised by how much of an effect your podcast has had on our family. Firstly, I began listening while on bedrest during my second pregnancy. Sorry to hear that, by the way. Stuck with us. Yeah. I quickly became addicted to the fun tidbits of knowledge that you two threw out. I began listening to your podcast in the car after my daughter was born. My husband, who isn't big on listening to people talk, also took quite an interest at this point, as well as our six year old son, man. So think about it, though. We probably have had, like, a real hand in their daughter's development from the womb. That's right. When you began talking about Kiva, I realized how wonderful this would be to teach our son about helping others all over the world while also teaching him about how money lending and percentages work. He's extremely proud and excited to be doing so much good and even asked if he could use his birthday money to lend on Kiva. Oh, sweet kid. I was so touched by this. I even shed a little tear. That's her talking at me. I might have got weepy, though. I'm sure our son is extremely intelligent for his age, and his school doesn't seem to adequately feed his appetite for knowledge. He wanted me to let you know that he loves your podcasts on animals the most and request that you include more insects and animals in your lineup. Okay. Wait, this one can count? Yeah, sort of. My husband listens to your podcast religiously while deployed and even had a little baby fit when his ipod pooped out a few months ago. Did he get a new one? I hope so. He had me immediately send him my iPad so that he could survive. We often email back and forth as we don't have many opportunities to talk on the phone, and the subjects of the podcast often come up in the emails between my son and my husband gives him something to talk about that isn't too heavy. Since I don't want my husband or son to get too upset about the distance between them, it doesn't do any good for a Marine to have his mind off his mission. Thank you so much. Kate, Dan, Olive and Ryan. Man, that is awesome. Nice whole family listening. That is awesome. I love hearing that. Hey there, Kate. Dan, Olive, and Ryan. Thank you very much for listening. Guys, be careful over there. Yeah, and sorry for this one. Sorry for this episode. She'll never hear this one. She turned it off. Yeah. Well, that's cool. If you have a story about how SYSK had an impact on your life, we love hearing stuff like that. We would love it if you would let us know about it. You can tweet to us at syscast. You can hit us up on Facebook@facebook.com stuff youjnow and you can send us an email at stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you." | ||
How Passports Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-passports-work | The concept of passports - that people should enjoy protected freedom of movement - is an ancient one. It wasn't until WWI that they became universal. Learn all about this overlooked, important document. | The concept of passports - that people should enjoy protected freedom of movement - is an ancient one. It wasn't until WWI that they became universal. Learn all about this overlooked, important document. | Tue, 27 Oct 2015 14:36:05 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=14, tm_min=36, tm_sec=5, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=300, tm_isdst=0) | 35389509 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, my Favorite Murder from exactly right media, my Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilguera and Georgia Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today, this July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful from the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. 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 Noel. The autumn of Noel continues. Yeah, Autumn of Noel. That's a good album title. Yeah, I get royalties from it if anyone uses it. I think that we should entitle this passport. Go to sleep now, man. I know this is one of the ones that gets chalked up in the calm of well, we got to explain everything. Yeah, it's okay. I don't want to talk down before we start. Right, but it's not scintillating we're supposed to be enticing. People actually kind of chasing them off now. I think this file is under, like, helpful Informational podcast. There you go. We're not going to blow your mind with the coolest stories on Earth, but you're going to know how to get a passport. Yes, you are. Especially if you live in the United States. Yeah. All right, well, let's start with the name Chuck. There's a great debate over what passport the word comes from. Oh, yeah? Yeah. It depends on whether you are British or a Francophile. Okay. In British, it means quite literally what it sounds like. It allows passage through a port, like where ship docks. Right. You come in, say, here are my papers. This is a passport. Let me pass if you're French. Port. P-O-R-T-E means like gate or door. So you would be allowed passage through, like, the gates of the city. Okay. Never been settled. No one knows exactly which one's correct. But it's probably one of those two that the word comes from. It's never been settled because they quit arguing about it. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Who cares? But it does underscore the fact that passports are quite old, actually. Yeah. You dug up this article from The Guardian, a Brief History of the Passport, which, although it's kind of interesting, back even in biblical times, they had things that were like passports. They obviously didn't call them passports, but not yet in the Book of Nehemiah. Very underrated. I heard of it. Had you? Yeah, of course. I used to have them all memorized. You had the Book of Nehemiah. No, all the books of the Bible memorized. I can still save them up through a certain point. Nice. And then I just forget and then start shaking. Is Nehemiah included in what you can remember? No. Okay, good. I think I go through, like, judges. Yeah. And then I forgot to do it alphabetically. No, just in order. Okay. I could start rallying him and off that's. Okay. Sorry. I don't think we need to go there. In the Amae, though, there was a profit working as the Royal Cupbearer, and basically we had to travel to Judah and said, I need some help, King. So I don't get, I guess, drawn and quartered, which they probably didn't even do back then. So can I get safe passage? And that was sort of the earliest idea of a government sort of agency saying, please allow this person to pass into your town. No molestar. No molestar. Don't touch this guy. Just leave him alone. He's got my protection. I will bring the full force of my kingdom down upon you. That's right. This actually ties in with our episode on diplomatic immunity. It's basically the same thing. Sure. So, yeah, this idea of getting some sort of protection to travel abroad, it's pretty old in early medieval, and then up until late medieval Europe, there is this idea that people should have a freedom of movement. Right. King John, the same guy from the Magna Carta, he was the first to at least in Europe, to enshrine the idea of freedom of movement, that you should be able to leave your homeland, go somewhere for business or pleasure or whatever, and then come back to your homeland without any real problems. It shouldn't be a big deal. You shouldn't be trapping your homeland, you shouldn't be excluded from your homeland. You should be able to move back and forth. Yeah. And since then, it's been considered something of a universal human right, this freedom of movement. You'd think so? Well, in fact, in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights that came after World War II, it's enshrined in there as well, freedom of movement. Pretty neat. It is pretty neat. But part of that is this idea that you have some sort of papers that says, this is a citizen of our country. Please treat them well. And, in fact well, I don't know about that, but at least allow them to come and go. There you go. In fact, in our own US passport, still something a lot of people probably don't even read therein lies the important statement that says that still, like, please allow the citizen I don't even think it says please. It says noma Lestar, just noma star play. It's very important. Right. In jolly old England, I thought, this is pretty interesting. From the 1794 on, the Office of the Secretary of State took over passport issuance. The Home Office. Right. It just says the Office of Secretary of State. I think it's the home office. Okay. And they have every passport since 1794. Stolen record. Yeah. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. Or frightening, depending on where you're coming from. I saw another thing about British passports. The photos have evolved over time like it used to be. They were just like, just make sure you're in the photo. Sure. Like, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has a photo of himself with his family and their dog. Really? On his old passport. Yeah. Over time, though, we'll see there's definitely strict regulations about what you can and can't use for your passport photo. Yeah. And also in England, they used to british passports had descriptions as well. So a lot of people didn't like this, that would have things like big nose, prominent eight head, BDI BDIs, and eventually they're like, yeah, maybe we should just let the photo do the talking. Right. So about the 1860s, europe said, you know, what the heck with this, this is a pain. We don't want to check everybody's papers. Let's just do away with passports. And they were fine with that. America went the exact opposite way. Up until about the Civil War, it was pretty easy to come and go into the United States without any kind of papers whatsoever. But then, apparently, because they were worried about well, they wanted to keep track of who was coming into America and who was going, and that's a really good way to do it. And freed slaves right. Is to require documentation for that kind of international travel. So America started its passport requirements around then, and then finally, when World War One came, everybody started using passports. Yeah. That seemed like the point where the whole world said, you know what, let's really keep track of this. Yeah. And they used to be pretty cumbersome. I think that the United States passport was like an eleven by 18 inch document. Yeah. That's a biggie. Yeah. This was taken from a book that you found called The Passport in America by Craig Robertson. And this dude really did his homework. He did. And there was even a direct quote from somebody in the 19th century that said, no pocket of any sex would tolerate them. No, they were just too big. So that was the Yelp review of passport, right? Exactly. I can't even put this in my pocket. Nobody could. So then 1926 came around in the United States, dropped it down to about the standard three by five, and that became the trend around the world. And everything interesting about passports is just coming. That's not true. I love that England called there's Old Blue for a long time. Yes, apparently it was very beloved. And then they moved over to Burgundy, and I was like, okay, Old Burgundy. I guess it's fine. All right, should we take a break here? Why not? All right, let's take a break and we'll get back to the scintillating details of passports. Okay. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno sesame and chocolate covered goodness with realtime datadriven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM, let's create. 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All right, we're back with Passports. Welcome back to passport talk. We should do a whole series on it. So in the US, if you are issued you are issued a passport from a number of places. The State Department well, the State Department issues well, they get routed through there for sure. Right. You can apply at different places. Yeah. So there's 27 passport agencies now in all 50 states. But you don't have to go to a passport agency. No, you don't. Unless the post office really quickly. It's only about a week quicker. It depends, though. We'll get to that. Yeah. But yes, most people just go to the post office. You can go to the post office. You can go to a court. There are other authorities around. If you look up that, you can apply for your passport. You can apply at home. Like, print it out yourself. What's the form? Dias stroke eleven. I think that is it. That's the one. Oh, yeah. You can print it out at home. But the thing is, you're going to need to we should say there's really two big circumstances that will change all this stuff. If this is your first passport, you can print it at home all day long. You're going to have to go somewhere to show up in person to apply. That's right. They want to see you. They want to verify you are who you are. They want to smell you. Yes. They want to take in your scent. Sure. Your first passport, you have to jump through a little bit of hoops, we should say. However, this is not difficult stuff. No. And there's really no excuse whatsoever for you to not have a passport. No. I think when you reach a certain age, it's good to have just in case. It's good for ten years if you're over 18. Right. 16, I think. Oh, is it 16? Yes, I think so. All right. Well, ten years is a long time. Sure. And we'll get into trying to get it one quicklike. But you can save yourself a lot of money and a lot of trouble and a lot of stress if you just say, Go ahead and get my passport. In case you ever need to leave the country in a hurry. Exactly. Or for fun. And cost now is for first timers. It's $135 for an adult, $105 for a child. If you renew your passport, which is a little bit of a misnomer, because they say you can't renew a passport, you can't renew it, and that you keep your same passport, you get a new one. But if you have a previous passport, you can't get it renewed, it'll just be a new one. And it's cheaper. Right. Yeah. So the first time you go to apply for a passport, you're going to fill out the form, what is it? The DS eleven. DS stroke eleven. And you're going to take it down there with some proof of identity, and you are going to sign it in front of the person at the post office or the clerk of court, wherever. You don't sign it at home. No. And then they're going to take all of your stuff and then you will get a passport in the mail. After that, you can fill out a totally different form, pay less money and just mail your old passport in. And they'll send you a new one. Yeah. Along with the old one. Right. Which is kind of neat, if you like a keepsake. Yeah. What I can say is, don't tear pages out of your passport as keepsakes, because I know someone who ended up on a watch list by doing that. No way. Wow. A family member, actually. Really? Yeah, just one. They're like, hey, this is a special trip, let me keep this page. Big no. No. Yes. Apparently you can be prosecuted for mutilating your passport. Yeah, that's how they put it. So don't worry, they'll mail you back your old passport if you just want to hang on. I don't know if it's changed when I was doing my traveling abroad in the didn't even get stamped in every country, so it's not like I had a passport full of amazing, memorable stamps. I think about half the country's even bothered stamping it. Right. They may be more strict on it now, I don't know. Yeah. Do you always get stamps? I mean, here or there? Most of the time. Okay. But not always. Yeah. I've never figured out what the deal is, why they would or wouldn't stamp it. Seems like it literally comes down to, do I feel like doing this with my hand? Yeah. That's the impression I have as well. But, I mean, that seems like a serious lack of standardization, maybe. Sure. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. There's something wrong with that, I think. So if you want to go abroad, you should do this a few months ahead of time just to take all the stress out of it. You're going to get your passport. It usually takes a couple of weeks, but you don't want to chance anything. No, just normally just using all the normal channels, going to the post office, not paying for any kind of expedite service. The State Department estimates you should get your passport from the time of your application about four to six weeks. Yeah, but it never takes that long. But again, it shouldn't. But it could. It could. That's the worst case scenario, which is what they tell you. Yeah. So Uncle Chuck will tell you it'll take a couple of weeks, but again, don't risk that. No. And there's actually a fairly recent history shows us that you really shouldn't risk it. Back in 2007, something called the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative went into effect, and it used to be that you could get to Canada and Mexico and parts of the Caribbean with just your birth certificate and maybe your driver's license. That was totally fine. That kind of traveled through North America in 2007, they said. No, if you are traveling by air, you have to have a passport, even if you're coming from Mexico or Canada into the US. If you're traveling by land or by sea, you need to at least have a passport card, which they created, which is about half price. Yeah. This caused a huge run on passports in 2007, and the backlog suddenly went to, like, a 15 week wait. Yeah. Which is a real headache for a lot of people who'd waited, assuming it was going to be four to six weeks, and all of a sudden it was 15 weeks. Well, if your travel was in that time, you're in big trouble. Right. And now the State Department is warning we're about to get to the ten year anniversary of that. So if your passport is coming up for renewal, you may want to do it sooner than later, because that same backlog is going to come again, as people have to renew after ten years. So if you were a chump before, don't be a chump twice. Well, no, be prepared to be a jump again, almost, I guess, or else run out and do it right now. So the little card for first timers is 55 for adults and 44 kids, which is a lot cheaper, and it fits in your wallet. And I guess if you are in the US, you're like, I like to go to the Caribbean every now and then, or Mexico. And that's about it. Yeah, but that's just if you're going by land or sea. Yeah. If you're flying, you have to have a passport every single time. You should say that at least two more times. If you're flying, you have to have a passport. All right, that's three. I think we got it across. Okay, but like I said, you know yourself. You know what kind of travel you like to do. If you just say, I like to go on the occasional cruise. Okay, so that's your little card. That's sea travel. That's covered. I don't want anybody getting the customs, being like but Josh and Chuck said end up ruining their vacation. No, I think we've really hammered. That okay. I'm fine. Know yourself. Know your travel style. Get the card. If the card is good for you, get Old Blue. Well, we don't call it Old Blue. No. The British call ours Old Blue, though. They name it what is it, Burgundy now? Old Burgundy. All right. So we're traveling abroad. By the way, if you have a baby, your baby's got to have a passport. Yeah. I thought there would be some exemption, but no, you got to get your baby photographed. Any live human has to have a passport, at least in the United States. But increasingly across the world, like, passport laws are becoming more and more standardized. Yeah. All right, so we talked about applying in person. If it's your first passport, you have to do that. We already said that. If you lost or had your passport stolen, you have to go again in person. If your passport is expired and was issued more than 15 years ago, you got to go again. And, by the way, the reason they I think when you're a kid, it only lasts so long because you change the way you look more. Right. Which makes sense. Yeah. They have no idea what you're going to grow up to look like. Yeah. It could look like a freak. They don't know. So is it every five years if you're under age 16? Every five years. Hey, if you're getting multiple passports before the age of 15, then lucky you. Nice going, kid. Yeah. If your passport expired and was issued when you were under 16, you got to go in person. Or if your name has changed, then you got to go in person. If your name has changed and you don't have any kind of legal document showing change, because you can send that in. Right? Yeah. You can change your name just by through the mail. Actually, as long as you have a certified supporting document. Here's what I thought was interesting to prove your identity, if you don't have a certified birth certificate, you can actually still get a passport through a letter of no record. Basically a letter saying, this dude doesn't have a certified birth certificate for whatever reason. It starts out, you're not going to believe this. Yeah, but get this, this guy doesn't have a birth certificate. I like that. There's an allowance for that, though. Yeah, I think it's necessary. And this is different from, like, a hospital birth certificate. The hospital actually reports the birth, and then the birth is recorded with the city or the county. That's the birth certificate you want. But if your city or county lost it or whatever and can't find it, then they should issue you a letter of no documentation. That in and of itself isn't going to be enough for you to necessarily get a passport. You also want to find other stuff that supports the fact that you were in fact, born. This is a great list. Yeah. A census record. Where are you going to find that? A certificate of circumcision. Yeah, that's one pretty good proof. Who's going to lie about that? Yeah, show them the certificate. Then I guess if they need further proof, you could do the background. They're like, Please step around and drop your pants. No, they wouldn't do that. Baptismal certificate? No. If they do do that, you should get a free passport and maybe even an attorney. A state. Like, they give you a state, the state you're in, you just automatically own it for that doctor's record of postnatal care. A family Bible record. I've never heard of that. I didn't even underline that. You didn't? No. That seems illegitimate. You could write anything in a family Bible. Is that what that means? I think so. That sounds archaic. Baptismal certificates. Another one. Then you want to bring in some proof of ID, like if your driver's license or military ID, government ID, basically, you want to load up on anything you can, including a signature ID, and say, please let me leave the country and come back. And there's actually a form called the DSLA, and it is a form that you can have a blood relative who's older than you. It's my favorite thing David saying, like, yes, this person was born, I remember when he or she was born, because they're my favorite niece or nephew, and they are who they say they are. They don't even need to be related. Oh, really? I thought it was a blood relative. Now you just have to know you for two years. Oh, that's a different form. That's the form. DSL 71. Oh, I thought what's yours again? DS ten A. Let's get it let's get it straight. But they both do the same thing. One is a blood relative, and I think it holds more weight. Okay. The DS 71 is where somebody who's known you for two years says, I vouch for this person. How long did you know Hippie Rob? Yes. I could have vouched for him, I guess. Could he vouch for you? I guess, yeah. I'm sure we knew each other for longer than two years, but I mean, think about it. I think that's like the last resort. It's like this person has been posing as this person for at least two years is what the form? DS 71? Yeah, he's my neighbor. He just suddenly showed up. I know that the older couple who lived in the house suddenly didn't live there anymore. And this man did. He doesn't have an accent. That's weird. All right, so let's talk about the worst case scenario, which we were talking about, which is, oh, no, I have to get it to Bruge in Belgium tomorrow. Okay, what do you do? Well, it depends on why you have to get there. If you have a family member who just fell down and hit their head and is at the death doorstep, you have what the State Department considers to be a life and death circumstance. That's right. You can go there and say, hey, this hospital in Bruce just sent me this fax that's my brother's medical records and I have to go. And they will work with you? Yes. If you say, hey, I just thought of going out of town at the last minute. I booked a trip for tomorrow for fun because I'm an idiot, so I need a passport. They'll actually work with you? Yeah. It's not going to be fun. No, you're going to have to jump through some hoops. But you can conceivably get a passport within 24 hours or less, sometimes the same day. Yeah. You can go to a private agency and pay anywhere from $180. Like $300 to get a same day passport? Yes. That's real. Right. It's not like the back alley. They should do it. I saw one here in Atlanta. They have an office where for $295, you can get a passport in 8 hours that they'll go get you one. Wow. But that is, again, if you have if you're, you say just need it to be renewed or need pages added to it or something like that. Right. If you have to do it and it's your first passport, you're going to have to do it yourself either way. And actually, you can save yourself those fees by simply making an appointment and going to one of the regional offices if you're lucky enough to live in that city. True. And then you should be able to get it the same day as long as you can prove that you need it within that time. Yeah. And if you pay the $60 rush fee. Yeah. Because if you hire this private service, you're going to have to pay all the normal passport fees, including the rush fee, plus the private services fees of $300 on top of all of the other fees you'll have to pay. Exactly. All right, well, let's take a break, and let's talk about the all important passport photo after this. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You called IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes and overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule up their own sleeve. IBM let's create learn more@ibm.com It automation. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? 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All right, Josh, this is kind of fun, too, because passport photos have very specific requirements, and you would think they would just be common sense, but some dummy might take their own passport photo, which you can do with, like, Beats headphones and a Brave sat and sunglasses on, you're dumb dumb. Especially if you mail that off and expect your passport to come back. You're going to get a letter of denial. Now, instead, you have to be facing front. You want it to be mostly a head shot. It has to be a two inch by two inch photo. Yes. And you need a duplicate of it. And your head has to take up one and three eight inches of this photo from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head. Exactly. Yes. You don't want anything covering your hair or your hairline. You don't want to be wearing sunglasses. No. But if, say, like, you wear a wig or you wear glasses or you wear something that is a separate feature on your face, but you normally wear that, you would want to wear that in the photo. Yeah. They want it to look as much like you look every day. And that doesn't mean I wear my Last Chance garage at no, you couldn't. You would get denied. But I could say, I wear this almost every day and they'd. Say sorry to denied. And they'd say, you're a grown man, for God's sake. Why are you wearing a baseball cap? It's got to be in color these days. It didn't used to have to be. And they prefer a neutral expression. Although you are allowed a slight smile, a little maybe a Mona Lisa smile. Yeah. If you're going to Paris for the Tour de France finale, is that where it is? We'll say France. All right. Yeah. You might be a little excited and smile a little bit, but keep it to yourself. Keep it tamp down forever. Or if you don't want to do it yourself, you're supposed to have a white background or tan background. You got to go to Kinkos or someplace, or just Google passport photos. And there's plenty of places that aren't the photo booth. Yeah. Which, again, technically, as long as it fit the criteria, they don't care if you got it done in a photo booth, as long as you're following all the standards. But it is a lot easier for you to go to just the drugstore and say, I need passport photos, and the person taking your picture should know what to do. We've already talked about renewal, but that is Dstroke 82 if you want to download that sucker. And again, it is cheaper to renew. And as long as you fit the other requirements, you can just send it right in and get it replaced. Right. Which is great. Right. So if you were to tear open your passport as of 2006 in the United States well, first of all, you'd be arrested, probably, which is nuts. But if you go and read page six, it says that it's property of the US government. Yeah. You don't own it. No. And that if a US authority requests that you surrender it, you have to surrender it. That's right. Which we'll talk about in a second because it's kind of a big deal. But if you tore it up and you would find an RFID chip, that makes your passport what's considered an epassport, and that has all sorts of information as a duplicate of your photo. It has biometric information about you, and it makes it a lot harder to travel under a fake passport or forge a passport than it used to be. That's radio frequency identification is what that stands for. Right. And the US gets a lot of credit for the E passport, but it actually was introduced in Malaysia earlier. And another big feature that makes it difficult to forge is, well, a lot of different features, like special inks and different types of illustrations and threading and stuff like that. That was actually introduced by Nicaragua. Yeah. Theirs, apparently is one of the most difficult documents to forge in the world. Yeah. I think it's become the standard, but they're the ones who started it actually pretty neat. They started the trend. So I said that your passport is technically not yours. It's basically on loan from the government. This really hurts a lot of people. There's a couple of laws that have become proposed recently where one is, if you owe the IRS $50,000 or more, you can have your passport revoked. Another is, if you owe $5,000 or more in child support, you can have your passport revoked. And another one is, if you're accused of associating with terrorist organizations, you can have your passport revoked. Well, all three of those are meeting resistance by people who say, hey, man, there are ways for you, the US government, to track all the people you need to track without revoking passports. We don't like you having that power overtly written down in law. This is a right that dates back to the Magna Carta, so let's just lay off of that. The US government is, shut up. We own your passports. And you, by the way. Yeah. So there is resistance to it, but I don't know how well it's being met. And this program of revoking passports among terrorist people associated with terrorist organizations. Have you read the drone papers from the Intercept yet? No. So in it, they talk about how that's becoming, like, a thing, and it suggests that it's a way of laying the groundwork for assassination. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's like, your passports revoked. You're technically not assistant anymore, so you're open for assassination overseas by, like, a drone strike or something. Wow. Yeah. So a lot of people are like, let's just leave the passports alone. Right. The passports out of this. You guys are really taking this right, and revoking it based on 100 people in the whole world or in the whole country. So it's a big thing. Interesting. Yeah. If you lose your passport while you're abroad, it's no fun. And that's why they always recommend that you make copies of your passport and leave with, like, a family member at home. That'll help you get it back quicker after you fill out the Stroke 64. Yeah. And don't forget to make copies and keep them with you as well, like sitting in your luggage, too. It's a good idea. And I think you can get hooked up at the embassy. Right. Whatever country you're in. Yeah, that's the first place I'd go if I was in trouble. Oh, sure, because that's what they do in the movie. Yeah, that's what Matt Damon always does. Did you see the thing about camouflage passports? No. This woman named Donna Shalela. No. What was her name? Donna Walker. Back in the 80s, she came up with this idea of camouflage passports. It's like a fake passport that somebody can have that is for a made up country. That sounds uninteresting. So if a terrorist is looking for Americans to kill and you show them your East Timor, well, that's killed country. Yeah, but like a made up passport that looks real, they might just pass you by for somebody else, and it's a real thing. They've been made and issued and people have made it out of Kuwait. I think Europeans made it out of Kuwait using camouflage passports, but it's also really wide open for fraud and that kind of stuff. That sounds argoesque. Very argoesque. I'm from Sea Land. Don't shoot. Well, that's a real place, too. Sea Land. Is that Sealand theme? No, I think that was maybe go ahead. Go ahead. Is that where we are now? It looks like you're about to read. Well, Josh said go ahead. Oh, wait, is that listed in the mail? I thought this was more passport stuff you're about to read. So you don't have anything else to take it? I don't. I mean, there's some other nitty gritty stuff, but what I would recommend is you read the House Stuff Works article because that's where it all lives. That's right. And there are some more details in there that we didn't reveal. You will find that by typing that word in the search bar athousoforks.com and I said search bar. Now is time for the go ahead. All right. This is a very special listener mail, by the way, from David. Hey, guys. Just listened to the Vestigial Organs episode and for the first time ever, you hit a flat note with me. Chuck was talking about receiving some criticism for joking around about calling men dumb. Josh seemed to dismiss the idea of anybody needing to raise the mantle of men. It is clear to me that you were just being funny by deprecating maleness to shine a light on how great women are. I've always admired how thoughtful and genuinely you guys are in regards to women. So I felt a twinge of pain in your apathy for the struggle of some men with their gender. And we got to say, David, you really opened our eyes here. Big time, man. I'm a male. I am also gay and short and introverted and emotional insensitive. It sounds like me, except I'm straight. As a child, being male meant that I couldn't play with the toys I wanted to. I had a rough house and played football with boys twice my size. As a teenager, I sat on the sidelines while all my female friends were going on dates and getting their first kisses from the boys I secretly liked. I eventually grew out of those problems, but even today I work in female dominated fields as an administrative assistant. My bosses are generally men and I have missed out a lot of opportunity because they often prefer my prettier female colleagues. I've often wondered if there is a part of their brain that is concerned with how they would be perceived working with a male assistant, which is a good point. Yeah. I've always wanted to be a father, and when I looked into a few years back, I looked into it, I was dismayed with the suspicion and ignorance many people hold for single men who want to adopt which is crazy. That's me talking. And of course, up until recently, being male prevented me from marrying the man I love. Being male has been an obstacle I've had to overcome to get everything I have ever really wanted out of life. Perhaps being male has made a lot of men's lives easier, but for me, it's been the opposite. There's an increasingly wide gender disparity in academic achievement. Some devoted fathers suffer from biased family law. It values female parents above male parents, and male victims of rape and domestic abuse face a lack of resources and an unsympathetic public. That's true. Man, this guy is hitting all the points. Male privilege doesn't work for all men. I know you didn't mean anything by the dumb guy's comment was perhaps for two straight guys with seemingly very happy lives. It isn't immediately apparent that other guys view the advantages and disadvantages of being mailed differently. I hate to shine a light on this one small thing. These guys are awesome and do a great job. Just as you have alerted me to the complexities of hundreds of topics in your podcast, I hope you will examine the complexities of maleness and see that we cannot all be painted with one wide privileged brush. This is probably one of the best listener meals we've ever gotten. Great intelligent, insightful. I mean, change. Just my perspective on things. Absolutely. I realized that by us saying, us taking the liberty on behalf of all men, putting down men in order to boost up women, that in and of itself is the definition of male privilege. Because we were just assuming that everybody has it as great as we do. Sure. And this guy pointed out that we were wrong. And thank you, David. Seriously, that is one of the best listener males we've ever had. Agreed? Yes. Thank you. Great way to end a bad podcast. If you want to see what you got and you can try to compete with David's all time great listener mail, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyieshow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast athouseauffs.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web stuffyouhornow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseupworks.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 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 Halo petscom." | ||
Shoo Fly Don't Bother Me | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/shoo-fly-dont-bother-me | Flies: They're disgusting, disease-spreading flying machines. They're also really fascinating. Flies taste with their feet, smell with their antennae and use a pair of eyes as a compass oriented to sunlight. Listen in to learn more. | Flies: They're disgusting, disease-spreading flying machines. They're also really fascinating. Flies taste with their feet, smell with their antennae and use a pair of eyes as a compass oriented to sunlight. Listen in to learn more. | Tue, 19 Apr 2011 20:21:21 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=20, tm_min=21, tm_sec=21, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=109, tm_isdst=0) | 33838887 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. This is Josh. That's Chuck. This is stuff you should know. How do you smell Chuck? I was out of the ocean this morning. How are you holding up? Well, we got a good three and a half feet between us. Yeah. So fine. You heard this is a nonusual opening for this podcast. You can hear, but I heard. Oh, you did? Okay. Earlier today. Yeah. Okay. So that's the last few seconds, I guess, of the Fly, the original 1958 version starting Vincent Price. And that is the inventor named Seth Brindle. Brindle fly. Yeah. Who has converted himself into a fly. Well, switched heads with the fly. Right. Switched bodies, I guess. And now he's a tiny little fly man who's being attacked by a spider on the spider web. You know, I just saw the crimebird version a couple of months ago. I think I told you that. Yeah. It holds up the first time. Yeah. Except I don't understand why what is his name, the main guy? Goldblum. Goldblum. I don't understand why Jeff Goldblum decided to add, I guess, a kind of, like, sexy arrogance to his character because he came off weird. That's just the golden he came I guess so then the hefe brings that to everything he does. He's tripping with it. So, Chuck, we played that part of the Fly, not so much because we could although that was a large part of it, but because we can explain what is on that little fly body now. That's right. We've read how flies work and specifically how house flies work by Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Robert Lamb, who's been popping up a lot lately, hasn't he? Roberts work. Yeah. Good stuff. And he just kind of pops in to the cubicles and says, hey, how's it going? A lot lately. And we go, yes. The housewife. Josh, if you live in a house and you got flies flying around, you got about a 90% chance that that is an actual musca domestica. Yeah. Common house fly. That's the house name. That's right. There's not some other more exotic name? It is, on all initial appearances, one of the more mundane bugs ever. But it's actually pretty interesting, if you ask me. And disgusting, because they carry lots of diseases like typhoid fever and salmonella and leprosy and cholera. Isn't that crazy? They carry leprosy intestinal worms. Well, I knew that. Bacteria that can lead to dysentery. I didn't know that they could carry leprosy, though. I didn't either. You know, I always equate leprosy with nudism because they both live in colonies. Really? Yeah. I always think of leprosy. When I think of leprosy, I think of the Bible, because growing up in church, that's where I heard about leprech colonies and leprosy. Sure. And lepers being healed and all that. Exactly. Have you ever seen The Fog? The second one, I guess for the fog, too. Was there a fog too? I don't know. I mean, john carpenter did the original fog, I think. Right. This is the remake where the people attacking were lepers who were turned away and now their ghosts have come back for vengeance. I think that was the original as well. Oh, was it? I didn't realize they were leopards. I thought they were like pirates that have been crossed or something. Jeez. We need to get our act together. That's such a good movie. The first one. Yeah. I'll check it out. I just watched the thing last night. Oh, that's a great one too. And I had a fairly voracious alien versus The Thing comments on I saw people get into that. I definitely say alien is better, but The Thing is more disgusting, a little more twisted. Yeah. All right. This has been a long set up, flies. Yeah. So, Chuck, we've got down that they spread disease. Right. Potentially. One of the things that kind of cropped up while I was reading this is it was kind of an expansion of everything I'd always knew about flies. Yeah. We all know a little bit, which I find very reassuring. It's not like quantum suicide, where it's like everything you think you know is completely unreal. Just go ahead and stop thinking now. This is like yes, you understand house flies. And here is some more information about them. So I guess, kind of this is almost like an elementary school episode, which I find comforting and reassuring. I like it too. Let's talk about fly anatomy. House fly anatomy. And if I accidentally say fly if you accidentally say fly, we mean house fly specifically, right? That's right. Oh, and dispersed throughout the podcast, we all have fly fax that sounds like this. So when you hear that it's going to be a new fly fax, josh, if you're talking a house fly body, it's like a lot of insects. It's got an exoskeleton made of chitin, and it's got three sections to the body. You got the head right. You got the thorax, you got the abdomen right. And as everyone knows, this actually isn't a fly fact, so no buzz. But it is a fact. But it's not one of our fly facts. No jingle. No jingle. Everyone knows that the fly has all those tiny little bitty eyes. And like you said, it's reassuring to know that's exactly what they are. They're two common eyes divided up into three to 6000 simple eyes. Yes. And it's like a bunch of little video monitors because they can't focus on one little thing in particular. Right. It's like a mosaic. Right. But I also got the impression that it's like a mosaic, but each little eye is kind of representative of the physical grid. It makes a grid of its physical environment. Right. Yeah. So I wonder if the fly is, like, oh, there's a movement in Sector 90,000. That's what I wonder. And I go focus on that one simple eye to see that piece of poo on the ground that I need to go waddle through, or there's a human who's coming toward me or something. And of course, by Sector 90,000 G, I meant Sector 3000 to 6000 G. Those are the eyes. And there are also a couple of little, I think, three ocellives. Or if you're in Italy. In Italy. And they are between the two compound eyes. And that's sort of like a compass that keep the fly oriented and ideally flying toward the sun. Okay. So I think that this should be the first fly fact. All right, let's do it. Okay. Chuck, the reason house flies are commonly found kind of flittering against a window because they're stupid. No, that's a fly myth. Okay. The fly fact is that they're ocelli to symbolize that act as the compass orient themselves upward by finding the sunlight. They're all constantly searching for sunlight, which is why they always go to a window or a bugs ever. That was fly back number one. All right. I like it on the head, Josh, which is where a lot of the action takes place with the fly, they get their sense of smell from their antennae right there. For tasting and eating, they have a per biscuit, which is a little plunger like thing that sticks out from the bottom of its mouth. I'm sorry, the bottom of the head. They have little feelers. Two of these, and they are axillary pouch. And then they are the tasters. And at the end of the proviscus, you have the labellum, which is that the mouth, the little spongy part? Yeah. It's like a sponge mouth. It's not like an open mouth that you think of. It's like a sponge on the end of the proboscis. Okay. Where you just suck. I said provost, didn't I? It's close. It's proboscis. Sorry about that. No, it goes either way. And that always makes me think of adaptation. Chris Cooper's character talks about the probiscus of the orchid. Oh, yeah. Jerry is an interesting yes, it's really weird. Apparently she's guest starring in this episode. She's paying attention for the first time in weeks. So, Chuck, there's a huge little thing that you pointed out that the labellum, the spongy mouth, doesn't allow solid food in. And we're going to get to that in a minute, but just keep that in mind. That's fly foreshadowing. Not to fly back, but we've come to what I think is fly fact number two. Don't you? Are you going with the biting? Yeah, the biting. Okay. Fly back number two. House flies do not bite. If you get bitten by a fly, it was not a house fly. Not a housewife. It might be a horse fly. And you know those in the summertime when you're in the pool, they land on your head and bite the tar out of you, or it might have been your little sibling, brother, or sister. That's true. And what other did they list? Another one? Stable flies. Yeah, horse flies. They kind of take care of all the horses at once. Where a horse flies, I just want this one horse. Right. That's my take on it. All right. So that's fly fact, too. So, Chuck, we are on the wings now, which isn't necessarily a fly FAC, because it's so essential. Right. Back in ancient times, which was up to 65 million years ago, as I understand. Okay. That's how long house flies have been around. Okay. They had two sets, two full sets of wings. Nowadays, in our modern times, it looks like flies have house flies have one set. That's not necessarily true. Yeah. If you're a little jerky kid, a little milo on a jerk, and you pull the wings off of a fly, you probably think you're just pulling off two. And you may be, because those are the large ones, but there's little tiny guys under there. They're called halters. Right? Yeah. And the halters actually, if you pull the halter off these little tiny wings that are underneath or above I think they're underneath. They're underneath the big wings. They basically allow the fly to move quickly in the air, right? Yes. To maintain balance, a direct direction hover. Yes. And so if you remove one of these, it can only go in circles. If you remove both of the halters, the fly can't get is an airborne at all. Yeah. With those two big wings, it still can't fly. Yeah. Without those little halters, it's pretty good. But not a fly fact. No. Very interesting, nonetheless. But the big wings, the large wings that you see when you look at a fly are the ones that do the real heavy lifting, right? Yeah. We're talking 200 to 300 flaps per second, and they can go about four and a half miles an hour, which I would have assumed they could go faster than me, too. I can run four and a half miles an hour. I've seen flies zipping by me when I'm running. Yeah. So check first, I don't know if you said all of the moving parts, the wings, the legs, all this stuff are located in the thorax, right? Yes. So you got the two sets of wings up top, and then below that, you have the different legs. And the legs, they're standard legs. They're segmented and jointed. But the most interesting part for me about the fly legs, the house fly legs are the tarsi, right? Yes. Which are little tiny hairs on the end of the legs that act as pretty much the same thing as taste buds do for us. So that's why it'll land on food. It's not just landing, it's tasting to say, Do I want some of this? Yeah. And most of the time, the answer is yes. Yes. And we'll get to the gruesome truth that's that in a moment as well. Right. My favorite part of the legs is the pulvery. They are little moist suction pads, and they are the little grippers. So that's why when you see a fly jump on a wall fly into a wall, and just all of a sudden, they're like spiderman walking up the wall. Little grippers. How Jeff Goldblum did it with some Zwad Aviv as well, thrown in there. And then the abdomen, they have the key organs, which are the reproductive organs, and the female, the oviposter and the male has the ediagus. And actually, look at that one up. Nice. And that's not how I would have pronounced it, but these little things retract when they're not in use on both the male and the female, so they stay protected there. It's very aerodynamic. It would be very UN aerodynamic to have the Adidas just kind of laughing in the windows, zipping around the house. Yeah. It's like putting the landing gear down a little too soon. Exactly. So, Chuck, we already foreshadowed what's going on with the mouth, the sponge mouth, the labellum. Yes. That it can only accept liquids. Well, not everything a fly eats is liquid, right? No, not if they want to chomp on that steak or that dog crap or dry blood. Yeah. When a fly encounters something well, first of all, when it accepts food into the bellam, it basically sucks it straight into the stomach. Yes. It's liquid. It's good to go. So when it lands on the food and it finds that it can't just suck it up, it basically tries to crumble it with the end of its proboscis. Right. At that point, it's got tiny little it's smaller, it's more manageable. Sure. And then it pukes on it. Yeah. That's step two. Everything you've ever heard about flies vomiting on you or your food or whatever when they land is absolutely true. Yeah, I might have thought that was an old wives tale. Yes. Article. No, it is true. What the fly does is basically spit up saliva and digestive juices onto the little crumbs that it's made using its proboscis. Right. And it sits there for a couple of seconds thinking, and then it tries to slurp it up. Yeah. Robert makes a really good point in the article. This sounds extremely disgusting to us, right? Sure. But the fly isn't doing anything we don't do when we take food into our mouth. We chew it, we masticate it. Right. Saliva is attacking. It, starting to break it down, and then it goes through our esophagus into our stomachs and it becomes digested by juices. The flies just doing the same thing, but on the outside of its body, it doesn't have teeth. We have the decency to keep it all internal. We don't go into restaurants and puke up onto our plate. That would be untoward. So if this food is kind of in an in between state and it's been spin on and vomited on and left and it's still not quite right. Yeah. It gets moved to the crop, right? Yeah. Should we call this flyfac? Sure. Okay. Flyfax three. Yeah. There's a crop, like you said, and instead of just saying, well, this little bit of crumb isn't quite liquid enough, let me just go fly to another one, the fly is pretty efficient. So they say, actually, let me save this for later, stick it down another hole into the crop, and in the crop it waits. And then they'll pass it back and forth, maybe add a little more digestive juices, throw up on it a bit more. And they do this until it's ready to be until it's liquid, ready to go down the chute. It doesn't waste its food. Yeah. That was Fly back three, right? Yes. There is one thing we said that the fly is not really doing anything differently than we do to our food. It's just doing it on the outside that's still horrific and disgusting, because not only is the fly carrying possibly leprosy to your sandwich, when it throws up on it, it's probably throwing up something it just ate, which, as you pointed out, could be dog poop, could be blood, could be the poop from a leprech dog, something like that. Yeah. So when you're at a picnic or something and you see that fly on your sammy, and if you see it moving his little hands around it's, vomiting disease on your food is what it's doing. Right, exactly. Potentially disease? Not always. No. And plus, you don't underestimate the human immune system. I mean, we all have white blood cells. We all can mount a pretty decent defense unless we have some sort of immunodeficiency. And if we do have that, then we're probably in some sort of treatment for it. So for the most part, I mean, it is gross. But I think in modern times, where we got the flies under control, at least here in the west. Yes, for now, until the apocalypse comes. The rise of the fly. Do you remember that part in Amityville Horror where the priest is like, he's covered in flies and starts sweating and very creepy. Is that Rod stager? Yeah. Nice. I would have been so out of there. Chuck. Yes. We talked about their sexy bits already. What do they do with them? What's the fly family like? A fly family, Josh, is like many insect families. The male will chase down a female and impregnate her. And it happens really quick. She's ready to lay her eggs. Toot sweet. And they don't stick together after they mate, they separate. And the mother doesn't even guard the eggs like a lot of species do. One night love affair. Yeah. And she basically dumps the eggs and what she deems to be a safe place, and she's like, I'm out of here. It's one night stand followed in child abandonment. And how many eggs is it late at a time did we get? That up to 900 over the life cycle of a fly. Okay. In a life cycle, I think they said the average life span is about three weeks, but it could be three months. Yeah. I don't think a fly can live physically beyond three months. But yeah, the average life span in reality, because of fly swatters and things like that, is like, 21 days, I think you said. Yeah. So the life cycle is a lot like most insects. It's got the egg and then the larvae, then the pupa, then the adult. Warm summer time is optimal. It takes about seven to ten days to go from egg to adult. And they go through, I think, three molting stages. The little maggots do, don't they? You know all this you learn this in school. Isn't it nice to know this? Yeah, very nice. So, Chuck, with the maggots, the first stage, the most interesting stage, we've arrived at a story that I have oh, boy. When I was in college. Cooked steak through cooked steak. And really, actually, now that I think about it, I guess I probably trimmed some raw meat off okay. And put it in the garbage can, as is normal. A garbage bag in a garbage can, the kitchen garbage can. Okay. So I'm a normal person. I'm not a freak. Right? I throw a stick away. Exactly. So I get up the next morning, and I go into the kitchen, and I wonder, why is the kitchen floor moving like that? Oh, man. And I kind of followed the floor as it went up the garbage can and into it, and I realized that my kitchen floor is a small kitchen granite, but my kitchen floor was covered in a living layer of maggots. The whole thing? The whole thing. Wow. So I'm like, I've got to get rid of this. How do you take care of a maggot infestation? Holy cow. And I tried bleach first. Did nothing to them. What? Didn't even slow down one of them. Really? I ended up having to walk all over them. Yeah, that's the old fashioned way. That's what I had to do. And I did not actually have a fly infestation after that, so gas. I got them all, but they make a horrific little popping sound. Did you have, like, snowshoes or something, at least? No, probably, like, hiking boots or something. Right? It was in Athens. Why were they all over the floor? Was it from the stick garbage out of the garbage can overnight? Yeah, like that. That's frightening. But that follows with what we know about the house fly life cycle, that larvae's hatch within a day. Right. And don't forget larva. And by larvae, I meant larvae with an E on the end equals maggots. They breathe out of their butt. Right. Then we learn that somewhere else. Yeah. So they never have to stop eating. Exactly. So they're just like this little fleshy worm like thing with a hooked mouth that just does nothing but eat and poop. Yeah, because they breathe out of their butts and mold, like I said, three stages. And the third molting stage, it gets a little darker and enters the pupa stage, and that's the larger protective shell. Then it fully develops and outcomes a beautiful butterfly or a disgusting house fly. Like Bart in The Simpsons. Yes. Like what? Bart in The Simpsons. There's a treehouse of horror where they redid the fly. That's right. Where he's like that mindless. Like the fly with Bart's body is this mindless eating machine. Yeah, that was one of the earlier ones. It's a good one. And then they get out of their little shell there with a temporary swollen bump, because they can't chew to get out of an egg or the shell. So they literally use this bump on their head to crack their way out. And then after they get out, that bump deflates and it just becomes part of the head again. I wonder if it's unique to each fly. Like they can recognize one another from the bump on the head. I don't know. There wasn't a name for that in here either. No, it's just a swollen bump. All right. Fly fact number four. Yes. So we talked about a fly. It can't live longer than three months. That's right. That is if it's existing outside of diapause. Right. Totally fascinating to me. Yes. So diapause is basically like suspended animation or hibernation for the fly. Yeah, basically, if there's no food around and there's no predators either, and the fly is like, I'm going to see what's going on. A few months from now, the fly can basically shut down its life processes to the state where it can just exist without moving. It's like a state between life and death for a few months. Right? Yeah. And then wake back up and be like, it's the future, or, It's winter and I'm dead soon. That's another part. Because they only live during the warmer months or they don't live all year round, do they? They thrive in the warm muggy areas. So, Josh, surely these things add nothing to the world aside from being disgusting little creeps. Agreed. Not true. You don't want them in your house. Remember, Chuck, these are one of the three bugs that you and I agreed are fine to kill. Yeah. What else did we say? Ticks. Mosquitoes and mosquitoes. Ticks. And this is the only non blood sucker. Interesting. It's a poop eater, though, and that's why you don't want it in your house. But they are good. Like all flies in the world at large. Great source of protein. They break things down into smaller bits for other bacteria and life forms to feed on. Right. They are an important part of any ecosystem that they live in. There's nothing here that's useless. Right. That's right. Okay. I think they even found a use for the old appendix, didn't they? They did. Doesn't it, like, combat cancerous growth? I can't remember. I believe so. And I think they even use maggots in freshwater fishing, raising commercial fish. Like tilapia. Yeah, tilapia. Love them. They use pupa. The pupa is high in protein. OK. So that's what they feed them, little freeze dried pupa. And if you're a survivalist or you're in a bad situation out in the woods and you need to survive maggots, if you get like, a rotted tree on the ground, you want to eat those maggots. You'll eat it and you'll like it. I would do it, and I'm not done with that stuff at all, but I would do that, of course, to save myself. Full circle antimafj. Oh, yeah. Nice job, Chuck. Thank you. Do we have time for one more flyfax? I think so. Yes, we do. All right. Flyfac number six. No, five. Five. Ancient civilizations actually made regular sacrifices to the fly guards to keep the swarms out of their houses and temples because they thought they were harbingers of sickness and death, even though they didn't know the science behind it. Right. There's something about them. They're disgusting. They're unwholesome. That's the word I'm looking for. They are inherently unwholesome. Yeah. So if you want to keep flies out of your temple right. You have several options available to you, right? Yes. Keep a clean house. That's number one. That's the smartest thing to do. Don't leave, like, your carton of milk open and just sitting on the counter or doing a shot of it. Right? Yeah. Or the steak in the trash. Yeah. Emily makes me throw away food. I put it in a bag and take it out to the garbage. Now we do too. That's what you do as adults in college? I think so, yeah. It's like scraping the trash. It was in a kitchen garbage can at the top. I mean, in college, I would have left that plate out in the living room on the couch. I've always been fairly clean. Yeah, me too. What else can you do? Biological control. You got the old Venus fly trap, which, if you can keep them healthy, they're kind of tough. Not just that. At the end of the fly that was at the beginning of this podcast, I caught in a spider web, which happens quite a bit. So as long as the spider is not going to kill you and your family while you're sleeping, just leave it alone. Because it's going to control the fly population tremendously. That's right. And farmers even there's some commercial farms that actually buy parasitic wasps to eat larvae and take care of flies for their crops. The taromalida wasp. That's right. Keep your windows and doors shut. That's kind of obvious. If you're going to keep your door open in the middle of summertime, you're going to have a lot of fly. I think that's funny that they even warranted its own bullet point and a fly swattered to actually physical control and fly paper, which is disgusting. Yeah, it's gross, too, especially around food. Like, if you see that in the kitchen at camp, when you went to camp, you walk past the kitchen, there like, flies there. It's like, get some glass, glaze these windows. What is wrong with you? Or at least change the fly paper every day. That's something, too. There's bug zappers. And then I wouldn't even endorse pesticides for house flies. You don't want to be spraying that stuff in your house. But that is an option for some people. It's just not for me. They can be very dangerous. And has anybody who's ever seen a Bug's Life knows the bugs zappers actually get bugs high? It's kind of like a hallucinogen to them. Oh, is that what happened in that? I remember the guy that got zapped and bug got zapped. He's like, oh, that was far out. Really? Something along those lines. Yeah. Bug zappers are fun. So, Chuck, you got any more fly fax or anything? No. So we're done with house flies. I'm done forever. Yes. House flies. Just as disgusting as you always thought. That's right. And you already knew everything about them, so everybody yourself pat on the back for this one, right? Yeah. We should mention if you use a fly swatter, it's a lot of fun to smash a house fly, but you leave behind quite a disgusting mess. You will not allow fly Swaters in the house. No, we don't. We haven't owned it. They're really kind of gross. That's only second to the pooper scooper for the kitty litter as far as disgusting devices in the house. Or the toilet scrubber next to the toilet. Yeah. Or the plungering. Yeah. So that's it. Now you know what tucks in my houses look like. Yeah, right. If you want to know more about flies and you want to see these fly facts in text, even you can type in houseflies in the handysearchbar@housetepworks.com, which, of course, brings up listener mail. Funny or sad? Funny. Okay, I'm going to read the Hodgman exchange. Oh, really? Yeah. I was thinking we wouldn't do that and end up on Judge John Hodgman. Maybe he'll litigate us if we just pretend like it doesn't exist. We'll see. I'm going to read this, though. Our buddy Johnny Rocket hodgman. John Kellogg Hodgman. Rocket is his maiden name. He has a podcast? He does. Through Jesse Thorns. Maximum fun sound of young America called Judge John Hodgeman. We've plugged it before he settles minor disputes between friends, lovers, husbands and wives. Yeah, it's very funny. So John writes this last week, and there is a fan that said, I wish to file suit against the Stuff You Should Know podcast. And this guy is complaining about the fact that we said in the Scuba Do Show that there were the Boston. Area campuses. Yeah, the five colleges that were represented by the characters. Supposedly, it was one of the Scooby Doo myths, and we said that they're all Boston area colleges. What ones? Amherst? UMass UMass yeah. Mount Holyoke North. North. That's the one we'll get to. So March judge John Hospital writes stuff you should know. Seriously, guys. See this below. The five colleges are in the Connecticut River or Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. Specifically Amherst, Northampton, and Holy Oak, Massachusetts. This is painful to me, not only because this is Hodgman country, which is mainly than Marble country, actually. It also has more argyle. It was indeed, while driving up and down the tobacco fields along the Connecticut River that I first came to enjoy your podcast and to admire your great knowledgeability. Wait, you say tobacco fields? That is right. The Connecticut River Valley produces what is historically the most prized shade tobacco in the United States. In Massachusetts, tobacco is still dried and used as wrappers for fine cigars. Were you aware of this? In all caps. He loves all caps. He's very intimidating. Someday I even hope to show this fine country to you, my semi hometown in my total home state, and to remind you of the great motto of Hampshire College, to Know is Not Enough. I look forward to hearing this letter read in its entirety on your podcast before you force me to humiliate you on mine. That is all. At 957, Chuck Bryant writes back, boy, John, did we hear about this one. It made it abundantly clear that the fine people of Massachusetts need to get right with one another and cease to throw up walls between themselves. There's enough segregation in the world. At ten four, Judge John Hodgman writes, so you have already run a correction, then? I must have missed it. That was sarcasm. Six, Chuck writes, we have not and shall not take part in the continued segregation of the fine people of Massachusetts. That is all. At. John writes, you leave me no choice but to mention this on my own podcast. Good. And I respond to him, and you leave me no choice but to scoff at it publicly on our podcast. This is like a nerd battle at this point. Yeah. And then John writes very seriously, you don't want to go down this road, Chuck. Just read my letter on the air before this gets ugly. I finally responded, if anything gets read shall be the entire exchange, John, complete with your threatening words from the alleged judge. And then he writes back, finally, you are a monster. That is the end of the exchange. That was a great dramatic reading, man. Thank you, thank you. And thank you, John. Beep, beep, beep. And sorry, I guess, to everybody who was offended by that, which was a substantial amount of people who wrote in, I guess, in Massachusetts, that would be like saying Equating. Macon with Atlanta or something. And we would say, no, macon is not even close to Atlanta. Yeah, but I don't know if I would point out the difference angrily. Well, plus, they were disassociating from Boston. Usually you glom onto the big city and they were like, no, we're not Boston. Yeah. I don't get it. I don't either. But to each his own, as we always say, right? That's right. If you want to litigate us somehow via email, maybe you can contact John Hodgman. We should probably give his personal email out. Yeah, he was so kind to copy ours. Yeah, well, you could contact us first and we'll see if we can put you in touch with John. You can reach us via Facebook at facebook. Comstuckychannow. You can tweet to us at syskmate. And then you can always send us a good old fashioned email, which we're always appreciative of, although no longer respond to every single one. Be aware that stuffpodcast@howstuffs.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The house upworks. iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | ||
439cb336-53a3-11e8-bdec-c7a75ee6e86b | Can You Eat A Tapeworm To Lose Weight? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/can-you-eat-a-tapeworm-to-lose-weight | There’s a persistent insistence that you can ingest a tapeworm and as the parasite hijacks a lot of the calories you eat, the pounds will fall right off. In theory this could be true, but it’s also extremely dangerous. And has anyone ever really done it? | There’s a persistent insistence that you can ingest a tapeworm and as the parasite hijacks a lot of the calories you eat, the pounds will fall right off. In theory this could be true, but it’s also extremely dangerous. And has anyone ever really done it? | Thu, 11 Jun 2020 11:15:18 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=11, tm_min=15, tm_sec=18, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=163, tm_isdst=0) | 38303541 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good, it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today, this July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney Nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck, your friends. And we're here to tell you about our upcoming book that's coming out this fall. The first ever Stuff You Should Know book. Chuck? That's right. What's the cool, super cool title we came up with? It's stuff you should know. Colon. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right. And it's coming along so great. We're super excited, you guys. The illustrations are amazing. And the look of the book, it's exactly what we hoped it would be, and we cannot wait for you to get your hands on it. Yes, we can. And you don't have to wait. Actually, well, you do have to wait, but you don't have to wait to order. You can go pre order the book right now, everywhere. You get books, and you will eventually get a special gift for pre ordering, which we're working on right now. That's right. So check it out soon, coming this fall. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Wucktrain. Chucker Bryant. And this is stuff you should know. The super gross. But I love it. Addition. Big time trigger warning for people. This is about tapeworms. It is disgusting and super creepy and gross, and I knew that you would love it. So great. It's just so gross. We're going all the way, baby. The word perianus comes up at least once, and not in a good way. Oh, man, Perianis, he was a good guy. He was. Best boss I've ever had. He was. Was he the one who made himself everybody's Secret Santa every year? That's right. Peri anus count on him. And he would sign his name Perius parentheses. Sorry. Well, if you don't know what Perez is just buckle up, because like you said, Chuck, it's going to be quite a ride. Because we are talking about tapeworms. And we're not talking just about tapeworms. We're talking about the idea of taking a tapeworm, ingesting it, and letting it live and grow in your body in the hopes that it will divert enough nutrients and calories away from you that you can just eat whatever you want and lose weight at the same time because you're not getting fatter. The tapeworm is right, but we're mainly just talking about tapeworms because well, I don't want to issue a spoiler. No, seriously, we'll save that for act three. Okay. So tapeworms. This is from our old houseofworks.com website, which is nice to find one of these. It is a little hidden gem hanging out. This is the Grapes, the article originally just hidden in the anus, waiting for us to discover it. That's right. Actually, it crawled its way out and dropped it off at my feet. So tapeworms the very first line of this article is, a tapeworm is like something out of a horror movie. And it really is. It is this wormy little ribbon shaped creature that is a parasite in every sense of the word. They can be very big. They can be as big as 80ft long, and they can live in a host for up to 30 years. Yeah. Like, you could get a tapeworm as a kid and that thing might be with you through every formative experience you've ever had. And you might actually be sad when it crawls out of your anus and detaches itself from you. It sounds like a Simpsons episode or something. Kind of. Yeah, maybe a little more like Cleveland Show. The good news is, if you don't live in a developing nation, then you probably don't need to worry about a tapeworm. Although it can still happen, to be sure. Yeah. But with good hygiene, good hand washing, good livestock practices, and good just overall fecal and food handling practices, it's not likely to be an issue with you. Yeah. Great practice, livestock. Great practice, everybody. Yeah. So if you are in the developing world, there is a good chance that you can get a tapeworm because in some cases, sanitation is not as great as you would like it to be. And there's more poop hanging around than there should be, or that there could be, considering other modern practices. And then even beyond that, there is a lot more living among livestock than there are and, say, like developed urban areas. Right. So even in the developed world, if you go outside of the urban areas and you start running up against pigs and cows and their poop and stuff like that, you can conceivably catch a tapeworm fairly easily. Especially if you're not really big into hand washing. Sure. Which you should be if you're around poop from animals or humans or any kind of poop. Yeah, just any time there's even any kind of coincidence of poop in your hands, even possibly just take 20 seconds, recite the alphabet and wash your hands. Because if you don't, you might get some of that fecal material in your mouth. And aboard that fecal material can be tapeworm eggs. And that is how you get a tapeworm infection one way in the developed world, you're much more likely to get it from something like eating undercooked meat. Right. I've never even had pink eye. Oh, really? Never? It's not a pleasant experience, Chuck. All right. Poopy. Yeah, I got some fecal material in my own eye couple of times, I guess. Pupae the Sailor, man. Yeah. Like I was sniffing my fingers and I guess I got too close to my eye. There you go. Get your nose confused with your eyeball. Right again. Right. I had a little itch and I was like, oh no, what have I done? It was too late. Tapeworms, like I said, are true parasites. Everything that it needs, it gets from its host. Right. And that's how it lives, man. Like you said, a true parasite. All those things that you're supposed to be getting from the food you eat, some of it is being diverted by to the tapeworm. And they absorb nutrients like gangbusters. They actually don't have a mouth, which is weird because it looks like they have several mouths, but they actually use those mouths to hang on to your intestines inside so that they don't get flushed out by the Paristolic action that helps move poop and stuff along your intestines. And instead the tapeworm is just kind of floating there, absorbing nutrients in the matrix of your gut juices, basically. And they absorb it through their skin and they're just really good at it. So much so that there's at least one type of tapeworm out there that you can actually get from eating undercooked fish. Pike, specifically, that's so good at absorbing B twelve. It can outcompete you, it's host, and you can get a pretty bad vitamin B twelve deficiency as a result. So the tapeworms live in all kinds of host animals. It could be you or me. It could be, like you said, a fish, which is pretty surprising. Yeah. Most often you hear about beef and pigs or cow, I guess, is the animal and pigs. But depending on what kind of species it is, it might have a preference for a kind of host. And I guess we should describe the body of this thing. Oh, yeah. Right now it's pretty gross. It's got a head, I guess you would call it. No, I call it the scolix. Yeah, it's called the scolax. It's the top of the worm, what we as humans might call a head. Yeah, but it looks like an old timey diving head diving helmet. You know what I mean? It's round. It's got those suckers so they look like kind of the port holes on the old diving helmet. And again, those suckers, they look like mouths that the thing would eat on. But no, they use it to suck onto the sides of your intestine. But at the top of the head, there are some hooks, like a ring of hooks that actually latch onto the like, really grip onto the side of your intestinal wall. So that tape room, once it gets its hooks and it suckers into your intestinal wall, it's not going anywhere. We should bring back the term skin diver. Sure. You remember that? Skin diver? Yeah. Wasn't that like a snorkeling? I think snorkeling or maybe even scuba is just such an antiquated term. Like, nobody uses that anymore. No, I know, because it makes no sense now, and it's possible it never made any sense. Like, I could see someone's granddad now saying, I'm going to get certified to be a skin diver. Right. And now I'm going to get me some pearls. And I thought all the kids laughing, grandpa, no one says skin diver. Right. Grandpa was probably saying a bunch of other stuff nobody says anymore, too. You know what I mean? Yeah, I know what you mean. So we're bringing skin diver back. Okay. What was the last thing you said? Something about the skolx? I said that once this thing gets his hooks and it suckers into your intestinal, it's not going anywhere. Yeah, like a good catchy tune, like you're tapeworm. So if it wasn't for the skolex this article points out the skollex is the problem. If it wasn't for this thing, your intestines would just turn it out, and you'd poop it out, no problem. But the scolex is really where the rubber meets the road as far as attaching to your body. Isn't that neat to think that Paristolic action I was talking about. It's just a bunch of quivering muscles that move in a progressive direction towards your rectum and anus and all of that, that push, like, poop out through your intestines or push nutrients through where they absorbed, but then it ultimately pushes the poop out, and that's how the whole thing works. It's just like some quivering muscles in there. And I read, Chuck, that if you take a Stimulant laxative, that's actually what it does, is it really kind of energizes and makes those muscles contract, which is good on the one hand, because it really works. But on the other hand, it's bad because your body becomes dependent on those things really quickly. So you don't want to just take those willy nilly. From what I saw, you want to try just about every other type of laxative there is. First, starting with a diet high and insoluble fiber, and then work your way on up to where you're talking to a doctor or a nurse practitioner or something before you're hitting those Stimulant laxatives. Yeah, I think the word laxative, it sort of is backward because it makes it sound like it's relaxing everything right when, in fact, it's making everything work harder. It's pretty interesting. It's all upside down and dipsy do. But I tell you what, there's a bunch of signs along the way that say one way, one way, everybody. You're going this way whether you like it or not. Right. The scolex is, like I said, where you're sticking to the intestine, and then below the scolex is the neck, and then the rest of it is from the neck down. It's just sort of the same thing. There are all these just individual segments. It can be thousands of them, at least hundreds, called the strobila. And each segment by its own is known as progladd. Yeah. And those are when you look at a tape room and it just looks like a piece of segmented tape. Those little segments, those proglottes, I did not know this at all, but they're basically reproductive organs that also contain eggs, and that the ones closest to the head are male sperm sacs. And then as you get further away from the head, those proglotids become female and egg holding. And that under some circumstances, with some species of tapeworm, they can self fertilize and reproduce themselves. Right. But more often than not, they're just kind of exchanging sperm and eggs with nearby neighbors who are, again, floating around in your intestines, absorbing nutrients and just sperming and egging everywhere inside your gut. Yeah. And you're just sitting there watching Jeopardy, and it might be 80ft long and 30 years old. You have no idea what's going on. Like, your gut may be infested with tapeworms right now, and you probably you might not know. Yeah. Isn't that creepy? It is super creepy. Yeah. All right, let's take a break. I'm going to go wash my hands again, and we'll talk more about these per glads right after this. All right. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about summer. I mean, what's not to like? School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where True crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah. And with so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and light hearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of true crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night, there's a podcast out there for you. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Are you looking for an escape or a relaxing getaway or a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of it all. Well, we know just the place. Maybe you want to solve a murder in your building, or you're just all about that paper boy. Perhaps you want to watch Hollywood's biggest monitor. Or you crave the thrill of a classic American story about horror. Or is your stomach grumbling for a milkshake flaming flamer's chip? Would you love to quench your thirst with a delicious Tranquilium house smoothie? Did you see blood analysis? As an investment opportunity, would you wear one of Dave's wooden shirts? Do you smash glasses whilst yelling who's? Well, then there's a place that has everything you love, from Atlanta to the Kardashians to only birders in the building and everything in between. Hulu is your entertainment. Getaway hulu. Check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription required terms apply visit hulu.com for plan details well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? Okay, Chuck, so you promised more proglottic talk laid on us. Yes. So these proglottes can like, the taperam is hearty, but it can also break apart. It'll still be alive. Like, make no mistake, like a chameleon's tail. It's no big whoop if some of these per glottage break off and they'll just come out of your poop. And you might look at your stool and see these things and say, like, wow, I have a tapeworm. Thank goodness I got rid of it. But don't be fooled. There might be a lot of tapeworms still back up in your body. Yeah, because remember, up toward the neck is sperm. Down lower along the body is eggs. And then the lower you get are fertilized eggs. So when those proglottes break off toward the end and make their way out in your poop, they're fully fertilized egg sacs. And that's how they enter the environment. It's all part of the lifecycle, the proglodids breaking off and making its way out of your anus. By the way, proglottes are spectacular in that not only are they segments filled with fertilized eggs, by the time they break off and leave you, they also contain muscles, meaning that they can walk on their own. So these little segments of tapeworm filled with fertilized tapeworm eggs can move and crawl their way out of your butt. So much so that there's something called discharge of the proglottids. Which is the record, right? Yes. Album. Totally. I was going to say that is so progressive, it's crazy. But when they start marching their way out of your butt, there's a crawling sensation perionus. And this is one reason why dogs with tapeworms butt scooch. And also why you might butt scoot, too, because you are trying to erase the very anus from your body to get rid of this crawling sensation, for sure. But even if they don't crawl right out of your bottom, they can still make their way out in your poop, and then they crawl away from the poop. Because if they crawl away from the poop and say, like, a pasture right, where some human is just pooped, there might be a cow nearby that eats the grass that this periglotte has broken open and deposited the eggs into the soil. And when that cow eats those eggs, this life cycle starts all over again. You know what we call that dog scooch in our house? What? The Boot Scootin Boogie. That's a good one. Whenever you see the Boot Scootin Boogie happen in your house yeah. It may not mean it's a porn, but it's not good. No. Lil Mo does it sometimes, but she does this cute thing where she does a little 180 in one place. She doesn't make a line. She stays in one spot and then just kind of does, like, the twist, and she eventually bore a hole in the floor and falls through to another dimension. That's right. Yeah. The Boot Scootin Boogie also could be, like, anal glands that need expressing or just dingleberry that needs taken care of. Bored on a Saturday night. But it's never something awesome. It's never $100 bills or just a dog that's, like, making some cool noise with their butt. Exactly. Oh, man. Yeah. So this lifecycle thing that just kicked off again, we should follow this through one more time. Okay. I actually don't even know if we've gone through this, but the thing about tapeworms, and you kind of touched on it before, is they infest different animals, but the same kind of tapeworm might infest different animals as part of its life cycle. Right? Yeah. So, like, when you just pooped in the cow pasture and that proglote opened up and deposited the eggs into the soil, and the cow eating grass ate that soil, those eggs went into that cow, and they said, okay, time to turn into our larval stage. And in the cow, they turned into larvae. But the larvae of tapeworms form like, a cyst around them. And from what I can gather, the reason that they formed the cyst is because it prevents them from setting off an immune response. Because, like you were saying, you can have a tapering infection unless it's really bad and you're becoming really malnourished as a result. And it's an adult tapering in your gut. You may never know that you had one until the thing just falls out of your bottom one day, like it's done. Or you start discharging pergolottide in your stool. The same thing with cows when they become infested with tapeworm larvae. In the cysts forms, the cysts burrow their way out of the intestinal wall and then just implant themselves in. The cow's muscles don't seem to really provide any kind of discomfort or problem. And again, they don't set off an immune response. But the reason that they deposit themselves and their muscles is because somewhere along their evolutionary history, which from what we've seen, goes back at least 270,000,000 years. They figured out that the animals eat the muscles of other animals. And so we come along and we eat the muscles of the cows. And those cysts, those larval cysts of tapeworms deposit into our guts, and they mature into the adult tapeworm so that the whole life cycle begins again. Yeah. At the larval stage, what they're trying to do, they're trying to get to the bloodstream. Right. So, like, if you eat eggs or whatever, then they'll become those cystic larvals, and then they go into the bloodstream, right? That's right. Okay. If you have the tapeworm, then you have an infection known as human. I had it. I even spelled it out. Tiny acid. Nice. Is that right? I think so. That's how I was going to say it. And if you have that, like you said, it's not a big deal. It's asymptomatic, probably, and you won't even know you've got it. But that can develop into cystosyrcosis, and that is when these things get into your bloodstream. And that is not a good thing because the chain reaction that can happen from here is pretty bad. I mean, it can lead to death. It usually doesn't, but they can be anywhere in your body. They can grow and they can inflamed tissue. So if it's putting pressure, like, near your eyeball, it can cause temporary blindness or permanent blindness. If it's near your brain, that's no good. It can cause brain damage. And in fact, in some countries, they think it's the main cause for adult onset seizure. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, I saw that. There's one guy, it's called Neurosiscarcosis. And this one doctor says that at least 5 million cases of adult onset seizures worldwide from having tapeworm cysts in your brain. So that was the appropriate response. Chuck so the thing is, when you eat a tapeworm larvae, it becomes an adult tapeworm in your gut. Humans, our bodies aren't set up, or they're not in this kind of symbiosis with tapeworm eggs to do the same thing. So if we eat tapeworm eggs accidentally, then those become the cystic larval larvae, and then that's what travels into our bloodstream and causes all of these problems. And there's specifically one kind of pig tapeworm that goes through its lifecycle from pig to human to pig. And under normal circumstances, if we eat undercooked pork and get those larvae, they're going to turn into adult tapeworms. But if we undercooked pork and we accidentally eat some eggs from that pork, then that's when that cystic or COSIS. Is that right? Yes. Cystic or COSIS can be a real problem that you will know. Like you were saying that you've got a tapeworm problem pretty quick. Yeah. If they get big, they can block your ducks, your pancreatic ducts, your bile ducts. They can get in your organs and grow within your organs, which is something that should keep you awake at night. If they get large enough in your organs. Those organs are not going to be good for very long. They can rupture sometimes, and this is just in the body, not necessarily in the organs. But if it ruptures in your body, then your body is going to amount like an immunore response. You're going to get hives. It's going to itch, it's going to swell, and you're just going to have like this massive allergic reaction. You're going to be like, what? Bug bit me. Right. Except you won't be able to talk because your throat will have closed, perhaps. So, Chuck, if you don't want a tapeworm, which hopefully by now you've realized you don't want a tapeworm, again, in the developed world, it's not that hard to avoid a tapeworm. And in the United States in particular, the meat packing industry is. I mean, it's dirty and gross and horrific, but it's actually pretty good at spotting things like tapeworms. So there's a really low chance that you're going to get your hands on meat from an American grocery store that has tapeworm cysts in it. Right, right. Probably not going to get a tapeworm. But just to be sure, the government has very conscientiously recommended some minimum cooking temperatures for things like whole cuts of meat, like a chop or a steak. Right. I think it used to be 160 Fahrenheit height. Now they've lowered it to something like 145, which is 63 degrees Celsius. And here's the key. They say after you're done cooking it to that internal temperature, which you want to meet thermometer do you have one of those? Sure. One of the best things I've ever bought, Chuck, that really up my steak game quite a bit. But the key to a good steak, and apparently to killing tapeworms and other parasites, is to letting your whole cut of meat rest for at least three minutes. I always do five after you cook, before you carve it up and start eating. Do you do that? You should do that anyway because of the flavor and the juices. It just does something amazing. Like before I started doing that, I was just a shrub. I was a total loser. I had no idea what was going on in the world. Just take it off the grill and put it in your mouth. Sure, yeah. Basically, let me put it on a plate and start eating it. Right. Once I started letting meat rest, it was like a whole new world. Yes. And here's another tip. If you want a really delicious steak, or I guess pork chop, if you don't have one of these sort of slotted cutting boards for it to rest on, use like a baker's rack or something, because you still maintain that crisp on the outer, that char. If you just let it sit in the juices, that's going to change the texture. Oh, like a grill pan or something like that. Use that. Yeah. I've got this cutting board that has basically like a grid instead of being flat. And it has a grill grate that can lift up and out of it, so it's never sitting like, not much of the meat is sitting on a board when it's resting. So you don't want it to rest in its juices? No, I want to keep it crispy. Okay. I didn't know that I'll have to try that because basically I just put it on a plate and throw some foil loosely over it or else, like, a pan cover. You cover it, too? Yeah, I always regularly I was going to keep cooking, right? Yeah, for sure. But, I mean, it's not on the flame anymore, so it's like just kind of yeah, I know. I've never tried it uncovered. Maybe I will I'll try uncovering and away from the juices and see what happens. You try covering it and leaving it in its juices. I don't even use a meat thermometer, so I think we have different state games. You don't do you like, using rare, medium rare. Medium rare. But if I know the thickness and the weight and the temperature, I don't need a meat thermometer. I stopped cooking as many steaks, so I had to go back to elementary school again. No, there's no shame in it. I'm not ashamed. I had a chef that I worked for that he just touched his he's like, you can tell the internal what the inside looks like just by touching the outside. Right. And we should tell people. They're probably people who haven't been listening that long and don't know the secret to steak that we've said before. Chuck. But you do not touch your steak. You don't cut it. You cook it. You sear it on one side for a minute and a half, two minutes tops, depending on how thick it is. Flip it over, do the same thing on the other side, and then you take it off of your oven or your grill or whatever, and move it into a convection oven. If you've got one, at about 390 degrees. Three minutes to three and a half minutes per side for six to seven minutes total. Let it rest five minutes. Thank us in the morning. I don't do mine that way either. Like I said, we got different state games. I thought you said you tried it that way before and you're like, this is amazing. I do all kinds of ways. Sometimes I do it in a pan and then stick it in the broiler. These days, I'm all about the grill again because they got a grill that can get really hot. Oh, yeah. Well, that's the key. You want to sear in those juices to keep it from escaping. Yes. Which is another reason to meet thermometer is good if you can't just use your thumb. You don't have to cut it open to look inside. You just plunge that thing in there, and it tells you. I think all this talk of steak. Has made people forget that we're talking about tapeworms. Yeah, perianous tapeworms. Should we I mean, I guess we should talk a little bit about the symptoms before we come back for the final act of tapeworms as a weight loss aid. Yeah, I agree. But you might not have infection. I'm sorry? Symptoms at first you might feel a little weak. You might have some diarrhea. You might feel dizzy or lose your appetite. You might lose a little weight. You might crave salt, which is an interesting one because I always crave salt. Yeah, I thought that was interesting, too. Or pica in general. Like if you crave eating clay or just anything that you is a little weird is a big sign. You're saying pika now. Pika. Yeah, I think I've always said that, haven't I? You always said pika. This is amazing. It's like starting our podcast all over again after twelve years. It's a refresh. Yeah, pica. That's what I'm going with now. All right, so you will deliver a stool sample. If you go to the doctor, if you suspect you have a tapeworm, you want them to ask you for it first. Sure. Just don't bring it in a bag unless you happen to see that your poop has worms in it. You could bring it in, but you could also just say, those were definitely worms in my poop. And hopefully what happens is that you've gone in there quickly enough to where it doesn't end up being a very big deal, and you take a little antiworm medication and this thing works by basically kind of paralyzing the parasite so its muscles are permanently contracted. Man, that's unpleasant. Yeah, we were talking about how that head just latches on. It's not able to latch on and it just comes right on out in your poop. I know, because it just falls out, basically. And there are plenty of videos on the internet that show tapeworms that have come out of people's anuses. If you want to go see that kind of thing, they can get really long. But that drug truck that you're talking about, the antiwarming agent, it's the same thing that they give dogs. Like any animal that's going to have a worm is going to get the same treatment. Yeah, but they found they're pretty sure this particular one, Nicolasamide, the Deworming agent, is actually also good for things like treating cancer, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, graph versus host disease, endometriosis, and a bunch of other stuff because they're like, it does something to channeling pathways of multiple channeling pathways. And it might be like this wonder drug that's just waiting to be unlocked. Isn't that neat? That is super neat. Necrosa mead. Do we take that break? Yeah, man, let's take the break. All right. Then we'll get to the big revelation. Renovation. No revelation. Yes. Can you use a tapeworm to lose weight right for this? Hey, everybody, I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about summer. I mean, what's not to like? School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah, and with so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and lighthearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of true crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night, there's a podcast out there for you to download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Are you looking for an escape? Or a relaxing getaway? Or a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of it all? Well, we know just the place. Maybe you want to solve a murder in your building where you're just all about that paper boy. Perhaps you want to watch Hollywood's biggest monitor. Or you crave the thrill of a classic American story about horror. Or is your stomach grumbling for a MILKSTAKE flamer's chip? Would you love to quench your thirst with a delicious Tranquillum house smoothie? Did you see blood analysis as an investment opportunity? Would you wear one of Dave's wooden shirts? Do you smash glasses whilst yelling Who's A? Well, then there's a place that has everything you love, from Atlanta to the Kardashians to only murders in the building and everything in between. Hulu is your entertainment. Getaway hulu. Check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription Required terms apply visit Hulu.com for plan details well, now, when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's tough. You should know. All right. No, you can't and you shouldn't. That's right. So remember Kelly Kapoor tried that, or else she considered taking it. I don't remember. Do you? Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. This has been around for a really long time, this idea that you can take it, eat a tapeworm of some sort of tapeworm? Cyst. Not eggs, because those will turn into cysts and invade your brain. You could get a tapeworm infection and start to lose weight, possibly as long as the 19th century. They think that there. So here's the thing. Do you remember when we did our episode on Flea Circuses? Sure. It was really thrilling to me, because even while we were podcasting, I still could not tell for a little while whether it was a real thing or just one of the most exquisitely perpetrated hoaxes ever. Right. And that it was still working on us. This is kind of a similar thing where it's not entirely clear if these old timey ads are real, people think they typically are, or if they were real, if anybody actually did this, or if it was some sort of farce or hoax or satire. And if it wasn't satire, how widespread was this? Because it does seem that there were 19th century ads late 19th century or early 20th century ads for sterilized tapeworm pills that women could take. They were marketed toward women to keep their figure trim, right? Of course they were marketed toward women. Right. Take a tapeworm, ladies. Exactly. There was a singer, an opera singer named Maria Callas. And this is almost certainly urban legend, but she lost, I read \u00a380 I've seen other places \u00a360 over a few months in the mid 1950s, so much so that it affected her singing as an opera singer. And we do know that she got a tapeworm at some point in her life. And we do know that she liked to eat her steak rare. But I think it looks, by and large, like it was urban legend, that it got kind of all mixed up together. And people said that Maria Callus lost weight by ingesting tapeworm. Right. Those two things did happen. She did lose weight, and she did have a taper infection probably at some point in her life, but that the two were in no way related. But based on this kind of idea that you could take a tapeworm and lose weight, that they became conflated into this urban legend, as you were saying. And that's like, the one that people point to is like, proof that this actually happened and actually it didn't happen at all like that. Supposedly there is a clinic in Tijuana called Warm Therapy, and supposedly this is the one place in the world where you can go get a tapeworm put into your body to lose weight. For about $1,300, you can get a beef tapeworm. And I've been to Tijuana a few times and never sought out worm therapy, but apparently it existed, or still exists. It's not clear. So they have a website. I think it's wormthropy.com. Org.edu. It has contact form fields. It shows a map of where it is, and it isn't t one and all that. There's a phone number. I didn't call the phone number, but it's one of those things like, is it actually real number one, or is it just a hoax website? If it's not a hoax website, and it actually is a helmet therapy, because remember in our Hook Worms episode, we were talking about that theory that losing some kinds of parasitic worms they think actually harmed our immune system and led to a rise in crohn's and stuff like that. Yeah. So there are clinics out there in the world that use parasitic worms to help autoimmune diseases. So it's possible that worm therapy does that and that they don't do the beef tapeworm thing but the urban legend is that they did, at least as recently as 2009, they offered it. It's just not clear whether any of this is true or not. Right. What we do know is true is that to purposely do this is not a good idea. It is not a healthy way to lose weight, and you're not even going to lose, like it said, that you can expect to lose one to \u00a32 from a tapeworm a week. You can lose that much with a pretty aggressive diet and exercise plan. Yeah. Supposedly just cutting 500 calories out from your diet every day, every week, you could lose a pound. You can look forward to losing a pound. So yeah, exactly. Taking a tapeworm to do that is not a good idea, especially considering because that tapeworm is competing for nutrients from you, you're going to end up with a pretty nice little case of malnutrition if it gets pretty bad. So your body is going to talk you into eating more than you normally would. Right. So you'll develop even worse eating habits than you did you have before the tapeworm infection. So that when you finally get around to taking a Deworming agent and it gets rid of that tapeworm, when you just keep eating again, you're going to gain that weight right back, and you're probably going to gain more weight back because you've developed even worse eating habits from having the tapeworm. And again, all of this is based on the idea that any of this is even true to begin with, which is totally unclear still at this point. Yes, totally. So that's it. Don't take a tapeworm to lose weight. Just exercise and diet. That is it. There's no better diet fat than that. Just exercise and diet and you will lose weight and feel healthier and better and sleep better and have less chronic disease and just be far better off. That's it. That's right. You got anything else? No. Well, since Chuck said no, it's time for listener mail. This is from a high school student. We love hearing from high school students. This is from Kate. Kate says, Hi, guys. I am a junior in high school from Massachusetts. Discovered the podcast in September at the start of the school year, and I've loved it ever since. It definitely makes my morning car rides much more interesting, and it does wonders to decrease my horrible road rage. I feel you can't recently as I was driving to Cape Cod, I was listening to your Spartacus episode. I've been studying Latin since 6th grade, and this year was my first year taking ancient Greek. So needless to say, I'm a huge nerd when it comes to Roman history. I couldn't help but to laugh when I heard you both struggling to pronounce the names of the Roman consuls and their other important historical figures. This quarantine has really been tough on me, guys, like it has on everyone. And I really needed that laugh, so I thought I would write to you as a sort of thank you note. Although your pronunciation may not have been great, the whole episode really did wonders to lighten my mood and make me feel better. Even though things are crazy right now, always know that I have your podcast to listen to when I'm feeling down or just want to smile. Wishing you health and happiness, that is from Kate in Massachusetts. Thanks a lot, Kate. That was nice of her to say. Our pronunciation may not have been great. Yeah, what she means is, guys, you were way off. That's terrible. Well, that was very nice, Kate. And nice to hear that we're helping you out there. And thank you for writing in. And if you are like Kate and we're helping you out, we always love hearing that kind of thing. You can send an email to us if you like. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuff Podcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and 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." | |
42967454-53a3-11e8-bdec-33f8fc35aa8f | NYC Water: An Engineering Marvel | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/nyc-water-an-engineering-marvel | Getting the rain and melted snow from upstate NY into the taps of every NYC resident and business is one of the great feats of engineering. Does it taste great and make perfect bagels and pizza crust? Sources say yes! | Getting the rain and melted snow from upstate NY into the taps of every NYC resident and business is one of the great feats of engineering. Does it taste great and make perfect bagels and pizza crust? Sources say yes! | Thu, 14 Nov 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=318, tm_isdst=0) | 46093458 | audio/mpeg | "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. With no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is like the easiest decision in the history of decisions, kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with Capital One's top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply capital One n A member FDIC seattle, we're coming to see you. Yes. And your little horn announcement is one of my favorite things that you do because I know it means we're going to do a live show. And in this case, we're going to the great state of Washington, the greatest city in the United States, seattle at the greatest theater in the world. The more the more we're going back. It's like our home away from home in Seattle. We're going to be there Thursday, January 16, and tickets are already on sale, and they're going like Washington hot cakes. That's fast. Yes. They're going like TrueCar cherries. And you know what? If you want to save a few bucks, I think you can even go to the box office there and buy them without those Internet fees. Yes. Or if you don't care and you just want to buy them on the Internet, you can go to Sysklive.com and follow the links there, and it will take you right to the beautiful ticket site. And also, FYI, if you go to buy tickets in person, you want to go to the box office of the Paramount Theater downtown. Not the more the paramount. We'll see you guys in January. 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 guest producer andrew this is stuff you should know. Let's get busy. I'm excited about this one. This was your pick. And I was like, what is Chuck talking about? Were you really? Yes. And then, Chuck, I happened to stumble upon I don't know what I was looking for, but an email from somebody who sent, like, a Google doc or something. That was a list of episodes we said we should do, and people have sent those in before, but this one was kind of condensed, and that was on there. So I've stumbled upon your dirty little secret. I don't think that's where I got it. Oh, really? I don't think so, but maybe. Okay. I just know that I am always fascinated by not only New York City, but by the fact that New York City functions with that many people and all that everything. It's just all amazing to me that the city functions with that many people, that many buildings. I want to do an episode on trash removal. Okay. I want to do one on wastewater treatment. Yeah. Not just New York, in general. That's been long brewing. Are you okay with that? Yeah. I mean, we can mention New York or whatever. Big thanks to Dave Ruse, though. One of our great writers, they put this together, and it's really fascinating. Dave is just an amazing human. He's great. All of our writers are amazing, for sure. Dave is great as well. He's one of a few select, amazing people. Right? So the reason why anybody would ask about New York's water is because if you've ever interacted with the New Yorker, they talk about their water a lot. It's like kind of a thing in New York where they're like, our tap water is the best water in the country, and they have a lot of stuff to back that up with. So much so that they say, this water is actually the reason why our bagels and our pizza are so good. Yeah, we were both just there for our final shows of the year at the Bell House, thanks to people who came out. Yes, they were great. A lot of fun. And by the way, the guy that fell asleep on the front row on night number two I think it was night number two, I was walking down the street, and he randomly passed by, driving in a car and rolled down his window and said, hey, man. He said, Great show the other night. Right? I was waiting for him to say, Is that Freedom Rock? And I said, thanks, dude. I was like, front row. And he was so excited that I remembered, and he said, Front row, and he drove on before I had a chance to say, you fell asleep. He's like, I feel like I was there. Maybe I felt like a dream, too. I don't know. But we were just there. And there are many restaurants in New York where there will be, like, a water cooler or a place where you can help yourself to your own cup of water, and it will have a big sign on it that says, new York City Tap Water and Proud all caps underlined letters. Yeah, and they mean, like, they're just getting water out of the tap. Whereas in other cities, that's a dirty, shameful secret that people don't talk about. That's right. In New York, they probably boast about it. And just the fact that New York or any New Yorker in the city gets water at all is pretty spectacular. Like you said, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of buildings, and something like more than a billion gallons of water flow into New York through the taps every day. Yes. I said day with the D. Yes, it is the largest water system in the United States. People from all over the world, government officials fly in and take meetings with the New York City water people just to see how have you done it? They're just a GOG. How could we do better? That's impressive enough that more than a billion gallons of water is delivered every day to New Yorkers. Pretty great. But the idea that you can just drink it straight from the tap and it is 90% unfiltered, that is a truly impressive feat. Yeah. And by 90% unfiltered, we mean 90% of the water is unfiltered and 10% is filtered. Right. And you might say, how can you just filter 90% of the water? Well, it comes from different places. That's right. So 90% of the water comes from two places. Two watersheds that combined are called the Catskill Delaware Watershed or water system, I think. And then the other one from the Crow Croughton, I always want to say crow towing, but from the Crowd Reservoir, that 10% is actually filtered. We'll get into all of that. But 90% of New York's water, it doesn't go through a filtering process. And that makes New York one of only five major cities in the United States to get a waiver from the EPA that says your water is so deliciously, pure and delightful that you don't need to filter it. Almost every other city has to have a filtering process before it gets delivered to taps. That's right. And the other four, naturally. Seattle, Portland, Oregon, San Francisco. The one that's a bit of a surprise is Boston, Massachusetts. What? That's how surprising it is, Chuck. Yeah, that's right. So let's talk a little bit about the history of New York and their water. Because back in the day we've always talked about what a disgusting, disease ridden, poop and horse urine ridden place New York City was. Yeah. Supposedly there was a good twelve inches of horse manure on the street at all times before they really started cleaning their place up. Yeah, it's pretty bad. I think that was in the Wind Cries Typhoid Mary episode, which is a great one. Another great New York episode. So if we're talking New Amsterdam, pre New York City, they got water where you would think from ponds and natural springs, underwater springs, and they had a 48 acre pond. It's about 60ft deep in Tribeca, what is now Tribeca, called the Collect, and also the little collect that was just south of there. And that name comes from the Dutch word caulk, which means small body of water. And the collect was where they got their water for a long time until the city let some tanners. Built a tannery on the shores of the Collect not smart New York, which ruined everything. Yeah, because it started to get polluted. They also were able to drill wells and stuff around places where people pooped and peed and then dumped their poop and pee. It was a dirty, dirty place because this is pre germ theory, or at least around the time that germ theory was being developed and people didn't understand it. And I think it was our great stink episode where they traced the cholera epidemic to a public well, a public water pump. John Snow, if I remember correctly, did that. And this would have been around the time that New Yorkers were suffering from cholera epidemics, one of which took place in, I think, the 1832. It killed 3500 New Yorkers and that was a substantial amount of the population at the time. And another 1000 New Yorkers had to flee just to get away from this caller epidemic. And it was because their sewage and their water was coexisting in very unhealthy ways. So New York said, maybe we should try something else. Let's look a little further outside of the city where we are dumping our waste and everything and see if we can get our water from there. And they did. They built the Crouton Reservoir. They damned the river and reservoir collected and they said, now we have some beautiful, pure water. We will never need to do anything again to get our water. That's right. Previous to that, though, in the 18th century, they had these public pumps like you were talking about on street corners about every four blocks or so, a big wooden pump where you would get your water from underground streams and springs and stuff. But there were only a few of these that actually delivered good water. A lot of it was really brackish and gross tasting. And Americans and early European settlers obviously love their tea. And so they marked this was almost like an early Yelp or whatever. They had these pumps that actually delivered the two or three good pumps in the city that delivered good water, labeled tea water pumps, like it was good enough to use for tea, good enough to use for making good tea, okay? And so they would go to these tea water pumps. You would have to buy the water. The best one was apparently at Chatham and Roosevelt. There was another and sort of what the Lower East Side is today. That was a good tea water pump. And this worked out for a long time until the collect and all this stuff, it started to sort of get nasty and stinky. And so they built a canal to channel that water into the river. Like, we got to get rid of it and drain this thing, right? So they build this canal 40ft wide. They channel it. Right after they finish it, this canal begins to sink. And in 1821, it got so bad, the smell was so bad that they eventually just covered up the canal. And guess what that became? I don't know. Central Park Canal Street. How about that? That's so stupid. I wasn't even in the right part of the city. That's all right. We've even done an episode on Central Park and that wouldn't forget it. Yes. Canal street. Obviously, that's where Canal Street came from. That was literally a canal. And then eventually an underground sewage system running under Canal Street. Right. And there's another cool little tidbit if you want, like your little New York history, if you like to walk around on subways and tell people about cool things. One of the first public reservoirs in the city was dug by Aaron Burr and his Manhattan Company, and that didn't work out. They transported it through wooden logs as pipes buried beneath the city. Somebody found a piece of that wooden log that's in one of the museums up there now. Oh, no way. Yeah. That is very cool. But the water didn't taste great, and it didn't work out for Aaron Burr, so he still kept the Manhattan Company, but he got into banking, and the Manhattan Company became Chase Manhattan Bank. I saw somewhere that was his aim all along, that the water thing was just basically a fleece to raise money to found out. Really? And that's why the water was so shoddy and the delivery was so shoddy, but what they were selling was so bad, supposedly, the horses wouldn't even drink it. So it's a scam. It was basically a scam. Erinburg was not the greatest historical American shot. Alexander Hamilton. I know. That's enough right there. Right. And then also scammed a bunch of people out of their water investment. That's right. Because, I mean, if you want to invest in a bank, you want to invest in a bank. If you want to invest in a water outfit, you want to invest in a water outfit. You want people to be above the boards with stuff like that. That's right above the whole sorry, that's my tirade. So you mentioned the Crouton Dam and the Croton reservoir. I want to say Crow Atone as well. Yeah, that became and that aqueduct became operational, and things were okay. But then a tragedy struck with the Great Fire of 1835. Yes. Which actually, I guess that the Great Fire took place right before the reservoir was open, which is why the Great Fire so bad. Yeah. So in 1835, on the night in December, a warehouse caught fire, and it just leveled Lower Manhattan. Like, just destroyed something like 17 city blocks, 50 acres of the most densely populated part of New York at the time. And luckily, only two people died. Too many. But considering that it was 17 city blocks that got reduced to ash, that's not bad, actually. Especially considering that the way that they ended up fighting this fire was by setting buildings on the perimeter on fire because they didn't have the amount of water that they needed. Yeah. The reason for that, it was just sort of really bad luck. There were two smaller fires that drained our like, I'm a New Yorker. Listen to me. You're an honorary New Yorker. I would guess it drained the cisterns. The reserve cisterns. That they had. And because of those two smaller fires, they didn't have enough to fight the great fire. And the long and short of all of this is New York said, we got to really speed up this Crouton reservoir work. Yeah, and they did. And so the Crowd Reservoir was brought online in the middle of the 19th century, and they had a big old parade and everything, and it delivered something like 90 million gallons of delicious pure water to New York in the middle of the 19th century. It was a really big deal, and it worked really well for a very long time. But there was also they built the Murray Hill reservoir. So the Crowdon Reservoir would be where the water collected upstate. And then they build an aqueduct system, which is still around in parts today, an elevated aqueduct to what's called the Murray Hill Reservoir, which is a four acre above ground swimming pool, basically. It's pretty cool if you look at pictures. Yeah, it was like a real spot in the city while it was around, I think something till went 1842 to 1900, it was around, and people used to take strolls around it and make paintings of it and that kind of thing. And it is where the New York Public Library is now today, where the ghostbusters did some of their early work. Right. But it worked really well for the time. But then as New York grew and grew and grew, it became very painfully obvious yet again that New York had outgrown its water supply. Yeah, they needed more water. 90 million gallons a day wasn't enough. And then what made matters worse was in 1898, New York City officially made it a declaration that we are now not just Lower Manhattan. Of course, they didn't call Lower Manhattan at the time. That was just sort of where the city ended. They called it Manahatta. Yeah, manahatta. I saw that episode, by the way. It was one of the better ones ever. Which one? Of what we do in the dark. Oh, that's right. Where they go to party in Manhattan. Manhattan, yeah. What we do in the shadows. Yeah. I'm so stupid. That's all right. The five boroughs were included in New York, and the water needed to get to the people was officially grown to more than 3 million people by the time the 20th century turned. Right. Which is just precious today. 3 million New Yorkers. Oh, my gosh, they do. So they started to look upstate again because they had hit upon, like, a pretty good idea. The city is a cesspool. We need our water from outside of the cesspool. And they started looking upstate. So this time, they looked up to the cat skills, and they found two watersheds, which we did an episode on watersheds that I would love to forget, but it came up just now. Oh, I thought it was good now. Oh, man. It was horrendous. Was it? Yes, I thought it was terrible and boring. January 2017 I don't remember when it came out. Like I said, I tried to forget that it ever happened. I thought it was pretty good. But anyway, so a watershed is basically a specific topographical air area where rain, snow, whatever, precipitation falls down into this area and is delivered to a specific creek, river, stream, something like that, that eventually empties into like a lake or reservoir or something like that. So there's two watersheds, the Delaware and the Catskill watershed that put together create something like 2000 sq mi of water catching goodness and it delivers it to a number of different reservoirs. And that is now today where New York gets like 90% of its water. Yeah. So obviously they had to dam up rivers to create these reservoirs. And this all happened in the early nineteen hundred s. And then finally they were like great, we've got all these reservoirs and the Catskills. But let me remind you we're on the Lower East side of Manhattan surrounded by horse urine, a lot of it and poop. We need our fresh water. How do we get it here? So in 1917, the engineers of New York City completed the 92 miles Cat Skill Aqua duct, which is amazing. It's basically a big concrete tunnel that sends water 92 miles from the Catskills down to New York. It's as wide as 30ft in some places. It is not a tunnel the entire length as we will see here in a minute. Not a continuous tunnel. Right. I'm not sure what that means. What is it just like open? No, there's parts of it that aren't technically a tunnel in that it's a covered trench. They cut a trench and then they covered it back up. Which I don't know how you do that, but it's not technically a tunnel. Like a circle or tube. Interesting. And here is to me one of the facts of the show. You get this water down there in the aqueduct and you get to the Hudson River and what are you going to do? You got to go under it. Right. To me it'd just be like just pump it in the Hudson and hope it comes out the other side. But then I would have gotten fired immediately when I experienced that idea. He's no engineer. No, he's a sham. He's a reps scallion. So it gets to the Hudson River and then it goes way down into the ground about 1100ft below sea level and then climbs back up the other side. And it does all this via gravity? Yes. And they did that not just to show off, but because they decided I read this awesome. You know how I'm always like read the contemporary articles? I read one from 19 Seven where they were talking about the construction of the aqueduct and they said that the reason why they were going down that far is because they wanted to hit bedrock because it would be fissure free, meaning there would be no leakage and they could just pump the water through the hole that they board in the bedrock. Well, they thought the bedrock was going to be about 500ft down, and by 19 seven when they wrote the Scientific American article, they'd reached like 700ft, still hadn't hit it. It ended up being like 1100ft below sea level where they finally hit bedrock. And that's why they had to drill so far down. And they drilled a tunnel, a vertical shaft from the Hudson down to that tunnel, and they built like, a tube to pressurize it. So the water 1001 0ft under the Hudson is at like 15 tons per square foot of pressure, which also helps. But the fact that there's no pumps or anything, it's all gravity and pressure driven. Yes. And sadly, though, that story has a sad ending because it took so long that their fisher free and three Tshirts were all rendered useless. What? No. I don't know. That was a great joke. I'm going to go back and listen to it and I'll probably think it's hilarious. Andrews compliments on it in advance. Oh, man, that was a quality joke. Got you. Okay, sure. All right. I got you. We're all together now. Okay. That was a pretty good joke. Geez. Should we take a break after that? Yeah. All right, let's take a break. We'll talk a little bit more about this Socalled aqueduct 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. 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Go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20% off with interactive monitoring. Just go to Simplisafecom. Stuff you should know. Okay, Chuck, so we've got the cat scale aqueduct delivering water. There's another one too, called the Delaware Aqueduct. And this one actually is like a genuine tunnel. Yes. It's 85 miles, completed in 44. I'm not going to make a t shirt joke about that. And it is still the longest continuous tunnel in the world at 85 miles. And they did this all just this digging process is amazing in and of itself. Digging these tunnels and these trenches with steam shovels and pouring the concrete tunnel, which I was like, how do you do that? Even you do the bottom half, let it set, and then you do the top half and let that set. So they were like Charles Bronson and the Great Escape. They were digging tunnels. Yeah. I mean, we're talking like dynamite and stuff like that. They really did it the old school way to build these aqueducts. And they're still in use today. So much so that there's three tunnels. Tunnel number one and tunnel number two have been in operation since 1917 and 1936. They've never stopped operating. They've never been stopped up and drained and inspected in over 100 years for tunnel number one. Yeah, I think the current memo going around is, I'm sure it's fine. Well, so they're building tunnel number three, and they decided to start building tunnel number 319 54. They actually started in 1970. They are still not done with tunnel number three. It's amazing. Parts of it are online. And when it does fully come online, tunnel number three will have a capacity enough so that they can individually stop and drain and inspect and repair tunnel number one. And then eventually tunnel number two. Yeah, tunnel number three will save the other two. And it's good that they're doing it now, but I saw that it's going to be fully operational in 2021, they think. Oh, wow. So we're almost there. Almost. Man. Yeah. It's the New York's longest running municipal project. $5 billion price tag so far and counting, I guess. And then those three tunnels, or two and however many parts of three are working, deliver 1.3 gallons of water a day through a network of mains and then individual pipes leading to apartments and homes and businesses and skyscrapers. And all of those pipes, if you total them up, would lay out about 7000 miles. That's pretty impressive. I would also like to point out that I think you meant 1.3 billion gallons. What did I say? 1.3 gallons. Did I really? Which would be hilarious that they went to all this trouble, spend all this money, and they're like, we can crank out 1.3 gallons a day, new York, gather round and get your water. I was still thinking about my t shirt joke, and here's the kicker, too. Another great fact of the show. Only 5% of all of the city's water relies on pumps to get to its final destination, which means your tap. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. So that means that it can't break down, or if something does happen, they still have things like gravity to help things along. It's great. So the reason why the EPA gave New York a waiver and said, you don't have to filter the water coming from the Catskill in the Delaware watersheds is because giuliani greased the palms of the EPA. Exactly. Well, it started out as so pure and pristine and just great water to begin with, but they have taken steps along the way to ensure that it stayed that way, because one of the things that happened with the Crouton Reservoir is development was allowed to grow up around it. Agriculture was allowed to pollute it. It turned. And after that, EPA, I think, in the late 90s, said, you guys have to start filtering that water. It's no longer unfilterable. It's not drinkable as is. So they had to start filtering. It. Used to be 100% of New York's water was unfiltered. That Crouton Reservoir now is 10% that is filtered. Right. So they learned a valuable lesson from that, and now they're very proactive in keeping the Delaware and Catskill watershed water from becoming corrupted by things like development and agriculture. Yeah. And the lesson they learned is money, because you might be thinking, like, what's a big deal? Why don't they just filter all of it? It's a lot cheaper to take care of the land and make sure you never have to filter it than to install a filtering plant. Yeah. Because they estimate that a filtering plant would cost something like $10 billion upfront and then $100 million a year to operate. New York is spending something like $1 billion every several years to protect the Delaware and the Catskill watersheds. So it is an enormous investment, but also it's great because it's natural water that's unfiltered. Yeah. And they do this in a number of ways, aside from buying up 40% of the land, which was a good move, and making sure nothing happens to it. Yeah. So New York City owns a lot of land upstate. Oh, yeah. Just FYI. Yeah. 40%. Yeah. That's a lot of land. It is not 40% of New York State, but 40% of the property around the Catskill and Delaware watersheds. They also did things like, hey, let's look at all the wastewater treatment facilities upstream, and let's invest a lot of money in upgrading those. Hey, all you people that have septic tanks that are falling apart, that matters. So we're going to reimburse you 5200 homeowners. Yeah. That's impressive. Yes. Install a new septic tank, and we're going to pay for it. They remove dead trees. They replace those with little sapling trees who apparently have roots that are young and can absorb a lot of harmful nutrients from that rainwater. And here's another good fact of the show. Some of the water from those reservoirs or from that watershed can take up to a full year to make its way down to the tap that you're drinking out of. That's a good one. I like that one. It's almost like how long it takes sunlight to reach us. I know you're going to say that it's the same thing. It's the same thing. They also did you talk about farmers? The only difference between those stats is you don't have to explain what a photon is, right? You can just say water. It's a tiny packet of light. It's the carrier of electromagnetic energy. What did you ask right before that? Did you talk about the farmers, how they trained farmers upstate, too? I did not. So they say, hey, you. hicked. You're going to learn these techniques. Oh, man. I'm just kidding. I love farmers. I would actually, as a matter of fact, Chuck, when I retire, I really want, like, a small working farm. Oh, yeah, very small. Like, what do you want, like a 10th of an acre small? No. What kind of stuff do you want to farm? What do you want on it? Oh, I don't care. Some animals, but having pigs around, not to eat or milk, but basically to churn up, like, a field so that I can plan it the next year and move the pigs to the next part of the land. That kind of stuff. For chickens to just walk around and eat their eggs and things like that. You want some chickens, some pigs, probably a couple of goats. A couple of goats? You want some planting, you want to farm some plants and vegetables? Sure, yeah. But mainly just to have something to do with the earth. So I was 100 million% teasing when I said that New York was calling the farmers hicks. New York probably did call the farmers hicks, but I wasn't condoning that. I was just making a joke. Right. You're the guy who wants a 10th of an acre one day to do something on that. You're not sure those pigs are going to be like, there's some pretty tight corners around here. Oh, you know what else I would do? And I would need more of more than a 10th of an acre for this. Raise bees. That is where I will eventually raise bees on Josh's farm. Well, brother, you better get some land soon, because it's leaving at a random pace. Land is leaving? Yeah. People are buying land. I remember my parents looking at land when I was, like, ten years old, and they didn't buy it. They said, it's leaving and it's a different deal now. It's a lot harder to find the land that you want. People bought it all up. I know you can still get it, but you got to pay through the nose for it. Yeah. Or it's up to them if they want to sell it or not. Sure. We're getting second rate. We're getting sloppy seconds. Oh, man. That's going to be one of those things that, like, our younger listeners is going to be in college, smoking pot in a dorm room, and it will just hit them. What you just said, like, 15 years on. Oh, goodness. So you mentioned the Crouton watershed needs the filtering, and they're trying to avoid that at all cost with the other watersheds. But the Croat and water supply, when they built this filtering system, it costs $3.2 billion. And it's under a golf course in New Jersey, which is so appropriate. That's where the tainted water is. Under a golf course in Jersey. In bedminster, perhaps. Sure. I don't know what that is, but it sounds right. Some people will get that one. New York's like, hey, you Hicks, build a golf course over this. New York just calls everybody else Hicks. And that's right, they do. When we fly in, they welcome Hicks. Right. So have we taken our second break yet? No. We probably should, though. This is a good time. Okay, we're going to take another break and we're going to come back and explain what New York does do to its water and whether or not it is a secret ingredient in bagels and pizza. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of demand to ensure more customers can buy more Sherpa like jackets you call IBM to automate your It infrastructure with AI. 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And SimpliSafe offers comprehensive protection not only against intruders and burglary, but against expensive home hazards, from flooding to fires. You can customize the perfect system for your home in just a few minutes at SimpliSafe. comStuff. Go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20% off with interactive monitoring. Just go to SimpliSafe.com. Stuff You Should Know. Josh and Shawn. Stuff you should know. All right, Chuck, so one thing that you're going to want to say if you're a New Yorker and you're boasting about your tap water, there are some things you should know. Number one, it's chlorinated. Number two, it's been run through a UV filter. Even if it hasn't been filtered filtered? There's still things that are done to it. It's not like it's coming straight out of the cat skills into your tap. Yeah, they take it very seriously. Obviously. Here's a good stat. In one year, there are more than 15,000 water samples taken and analyzed at the source. So this is upstream, right. They have AI. Well, not AI. Or is it AI? There's AI involved somehow. There always is. I always ask if it's a I always ask you because, you know sure. I know. Thanks. Tune The End of the World with Josh Clark. Thanks for the plug. Still available on itunes, the Iheart podcast app, or wherever you find your podcast. Wow. That wasn't just a plug, that was an ad. So they have these robotic buoys that monitor the Kinseko Reservoir, one of the reservoirs that feeds down into New York, and these things take 1.9 million measurements a year and wirelessly transmit that back to the Department of Environmental Protection in New York. Yes, which is pretty awesome. And they had a buoy before, but they had to remove it in winter because ice would mess with it. And this new one, apparently, is ice loving. Oh, yeah. If you walk down the street, there's something like 1300 no, 965. Little gray boxes that if you could open up, you would find a little sink and a faucet. That's adorable. Maybe a little sample size of Loxitane soap. And that's a water sampling station. It says Nydep Department of Environmental Protection. And scientists walk up to these things, unlock them and take samples and test for all sorts of different things to make sure that the water getting to New York is good. Yeah, it says more than that. It says New York City Drinking Water Sampling Station on the front of it. Oh, wow. They really spell it out. It's yeah, it said Fisher free. And three, they're testing they take 1300 water samples a month. I'm not sure if you said that, but they were from these particular stations and they do all kinds of tests or testing, obviously, for turbidity, which is cloudiness PH, chlorine bacteria. Does it stink? Like, all kinds of tests that they're doing. Right. And usually the New York City water is going to pass all these tests. There's not going to be a problem. This is just an extra little quality assurance that they're doing, because by the time it reaches these testing stations, that's where it's going to the taps anyway. It's tapping into the tap water, basically, so that 10% of water goes through a couple of extra steps that the other 90% doesn't go through. One of the first things it does in a treatment plan is it's mixed with alum, which is a component of aluminum. Right. And alum attracts organic compounds and basically says, rise to the surface. With me, it creates flock, which is a white frothy sludge, and all that is just skimmed off the top. That's step one. Yeah. This sounds so gross. And it is. Yes. But in the end, you get your good water. The next thing that happens is it flows through these giant water filters. Dave put it as like, these giant bridge filters. It's essentially sort of the same thing. And this is just going to further purify the water, passing through layers and layers of stuff like sand and anthracite. And then comes the ultraviolet light that you referenced earlier, right? Yes. And 100% of New York's water is sent through a UV filter because UV filters are really good at disrupting reproduction of bacteria, and so all water is up, but that 90% of water that's not filtered. That goes through a separate UV filtering plant that's built just for those. That's right. That's where, like, a billion gallons of water a day are zapped with UV lights. So all of that gets combined together eventually and comes out your tap. And New Yorkers drink it straight from the tap, literally. It is very bizarre because I don't know if it's a placebo effect or what, but I feel like it does taste pretty good for tap water. It does. But at the same time, I typically don't drink just straight tap water, so my frame of reference isn't necessarily right there. You want to hear something funny? Yeah. You know what my brother's favorite water is? And it's probably just a bit, but he claims it's true. What? Hose water. Oh, I know what he's talking about. Yeah, like when you're watering the car or watering the car. When you're washing the car. Grow car when you're watering your mini. So it grows into an SUV. Right. So I think the reason why Scott is onto something is because when you're drinking from a hose, it's summertime and it's hot out. Yeah. And you're probably working hard. It definitely does taste different. For sure. So when it comes to New York water, everyone says it's the best in the country. There are rankings, actually, and it is 13 out of 100 metro areas in the US. So it's not the best. Literally, by definition, not the best water in the country. You got to move to Arlington, Texas if you want. And this was from ten years ago, but I'm not sure what the current status is. Imagine Arlington still up there, though. Sure. But you're going to have to have a lot more reasons than that to move to Arlington, Texas. Ouch. That one I'm not taking back. What are some of the problems with New York water? Well, there's two big problems. Turbidity, which you mentioned earlier, which is sediment suspension in the water, which gives it kind of a cloudy or darker, gritty kind of look, which is not just that it looks bad. Pathogens can cling to that sediment, so it's not something you want to spend spending. Plus, it also makes it much more difficult to filter that stuff out. It's like extra work that has to be done to get rid of that sediment. And if you're not filtering your water to begin with, that's kind of a problem. And then secondly, the other one is nutrients. It's over nutrient, meaning it's just packed with riboflavin. Well, what it actually is is fertilizer runoff. Those farmers are doing their best, but there is fertilizer that goes downstream and runs into the watersheds. And phosphorus is one of the biggest problems because farmers do fertilize with phosphorus, and if it runs off, the phosphorus alone is not great because it can cause algae blooms and stuff like that. And it can taste bad and stink. Yeah, because when the algae dies, it decays and it does not smell good. No, it does not smell good. But a bigger problem, though, is when you combine that with the chlorine. Because like we said, New York water is chlorinated and fluoridated. We have the T shirts to prove it. Right. I don't think we said it was fluoridated, but yeah, everybody knows. Yeah, it's fluoridated. Right. And when you combine that chlorine with the phosphorus, it can create byproducts called disinfectant byproducts. And that is no good at all. No, those are nasty. They're called DPPS, and they are basically like chemicals that are accidentally made from sanitizing water. And not just with chlorine, but chlorine. Chloramine. There's a bunch of different stuff that they use to disinfect water, and all of them can combine with organic compounds to create really just nasty stuff like carcinogens. Some can produce miscarriages. It's just really, really bad stuff that can be produced in the drinking water. Chloroform is one of those byproducts. Yes, which is why New Yorkers frequently faint when they're drinking tamp water. But this all sounds super scary. New York City, I think there are eight known contaminants, but they are still apparently well under the legal limit, depending on what you think about how the legal limits are set. Of course. Right, exactly. It's a good caveat. But New York City drinking water is 30.9 parts per billion chloroform, and the national average is eleven. So they're way higher in chloroform. But as far as all of those DBPs total, they're far below the legal limit and just a little bit above average nationally. Right. And then the total number of DBPs that they have is actually less than those in Arlington. Interesting. Chew on that, Arlington. That's right. Chew on that. Bad pizza. Speaking of chewing chuck and pizza, let's just answer this question. Is New York City's water, the key ingredient to New York City bagels and pizza. You can't definitively say, but I think it does have something to do with it, for sure. It's got to, because science is involved. So here's the thing. The water from the Catskills and from the Delaware is naturally soft, meaning that it's low in calcium and magnesium. Where do you fall on loving softer, hardwater? I'm a hardwater guy. Same here, ma'am. When I lived in Arizona, they had soft water where I lived and my sister's house that I lived in. And most of the houses had water softened, or I guess hardening units or whatever in the house. Yeah, because you can't feel clean. Like, you never feel like you got the shampoo or the soap off. It's awful. It's just awful. Does anyone like soft water? I don't know. Weirdos, probably. I mean, hardwater. Sorry. No, I had it all backwards. Okay, so you like soft water? Yeah, that's why I misspoke. They had water softeners in Arizona because the water was hard. New York. Water is soft. I like soft. Okay. I like hard water, typically, because I feel like I'm clean afterward. But soft water, like, just the New York water is fine with me. But a softened, like a chemically softened water, I can't stand. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. But New York is naturally soft, so it doesn't have calcium, magnesium, or it's very low in those things comparatively. And that actually has an effect on taste. Like, calcium and magnesium can provide, like, a bitter taste to water. So there's one thing that they're saying, like, okay, the dough isn't going to taste naturally bitter because of the calcium magnesium. That's something. That is something. And it also interacts with the flour. If you're going to make a bagel or a Biali or pizza crust or a lot of things when you're baking. But those are the big three in New York. You're going to be using flour and water as your base for your dough and hard water. The minerals in those tap water are going to fortify the gluten, and they're going to make it tough and less flexible. You don't want it too soft, though, because it will have the opposite effect and will be gooey and you won't be able to work it as well. Right. And apparently the American Chemical Society says new York City tap water is the goldilocks of bagel water. It is just right. Yes. Not too hard, not too soft. Just perfect for a bagel and for a pizza. And the American Chemical Society quote came from a Smithsonian article, and they went on to say, probably, though, it's actually the techniques that New Yorkers use to make bagels. Like, they poach the bagel dough first, like they boil it. That's the only way to do a bagel. Sure. It's not boil. It's not a bagel. No, it's not. It's like a baked donut. It's not a doughnut, basically. And then they also will let the yeast sit for a little while to make it ferment, which creates volatile flavor compounds. So it just tastes better, they're saying. Probably those are the reasons why New Yorkers make better bagels or pizza. And it's not really the water. The water just contributes a very small amount. I think it's all those things. Why not? No one can say for certain. So let's just say, yes, it is all those things. Well, if you want to know more about New York City's tap water, go on to New York City and try their tap water. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail, everybody. I'm going to call this house rolling. We talked about TPing houses. Yes. Love the podcast, guys. Just finish up trick or treating and you're talking about rolling houses. I grew up in Franklin, Tennessee, where we used to roll houses all the time. In Franklin, Tennessee, for people don't know is where a lot of big shot Nashville bigwigs live, because you can buy a huge house with lots of land. That was Chuck speaking, right? Funny thing though, guys, I'm back to being Brandon. Okay, funny thing, though, guys, my neighbor was Brad Paisley. This is a couple of years before his first Grammy Award, and once we found this out, we knew that we had to get them. So my sister and I gathered all of our friends, dressed in black, and snuck out to roll this country music stars house. We were halfway through the job when his freaking tour bus rolled up on us. At first, we all ran away frightened, but we were pretty much caught in the act, nowhere to go. He got off the bus and was super nice about the whole thing. Actually. He gave us a quick tour of the tour bus, chatted us up for a little while. We even cleaned up the little bit of mess we had made and left starstruck. I highly doubt he remembers that night at all, but my friends and I will certainly never forget. Anyway, that's all I got, guys. I have a spooky Halloween that is from Brandon soldiers. That is very nice, Brandon. Thanks a lot for that email. And hats off to Brad Paisley for being so cool. He doesn't take his hat off, but all right. Exactly. But also, how about just a hat tip, then? Actually, I was thinking kidney chesney because he's bald. None of those guys take their hats off, dude. Also, he hangs out with Peyton Manning, which means that he must be a good guy, right? Oh, yeah. Isn't Peyton a good dude? Sure. I'm just tired of seeing him on my TV. Oh, that's not going to happen anytime soon. Pretty soon you'll see them in augmented reality. You're going to see everywhere you go, like it or not. Charles. Okay, well, if you want to get in touch with us like Brad Paisley did, you can go on to Stephishando.com and check out our social links. And you can also send us a good old fashioned email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom with some good old country goodness, and send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon music that's so good it's criminal morbid part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by 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." | |
8d91960c-ba8a-11e8-a624-3fd25a38768e | Short Stuff: Horseshoe Crab Blood | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-horseshoe-crab-blood | Perhaps the most expensive liquid on the planet is the blue blood that comes from horseshoe crabs. Researchers realized that horseshoe crab blood could indicate the presence of pathogens and the massive, ongoing horseshoe crab harvest began. | Perhaps the most expensive liquid on the planet is the blue blood that comes from horseshoe crabs. Researchers realized that horseshoe crab blood could indicate the presence of pathogens and the massive, ongoing horseshoe crab harvest began. | Wed, 21 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=233, tm_isdst=0) | 12772045 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry over there. And this is short stuff. So we should probably get talking about this right away. What are we talking about right now, Chuck? We're talking about an ancient, primitive animal, a beast that was around before dinosaurs that survived ice ages. Well, and that has been virtually unchanged since they made their way onto the scene. Little horseshoe crabs. Little horseshoe crabs still around, still kicking, still virtually unchanged after I think I saw about 450,000,000 years. Yeah. And still, when you have a child, or when you were a child, when you go to the beach and you see one for the first time, the question, what in the world is that to your parents? Yeah. And they say, Stop asking questions. They're crazy looking. They really are crazy looking. It looks like how do you describe a horseshoe crab? You think it was over a wooden bowl and gave it a tail. Okay, great, we'll go with that. But it also has, like, a really tough exoskeleton. It's got six legs. If it's a male, the front two legs are hooks because it uses those for mating. Yeah. And the legs look like little crab claws. Yeah. And so it looks like a freaky, scary little thing. Even though it's called a horseshoe crab, it's actually much more closely related to spiders and scorpions. And once you realize that, number one, what it looks like make sense, number two, it becomes maybe the most terrifying thing you've ever seen in your life. They're not going to hurt you, though. They're friendly. They are. They're fine. They don't want anything to do with you. They're old souls. They've been around too long to mess with you. But we humans like to mess with them, and there's a reason why. The reason is because they have a very peculiar kind of blood. It's copper based, actually, so it's blue. And back in, the guy named Fred Bang, frederick Bang, figured out that you can use horseshoe crab blood to identify whether there's harmful bacteria present in, say, like a biological sample, a medical device, a vaccine, a new drug. And with that, I think, 20 years later, I got FDA approval to use it for that use. It just began a horseshoe crab harvesting bonanza. All right, so we'll explain how that all works here in a second, but let's talk a little bit more about the body of these guys and gals. Like we said, they have a big head. It's called a persona. And in that head is the brain and the heart, which is super cool. You already mentioned the six little claw legs. And then the males, the very first pair, are like hooks, and they used to clamp onto the female during mating. And this is how that happens. The ladies dig a hole in the sand right. Lay several thousand eggs, and the male hooks in clings to her back and fertilizes these eggs. And the coolest thing about all this is there are other males sort of in the area kind of hanging around. Yeah. And they're like, hey, if you've done your thing, maybe give me a shot. Right. That guy, he was a real jerk, wasn't he? I'm a nice guy. They're called satellite males. Yeah. But the females can do this a few times per night for several nights in a row. And all in all, a breeding female can lay about 100,000 eggs a season, which is great. We're in the horseshoe crabs. The world is saved. Fantastic. But they also are a delicacy for shore birds who fly up and down the eastern coast of North America, of the Iraq, and they eat tons of these eggs. So even though a female might have, like, 100 of these and there might be a million mating pairs of horseshoe crabs in a single place, a lot of them get eaten by birds. Yeah. I mean, if you've ever been to Delaware Bay or seen pictures of just type in Delaware Bay horseshoe crabs, it's like a beach made of horseshoe crabs during mating season. Right. Remarkable. So the horseshoe crabs can deal with the shortbreads. It's fine. They've been around for a very long time, and Shorebirds have, too, so they've learned to just kind of live with it. The problem is, we humans have a big impact on horseshoe crabs as well. We like to catch them and use them for bait. And we also develop in the areas where they mate and reproduce. And so we eat up their habitat. So when you put those together with shorebirds eating thousands and thousands and thousands of eggs that could have been little, tiny new horseshoe crabs, their population, it's under strain. And that's just the population in the United States. It's actually far worse in Asia. Yeah. And you know what? Let's take a break, okay? We'll talk a little bit about how they benefit the humans and what's going on in America with this research and in Asia right after this. Okay, Chuck, we're back. I think I mentioned that you can actually use horseshoe crab blood in the biomedical industry. It's virtually priceless, although there is a price for it. It's just really expensive. Yeah, it's $15,000 a quart. Wow. Making it one of the most valuable fluids on Earth. And this is specifically the clotting agent that's that expensive. It's called lal limolis or limelus amoebasyte lysate. And it is in their blue blood. And it is a supreme clotting agent, as it turns out. Yes. And the reason why it's a great clotting agent is because that's how horseshoe crabs fend off infection on their own. In your body, you have white blood cells and you have all sorts of veins that your body can kind of close off and surround a foreign invader pathogen in. Right. Well, blood just flows freely all throughout the horseshoe crab. They got no blood vessels. They don't. It just kind of moves through their tissues and their organs and everything. It just sloshes around everywhere. And they pick one up and shake it. You'll hear just plain as day, no, don't do that. But the fact that the blood can just move around very easily means that they have to have a very specialized type of blood cell that can do everything. So I guess it's a generalized type of blood cell, if you think about it. And that's what they have. And these blood cells, when they encounter a pathogen, they clot like crazy around that thing because that is their immune response. They basically sequester it in a big gob of goo. Right. So we figured out that we could use this Lal. And the way that we originally started harvesting this was from rabbits, because I guess rabbits have I don't think as much. Right? Well, they don't have specifically the same thing. And we didn't harvest it from them. We would just inject them with a drug that we were testing okay. And see if they got an infection. And then whether they did or not, we just kill them when we were done with them anyway. Got you. So the fact that we were able to use horseshoe crabs has saved rabbit lives. Yes. We can feel good about that on one hand. Right. But here's the deal. Horseshoe crabs can survive about four days out of the water. So if you want to harvest this crab blood or this spider scorpion blood, you pick one of these horseshoe crabs up. They like females because they're much bigger. I don't think we said they can be much, much larger than the males. Yeah, like by half, I think. Yeah, 50% larger. And so they bring them out. They bring them to the lab. They chill them for an hour, put them on ice, then they mount them to a rack. And keep in mind, they're alive this whole time. And they insert a needle around the heart into that tissue, and they drain about 30% of the blood from these horseshoe crabs and try and get them back in time to survive. It looks like, like I said, four days out. They can survive, I imagine, probably less than a traumatic situation like this. Right. But they like to get about 70% survival rate in America. They want even higher than that. But what it washes out to is that they have about 30% of the horseshoe crabs that they harvest and put back end up dying. And they think that it's not the bloodletting process. They've got the bleeding process down pretty well, down to a science. Basically, it's how they're caught, transported, and handled during this process that can kill them, that they think that that's usually what kills them. So if you're talking about, like, 600,000 horseshoe crabs being harvested every year in the United States alone, 30% of that that's a lot of dead horseshoe crabs that would otherwise still be alive. And this is the point. Aside from the fact that we're killing horseshoe crabs for our own purposes, if those things survived, they regenerate their blood and we can bleed them again. It's not like a once in a lifetime thing. And they tag them so that they don't over bleed them too much. But 30% of them dying, that's a big problem because that's just a big loss of that blood market down the line. Yeah, that's about 180,000 a year in the US. That are not surviving. And we mentioned before the break that it's worse in Asia and that's because in places like Singapore, they do the same thing, except when they bleed them out, they then sell them as food. So they don't return them to the ocean at all? At all. They eat them. There was an expert on this who said that at this rate, in a decade, the other three so North America has one species of horseshoe crab, the other three on Earth all live in Asia, and those species may be extinct within a decade because of those practices. Yeah, and this is interesting. I don't know anything about these kind of processes, but they are making synthetic lal. They've been doing it for about 15 years, but there's only one company and one facility that was doing this. And I never knew that that was a big deal. But it makes sense now. If you're a BioMed company and there's only one facility producing this, you can't just say, all right, we're scrapping all of the harvesting because we're going to use synthetic lal only. What if something happens to that company? You're back to square one. Exactly, for sure. And I think that's wise because from what I understand, if the supply of lal ran out, the biomedical industry would just stop because they have to test this stuff. You can't put like a pacemaker inside a human being with it potentially covered or infected with some sort of bacteria that could kill the person who received the pacemaker. So you have to test some of the stuff in the way that they tested by exposing it to this lal. So if you don't have the lal, people don't get their pacemakers and the whole industry is grinds to a halt. So it would definitely make sense because if you have one factory producing this stuff and the thing gets hit by a hurricane or tornado or something like that, that's it. But more and more people are starting to make the synthetic lal. So it looks like within just a few years, the horseshoe crabs might start to be left alone, which is good for them. That'd be great. I think so, too. Let's push for it, Chuck. We'll make it a SYSK initiative. Let's create a hashtag. Okay. Save the horseshoe crab. That's a long hashtag. Okay, but you too can save a horseshoe crab if you're ever walking along the beach, they have something called the Telson. That's a little spiky tail that they use to flip themselves over if they have flipped over the wrong way, which would be legs up. If you happen to see a horseshoe crab alive, though, and their little arms are wiggling and their Telson's not flipping them over, do so yourself. Don't grab them by the telson that should be stepping in a t shirt. Grab them on the sides. Just pick them up on the sides, flip them over, maybe in the water, and they will be eternally grateful. I could imagine they would be. They'd be like, thank you so much. And then they swim about 5ft and someone grabs them and takes them to the horror show for the blood letting. Well, maybe at least you did your part. Yeah, that's good advice, Chuck. And since we don't have anything else to say about horseshoe crabs, then this short stuff is out. Adios. Stuff you should know is a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
44960832-53a3-11e8-bdec-b31565948114 | The SYSK 2020 Holly Jolly Extravaganza! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-sysk-2020-holly-jolly-extravaganza | It's here again! Our annual ad-free holiday spectacular. So pour up a hot toddy, throw a log on the fire and listen with the whole family! | It's here again! Our annual ad-free holiday spectacular. So pour up a hot toddy, throw a log on the fire and listen with the whole family! | Thu, 24 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=359, tm_isdst=0) | 40873179 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio hey ho and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's even here. And we're all wishing you glad tidings and Mary Tidings and Decking the Halls and all of that for this very special 2020 Christmas edition of Stuff You Should. Ho. Did you say stuff you should? Oh, I did. That's great. I thought so, too. You never said that before. I don't know, it just came to me. And it basically made up for the pan of apple pie turnover analogy in the Buffet episode, if you ask me. You tried it twice, though, didn't you? The apple pie one? No, I hit the three time thing. Oh, you did? For genuine comedic effect. And I think that episode might I don't know. Is that going to come out before this one? Yeah, it came out on the 23rd. Oh, okay. And what day is this one out? The 25th, I believe. Is it on Christmas Day this year? I don't know. I'm going to look right now to see and as I'm talking no, this one comes out on the 24th, so Buffets came out. But it's Christmas Eve. That's even better. Almost. Yeah. Merry Christmas Eve, everybody. Yeah, merry Christmas Eve. And we like to remind people, as per tradition, we fight tooth and nail for this. It is an ad free episode. And that's all we have to say about that. We don't do ads for these episodes. No, it's a very special thing every year. This one in the Halloween episode. Yeah. We didn't even talk about how we're going to order these, but I'll go ahead and make a pitch for lead tree tinsel to go first. Okay. That's what I've got up first to Chuck. It's a Christmas miracle. So, Tinsel, I think we've talked about in another episode before Chuck, where that came from. I believe it was in one of the really early Christmas episodes. But we can give a little background here in that. I think starting around the 16th century or the 17th century, the very wealthy aristocrats started putting actual, like, gold and silver strands, or more commonly, I think, these kind of like twisted, almost candy cane looking hooks made of gold and silver. They would put it all over their tree, hang the stuff, and they called it tinsel, which is from the old French for eston sale or sparkle. And that's kind of where tinsel came from. But you have to be fairly wealthy to put strands of pure gold and silver on your Christmas tree. That kind of is how it goes. Yeah. I'm surprised it's a French word. It sounds very German. Tinsel. Yeah, tinsel does. But essencel. Well, that sounds very French. You're right, it does. It's almost like a spree brand of clothing, but it takes a real sharp turn after that first es syllable. Yeah, the rich people were doing this on the tree. They kind of kept it to themselves. And then the industrial age rolls around, and all of a sudden we had less expensive varieties of this kind of thing, which meant aluminum. Copper great for both, and lead not great. Well, the aluminum wasn't so great either. They would make an aluminum paper tinsel with acetate, and that stuff would go up faster than ever, a matchbook on, like, a dead tree. And this is a time when everybody was smoking everywhere all the time. So the aluminum one was particularly bad. And the copper I saw is still around chuck they make garlands of copper tinsel, but it's not for decorations. It's for you to walk through to discharge static. Like if you're going into, say, like a computer cleaner or something like that. They make copper tinsel now, but that didn't really catch on either. So they settled finally, like you said, on lead. And that's kind of problematic because lead is poisonous, as we talked about in our why is lead so poisonous episode. Did we do that? Yeah, don't you remember? On Mother Jones, kevin Drum made the case that the end of leaded gas actually was responsible for the decline in violent crime over the years. We did an episode on that. That was a good one a long time ago. Yeah. So this was before the FDA got involved and knew that lead was in our plates and in our paint and in our jewelry was killing people. And there was a German company called Staniol Fabrik epstein very nice. And they had an imperial patent on lead tinsel in and people love this stuff. It translated Stanilo lameta into tiny blade, which is hysterical if you think about it. It's kind of what they were. But people love this stuff because they started making it in South Philly, too, in the early 50s. It really looked great. It hung on the tree, very heavy, obviously, because it's lead. And apparently this woman, Susan Wagoner, wrote a book called Handcrafted Christmas where she talks about how wonderful it was, and it didn't tarnish, and it just gave a really kind of heavy, icicle look to the tree. Yeah. And so that German patent was issued in 19 four. I guess it took almost 50 years before it made its way over to the United States. But by the 50s, there is a company called bright Star Manufacturing that was making lead tree tinsel for use in the United States, too. But the party didn't last very long, about a decade, really, before it was becoming quite obvious that lead poisoning was a real problem. And the thing is, like you said, there's a lot of places where lead turned up in your house, including on the plates you ate from. So tree tensor was probably one of the lesser evils in your house that you were going to get lead poisoning from. But it was also one of the easiest things to phase out. And so the FDA kind of zeroed in on getting rid of lead tree tensile using these kind of back channel methods to get rid of it before anybody knew what was going on. Yeah, so they ended up making a deal, the FDA with tinsel importers and said, you know what, you've got no product here that you can sell here anymore. And this was in the early seventy s your time, face it, your time here is done. And the thing is though, they didn't get the word out. It's not like that was like burning up the headlines all over the country because what they were afraid of is people love this stuff and if they hear that it's going to go away, people are going to go out and start buying up all the lead tinsel. Totally. It's going to be counterintuitive to our goal here, which is to get rid of the lead tinsel. Right. It would take years and years before that finally got phase. That would be so much easier if it just didn't come back one year. And that's basically what happened. The FDA managed to kind of secretly get rid of lead from Christmas tinsel and they come up with some other stuff in very short order. Plastic came along to replace it. But what was crazy Chuck, is that lead tinsel remained available in Germany until 1988. Really? Yeah. They did not get rid of the lamenta until then. Wow. Very surprising. Germans are tough. So I want to say also big shout out to our friend and longtime listener Robert Paulson for suggesting that one. And as you'll see later on in the episode, he's basically the secret elf for this year's Christmas extravaganza. So thank you very much, Robert. That's right. His name is Robert Paulson. Should we move on to Charles Dickens? Yeah, I thought we would just leave it at his name as Robert Paulson, but yeah. All right, here we go with a little bit on how Dickens saved Christmas. So everybody thinks like A Christmas Carol is the most Christmassy thing that anyone has ever come up with until A Christmas story came along that was true. And A Christmas Carol is kind of responsible for a lot of the traditions that we think of as Christmassy these days. It basically came from the end of Dickens pen. Things like this idea of having your family around you and being charitable and spreading goodwill and peace and all of that stuff. All of that kind of came from this Christmas Carol. And in fact, even wishing people Merry Christmas was a Dickens invention too. But what a lot of people don't realize is that Dickens, when he wrote A Christmas Carol, he basically grabbed Christmas out from the clutches of oblivion and dragged it back into popular culture. That he was largely responsible are one of a few Victorian authors who were responsible for saving Christmas from obscurity from around that time about the middle of the 19th century. It is hard to believe, but that is true, that in 1863, Christmas was dying in no small part at the hands of a man named Oliver Cromwell, boo, lord and Protector of England, a very famous 17th century Puritan who didn't like Christmas. He didn't like the people going out and having a good time and drinking and eating too much, and he's like, Listen, there's no scriptural basis for Christmas. It's not in the Bible. There's the Sabbath, of course, but it doesn't say, hey, everyone, get together on the 25th and get drunk, does it? Right? I mean, that's definitely what they were doing. In fact, since the medieval era in Britain and other parts of Europe, especially like Celtic Centric, but pagan, basically, parts of Europe, they would get together and kick off, I guess, the whole thing on Christmas, kind of like Tuesday ends Mardi Gras, it's like in reverse. Christmas kicked off twelve days of festivals and celebrating, of gathering at the tavern, of having friends and family over for a big feast, and all of it can be traced back to these pagan winter solstices. But then when Christianity came along, they said, oh, we'll just say it's the birth of Jesus kicking all this stuff off. But it was a big, long, twelve day winter festival of revelry, and people really appreciate it. And Cromwell said, no, that's too much fun. Christmas is hereby banned. And he got it pushed through Parliament. That Christmas was in fact banned. Yeah, in a couple of Acts of Parliament, 44 and 40, 716, 47. He pushed it underground, essentially, because people still did their celebrating. It just wasn't as raucous at the local tavern. He was a little more at home behind closed doors, but he certainly could not dampen people spirits. They just took it inside, basically. Then the Industrial Revolution comes along and people worked on Christmas, and it wasn't like, I got to work on Christmas this year. It was like Christmas was kind of like any other day, and you just work because the factory was open, because there were seven days in a week and you were expected to work all of them. Yeah, cromwell couldn't quite get rid of it, and he actually he and the rest of the Puritans got pushed aside when the monarchy came back and all that stuff got overturned. But just about 100 years later, when England went through the first Industrial Revolution, that almost did it in, because, like you said, everybody was too tired to celebrate Christmas. They didn't have any time off. But also, very importantly, Chuck, a lot of those people who had been celebrating these Christmases in the medieval style, with feasts and friends and family and revelry and carols and all that stuff, they used to do that back in the country during the Agrarian age. Well, the Agrarian Age had come to an abrupt halt during the Industrial Age. And so all those people had moved from the country to the city and they didn't have these longstanding multigenerational community ties any longer. So celebrating Christmas kind of fell away. It stayed back there in the rural areas and it didn't quite make that transition to the city. So between these long seven day work weeks and then this transplanting from the countryside to the city, christmas was almost lost had it not been for Dickens. That's right. Then A Christmas Carol comes along and that kind of did it. People loved it. It was a very big hit. He didn't make a ton of money on it, and that was kind of his fault because he really wanted a really good looking book that was packaged well. He didn't want to charge a lot for it. And like you said at the beginning, a lot of the things that we think of at Christmas, like saying Merry Christmas, wishing for a white Christmas, this all comes from Dickens version of A Christmas Carol and it was a big hit. And he worked in stuff like ghost stories, which in the medieval times they told Christmas ghost stories so that people think that's kind of where he got the ghostly visitors from. Y, I think we talked about that a couple of I think the live Christmas show. We talked about that, didn't we? I think so, yeah. But yeah, thanks to Dickens, Christmas was a big hit again and has not been threatened since. Except for people trying to kill Christmas. Now, I guess it's rampant, isn't it? The new Cromwell's, right? That's right. Well, now you can say Merry Christmas, everybody, and you can know you're giving a hat tip to good old Charles Dickens. All right, next on our list of merriment is finance and economics. But in a very fun way, I think. I got to feel like we talked about this before because it seems so familiar, but the PNC Christmas Price Index. Since 1984, the PNC Bank has been doing this, where they calculate the current annual cost or the cost of that year for the items on the song, from the song The Twelve Days of Christmas. Obviously we're talking about French hens and leaping lords and five golden rings and all of that livestock and jewelry and entertainment in a very fun way, since the mid eighty s have been calculating, hey, what would that cost this year? Yeah. And in fact, there's one particular economist at the bank, Rebecca McCann, fun job, kind of overseas, this whole thing. She's like, yeah, it's super fun. I don't get to stop doing any of my regular work. They make me do this on top of everything. Yeah, probably. And they don't even give me a bonus anymore. They did away with bonuses in the merger of 1995. So it's funny when you think about this, a lot of these are pretty easy to get, like turtle doves and partridges. You can call bird suppliers or hatcheries for hens and swans, or a nursery for pear trees and stuff like that, or obviously jewelry chains for gold rings. But it gets a little trickier when it comes to ladies dancing and Lords of leaping. What do you pay for that? Well, she calculated the cost by getting in touch with things like dance companies. The Philadelphia Ballet, I think, was one of them for the Pennsylvania Ballet. The other one, she got in touch with Philadenco, which is a dance company in Philadelphia, believe it or not, and said basically, how much would it cost to put on a show or to rent, I guess, eleven Lords of Leaping. And I'm sure they hung up a couple of times on her before she finally convinced him to give her a straight answer. But, yeah, she goes through and figures out the price of each of these things. But then she's also being an economist as well, it's more than just that. You also have to pay for things like gas, for shipping. The cost of services has gone up recently, but the cost of goods has gone down by comparison. She takes all these different prices together, adds them up, and that is the Consumer Price Index every year. That's right. The Christmas Price Index. That's right. I'm sorry. Actually, it reflects the Consumer Price Index, which is a legit thing that's used as a metric to track the economy of the United States. This is a slightly more tongue in cheek, although, as we're going to see, it actually does have some real world reflections to it. And if you went through and hired Eleven Lords of Weeping, this is probably roughly what you would pay for it. Yeah, I think the saddest one for me would be Maids of Milking, and it's also the easiest one to figure out, because all she has to do is plug in minimum wage, because that's what a milking maid would probably get paid. But that one hasn't changed, obviously, since 2009, as horrifically, the federal minimum wage has been locked in place for eleven years, 725 an hour. Yeah. So that was a bit of a bummer. And then the big surprising thing for me, definitely, was that there were a number of things that you couldn't get this year, McCann found out, and that this year's total Christmas Price Index was about 60% less than last year's. The cost of it in 2019, it was $38,993.59, in 2020, it cost you just $16,168.14. And you say, like, oh, okay, well, that's great, prices are going down. Well, now, like I said, the reason why the cost had gone down is because you couldn't get things like Lords leaping or drummers drumming or Pipers piping or ladies dancing because of COVID-19. Yeah, it kind of surprised me. And it's not very fun. No, it's not. You could get a drum line outdoors, space them out and pay them money, I guess. So maybe McCann wanted to point out that there's a Coronavirus, Panama going on right now. Yeah, I think that's kind of the deal. Is there? I think there's a bit of a nod and a wink and a message to be sent each year when this is released. Yeah, but the thing is, Chuck, even if you're like, whatever, I don't care about the pandemic. I've got this price in hand. I'm going to go with the 2019 prices because I'm really going to twist the arms of those dance companies and get them to lend me some dancers. Do you have to stop and ask yourself, like, are these actually good gifts anymore? Yeah, the answer I think, would be no. I mean, yes, the birds are calling. Those are canaries. That's a pretty good idea. Sure. Or if you have like a farm friend and you're like, not only did I get you some chickens, I got you some French hens, I think they might be slightly impressed. Everybody would like five gold rings, that kind of thing. But if you put the whole thing together all at once, it can be kind of overwhelming. And they mentioned this on an episode of Christmas, episode of The Office where Aaron, the receptionist, says, whoever is my secret Santa that's buying me the twelve days of Christmas presents, like, please stop, it's ruining my life. Yeah, she said the fridge ends are plucking at her hair to make nests out of it. That's good. Other terrible stuff. So I guess if that's your idea, that you're thinking that you're going to buy your true love, the presence from the twelve days of Christmas, just don't, don't do it. Maybe some leaping words, but then stop. Alright, shall we move on to our next segment? Yes, let's. We need to thank Robert Paulson for this one, too. Right. The little elf from Los Angeles came to visit us yet again. Yeah, the little elf who could so this is about the first apartment store Santa Claus, and we need to caveat this in a big way because 1890 is when James Colonel Jim Edgar of Brockton, Massachusetts claims and people look at him as the first department store Santa Claus. And we were emailing back and forth because Macy's, they say, goes back to 18 what, 60 something? Yeah, there was another one called, I think, JW. Parkinson's from Philadelphia who hired somebody to dress up as Santa and climb the roof even before Macy's. But Macy's was the first to actually have a Santa in their store. And there's postcards from the 1870s that clearly show this, that Macy's was the first. And yet you can go all over the internet and you search the first department store Santa, you're going to come back with James Edgar. And people even mention this in the same article that, yeah, Macy's head at first, but this guy's the first. Just let's go out back and fight over it if you want to. Yeah. I think what you found and what we're just going to agree on is that it said he was the first known what was the exact wording? Not known quantity, but known individual, known entity, I think is how they put it in the weirdest possible way. Yeah. The only thing we could figure out is that James, colonel Jim Edgar was the first person to say, hey, I'm Santa Claus in this town and my name is Colonel Jim Edgar and everyone knows it's me that's doing this thing. And he became known as the guy, whereas I guess Macy's just had nameless Santa Claus. So maybe that's the difference. That's all I can figure out. But let's put all that nitpicky stuff aside. Okay? But I think it's important that we said it and I'm glad you sure, man. I'm glad you brought it up. But the thing is, I think a lot of the reason why people are really willing to go out back and fight you over Jim Edgar being the first Santa Claus, because this guy's character was as close to Santa's, probably any Santa's helper who ever put on the suit and worked at a department store over the holiday season ever has. Yes, he seemed like a really good guy. And there are stories that abound about the good things that have happened with Colonel Jim and in his wake, and one that happened in his wake was about 30 years after he started doing Santa. I guess he was gone at this point, but Brockton Mass was a shoemaking town. It was very famous for making shoes, but by the 1920s and 30s it had fallen upon hard times and there was a truant officer that found out that hundreds of kids were not even going to school because they didn't have new shoes or means to repair their shoes. And so that true. And officer's name was Charles Brooks. Explained this to William Wright, the president of Edgar's department store. And he said, what should I do? What should I do? And he said, you know what you do? You do what James Edgar would have done. And the guy says, what? And the other guy goes, do I have to spell everything out for you every Tuesday I have to explain everything I say. And the other guy, that Truan officer said, please, just one more time, I have to know what would James Edgar do? He said, well, rip off Macy's. Yeah. So what he said was that James Edgar would fix these shoes and that he would use his company to do that. And so that's exactly what the president of James Edgers department store did. They removed the third floor of the department store from use, bought, I think, a $3,000 shoe repairing machine, hired six cobblers in the town and started repairing children's shoes for free. Amazing. You found another little piece about James Edgar and what kind of guy he was too, right? Do you want me to talk about it because I will. That'd be great. So this is why I said he had the character of Santa. He would dress up as a clown or that kind of stuff and wander around. And finally one day, he decided to dress up like a Santa. But he loved children. Like, really genuinely loved the kids. And I read Chuck that when he died and the local school let out for lunch, all the kids went down to his funeral to pay their respects, like hundreds of children in town. And that was because he did things like he was well known to take care of his staff, his employees. He made them shareholders in the business. He lived on a second floor walk up apartment, even though he's a very wealthy man, because he wanted to have more money to share with his employees. So cool. He would close early four nights a week so that his employees could go spend more time with their families. And he had a really great quote that I think sums them up pretty well. I've made a barrel of money, and I have spent it as freely as I've made it. Thousands of it goes back to the people from whom I made it for. I fully believe in that kind of an exchange. And he seems to be the kind of guy who really literally put his money where his mouth is. He would take his money, put it in his mouth, and be like, good one. Thank you. So the whole reason people say Jamaica was the first department store saying is because he did this thing in 1890 and he attracted kids from all over the Northeast. And in very short order, starting in the next year, department stores all over the place suddenly had mall Santa's or department store Santa's. So a lot of people point to Jim megar's influence, is the reason why I love it. So hats off to you, Colonel Jim. We salute you, sir. Yes, we do. All right. So the leg lamp from A Christmas Story. I know that we had to have talked about this at some point when we talked about a Christmas Story in one of our previous holiday episodes, but we're going to talk about it again. We could talk about this every year and I'd be happy, man. Everyone knows the very famous major award from The Christmas Story, when the old man wins this award that is brought into his house in a crate, pulled out to the horror of his wife, the wonderful Melinda Dylan. And the leg lamp and the kitschy item that everyone likes to have on their tree or in their actual window to this day was born. Yeah. So there's some really great background about that leg lamp in particular. As far as the movie production went. It was designed by the production designer, I believe. Yes. His name was Reuben. What was his last name, Chuck? Reuben Freedom Fried. And so Ruben Fried based it on the description by Gene Shepherd, who wrote the book and God We trust All Others pay cash. That A Christmas Story was based on and apparently Jean Shepherd was involved in the production and saw some drafts of what Reuben Freed had drawn up and said, yes, that's it. But he apparently Gene Shepherd apparently based it on a knee high sign that he'd seen as a child. Right? Yeah. Nehai soda. You can still get kneehigh soda. Like the knee high orange and grape. And I think it had a pair of Gams, had some lady's legs and he liked the look of them. And this is how I love the reading, actually. And this is from I actually got this part from the man behind the leg lamp from Reed Krieger from Inventordigest.com a few years ago. And this is from the actual short story My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award that heralded the birth of pop art and I guess was that the deal is and God We Trust all of US, Pay Cash was a collection of short stories. Yeah. Bob Clark interpreted them perfectly into the movie a Christmas Story. So this is how it was described in that book, the Leg Lamp. From ankle to thigh, the translucent flesh radiated a vibrant, sensual, luminous orange, yellow, pinkish nimbus of pagan fire. All it needed was tom toms and maybe a gong or two and a tenor singing in a high, quavery, earnest voice. A pretty girl is like a melody. That's great writing. It is really great. I love Gene Shepherd stuff, even though I've never read a lick of it. I just love Christmas Story that much. Right, exactly. So the leg lamp actually made its first debut before Christmas Story did. It? Showed up on a PBS special called The Phantom of the Open Hearth. And I watched it, dude. I watched it and it is wrong. It is the most alien thing I've ever seen. Ralphie is like 15 and a bit of a punk. Randy is like, about what Ralphie's age is in the Christmas Story. It's just really weird in mid 70s. So it should be stricken from the memory of humanity. But if you're interested, you should go check it out and you'll see what I'm talking about. It's just very weird. But they have a leg lamp in there. They basically adapt the same short story. But this leg lamp is way more tasteful than what Reuben Freed came up with. And once you've seen the Reuben Fried one, everything else is kind of pales in comparison to it. Yeah, I mean, do you remember Reuben Freeds version had a stocking and little fringe hanging down. It was a very sexy lamp. And I think that's what made it so iconic. I believe they made three of them for the movie. The story is that they were all broken during the production of filming. Although, and this is from. Reed Krieger's article. Supposedly there was a special effects, like prop shop in Toronto that said that they had one of the originals until the early 1990s, which may be true. Yes. There was a guy named Martin Maliveoire, and he worked on the movie. He worked on several movies, but he worked on A Christmas Story. And he said himself that he had several of these things in the shop, that they actually made more than a dozen, not just three. So it's not entirely clear. But there doesn't seem to be any surviving ones. He said he threw his out in the 90s, which is terrible. It's like me throwing out Burt Reynolds door. Or Jackie Gleason's door. Yeah or Burt Reynolds. Mustache. Don't throw that out. But the one thing I couldn't find was whose leg it was molded from, because it was supposedly molded from actual human model's leg. And that seems to be lost to history. Another kind of fun fact here, if you notice carefully when they're bringing that crate in, it says his end up instead of this end up. And a lot of people think that's just a little joke, but apparently it's just a movie thing. The crate was too big to fit through the door, so the set carpenters came in and shaved four inches off, which included that letter T. Yes, that's a good one. And then that lamp is just so iconic. It actually is patented. The lamp itself is patent number 36454. Two. And there's a Christmas ornament you can get we actually have a string of lights of leg lamp lights. Nice. But the ornament itself has a patent. And the town of Cleveland, where we talked about Christmas Story being shot, partially turned one of its skyscrapers. They changed the light so that it created a leg lamp to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the movie in 2013. That's right. And as we said back when we initially talked about The Christmas Story house, if you were a fan of that film, I highly, highly recommend you visiting the Christmas Story house there in the shadow of Cleveland. To walk around that home is a pretty great thing. Very special place to be. I got to go. You've never went? No, I've still not been. Yeah, you guys will make it over there at some point. Go to Cleveland. Cleveland's. Great. Go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Check out this. You probably don't care about the NFL Hall of Fame. That's kind of cool, though, if you're into football. But it's worth it to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Christmas Storyhouse. Are you talking about? The Hard Rock Cafe. Cleveland. No. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I don't know what that means. It's where you walk around I'm teasing. At the end, when they have everyone's original clothing and these iconic outfits like Princess Purple Rain and Jagger's thing, and Bruce Springsteen's outfit from born in the USA. And you just walk around and look at them all and think, was Prince nine years old? Yeah, he was a little guy, wasn't it? Was Mick Jagger. Twelve. They're all tiny. A lot of energy. It's like a small dog. Small dogs have a lot more energy than big dogs, you know what I mean? That's right, man. I guess that's it about the leg lamp. Yes. Well, actually, I want to know where you hang those lights. Do you string those on the tree? Are they like on an archway or something? Archway or something, yeah. Because you can't just throw one string of leg lamp lights among your other lights. Plus, I mean, the trees already got it going on. Those leg lamp lights, they can really light up a neglected or overlooked area. They're so bad corner. Yeah, exactly. Awesome. I got to get some of those myself. I'll get you some for Christmas. All right, Chucker. So it wouldn't be 2020 if we didn't have a Christmas segment about COVID-19. This is for all the kids out there, because I know kids listen to this with their families on Christmas Eve. It's a tradition. Nothing else happens on Christmas Eve and comes across America. Just people listening to this. That's right. So this is from people.com from Rachel DeSantis, and this is a great article from Dr. Anthony Fauci revealing to all the kids all around the country and all around the world that they don't need to worry about Santa Claus coming in with COVID because Santa Claus is basically immune to Coronavirus. Because as Falci says, quote, of all the good qualities, he has a lot of good innate immunity. Yeah. So Doctor Fauche is reassuring us that Santa is immune. And it makes sense, Chuck, because as everybody knows from the night Before Christmas, santa is actually an elf. He's a jolly old elf. So of course he would be immune to something like COVID-19. That's right. And that's not to say that Santa's helpers who are in department stores and malls all over the country and all over the world. Yeah. Like James Edgar. That's right. Those guys are oftentimes are elderly gentlemen. Sometimes they may be carrying a little extra weight. And I guess the nicest way to say this is that those Santas are high risk. Right. But everybody wants to see Santa's helpers in the mall whenever they get a chance to, even during a pandemic. So there's a lot of these Santa's helpers who are figuring out how to do it as safely as possible. This year there's things like virtual Santa visits, which apparently Macy's, which apparently is the originator of the department store Santa. This is the first year since the 18th, 60s that Macy's will not have a Santa at their department store in person. They're still going to have a virtual Santa, though. The ghost of Colonel Jim Edgar is right now just saying, why are these two loud mouths messing with me, right? I will haunt you. Yeah. And he has been has he been haunting you? He's been haunting me for the past couple of days. For sure. He is terrifying. So, yeah, they're doing some virtual Santa meeting by appointment. I thought this was fairly creative. This one Santa named Steven Arnold, who is a professional Santa, said he has three engagements where they are setting him up in sort of a protective bubble built to look like a snow globe. And I thought that was a very cool, kind of fun, creative idea. Yeah. The other two engagements, he's going to be sitting on a giant fire truck or a giant slay, kind of like a don't climb up me fire truck with his foot sticking out. Like pay back. Yeah, way back. But yeah, there's no reason you can't see Santa probably just virtually this year, but at the very least, you don't have to worry about the real deal coming through on Christmas Eve and Christmas when saying it comes through, because he's not going to be spreading covet, he's just going to be spreading glad tidings and jolliness. No, you don't need to worry about the kids. You need to put out those cookies and milk, you need to put out those carrots and celery for those reindeer and make sure you're cooperating with your parents or else you're going to get cold in that stocking. That's right. And it always helps to put out probably triple or quadruple the amount of celery or carrots you think you should. Kids, is that it? I think so, Chuck. I think it's time we wish Merry Christmas to everybody in the Charles Dickens way. That's right, put a figurative bow on it. And what else? Well, put your finger right here and I'm going to tie the bow. Okay. And then when I count to three, move your finger at the last second as I tighten the bow. You ready? Three, two, three. Ouch. Okay, we just got it. Got you a little bit. You're going to lose that nail. So happy holidays, everyone. No matter how you celebrate it, we're thinking of you. It's been a tough year for everybody. We look forward to Alight at the end of the tunnel next year and we just hope you are with the friends and family that you really care about. I know everyone is forced to keep it small, but hopefully that will not tarnish your Christmas and that everyone has a really great holiday. Yeah. Just remember, there's going to be another Christmas six year and the year after that and the year after that, and we could all make it through this one. Because Christmas isn't necessarily about traveling or flying or doing or seeing. It's about feeling and family and charity and you can experience all of that online this year. So no matter where you are, no matter how you celebrate it, no matter who you are, merry Christmas. Happy holidays. However you say it, hopefully the joy of the season alights upon you and yours. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio. 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/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-02-09-sysk-sketchfest-live-malls-final.mp3 | Live from San Francisco: How Malls Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/live-from-san-francisco-how-malls-work | In this show recorded live on January 5, 2017 at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, Josh and Chuck delve into the history and the heyday of the church of consumerism and what it means for local communities and our capitalist society at large when malls die. | In this show recorded live on January 5, 2017 at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, Josh and Chuck delve into the history and the heyday of the church of consumerism and what it means for local communities and our capitalist society at large when malls die. | Thu, 09 Feb 2017 17:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=17, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=40, tm_isdst=0) | 62491258 | audio/mpeg | "The Neogen device developed by Rst Syndnexis is a Wellestablished advanced quantumbased medical device using electric cell signaling technology. Treatment is noninvasive safe, effective, and used in managing pain associated with neuropathy and other painful conditions. It helps improve circulation, offers better rehabilitation through pain relief, and activates the recovery processes, giving better patient outcomes. Visit Neogenreleasepane.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen System come chat with us. That's Neogenreleavespane.com. Your patience will thank you. With no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is like the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with their top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply capital One NA Member FDIC welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. We are in beautiful San Francisco, California at the Castro Theatre. Thank you. Wonderful. Our biggest show to date. Seriously, today on a Sunday afternoon. Who knew? San Francisco sketchfest. All right, so we're talking today, everybody, about a little something called the mall. And I'm not joking. Yeah, that's what I have. That's good. So we've been wanting to do something on the mall for years now, and years and years, and we thought, well, what is San Francisco if not the mall? Right? They're going to love this one. And I guess we're wrong. Now, you guys will love it, I promise. It's just like the grass episode. You may have been like, I'm not listening to that. And then you finally ran out of episodes. Listen to the grass episode, and you're like, that wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. This will be similar to that experience. Okay? Except the grass episode is free. I promise we will give it our all. I don't know why we're selling it like this. It's going downhill so fast. It's great. Okay, so uphill. Shall we get in the way back machine? Which is imaginary. So when you think of shopping mall, you think of the mall, right? Everybody knows what the mall is. If there's somebody who doesn't know what the mall is, raise your hand. And whoever's sitting next to that person, punch them in the arm really hard. Be like, come on. You know what the mall is. I assume San Francisco has malls somewhere. Oh, yeah, they've got malls. I've never seen one. They're probably out a bit. It's not like a mall in the middle of the Mission or is there? I don't think so. Right? Okay, there's a few oh, you did the research. I did a little research. They pop up here or there. You guys will know because I'll be like, so we're on the way back machine, and we're going all the way back to ancient Rome where the actual, what you could consider a shopping center appears. It was called Trejin's Market. And Trajan's Market was built in something like 107, I think. Yeah, that's early. I think it's anchor store was Trejin's Horse. That was okay, sorry. If I had a store back there I would have totally called it Trajan's Horse. Yeah. And it's known as the world's oldest shopping center for good reason. Again, it was built in 107 and right now it's in ruins. There's some guy who sells those little balls with the raccoon tails on the end of them on a tray. But he's technically outside of the mall, so it doesn't really count. So the mall is closed. It has been for several millennia now. But the oldest continually operated what you would might call an outdoor marketer mall is the Grand Bazaar. With an A. Three. A's actually two. No, there's three. You've been drinking? Yeah, just not together. Bazaar. Oh, got you. His math checks out. That's a joke from Fletch, if I'm not mistaken. I don't like Fletch. All right, deep cut. The Grand Bazaar, Istanbul between 1455 and 1461 is when that was built and it is still in operation today. About 5000 covered shops. Still gets about a quarter million visitors a day. So still rocking. Yeah, a lot of folks. So you've got what? Medieval market towns kind of started to come later. Seaport, all these things. These commercial districts where people went to shop, they all had to kind of be centered in an area together because people rode horses or they walked or they were chased by other people, whatever. But you had to go and get all of your shopping done at one place. Right. And that's just kind of a very ancient idea. And it's been around for a long while. Right. It's wonderful. By the turn of the 20th century here in the US, we had something we still do, it hasn't gone away. Pre mall, we had the department store and I think I even mentioned this on another show. It didn't dawn on me. You know how like the simplest words dawn on you late in life, like what it really means. I just always said department store. It really just occurred to me a couple of years ago like, oh, it's a store full of many departments. Right. Never really thought about it. Do you ever have those? It's kind of nice. Department stores, 13 storeys high. In Chicago. The Marshall and Field company. Marshall Field and Company. And then in Detroit, there was one called J. L. Hudson's. That was 25 floors of department store, 25 floors of retail space. And this thing took up like a whole block. Yeah. And it's 1911. It's a lot of stuff. It is a lot of stuff. In 1828, though, if you back up a little bit, the first sort of enclosed shopping center that you might kind of consider a mall. Mall. Even though we really don't, as you'll see, because it didn't have an arcade, even though it is called the westminster arcade, ironically didn't have an arcade in providence, Rhode Island. Has anyone ever been to this place? Yeah, I've been. Have you really? Yes. I didn't know that. Yes. You didn't type in here. I've been there. Yeah. All right. I didn't know I needed to say that. It was assumed. It's a pretty cool place, though. If you look it up online, it doesn't look like the mall that you would consider a mall. It looks like sort of like a greek revival building and it's like big glass ceiling. Yeah, it's really nice. It sort of looks like a train station. Three floors. And recently they were going to demolish it, but someone swooped in and built micro apartments. Now you can live in there and they're really kind of cool. And I was going to explain again what a micro apartment was, but I forgot where I am. You all know. Isn't that like a dresser drawer? You ever go to Ikea and you walk through the little thing that's like, oh, my god, I love it. Yeah. Living in 30, it's just some guy standing in a broom closet. Screw the suburbs. Wait. Well, even back further than this, russia should get its due. It's bad timing. Even before the westminster arcade, there is this thing called the ghost vidwar. And I looked at the pronunciation but I should qualify that. I looked up the pronunciation on the same site that I looked up the pronunciation on dicha chang, which I called dixie chang throughout the entire underground city episode. Right. So take that for what it is I was about to say. All our Asian friends let us know that was wrong. But really, everyone of every race let us know that was wrong. Thank you. Dummies. After world war II, things really kind of evolved with the shopping center, though. That's when things kind of started going. And in 1950, Seattle's north gate center was but I feel like we said several times, the first thing we think of as a mall, I guess it was just part of the evolution, right? South dale was the first real mall. All right, so south dale, we're going to pick up with south dale. South Dale was in Edena, Minnesota. Edina. Thank you. Live corrections. Very nice. Where were you when I was saying Dixie a chance? Well, previous to that, boy, we're jumping all around this designer and really the man who are going to either thank for the mall or blame for the mall, depending on how you feel about malls, is a gentleman named Victor gruen. Anyone want to correct me on that? He's an Austrian architect and he designed northland center in Michigan. Is that correct? Yes. And northland center is in southland, Michigan. That's so confusing. Terrible. It had what was known, as I said, anchor store earlier. And this is what malls had. They had these Anchor stores, which are still, to this day, mainly department stores. And that Anchor store was Hudson's Department store. Right. Had about 110 other stores. But it still wasn't a real mall mall because it wasn't, as you'll see, introverted. Correct. And it wasn't enclosed. It was open air. Like, you know when you go to those outlet malls today where it's just all you're walking around outside like an idiot. This is kind of like what Southfield was like in Michigan. And that's what all shopping malls were like up to that point. They weren't enclosed. It was 1956 in Adina, Minnesota, when the first enclosed mall, like we think of it today, came about. Yeah. And I actually looked up the previous Northland. They did close that in the it finally shuttered for good a couple of years ago. And I found this website that said twelve weirdest things left behind in the Northland Center. And it wasn't that exciting, but there was one, the group detention room. And I started thinking, holy crap. Malls have jails. Yeah. And I looked it up, and someone said, I went to Yahoo. Answers like, where else do you go to get the real truth? And the number one voted up answer said, it's not a real sell. It's just a small, dark room with no windows in a chair and a camera in it that you're not allowed to leave. It's a micro apartment, basically. This one had chains on the benches. And I was like, no, that's a jail cell. Yeah, I saw that, too. There was, like, a Target cart under a spotlight, I think. I thought that was beautiful. Yeah, it was very arty. Haunting. I'm with you, lady. All right, so jumping back forward again to Minneapolis outside of Minneapolis. Is it edina or idina? Edina. Thank you. South Dale, $20 million. The anchor store was Donaldson's and Dayton's, right? Who can forget Donaldson's? I did. Okay. And Dayton's actually commissioned this mall to be built because they were building a new outpost in the suburbs of Minneapolis. And it wasn't just by coincidence that Adina was 10 miles away from downtown Minneapolis because, again, this is during the Cold War. That's actually right outside the eight mile blast radius of atomic bomb. Were it to be dropped out of Minneapolis because, of course, it's what the Roost Keys were thinking. We're going from Minneapolis first. But they built a mall outside of the blast radius, so I guess we'll just give up. So the original idea for the mall from Victor gruan was to he wanted to come, and you know how they have with these mixed use centers now, he had this idea way back then, and he wanted people to live there and kind of congregate there. And we'll get a little more to this later, but it sort of ended up just being a shopping mall to his disappointment. But he modeled it on Northgate in Seattle and sort of the big idea was that you go to these department stores because that's what people were used to. But how do you get them to these other stores was the big question. Right? How do you get them shopping? Oh, at the mall. Yeah, if they're there, because people went to department stores. So if you put a department store out in the suburbs, they'll go to the department store. They're like, oh, I thought I was supposed to take a left. Now I'm picking the right I'm at the department store. Who cares, right? The problem is, if you put 110 other stores coming off of that department store, they just go to the department store and leave. Not good, right? If you're one of these other stores. So what northgate figured out and what is mind numbingly obvious, but really works, is you just take this department store, put another department store, and then put the shops in between them. And then the people take a right, but they should take a left. But they're fine. They go in the department store. Oh, there's another department store. Well, I'll just walk past this. Maybe I'll buy that. I'll buy a little bit of this. Sure, I'll take a feather boa. And then they walk into the other department store, and consumerism is saved. That's right. It was revolutionary at the time. So he was commissioned, at least by Dayton's department store to build this kind of advanced shopping center. They didn't call them malls at the time. They called them advanced shopping centers. It's so high tech. He actually added space for a competitor at the other end because he had this idea, like, how to keep people there. And I don't know how he talked Dayton's into it. Yes, the Daytons were like, wait, yeah, hold on a second. No, we're paying you to do this, and you want to put a competitor store in there? He's like, yeah, it'll work. Trust me. So a few minutes ago, I mentioned that it was introverted. My uncle is still texting me, still looking for parking, just circling the Castro at this point. So we mentioned introverted and extroverted. Malls previous to this were outdoor, and like we said, they were extroverted. So in other words, you walk the perimeter, and the stores face the outside, and they had doors on them that you would walk into if you wanted to shop. So he had this idea like, wait, let's reverse all that. Let's turn it all inside. Where you walk into this huge building, you got these two stores on both ends, and there are no doors. They might have a gate. They lower at night, but it's just open. Like, people will just walk through this little concourse, and all the stores are wide open for everyone. It's air conditioned. It's heated. Not at the same time, at appropriate times, especially in a place like Minneapolis. It's probably a nice place to go in the wintertime. Yeah, it was a big deal. He introverted them is what they're called, right? Where they look in on themselves and they're enclosed as well. So for the first time ever, you could just walk around this beautiful place with trees, and he put like a 20 foot birdcage, and there were goldfish ponds and all this stuff, and it would be the middle of winter, and you could walk around in short sleeves and be like, I live in a dina. Not a dina. The other thing he kind of nailed right out of the gate was previous to this, shopping malls were usually our shopping centers are on one floor, and they were spread out over this big broad area, and you had to enter from the outside and walk around the cold. And it was all this one big single level. And he said, how about this? How about we stack it? Because this is ingenious. Everyone put a store on one end, put a store on the other end. You stack them on top of each other. You put escalators on both sides. You park in this side, you go into your department store, you walk down on the first level to get to the other department store, you go down the escalator, and then you walk back on the other level to get to your car. And you've seen every store, right? And it was genius. It was retail genius. Exactly. Pretty amazing. And again, we take this for granted now, but at the time, everyone's like, huh, never thought of that. Well, the point that we take this for granted, like, all of this sounds brain dead. All of this came essentially from this one guy, this dude named Victor gruan, who was kind of like a high artsy fartsy society type from Austria, who fled the Nazis in 1938 and was a self taught architect who just started designing a mall. And he invented the mall, and he got basically everything right out of the gate. It's amazing. The Economist has a really great quote about him. They say that it was as if Orville and Wilbur Wright invented not just manned flight, but also tray tables and duty free service. Not bad. The other thing you got right out of the gate was these low balconies. If you ever go into a mall, if you're on the top floor, you can look down and say, I got to go into Chest King and get some parachute pants. Sure. Or if you're down on the bottom floor, you can look up and you can see, I got to go to Mary Go Round and check out the ladies. Mary Go round. Man, that takes me back. There will be a bit of nostalgia peppered in here and there. Actually, I don't even think I put Mary Go around. I put camelot music is what I have in mind. Camelot music, everyone. And the joke I have was the DuranDuran casingle. Oh, my God. The casingle. It's like I just ate a whole bunch of member berries or something. Of what member berries? I don't know. It's a whole South Park thing. Okay, yeah, well, three other people love that joke. So more than 75,000 people 75,000 people turned out on the grand opening day of South Dale Mall. And not just local press. Life magazine, Time magazine, New York Times, Business Week, Newsweek, they all came out and said things like, it's the splashiest center in the US. As a goldfish pond, birds art ten acres of stores, and all under one Minnesota roof. It's a pleasure dome with parking, said Time magazine. But one guy got it right. One guy said, south Dale has become an integral part of the American way, and this is the first mall. And some journalist points to it and says, this is how things are from now on. And this is the page that is very hard for me to read, because, as you can see, I crumpled it up. Well, hold on. So if we're going to release this, we should probably take an abbrek, huh? Oh, yeah, sure. Okay, you ready? So we'll be right back. Capital One offers commercial solutions you can bank on. Now more than ever, your business faces specific challenges and unique opportunities. That's why capital One offers a comprehensive suite of financial services custom tailored to your short and long term goals. Backed by the expertise, strategy and resources of a top ten commercial bank, a dedicated team works with you to support your success and help you achieve your goals. Explore the possibilities at capital one. comCOMMERCIAL it's 2022. 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Yes, you guys get to see how the sausage is. So as I was saying before the break, I don't know if you can see it there, but this is crumpled up and very hard to read because Josh sent a new version. And in the hotel room I said, great, I printed it out. I crumpled up the wrong one, threw it away, and right before I came, I was searching through the trash. And here it is. It's not that bad, actually. So we're going to entitle this next section, the golden age of the mall. Well, you have to go like this one. It wouldn't be a live show if we didn't have a golden age of skyjacking, golden age of PR, golden age of grave robbing, and now the golden age of them all. Right, I was about to say golden age of Rodney Dangerfield, but it was all golden age for that guy. So the mall had its golden age. Between 1956 and 2005, 1500 malls America were built. Possibly 2000, possibly 3000. What? No one knows. They just stopped counting? Pretty much. They're like, forget it. We'll say 7000? Who cares? A million malls were built between that time in the US. So there's a woman named Lisa Sharon who runs wrote a book called America at the Mall colon. Because every book has to have a colon. Sure, if you're smart. The cultural role of retail utopia. And she said for the children, seventy s, eighty s and ninety s. The shopping mall was the place to be. A space where we defined as our own. The mall taught us how to fit in, how to be a consumer, ultimately how to be an American. You don't have to say how old you are, but if you grew up in sort of the that the mall and into the course. Sure. The shopping mall was like, it's different than it is today. Like, families used to go to the mall for the day. You pick a Saturday and you all pile in the car. You go to the mall, you maybe go see a movie. The kids would go to the arcade, mom and dad would do some shopping. And you would literally spend like six to 8 hours as a family outing at a mall. Right. Pretty unbelievable to think about that. Now you gather on the laptop and go on to Amazon.com. Yeah. And I'll sit around and stare at your phones and ignore you say, yes, I would like to get into Fermenting pickles. I could use some fermentation. Wait. Thanks for suggesting that Amazon interesting. You just changed my life. But it was a big deal. You would spend family day at the mall and in the 80s it was a part of America as anything else. There were restaurants in the food court at the mall that didn't exist outside of the mall. They were born in the mall. Like Cinnabon. Someone gasped, that's it, we can go home now. That was an awesome all. Whoever ever working towards is a gas from somebody. Orange Julius. That was another one. Panda Express was only in malls for a long time. And apparently sborrow everyone knows Sparrow, right? It was so tied to malls that when Saboro filed for bankruptcy in 2014, they cited unprecedented decline in mall traffic. In their filing, there's like, no one likes them all anymore. We're sparrow. We're dead. Chickfila too. You guys don't have chickfila here, do you? Oh, you do. You do. This is long before we knew they served hate chicken. This is back when everyone just thought it was delicious and juicy and crispy, not filled with homophobia. But no, they've since walked it back. So it's all fine. Yeah, we're just not open on Sundays. Chickfila was used to only be in the mall. I think there was one original chickfila store in Georgia. I think that's where it was born. But aside from that, it was only in the mall. And I remember going to the mall, remember when malls used and they may still do this. I don't go to malls. There's no shop on Amazoncom. Malls used to have events like a world record Sunday, ice cream Sunday or something to get people there. I went to chicksA when I was about ten at north Lake mall, which was my mall, because they had the world's largest cup of lemonade. On a Saturday afternoon, my mom took me and I drank from that spigot along with thousands of other people, and it was not even that impressive. I thought it was giant, but now that I'm adult, it was probably like 8ft high, right? It was 64oz. But they were just the first ones to try. So whatever they did was the world's biggest cup of lemon. It was a mall event that I went to. What was your mall? I had two because we moved a very formative time in my life. I had Southwick Mall in Toledo and then Holpers. Okay. I had a town center mall in Atlanta. Okay. You guys haven't been to town center mall? Believe me, I would recognize you. Were you a mall rat? No, not necessarily. No. I would not call myself a mall rat because I didn't, like, sell or consume drugs at the mall. So I wasn't a mall rat. I was like, there legitimately. I was there to visit the Led Zeppelin box set on cassette that I was saving up to buy just to make sure it's still there. Or like, I would go to Spencer's and put my hand on the plasma ball, be like, what? Spencer Gifts? I say that like, you're from here. I know that eight people are from San Francisco in this room. You know Spencer Gifts. Okay. Very titillating place for young battles. Oh, it is. After the one section. You know what I'm talking about? Plus the posters, too. Yeah, it's funny. Now, as an adult, the one section, I just thought it was like, oh, man, and then there are some children here just you don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe she's used pick Latin. I don't know how to do that. But for a young Baptist kid, I was just like I would walk by it and I would pretend like I'm looking at other things and just looking in that section to see what was in it. I remember now. It's so dumb. The stuff that was in that section. Sure, yeah. It's like a stud collar. Like, who cares? By the time you're like, oh, my God, a guy checking me out yesterday was wearing one. And nothing else. Yes. Maybe a condom with bells and that's. It so silly. I remember walking past Victoria's Secret like I was not doing that on purpose, but just kind of like I could actually I trained my right eye to go like that. Took a lot of exercise, a lot of work, a lot of muscle relaxers, but I got it down. That's good. And that was pretty cell phone when you couldn't fake like you were doing something else. Right. Good work. That's very impressive. You trained it back and everything? I did. Now I can't do it anymore, or else I'd show you guys. I didn't know where I was. I got so sidetracked by North Lake Mall. Oh, and the gold mine was my arcade at the mall. Sure. Wonderful. You get, like, 20 tokens for a dollar on a Wednesday. And now games cost, like, a dollar 50 to play one game. Yeah, progress. What else did they have back in those days? You made a list. Chess King. Of course. Mary Go Around. I mentioned contempo casuals ladies. Deb. I knew this section was all into that. County seat. Remember county seat? That is a deep cut where you could go get jeans. Like when the Gap used to be, like, sweatshirts and blue jeans before they rebranded. Right, sure. You should go back to that. Mary, go round. Camel Music. What else? Oh, well, bookstores. You could just say bookstore. And that would be novel. B. Dalton. Yeah. Walden Books. Walden Books. I think I consumed every single volume of truly tasteless jokes in those without buying a single one. Man, I remember those. Those were great. Yeah. Pet Doctor. The cruelest cutest store of all time. Remember, like, the mall pet store. I was like, this Hampshire is so cute. And then it died, like, an hour later from neglect. You just shuffle it out and put a new one in. There's a trap door. Right. John Hodge wanted to hate this show. Dripping with nostalgia. Dripping. He's here in this town. He refused to come because he knew. Or did he? Are you kidding? He'd already be up here. Like, Let me take the money up. Nostalgia is toxic. The mall became a prominent fixture in movies of the day. Of course, the Sherman Oaks Galleria in California, which is where we are in California here. That was the mall in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. One of the great mall movies and full mall movie, but sell it short. It also appeared prominently in Commando, where Arnold Schwarzenegger beats up, like, a ton of guys at the mall. Yeah, same mall, not as a comet. You mentioned anyone I. Remember seeing that as a kid and thinking because if you haven't seen the movie this comet comes and destroys, like, everyone at night. Yeah. And everyone has these comet parties to watch the comet, but it kills everybody except for the two really hot teenage girls that didn't watch the comet. And then a few other people. And what do they do? They go to the mall shop because it's abandoned. And I remember being a kid thinking that would be the dopest thing ever. Sure. To just go in an empty mall and it's all yours. Or to live at Restoration Hardware or something. I would have run and dispense your guests into that section. Yeah, that's what awaited you. And you missed your chance. You could be walking around the Castro right now. And I look out and there's this creepy guy with a wandering eye staring at me. And who knew what else? The Blues Brothers had a very famous mall scene. Yeah. They went through the Dixie Square Mall sorry, the Diisha Square Mall, where they were like, this place has got everything. And maybe one of the most famous mall parking lots of all time. The Twin Pines mall from Back to the Future, which was actually the Puente Hills mall. Hills. That was possibly appropriate, maybe, which I don't even know where that is. I mean, it's in La. Obviously, but I'm not sure it's in City of Industry that don't even offer the name for a town. Everybody. It's outside of La. I looked it up. And of course, Mall Rats, which we don't need to talk about too much, really. That was Kevin Smith. He has a really high voice. You can't leave out moon unit. Zappa, dude. Oh, yeah, of course. Valley Girl. Yeah, she had a hit single, Valley Girl. And her father, Frank Zappa, hated the Valley Girls. Right. And, well, it kind of blew up in his face when he released a song with his daughter about how stupid Valley girls were that it actually popularized valley girls and made them cool in America. Yeah. So eat that. Frank Zappa. He's past eat that in musical heaven. So malls started to really grow not only in popularity, but in size. To the point, as Josh says, of sheer absurdity in Canada. Because they have malls, too, I should say. Yeah, we have some Canadians here. And yet no one from Toledo. The West Edmonton. Mall. Really? All right. Opened. And no one from Toledo. Anyone from Elm Street in Edmonton. That's what I thought it was open in 1982, had an ice skating rink. It had sea lions and a pool boo and an indoor bunch of jump to tempt fate for shoppers right over the sea lions. It's just scare the oh, my God. Sea lions hate being dumped over. And the developers knew it, too. And of course, the Mall of America, perhaps the most famous mall in Minnesota. They were going to build a roller coaster there? They did when they decided to build three roller coasters there. I've never been there. Have you been there in Mall of America? No, I haven't. Anyone been there? Oh, wow. All right. Huge, right? It's outside of Adina, actually. No, really? It's like 7 miles from a diner. That's true. Should we go to the mile walkers? Yeah, I think so. This may be one of my favorite sections of any show we've ever done because I love mall walkers. Didn't know it existed until I worked at a mall. I think I mentioned on the show I worked at the Gap for a month in college over Christmas break and I was a champion folder and I still have those skills today. Were you really? You know, I actually quit working in the Gap is because they got mad that I wouldn't recommend socks and belts as they checked out. And I said, I think if they wanted socks and belts, they would get socks and belts. And my manager said, I don't know if the Gap is right for you. I went, I think you might be right. Took off my little pen and I handed it to him and me and my mock turtleneck strolled right on out of here. That was it. That's the only retail job I've ever sticking it to the man. I did. But anyway, long way of getting to mall walkers. I remember showing up for work one morning to open and there were these old people walking around and I thought, does anyone know that they're in here because the mall is not open yet? And someone said, Maybe they live here. Yeah, they live in Mary go round to come out at night from the giant pants they just sprout out of the legs. But they explained to me what a mall walker was, and even at a young age I was like, that's wonderful. It warmed my heart and it became a legit, real American thing. It did. Apparently the CDC did a report on this because if you can't study gun violence, might as well study mall walking. And in 2015 they said malls are right behind neighborhoods for popularity of walking. They just went to bed after that, but they did a little more digging and they said the reason people love malls is because there's restrooms, water fountains, benches and level surfaces. And this is one of my favorite quotes from any CDC report ever. They said that the latest fashionable workout attire is not a requisite for mall walking and no truer words have ever been spoken. You won't find any yoga pants on the mall walker. Oh, no. As a matter of fact, I would imagine you would be ostracized if you did just kind of gussy up like you're putting on airs or something. They don't play that in a diner. Yeah. Actually, you know what mall walkers wear those workout pants that look like watered up paper. You know what I'm talking about. It's like this wrinkly, weird material. I don't even know what it is. It's made of fish skin. What? Yeah. All right, we're going to talk about it. All right, we'll talk about it later. Let's hang onto this page to remind us to talk about it. Well, that's fish skin, but you mean clothing, right? That's totally weird. But it makes sense in a way. So these generally elderly folks are walking around malls, and at the Mall of America, they have a PR coordinator there named Tara Neibling. And she says, we love our wallmarkers mall walkers. They're very special to us. And they even have a program there. It's so adorable. But they give them little swipe cards. It keeps track of it sort of like a fitbit. But they can't wear a Fitbit, I guess, because I don't even know why they can't figure it out or something. Well, they're expensive. That's very aggressive. Your back is going to be against the wall for that joke later on. But they give them these little swipe cards that lets them track how much they're walking and how much exercise they're getting. They have monthly breakfast meetings where they have health experts come in and talk about exercise. We should all go there right now. And all this is in exchange for a $15 annual fee if you want to officially be a member. But don't feel bad, sir. Like, I was like, what a rip. It said they welcome unofficial mall walkers, aka the old dudes who refused to pay the $15, aka society's Leeches. That would be me. I'm not paying $50. That's me in about ten or 15 years. Anyway, I think it's adorable. And the whole thing about mall walkers is it was a problem at first because they didn't use to open malls to allow this. They just came to the mall when it was open and they would walk around and they said that there was a quote in here. And they said they thought it would upset the regular shoppers to have them just exercising among them. And they're like, what do we do? We can't kill them. They have our arms behind our backs. They really have us over a barrel. We can't kill them, can we? We could wait for them to die. But they're really healthy because mall owners gets together once a year. Yeah, like capes, red satin inside, black on the out. So they decided to open the mall just for them to walk around before the stores open, which is just adorable, I think. Speaking of the Mall of America, douglas Copeland. I don't know if any of you have read Generation X. It's a really great book, but he basically coined the name. Apparently no one's read it. Douglas Copeland. Wow. This really would work so much better if you guys knew what Generation X was. Yeah, we wrote it. So he wrote the book literally Generation X and just set the tone for the whole thing. And he was actually at the opening of Mall of America on August 11, 1992, and he was up there on stage with a local radio affiliate and he said that everybody was walking by with what he called country fairface where they were like Google eyed and eating ice cream. Couldn't believe this mall. It was the most amazing thing they'd ever seen. And he said that the interviewer just assumed he was going to be like a slacker ironic wise ass and said, I bet you think this whole mall is very hokey and trashy. And Douglas Copeland said, actually, not at all. Chuck Where should I start? Here. Oh, sorry, I didn't finish my part. Then the radio guy was like, What, Chuck? And he said, quote, I mean that I feel like I'm in another era that we thought had vanished, but it really hasn't. Not yet. I think we might one day look back on photos of today and think to ourselves, you know, those people were living in golden times and they didn't even know it. Communism was dead, the economy was good, and the future with all of its accompanying technologies hadn't crushed society's mojo like a bug dropped the mic and they said, well that's really not good for the mic. Please don't do that anymore. And he goes on to say it's true. He says that technology hadn't hollowed out the middle class and turned us all into like laptop click junkies. He didn't say that. He said there were no new boogeymen hiding in the closet. He said we may look at the 90s as the last good decade. And all of this came to him at the mall. So they didn't get their snarky quote after all? No. Which is kind of ironic in a way. So he really did zing them, but it was a meta zinc. So if you want to talk to psychology of malls, we need to go back to Victor gruan. And he has a quote where he said shoppers will be so bedazzled by the store surroundings they'll be drawn unconsciously continually to shop. And this kind of goes against his ethos. He wasn't like the PR guy. I can't think of his name. We did that like twelve times. Oh, Ed Bernays. It wasn't like Ed Bernays. He didn't have this thing where he was like, yes, we need to get people to shop. But he was commissioned to do so and he did a good job. He thought the mall would be a little bit more like sort of like they had in Europe, like a public meeting space. And that's why he built these atriums in the middle with the skylights in the fountain. And he thought people will go there and hang out and talk politics and maybe even stand up and speak about things publicly to people because that's what happens at the mall, right? Instead, the developers are like you go over there, you're done. You did your damage. Right? We're actually going to go so far as to name a psychological effect after you. Something called the Gruin Transfer, which is where you walk into the mall and you're like, I'm going to buy a Hello Kitty pin. And that is it. And you get through the mall and you're like, oh, my God, there's a water fountain. Oh, my God, there's old people walking around. There's just amazing stuff going on here at the mall. I forgot what I was going to get. And now I have a compulsion to get an Orange Julius with drugs in it. And you forget what you're doing, and all of a sudden you're shopping in general rather than purposefully shopping. That is called the Gruen Transfer or the Gruin effect. Victor Gruen probably would not be very happy to know that that was the case. No. And as we'll see later, he, in fact, was not happy about that. So malcolm Gladwell. Josh's mortal enemy. That's not true. He did an interview with a Alfred Talben, and he said it's called threshold resistance. He said people assume that we enclosed the space because of air conditioning and climate control. He said what it really did was allow us to open the store to the customer, which is what we talked about, that introverted thing. All of a sudden, you're in this huge retail utopia. All the doors are open at all times, and you're just strolling through the mall and you walk by Nike Town and they have looks like a nightclub in there. Sure. So you're just sort of unconsciously drawn inside there. You're like, I'd like to make some new friends, right? Surely I can. At Nike Town. Back in the day, in shopping centers, they used to have live bands. And that was replaced, of course, with music later on, which is you take like, a normal song, like Breads, I Want to Make It with you. And then you remove the lyrics, the percussion, replace it all with strings, and all of a sudden, people are just walking around like, Bye. It works really well. So much so that the people at malls who are typically in charge of the music were the same people who were in charge of the heat and the lighting. The facilities manager. That's how much music meant to it. It was like part of the building. But at the same time, you can't really call it music. In fact, you'd probably call it something weird. Like music. Yes. You think about the coolest DJ. I'm not hip on that scene. Steve Ayoke. Okay. The facilities manager is the opposite of Steve IoKE. But they're sitting in their room, man, and they're controlling the music and the lights and the sounds of the mall all in that little room. Dead mouse. I know what that is. But the S is the number five, right? Yeah. So hip, not old. I know that guy, too. So we talked a little bit earlier about the cycle of the mall, the two story layout, and while you can go to malls where there are three stories, most of the malls I've been to that have a third story. It's not the entire mall. There'll be, like, a section with a third story. I don't know if they built it on or what, but generally you see a two story mall because you had that cycle across, down, across, up back to your car, right. And you've seen all the stores. Right. But if you had a third level, you go across, down, across. My car should be here, but now I have a third level, and I'm stuck. I'm just going to wander around in this corner until some people come get me. And as a matter of fact, VALCO Mall had three levels. Look what happened to it. What mall? It's a local mall. Oh. And the 14 people from San Francisco applauded. All right. Yeah. Oh, it's in San Jose Cupertino. It's like the same place. Come on. I think you could default to Bay Area and you do yourself a lot of favors. You're hearing this from the guy who took off an infinity scarf right before he came on stage because he was told that it's not cool anymore. I don't even know what that is. So your burn does not work. No, I was talking about myself. I wasn't burning you, buddy. I wasn't burning you. All right. Burn. Yeah. With an infinity scarf. It's a stupid what else did they figure out? You're fine, lady. Your infinity scarf is fine. Is that an infinity scarf? That's lovely. Can you come up here and show everyone when an infinity scarf I'm kidding. No. Everybody stops because we thought about adding runway modeling to our shows. That'd be a great time. Sorry about the infinity scarf joke. Now I feel terrible. Is anyone drinking nothing but soylent right now. I should have made that joke. Instead, I'm looking over my glasses for more clothes. I can make fun of Tyler Murphy. That beard is something else. Tyler here he is. He died at Blue. Everybody. All right, this is another part that's going to be edited out later. So, Tyler, say whatever you want. So the other thing they figured out was keeping people in the mall, which is a big goal, is that people like to shop with other people, but sometimes the people that you bring to shop with you, namely husbands, don't like to be at the mall. So they said, well, let's put comfy areas in the mall, like chairs. And in fact, there was a quote that said, a chair says, we care. Yeah, a famous mall designer. What it really means is a chair says, we can keep your wife here longer than you would like to be here. Right. The husband's like, oh, I just want to lay down and die on my floor at home. Can I just go home? You can lay down and die here, sir. Right. Lay there. Shut up. So the ironies of Grueling, we said earlier, I don't think we specifically said he was a socialist. No. Just really weird for a socialist to be the father of the shopping mall, wouldn't you think? And his original idea was that people could go there and espouse their views. And that maybe happened once in 1976, until the Supreme Court came in and said, in the case of Hudson versus Natural Relations Labor Relations Board, basically, these union dudes wanted to pick it inside the mall and they did. So they got kicked out, they sued, and the Supreme Court said, actually, this private property and you can't bring your picket signs in here. And the picketers were like, Wait. The mall is the new heart, the new civic center of American life in the Supreme Court. Don't be an idiot. Place to shop, dummy. And everyone. I didn't hear what you just said. We're going to just keep pretending like the mall is the hardest of his life. So it was a big problem for gruan, actually. He also hated cars. He was big into walking, he was in favor of pedestrianism. And yet you have to drive a car to get to the mall. And not only that, you have to park some of his creations. I think South Dale had, like 2.8 million parking and he called these things like land wasting, seas of parking lots. So as he's designing these things, he's like, I'm not very happy about this. And they would go do it anyway. Even the stuff he scratched out, they're like, no, this is a good idea. We're going to go with this. And he had no say whatsoever. After a while, no. And he got pretty disgusted and he left the United States forever in the 1960s, went back to Europe and said in 1978, a couple of years before his death, he gave a speech in London and said, I am often called the father of the shopping mall. I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refused to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities and they said, sir, we have the paternity test and you are the father, right? He said, no, I'm not. No, you really are. Yeah, we use lumenol and everything. Maybe we should take another ad break. Yeah, let's take another ad break. We'll be back 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 at CapitalOne. comCOMMERCIAL. It's 2022. When things look different, like doctors visits, for example, sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for nonemergency situations, like a sinus, infection or allergy. And that's why teladoc gives you the chance to connect with board certified physicians right from your home via phone or video. That's right. Doctors are standing by 24/7, so you can schedule a visit according to your schedule. You can see for yourself why teledoc is ranked number one by JD. Power and telehealth satisfaction with direct to consumer providers. Telecom is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teedoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teladoc.com stuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's teladoc.com slash stuff. For JD. Power 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS and we're back. We should, I guess, move on to the death of the mall. Yeah. Because I don't know if you guys know this or not, but malls are not doing very well these days. I know, clap, but you'll probably like the rest of this episode. The mall actually peaked in 1990 at 16 million. Space opened in that year, and it's been tapering off ever since. And here's a little staggering statistic for you. Since the 1950 is when the first mall was built. There was at least one mall built every single year until 2007. Usually many mall. Well, up to a million from what I hear. I mean, that's an estimate, but yeah. So 2007 marked the first year that a new mall wasn't built. And I think there were no new malls built until 2012 in the United States. 2008 recession. The great recession had a really big impact on retail. Yeah, there's like a bunch of different reasons people put for what killed the mall, right? The mall has long been known for killing the American downtown. Right. The mall moved out to the suburbs and the downtown just kind of went away. Right. So reason number one is that the great recession killed them all. And this is true to a pretty large extent, actually, from world War II until, I think, 2009. Every single year, americans spent more money than they had the year before, which is nuts, right? Then 2009 comes and we stopped. And not only did we stop, we actually declined tremendously. We stopped spending by something like 10%. And then the money that we did spend, we started spending at target and Walmart, not at the mall or at places like JCPenney or Sears who tried to keep these malls propped up and who malls depended on. Because, again, remember, if you go to a mall, the whole reason the mall exists is for the department stores to spread their traffic out to the smaller stores. And if the department stores are hurting, which they were, then the smaller stores hurt as well. So as these big large anchor stores started to go under, the malls did as well. But people said the Great Recession was pretty bad. It's probably not the only reason that the mall is dying. Yeah, we mentioned Amazon.com earlier, and they're not the only online retailer, of course. And you can tell we're not from the area because we say.com after it. We just want to make sure you guys know what we're talking about. We're trying to communicate with you. I can't believe I said that. How nerdy. Both of us have said it like five or six times. Yes. Stuff you should know.com. Well, there's orgs and nets. Yeah. Not Amazon edu's UK specificity is the soul of narrative. Oh, good one. Thank you. Take that, everybody. Thank you. In 2014, traditional retailers for the very first time generated about half their sales from the web. But you can't like I do all my shopping online now. I literally haven't been. I think I went to the mall last year for something and asked my wife. She's out there. I was miserable, I hated it. But we had to go for some reason or another. I can't remember. Probably staying in the line for a stupid phone. I'm just kidding. I don't do that either. Thank you. But I almost stood in line for breakfast this morning right here in San Francisco. Because that's the thing. Jeez. Yeah, but online retailing isn't that big of a thing yet. Even if it hits the 15% annual growth over the next three years that they project, by 2019 it'll still only be about 12.4% of retail. Which is not enough to kill them all. No, but it's a factor. No. And plus, you can kind of find this weird confidence in the idea that malls may continue limping along, if you're into that kind of thing, by the fact that Amazon.com open a brick and mortar store, a bookstore, to help boost their online sales, which is mind boggling, but they did it in Seattle. But more than anything, perhaps the reason the malls died is because they were never meant to live forever. And this next part is about the economics of malls and specifically it sounds so boring, tax loopholes concerning malls. Josh is going to explain it. Oh God. If you build a building somewhere, and I should say hats off to Gladwell for explaining this to this comes largely from him, but if you build a billing somewhere in say like 1950, the government said, you know what, your billing is not going to hold up forever. So you can deduct a certain percentage of your billing value every year and put it aside tax free to replace that building. Eventually. And at the time when shopping malls first started to come about in the early fifty s, the deduction for this wear and tear was 140th. Right. Like you had a 40 years to deduct this value of your building. This is not going well. No, that's perfect. So far. I'm checking in for accuracy. Okay. All right. I feel like my fingernails are bleeding. So every year, right, if you went and built a shopping mall, you could deduct 140 th of the value of the shopping mall. Not a huge deduction, but it was something called depreciation. The problem is this depreciation deduction. It was something, but it wasn't enough. If you built a shopping mall in the early fifty s, you were really asking for trouble because they were hugely expensive. They cost, like, 20 million or 30 million, which are on par to 180 or $200 million today. Right. And you were going to make your money back very slowly. But then and I think the US. Government said, you know what? We really want to kind of get things going on billing and construction. We want to make sure Josh and Chuck have something interesting to talk about at the end of their malls episode years from now. So we're going to change the tax code. And they did, and they created or allowed for something called accelerated depreciation. And this changed everything. Chuck so I'm going to go back to the Wall Street Journal, wrote a little article trying to describe this financial situation for a real estate company named Crater Corp. Sounds totally made up, like an evil villains business that he would run, or an STD. I abbreviated. What does that stand for? It won't go away, doc million to one, I tell you. So this is going to round the numbers just to make it easier. So let's say Cratercorp in 1960, made about $10 million overall. Is everyone writing this down as we're saying this? You don't need to. So deductions from operating expenses and mortgage interest is about $5 million. So they still make about $5 million. Not a bad income, but not good enough. Then came the depreciation, accelerated depreciation to the tune of about $7 million. So all of a sudden, Crater, instead of having a profit of $5 million on the books, has a loss of a couple of million dollars on the books, and everyone has these huge tax write offs. And now you fully understand, if you didn't before, why our next president doesn't pay income tax. It's basically this accelerated depreciation on real estate that allows you to write off these massive amounts of money to show big losses where you're, in fact, making gains. Right. And the big change to the tax code was to the IRS. They're still getting the same amount of taxes over the life of the building. They just said, if you want to deduct this depreciation at the beginning of the life of the building, that's fine with us. It's all the same to us. Well, if you are a developer, you would build this building, deduct as much as you could over, say, three, four, five years, maybe even break even just from the tax. Deductions and then sell that mall for pure profit of 50 or 100 or $150,000,000 and walk away laughing and laughing and laughing. Right? Exactly. We're in your cape. But here's the thing. They wouldn't put that money back into the mall to make it better. They would sell it off, like you said and just go build a bigger mall further out. And now we'll call these exorbs. They're not even suburbs because they were all about going where the land was cheapest. The mall stopped being a place to actually service people. They would just build malls where they could get the best deals on land and found that people would drive to them and sometimes even build entire towns around them. Right? Yeah. Let's move to the mall. And it's true, under this view, when you really understand why there were 2000 or 3000 or 1 million malls built in the United States, huge mall. Some cities have multiple malls. When you realize that they were built for tax breaks and not to fulfill some consumer demand, then of course they were destined to shrivel and die because they were part of an artificial supply. And once that became exposed and the tax breaks went away, malls started going down. And it's sad in a way, when a mall goes under, people have associations with memories with the mall. Like, you think about all the mall walkers you've seen and loved walking around the mall. And when it dies, it's sad. But even more than that, it can actually, depending on the town, can take an entire city down with it. Yeah, there was a place. North Randall, Ohio. I'm satisfied. What do you mean? Really? I mean, it's outside of Cleveland. I figured half of Cleveland probably tried to move to San Francisco. Emily didn't cheer for that one. I know. She's from Ohio. So they had the Randall Park Mall, and it cost about $175,000,000 to build in 1975. And get this, the grand opening. 5000 guests had champagne, one \u00a3200 of fresh shrimp, crab, cold roast turkey, hot corned, beef and ham, melon and cheese, small crepes filled with chicken and spinach, coffee and dessert. It was like a Roman orgy. Basically in disguise of the opening of a mall. You got the world's largest cup of lemonade. Wasn't too bad. I just hate that I put my mouth on that thing along with all the other people. You should have at least had smaller cups. Or maybe not professional swimmers inside the cup. No, there were sea horses. No. Sea monster monkeys. Those are fine. They pass right through your digestive trip. You don't metabolize. That so gross. Tommy Dorsey showed up at the grand opening of this mall with his orchestra to play. It was a big event. But Randall Mall has since fallen on hard times. And those 2.2 million retail space have been shuttered and almost along with it, North Randall, Ohio. As a whole. That whole town is sort of on life support, basically because the closing of the shopping mall very sad. Yes, but there are some malls that are still doing well. Outlet malls are thriving. High end malls, in case you were wondering how they're really wealthy, are doing pretty good. High end malls are thriving like you would not believe. They're up by 14.6% since the economic crisis. And there's this dude, his name is Rick Caruso. He pretended the death of the mall. Malls are dead. They're gone. Unless they reinvent themselves. And it just so happens that I build the type of mall that mall should reinvent themselves into. So he basically is trying to recreate downtown, but a nice, happy, Disney esque downtown where nothing ever goes wrong and everything is great. And by the way, it's also a mall and it's outdoors. And to follow this trend, malls are doing the exact opposite of what they did when gruan started designing enclosed malls. They're tearing the roofs off and following this new trend to try to survive. Yes, he calls them lifestyle centers. I don't know if there's one here. There's one in Atlanta called Atlantic Station. I hate them more than anything. To those really strong opinions on mall, at least the mall is a mall. It's not pretending to be a small town. Yeah, that's true. It's like, look, we just built these streets and it looks like a stoplight, but your child can control it fully. And no cars are allowed. There's no cars with a button. So it's like downtown USA. There's no crime anywhere, security guards everywhere, and all you do is shop. Shop. So to me, there's a certain sadness over the death of the mall. For me, personally, I think even for some of the boomers in here, you spent time at the mall. The mall represented something to America. But if you step back and look about exactly what the mall represents, and even more to the point, what the death of the mall represents, is it really the death of a golden age or a golden era when things were great? Because if you look at them all, it's an outpost of consumerism. It's like a church of consumption. Right? So if we've lost that, then maybe out of the ashes, out of the things that are so broken right now, you can find some kind of weird hope that maybe we can rebuild in a new, better way to where the most important part of civic life isn't the mall. Wow. And that is mall. That's mall. Thank you, everybody. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.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 Kilgarh 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, 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." | |
What's the deal with crop circles? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-crop-circles | For a while in the 1980s, people were fascinated and confused about what exactly crop circles were. Now we know that they aren't signs left from aliens, but art made by humans. Learn all about these stunning, large form art installations in today's episod | For a while in the 1980s, people were fascinated and confused about what exactly crop circles were. Now we know that they aren't signs left from aliens, but art made by humans. Learn all about these stunning, large form art installations in today's episod | Thu, 13 Nov 2014 16:17:02 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=16, tm_min=17, tm_sec=2, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=317, tm_isdst=0) | 36948931 | audio/mpeg | "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 Jerry, which makes this whole thing stuff. You should know the podcast. That's right. How's it going? Good, man. I got on my snowshoes, and I'm walking in a wheat field making geometric patterns. They run into snow shoes. Well, it's sort of a large snowshoe. I could see that, though. Yes, that would definitely work. Snowshoe takes longer. Yeah, right. But it's easier. You can do something else with your hands while you're using that. That's a good point. So did you ever have the Legs Up and boxed set from, like, 1990? My college roommate did, yeah. So you're familiar with the crop circles? Oh, yeah. And the suggestion that by Led Zeppelin that it was their zeppelin that was responsible for all of them. Is that what that was? Yeah. I didn't pick up on that because on the cover of the box, that there's, like, this awesome, very real life crop circle formation and then the shadow of the zeppelin floating over it. Oh, I don't think I noticed the shadow ever. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that was the whole thing. Led Zeppelin took responsibility for this. Right. And by the way, we got a lot of responses on how they got the name Led Zeppelin. So thank you to the hundreds of people yeah. Where they mailed in, where the e, where the A went. They didn't want people to think it was Lead Zeppelin. Exactly. That makes total sense. Right? Yeah. The zeppelin in front. The Lead Zeppelin. Anyway, it turns out that it's complete fabrication that the Led Zeppelin Zeppelin was responsible for crop circles. But that's one of the few suggestions that have been made for what makes crop circles. This is a really strange topic, frankly, because it's been out for about a quarter of a century how crop circles are made, who makes them, and yet there's still a lot of people called sera, ologists after series, the guys of agriculture who are like, no, those people. That's the whole catch. It's a hoax. Right. They're responsible for, like, 80% of crop circles, which leaves 20% unaccounted for. Yeah. I don't even call it a hoax. I just call it art. Well, yeah, I saw somewhere at one point, somebody said it's the most science based art there is, because the stuff that crop circles are made of, a lot of them, is some really impressive Euclidean geometry. Yeah. Some smart people are behind these, what I like to call art. They're not just a bunch of dummies walking around on a cornfield. No, but they are people. Yes, they are. And we kind of spoiled it. So if you wanted to find out who makes crop circles, it's art. You can turn the episode off, but if you do, you're going to miss out on some kind of some cool, interesting stuff, if you ask me. Yes, and what I think is weird is that despite the fact that it is definitely not aliens and all the stuff that people propose, we'll get into all that is that even when the people came out and said, no, we've been making crop circles for years, some people are like, no, they're being paid to say that right. Aliens, in fact, that's something that you run up against with conspiracy theories, though, is just admitting that you're responsible to suggest that somebody's put you up to admitting it's disinformation, basically. Yeah. And that's what a lot of people have said. A lot of people say it's Mi five. And the reason they say it's Mi Five is because if you start tracing the history of crop circles, they originated basically, the hoax did in England, specifically in a couple of counties in England. Yeah. I mean, not only originated, but I think 90% of all crop circles have existed in southern England yeah. Even though they've had something like Japan and the United States and some other parts of Europe, but yeah, 90% over in southern England. They clearly are inspired in that area to undertake the process of circle art exactly. For one reason or another. Who knows? Well, I can tell you how it started out. Yeah. So crop circles, if you're a serialogist, you will point to the 16th century, maybe, when somebody like the first, what could be described as a crop circle is accounted for. I couldn't find anything to back that up, but apparently in the 16th century, that's where the first description came from. I did find in the 17th century, in the 16th, there's a woodcut of something called the Mowing devil, and it's a devil, and he's clearly making a crop circle. But there's a pretty good explanation for the whole thing. Well, yeah. I don't understand how this became some sort of weird pseudo proof that they had crop circles back then, because if you look at the wood cut, it is Satan with a sith, and he is clearly cutting down corn or something. Some wheat harvest. Right. And cutting it. Yeah. That's a distinction. Crop circles aren't cut. It's a cornstalk that is laid down, but not damaged, supposedly. Right. They yield the pressure without breaking. So this is just complete hooey to me. And even more so, there's an explanation on the wood cut itself. Yeah. It's a story. Yeah. Basically, a man bulked at the price that he was quoted by a laborer to harvest his grain, and the man said, I would rather have the devil harvest my grain than you. And so when he woke up the next morning, he was quite surprised to find that the devil was harvesting his grain, and he probably went to hell for it. But that was the whole story behind the Mowing Devil. If you're a seriologist, this is the first evidence of crop circles, which kind of says a lot, if you ask me. Yeah. But something that does kind of pop up that's a little less easily explained, came along in 1880 in the issue of nature. There was an Englishman named John Rand capron, or capon, and he was from Surrey, and he said that he found a field of wheat that appeared to have been knocked about as if by wind. And they say there's a crop circle. Yeah, maybe it's possible he said that to him. He thought it was cyclonic wind action. And again, we'll get into other explanations later, but one of them is that they are the result of, like, a tornadoes or cyclones. Yeah, but what he didn't say was that it was like a perfect circle, and the circumference was it could have just been a windy spot where some stuff was knocked down. Right, yeah, exactly. He didn't say it was in the shape of an Egyptian arc or anything like that. Right. Or an alien smoking pot. That's a real one. Really? Yes. Those are like the earliest evidence of crop circles. And then in the modern idea of a crop circle came about in Australia, and there was supposedly a depression in a bunch of grass, a circular depression, and it had been associated with a UFO sighting, and it made the rounds in the media. And even then, a lot of people said it was probably a tornado or cyclone or something like that. But there was a dude who happened to be in Australia at the time when it was being reported on. It was a big hub up and everything. And his name was Dave crop circle. Dave crop circle. No, I'm sorry. His buddies. His name is Dave. Doug Bauer. Oh, yeah. And Doug Bauer, when he got back from Australia, he was hanging out with a friend of his one night, 1978, drunk. They'll just come out and admit they were drunk at the pub. And he told his buddy about that, and they said, wouldn't that be hilarious if we went out and made our own crop circle? And Dave said, I think that would be really hilarious. So much so, let's go do it. So they figured out how to do it, and they made the first crop circle in 1978. Like the first crop circle, the first hoax crop circle, what you call art, was made in 1978. And what's funny about the whole thing is they made these things for years, hundreds of them. Yeah, but say the first couple dozen, maybe nobody noticed because they made them on flat fields, and then they finally figured out, what if we made one on, like, a field that was on an incline? They made that one, and all of a sudden, the whole crop circle paranormal phenomenon took off like a rocket. Yes. And people caught on, obviously, and started making their own crop circles all over England and all kinds of cool designs. By the 1990s, it was a genuine tourist attraction. Even farmers were saying, come to my farm and pay me some shillings and come look at my cool crop circle. Well, apparently, they were charging to offset the damage to their crops by so many people flocking to these farms. Yeah, I saw where it didn't damage the crops. I just don't see how that's possible. The actual crop circle itself. Yeah, I think it can damage it, but the hallmark of it is that the grain is bent but not broken. So as long as it's not broken, there's still a pretty good chance it could continue growing or try to grow back upright or something. But yeah, I'm sure there's tons of broken grain in a crop circle. Yeah, I mean, I guess we should talk about the designs. Most of the times are circular, but not always. There are all sorts of different shapes now, but they started out as circular, either singles or doubles or triples or quadruples. And sometimes they're connected, sometimes they're not. They are usually bent in one way for a while, so either laying down clockwise or counterclockwise, or if they get super crafty, they can be clockwise for 10ft and then counterclockwise. And from the sky, you see these different kind of swirly patterns, like a layered swirly pattern. It's very impressive. Yeah. And again, this started really kind of to take off in the throughout the as they became more and more popular and more and more widespread in the media among people who watch the x files. And again, the 90s were a deeply paranoid decade because of the impending millennium. So I think that kind of really helped the popularity of crop circles explode. Yeah, because there are a lot of people who are like, these are signs from aliens. They're either alien landing, like alien spacecraft landing and leaving these impressions, creating artworks. Right. Or else they're leaving science for us. There's even a movie called science, a terrible, terrible movie starring Mel Gibson about this very thing. So there's a lot of people who bought into it like that. And as the awareness of crop circles grew, so did the complexity of them, to where you did have people who were sitting down and coming up with, like, really incredible math and then going out and doing it in crop circle form. Yeah, and some people use that. Like, this one is exactly four times larger than the one below it as evidence that it's something extraordinary and not just people who are good at figuring out design and geometry and math. There's specifically a man who kind of, I guess, provided a stumbling block to the debunking of crop circles. His name is Gerald s. Hawkins, and he is a retired astronomer who became a crop circle enthusiast. And he used his math skills to analyze crop circles and basically said, I've discovered a new kind of euclidean geometry in crop circles, which implies that there was some nonhuman agency creating crop circles, something advanced beyond the scope of human understanding. Right. Because if this incredibly brilliant mathematician could learn something from the something new, then that implied that something extraterrestrial was behind them. Well, his findings have been challenged time and time again. He believed it was I thought he said he was debunking. No, no, he confounded debunking. He created this. He bunked. He did bunk. Yeah. And the thing is, the language he's using, the math he's using is real math. So the average person can't come in and look at this and be like, this is wrong for this and this reason and this reason. Right. And then I think the real giveaway, though, is his work is not discussed at all in what appears to be normal academic math forums. Right. It doesn't exist, it doesn't get any recognition. Even though he published his initial findings in, like, a respected math journal, if this guy had discovered a new kind of Euclidean geometry, it would be in textbooks. Revolutionary. Yeah. And it's just not discussed. So I think that in and of itself is a pretty good example of how serials but up against skeptics and the whole thing is continued. Somebody will present a body of evidence and then nobody is either capable or willing to just go to the trouble of debunking it. Yeah. And these things this article is I don't know if I can recommend people read this one. No, it seems like it was written by a believer. Yeah, it was pretty bad. But one thing that struck me as odd in this article at least, is these things are usually, like they're big, they're several hundred feet, maybe 100ft. It says sometimes they range from several inches. I don't understand that. That's called, like, stepping on a piece of wheat, right? Like, how can a crop circle be several inches across? There was some stuff in here that I couldn't find any support for anywhere else. Here's a sentence for you under the title, who makes crop circles? The first sentence is the answer of who or what is creating these crop formations is not an easy one to answer. Sure it is. Actually, it's absolutely easy to answer. There's another sentence, too. Even with crop Circlemakers claiming responsibility for hundreds of designs, hoaxes can account for all the thousands of crop circles created. Sure you can. Yeah. Again, hoaxes can account for every single one of the crop circles ever created. Yeah, I was really disappointed with this. I put in for an article update. Oh, yeah, good, all right, so we'll talk about a little more about where these are located and what kind of fields are used after this break. All right, so you mentioned a couple of counties in England, Hampshire and Wiltshire are where most of these are, which kind of makes sense if people are saying, hey, mate, I built some crop circles. Oh, yeah? How do you do that? Here's how you do it. Oh, cool. I'll go do one right. It's localized for the most part. And the reason it's localized there is that's where Dave and Doug lived. Exactly. That's where they live. That's where the crop circle started. So, yes, they were concentrated there. The other thing, though, unfortunately, is that's where stonehenge is? Yeah. A lot of people are like, sure, Dave and Doug live there. Who cares? They were put up to it, saying that they did it by mi five. The real story is that stonehenge is right there. Yeah. All kinds of fields can be used for this art. Corn, oat, barley, tobacco, weeds. I like the cornwall. I think that makes a nice canvas. I don't know that I've seen a corn one. Oh, yeah, I like the cornwood. Well, I think they were corn and signs. Right. Are you surrounded by corn? I tried to make myself go to sleep. I wouldn't allow my hippocampus to form memories of that movie. So I guess we should cover some of the theories, because we covered, like, bigfoot and other things that aren't real, too. So here's what seriologists believe. We mentioned that it's an alien calling card, perhaps. A lot of eyewitness reports supposedly say, I heard some strange noises. I saw some weird lights. There's a famous video called the Oliver's castle video where you see these strange lights above the field, and you actually see the crop circle on video form. It's a field, and then it just depresses into a crop circle. Yeah. You've seen this? Oh, yeah. It's on YouTube. Okay. But that guy who made that video came out and said, here's how I did that. It's these computer programs, and it's paint and it's all fake. But some people say, no, that guy was paid off to say that. Or am I five? Kidnapped his family. Exactly. And made him say it. But it's very cool looking. But that is one of the points that rational people point to, is, like, if these things are being made, why isn't there a single image anywhere of it happening? Right. Because cameras are ubiquitous. Video cameras. People look for this stuff. They camp out in fields trying to get those images. Oh, yeah. There was a very famous operation by a group of seriologists who camped out at a field for several, like, a week or two, I believe, back in the 80s or ninety s. And apparently, not only did no crop circles form during the time they were camped out in that area, none did in all of England during that time that they publicized that they were camping out. And then right when the operation ended, a crop circle popped up, like, I think, a couple of football fields away from where they've been camping. That's because Doug and what was his name? Dave. Dave were like, all right, they're gone. Exactly. Let's go mess with them. Another one is that a lot of people say that there's this plasma that can form ionized wind, basically. Yeah. The plasma vortex theory and that it forms a cyclone. It's cyclonic, which means that it moves clockwise, I believe. Yeah. Or counterclockwise one of the two. They're cyclone and anti cyclonic. Whichever way that they said the cyclone rotates, the dog and Dave started doing crop circles that rotated the other way. And when they were like yeah, there's anti cyclones, people started making square ones. So every time there's been a real tug of war or playfulness between people popping up in the media, experts on crop circles saying something, and the people making the crop circles doing the opposite of what those people just said to prove them wrong with their crop circles right after that. Yeah. I think the English have, like with banksy, I think there's an undercurrent in England of cheeky mess with the establishment sort of subversiveness. Yeah. Subversive art and hoaxes and pranks. And it seems like I admire I think it's kind of neat. Sure. Another theory is that downdraft from, like, a helicopter or an airplane, a small airplane might push it down into these perfectly shaped geometric patterns, but they've tried to recreate that. And of course, that's not possible. No, it's not possible. But that is a theory. Again, there's the cyclone theory. This is another thing in this article that got me. Probably the most scientific theory says that crop circles are created by small currents of swirling ring wind called vortices. Yeah. That's not the most scientific theory. The most scientific theory is that humans are making the crop circles. Like, what is going on with this article? It's just wacky to me. It is. But that is a theory. That's a theory that some people put out. They say when that crop circle in the 60s in Australia was created, a lot of people said, oh, it's a cyclone. They call it a willynilly. Did they really? That was my Australian accent, too. No, they call it a willy. Willy. Willy. Yeah. And that was something that they said that is possible. It was that they also said it could be a lot of things. Probably wasn't a UFO. But that wind theory has been around for a very long time. And a guy named Dr. Terrence Medan who's from the Tornado and Storm Research Organization in England. In Wiltshire? Yeah. He says that there's this thing called the plasma vortex theory. He says that dust particles get caught in charged air that's spinning, and not only can they make crop circles, this dust can glow. And that accounts for the light scene. There's the UFO. Yeah. He's using pseudoscience to debunk even further. Pseudoscience? Yeah. I'm surprised it doesn't say dr. Terrence Meeting, formerly of the Tornado and Storm research site electromagnetic radiation is another theory. Supposedly, there have been strong magnetic fields measured inside crop circles, and people that go to visit them report feeling tingling sensations all over their body. I think this is explained as easy as if you get someone that believes in an electromagnetic radiation of a crop circle and stick them in the middle of one, they're going to feel a tingling sensation. Yeah. That was another thing, though, that I ran into. I couldn't find any evidence to back that statement up, like, who's finding electromagnetic radiation in these fields and are they reproducible the findings? There was another crop circle called the Julius Set. It's a fractal. Yeah, it's pretty cool looking. It's amazing. Yeah. From what I could find, it's the largest ever. It was like 300 meters, 900ft in diameter. That's enormous. And it's 409 circles just basically look up. The Julius Set. It's cool. It's very awesome. But it was right next to Stonehenge. There's plenty of images of this crop circle with stonehenge in the background. And apparently a lot of women who went to visit it found that their menstrual cycles synced up. And then some women who had already been through menopause started menstruating again. Both are things that can't happen, can they, without aliens taking part? Did that happen, though? Who documented this? This is the thing, like, people are just saying stuff, and you can say whatever you want, and it doesn't count necessarily. At least not if you're trying to explain something. Yes, I think both of those things can happen. Like, I'm a 48. I think there are limits to science, and there's stuff that exists beyond science's capabilities to explain things right now, that there are things that will understand more clearly that appear to be superstitious. Now, crop circles, to me, are not one of them. They're just not. That's because it's art. Right. In the 1990s, there was a biophysicist named Dr. William Levin Good who discovered that crop circles were damaged as if they had been heated by a microwave oven. So he says, I think they're being heated from the inside by some kind of microwave energy. And there's a guy named Richard Taylor from the University of Oregon, a professor of physics, who said, yes, you can build something called a magnetron using stuff from like, a household cooker and a twelve volt battery, and you can essentially use this to create crop circles and shoot microwaves. So, yeah, that might be possible, that they've been heated by microwaves, because that is another way that you can make a crop circle. He says that these crops usually have joints in the stocks, like a cornstalk does. And if you heat it up, it expands. Pops corn. Yeah. And it's going to fall over. It would be funny if there's a bunch of popcorn that it pops. But he says, I'm not saying this is how they do it, but using GPS coordinates and a computer and a design program, you can actually use one of these magnetrons to do this. And that is something that possibly could happen. Got you. Again, the clearest theory is that humans are doing it, and we'll talk more about evidence that serials point to and evidence that skeptics point to, and then how you make an actual crop circle right after this. So, Chuck, there's a couple of pieces of evidence that cereal point to. They're very rarely, if ever, footprints found around a crop circle explain that they're walking between the planted crops. Yeah, if you look at any picture of a crop circle, any picture of any crop circle ever made, you're going to see little lines that go all along the field. Those are left by the tractor. They're tractor tracks. And crops are planted in rows. Exactly. So you can just move in and about them. And you know why they're planted in rows? So you can move in and about them right. Without stepping on the crops. Okay. And like we mentioned earlier, Dave, Charlie and Doug Bauer came out in 1991 and said, hey, we did this, BBC, come along, let's film a little documentary, and I'm going to show you how to do a rope and plank crop circle. And apparently one of the guys had racked up a bunch of mileage on his car. Yeah, I saw this, too. I don't know if it's true or not, but it makes for a good story. And his wife got onto him and was like, hey, what's going on here? Are you cheating on me? And that's why he came out and said, no, I haven't been cheating on you. This is why there's all this extra mileage and I'm going to go public with it. Makes for a good story. They were the only three people in the world who knew about that for a while. Apparently they went public because the government people had bought into this lock, stock and barrel. It was just UFOs possibly that were doing this. Smart people were talking about this. The media was covering it like, are these UFOs? And these guys are just sitting back laughing. And apparently the Queen had a book on her summer reading list that was released by her press people that included some crop circle experts, like UFO, analysis of the crop circles around the world and what was going on. So the Queen was even reading this, and these two guys and the guy's wife are just sitting back laughing, having the time of their lives. And then apparently the British government was about to conduct an investigation and these guys were like, we don't need to let taxpayers waste their money on this, so let's go forward. And they came forward in September of 1991, and apparently within days they were on Good Morning America showing the world how to do this stuff. And a lot of people started doing it after that because they're like, this is kind of fun and I'm an artist as well. And here's how you do it. Well, there are some different ways you can get a magnetron, apparently, but the most conventional way is, like I said, the rope and plank so you're going to choose a spot, you're going to choose a field, you're going to create your little design. It could be a circle, it could be the Mendelbrot set or the Julia set. Yeah. Whatever it is, you want to put it down on paper. Yeah. Because it is math and you have to work it out. You have to have a pretty good eye or brain for design, I guess, to draw something on a page and make it hundreds of feet across. It's like, these are talented people. Sure. You're going to get to your field and you basically act as a human compass, exactly like a math compass that you use to draw a circle, not a compass to show you which way north is. And you're going to put one person in the middle and that's going to be he's essentially the little point. And then you use rope and you're going to mark off your four opposite marks as the circle. And you're going to give the guy in the center of rope give someone on the outside of rope and they're just going to walk in a big circle as he holds that rope. Right. And then it's going to make essentially a near perfect circle. In theory, it forms the diameter of the circle. Yeah. If you're taking your time, then you're going to have a pretty good looking circle. Right. And then after that, you start just moving inward from the outside in. Just stomping the grain down. Yeah. With your big snowshoe like things. Right. And there you have a crop circle. Yeah. And like I said, you do one for 3ft going this way and hey, I'm going to jump around and turn the other way and lay the corn or wheat down that way. It appears that stymie the weirdos of the world. Right. How does that happen? Yeah. And the whole key, apparently, is planning it out ahead of time and then just translating what's on paper into real life. Basically, all it takes is a little bit of multiplication, some ropes, poles and a couple of boards and you can make a pretty awesome crop circle if you know what you're doing. Yes. You could also use a gardener, lawn roller or the traditional rope stop stalker. Right. And there you have it. There's a group called Circlemakers.org, and they were very much inspired by Doug and Dave. I think Doug and Dave kind of became honorary circle makers. Yeah. But these guys, their website is still up. It's not nearly as active as it was like 510 years ago. But they were getting paid by companies around the world to make crop circles. They made a Nike crop circle. They made like, a Swedish furniture stores crop circle. I think a Nike one would be. Did they make the swish? They made a footprint, like a huge footprint. And they just did tons of them and got paid, apparently, like hundreds of thousands of. Dollars for each one. They did. Good for them. So these guys spent the early 2000s making bank, running around doing crop circles. At the same time they're teaching people how to do it. And simultaneously, serialogists are still investigating this. And so the serialogist came up with they're also called croppies. We should say croppies came up with some steps you need to take when you're investigating a crop circle. Are we going to go over these? Sure. They talk to eyewitnesses, did you see or hear anything weird? Right. Because there's a crop circle and they'll say, yeah, actually, come to think of it, I did hear something weird. Am I going to be on the news? They check out the weather patterns in the area of the previous night because it always happens overnight, which enthusiasts will say they're doing it under nightfall to not be caught as aliens. And they're sending secret messages and rational thinking. People say, no, their artists are doing it under nightfall to not get caught. So they can keep the hoax going. Right. Exactly. What else do you do? Supposedly, they will bring out machines to actually measure soil and use, like, x ray diffraction analysis and electromagnetic energy readings. Right. They're analyzing all of this information, and I don't know what they come up with. Clearly, they've been forced to say, yes, some of these are hoaxes. Like the alien smoking pot 80%. Right. Right. 20% cannot be explained by Syria. And just yes. There was a famous one that said, we are not alone. Spelled out all in one word, basically, but in all caps, we are not alone. And a lot of skeptics say, shouldn't it be you are not alone if these are messages from aliens? And do they just happen to speak English? Yeah. So there's a lot of points that skeptics point to, the ones that do go to the trouble of debunking these. And there's a guy named Joe Nicholl, and he writes for the Committee for Scientific Investigation, CSI, and he basically came up with four good points that debunk crop circles. One is that there is an escalation and frequency as they became more and more popular. Sure. Which is kind of a weird thing. The geographic distribution of them was again concentrated primarily in this region of England. Right. Even though you'd find them elsewhere, brazil, Japan, all over. You can also explain that by the fact that people were inspired by other crop circles. Yeah. There's an increase in complexity, which means that they're getting better at it. Exactly. And then there was they called the shyness factor, which was they were only done at night. No one had ever seen a crop circle formed. That one guy's YouTube thing, not outstanding. Sure. Well, which was faked. Exactly. Unless he was paid off to say it was faked. Exactly. Yeah. And it's pretty tough to disprove that. Yeah. Like I said, I think if people just look at this as really cool public displays of art because they are amazing. It's really neat looking what people are able to accomplish with their hands and feet. Somebody redid the NASCAR hummingbird the Nazca lines. They did, like, kind of a more stylized version of that. Again, the pot smoking alien. Somebody else just did a straight up pot leaf. Of course someone did. The mothman. The West Virginia mothman. The Shroud of Turin. Nice. Yeah. People got really good at this. And like you said, if you look at it as art, it's pretty easy to appreciate it. I bet a fun conversation over here at an English pub is a crop circle brainstorming session on what kind of circle they can make next. I bet that's a lot of fun to listen to. Yeah. In a rural county in England, in a pub. I'd love to be in on one of those. Yeah. Well, go to Wiltshire. Yeah, maybe I will. You got anything else? I got nothing else. So that's crop circles. The mystery continues. If you want to learn more about crop circles, you can type that word into how stuff works in the search bar or don't, and it'll bring up this weird, weird article. Yeah. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Chilean camouflage. Hey, guys. And Jerry, I was writing to make a comment on something Chuck said on the last listener, male animal camouflage. At one point, Chuck read that the listener suffered from mental illnesses that were practically ignored by her parents, who happened to be doctors, then commenting that that was quite a shocker. Oh, yeah, that's right. Right. I remember that. Yeah. This girl had, I believe, doctor and psychologist parents who kind of just ignored her mental issues, which I thought was weird. He said, I don't know if it's just the country where I live, Chile, but we have a saying for that. In casa de Herrero Cuccio de palo. Jerry, do you know what that means? She says, no. That literally translates into, in the blacksmith home, stick, knives. It alludes to what happens when an expert on something tends to neglect his field of expertise once he gets home. Yeah, it's like here we say the Cobbler's children have no shoes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Interesting. I bet every country has their own thing. It makes more sense than the knives thing. Yeah. I'm not sure what that means, but I'm not chilling. The doctor thinks that a sick child is just fine. The electrician that has a mess of cables on appliances, an accountant that can't control her own expenses, a chef that orders fast food, et cetera. Maybe they are just tired of doing the same thing over and over again. They just want to stop and rest when they get home. Or maybe they're just jerks. Who knows? But apparently it happens often enough that the situation got its own saying around these parts. More than one. Stay classy. Best witches, Matt. Thanks, Matt. And Matt was super excited that this is going to get on listener mail because he's been listener from the get go. He says, all right, Matt, way to hang in there. All you have to do is write in. You're bound to get on at some point. In casa de jerrero Cucio de palo. I'm going to get that tattooed. Both the wakes line in the blacksmith's home. Stick knives. I don't get that one. All right. Thank you for confounding us, Matt. That's good stuff. If you want to try to confound us, you can do so via Twitter at suskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffychino.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com." | ||
4305a0c2-53a3-11e8-bdec-c7ea1cb173d9 | 911 Is Not a Joke | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/911-is-not-a-joke | Josh and Chuck delve into the world of 911 in today's episode. | Josh and Chuck delve into the world of 911 in today's episode. | Thu, 13 Feb 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=44, tm_isdst=0) | 52067334 | audio/mpeg | "Attention, Pacific Northwest. Both the Canadian side and the American side, stuff You Should Know is coming to you live. That's right. And this, combined with Seattle and San Francisco, which we've just completed, will be our, I would say our only true west coast dates this year. So true. So if you are anywhere near Portland or Vancouver, then come on out and see us. Yes. So we're going to be in Vancouver at the Chan center on Sunday, March 29. And then the next night, we're going to go on down to Portland, and this time we're going to be at the Arlene Schnitzer concert hall, which is a beautiful room. We'll be there for the first time. And that's going to be on Monday, March 30. That's right. We've stepped it up in vinny size, so don't make fools of us, please. Right. So you can go get tickets and all the info you need@sysklive.com. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles w chuck Bryan over there. There's guest producer Josh T rocking it out. And this is stuff you should know. Take two. Dish. Yes. One of the rare second takes. That's right. We lost the whole 14 seconds of try number one. Right. It wasn't any good anyway. That's what it was. Josh turned into, like, Elvis Costello. No, stop, stop. Oh, wow. Look at that reference. SNL callback. Yeah, it was nice. So as you can tell, Chuck, I'm pretty excited about this episode, which is kind of surprising because talking about 911 seems like it might be the most boring thing we could talk about. Oh, you think? Untrue. What with all the people dying. Well, yeah. Cat stuck in trees. Sure. What else? I should name everything. You shouldn't call 9114. Let's see. Neighbors playing his music too loud. That's fun. Exactly. Yeah. There's a bunch of stuff you shouldn't call 911 for, which we'll talk about. Sure. But one thing I am familiar with 911. I remember growing up as a child in the Was. Like, I remember hearing about this new system that was coming around when I was growing up in Toledo, and I was like, that doesn't make any sense. Because 911 turns out it's been around at least since 1968 in the US. It's been around way longer part in the US. In the UK. Yeah, true. But I like to think of Toledo as kind of a happens spot. Sure. Toledo didn't get a fully functional 911 system until 1989. Did you look it up? Yeah. So you guys resorted to the previous method, which was run down the street screaming for neighbors, just swinging a cat by its tail. Yeah. That was your siren. Yeah. I seem to remember I don't know exactly when we got it, but I think I remember it happening. If I remember correctly, when I was a kid, we had one of those little cards next to the kitchen phone that had police, fire and whatever else. So that had to have been pre 9110r, else we wouldn't have had that dumping. Right. That would just confuse the children. Call these numbers first. If they don't answer, call 911. Then do the super easy thing that will route it to the correct person child. Your parents have just taken out a substantial life insurance policy on you. Yes. That's a long game. Right there. It is. So, Chuck, as new as 911, even though it seems old. Right, especially for younger listeners. I would guess that it seems pretty they probably think it's been around since buggy days. Yeah. Since rotary phone days. Yeah. Right. So as old as it is or as new as it is, it's gotten pretty robust. Very robust, yeah. Every year. These are some stats that our buddy Dave Ruth helped us compile. 240,000,000 calls in the US. That is 650,000 calls a day. Yeah. That's like 900,000 calls a minute. No. Are you sure? I just did that back in the army you made me do. And another important thing here is that 80% of calls these days are from your wireless phone. It's a big deal. It is. Which we'll get to. But that changed things. Yeah. The big spoiler is that the 911 system that we currently use in the United States is hopelessly antiquated, and they're working on improving it. And nothing that we should say about how antiquated is should keep you from calling 911. It still generally works, but it's having trouble, or it's had trouble traditionally keeping pace with the massive sweeping changes in telecommunications that has gone on in the last couple of decades. Yeah, because telecom is always trying to move forward and they don't think, like but maybe we should slow the pace for 911. Right, exactly. And plus, I mean, 911 will see those systems are built alongside the other system, so when the other system leads forward, they have to go through and rebuild the system. That's just for 911. Because you can't get rid of an old system because people well, we'll get to that stuff. We'll get to that. Let's not spoil it. But we were laughing earlier about things that you should and should not call for. Some of these are debatable, I think. Oh, yeah. I think so. It says me. Okay, we'll get to the last one, really is the only one that's debatable. But obviously if there's a fire or smoke that you think is a fire, where there's smoke, there's fire, medical emergency. And you can't obviously get in or get in your car and run someone in the emergency room if you can. If it's quicker and you can do so safely, it's quicker and cheaper. Oh, well, sure. Cost of gas, maybe a couple of tolls. Who knows? Compared to, like, an ambulance ride. No, that's a good point. But I mean, I imagine if your home just loaded and your kid gets hurt. Right. You should probably call 911. Car accidents, of course, if they are major enough and have injuries. Yeah. Call 911. You should be able to tell like if somebody's like, oh, that kind of hurt my neck, you don't have to call 911. Here's the other thing. If we're saying don't call 911, that doesn't mean like don't alert anybody. Right. But your police have their own phone number. Your local police have their own phone number. They do look it up and call. That the non emergency number. Right. And then obviously the last category is some sort of crime being committed, violence being committed. Sure. Call 911. Yeah. So no one's going to argue with that. I think so. Okay. There are plenty of instances where you shouldn't call 911 and yet people reliably call 911 for stuff like this. And I think that's because it's been drilled into everyone's head, it's kind of a double edged sword. You can't drill that into everyone's head. 91191. One, all you got to do is call 911 and then not expect to get some cats stuck in the tree calls. You keep going back to that. Well, we actually did that when I was a kid. Did you call 911 for that? Well, you know the funny story, it's not very funny to my dad, but we had a cat stuck in a tree. Okay. My dad went up and he got stuck in the tree. He just climbed up too high. Yeah. And he got freaked out, I think so. That's right. I mean, I was a kid, so they weren't saying, your father is very afraid, it has screwed up. Right. I was just a kid, kind of like, well, now dad's up there and now there's firemen here, helping my dad out of a tree. Cats and dads get stuck in trees. Yes. And looking back, I think that's totally probably what happened. Sure. He got way up there. I was freaked out. Yeah, that's cute. I have to ask him about that one day. Okay, so your dad stuck in a tree. I would say that's called 911 situation. Cat stuck in a tree. Now, unless you live in Pleasantville, don't call 911 for that. Yeah, that's true. If you have a question about the speeding ticket you got the other day, that's not a call that you would place through 911 again. You can just call. There's even a number on the back of the ticket. Don't be dumb. Okay, hey, bringing that back just for that second. Okay, what else, Chuck? Oh, of course. Anything dealing with your animals. Unless well, I'm not even going to say that. I was going to say if there's an animal attacking someone yeah, you would call me, call 911 for that. Come out and shoot this dog. Basically. It could be rabid. It's terrible call, HECT hate out. But otherwise, if the cat in the tree, lost animals, injured animals, noisy neighbors. I love that day. Puts power outage in here and in parentheses, call your power company. Right. It's that last one, I think, is a little it kind of opens a can of worms. And that is the suspicious person thing. All right. Because they say to call for suspicious activity, which theoretically is a suspicious person. Right. I think the distinction is in what we see and we'll get into this later, racial biases, people in neighborhoods calling the cops on someone because they're black and walking down my street. Right. Which happens. That is not a suspicious person. I mean, if there's nothing going on, I know people try to justify it, but then local police say, hey, always call us if you think something might be going on. Right. And that's where it gets dodgy, because that comes down to a human being's perception, which can be very tilted, as Dave puts it. He put it a couple of ways that I thought were pretty smart. He said, people aren't suspicious behavior is suspicious. Yeah. And they say specifically to call nine one for suspicious activities. Right. But again, these are people. So it's just such a weird fine line you're walking there. The other little litmus tests that I've seen is stop just for a second because of the suspicious behavior. You see somebody, like breaking into a car, like assaulting somebody, that's beyond suspicious. That's like the act. That's the act. It's a crime being committed. So you have a second when you see a suspicious person to stop and think like, would I call nine one on one if this person were white? Or if you're a black person doing this, say, would I call nine one if this person were black? And if the answer is no, then maybe you shouldn't call. Maybe they're not acting that suspiciously. Yeah, it's just interesting on these Facebook neighborhood pages, it's kind of evenly divided between people saying, don't call 911 for this. This is just a guy going door to door, perhaps. Right. Other people saying, no, you know what, if it's 945 or 10:00 at night and someone's knocking on your door in our neighborhood suspicious, maybe you should call the cops and let them work it out. And for the cops, they say, call us. That doesn't mean we're going to dispatch eight cars to your home, but we might work you through the situation and it's all going to be fine. Yes, but this is the only one where I thought was a little bit like, you shouldn't just say don't call 911 when you see a suspicious person. No, you certainly shouldn't say that. At the same time, though, I think one of the big hesitations for calling 911 these days is like either the increase or the increase in reporting of innocent people who had 911 calls on them being killed by the cops. Exactly. And that death would not have happened. Their death wouldn't have happened. Right. Had the person been suspicious of them and called 911. And the fact when news of something like that gets out, it will make you second guess that kind of thing for sure. It makes you realize you're bringing like, people who are armed and jumpy out to a situation where it's just somebody walking around or whatever. And when you look at it from that respect, it can make you second guess the whole thing. Yeah. And things can look like potential malfeasance. That's not like a lot of people. You see a lot of people saying, well, I think someone's casing my house because a car pulled into my driveway and sat there for 2 minutes. They asked me if I wanted to know more about Sierra Core or someone stopped and was taking pictures of my house. Like, you never know, somebody might be taking pictures of the oak tree that they're trying to learn about or just looking up something on their phone and standing in the direction of your house. Right. Nine times out of ten, they're trying to figure out more about the oak tree near your house. I'm trying to give people the benefit of the doubt. No, I'm with you. Anyway, that's where it gets a little dodgy, for sure. And we'll have statistics later on about actual racial bias because it's real. Sure. Okay, moving on. You want to take a little break after that? It seems like a good spot. I think I do. Okay, well, everybody, we're taking a rare Josh break and we'll be right back. Okay, we're back. That Josh break was invigorating. I wasn't doing anything. I was just taking a picture of oak tree. Will you get off my back? Oh my gosh. What kind of oak is that? Sir, there's only one kind of oak. I know there's a bunch of different oaks. Everyone in Ireland is like no, that's not true. While we're mentioning calling 911 though, you can get arrested. It is a crime to prank call 911. Yes. You don't want to do that. Or to SWAT. It's called Swatting. I think that deserves its own podcast. Maybe because there was some guy got killed, right. From a Swatting incident. Yeah, I think it's happened more than once. Yeah. That's serious stuff. If you don't know it's Swatting as we'll just give you the abuse of 911. I love myself sometimes. Great. So Swatting is where you are a hacker, right. And you can disguise the number that you're calling from to make it look like you're calling from a house that you want the cops to go to. And you basically say, like, I'm in this house and I'm holding hostages and what are you going to do about it? Johnny Law? And the law comes out and usually SWAT, I shouldn't say usually in some cases, the SWAT team will actually enter this house where people who have no idea what's going on are and maybe that the people who have been Swatted said something mean to the guy who called the SWAT team out on them. But basically it's not like saying that I think there's a hostage situation in his house. I'm the guy holding the hostages and here's where I am. And SWAT teams stink. Right, exactly. But the SWAT team is like, we're going to go kill that guy. I'll bet you would never in a million years bring your SWAT team out. Whatever you do, don't come in guns blazing. Right. Which we're joking about something that's really happened. Sure. I really think we need to talk at least a short time. I think so we'll look into it a little further. We'll do one on squatting and one on doxing. Okay. Two weird new things that people do now. Right. But spotting is definitely a crime. Yes. Okay. Also so that you don't make 911 feel like I think this is great. This is almost like a public service announcement that we're in the midst of. Yeah, we do these so you don't get in trouble with the 911. So they don't think that you're pranking them when you're not. If you ever call 911 accidentally or say your kid does or whatever, you do not want to hang up the phone. Yes, I did that a few years ago. I feel like I accidentally called 911 because I think cell phones have a feature that enacted like an automatic call by accident. Right. And I saw it and I went, oh crap. And I hung up and I got a call back like in a second. That's great. Ideally you should yomi has a great story from when she was a kid. She got scared. I can't remember something about her grandmother who was perfectly fine, but she called 911 and got scared with 911 answer and hung up and they kept calling back and she kept hanging up. That's very cute. So they came out to the house. A little welfare check. Yeah, basically. But you don't want to do that. Don't follow the yummy model no. Of 911. Just stay on the phone and be like, I'm really sorry this is an accidental call and I'm definitely not the bad guy pretending that this is an accidental call. Make sure you say that too. My name is Timmy. I'm five. It's all good. My name is Little Boy With Brown Hair. So I think the history is fairly interesting because England started not but their version, which is nine nine nine way back in 1937 in London. I didn't know this. I didn't know it either. But they were the first city in the world that created the three digit model. Apparently, as the story goes, there was a fire in downtown London and people tried to get through the fire department and they were put on hold and switched around. And so they said the town crier came out and said 999 is the answer. Yes, 999 is easy to remember. Sure. I guess no one else is using 999 at the time, but this is back in the day of rotary phones, right? Yeah. It was a burden to dial 999 with a rotary dial. Should have been for sure. Yeah. I just thought that was kind of clumsy of them, a little bit clumsy of the Brits. But let me see here. I think it was a twelve mile radius around London at first after World War II and went wider. And because Britain like to do a little world conquering, you can find nine in cities all over the world where England has left their imprint. That's a way to put it, for sure. Yeah. And the US, of course, said, well, we're not going to let the Brits out do us. You're going to do, Brexit? Hold my beer. Yeah. We're going to wait 20 something years and do it ourselves. Right. Exactly. So I think in 1957, the Fire Chiefs Association. So the National Association of Fire Chiefs. That was way off. They said, hey, we should come up with an easy to remember three digit number for people to report fires. And other people said, hey, that's a great idea, we'll do that to report emergencies. And the Fire Chiefs association said no, just fires. Yeah, right. Luckily no one listened to them. Well, they didn't listen to the just fire part. That's right. And then a couple of years after that, or maybe a few years later, the National Academy of Sciences said, this is actually a really good idea. We should do this for calling ambulances, too. And then finally a Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of justice said, no, all emergency should have a three digit, easy to remember number. That's right. So the FCC says, who should we get in touch with you? How about at and T? Because these were the days of phone monopolies. Right. Or phone monopoly. It was just one, right? No. When did they break up the phone companies? I think it was before this. Okay. Because they broke them up into the different bells. Right? Yeah. Where all the different bells part of one big phone company. That's right. Which one? I just said two different things. The Liberty Bell. The Southern Bell. Yeah. Bell from Pacific Bell. Pacific Bell. The bell from Beauty and the Beast. Right. All the bells. Albuquerque Bell. Sure, why not? You could ring my bell. That's a good one. That's a good song. It's a good one. But I think more, more and more by Andrea true connection is far better. What's that? Virtually the same thing, but just a better song. Oh, okay. They got in touch with at and T and they said, can you help us out with this? Apparently at and T is the one that chose 911 because it hadn't been used yet, which is kind of the first stumbling block. Again, the rotary dial. Rotary dial, that was, 911 is a lot better. Nine, nine, nine. It's two thirds better. It is two thirds better. And it was easy to remember. And I think they had set up at this point already four one one in a lot of areas. So they just kind of extended that idea of the something one one. Right. So this really surprised me. The first 911 call that was ever placed in the United States. New York City? You would think so. Washington, DC. No. Chicago. What else you got? Chicago. You already said that one. Okay. I don't know. What about Los Angeles? Yeah, why not? What about Albuquerque? They're doing fine. Okay. No, none of those are correct. Haleyville, Alabama was the site of the very first 911 call. Yeah, that's a good little trivia question. I think that is pedal to the metal, by the way. I recently watched I had recorded all those Jeopardy. Shows with Ken Jennings on there. The Champions. Sure run. How was some of the better TV I'd seen in a while. Really good stuff. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, if you're a jeopardy. Fan, it was as good as it gets. Like the smartest competitors and big time drama because they had to bring it on. Those daily doubles, it wasn't like a regular show. They were daily doubling on, like, $20,000 and stuff. It was really tense. Wow. Like good drama. Yes. So cool. Because I think Kennew, that other guy, the wholesaler guy, was a gambler, and he made his name for really just going all in. And Ken knew this, so he had to do the same in order to beat these chumps. If you're playing a gambler, you get dragged into gambling whether you want to gamble or not. Get in there. It's good stuff. Anyway, good trivia question. It's probably been on Jeopardy. Haleyville Alabama did. It was kind of a publicity stunt, it sounds like. So the little phone company there, the Alabama Telephone Echo, basically said, pretty funny, at and T is about to do this. We're about to launch this 911 system. We want to jump on it and adopt it first. So we're going to set this up as fast as we can because here's the thing. We'll find out more about this in a minute. But there's no national 911 system. Everywhere in the United States, 911 reaches an emergency dispatcher or an emergency operator, but each system is local, regional at best. Right. So Haleyville Alabama could jump on this and set up their own system and get started. And that's exactly what they did. That's right. February of 1000, 1968, they had a state senator named Rank and Fight. He dialed 911, obviously. Is this like a photo op or video op? In other words, there wasn't an emergency. Sure. Man, what a coincidence that the state senator had the first emergency and happened to be standing next to the special phone. That's right. They had a special bat phone. A red phone, and I think an Alabama congressman was on the other end at the police station, congressman Tom Bevel known as the pork King. Really? Not just the Alabama Port King, the Pork King of Congress. And the state senator said, pork King, what are you doing at the police station? I've got an emergency. And he said, are we really going to do this bit? I would force whoever's on the other line to do it. So, yeah, it was all just a big show to say, hey, we did it first, they did it a week later. They still have a big festival every year, too. Sure, a 911 festival. I wonder if they reenact this famous phone call. Oh, man, if we could play those two parts, I'm the port team. How great would that be? Forget drunk history. Just put us up there. That's cool. And when I say forget drunk history, I mean, we very much want to be on it. Are we still pursuing that? No, I mean, just by occasionally yelling out of my window every now and then, okay, why not? The crickets are deafening. I'm surprised no one said, like, hey, this is a natural fit. These guys are great storytellers about history. They can get drunk with the best of them. We've been saying this for years. No one's listening. So Noah Moscow about a week later did the same thing, and we're the second city and then throughout the kind of started rolling out. But it takes a while to get this kind of thing going. It does because, again, it's a local, again, at best, regional system. Okay. And your local city might not have the money to put in a new telecommunications system to be used for emergency services. And at first, cities that were a little more flush with cash because they had a larger tax base had the money to roll these out. So, as expected, aside from Haleyville and Gnome, it was mostly like large metropolitan areas that were starting to roll out the earliest 911 systems. But the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which was the foundation based on Johnson and Johnson's company, they took an early interest in this and started handing out grants to rural areas to set up their own 911 systems. So, ironically, Haleyville, Alabama, had it not jumped on, it probably still wouldn't have a 911 system where not for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation doling out grants to small towns around the country for their own yeah, because they're like, you know what people call 911, they go to the hospital. We using Johnson and Johnson products. Yeah. I'm not being overly cynical. I'm sure that, you know, 911 is probably good for the band aid business. I would guess so. And baby shampoo. Yeah. Because if you can't get if you can't get an ambulance to that person, they're going to croak. But if you get an ambulance to them, right. You don't need Band AIDS when you're dead? No, that's just like a fact of death. But if you survive, you're going to need a lot of bandaids, depending on what you've done to yourself. That's right. Here's some stats for you. By 1976, when I was five years old, only 17% of the US. Had 911. You want to know a surprising fact? I was just born. Well, you probably weren't covered by 911. Again, not until 1989. Well, by 1987, only 50% of the country, which is pretty late. I would have thought we would have had a lot more of the country covered by then, for sure. You would think so. And it wasn't until 99, actually, Chuck, that 911 officially became the emergency number for everywhere in America. Bill Clinton said, let's do this. He said, what about nine nine nine? And they went, Bill, yes, please. Wrong country, Canada. Speaking of wrong countries, they are very much the right country because they got on board with 911 as well. That's absolutely true, Chuck. They were like, why make things too difficult? You know, that's a great question. Canada. And I think the answer to that is you shouldn't make things too difficult, just kind of go with the flow. Or should we do some more stuff here? I was thinking maybe another break. Okay. Are you okay with that? Yes. Are you sure? Yes. What about you, listeners? Okay, good. Well, we'll be right back. Okay, Chuck, let's talk about how it actually works. Yeah. In the early days, obviously, it was all landline telephones. So when your call got routed to the switchboard, which was a 911 switchboard dedicated to that, they would patch you across phone lines that were dedicated to 911 to what's called a PSAP, a public safety answering point. And at the time, they were a lot of times, like, in the fire department or in the police station, right. So they could just turn their chair and be like, sarge, dispatch some people to this address. We got a suspicious person staring at oak trees. Right. Again. Right. Today at 911, dispatcher is a highly trained, highly skilled person. There's a lot of stuff going on. It's like a flight attendant. Remember when we've learned, like, flight attendants are actually trained to save your life in an emergency, and they just hand out peanuts as, like, a side thing? Right. This is basically the same thing that the 911 operator call taker. They know how to do a lot of stuff, but the earliest ones just knew how to answer the phone, take down your info, and then turn around and send it off to the fire department or the police department or the paramedics or something like that. They'd be like, okay, I got to go. All right, I'll see you by right. And then they would get off the phone, and that evolved to the call center. That evolved to what was called enhanced 911, which was in the 1970s. Again, Driven by telecom, advancing with at and t. With new technologies, they developed ANI and ali automatic number identification and location identification. ANI is just caller ID. That's what everybody calls caller ID. Yeah. Remember those cute little boxes that you can plug your phone line into a little table, show you in some little terrible readout, basically dot matrix read out. Yes. Who was calling? Pretty neat. And then it was on your handheld cordless phone. Right. You could look at it and that was like, whoa, we're living in the future, rich, or the answering machine now is digital. We don't need those tiny dates. Yeah, it's true. That was like a big revolution, too. That was huge. Amazing. Because you could leave as long a message as you wanted now. Yeah. But you couldn't get that clever. Nobody's home. Nobody's home. Sure. You're still recording your outgoing message. Right. You could sing it, but they actually had that tape you could buy that. You could really yeah. There was one that was like a whole mix tape of them, just like gag answers. Oh, boy. You don't remember that? Not really. There was a very famous ad that ran really? It was like delight your friends, basically. Yeah. Wow. It's pretty funny. So this enhanced 911 system, the automatic number and the automatic locator, that was a big deal because now all of a sudden, if you were a call taker for 911 and a call came up on your little computer screen, it said what the number was and what the address was. And because everybody was calling from landline, you knew exactly where that person was who needed help. That's right. It saved a bunch of time. It was a very huge life saving measure. Yeah. I mean, when you think about people in an emergency, it could be everything from crippling fear keeping you from even knowing where you are to have been hit on the head and not being able to say where you are. Yes. You just can't speak. Yeah. And so that really imagine that they spend a lot of time sometimes just trying to get through that first step of where are you? Right. So this is an enormous leap forward and in the really kind of cemented how helpful and life saving this 911 system could be. And then cell phones came along, and the rest of us kind of leapfrogged right over 911 because the cell phone carriers didn't have ANI and ali. When you call 911 still to this day from a cell phone, it does not come up what your number is or where you are in any specific way. And so congress, or at least the FCC said, hey, we need you guys to do something. There's got to be something that just can't be like, you have no idea where this person is in the country. Because part of the other thing about the automatic locator that they had originally with 911 in the is it would route you to the closest public safety answering point. Right. So that would be saving time too, because the person you're talking to is in the same area as you know, the area you're talking about and can more quickly dispatch people. Right. Cell phones is not the case. Yeah, and Dave makes a good point. Even if they could have located like where your cell phone plan was or your phone was activated, you don't have to live in the city where that is. Right. You can have La members that work in the film industry here just because that stupid. La 31032 three makes them look like a more legitimate hire. Just so cool. So cool and so dumb. Right? But yeah, it would be like you're in Atlanta, it says you're in Los Angeles. Is this the prank? Are you swatting me? Yeah, the FCC said, okay, you guys need to do something. So what they did was they came up with a triangulation where the closest cell phone towers address comes up when you call. It a good start. It is a good start. But if you're out in the sticks, the closest cell phone tower might be miles and miles and miles away. It's true. And even if it's not miles away, let's say it's a football field away. Well, if you're in a densely populated area and you're bleeding out, sure, it doesn't help. It does not help at all. But it gets you a little bit closer and it helps to transfer your caller to route. Your calls are the closest piece app. Okay. And then the other thing that they have them do now, phase two of this enhanced wireless enhanced 911, it gives your GPS coordinates, right, which is so 90s, it's ridiculous. It is like MapQuest. Anyone who's ever waited on a ride share that thought you were down the street from where you were, knows how accurate that GPS can be. We'll still great, but that's way more accurate than what 911 is working with. Well, they're just working with longitude and latitude points, right? Yeah. One of the big quality to have as a 911 operator is to be able to quickly translate longitude and latitude coordinates, GPS coordinates into like Google Maps to get an address really fast and smooth. Sexy voice. Sure. Like Barry White with fingers of fury. Or like Halle Berry Barry White's fingers. Did you see the movie? The Call? No. She played a 911 call specialist in a movie, a thriller. It was good. It wasn't great. Yeah, it was good. Okay. The Brad Anderson directed it. He's like a really quality director. Yes, I know that name is and it seemed like this sort of from what? You're going to call me out on that? I didn't hear you. From what? From where? I don't get what you mean. What other movies has he directed? He directed a scary movie called Session Nine. Oh. Yes. Okay, well then this guy is one of my favorites of all time, that movie. It's one of the best horror movies ever made. Yeah. I'm a fan of Brad Anderson because he has a range of genres. Like, one of his early movies is this kind of spacey romcom called happy accidents. That was great. Happy accidents. Yeah. Really good with Merci Tome and Vincent Dinafrio. But it had this romcom with a sort of a bit of a scifi twist to it. Okay. And he did transsiberian. He did next stop wonderland was one of his first little indies. But, yeah, it's unusual for a director to tackle all these weird or different genres. It's neat, disparate genres. Oh, you have me at session nine. Yeah. The call is a good popcorn movie. I highly recommend it. Okay, I'll check it out. Halle Berry is a call center person, then. That's all I'll say. Hey, she's quality. She's quality actress. She is. But the fact that I had never even heard of this movie really made me suspicious. It did pretty well. Okay. It wasn't a massive hit, but it did, like, $60 million. But that's really surprising. I'm very aware of movies. I'll know what the movie is about, and I've never seen it. Not even seen a preview. I'll just kind of know. Sure. So I'm surprised. Yeah. Okay. I recommend it. I'll check it out. Yeah. I mean, it's no black coat's daughter, but that's a good one. Where are we now? We are now at texting to hold on. I wanted to drive this home real quick. Okay. Driving home. The 1996 FCC rule that says you have to have a cell phone tower tell 911 it's address the closest one to your cell phone, and then give the GPS coordinates for wherever that cell phone they think the cell phone is. That's the 911 system that's in place nationwide today in 2020. That's why they ask you from a cell phone, who are you, and where are you? Just like they did in the early days. Right. And this is a problem, because, as you said earlier, 80% of 911 calls in the United States are made from cell phones, and 911 does not know where you are unless you tell them. Yeah. But it's also balanced out by the fact that you have to help. Well, you have that cell phone right there immediately, so yes. Remember the old days? You're like, let me find a payphone. Let me go knock on someone's door that's true. And ask about their oak tree, and hopefully I won't get shot. So people are calling right away. So I would think that kind of counterbalances the clumsiness yes. Of location. I think you're right, Chuck. We'll see. Well, you really swooped in there. I say we'll see as if there's some report coming out. The thing is, though, is people have figured out the people, the powers that be who are concerned with 911 in its system are well aware of this major flaw and our work have figured out how to update it. It's just now we're in the process of rolling out updates. Well, then privacy advocates are going to be like, what, you're going to locate every single person with a cell phone and know where they are at all times? Right? And Amazon and Apple are like, dude, we already know that 911 is the only one who doesn't know where you are at all times, which is the problem. It's funny, I saw a Wired article from 1998 that was like wringing its hands. Like, oh, privacy advocates are worried that they may be able to track the movement of cell phone users based on this information. That 911, maybe, I don't know. We'll have to see what the future holds. So texting the 911 is the latest technology. About ten years ago, eleven years ago in Iowa and Blackhawk, they were the first jurisdiction to offer this service. And it's still kind of coming out. I think a couple of years ago, all 50 states had text capability. Not everywhere in each state. Yeah, exactly. It's just text. I love Day points out you can't send emojis, need help emoji, but you can't send text and video and that kind of thing would be super helpful, I think. Right, so this is where we are in the next generation. It's literally called next generation 911, and it's where 911 finally catches up to every other telecom company and device manufacturer already is, and it basically uses all the information from the Internet of things that lets people know exactly where you are. Right. Not just like what your address is, what floor of a building you happen to be sitting on right now. All of that information is now going to be funneled to 911 when you call because nine one is finally abandoning landlines. Landline Telecom. That's what they're dealing with currently. Yeah, they're going over to VoIP, so 901 will be using a secure Internet connection in the near future. And when they get to that point, they will be able to accept video, photos like, this is the guy that's attacking the lady, hurry up, that kind of thing. And then they'll also be able to because they're setting up a separate wireless broadband network just for first responders called FirstNet. Yeah, that's going to be a big deal. And so 911 will be able to say, hey, here's a photo of the guy that you're looking for. They can't do that now. It's mind boggling as it is. They cannot do that. Yeah, I mean, just to have a dedicated wireless network cuts down on, I imagine, interference and potential hacking. Plus in a disaster, if you're out there in the field, you are using your own wireless device that's on the public broadband right now. And so if the public broadband goes down because there's so many people trying to use it to find out what's going on in, like an earthquake or something. The first responders suffer from that too. So this separate broadband network just for first responders won't crash in the event of a disaster. Yeah, and speaking of first responders, I think it's kind of time we join certain people and saying call center employees are first responders. Are people saying they're not? Well, I don't think they're generally thought of as first responders if you work at a call center because they just sit around maybe. But they are literally the first and most important first thing that happens in an emergency. And like you said earlier, they are trained to walk people through CPR. Heimlick, how to deliver a baby, how to handle an active shooter, suicide, domestic abuse. If you're a kid and you're scared because grandma fell over, like how to handle children. They're really skilled. And I think it's a shame that I feel like the only time you hear about 911 call center responders is when there's a bad one and you release those calls and everyone's horrified. And it is it's awful. But those are clearly, like, the standouts, I guess. Not stand outs. The standouts are all the good employees. There have been some Doozy's, for sure. Yeah, I read about one where somebody called in a wildfire in Oregon. Sorry, oregon. Oregon. And the 911 operator said, what you're seeing is probably just the play of sunlight on the fog. Right. It was like, how would you even know that? You're in a call center. I'm looking right at this thing. It's a wildfire. And they didn't dispatch anybody. And like a half hour, 20 minutes later, somebody else called it in, and by this time, it was, like, raging. There was the one lady drowning in her car, too. That one was horrific. I didn't hear about that one. She was in her car that was going down, and I don't remember exactly what happened, but she was freaking out. And I think the 911 person was just sort of dismissive, and it was really kind of rude, even. But that makes the news, not the 650,000 calls a day that go through and our lives are saved. No, absolutely. That's absolutely true. That's a great point. There are plenty of stories, though, people like of them just like, straight up doing hero stuff, going above and beyond. You should see Halle Berry in this movie. One of the things that can happen is as much as you're trained to not let it happen, you can become emotionally invested in a call. Totally. And I've read that some operators are just fine at leaving it at the door, at least appearing to leave it at the door. But others can suffer burnout PTSD. And one of the big things that I saw that's a huge psychological problem for 911 operators is that there can very frequently be no resolution. Right. They can be on the phone with somebody who is holding someone hostage. And they're trying to talk them down, and all of a sudden the cops come in and the line goes dead. If they're not good friends with the cops who came in, they may never find out what happened. Like, no idea they're talking someone through who's been shot or whatever to try to keep them alive and conscious. They have no idea what happened to that person. They have to take the next call. And that's a huge problem. There's no closure. And then sometimes there is closure. Like, if you're a 911 operator, you probably have been on the phone with somebody when they took their last breath, when they were murdered, when they died. Very scared. That kind of stuff takes its toll on people, and it can be a big problem. And there can be pretty frequent turnover among 911 dispatchers. It's Halle Berry movie. Oh, yeah. I'm telling you, it's all there. Yeah, because even if they don't get closure on the work site, they could see it on the news that night, be like, man, I took that call of this murder or whatever. Pretty bad. Sure. Not a job for me. I don't think I could hack it either. And then practically speaking, you have to be able to type really fast with a high level of accuracy while somebody's telling you other information. Yeah. Like, you might be taking info in, and you have to be chatting with a cop on Im who you're sending out while you're also taking the description from the other person. You're just going back and forth. Yeah. You got to be able to compartmentalize and multitask. None of those things are my specialty. No. If you're wondering, you pay for 911 if you have a phone bill, cell phone bill is included. That's a little surcharge there. That's outrageous. To scream socialism, everybody. Yeah. And as far as those statistics we talked about earlier, about the racial bias, of course, if you were a fan of Public Enemy, you remember the great, great song, 911 is a joke. Flavor, flavor. There was a study done by the ACLU in 2013. Residents of Grand Crossing this is Chicago study african American neighborhood on the South Side waited 11 minutes for a cop to come after a priority call. Two and a half minutes for the predominantly white neighborhood of Jefferson Park. And response times were four and a half times slower in the black community. And as I mentioned earlier, with the people calling 9110n, just an African American person living their life, there have been cases where people ended up dead because of that after escalation. And that's just like a pure tragedy for sure. When you have something that's massive and huge and it involves people at their worst moment of their life, a lot of stuff is going to kind of come out of it. There's a lot to a lot of legends and myths and everything. But one of the things I saw that everyone seems to know about is that if you call 911 and pretend you're ordering a pizza, they will understand that you are in a position where you can't talk and they'll dispatch the police. Supposedly that's a myth, but it makes total sense, doesn't you heard that before? I was just thinking of Diehard. I don't remember that. There was that line where he's calling the 911 dispatcher. Well, I guess I don't even think it was. I think it was an actual cop on the other end. And she's like, calm down, sir, and it's not an emergency, whatever. And he said, what do you think I'm doing ordering a pizza? Oh, yeah, that's right. And that might have been a reference to that. Maybe so. So what are you saying again? The urban legend is that let's say there's somebody who's got a gun on you if you can somehow get it to the point where you're like, hey, let's order a pizza right now. You call 911, say, hey, I'd like to order a pizza. That code for my address. Nine one will get what's going on and send the cops out. Apparently that's not true. Okay. But there was an urban legend I saw in the UK with 999 that if you call and you don't say anything, they will send someone out. And I think that is kind of widely believed over here in the US. Too. Apparently in the UK. That is true, but it's going to send you through a series of prompts if you don't respond, and if you press five five, you will be confirming that, yes, there is an emergency and you just can't talk right now. And they will send people out. If you don't press five five, then they won't it'll just take it as, like, an accidental call. Well, and that's the big benefit. I don't even think we kind of brought up about texting to 911, because you might think, like, people want to text millennial, but there are plenty of cases where you can't talk. You're maybe in a domestic dispute or if you're hearing you're hiding in a closet or if you're hearing impaired or if you've been kidnapped and don't want to use your voice out loud or you're a scared child. Like, plenty of great cases to be made for texting. And since text to 911 isn't everywhere, the FCC has a law that if your telecom carrier doesn't have text 911, they have an immediate bounce back that says you can't do that. You have to call 911. Yes. Which is pretty valuable. It is. And one last thing, if you find an old phone that has a charge in it, even if it hasn't had service for 20 years, you can dial nine one. You will be connected. Yeah, that is pretty cool. Every single phone that is in operation dials 911 for free. Yeah, I like that. I do too, man, I love 911. I think Kervin said, there's no greater display of humanity than seeing a fire truck go down the street with its sirens blazing. Oh, really? That sounds like something you'd say. Interesting. Well, if you want to know more about Kerr Vonnegut, you can just type that into the search bar. How stuff works and who knows what that will bring up? Who knows? And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. This is a response when we ask for examples of racism in today's military. And we heard from a range of people, I have to say, from this guy who to the other guy to the other guy. I'll just tell you what this guy said in a minute. But other people have said that, yeah, they've seen some pretty bad racist stuff in the military, but they're isolated incidences, just like in the real world. Got you. But this is what Matthew Applewhite says. Start off, I'm a white guy. I can't speak on everyone's experience while in the service. But during my four years, I saw more camaraderie between the mix of races than I ever see in my real life. It seems like this is the response that we got the most. The most. I think you're right. They taught us from the start in boot camp, Marine Corps, that you're all nothing and you will all become Marines. And with that in common, it gives the common ground between any race or nationality. They might often refer to African American Marines as dark green, implying, yes, they may have a different skin tone, but they're still green. And over the years, in and out of training, you learn that everyone endures the suck and the hard times together and no one is above another. In the end, you learn to trust the man to my left and right with my life, no matter what his skin color. And ladies, too. They're female Marines. Sure. I'm glad you said that. Yes. Now, saying all this, some prejudice from other people's upbringings do still remain. But most of the time it is shot down very fast with harsh repercussions and it is kept to a minimum. I made many friends from all walks of life that I would have never even imagined being so close to, without the common ground we stood on or the hard times that we endured together. And that is from an avid listener named Matthew Apple White. Thanks a lot, Matthew. We appreciate you letting us know. Thanks to everybody who wrote in to let us know virtually the same thing. Yes, except for the couple of standouts. Yeah. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Matthew did, you can go on to Stephanie.com. And I think our social links are there. Who knows? But you can always get in touch with us via email at stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of Iheartradios how stuff works. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, 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." | |
How Online Gambling Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-online-gambling-works | Pretty much immediately after the Internet was opened to the world online gambling sites sprang up. Over the last couple decades, U.S. law and online gambling have had an unusual and complicated relationship. Learn the ins and outs of this grey area. | Pretty much immediately after the Internet was opened to the world online gambling sites sprang up. Over the last couple decades, U.S. law and online gambling have had an unusual and complicated relationship. Learn the ins and outs of this grey area. | Thu, 08 Jan 2015 16:26:27 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=16, tm_min=26, tm_sec=27, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=8, tm_isdst=0) | 37982611 | audio/mpeg | "You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it, because we're pet moms too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com.com. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss, turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comcysk, and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry for the third time. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast two ball starts. Yeah. Really? You a gambler at all? No. I mean, not really. I would lose too much money. But you've been to a casino? Sure. Yeah, I've gambled before. I realized pretty quickly that I'm a terrible gambler. Not like I'm an addict or anything like that. Like, I never win. Losing money is not fun. No, it isn't. I enjoy I don't like Vegas at all, as you know, but when I've had to go there I do enjoy little gaming, but always just I'm very disciplined to set aside a certain amount of money. I'm basically like paying that to have a good time gambling. Right. And if I lose it all, then that's what I because it is enjoyable. I enjoy it. And I did a little sports gambling at one point in my life and got out of sort of a tight squeeze once, and then I was like, not doing that again. Do you have your thumbs broken or something? No, I just owed a lot of money going into NFL Sunday, and I was like, I can't afford this. So I did something really stupid, and I made full of kidney two bets equal to that large amount of money. Wow. One of them both and broke even, and I was like, no more. Wow, that was good that you weren't like, okay, I'm on the street. Keep it going. That scared me straight. For this episode, I did a little online gambling. They let you try it out for free or whatever? Yeah. Nice. I was down $500 in, like, four minutes. But when it's fun money, not real money, it's easy to bet a lot. I was just betting, like, the normal amount. I was playing a roulette called Greedy Goblin. Oh, boy, you can fast. What site was it? Bovada? Yes. Have you heard of Bovada? No. It was the first one that came up when I put in online gambling, but it was the classy site. Is it a classy simulated casino? Pretty waitresses. There were pictures of people. Yeah, sure. No one was actually moving except the 3D Goblins. They try to simulate a casino as much as possible. Right. A little bit like the background of the website was like felt. I think maybe it's like that, but now it seemed to be one of the nicer ones. You could tell that the programmers really put some thought into it. But not the roulette, the slot I was playing. Did I say roulette first? Oh, yeah, you're playing slots. I was playing a slot called Greedy Goblins, and it was nice looking, but I lost very quickly, so I was like, forget this. I'm so glad I'm not addicted to online gambling, because that would be really rough. I'm sure. And actually, they say that online gambling is even possibly more addictive than regular gambling just because of its ubiquity and ease of accessibility. Not only can you get on the computer at home now, the big push is mobile. So you can gamble anytime, anywhere, and if you have a problem, oh, man, big trouble. Yeah, that's super dangerous for some folks. You can gamble in your warm up pants, in your shirt off, or your city jogger pants. I think some casinos in Vegas you could do that probably maybe like the Golden Nugget or one of the old ones downtown where they're like, just give us your money, please, we're hurting so bad. Or in all of Atlantic City. Sure. So you want to talk about the history of online gambling? It hasn't been around forever. No, it hasn't. Gambling might be one of the oldest pastimes, but online gambling is comparatively new. Yeah. In the mid 1990s in Antigua and Barbuda, they passed a law called the Free Trade and Processing Act, which basically paved the way for some of these smaller Caribbean island nations to get into the gambling business. Well, for that nation specifically. Yeah, to get into the online gambling business specifically, they created, out of thin air, their own ability to create licenses for online casinos. So they became the haven for online casinos. It's a pretty good idea. It is. Especially considering that there was no such thing as online casinos yet. Like, that's some foresight right there. Yeah. Around the same time, a company called Microgaming started the first kind of workable software for online gaming, and that came along at just the right time. And Canada, they started opening up some online casinos, and basically all over the world they started popping up. I think by 1997, there were more than 200 online casinos and revenues in the late ninety s of up to eight hundred and thirty million a year. Which is chump change now. Sure. But back then you'll notice we did not mention the United States, because there's a lot of legality issues up to today, you have online gameplay virtually out of the gate. The United States is like, no, that's illegal. Completely ignore the fact that 40 plus states have state lotteries. Sure. You can't gamble online. And actually, I read an article where Antigua sued or filed a complaint against the United States with the world trade organization. The WTO sided with Antigua. Oh, really? And they granted Antigua like, $120,000,000 worth of freedom to distribute American intellectual property without paying any royalties. Wow. Because America closed down its population to Antigua's online casinos, and Antigua said, you guys are violating treaties. We have interesting. And the WTO actually and levied sanctions against the US. Sided with Antigua. Levied sanctions against the US. Which is mind boggling. Yeah. That probably doesn't happen a lot. Yeah. In the early 2000s, all of a sudden, thanks to a company called betfair wager, peer to peer bets on sports. A lot of this early stuff was sports wagering. Right. And then online poker, of course, in the late 90s, really started to catch on in the late ninety s and early 2000s, company called poker spot and party poker and poker stars, they all have silly names, but they really hit on it big when they allowed you to qualify online for these real world series of poker tournaments. Right. And the one guy, Chris moneymaker, actually won the world series of poker in 2003 after having qualified online. And then everyone was like, whoa, that's a big deal. Because I think he ended up having to pay in like $40 to qualify for the world series of poker. Yeah. And he didn't have to travel to Vegas or Atlantic city or wherever else you can go to gamble. Yeah, and that's the way it was going, too. And everybody was really up on poker, especially party poker and poker stars, and the US. Ended up cracking down on it, which we'll talk about a little more in detail coming up soon. But let's talk about just online gambling and how it's different, because it seems well, there's some pretty obvious distinctions. Sure. Like, one, do you have to travel to Atlantic city or Las Vegas or your local Indian reservation and sit there and gamble in person, you might say, well, yes. Obviously if you're gambling online, you can do it at home. But there's a big difference. There's a lot of nuances in between those two. The obvious difference between the two. Sure. One of them is you can play a lot faster without all the chitchat and all the decision making of the little old lady next to you at the blackjack table. Yeah. And I read an article with a guy named John Gugliano, or gagliano. I mean, he's a new Jersey professional poker player. John the googs gagliano. I think it was like googs 33 or gags 33, something like that. Seriously? Anyway, he plays up to 1000 hands an hour. Wow. He plays, what, blackjack? No, poker. He's a pro poker player. He plays maybe 100 hands an hour per table, and he plays up to about ten tables at a time. I was about to say he's got to be playing more than one. Oh, yeah. So he's playing like 1000 hands an hour, and he says in real life, he can play maybe 25 tops if he's really working. And a lot of it is the chitchat, the dealer. Sure. And not being able to physically play ten hands at a time. But see, that's the experience I enjoy about gambling, is being at the table and chit chatting and having a couple of free scotches. Right. It's like a good social, fun social. Like a crap stable. A lot of fun. Okay. To stand around. So, yes, I think that's what makes Gags, 33 a professional poker player. He's in it for the money. Oh, yeah. He doesn't care about all that stuff. And probably to win, too. So yeah, it's a lot quicker. You can win and lose money at the drop of a hat. And like you said, they try to dress it up and make it look and feel like a real casino. Other than that, though, it's a lot of the same games. Like, pretty much any game you can play in a real casino, you can find online. Right. From, like, Lotteries and Keynote to Roulette and all that stuff. Yeah. Bovada had more than 150 different games. Really? Wow. Yeah, a lot of them were slots, but they did have all the regular stuff, too, and tons of different poker. And then, like you said, sports betting. And then there's a subsection of sports betting, entertainment betting. You can bet on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The Oscars, apparently. Spelling bees. Yeah, sure. Competitive eating contest. Reality TV. Yes. Which I didn't get because reality TV is not actually unscripted. Yeah. Like you could easily find out from a producer what happened on the show that was shot five months before it's live, or who's going to get the rows or whatever. I think those episodes are live. A lot of times they've got to be like the American Idol finale or the Survivor finale a lot of time, or Big Brother. But I just assume all those are extraordinarily rigged one way or another and that anybody connected well enough could find out and make some big money. Which I would guess that the people laying odds the bookers. No, the bookies. The bookies would know well enough to stay away from that kind of stuff because it could be rigged. But sports is never rigged. Are you being the sports is rigged? A lot of times. Really? Yeah. You kidding me. Like what? We're not talking about Mickey Rock's boxing fight? No, boxing is notoriously historically fraught with boxers taking dives. Okay, I thought you meant like, Monday Night Football or something like that. No, I mean, NFL is a pretty good track record, but most of the pro sports have had one major betting throwing game scandal in there at some point. Yeah, I don't think it happens all the time, but yeah, like the Black Sox was baseball and it was good movie. Eight men out. Yeah. And I think you'll hear about every once in a while, like NCAA basketball team will come out years later, be like, we threw all those games. Oh, yeah. Didn't. Who was it that played Billy Jean king. The man who played Billy Jean King. Oh, Bobby Riggs. No. What guy? Was it a tennis player? Yeah, very famous men's tennis player. I think it's Bobby Riggs. It wasn't Bobby Riggs. Anyway, he came out within the last couple of years and said that he threw the match. Oh, please. Which is kind of like it wasn't Jimmy Connor. Maybe it was Jimmy Connor saved Face. Yeah. But like four decades later. Yes. Which is weird. Deathbed saving face. I think he's still walking around. We're going to talk more about online gambling and gaming and the distinction between the two right after this. You know, Josh, back in the old days, let me tell you a story. If you wanted a website, you had to learn how to code. You had to learn how to design websites. You had to be really super smart until a very cool company called Squarespace came along. That's right. They simplified things. They did. And Chuck, even better than simplifying things, they're now progressing even further. Squarespace has just rolled out the redesigned Squarespace Seven interface, and it makes the whole shebang even easier and even cooler. Yeah. They have a partnership now with Getty Images. They have new templates. They have cover pages. They have an integration with Google Apps. It is really awesome. Beautiful designs. And you know how awesome their customer support is, right? They haven't done away with all the great stuff that made Squarespace great to begin with. They kept it and expanded upon it. So you've got that 24/7 support via live chat and email. And at only $8 a month, you can get a free domain if you buy Squarespace for one year. That's right. They have responsive designs, too. Man, your website is going to scale and look great on any device. And if you want to make some money, they even offer commerce platforms so you can have your own online store, basically. And if you want to test it out, you can start with a trial with no credit card required and start building your website today. When you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to use the offer code stuff to get 10% off your first purchase. And when you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure you use our offer code stuff stuff. And it will get you 10% off your first purchase. Plus it'll show your support for us. That's right. So thanks, Squarespace, for supporting stuff you should know and thank you, listeners, for supporting Squarespace. Yes, squarespace. Start here, go anywhere. All right, so you mentioned that you tried it out for fun. Yeah. And that is research. Yeah. That is one way, though, that they can get you hooked to say that you don't have to pay any money. Did you have to do anything? Did you have to sign up? No. There's a way you can download the casino software. Okay. Which seems like a really bad idea to me. Do you want to download software from a Russian site? No, I don't, but I will play it for free in my web browser, which is what I did. Was it really Russian software? No, this was Latvian. But I imagine there's plenty of Russian casinos out there. Some of the other differences, though, besides being able to play for fun and get you hooked, is they will offer different odds a lot of times, sports wise, than you can get in a real casino. So the grabster says that this isn't oh, I'm sorry, you're saying that the odds are better? I'm just saying different, like sports odds can be different. Usually they're better for you because the overhead is lower. Right. They don't have to pay as much money. Exactly. They don't have to give out the free scotches because there's nobody to physically sit there and drink the scotch. Yeah, buy your own scotch. You're at home. At home. So you can get different odds. And then a lot of times, the games themselves will have different kinds of payouts that you can get in casinos. But you're also going to have to pay the vague, as they call it, in order to get your money. And this is a whole different thing we have to talk about at some point, too. But you're going to be paying percentages, like 10% to 15% sometimes just to get your money. And that's not the same as in Vegas. No, it's definitely not. And one of the reasons why you have to pay that. And that's on top of the vig, like you said, right? Basically, that's like, okay, here, give us our house money. Yeah. Just for letting you play. And then here's your transaction fee. But that's when you're trying to withdraw stuff from your online account. And the reason that they do this and that the rates are so steep is because they know that you're an American player and you're not supposed to be playing. Technically, that is correct. Historically, that has been very difficult to prosecute because you're in your house playing a casino in Amsterdam online. Right. So what are they going to do? Unless they're, like, spying on PD. Exactly. What are they going to do? Go after the operators of these online gaming sites that are located overseas? Actually, yes. Yeah. That's exactly what they did. This article, Black Friday yes, this article on how stuff works was written before Black Friday. So even though it's a grabster article. It's naive because it was before this Black Friday happened on September 20, 2011, where the Feds basically rated the top three and then some other ones, but definitely the top three online poker sites and shut them down. Yeah. Poker stars. Full tilt poker and absolute poker. And apparently there were a bunch of some say hinky allegations and arrests. Well, yeah, they used Interpol to go arrest the people in other countries for breaking US. Lawyers. Yeah, a lot of us. Lawmakers had big problems with that, even though they attached a bunch of other charges like money laundering and fraud. I'm sure there were some legit illegalities as well. Right. But yeah, it was a pretty interesting sting operation to say the least. Right. So there's a thing called the Wire Wager Act, I believe, from 1961, and it said you can't use any kind of communications device basically in the US. For betting. And the courts interpreted it in various ways as the Internet came along. And some courts decided, like, yeah, this includes the Internet. Other courts are like, no, this is too old and too vague to really include the Internet. So the Feds were kind of like making noises about making prosecutions and stuff based on this. And when they kept running up against the fact that it was too old, they came up with a new law in 2006, the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act. And this one had teeth. Yeah, the reason this one had teeth is because they didn't go after the online gambling people. It went after the third party processors, the payment processors. Yes. And what good is gambling if you can't get your money when you're finished? So all of a sudden, Visa, PayPal, all the banks are like, wait, we could be prosecuted for processing this payment, so we're not going to do it. Which left these online gambling sites basically just completely without Americans. Exactly, because like you said, nobody who wants to gamble online wants to do it for nothing. The whole point is to try to win some money. Right. So that was 2006. That's when, like Party Poker and Poker Stars and all those guys either shut down or they moved overseas. So those were actually American companies, but they moved to the Isle of man, they moved to Ireland, and there was one in Costa Rica, full Tilt, I think was in Costa Rica. And so the Feds were like, okay, we did our job, everything's cool. And these guys figured out loopholes, of course, in 2011 when they rated on Black Friday. The guy who actually ended up in real trouble was this dude who served as the payment processor for the three biggest online poker sites in the world. So not the gambler, not the casino. And it wasn't a company, it was a guy. Yes. And the reason he got in trouble is because he made all these phony businesses up to get banks to process payments so the banks wouldn't think that they were doing any kind of illegal activity. Money laundering. Right. So he laundered money. So he did get in big trouble, and so did the top three sites until that same year. All of a sudden, this crazy war on online gambling was totally reversed by the Obama administration. Yeah. Within the Obama administration. It's not like this is the Bush administration aggressively prosecuting people for it. Right. This was the Obama administration. Then all of a sudden, the Department of justice came up with a new opinion and said, you know what? We don't think the Wire Wager Act applies to this anymore, and we don't think that people should be prosecuted for online gambling if the states allow it. Yeah. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't one of the big reasons behind this. We need to start regulating this fast and get out in front of it or else it's going to be a huge mess. Yes, it's going to be a huge mess. It could be a huge boon for states for taxes. Sure. And Grabster mentions in this article that people tended to gravitate toward sites that had, like, a NL domain or Au domain because they knew that Australia and the Netherlands heavily regulate this kind of stuff. Right. They're legit. And so online casinos that operate out of those countries have to tow the line, which means that if you win, you're going to get paid. Right. So they provided a model that like, yes, if this is legal and regulated, people will come to it, and you can actually manage it pretty well. Yeah. So in other words, I don't have to set up an offshore bank account or send money orders to some shady third party Internet site. Exactly. That may or may not pay you. Exactly. Last year, I was the commissioner of my fantasy football league, and we all throw in $20. It's no big deal, right. Twelve of us. Just to make a little more interesting, at the end of the year, you win the money. And I said, just pay me through PayPal. And a few people said, when you go to make the payment, it's like writing a check. You put what it's for. They were like, fantasy football payment and PayPal flagged it and wouldn't allow it. And I didn't even know at the time that was against the laws. Like, really? And so I had them either send me money or just say, don't put what it's for. Right. Exactly. For woodworking. Because apparently anything but fantasy football. Yes, apparently that made me, I guess, an illegal bookie. Yeah. They could have gotten you Enrico. Probably. Nice. So we're going to talk about legal online gambling and all that kind of stuff right after this. 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It's so weird when this country it always amazes me. Like, this is illegal in the United States, but it's legal in the state if they say it's okay. Sports betting is still very much illegal online sports betting. The Justice Department said it's very clear that this law was originally written. This law that we've been aggressively prosecuting for 40 years, 50 years was actually really just pertaining to sports betting because that's chance. Is that correct? Is that why? That's not necessarily why. Because, like, roulette is chance and you can do that now in some states. So it's strictly because the law said sports. Okay, it was written in the law. Yeah, but fantasy football now, one of the big new trends are these day play sites for fantasy football. What is it called? One is called Draft Kings, but there's a name for the whole thing. It's not fantasy football. It's like league draft or something like that. They call it daily fantasy sports. Okay, in this article that's a little more generic than I was thinking. Yeah, but there's one called Draft Kings and there's another one, and I hear these all the time on sports radio, the ads for them. Fanduel.com you're right. Where you can draft the team in a day and have your team play that weekend's football games and then cash out that weekend as well. Yeah. And so it's not the same thing as like, just your ESPN Fantasy Football league where it's just a season long thing for fun, right, or maybe a little bit of money thrown in a pool. This is weekly and depending on the sport, it could be daily. Exactly. And all the sports, they allow that, though, because I don't think that's considered skill somehow. So fantasy football is currently considered skill and is allowed, I believe, which is hysterical. This daily fantasy thing is apparently considered a little more gambly, I guess. So it's in a little more of a gray area, even though everybody's kind of currently ignoring it. But all of the articles, for some reason, Forbes is like, really into it. I noticed that online gambling and it's been doing a lot of coverage of it over the years. Yeah. And so from reading these Forbes articles, the way that they track anything is where the money's going. And they talked about how these daily fantasy FanDuel are attracting tons of venture capital right now. There's just tens of millions of dollars being thrown at these tiny little startups that just allow you to do like daily or weekly fantasy sports drafts. And that suggests that everybody on the street, wall street thinks that there's going to be either a federal law that allows it yeah. Or this federal ruling from 2011, 2012 that says it's cool, just leave it up to the state, is going to lead to basically state across the country state laws that regulate and allow this kind of stuff. So it seems to be if you follow the money, the tide is turning and online gambling is going to be where it's at. Yeah. I mean, right now you said gray area earlier. There's a lot of gray area all over the country and all the states, because like you said, some states let you play the lottery. Some states will let you go to OTB and bet on racehorses or bet on racehorses at home online. Some let you bet on reality TV online, and some don't. Some there are now three states, I think Delaware, New Jersey, and Nevada, that have full fledged online poker, online gambling. And I think Nevada is actually running out of Nevada. Right. So Nevada, as far as I know, hilariously, only offers online poker. Okay. They don't have a lottery either, did you know that? Yes. They probably don't need one. I guess not. But you could always need more money. Sure. Especially if you're in Nevada, you're like, give me more money. But yeah, they don't have it. So I think that you're right though, that Nevada has opened up playing to people outside of their state, outside of the country. Yeah, but originally they were only allowing people in Nevada to play. But I think isn't the website owned and run in that state as well? It's not like an out of the country deal. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah. And that's the way New Jersey is too. So there's this whole secondary industry that's grown up around state sanctioned online gambling, which is geolocation services, which tracks where you, the computer user or online gambler are located. So they're watching it. Yeah. And if your computer comes up as outside of the state of New Jersey, you'll be blocked from playing. If you come up as inside of New Jersey, you can play New Jersey, which has a complete suite of online gambling available. And I guess Chris Christie said it was going to be a billion dollar industry in its first year or there's going to be a billion dollars in tax revenue, and it came to be like a 10th of that. So it's not catching on like. Wildfire, like I thought. But supposedly the casinos that are still standing in Atlantic City are still standing because those are the ones that went to the trouble of setting up online gambling sites. Well, that brings us to a good point. There are a lot of brick and mortar casino owners, notably what's his name? Sheldon. Yeah. Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn. Yeah. Those are some of the biggest, fat cat casino owners in Vegas. And of course, they feel threatened even if they think Addison's big quote was, click your mouse, lose your house. And he's saying, we're going to lose half a million jobs and people are going to stop coming to casinos. I'm sure they're also getting into the online casino game if they were smart. I'm sure they are. But it raises a good point, though. Like, Vegas, it used to be that Vegas made all their money on gambling and you could go and stay in a room for $10 and eat for $2, but it's not the same anymore. Vegas is a destination family vacation spot, right, with all kinds of revenues coming in, and you need people there to bring those revenues in, to see the shows and to take your kid to the stupid indoor amusement park and buy the now not so cheap food. But that raises the question then do you even need the gambling if you have all this other stuff to attract people? Do you need the casino? And even if you do need the casino, if you have the roller coaster and the indoor amusement park and all that stuff that you're taking the kids to yeah. As long as you're not losing money by having a casino open, it doesn't seem like online gambling would detract from that. Yeah, I see what you mean. I mean, those casinos are never losing money in Atlantic City. They do. Really? Oh, man. Even Donald Trump can't make money in Atlantic City. Well, that's probably just from overhead and low attendance. They're not, actually. The house is always winning. Oh, I see what you mean. You know what I mean, right. Unless they own the casino. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. We got a great episode on casinos that was a good one that you should look into. And we have one on addiction, too, which is why we're not touching too much upon gambling addiction. Yeah, I mean, there's different I've heard when I was researching this, I saw different things. Obviously, it seems like it would make it super easy to get addicted for online gambling, but there was this one Harvard Medical School study of 40,000 people that they said the overwhelming majority of online gamblers play in a very moderate manner, spending minimal amounts. I don't know how accurate that is, though. That site like misused apostrophes and stuff like that. Yeah, I was like, your credibility is a little bit out the window because of your grammar. Yeah, or maybe it's like any other kind of gambling. If you're a moderate gambler, then you'll probably stay that way. But if you have a problem with it, it's certainly going to make it easier to throw away a bunch of dough. Sure. And it's not money, cash money in front of you, at least in Vegas. That's why one reason they use chips is to kind of trick your brain a little bit, right. To make money more abstract. Yeah, but there's nothing more abstract than just signing your bank account to something online and clicking it. Yeah, because the little wheel on greedy goblins is like mesmerizing. Well, it's also small too, so, I mean, you see the slot going, but the amount that you have in the bank is not that big. And it doesn't seem like it's linked to real money. In my case, it wasn't linked to any real money, but I could see very easily. It just seems like a part of a game. Like a computer game. Yeah. And apparently there's a whole thing called slots for tot. Oh, boy. Which is if you are against online gambling, this stuff drives you crazy. It's basically like Disney versions of casino games for little kids, like apps and things like that, where there's no gambling going on. But it's basically like it's like Joe Campbell. It's like prepare for your adulthood as a gambler or a smoker or whatever. Right. Make it cartoony and fun. Exactly. Or a McDonald's consumer or something like that. Yeah. I would be worried. It seems like an online casino. You can find a reputable one, but it seems like it would be really easy because the cards aren't in front of you to cheat the player every time. Well, okay, that's another thing too, that the Grabster points out. So if you're an American right now, it's still kind of a gray area, especially if your state doesn't allow online gambling. So you are still a potential target for shady online gambling sites. And one of the things they can do is cheat you out of odds. It's why if you play an Australian site, you can feel comfortable that the Australian government has vetted this computer program and found that the odds are it's the real deal. Like if you're playing blackjack, that is a 52 card deck and every card is in there, even though it's virtual. That's what I would worry about is if you start winning too much, they'd be like, let's just have this guy lose the next generation. Exactly. Let's put the governor on this thing. Yeah. Not the governor of Australia. Right. Because he's called the prime minister. And if you listen to casinos podcasts, vegas used to be fraught with rigged games as well. Right. So it's the same thing. It's just the wild west right now, as far as the online version goes. Yeah. So Grabster gives a couple of pieces of advice. One, he said, especially when you're trying out a new one and you're using a payment processor and that kind of stuff. He said, open up an account with a small amount of money initially. Don't throw $10,000 just to see if it works. Said, put a little in, try it out, try to get it back out. Yeah. And if everything seems legitimate, then you can start to add more money if that's what you want to do. He also said that no matter how much trust you have for this company, you want to get your money out very regularly and frequently. Sure. They go under, you're done. They go under, they get rated, whatever. You just want your money out. And again, we should say this is illegal in some weird way still in the United States, so the Feds could conceivably come along and take your money. Yeah. And you're also signing up for terms of service, so there are age requirements, and if you fraudulently sign up for something as an underage gambler, then you're breaking the law there, too. Yeah. And they recommend that. There's one more thing I wanted to talk about. So when the Feds in 2011 rated those top three poker sites, and then in the same year the Department of justice issued that 13 page memo that said, I think we've been misreading this. Yeah. Those sites that were rated, the Department of justice brokered a deal where one of the sites that were rated bought the assets of its rival. That was also rated with the Department of justice taking the money and then distributing the assets to the other illegal gambling operations. They served as the middleman for a merger. I would guess that they got a significant cut of that. The vig. Yeah. And that's crazy. The Department of justice was brokering a deal between online gambling outfits. Unbelievable, man. So that's it. That's online gambling. If you want to know more about it, I suggest you go look it up on Forbes because they have a ton of articles on it. But first, go to Houseworks.com and type in online gambling, and it will bring up an excellent Grabster article to start you out. And since I say grabster, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this the Brazilian. Hey, guys, my name is Rafael. I'm your greatest fan in Brazil. I've listened to at least 100 episodes, and you keep surprising me with new interesting topics. I love the soccer show, especially because you know absolutely nothing about it, which was very funny for Brazilian. I thought we were never going to talk about that one again. I love podcasts because they helped me improve my English and I can listen to them while I am riding the bike at the gym or climbing. Last week, I was listening to other podcasts, and I must say, you're winning the competition of good knowledge providers off. First I listened to a program of freaking Amics radio called Tell Me Something I don't know. And one of the contenders presented the New York prohibition of pinball machines to the early 70s. They might didn't know, but I knew because of your show on Pinball. I remember when that happened. Do you remember that? We got a lot of email. That like two weeks after we did our Pinball show. This guy on freaking Ox radio on that show. But the guy was a Pinball expert because I did a little digging. He did not copy us. Oh, no. Rarely do people copy us. I think no, I think you're totally right. Rarely, if ever. Second, almost at the same day that you launched the nuclear fusion show, the BBC podcast in our Time with Melbourne Bragg invited three experts to discuss nuclear fusion. Both programs are awesome, but yours was funny. Only yours was funny. I could see that. My conclusion is that you are beating the heck out of other podcasts. Congratulations. Wish you all the best. And if I might add, challenge you to make a show on deflation and inflation. I'm sure that the crazy Latin American experiences to challenge high inflation will amaze you. We have we've talked about that a bunch. Yes, stagflation. We did one, Raphael, called what is stagflation? Yes. And we've talked about deflation currency. The stuff you should know. Guide to economics. That's right. Super Stuff guide even. That's right. So, Raphael, the information is out there for you. And he says, PS. Could you please tell me if my English is actually improving? I don't know where you started. We don't have a baseline, Raphael, but your English is pretty darn good. It is a couple of little charming Latin Americanisms, I think. But I think you did a great job. Yeah, thanks, Raphael. We are your biggest fans. That's right. We appreciate all the flattering stuff. Thanks for that. If you want to flatter, Chuck and I, we're always up for that. And by Chuck and I, of course, your grammar Nazis I mean Chuck and me. Don't listen to that part, Raphael. You can tweet to us at syskast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howsteppworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushinenow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-06-22-sysk-ketchup-final.mp3 | How Ketchup Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ketchup-works | Little-known fact: Ketchup, possibly the most all-American of condiments, evolved from fermented fish sauce people in Southeast Asia have been making for more than a thousand years. | Little-known fact: Ketchup, possibly the most all-American of condiments, evolved from fermented fish sauce people in Southeast Asia have been making for more than a thousand years. | Thu, 22 Jun 2017 14:16:19 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=14, tm_min=16, tm_sec=19, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=173, tm_isdst=0) | 51123582 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, my Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, my Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilguera and Georgia Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet at Halo. We get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com. Josh, my friend, if you are a listener of ours and you live in Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, Austin, Brooklyn, minneapolis, Kansas, or right here in Atlanta, you can come see us on tour starting in August and finishing up in November. Is that right? Yeah, that's right, man. It's our 2017 North America Monsters of Podcasting tour. I like the sound of that. Eddie Van Halen is opening. Yeah, he is. But not really. No, not really. But you can find out all the information and all the deeds@sysclive.com our Squarespace live touring home on the web, and we hope to see everyone out there. Welcome to stuff you should know from householdworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark there's. Charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's guest producer. No. This is stuff you should know. I hate ketchup. Do you really? Yeah, really? Yes. Do you like tomato sauce? Like pasta? Sure, love it. Do you like tomato soup? Don't love it. I'll choke it down, though. So I'm starting to see a spectrum emerge here. Oh, yeah, I don't go for raw tomato much. Well, love cooked pasta sauce. Yeah. But I'm a mayonnaise guy at heart, so we're talking condiments. You know, one thing about the dorito effect that it kind of ruined me a little bit on food. Like, I'll be like, oh, this is a good tomato. And then some part of my brain is like, yeah, well, it's not a 1940s tomato. You don't know what a good tomato is. What do you mean? Like a Jersey tomato versus just some other stupid tomato? No, supposedly, like just the agricultural production in the US. Is so homogenized now that we've lost all these great heirloom varieties of especially tomato. And the stuff that most people get that are tomatoes, they're no good compared to how they used to be. Oh, you hit up a farmer's market, sure. But even still grow that junk yourself. There you go. Or build a time machine, take the way back machine and get some data. We got that at our disposal. What's your problem? I'm just cheap. I don't like to spend it on the oh, gas. Yeah. Well, that's funny, Chuck, that you like mayonnaise, because did you know before this, I should say that the number one condiment for sales wise in the United States is mayonnaise? I did not know that. And when I saw that, that surprised me A, and it surprised me B, that it was that much more than ketchup. I figured ketchup would be far and away the winter, because I always feel like the ultimate weirdo for not liking ketchup. So what is it about ketchup? You don't like the taste? Oh, okay. That's a pretty good reason not to like it. I'm not wild about vinegar based things. Oh, yeah. I do like balsamic vinegar, but a lot of the other vinegars, I'm not crazy about. That's one of the reasons I don't like pickled things. Right. But some vinegar based things, it's really sweet, and I don't love sweet condiments. Have you ever had curry catch up? No, I don't need Ketchup. I see. And then when I was a kid, I can't lie, it probably grossed me out a little bit. Because they call your mom bathing in it. Yeah. Oh, my God. That's disturbing. The blood thing, I probably thought it grossed me out because we would use it as blood for play acting and things. Yeah. So yeah. Just not into it. Those are some solid reasons to not like ketchup. Plus, I don't know if people would probably argue that ketchup and mayonnaise are great together, but once you're on the mayo train to mix up another condiment with, it just doesn't make sense to me. I don't discriminate. I like most, if not all, condiments. So, like, ketchup, mayo, and mustard on a burger is good to you? Yes. It's not like I can't eat it without it. I've actually found I can eat burgers without ketchup. Now I'm a grown up. But I do like a little bit of ketchup on there, a little bit of mustard, and then, yes, definitely mayo. Well, Emily loves ketchup so much that she calls French fries a ketchup delivery system. Yeah, that makes sense. There are vehicle for it. Yeah. Tell her to try curry ketchup. It'll knock her socks off. I totally will. I like curry. Yeah, but you don't like ketchup, so you wouldn't like this. But if she likes ketchup, even if she doesn't like curry, she may still like curry ketchup. No, she likes curry. Well, then she's going to love curry ketchup. Yeah. So mayonnaise is the number one condiment in the United States. It's a big surprise, which must mean ketchup is number two. Yeah. Which, by the way, I'd mentioned how much more? I think it was about $2 billion to $800,000, $800 million, which is more than double. That kind of surprised me. Yeah, it is very surprising. What's even more surprising is I was being facetious because ketchup isn't even the number two condiment in the United States, salsa. Is that's right? Salsa had a big surge in the it's because people like to say salsa. That's a hotel reference. Ketchup is number three. Right. At least it's got mustard beat, for Pete's sake. What is this, the EU? Yeah, 97% of American households have a bottle of ketchup in there. Well, it's just kitchens, but we'll get to the fridge, non fridge thing later. Sure. So, yes, everybody loves ketchup, especially in America, because it's obviously an American invention. Everybody knows that John Wayne's grandfather invented ketchup while he was sailing his Ford truck down the Mississippi River, and one day a magical bottle budweiser came and whispered the recipe in here, and they commemorated the event by shooting off fireworks. I love it. That's how ketchup was born. Everybody knows it. And fireworks, right? Pretty neat. No, that's not true. Although I take a little bit of issue with this, because ketchup was first created in Asia, in China, and about 544 Ce, I should say. I saw they think maybe the Chinese got it from the Vietnamese. Yes, I saw that, too. Okay. But as you will see, these recipes that were originally for preserving fish, they didn't have tomatoes at all. That came in America much later. But it's so not like ketchup to me. You can't even trace it back and say, like, yes, that's ketchup. What's the point in even linking these things? Because you can link them. That's the fascinating thing to me about it. It's like American ketchup. What we think of as ketchup here in the States, like Heinz 57 stuff, right, is a species that evolved not hinds 57 sauce, but hinds ketchup. Okay? What everybody thinks of is ketchup, right? It's a species that evolved from an ancestor that can directly trace its lineage right back to this ketchup in Asia. So much so that the word ketchup is an anglicization of either a melee word that was borrowed from the Cantonese or a Hokian, South China Fujian province word. Either way, it was something like katsu, and it meant a fermented fish paste. Like when you go to the store today and you buy fish sauce. Yeah, I love it. That's the progenitor of ketchup. That's where ketchup came from. Yeah, I guess that makes sense to me. It's changed so much, it's almost like you should just draw a line, and I guess that line would be pre tomato and post tomato. I think that's pretty fair to say. Yeah. Pre tomato and post tomato. You can definitely draw a line, because if you look at Heinz ketchup bottles, it says clearly, tomato ketchup, and there's this really great I think it was a fast code design article by a guy named John Brownlee who points out, like, why would they even bother putting tomato on the label? Of course it's tomato ketchup, you idiot. And the reason is because that's a throwback to a time when ketchup didn't have tomato and it had things like sardines and anchovies. Yeah. Well, not sardines, but anchovies. I love that. There were sardines, you name it, and it was probably in ketchup at some point. Right. So. Asia, maybe southeast Asia, maybe China. The Brits encountered this on some of their wild trips abroad. Right. And there's many things brought at home said, we love this stuff, let's try and replicate it. And then, in 1732, was one of the first published recipes in the UK. Ketchup and paste by Richard Bradley. Right. Rick Bradley. Yeah, Ricky Bradley. And he did reference the East Indies as its origin. Yeah. And it was still pre tomato. Sure. Yeah. It was a very pretty faithful recreation of the fish sauce that they found. The cat see it I'm pretty sure that's how you say it. I'd be very interested to know how to pronounce it correctly, but it was a faithful recreation of it, which was basically like preserve fish and a sort of brine with some spices, throwing in maybe a little mace, some salt, some pepper, maybe something like lemon peel, and then yeah, if you like fish sauce, you would love the original ketchup, because it's basically the same thing. Right. Well, I do like fish sauce, but you got to use it liberally and it's only for certain things. Yeah, sure. You don't want to just, like, go throwing fish sauce on everything? I don't know, man. If you love fish sauce, it's like with ketchup, people will put ketchup on just about anything. Well, we'll get to that. At first, the Brits are, like, blindy. This is really good stuff. Well, that's a good accent, but I'm not that big on anchovies. What else can we replace it with? So they started making their own kind of offshoots of ketchup, where they replaced the anchovies with other stuff. Yeah. I mean, mushrooms, walnuts what else? Elderberry. Yeah. Oysters. Yes. And what they were going for was that, Umami flavor. They didn't know it at the time because Umami wasn't discovered until the Think 60s. We did a show on that. Yeah. Everybody kind of knew that it was a thing, but no one had actually sussed it out or named it. Right. That's what they're going for, is that savory meaty flavor that you would get from something like fermented anchovies, and they're trying to recreate it. And they did. Apparently, mushroom ketchup tasted a lot like Worcestershire sauce. Yeah. And then walnut ketchup. Apparently, Jane Austen was a big fan of that. And if you're sitting there thinking of putting this on, like your hot dog the hot dogs weren't invented yet. That's not what people were using it for. They were using it as, like, a base for stews or meat pies, things like that. It was like a sauce. It was a base. It was something that you were taking bland food and making it savory with this bottle of the stuff. That was made from fermented something or other. Well, and they would use it like we can use barbecue sauce. They would base it on things while they're cooking. Sure. Which I just can't imagine that like basting tomato based. Well, this is before it's tomato, I guess. Right. This is when it was mushroom based. Yeah. But you mentioned, umami, and your buddy Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article for The New Yorker and kind of throwing out the question, like, why are there so many kinds of mustard? Yet ketchup is kind of ketchup. And his answer was, because it satisfies all the fundamental taste, all five sweet, salty, sour, bitter. And, umami, another answer is that there actually are a ton of different kinds of ketchup. Well, yeah, I wouldn't get to mention it. Just as many as there are mustard to first, because tomatoes are native to North America, and this is where people first started using tomato as the base. Yeah, but Chuck, it took a really long circuitous route to get to that point. And the reason why is, in America, people were making ketchup, but they were still doing things like using walnuts and using mushrooms and oysters as the base of it. Right? Yeah. They still weren't using tomatoes. Even the tomatoes were everywhere. And that was because the Europeans and American colonists or European colonists considered tomatoes poisonous. Yeah. So they didn't eat tomatoes. I think they used them as, like ornamental plants or something like that. Finally, some people started to try them and tried to convince other people, and then they went through a little period where they were considered medicine. And then finally somebody started adding them to ketchup. And the first tomato ketchup recipe appears in an American cookbook, depending on who you ask. Either in one yeah, that's the one I found was 1812, but it still didn't really, really take off until post Civil War. Right. And this is 1871, when a man named Henry Hines, he got together with a doctor, isn't that right? Yes. That guy, Dr. Wiley, I can't remember his first name, but he shows up in our FDA. Does the FDA protect Americans? Remember that guy who put together that group of people who would eat preservatives until they were poisoned to find out whether something was poisonous or not? Yes. That was the guy who set up that squad. Yeah. Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley. So his whole deal was for a while there, ketchup had some really nasty chemicals in it. Some of them had and these are all preservatives. Some of it was coltar that gave it the red color and then sodium benzoate, and that helped to retard spoilage. So it was really nasty stuff. And he kind of first championed that. This stuff is harmful to your health. So he got together with Henry J. Heinz, who was producing ketchup in 1876, and they were like, you know what, if you use really good because at the time, the ketchup they were making was from scraps of tomatoes that were kind of like junk tomatoes. Right. And they said, you know, if you could ripe red tomatoes as your base, it has a natural preservative in it called pectin. And we got to ramp up the vinegar because that'll help out with the spoilage. And all of a sudden, we don't need to use chemicals anymore. Right. Which is a huge breakthrough. And the reason why there are so many preservatives in ketchup was because tomatoes have a pretty short growing season. It's like mid August and mid October. And so the only time during the year you could make fresh ketchup was those two months, and you couldn't make a year's worth of ketchup. Like, by this time, people were buying millions of bottles of ketchup in America alone a year. Right. So you couldn't make all that in two months. So you had to preserve the pulp. But they took terrible standards and practices to preserving. So when you opened up that tub of pulp come July good band name to make some new ketchup, it was totally spoiled, written with bacteria. It was very dangerous stuff to begin with, and that was the basis that they used to start with. So it was really bad stuff. And when Hines created this preservative free version of ketchup, it was a huge breakthrough. Yeah. And way back in 1890, he even created that iconic octagonal ketchup bottle that you cannot buy in stores anymore, as far as I know. But you can still get in restaurants. You can take them from restaurants. Just leave an extra good tip. All right, so let's take a break here, and we'll get back and talk about this foul condiment right after this. All right, so today ketchup is basically tomato, salt, vinegar, onion powder or some spice, some kind of sweetener, either a lot of sugar or a lot of corn syrup. Or high fructose corn syrup. Yeah, I think high fructose corn syrup is the standard. And I think it was Hunts that first came out with a brand that didn't have high fructose corn syrup. And they touted it all up and down the avenue, and Hines is far and away since I don't do ketchup, I made the bad mistake of buying the wrong ketchup one time for Emily. What kind did you get? I think it was Hunts. Yeah. And she was like, no, it's like, don't bring any Hunts and God forbid, any Del Monte catch household. Yeah, it's hinds in my house. And it is far and away the leader. I think they have, like, 60 or so percent of the market share that's in the US. They have about 30% of the global market. Not bad. Hines is synonymous, literally, with ketchup around the world that's everybody knows Hines ketchup. Right. We should have gotten them as a sponsor. Yes, we should have. But then we wouldn't have been able to do a show about ketchup. We're giving the values. Yeah, we do. We really do. Chuck, congratulations to you on your value. And you as well. So ketchup is much more standardized. Depending on who you ask, it's either incredibly toxic or actually has some health benefits. It could be both. Right. I think I already said that there was a period where tomatoes were seen as medicine back in the day. Yeah, they had tomato pills. Yeah, they had tomato pills. And actually, they had ketchup pills, too. There was a doctor in Ohio who stole the ideas of another doctor in Michigan and went to a guy who was selling patent medicine and said, hey, man, tomatoes are super healthy. And so, by extension, ketchup should be super healthy. And I believe that they do things like treat indigestion by removing bile from the body. Yeah. You got some diarrhea ketchup, got jaundice ketchup pills. Right. How about rheumatism or headaches? Well, so this is where it starts to get a little wacky, right? Yeah. They started selling Dr. Mills compound extract of tomato, and they were successful. This was back in 1835, and they were successful. And a bunch of imitators came on the market, and all of a sudden, it was not so great any longer. Well, no, because a lot of them didn't even have tomatoes in them. They were fraudulent ketchup pills, or they were laxatives acting as laxatives. And so that caused the great tomato pill market crash of 1840. But today, we're much smarter, and rather than ketchup pills, we take tomato pills, also known as lycopene supplements. Yeah. Because lycopene is that's the good stuff that you're looking for? That has been shown to help cancer patients specifically? I think the one that they've actually proven is prostate cancer. Right. So they haven't proven it, but that one shown. There's been the most, like, positive studies, but even still, the jury is still out on that one. Okay. But yes, prostate cancer is the one that they roundly point to and say, lycopene really helps with this. At least some studies have shown that lycopene somehow disrupts communication between cancer cells, and it retards the growth of blood vessels to the cancer cells so they can't grow as well. And apparently, the body produces glycopene naturally, but also readily absorbs and uses it, too. And one of the great sources of lycopene is tomatoes. Lycopene gives tomatoes, among other things, it's red color. But the amazing thing about it is, if you eat a raw tomato right now, you're not going to absorb as much lycopean as if you ate some ketchup right now. Yeah. It's got to be cooked. Yeah. It releases the license. It makes it more readily available to the human body, we should say. Yeah, but they also say even if it does help, it's like a little ketchup on a hamburger is not nearly enough to really do you a lot of good. No, it's something like 2.5 milligrams of nicotine in a tablespoon of ketchup. You say, Well, I'll just eat a bunch of ketchup. The problem is, if you eat, say, like a half a cup, about seven tablespoons of ketchup. But you just have to be a weirdo anyway to do that. Right. You're getting about three quarters of your daily sodium intake and four teaspoons of added sugar as well, where you're just better off, like, eating some tomato sauce instead. Yeah. But the point is, if Lycopene helps humans, which the jury is still out, but it looks like it's possible, then ketchup actually can help humans by giving a little extra Lycopene. That's right. Just ketchup on your tomato sauce. Yeah. And all these things can add up over time. Sure. So Ketchup was selling well in America post Civil War. You got the tomato going now, everyone loves it. But there was a problem early on with ketchup that took a long time to fully solve. And I bet you they're still sort of working on it. Is that ketchup? Anyone who grew up in the loved ketchup at a diner would have a hard time getting the ketchup out of that glass bottle. And there were all kinds of tricks. I remember one of them was that if you tapped on the 57 on the label, was that it? Yes. Then it would come out better. That's true. Then you had the jackass who would just smash the bottom of it until catch up would shoot out all across the table. That works, but not well. Or the more sheepish person at the diner might stick a butter knife in there, be like, die ketchup, and coax it out. And the reason all this is happening is because ketchup and this is a good little dinner party factoid, is a non Newtonian fluid. So if you ever change your oil or even pour water out of a cup, you will notice that all pours out at the same rate. It has a single viscosity. It's a Newtonian fluid. Right. Noon is like, those are great ketchup. It can start to come out very slowly, and then all of a sudden, it starts picking up steam and coming out of that bottle. And that's when you know you're really cooking. That has different external forces acting upon it to either increase or decrease that viscosity. Right. So it has multiple viscosities, which makes it a non Newtonian fluid. Right? Yes. And when you put force on it, specifically sheer force, it changes the viscosity. It actually decreases the viscosity of the catch up, which increases the flow rate, which means it comes out of the bottle faster. And one of the ways that you can introduce shear force, S-H-E-A-R is to tap on the bottle. That concussive force loses or changes the viscosity, and the catch up flows more quickly. So it actually is true, because there was something to that then. Yeah. That tapping on that Embossed 57, the one that was like embossed on the bottle? Yeah. That's the perfect spot to tap because if you hit it with the heel of your palm onto the rear of the bottle, if you hit it on the bottom. Right. If you do that lightly, all you're doing is reducing the viscosity of the ketchup right in the rear of the stuff toward the neck of the bottle that you're trying to get out. It remains highly viscous. Right. If you tap toward the neck of the bottle, you're going to reduce the viscosity of the ketchup that's up there in front, and it will start to slide out. If you hit that thing on the bottom hard enough that you change the viscosity of all the ketchup inside yeah. It's going to come shooting out and you're going to look like an idiot. All your friends are going to laugh at you and you'll die alone. That's right. So they had a problem with this, and they thought in 1968, what about ketchup packets? This kind of solves that problem. You can squeeze it out and they said, yeah, that's kind of neat. It might do well for restaurants, but no one's going to have a Ziploc bag full of ketchup packets in their fridge unless you're my mom and they're from eight different fast food restaurants. Sure. God bless her. So those are still around. But it took till 1983 to come up with a plastic squeeze bottle, which still didn't fully work, because, as this, our own article points out, they made funny farting noises, which I guess is unseemly at a dinner table. Sure. And then what the industry insiders call serum. That thin, watery, kind of gross stuff that nobody wants on their hamburger or hot dog ketchup juice. Yeah. Toward the end, that serum comes out and nobody wants that. So those squeeze bottles weren't the ultimate solve. Yeah, it's basically just separated water. Separated from the ketchup solids. And only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast, and start taking charge of your future today. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical goldmine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yep. 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 life Lock.com slash stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. There are actual academic papers on this conundrum this problem with serum separation and Ketchup. Oh, I'm sure people trying to figure out how to get around it. I think they've hybridized a new kind of tomato that allows for less serum separation. Once processed into Ketchup, even we couldn't shake it up. I'm a novice, but yeah, you do shake it up. And it typically works. But in, I think, 2002, Hines and Hunts, and apparently Hunts was working on it first, and Hines got wind of it and started their own project. But almost simultaneously, Hinds and Hunts released a new type of squeeze bottle that you could stand upside down. So the catch up stayed toward the bottom. Right. And it was actually designed to catch the Ketchup, juice the serum, and remix it back into the ketchup solids as it flowed out. That's right. A dude named Paul Brown is the hero to many because he created the silicone valve. And it wasn't just for ketchup. In fact, I don't even know if it was originally it was for shampoos. I think that he was trying to come up with, well, that makes sense, but he's a hero to catch up lovers. Yeah. So these liquid valves, they had right angle slit cut into the valve, so when you squeeze the bottle, it flows out nice and neat, and then they close back up when you stop squeezing, which seals it back up inside the bottle. And then it's revolutionary. It's a dome that has the slits cut into the side of it, and then around the dome, it's a place where the serum collects. And then as the ketchup is moving out, it's supposed to mix back in together. So funny how much science has gone into this, right, just to get the ketchup right. And it still isn't perfect. Like anybody who uses this bottle knows that you still get ketchup juice when you first cord it unless you shake it first. Yeah. And even then, you're still going to get a little serum. It's just a fact of life. You don't want to do it on a bad date, because that can be the thing that straw breaks the. Camel's back where suddenly you're sobbing, standing in your kitchen holding that squeeze bottle of ketchup. See, that's why you go for mayonnaise, because although it is a non Newtonian fluid, there's no mayonnaise serum. Did you finish your CuPy mayonnaise yet? I did. And I need to go to the little Martin near my house to see if they have more. Any halfway decent Asian market will have it. I'm sure they do. I mean, you can buy matcha powder and eel, so I'm sure you can buy this stuff. They will have Cuba. Manny all right, so 2002 is when that new valve was introduced by Hinds and Hunt doesn't mention for Del Monte. I wouldn't feel too bad for them, though. They're still selling a lot of ketchup. Yeah, they're still making that money. I want to hear from people, though. They're like, no, I'm a Del Monte man, through and through. Oh, there's somebody out there we want to hear from. The legit ones, not hipster ones. Yeah. I like Malort and Del Monte. Ketchup and PBR. I don't wear shirts. So 2002 was when that was invented. And then I'm sorry, implemented. And then there was that still final problem, apparently, with ketchup, where you get to the bottom of the bottle of the squeeze bottles and you can't get it all out. And that was solved with a little bit of technology courtesy of MIT called Liquid Glide. Yes. I don't know if they've implemented this yet. It sounds like adding something that is really unnecessary that could conceivably be toxic. Oh, is it not in there yet? I don't believe so. From the house. The first article makes it sound like they've invented it and they're planning on it, but they haven't put it in yet. Yeah. So the thing with Liquid Glide, I looked up what that was all about, and I think the deal is it essentially sort of is a coating on the inside of the bottle that makes the inside of the bottle pre wet in a way. Okay. Slippery. What was it that Clark Griswold came up with in Christmas vacation? It was a like a silicone that he ended up putting on me. That's Liquid Glide. Yeah. Basically, I thought if there was going to be any vacation reference in this, it would be real tomato ketchup. Eddie what was that one? That was when he spoon the ketchup on the sandwich and it was kind of this chunky mess. Real tomato ketchup. And he went, Nothing but the best. Clark so Liquid Glide, by all accounts, is they say food safe, but I always wonder about this stuff. I don't trust the FDA. I'm not going to say that I don't fully trust the FDA in all cases. So I just can't imagine that we haven't been poisoning ourselves all along with food containers. Don't you wonder, like, if there's going to be that revelation that it's a cookbook moment or Soylent Green is human just that moment where we come to realize that this deep whatever thing it is, this is the thing that's been giving everyone who's ever had cancer since it's been invented cancer. This is the smoking gun. Don't you just think that there's got to be I assume it's just plastics in general. I think it's a mix of a lot of things, of modern manufacturing and farming and pesticides and I mean, you name it. So, Depressing, should we take a break? Yeah, maybe we can pull this one back from the brink. All right, we're going to get to Ketchup versus catch up, which I know everyone wants to know about. 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. 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 USbased restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to Lifelock.com Stuff. That's Lifelock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity Theft protection starts here. All right, Chuck, we shouldn't put it off any longer. All right, hit me. So, ketchup. K-E-T-C-H-U-P versus Catsup. C-A-T-S-U-P weird. The house stuff works. Article. I didn't actually look, but I didn't see this anywhere else. Is that they're pronounced the same? Correct. Have you ever heard that? So you've seen people say catch up and you knew that in their mind they saw the word catsup? Yes. All right, I did not realize that. So you said cats up? Yes, but I always say ketchup, I say cats up like mockingly. Okay, but that's how I pronounce it. Yeah, but apparently they're both just bastardizations anglicizations of whatever word ketchup originally comes from. Either that Fujian word or the Malaysian word for again, that anchovy fermented paste. I think Hines used ketchup starting pretty early on. Correct? Yes. So that's an interesting story. And you just basically told the whole thing. Is that it? Yeah. Even though they're like the global leader in ketchup, they came to the market pretty late, like 30 years after ketchup was sold and mass produced in the US. Heinz came along finally, and they wanted to distinguish themselves from their competitors, so they use ketchup. But ketchup wasn't a new word. It was the original word. If you look back at, like, some of those 18th century recipes, it's ketchup, K-E-T-C-H-U-P. Right. And then apparently sometime in the 18th century, people started calling it catsup. And so that was the preferred term, spelling. Okay. And then Hines distinguished themselves and brought ketchup, the popularized spelling with a K back. And because they got market share, that became the norm. Exactly. And then so it was Del Monte who is the big outlier for years and years and years. Yeah. 1988 was when they finally said, all right, no more ketsup. Yeah. Going with ketchup. Yes. And they did. They gave in. What about this other thing that I know a lot of people have argued over for generations, is fridge or no fridge. It's got a lot of vinegar in it, supposedly, as far as hinds is concerned, they say it's shelf stable, meaning that even after you open it, it's got enough stuff in it that it's going to stay fine right outside of the fridge. But they still recommend keeping it in the fridge. Yeah. They say this is direct quote from Hines. Whoever the latest Hines air is, I think it's John Kerry. Oh, right. Wasn't his wife the Heinz air? Yeah. Teresa hine. Right. So John Kerry says because of its natural acidity, it shows stable. However, its stability after opening can be affected by storage condition. So we recommend, like, any processed food to be refrigerated after opening. So, in other words, if you live in Yuma, Arizona, you might not want to keep your ketchup and you don't have air conditioning. You might not want to keep your catch up on the table, but you probably could if you really wanted to. But if you lived in Southern California, where the breeze is always cool and the air is always clean, then you could put it on your table and you'd probably be fine. Yeah. And again, it's got like a number of different preservatives in it. It's got vinegar in it. It has sugar, which is a preservative. It has pectin naturally found in tomatoes. It's a preservative. It's probably going to be fine, but keep it in the fridge. Why not? We don't listen to us. Unless you have, like, if you don't have enough room in your fridge for the bottle of cats up, then you have too much salsa and sriracha. Right? Sriracha. Sriracha. You hipster you. Yeah, sriracha is really good, actually. And in fact, might as well get to that. There are sriracha ketchups. They're pretty popular these days because this article says millennials like their spice more than their parents. Depending on where you are in the world, there are all flavors of ketchups and all ways to use ketchup, depending on where you are. Yeah. And I just want to say, I love how that was put. Can't you see a hipsters parent? Yeah. I mean, what do you like more, your spice or me? Yeah, I like my spice more than my parents. Well, you know that's not what they meant, right? I know. Okay, but let's take a tour around the world. I know what you're leading up to. I just had to double back to that. All right, let's go to jolly old England or maybe Venezuela, even. Okay. Because apparently they like sweeter ketchup in those two places. Yeah. And in the Philippines, they like sweet ketchup, but they like sweet ketchup that's made from a banana base rather than a tomato base. But they're not crazy over there, so they dye it red so it looks like tomato ketchup. Yeah. And we also should say that in England, they might be more apt to reach for the HP sauce before the ketchup, though, right? The brown sauce, right, yes. They love that stuff. Yeah, I think that's their number one condiment over there. HP sauce. Or do they just call it the brown sauce? They call it the brown. The brown no, wait, that's heroin. Big brown. No, big brown. Apparently, Americans, like we said, well, we eat a lot of ketchup, but we're not the leading consumer because the Finns and the Canadians love the stuff more than we do, even. Yeah. Which is pretty shameful. America pretty shameful. Yeah. Mayonnaise in salsa. So in China, Jamaica, and I believe Thailand, they like to put ketchup on fried chicken. Got to try that one. What about pizza? Eastern Europe, apparently. And Trinidad, India, Japan and Poland. That's how you know it's good. Man, that is a diverse collection of countries that all put ketchup on their pizza. You know what's funny is my friend Eddie can say all of these foods. Ranch dressing. Well, yeah, I mean, ranch dressing should be the number one condiment in the world. Chuck, hold on. I have to tell you something. You have to go to Japan one of these days. Right, okay. I thought it was just understood you have a standing invitation to come to Japan every time we go, because you are the ambassador. Right. I got the sash and everything, but Japan is misspelled. They have pizza over there, and rather than tomato sauce, it's going to knock your socks off. They use the Japanese mayo, what with corn and sometimes ham. So, like panchetta or something like that. All right, so you've got a dough, then you've got a spread of mayonnaise, corn off the cob and ham. Yes. And it is mind blowingly good. Is there cheese? I don't remember if there's cheese or not. I think I fainted. No, they're not big on cheese or dairy. They don't have that much room for cows. Although all the cows they have are like, Kobe beef cows. I think that's what they kind of dedicate their cow space to. Did I ever tell you my story of being at the Chinese restaurant when I was a kid? There was a guy getting takeout, and he went through about probably about five or six different things, asking if it had cheese on it. Like egg rolls have cheese on it, mugu guy pans have cheese on it. And the sweet Chinese owner is kind of an older guy, kept saying, like, no. After the fifth thing, the guy stopped them and said, in this very sweet Chinese American accent, that no Chinese food has cheese on it. Really? Was the guy just messing with them or something? No, man, I think I don't know. I guess he was just unfamiliar. I mean, this was the 1970s. Oh, yeah. So maybe he didn't have experience with Chinese food. But it's funny as an adult to think about any Chinese food with cheese, like, melted on top. Yeah. That's got white American. Sweden. If you go to Sweden, they will actually squeeze ketchup over their pasta. That's like Honey Booboo. Oh, really? Yeah, they used to put and I never really watched this show, but, I mean, I was a conscious human being back then, so I was aware of this. But they would cook pasta and then put butter on it and then squeeze ketchup on it, and that was like Honey Boo Boo spaghetti. Oh, my God. No comment. We used to be colleagues of Honey Boo Boo at one point. Did they work for Discovery? Yeah, they were all on TLC. I have to remember to add that back to my resume. Right. What else we got? What kind of crazy ketchups do we have? Okay. All right. Are you ready for this one? Yeah. I've never heard of this before in Canada. Have you ever had well, you wouldn't have, but have you ever seen ketchup potato chips? Yes, they're pretty good. They're better than barbecue chips, if you ask me. Harris makes a good one. Right. Apparently the Canadians do some wacky thing with it where they take ketchup potato chips and turn it into a ketchup cake of some sort. I've not had this before, but we're going to be in Toronto and Vancouver this year, so I expect multiple ketchup cakes. But you don't really have to make a ketchup. I should point out, too, since we're talking about that tour that Toronto and Vancouver are far and away leading in ticket sales right now out of the gate. Yeah. So Canada, like America, needs to step it up because Canada is kicking your butt, man. That's the great thing about doing multinational tours, as you can pit one country against the other. Yes. Right. Yeah. Especially as everybody's kind of devolving into nationalism right now. You can really get it going. You know what kind of chips I did have the other day was the what do you call it? The country gravy sausage and country gravy. Oh, the lays? Yeah. I haven't tried those. Are they good? Yeah. I mean, do you like white gravy sausage gravy? Sure. It tastes like that. Really? They nailed it. They nailed it. Because sometimes those things are way off. Well, yeah. They have a contest now, don't they? Yeah, they do. I'm trying to remember some of the other ones because they've had some good ones, but chicken and waffles. Chicken and waffles. One was really good. Was it? Yeah, it had just this hint of maple. But yeah, it kind of tasted a little fried chicken. It was good. Crazy. What other kinds of crazy ketchups do we have? What about ketchup ice cream? No, thank you. So Baskin Robbins apparently came up with it and it died in the lab. But apparently it was based on a Hines ice cream recipe for Hines Carnival cream. So that was the thing. Again, I would try this stuff. Did I ever tell you about the time you and I went to Plaza Fiesta and tried tuna gelato? Yeah. And it tasted just like raw tuna. It was insane. Yes. Never heard of it before. Never seen it anywhere else. There was, like, this one specific place at it, man, if you ever find yourself in Atlanta, Georgia, with some time to kill, go to Plaza Fiesta. Try to find the gelato place and see if they have the tuna gelato. They have a good cowboy store over there too. Yeah, they have a bunch of them. Good boots, hats and belts and checkered shirts. Brother, if you're throwing a quinceigneta, that's where you go. Yeah, I'm sure. So lastly, Chuck, we have to give a shout out. We would be really remiss if we didn't mention that one of tomato or ketchup is a big ingredient in something called pruno. Yeah. We talked about prison wine in our Prisons episode. I don't think I remembered that. In fact, maybe I didn't know. Do we say that it was an ingredient? I don't think so. I didn't notice it until now. But you use that and sugar packets to feed the fermentation process in a sock, right? I don't know if you could make it in a sock. I think it needs to be a little more airtight than that. Maybe not. Maybe you could. Although it all just drip out. I'm not sure, man. For the rest of it, I came across a big gallon sized ziplock bag, but yeah, after day two or three of fermentation, you feed it with ketchup packets and sugar. Gross. Yeah. And then you got some pruneau, which you should never try. No. You got anything else? Yeah, we should cover this thing. This last thing you sent. Headline israel Ketchup War forces Heinz to relabel sauce as tomato seasoning. So in Israel, the leading ketchup maker is Osem Ocean, and they have a 66% market share. And in Israel, as in most countries, they have food standards where you can only call something something if it has this much of whatever. Yeah. And apparently Israel's standards are much higher than the US. Or Europe. Yeah. So you have to have a certain percentage of tomato concentrate to be labeled tomato ketchup in Israel. And so OSM, even though they have 66% market share, when after Heinz, they said, hey, we did a study with an independent lab that had no skin in the game leading European external laboratory. And they found out that Heinz did not have the required percentage of tomato concentrate. So they can't even call it ketchup anymore. And I believe it's being enforced over there. Right. Yeah. Well, this is from 2015. And the thing leaves off I didn't see any updates, but the article leaves off that Heinz was petitioning with the Health Ministry to change the tomato concentrate requirements down to something like 6%. Well, here's the thing is, Hines said their claims have no substance. Well, then why are they lobbying to get the percentage lowered? Right? I think what happened was Hines was selling the same ketchup that they sell in Europe and America, and this is just speculation on my part, but they were probably selling the same ketchup that they sell elsewhere, but in Israel. But Israel has higher food standards, at least as far as their ketchup goes. And their competitor nailed them on it. That's what I think happened. But, yeah, on the label, they can call it ketchup in English, but they can't call it ketchup in Hebrew. They can only call it potato seasoning. Malk. It's pretty funny. It is. It's a Funny world, Chuck. It is. And now ketchup is done. I guess I didn't think it would take us in our 900 something episode to finally get to ketchup, but we did well, and this now frees up. Now I have permission to request mayonnaise. Okay, that's the deal. We'll do that. All right. Maybe we should just have condiment month. Okay, I like the sound of that. Well, in the meantime, if you want to learn more about catch up, you can type that word in the search bar@housetoforce.com. You can also check out net geo's articles on it. Like I said, fast code design, mental flaws. Had a great one. And we got some stuff from our friends at List Verse who had a pretty interesting compilation of some cool tomato facts or ketchup facts. And since I said tomato instead of ketchup. It's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this wow signal update. Did you get tweets about this? I did, and I ignored them all because I think this is a lie. All right. I think it's propaganda. Here we go, then. Alien. Hey, guys. First, want to let you know that I love the show. I always look forward to new episodes, Tuesday, Thursday, as well as the selects on Saturday. I know you would be interested to find out that I saw a news article the other day that states that an experiment was ran earlier this year based on a paper from 2015 that claimed the wow. Signal was caused by hydrogen clouds from comets which transited that area of the sky back in 1977. In January of this year, those comments transited once again, and it was determined they were indeed the source of the signal. Of course, this sparked quite a bit of controversy among those hoping that this was a sign of alien life. But last, it appears it wasn't. So I can't help but be a little disappointed. Ever since learning of the wow signal, I knew it was a long shot. Anyway, keep up. Great work. Love to see you in Charleston, South Carolina, someday. I'm sure you'd love that city. And Sean Flanagan. I do love Charleston. Yeah, Charleston is a top notch town. Yeah. I don't know if that has enough people for us to go, but maybe I don't know, people might come from around the southeast of that show. Who knows? The heck? We went to Birmingham. Let's go to Charleston. Yeah, I mean, us playing there is a good enough reason to get people to go to Charleston. Maybe Bill Murray would come. Oh, yeah. Is he still there? I know his family is. Yeah, he lives there. Okay. I think he's got more than one place, but I think he well, I'll tell you what, Bill Murray, if you're listening, we'll list you for our show if you'll come. He's just crazy enough to show up. Yeah. So that's from Sean, and we had a lot of people write in about the wow signal. Yeah. Disappointing that everybody bought into it. Like, oh, no, it's not aliens. It's this hydrogen cloud. Stupid comets. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. We're at Syskast and I'm at Josh Clark. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W, Chuck Bryant or at STUFFYou Shouldeko. You can send us all an email to stuffpodcast@houseworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Hey, everybody. 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How to Control a Riot | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-to-control-a-riot | It's no secret that people in crowds will behave differently than they would if they were alone. In a riot, individuals may exhibit a drastic change in their behavior -- but why? How? More importantly, how can riots be controlled? Tune in to find out. | It's no secret that people in crowds will behave differently than they would if they were alone. In a riot, individuals may exhibit a drastic change in their behavior -- but why? How? More importantly, how can riots be controlled? Tune in to find out. | Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:42:26 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=16, tm_min=42, tm_sec=26, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=27, tm_isdst=0) | 37363534 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. 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Learn more at city comAdventure and travel on with Cityadvantage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast. Are you waiting on me? Yes, it is. Josh, did you see Mark Marin? What do you mean? He toppled IRA Glass for a few days. I did see that. Out of nowhere. Yeah, he must have had some sort of little publicity push or something. Something happened. Yes. It's great for him. He's a great show, though. Yes, he does really good interviewer Mr. Maron. I emailed him one time, told him that, and he was like, no. He said, thanks a lot, man. Who are you? He probably did, but that's fine. Yes, he's a nice guy. I'm not a famous comedian. No, not yet. No. Chuck, did you ever watch WKRP in Cincinnati? You know I did. Yeah. So do you remember the one every once in a while, Different Strokes would do this too. They'd be like, at the end of the episode, when it was really serious, where you're going? There would be no clapping. It would be quiet. Right. But you could tell the audience is still there is always somebody moving in their seat or coughing or whatever. So the audience was just sitting there being silent, which, through a pall over the entire episode, even though you're hearing the laughing, it was jarring. Yeah. And even as a lad, I remember thinking, like, wow, something big just happened that I wasn't paying attention to. There's a particular WKRP episode that stands out that was like, that the one where they sponsored the who concert, where those people got trampled. Right. Did you see that one? Yeah, I remember. I knew where you were going with that. So this happened in real life. There was a Hook concert in Cincinnati, and it was general admission seating, which apparently did away with general admission for a while. Yeah. Open the gates and run to wherever you want to go. There was like a sound check. And people mistook the sound check for an early start. It was a late sound check, and they thought it was an early start. Right. So people started pushing in. Well, I guess the people who own the theater had fewer entrances open than they could have. So this massive people just started pushing forward, and some people got pressed against the doors and were asphyxiated by this huge crowd. Yeah. People are trampled to death. Yes. Awful. To this day. I mean, you can explain what the trigger was, but to this day, there's a lot of study that has come up empty handed to that kind of crowd behavior. That's what it's called. It's a study of crowd behavior. People as individuals act differently when they submit to a larger collective group. A quote unquote, mob mentality. That's part of it too. But things like that stampede, black Friday stampede. Have you ever seen video of those? They're nuts. There's one where it ends with this guy coming into the foreground, and he's just like, leaning over this railing. Unbelievable. At like a target or something. And he's like, God, this horrible look on his face. And he's like trying to catch his breath. And he's been trampled. And they managed to extract him. And he's sitting there, like, leaning over the railing, catching his breath. And you just know that once he caught his breath, he was going to go right into the target and start shopping. All of this is called crowd behavior. And one of the big ones, the one that's really always been elusive, is rioting. Yes. Why riots happen, why ordinary people behave the way they do in a riot, breaking glass, beating up people for no good reason, like stealing, looting, all this stuff. Right. One thing they have kind of figured out is how to control riots, right? Yes, they have. And they've gotten better at it over the years. As recently as 1992 in La. With the famous La. Riots, which my brother lived out there at the time, they still weren't doing a great job at it. I think that was a big learning experience. 2300 injuries, 7000 fires. Such Detroit on the night before Halloween or something. Well, we'll talk about Detroit too. More than 12,000 arrests, a billion dollars in damage after the Rodney King verdict came back as not guilty, obviously, for the four white cops who beat the tar out of Rodney King. And it lasted from April 29 until May 2. There was full on riding going on streets of La. Yeah. And they've gotten better at it since then. Poor Reginald Denny getting shot in the leg, the trucker who got pulled out. Yes, I do remember that. That was crazy, man. So that's what's called the mob mentality. And one of the things this is the grabster ed Grabanowski always gets the good stuff. He's quality. One thing he pointed out here, which is a big deal with mob mentality I never considered, is anonymity. That is the point, right? Yeah. You got a crowd of people who are kind of all feeling the same way. At the very least, they're all feeling the same energy. But the cops are standing there staring at you. You're not going to do anything if the cops are standing there staring at you. Especially if you think you may be the only one to do something. Right. You're not going to throw a Molotov cocktail at a cop when you think everyone in the crowd is going to look at you like, what did you just do that for? Right. But if you're anonymous, not just to the cops, but within the crowd, you're probably going to start something. Yeah. It makes you do things you wouldn't ordinarily do if you are on your own. And there's different schools of thoughts with riots. Right. The prevailing idea is that riots are formed by a few people who do act as triggers once the risk of being arrested is low enough through anonymity, few people who are angry enough have something to gain. There's some reason they act as the leaders or the people who started the rides and everybody else, which they're considered a homogenous group of soccer fans or people low on the socioeconomic ladder in La. Right. They just got caught up in the mob mentality. Right. Yeah. And that's pretty much how most people see riots these days. Yeah. And that's basically every riot you just described. There are two things you need the fuel and the spark. It's like a fire and it's very much accurate to call it that. The fuel can build up and usually does build up over time. In the case of La, it was racial prejudice and what they perceived as unfair treatment because they might have been poor. Well, not just that. I think the LAPD has been especially at that time, was viewed as like the most crooked police department in the country. Sure. So this builds up over time. Maybe it's a union angry at their company, angry for years, decades even, over mistreatment. And once you get a big enough group of people that are all ticked off about something together and you can have a spark which doesn't even need to be something real. Sometimes it can be a rumor if something happened, people get whipped up to in frenzy. That spark ignites the fuel and you've got to ride on your hands. And that sparked another term for it, is a shelling incident, I think. Oh, really? Yeah. There's this guy who studied crowd mentalities, crowd behavior, and I think his name is Thomas Schilling. And a Shilling incident is like a signal. It can be anything from like when you reach that peak moment where everybody's charged up, but nobody's going to do anything. If somebody suddenly shatters like a plate glass window, everybody's going to go nuts. Happen. Yes. But another way to put it is that spark. Right. But it takes something like that signal, like it's go time for the balance to tip and a crowd to go from a crowd to a riot. Right. Josh, we talked about in the past, they were not very good at it. And when I say they're not very good, it was because it was us versus them. Cops go in and start beating people into submission and that's not the way they want to do things nowadays. No, it was viewed as a battle. Yeah. Like, let's go out and fight each other. Yeah. Like Braveheart or the other one that he made. Like that. Yeah. We've got better weapons. Cops do. So we're going to win. Despite the fact that you may outnumber us, although sometimes we might outnumber you and have better weapons. And apparently one of the things they figured out, this happened in La in 92. When you outnumber the cops, the cops back down. Apparently that's what they did in La. They were like, there's nothing we can do. We'll get eaten alive. So we're going to just kind of hang back and try to contain this. Right. Interesting. These days, it's pretty cool how they do it. There is a command team. They form a square, a big square of officers. Yeah. And by the way, it really helps to see this graphic. Do you have that? No, this graphic is as helpful as a graphic I've ever seen in my entire life. On a very simple site. Yeah. So what you've got is you got a big square of officers. In the center of that square, you have your command team giving out the orders. They're obviously well protected because they're in the middle. Yeah. And the sides in the front and back are called Echelons. Right? Yes. And an Echelon is about ten to twelve cops. You know what echelon you're in, so you know what to do. I'll get into that in a second. There's also in the center, there's an arrest team, and they are the only people that are actually placing people under arrest. Everyone has their own job. And what I get from this is you got to stick to your job in order to be effective. Yes. If you're in the front Echelon, don't start arresting guys. No. It's not your job. No. I think the whole thing would fall apart, like you say. So it's very mobile, very tactical. You can change direction. If all those dudes in the square all of a sudden said the command team sends out the message, we got people coming from the south, they can all turn around and all of a sudden you've got the same effective team going the other direction. Right. Very reactive, very active. The echelons cover each other. They don't all go out at once like an Echelon. If they want to advance, they'll send out one echelon while everyone else covers them. Then the next echelon will go forward. And then what you're doing is you're moving the square into another position. Right. And remember we said that rioting groups are generally taken as homogeneous, mostly people who get caught up in the thrill of the moment when they're confronted with police. The idea is that they really just kind of want to go home. They don't want to get arrested, they don't have any dog in the fight. So if they see this tactical squad coming at them, one of the first points of the squad is to let these people go home. That's what the cops want. They would just want you to get out of there. So it's not just like this solid wall, although it can be these echelons, they're also very capable of spreading out, to let people flow through them and get out of there. That's what they want to do. They want to leave you an escape route, whereas in the old days, they would actually try and strategically trap you in a corner. Right. But when you're trapped in a corner, you're going to be even more enraged and scared. So that just led to more violence. Right. So if you are confronted by an echelon of this, right, let's say you're just an average person and you want to get out of there, you're probably going to be able to make it through or around them, right? Yeah. But if you're just standing there and you're throwing rocks still, or you're shouting at them or you're not moving and they're telling you to, what's going to happen is they're going to close ranks, and then the two officers that you're in between are going to open up and you're going to find yourself swallowed by this tactical square of riot cops to double you up, basically. And that's when you're going to be introduced to the arrest team. You are in a walled area of cops. Yeah. And that's probably not a fun place to be. No. You're in trouble. So, Josh, you want to talk about some of the devices these officers use to quell a crowd? You're not going to go into a riot wearing modern shorts. No, it's not. You could, but you're going to be wearing them under what's called hard tack. Yeah, I love that. Which is a helmet with a visor body armor. And not just like the chest armor, chest and back, or the vest. Right. You're going to have body armor on your arms, your legs, your shins, probably flame retardant, and then a shield. And the shield in the face masks are made of lexing. Yeah. Which is like bulletproof if it's thick enough. This stuff isn't thick enough. It's not intended to be bulletproof, but it's probably brick proof or at least Molotov cocktail proof. Yeah, exactly. That's what you're looking for. They have a baton is probably what most of these women and men, I keep saying, dudes, they're probably some female riot cops, I imagine, that are holding a baton, so generally made of wood, about 24 to 42 inches long. And they use these instead of rifles, because rifles can ignite a crowd and you don't want someone grabbing your rifle. So they want to try and keep things as low key as possible, initially at least, right. And bringing a rifle into the fight definitely will not do that. Well, no, not only that, but if somebody gets the rifle away from the cops, bad news. Yeah. They have non lethal rounds. But just quick to point out, there is really no such thing as a non lethal round, right? Anything fired from a gun can kill you, potentially. Just ask Brandon Lee. Yeah, well, I guess you couldn't ask Brandon Lee, but look what happened to the director of the Crow. And they are fired from a 40 millimeter gun. And it's one of those. Sometimes it's a single shot, but it's like a grenade launcher. Sometimes it's those really cool looking things with six or eight round barrels. Looks like a Tommy gun, sort of very cool. But they shoot out 40 millimeter shells, right. And like you said, they're less than lethal rounds, right? Yes, less lethal. And basically, you have a couple of different kinds of rounds, a couple of different categories. Like, you have blunt force rounds, right? Yes. And blunt force rounds are basically meant to knock you on your bottom when you're in the middle of a riot, a big thud in your chest, or at the very least, to smack your legs in your stomach. Because if you're a riot and you aren't planning to be in a riot that day, you may be wearing moderate shorts. These rounds, these blunt force rounds, there's a wood baton, the rubber baton, the foam baton, all of these are designed they look like little canisters that are shot from these grenade launchers. And they're filled with these things, right? They're filled with little hockey pook like discs, right? That when the shell hits the ground. Usually you shoot them at the ground in front of protesters, right? When they hit the ground, the shell opens up and all these little disks just spread out and smack a bunch of people all at once, right? And all of a sudden, they're like, ow, and snap out of their riding mentality, hopefully, and go home. Right? That's the idea. That's the idea of the blunt force around. There's also a beanbag round, which is exactly what it sounds. It shoots little square bean bags, or there's some that look like tab poles. If you are aiming, if you want to be accurate. Yeah. Then there's the sponge round, right, which is the cleanest of all the blunt force rounds. Yeah. It's basically like a sponge bullet, which I imagine hurts pretty bad. Yeah. Actually, my nephew shot me in the back over Christmas with this little gun that he got, a little air gun that shoots a little rubber pellets. The little yellow one? Yeah. Very soft. I think so. Yeah. This is the second time for some reason in my life, I volunteered to be shot because everyone was wondering how bad it hurts. And I was like, well, just shoot me. So I made my back taut with my shirt and he shot me in the back. And it hurt a lot, didn't it? Yeah, it raised a big red welt. And, yes, it was not fun. 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 long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. So I talk to Strickland of tech stuff, john Strickland, he went to CES, and one of the things that was left out of this article was electrocution, nonlethal electrocuting weapons that just shock people. Specifically taser, which is a company's name, by the way. But Strickland said that Taser was at CES in Vegas. Tasing people? Yes. Are you serious? Tasing people who wanted to be tased to find out how it felt. And they were teasing people, but he said there was something called a taser shockwave, which is an electroshock cannon. Wow. Right? I showed you. Oh, yeah, that's that thing. So basically, it's just this array of tasers that you sit on, like an amount, and you can stack them up on four legs, stack them next to one another. So you create a barricade of tasers, and if people are running it, you just deploy. Wow. And it tases. Let's see, each little stack can TASE six people at once, and you start stacking them up and side by side. That's a lot of people that you're tasing at once. Strickland didn't get tased. There's no way Strickland got tased. No, there's all kinds of cool nonlethal weapons, actually. I've seen those foam guns that cover you in sticky goo and like, sound things, flashbang grenades, gay bomb that was created, that was thought of as a non lethal weapon at the time. Yeah, sure. Patterson, right? Patterson Air Force Base, right? Yes. They don't use all these in riots, though, obviously. They do use pepper ball rounds, and those are basically modified paint guns, but instead of paint, it's filled with pepper spray that hits you. It's not going to be very fun. No, it's going to sting, and then you're going to get that stuff in your face. They said they can also use a water in case there are children or elderly in the crowd. Right. You don't want to pepper spray the elderly if you don't. I just want to see the elderly riot thing, though. That's what I was trying to figure out, buddy. Wait until they take away Social Security and then you'll see some elderly rioting. You slow riot, apparently. The water, though, will still cause a stinging sensation and have a similar effect. Well, plus, if anyone who is a savvy rioter and has been hit with a pepper ball spray or pepper ball round may take this water round to be pepper spray and will start running, or it could have the same effect as a psychological effect, psyches them out. Yeah. You're trying to disperse people there's. Also, if you're into pepper spray or CS gas, which I'm going to go ahead and try to pronounce this now, okay. Chlorobenzalidine milan trial. Chlorobenzalidine chlorobenzalidine melania trial. Yes. And OCGAS is olivine capsicum, which is what pepper spray is. Did you look up the pronunciation of capsicum? No. Is that wrong? I think that's right. No, it's either capsicum or capsicum. I want to go with capsicum. Okay. But both of those can be injected into an aerosol grenade, which is tear gas grenade. Right. And you can throw that into a crowd if you want to start a stampede and kill a bunch of people. People get freaked out when you throw a grenade that starts spewing gas. Right. They don't know what it is. But apparently this is very useful for crowd control. Like, if you want the crowd to move, right, you throw one of these to the left and the left outskirts of the crowd, and everybody starts moving the way you want them to. Or if some people are just beating somebody up, you can throw that into a crowd to get them to lay off. Right. Or you can create a barricade of tear gas. Yeah. The other thing, Josh, they have is dye rounds, sponge rounds, ferret rounds. We didn't talk about ferret rounds, but they penetrate windows and wooden barricades, kind of to blast through something so that they can send in some gas. Well, they have gas in the round. It wasn't spelled out. Yes, I looked it up like it's in the round. Okay. Yeah. Well, all these things can be filled with die marker. Die as well. So if you see, like, one of the leaders or someone who's doing something especially bad, you can pop them with one of these. And all of a sudden, the arrest team knows, hey, get that guy with the red splotch on his chest, or get that smurf or the blue splotch in that case. Yeah. And so I would suggest I'm not going to suggest that if I was hit with one of these, I'd take off my shirt or something. Sure. Which would be a whole different kind of problem. Animals sometimes use dogs and horses to intimidate people. Yeah. But not only that, horses and dogs are also relatively immune to OC and CS gas. Just CS gas. Oh, is it just CS? Yeah. Pepper sprays. Not good for anyone. Okay. That's just straight up hot. But that's yeah, sure. I wonder how they test that. You know exactly how they test it. They spray a horse and then I wonder what happens if you taste a horse. Josh, what they're trying to do here is in fact, they don't even call it a riot squad anymore. What they now call it is crowd management units. Yes. We're onto the philosophy of riot control. Chapter one, prevention. Stop it before it starts is the goal. A lot of these things happen at planned protests, so when they hear about this, someone applies for a permit to stage a rally. Let's say if it's one that's particularly they think incendiary, they'll send a tactical unit in and they'll talk to the people beforehand and say, hey, you can do this, you can go here, but don't do this and don't go there. We won't have any problems. Right. And you're familiar with the Battle for Seattle? Yeah. There was Direct Action Network was running the show for that, the World Trade Organization protest, and they met with the Seattle cops. And we're like, this is what we'll do. Here's a great plan. We'll agree to this. But before Warren, there are probably going to be people there that are not under our control. And there were there was an anarchist group from Eugene, Oregon, and they're the ones who started just trashing the place. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That didn't work out so well. The Seattle police were grossly under prepared for it. They were not ready for that at all. Chuck, you're talking sorry to take us off on that tangent, but we were talking about prevention and how you meet with the cops, will meet with you. They're going to be like, don't do this, don't do that. If this does happen, we're going to go from this passive, observant, but present kind of mentality to, okay, now we're in a riot gear mentality. Yeah. But they say it's still important to be unbiased. Like, if it's, let's say, Democrats are opposing some Republican convention or something, the cops aren't supposed to let their biases figure into how they react. They're supposed to be unbiased and treat them like they're members of the community. And they say while they want to be not Stormtroopers, you also can't appear to be subservient. You still have to give the appearance at least that you're in charge. Right. So you got to walk that fine line between stormtroping beat you down mode and, oh, you're just doing great things and I got no opinion on the matter. I like your titles. Sure. I like your madras shorts. It's very nice. Oh, yeah, those. So, Chuck, if the ground rules are broken, apparently, and a riot does break out, the cops can't switch modes. Right. Intimidation mode. Yes. Again, the point, and all of this is theoretical law enforcement, but the point is to get this crowd to disperse. And it's based on the philosophy that they're just temporarily out of their minds and caught up in this mob mentality. And if you confront them with the strong arm of the law, they'll come to their senses and want to go home. Right, yeah. And they do that. They're very tight with their precision, with their movements, which is intimidating, apparently will, like, beat their shields with their batons and stomp their feet all at the same time. And all this is the idea is to scare people into thinking, I don't want to be swallowed up into that square. Right. They also pick and choose who they arrest or even who they mark would die. If they see somebody engaged in a crime, they're probably going to try to arrest them, depending on the severity of the crime, or at least they'll probably try to mark that person for arrest later. Right. But if they see somebody, like if they see a group of people beating down one person or shooting poor Reginald Denny in the leg right. They're going to go after those people because there's someone whose life is in danger. So they kind of triage, I think, in the middle of this chaos, they triage who they're going to go after first. Right. Makes sense. So we've talked about the rioters police, obviously, National Guard sometimes trying to contain riots. There have been some dark spots in the history of the world and continue to be where you get what's called a police riot, when the cops are the ones that are kind of I don't know about instigating in all cases, but definitely the aggressors in the situation. Yeah. There have definitely been police riots. The Haymarket Riot was a very good example of that. Which one was that? That was the one in Chicago in 1886 that created the first May Day. Oh, really? Yes. There were some striking workers and the cop showed up and just started beating the tar out of them. No, I'm sorry, the cops showed. Up. It was very tense. Someone threw a bomb at the cops and killed late cops, and the cops went nuts and started firing on the crowd, killed four people. And ultimately they went after these anarchists who founded this rally, and without any evidence that tied them to this bombing. And they also think it's possibly an agent provocateur, someone who's paid by the cops to agitate the crowd by throwing this bomb through the bomb. But without tying these eight guys to the bombing. They hung four of them, one of them committed suicide, and then three were finally pardoned. Wow. But that's the haymarket riot. Chicago. Well, you can't mention Chicago or riot without talking about the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Yeah, that's a big one. Very big. 1100 antiwar protesters showed up because they wanted to protest. Hippies hippies. Actually. Well, the Yippies were there. Sure. Yeah. Hubert Humphrey was the candidate that was to replace who was it? Lyndon Johnson? Yeah, we guess so. Yeah. And Humphrey was pro war Democrats didn't like that, so they went to protest. Richard Daly was the mayor. He didn't want any part of this stuff. He was pretty angry about it going in. Said things like, no one's going to protest in my city. Built up big barricades around the convention center. Got a lot of cops and National Guardsmen involved. Apparently 23,000 cops and National Guardsmen were on hand, and they had a stance on things, and they started beating the tar out of people. Yeah. Have you seen Chicago? Ten? No. You see it, you'd like it. Is it part of the Chicago Seven? Eight? Vin Seven. It is. There ten to begin with. Well, the filmmakers include the two defense lawyers who are cited for contempt and Bobby Seals, and then the Chicago Seven. Okay. Which makes ten. But it's all animated, like waking life. Oh, really? But it's mostly animated. There's also, like, archival footage and all that's. A documentary, but it's really cool. It's based on court transcripts, but that's animated. I have to check that out. It's very cool. But they were saying that people were staying in this park in Chicago, jackson Park, Lincoln Park, one of the parks. And the cops were like, yeah, stay as long as you want until when the park closes at 11:00, and then after that, we're going to go through and sweep the park and beat the tar out of anybody we find. And that, I think, ultimately set off the riots, really, when it got really bad because the cops wouldn't stop doing that. Well, it got pretty out of hand, to say the least. And everyone from Mike Wallace and Dan Rather to Red Cross medics were roughed up. Hunter Thompson. Oh, is he there? Yes, I'm sure he was roughed up. They went into a hotel where people were staying and dragged people out of their rooms. Really? It was bad. Well, I know that they said they threw so much tear gas on the scene, that Hubert Humphrey was actually bothered in the shower in his hotel by the tear gas. Well, yeah, that was a dark spot on our nation's history, for sure. Yeah. I think hunter Thompson wrote in, our client is probably fear and loathing at the democrat national convention. Absolutely. 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. And I said Detroit earlier, we would be remiss if we didn't mention that in this was the case of rumors of things that never happened sparking a riot. There was already a race fight going on at an amusement park. And then there were two rumors. One, that some white men had thrown a black woman who was holding a baby into a lake. Throwing a white woman into the lake wasn't bad enough. Right then. They're like, and she was holding a baby. They're like, what? And then white people heard news that a mob of black folks had assaulted a white woman. Neither of these things even happened. But that was my point earlier. It doesn't matter if it happened or not. There were racial tensions in Detroit at the time in 1943, and they set it off. And cops apparently were shooting fleeing black people in the back. That was the rumor. Well, I don't know about rumors. How many died? 25 black folks and nine white folks were killed. 2 million in property damage. And yet another black spot on our nation's history when it comes to rioting. But they say they've got it figured out now. Yeah, it's not just our nation either. Right now in Moscow, they have race riots going on. Yeah. Tunisia, too. There's riding going on as we speak. Yeah, that's anti government rioting. Yeah. This guy set himself on fire. A 26 year old student who had a college degree and dismal prospects for work. He was saying that. I think he was like, a merchant or something in the market and he was being taxed or something unfairly, he felt. Well, he was trying to sell fruit and vegetables, and they basically told him he couldn't do it at all because he didn't have the proper permit, and that was the only way he could make money. So he set himself on fire. And now, through Facebook, the word has spread to riot in Tunisia. And it's still going on. Apparently, Anonymous sent a message to the Tunisian government telling them to open up the Internet. Really? They have it locked down like China does. Wow. Yeah. So it's happening all over the place. Yes, it is. It's a crazy time to be alive, my friend. It is. Well, if you want to learn more about how to control a riot, if your kids are ever going crazy or something like that, you can type in Riot Control and the handy search bar at How Stuff Works.com. And since I said handy search bar, it's time for Facebook questions. Right? What's the jingle chat? Facebook question Time. But I'll change it every time. All right. This is from Christian Winger. If money was no object, what job would you love to do besides the one that you have? I would say two things. One, selfishly. I would love to be a filmmaker and then unselfishly selfish. Well, because I'm not helping out my fellow man. Okay. Except offering them great movies. But if money were no object, I used to want to start a camp for behavioral disorder children. I take them camping. You mean the camp from stir crazy? Yeah, basically. Or, no. Is it Sturcracy? Was it Richard Pryor and GWYDER? Yeah. Jean Wilder wasn't in. It was the one where he was the bus driver. It was just Richard Pryor. Silver Streak. No, that was the train. I know which one you're talking about. Yes, or what would you do first, Chuck? I want to commend you on that. That is very sweet. That's not sweet. My dad did that. He had outdoor programs. He's a principal. You could do both. You can take some of the money you make from being a successful filmmaker. Open up a camp. Exactly. So there you go. Both things are realized. I would write books. Whatever. Books. I just write book writing. Yeah. It's what I would be doing. You do that anyway. Maybe. Kerr Lockhartt. What's the room like that you recorded the show in? It is smallish. It's got some foam padding on the walls. There's a heavy curtain chains and shackles that are bolted to the walls. Chains and shackles? It's bleak. Bleak? It's depressing. There's a picture of Nikola Tesla and a picture of Pablo Picasso without his shirt on. Yes, there is. That's the only adornment on the walls. Right. That's what I can hear. Kerr. You've got some josh right? I do. But I like the way that you ask questions. Okay, let's see. We've already done that one. Chuck, were you ever in a Fret? That one's from Drew Sorenson. That was not in a frat. Nor was I. But I did hang out with the Pikappa Alphas. Yeah, I had fret friend. Sure. A few cigarettes and Fiji. Didn't hang out with any of them. My dad was a teak. Was he at the University of Utilita? Ali Smith. What career did you think you would pursue when you graduated? At one point I wanted to be a sportscaster, but I didn't pursue a whole lot right after college. Except traveling and stuff like that. I traveled after college as well. I lived in a van. I think I've probably said before, right? Yeah. This one's from Matthew Paul Morris. Possibly one of the better questions we've gotten. Injustice for all. Or Master of Puppets. Master of Puppets. Yeah, me too. But that's a very close contest. Yeah. Just straws, no slouch. How about Luke Kelly? If you had to live in a world without cheese or movies, which would you choose? I would say no cheese because I love movies. But that's tough, man. I love cheese. I love cheese too. But I would definitely choose cheese over mood. That means no pizza. That means Mexican food isn't as fun. Chinese food. You're good. Yeah. Really? Sushi. You're good. Yeah. Movies. I would want movies still. Yeah. What's your desert island beer? I think I'd say Sierra Nevada. Everyone knows I love that. Maybe Budweiser. I'm really big on Bell's two hearted ale right now. Oh, that's good. It is really good. Yes. They have it on tap at a place near me. It's very nice. Let's see. How did we meet? Obviously, it was at work, but did you hit it off right away or did the friendship grow over time? This is from Tamara Beth Stevens. Well, we hit it off and it continues to grow over time. Like any good friendship. I would say that too. Yes. It evolves and changes and makes us happy. It's nice. From Kim Rigdon. Briskow do. Your wife girlfriendgirlfriendmind. If you mentioned her on the podcast. Emily loves it because I'm always plugging her company. Yeah. You're fine with it too? Yeah. Okay. Favorite childhood toy? Mine definitely was my evil caneval crank up motorcycle guy. Nice. Because I would jump him through, like, flaming coat hanger loops that we would set on fire and soaking gasoline, which is, by the way, you should never, ever do. And we would jump them over the creek and all kinds of stuff. We put them in peril. It was always fun. Wow, that is fun. What about you? I would have to say I had this plastic Navaron. Castle Navaroo. Remember Force Ten from Navarro and yeah. Okay. So I had that, and it had little green army guys or whatever. And now I look back, I realized it was just, like, some generic knockoff toy. But I love that thing. And also, I think I did have a thing for castles because I also love my castle. Gray School heman play set certainly did. And then my sit and spam was pretty awesome, too. I wanted a green machine, but I was stuck with a Big Wheel. I had a Big Wheel, too. I don't remember the green machine. It was a more complex big wheel. That was pretty tough. Okay. And rich kids got that. Okay. I was kind of left out. All right, I've got one more. Josh from Tim Lindsay. I've always wondered, how much coffee do you both drink in a typical workday, I drink in the wintertime, maybe a couple of cups a week. I'm not a huge coffee guy. I like it in the winter to warm me up. Sometimes it jacks me up, which is nice, but I'm not coffee guy. But I've got to hear your answer honestly. In a day. In a day. Wintertime. It definitely steps up a little for me. I don't know if I can quantify it. It's more like I drink coffee until I can't breathe. Seriously. Probably eight to ten cups in a day. Eight to ten cups. Maybe more. All right. Of regular. Because we don't have decaf in the office. I was drinking decaf here, there, and now there's no decaf, so it's all regular. I think that for a big coffee person, that's about right. Eight to ten cups. It's a lot of coffee, but it's way too much coffee. Who might have judged? Yeah, keep drinking it. Thanks, man. A lot worse things you could be doing. Yes. Like I could be shooting junk or something. Eight to ten times a day. I don't want to do that. No. All right, that's it for Facebook questions. Thank you for those. They're always fun. Yeah. Again, we have fun over at Facebook. That's Facebook. Comstuffynow. We tweet S-Y-S-K-A podcast. And then we have an email address, too. Can you believe it? It's stuffpoadcast@howstupworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseupworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The House the Forks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You 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." | ||
How White-collar Crime Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-white-collar-crime-works | White-collar crime often involves fraud and other nonviolent acts. For most people, the term "white-collar crime" conjures up images of CEOs conniving their way to fortune. But what is it, really? Listen in as Josh and Chuck break down the facts. | White-collar crime often involves fraud and other nonviolent acts. For most people, the term "white-collar crime" conjures up images of CEOs conniving their way to fortune. But what is it, really? Listen in as Josh and Chuck break down the facts. | Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:33:15 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=14, tm_min=33, tm_sec=15, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=206, tm_isdst=0) | 42487720 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. This is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, sfin on his lacroix mineral water. Yeah, it's delicious. And this isn't even sponsored by the quoi free ad. I've done this like two or three times. Yeah, I agree. Laca, call us. And since you put the two of us a couple of microphones in an ice cold can of refreshing liquid mineral water together, you have something called Stuff You Should Know. It's a podcast. It's a podcast. I'm looking to see who makes this, actually. Oh, no, I thought I was going to say, like, Coca Cola and smaller. Is it Lacroix? No, it's Sundance Beverage Company. Oh, yeah. They're huge. From Minnesota. I think that's perfect. That is a perfect sponsor for Stuff You Should Know, a little guy that's producing a great product. Agreed. Laqua. So, Chuck yes. I've got an intro today. Awesome. I miss these. Stop criticizing me. No, I mean, so very recently, a trio of Brits economists, British economists, they're like walking saltin. They're very exciting. But anyway, these guys did something pretty cool. They studied bank robberies and their study was published in a journal called Significance. It's actually kind of a cool journal. It takes statistics and applies it to real world stuff. So it's an interesting statistics journal, if there is such a thing. And if there is, this is it. And what these guys found was that bank robbery is actually a really terrible way to make a living. Yes, I would agree with that. Morally, economically, it's a terrible way to make a living, too. Sure. The payoff is no good, right? Yes. They looked at a lot of variables, like the number of people involved, and they found that the bigger the gang, the more the bigger the hall, I guess. But it also meant there's one extra mouth to divide up amongst. Unless you're like one of those bank robbers. It just kills everybody afterward. You don't want to get in bed with one of those guys like Ben Affleck or like In Heat, when there are a lot of killing afterward and Heat. Yeah. And in the town, Ben Affleck is a recent heist movie. Yeah, a lot of killing going on. I was going to let that one walk by, but you brought it up twice. I enjoyed it. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. So, anyway, there's a lot of variables involved, but what they found is no matter what, in the UK, you can make off with about 31 grand. That's not bad. Per. Yes. On average, that's what the take was. So in the UK, it's not so bad, but at the same time, 31 grand. What are you going to do with that? Yeah, if you want to live the high life, you got to rob like, four or five banks a year, easy. Right? Okay. Or if you're in the US. You have to rob a lot more than that. So the UK suffers about 106 bank robbers a year. In the US. There's 12,000. And of those 12,000, the average take is, like, four grand. They only have how many a year? England, 106. God, that's amazing. They have really stiff gun laws, and I think that probably determined bank robbery because you kind of have to have a gun or a note in your pocket and it says something. Well, these guys figured out that the presence of a firearm increased your take. Okay. But anyway, so $4,300. Yeah. That's not much at all now. And about a third of bank robberies, I guess, in both countries yield nothing, zero. So it's a lot of hard work, a lot of risk for very little gain. The real money is in white collar crime. Oh, yes. You want to make some cash quick? Maybe one good heist. It's going to set you up for the rest of your life. And even if you're caught, the chances are you will have a mild, if any, penalty levied against you. White collar is the way to go. Yeah. We're talking guys who tell people that they are financial investors and get friends and family and parents of the Little League that they coach to give them 900 grand. There's other guys who just have little penny stock companies that pump up their stock prospects, called stock touting and dump all of their shares. Sure. That's investor fraud. They make hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. It's where the real money is. And historically speaking, it has really low risk even if you're caught. All right, so we're endorsing white collar crime. We're not endorsing it. I was being facetious. Okay. I thought you meant up with white collar crime in 2012. No, as a matter of fact, it's going down. The times are definitely changing. There's a big struggle going on right now as to figuring out just the right amount of punishment with white collar crime because there's a lot of factors involved. It's a lot different from blue collar crime, eg. Stealing a car, robbing a bank. There's a lot of differences that differentiate it that separate the two. And one of those now is the sentencing form is probably stiffer, which is a total reversal from how it used to be before. And they've also closed a lot of the club beds down that got so much press. Yes. Well, they changed them. They're still there. They just are changed. A lot of them are shut down, like, period. Oh, really? Yeah, just to ship them to real federal penitentiaries. That reminded me of a word that we'll definitely be hearing at some point in this podcast. It's a ponzi. Oh, yeah. Because that's definitely white collar. Part of the problem with white collar crime, Josh, as you know from reading this, is that it's hard to come up with an exact definition of what constitutes it. So that's why they have a hard time getting great statistics on punishment and fines, levied and how many they're catching. But I'm going to go with nonviolent crime. That typically involves and you have to sitting, like typically, because it's kind of all over the map. Right. Typically involves deceit and fraud given by perpetrator because of their occupation. Yes. And for that reason, a lot of times it's called occupational crime. Yeah. And if you look at it through that view, which is a very broad view of white collar crime, it's not just the execs in the $3,000 suits who are perpetrating this. It's the guy who's stealing pencils from work. Yes. Or nonviolent to see, especially if somebody asks him if he did it and he says no. Yeah. And it's because you're granted this opportunity through your occupation. Actually, I would call that petty theft. But I'm saying, like, in a very broad definition of white collar crime, that definitely counts. But for the most part, when you think of white collar, you think about the CEO, you think about investor fraud, embezzlement, that kind of stuff. Exactly. Feds have been after it in the United States and earnest since 1974, as far as a dedicated division, the the FBI. Yeah. And that's because of Nixon. I read. And then, despite that, about $300 billion a year. And that's a pretty rough estimate. It's a 2010 estimate. 2010, yeah. So let's talk about a few ways you can commit white collar crime. Yeah. Because the definition you gave is beautiful. It's pretty good. And there are some that just like I said, investment fraud or embezzlement or just prototypical white collar crime. Insider trading is one that's a big one, which falls under securities fraud. Right? Yeah. I mean, it's a type of securities fraud. So basically, insider trading. I swear we've done something on this. I don't think so. It must have been in our Fanny and Freddie presentation then. Yeah, we studied a lot of this stuff. Did we? Yes. And I thought we'd done a podcast and I guess not. But insider trading is essentially like, let's say that you and I find out that Discovery had an awesome quarter, and so we go and buy a bunch of Discovery stock for nothing, and then it just shoots through the roof after the stock price comes up. That's inside of trading. Sure. That's using private knowledge about a publicly traded company for your own gain. That's a no no. Or to other people that would count as well. And then stewart yes. That they took part. Then they would be insider traders as well. Exactly. And it works the opposite way as well. Like, if you find out there's a lot of terrible information is going to make your stock drop, that's when you sell before that information becomes public, you're in trouble. Big trouble. Securities fraud, which insider trading is kind of like that but it is also manipulating cooking the books, you've heard that term of your own company to maybe undervalue a stock before it goes public or I mean there's all different variations but it basically involves manipulating numbers in a dishonest way. Right. That pump and dump scheme. Yeah. Where it's stock touting that's all securities fraud. And then there's antitrust violations for another good one. This has been kind of big lately. So Google is supposedly hogging the YouTube metadata which is preventing Microsoft from making a decent app for it. Oh really? Yeah. And Google's like well it's proprietary or whatever. You got to kind of have to share that. They're alleging an antitrust violation. Companies kind of police one another with that. Sure. And then also price fixing is a big one which is like the opposite of companies policing one another. It's collusion between companies and like Apple and book publishers fixing the prices of ebooks allegedly has been going on. Oh really? Yeah, man. It's going all over the place. It's a dirty, dirty, dirty world. Bribery one of the oldest tricks in the book. Obviously that involves some sort of a payoff or a kickback in exchange for whatever information. I get the bid, my company gets your bid for this government job and I get a little kickback or I give you a little kickback. Rather any kind of maybe favorable decision that can influence your company. Yeah. Little grease in the palm going on like here's three high quality frozen steaks. Please consider it. And you say consider. Granted. And within each of these stakes is a $1 million bill that doesn't even exist. What? Frozen steaks with money in them. A million dollar bill. Okay, we know about frozen deutsche marks. Someone sent us a dollar, by the way. I want the dollar. I'll give you $0.50. Alright, I guess 33. And the third we got to give Jerry or cut. Don't go there. We'll talk about it later. Embezzlement. Yeah. Office Space. Everyone's seen the movie? Office space. Sure. The little program they had to like shave a cent or something off of a transaction. That's embezzlement. They were given the opportunity through trust with books, with accounting. They basically had access to the money and skim some off the top. That's embellzing up pure and some wrong guys. Yeah. Money laundering, which we have done a podcast on the policy schemes on tax evasion. Huge. So basically these are all the stars. There's also other ones like espionage, industrial espionage, corporate espionage. Yes. Selling secrets. White collar. Sure. Remember the lady who tried to sell Pepsi's secrets to Coke? Yeah. That was pretty heck neat. No coke secret to Pepsi right here. She wasn't and they went and called the cops. She didn't do a real good job but she was surprised. Environmental law violations like dumping toxic waste. Yeah. Covering that up like Aaron Brockovich style. Yes. One of the things they point out in here, which is when it comes to things like your little office space scheme, that you just touted a lot of times it's difficult to imagine victims like in office space. They think no one is going to miss a penny. It's a huge company. Right. So you commit these crimes without realizing that someone is hurt somewhere down the line. If you dump your stock, your company stock that you know is about the tank. And I'm not saying it's understandable, but if you've worked your whole career investing in this company with your 401K, it's about to tank. You're like, man, I need to sell this or else I'm done for my family's. Done for. You don't think about the people buying the stock. They're the victims. No, it's absolutely true. And I mean, like, you are pawning your problem off on somebody else. But I think you paint a really excellent scenario. You can in some cases, feel bad for the white collar criminal, especially if it's just some average Joe who's worried about his 401K. Yeah. Or in the case of Enron, you don't feel bad for the upper dudes. You feel bad for everyone in that company that got defrauded. Right. But they were strictly victims. They didn't turn around and try to dump stocks. But that's a very visible case of, like, screwing over your own employees. But you make a good point. Even if the criminal is sympathetic, there still is a victim. Even if it's just some amorphous trader they'll never meet. Even if the victim is some, like, hedge fund manager, it's really tough. There's, like a really weird spectrum here. I don't know if it's a bell curve or like, the UV spectrum, who knows? Yeah, but there's sympathies, like, placed in different spots. Sympathies and antipathies. Yeah. Placed along this, depending on who did what and what they gained from it and what their motives were. Agreed. Because you got to also have credit card fraud and computer and mail fraud and counterfeiting and things like that. Like the Nigerian email scams that's white collar. And they're in the same boat as, like, Ken Lay and Jeff Skillings. Ren Ron. Exactly. Same scummy crooks. Or let's say you commit a little credit card fraud or bankruptcy fraud, and you're just like, this is the easy way to get out of my debts. Or I just say someone stole my credit card. It's very easy there to not envision a victim because it's Chase Manhattan Bank, and, like, they're going to notice. But what happens is they raise the rates on you and me, and all of a sudden everyone across the board is paying more money for stuff. Yes, that is true. That is very true. And everybody's probably I think, a good companion piece that occurred to me is to go listen to our why do corporations have the same rights as you? One of the fundamental flaws of corporate policy is that you serve your shareholders first. Right. You need to adhere to the law, but really, ultimately, anything you can do to serve your shareholders is your mandate as a corporate governor. Right. That includes keeping the profit margin as high as possible, which you're not going to go to your shareholders and be like, hey, we're making enough money. We took kind of a hit, but we're still making a ton of profit, so we'll just take a little hit this year. No, we took a hit, so we're going to fire people. However you reconcile that, I mean, that's your own personal beliefs, like what you feel about that. But that is reality as far as business goes, right? There's fraud and there's adjustments to the fraud, absorbing the fraud, and it's the corporation trying to get as lean as possible. Yeah, they're not going to take the hit for that. They're not going to say, oh, well, a bunch of people defaulted on their credit card this year. I guess we'll just have a bad year. No. And I know in reality that's how it works, but I just find it disingenuous to be like, well, everybody suffers. People lose their jobs because of thought. It's like there's a point b in there that has to be held accountable to some degree. Well, which is your own frigging ethical code of conduct. And, like, how about not doing that because it's the wrong thing to do? No, but I'm saying, like, there's an institution that's absorbing the hit and then turn around and firing this poor guy. Yeah, exactly. It's tough because I came across a word when they were describing white collar crime, giving a definition of it, and they said victims diffuse. Yeah. You don't meet the person, the victim passes along the hit to other people. It's nebulous. Yes. And even if they're raising rates by a quarter of a percentage point, or you're paying an extra $2 as a consumer a year, it's still not right. It's not right all over the place. Josh so where did this come from? Josh it sounds like it came from a cold wool delivery boy. I want to know more about this. Was this dude just cold or did you really steal a lot of wool? So you're talking about the carrier's case? The carrier's case of 1473. It's the first white collar trial. Yes. And it resulted in the first white collar law in 15th century England. And this wool transporter was given a bunch of wool and said, hey, take this wool to this person. And it was his job. So he decided to instead just keep the wool for himself, for his own use. Okay, so you looked into this more? Yeah, I thought he might have been, like, cold on his journey and said, I'm going to keep some of this wool. No, he kept some of the wool. I think he kept all of it, but somebody gave it to him. He's like, thanks, chump. After all, he was but the key is, and this is something that is woven into the history of white collar crime, what he did was not illegal at the time. Right. The law that was enacted as a result of the Carrier's case was they were saying, okay, this isn't illegal, but obviously there's a huge problem with this. So we're going to create a law right. That outlaws this act so people can't do it anymore. Good point. And basically that's what happened. Well, it's kind of what happens with every law, I guess. Someone commits it first and then someone says, hey, maybe we shouldn't do that. Yeah, I guess. But in this case, especially like the industrial revolution in the west, obviously you started getting these larger corporations and all of a sudden things like monopolies and price fixing and employee safety and all these things come into effect for the first time. So that's sort of when it was really born and when they started saying, hey, we need to look at something called antitrust. Yeah, again, like monopolies were not illegal, but when a company bought up all of its competitors and said, oh, suddenly the price for your groceries through the roof. Right. Where else you're going to go? It wasn't illegal, but the people of the world started screaming and governments finally responded. And it was really the US that first had the real first solid response in the Sherman Antitrust Act in like the 1870s maybe, I think. Name for John. Senator John Sherman of Ohio. Republican Dude, chairman of the Senate senate Finance Committee. Yes. Which I didn't know they even had way back then. I forgot either. But I mean it seems like a basic committee there. So this is interesting in that it was voted on. It won by vote of in the Senate 51 to one, in the House by 242 to zero. Wow. So there was one dude that didn't vote for it. And then I think 25 years later when they came up with the Clayton Antitrust Act to really put some punch into the Sherman Act, it was 277 to 74 and 46 to 16. So in that 24 years, it sounds like maybe things got slightly corrupt here and there. Well, it wasn't that. It was that. Well, maybe it was, but there was also some real problems with discrimination that was really vague. It basically said, like, from here forth, all anti competitive corporate measures are illegal. Right. And then it left it to the courts to decide what was what and the courts weren't really in the mood to enforce it. So it went largely unenforced. Although American Tobacco Company and Standard Oil, like two of the biggest companies in the country were dissolved under the Sherman app. Yes. Standard Oil. Big time. Imagine that. Imagine going to a company now and saying like, hey Apple, you're just too big, so we're going to dissolve you into 31 companies. We have all these federal regulators here and they're going to come in and look at everything and then dissolve you into different companies. Sorry. That's what they did. Yeah. Okay. Even still, it didn't have enough T, so they came up with the Clayton Antitrust Act, and then that one really spelled things out. Like, you couldn't do price discrimination anymore. Right. Which if you were black in America during the Jim Crow era, price discrimination was mind boggling. Oh, yeah. You walk into a store if you're allowed in there to begin with, and they'll just make up whatever price they want. Yeah. I'm reading this Consumerism in America book, and it's at this point now, and it's really just this blemish on American history. I mean, slavery wasn't bad enough. I wanted to have slavery light through the Jim Crow era. It's just disgusting. Exactly. Okay, so there is no price discrimination, allegedly. Corporate mergers were outlawed in the Clayton. Yeah. And then interlocking boards where you have, like, competitive companies, but the same people on the board of each. Right. You can't have that. And then also exclusive contracts where it's like, hey, Home Depot, you can sell our weed whackers, but you can't sell anybody else's. Contracts are out. Right. Pay, Home Depot, they do stuff like that now, though, right? Maybe not exclusively, but they carry they do now a limited number of brands. Corporate mergers, interlocking boards, exclusive contracts, all that stuff went away. It all got chipped away. Okay. This act is not in force anymore, basically. Well, that's one thing that bugs me about, or actually the big box hardware stores, grocery shopping, you only have access to who they have partnered with, right. Whether it's your potato chip that you want or your weed whacker that you want. It's true. And most of the big box stores also have exclusive contracts. The other way. It's like, yeah, we'll sell your weed whacker, but you can't sell it. No one else can. Right. So it's like a real gamble, I understand, to sign on to one of these giant corporations. Well, that's in the Walmart effect. That was one of the things. I think they used to, like a tent company or an awning company, and this mom and pop awning company all of a sudden gets a Walmart contract and they're like, sweet, they answered all our prayers. They ordered, like, 30,000 of these. They order 30,000. They open up, like, three new buildings, hire all these employees, and then the next year they come back and say, we want 30,000 more, but we're going to pay you about 60% less. And you've already bought the buildings and even invested in the materials and the people, and all of a sudden you're screwed. One thing that I've long thought, and I'm going to totally take flak for this, but I still think it's worth saying, like, you hear, like, well, that's just business. I feel that any institution where morally reprehensible acts can just be offhandedly dismissed as a matter of course of that institution is inherently flawed. There's an inherent problem with it. Yeah. That's not okay, agreed. Like, we don't just go, well, that's just murder. Right? Well, that's just stealing. Welcome to Earth, human. We have moral and legal guidelines that we follow, and business and corporations have so long stood outside of these things right. That it always bugs me when it's just like, what are you going to do? Yes. I don't like that. So sorry, I'm off my soapbox. No, I agree completely. Well, I'm off of my Thai brand soapbox. Well said. Things are kicking along here in the industrial west. Corporations are getting larger, and all of a sudden these crimes start happening. And something called a muckraker in the 19th and early 20th century comes about. And I didn't realize a Muck record was exclusively a journalist. Yes, it's another for an investigative journalist. I thought it would was anyone raking muck? No, but it's specifically a journalist who basically early on said, you know what? There's bad stuff going on, see, and I'm going to expose you right. In sinclair was one. Oh, really? And he wrote, the jungle changed. Oh, of course. I mean, the FDA basically came about because of the investigation that he conducted. Well, Muckrakers raked a lot of muck and caused a lot of problems in these companies. And one of the things that came about because of the Muck raking were things like the Clayton Act. That's exactly right. Exposing all the stuff. Exactly. And things like the FDA, federal regulations, consumer protections. The muckrakers basically stirred up public sentiment, like, hey, don't be idiots. Like, this stuff is going on. Right. And a lot of people said, well, it's not illegal. And then, unfortunately, there are guys like EA Ross, who was a criminologist and a sociologist, and he started really kind of looking into this and said, hey, man, these people might not be criminal, but let's call them criminal. OIDs. Like, that is the term for people who, especially in business, carried out these terrible acts that weren't illegal. He argued that even though it's not illegal, they're causing ill, and these people are still responsible for it. So make a law that outlaws it. Dummies. Yeah. And he inspired a guy named Eh Sutherland. Okay. He came before Sutherland. Yeah. Got you. Ross was working at the time of the muckrakers, and then Sutherland came about 20 years later. Yeah. Sutherland coined the term actually white collar crime in 1939. And he was a criminologist and sociologist, and he had a broader definition that basically it was the high society and not the lower class at all committing these crimes. Right. Which nowadays you can't really say that because anyone can get a stock tip and commit. It happens all the time across all spectrums of the class system. But Sutherland's point was when he wrote a book called White Collar Crime. Yeah. His point was that there is a huge bias in the United States where law enforcement and the courts lean heavily on the working class crimes sure. And just basically ignored the crimes of the upper class and said, this is not okay. Like, if a guy is going to steal $1,000 from a cash register with no gun or anything like that, there are other factors. But let's just say a guy steals $1,000 from a cash register and he's poor, and a guy steals $1,000 from an investor and he's rich, they should be treated equally, and they're not. And that's what Sutherland's point was. And he was the first due to really bring this to light, wasn't he? Yeah. Well, we're all kind of started to but Sutherland was very well received. It was well received in certain corners, but there are also certain flaws pointed out by people over the years. One of the things mentioned, the article said that he failed to distinguish illegal crime from mere deviant behavior. Right. Apparently, his whole premise was, like, you're into donkeys. You're a white collar criminal. Exactly. And the other thing I mentioned, too, was that he pretty much said it was anyone like any upper class nonviolent crime. Right. And that's definitely involved, and I think fairly sure. I think you can be working class, you can be business class. That's a big part of white collar crimes definition, is that your opportunity arises because of the trust that's granted to you through your occupation. Yes. Even if you're a lower level employee, you still may have access. Like the lady who wanted to sell the coke secret. She wasn't like a CEO. No. She was an admin, I believe. Yeah, exactly. So there's one thing that, like you said, they like to shoot a hole in Sutherland's theory, or they say his definition is too broad because he did include behavior that's not illegal. But it's a very legitimate point to say. You kind of have to, because if not, then we wouldn't have had the Sherman Antitrust Act, we wouldn't have had the Clayton Act, we wouldn't have had the FDA, all of these things. That the Carrier's case. He would have gotten off scot free. What he did was not illegal. So it has to evolve over time. Agreed. Okay. And it has. Agreed. So let's talk about, I guess, the impacts of today's modern white collar crime. I was like, man, that was suspenseful all of a sudden. Thanks. Yeah. We've talked about a few of these, about seemingly not having a victim. But what happens is you rip off a huge corporation, they'll raise the prices. There's another ripple effect. You talked about cutting jobs to meet the needs of the investors. If it's a publicly traded company right. When there's stock fraud committed, insider scandals like Enron are going to ripple out oh, my God. Throughout the stock market. Basically cause people to be unsure and have no faith in the stock market. All. Of a sudden. Yeah. That's dangerous. Yeah. Think about all the people who just lost everything. I know. Oh, my God. Yeah. I get just as angry, if not more angry at something like that than some, like, heinous crime. Yeah. That's an equal. They're both scumbags. Okay, so you said, like, in 74, the FBI first started that's when they created this white collar crime division. Yeah. So apparently, like yes. And it was a response like this University of Michigan survey that they conducted between 1958, I think, and 1973. They found that people who said that they trust the federal government went from 73% to 37%, and then apparently the time between 1958 and 1973. Wow. Yeah. It flip flopped. Yeah. I could see that over that time period, the 60s. Yeah. One of the big ones was just, like, fraud and corruption at high levels. And so the FBI created this white collar crime thing. One of the other things that differentiates white collar crime from regular working class crime is the police's ability to police it. Right. You walk into a room, and there's some guy weighing out cocaine. He's a criminal. Yeah. You walk into a room and there's some guy on a computer doing a pump and dump scheme. Who knows? The average cop isn't equipped to detect this kind of crime. Right. And as a matter of fact, even very well trained cops aren't typically equipped to detect this kind of crime. One of the hallmarks of white collar crime is that it's very difficult to prove, it's very difficult to uncover, and it's also difficult to prosecute. Yeah. And there's no smoking gun. There's no paper trail, or there may be a paper trail, but it's probably electronified. Sure. So it's a little harder to follow. You got to have people that know what they're doing. That's why the FBI created that division, and I guess they're doing a good job, but it's kind of hard. Well, the justice department has been going after white collar crime lately under Obama pretty hard here or there. And then the Sarbanes Oxley act definitely step things up. Some say too much. Yeah. I mean, I've had to comply with this at various when I worked in the philosophy, production companies had to jump through way more hoops paperwork because the starbanes Oxley yes. Do you want to tell them? Well, it was in 2002, and it was to improve corporate governance, which is basically accountability between corporations and stakeholders. What it amounted to was a lot more paperwork, essentially a lot more proving of numbers and showing numbers and jumping through hoops. It was a direct reaction of the fallout of Enron from the fallout of Enron and Tyco and all the other companies around that time. But one of the other things that did checkers was it quadrupled sentences in a lot of cases for white collar crime. So now you have guys like Bernie Madoff getting 150 years. There's a guy named Sholem Weiss, who was involved in the breakup of some insurance company. He got 845 years. Wow. He gets out in 27, 54. I don't think he's going to see that. I don't either, but, I mean, a guy named Rich Hartness got 100 years for a $39 million Ponzi scheme. And all of this is like post Sardines oxley. Yeah, except Sholan Weiss, which is really saying something. You still get that now sentences are like quadruple, and it's like, well, wait a minute. Maybe this is a little too much, like just retribution on the rich. It is. And that's kind of, I think, why a lot of people are having a hard time feeling bad for ridiculously wealthy people who were hucksters and frauds or people who built people out of their retirement accounts. It's tough to feel sorry for them, but legally speaking, it's like, well, wait a minute. You were worried about the guy who stole $1,000 out of a till being treated differently from the guy who stole $1,000 from an investor. Now it's flip flop. How is that any better? Exactly. One of the arguments for these kind of things is that these people are traditionally and historically have been treated differently because they look like the judges that are sentencing them. And so judges historically really have taken it easy on them. Let's go ahead and just call them white dudes. Okay. But they also have been you can make the case that they are usually first time offenders. They're usually family people. That's something that the judges put out there, like, well, this is a family man. He's not much of a flight risk. He's probably never going to do this again. Yes, he's a danger to society. Yes, he didn't use a weapon, which is a huge differentiation. And so sentences have typically been light, but you can also kind of say, well, it feels like we haven't quite felt it out. We've traditionally ignored white collar crime. Now we're really sticking it to them. Well, it's that whole argument with prison. Is it like punishment for a crime done, or is it rehabilitating a person who has a problem with crime? Well, with an 845 year sentence, it's making an example out of that person. Sure. Because since you can't police it, another way to prevent it is to send a message through the courts. Like, you do this, man, you're going to prison for a long time. Yes. I don't know if that's such a deterrent, though, for some of these people. I don't know. Think about it. 20 years in a federal pen. You said Club Fed is not around any longer. Yeah, true. And, I mean, this is like 20 actual years. Yeah. Some guy named Thomas Peters recently got 50 years, and he will spend 40 years in jail, and he's 52, and he will probably die in prison. Now, that's a big deal to somebody who's like, maybe I shouldn't do this. Insider tree. Maybe I should let this 50 grand just walk by because it's not really worth it. Well, something like that. I'm talking about the ones who are getting rich by the tens of millions of dollars. What I want to see is that these people don't get out of prison and still have all those millions of dollars like hidden in different foreign accounts and offshore islands. And the financial part is what really bugs me. I didn't get a chance to look up and see if any of the enron victims and employees were ever repaid or if they were just sol. I'm under the distinct impression they were sol. Really? Because the company was in such bad shape that even dissolving it's just like putting our assets up. No, I think some people did get some money, but I don't think it was anything approaching what they lost. Well, if whoever commits these crimes gets out of jail and they have two pennies to rub together, then those two pennies more than they should have, I think. Well, that's the thing. So the government started prosecuting under the Rico Act, which is the same thing they bust up mafia organizations with and they've been fighting white collar crime with that. And one of the things about the Rico Act is it allows states and individuals who are harmed to sue for up to three times the damages. Yes, but even then, all they have to do is say, yeah, I don't have that money. You kidding me? It's true, you can't pay it. No, it's true. Like in the made of case, the guy who was assigned to basically get money back for investors have gotten, I don't remember how much may off lease, but let's say it was 8 billion. The guys managed to get like 6 billion back. Oh, really? Yeah, he's done a really good job of getting the money back. And that's just that's an example. It's not a figure, but it's something pretty significant. You're still going to get an email that wasn't 8 billion. I'm looking forward to the ones that's like, hey man, we don't listen to you for free to hear your opinion about class. All right, let's move on to other countries. Things are different all over the world. Obviously, when it comes to big business and business dealings, western Europe has followed right behind the US most wholeheartedly with laws to prevent corruption. Eastern Europe is coming on board a little slower, but then you go into other countries like in Western Africa, and it may be customary to Greece palms to get a deal going. Or in India where apparently if you're a truck driver, you're going to have to bribe people to keep your rig on the road. And that's just how it is there. Right. And not only is it customary, it's frequently legal. Yeah, Russia bribes all over the place. If you want to land contract, you might have to bribe somebody. So if you're a multinational corporation, it's tough to do that's headquartered in America. Yeah, you have like a real problem facing you, especially, like I said, the justice department under Obama has been prosecuting white collar crimes and going big time after people under the foreign corrupt practices act, which says if you're an American company, you can't engage in bribes even if it's legal in that country. Oh, good. But what's the point? Like, why hamstring American business abroad? Yeah, exactly. And to help us out, actually, there has been a unified committee called the company I'm sorry, committee called Transparency International. And they are out to get rid of corruption and to unify business ethics all over the world. Right. And that's the reason that you hamstring American business, because it's basically saying, hey, we can take the hit in the hopes of pressing the rest of the world into the same clean up, direct competitive laws we have here in the States that work very well. So good luck to them. Yeah, that's it, man. I got nothing else. No, we should play this one out with talking heads. Big business. Okay, agreed. Okay, so, Chuck, let's see if people want to learn more about white collar crime, I would strongly advise them to go read this article by Jane McGrath. It's a good job and there's a Simpsons reference in it. It's the way to go, jane, you can type in white collar crime in the search bar@hostoforce.com, which friendo brings up listener mail. That's right, Josh. I'm going to call this hot off the presses. Good, cause I'm fucking with that stuff. Okay, Chuck and Josh and Jerry, I want to say thank you for all the hours of listening. My brother Chase and I've been listeners nearly as long as he has been making them. There was even one New year's day where all we would do was listen to your Hangover podcast on repeat. I don't know if that's good for Hangover. Yeah, it's funny and informative and I always feel like calling my brother after listening to the latest episode I'm writing you because it's recently his birthday. He's the best brother in the world and downright awesome human being. It would mean a lot to me if you could tell the stuff. You should know, listeners, about his latest project. When his friend Jim survived cancer, he told Chase that he gained strength in the music he loved. Over two years, 200 and 2600 tracks. 200 tracks? That's a weird way to put it. What would that be? 202,600? Would that be wait, how many? 202,600? Yeah, that would be 2800. Would it? Or 2200. No, 2600 plus 200 is 2800. Nearly 200 artists. This person is insane. No, she's not. Over two years, 202,600 tracks. Nearly 200 artists from other countries all over the world have allowed them to share that message. They are releasing their second compilation disk, electronic Saviors colon Industrial Music to cure Cancer. So these artists compilations are putting together got you. Apparently 202,600 track. They are a registered US charity and all proceeds go to cancer research. And if you're into electronic music and if you want to support cancer research, yeah, you can go to www.electronicsaviers.com. And that is something Chase has got going. And his sister Laura Dudley is a big fan of her bro. He sounds like a swell guy. Nice. I'm all for it. That is good. Good answer. Way to promote a good cause, Chuck. We tried to do that. You did good. Yes. We always want to hear about good causes. So you can get in touch with us, let us know about yours. We'll try our best to let everybody else know about it, especially if people can support it. Agreed. Let's see. Also, enjoy a little talking Heads big business from the live album Stop Making Sense, released in a Ford. We're sure it's up on itunes, Amazon and elsewhere. You can get in touch with us at syskpodcast. On Twitter, you can go to facebook. Comstuffynow and you can send us a regular old email by wrapping it up, spanking it on the bottom and sending it off to stuffpodcast s@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?" | ||
How Garbage-powered Cars Could Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-garbage-powered-cars-could-work | We're not so far off from being able to power our cars using beer and banana peels, like Doc in Back to the Future. Rather than solving the energy crisis with Mr. Fusion, though, we'll be taking advantage of a technique that's been in use for hundreds of | We're not so far off from being able to power our cars using beer and banana peels, like Doc in Back to the Future. Rather than solving the energy crisis with Mr. Fusion, though, we'll be taking advantage of a technique that's been in use for hundreds of | Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:23:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=16, tm_min=23, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=36, tm_isdst=0) | 24573579 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporkscom. Hey, buddy. Yeah. Before we get started yeah. We have a big announcement here about a time time change on our TV show. Yeah. Again, we have a TV show that's pretty awesome. We are now on Saturdays beginning at noon. They're playing it in blocks, so you can just sit down and basically totally lose yourself in the sysktv world. Yeah. I think people marathon like TV shows these days. I know I do. Yeah. Nick and I originated this kind of thing. Oh, did they really? The world's been eternally grateful ever since. For me. Those were the first marathons I ran into. Yeah. I call it Mainlining. That's what we do at our house. We'll get, like, a new show and we'll watch, like, three seasons over two weeks yeah. Until we just can't stand it. Science Channel, they know what they're doing. They're like, oh, you like to mainline the show? Yeah. We're going to give you a taste. We're going to give you a taste. They're not going to put it all on at once yet until they run everything. So over the course of three different Saturdays, beginning February 9, February 23, and then March 9, starting at noon on all three days, you're going to see a couple of new episodes each time and then some reruns, which we like to call Classic Classics. And then in the final day was it March night? Yeah. You're going to see the lost pilot episode. Yeah. Which we can't believe. For better or worse, you get to see that one. Yeah. The Lost Pilot. Yeah. And you can also, if you guys don't have Science Channel or don't have cable or whatever, and you watch your TV on your computer, you can get it on itunes. You can get it on Google Play. You can get on the Amazon instant. That's right. And the first episode is free on itunes. Yeah. And I know if this is US, itunes and stuff. And guys, if you don't live in the US, we are working hard to make this available in other itunes all over the world. It's important to us that you see it, too. So just hang in there. We're doing what we can. We're doing what we can. Yeah. So thanks for the support. Watch it. It's funny stuff. Yeah. And if you just need to get your fix of stuff, you should know all the time, you should go to our website, Stuffychildnow.com. It's got our podcast there. It's got our blog there. It's got all sorts of fun videos. It's very cool. So check it out. Great. Okay. Get down to business. Let's get down to business. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Charles W. Chuck. Brian is breathing on his glasses, which means it's time for stuff to snow. Is that what that means? Yeah, it means my glasses are just dirty. Always. I think I'm just greasy as a human. I just grease things up everywhere I walk. Everybody wears class, gets their class. Really? Yes. If you don't, I mean, what, you're like a loser or something? Okay. You don't want that. You want to make your glasses greasy. It's a small price to pay for having hydrated skin. Gotcha. That should be a T shirt. I'm sure it will be in the near future. Are you doing good? I am doing well, sir. I enjoy these kind of topics where we hit on some nice environmental things that can help the environment. Same here. This one's beautiful. Elegant, in my opinion. And I apologize straight off for everyone that was cringing when we couldn't pronounce the river in Paris, France. The sin, the scene. The Seine or the same? The sein. The sine. One of those three. Yeah. Our friend and mortal enemy, Joan Dazzo hates us now because of that of thingx.com. Yeah. If you haven't checked out Thingx.com, go because they're certainly watching you. Yeah. Some of the former Onion folks from New York split off and made this comedy website, and we're going to be on it soon, but we'll let you know when that happens. Yeah, it's an Adult Swimwear website, too, right? Yeah. So despite the fact that Joe is angry at us and what do you say? How can you guys be adults in the world and not know how to pronounce that? How do you not know how to pronounce the sin? Yeah. I'm like, dude, I'm not Mr. Fancy Pants. I'm not in Paris every other week. Right. Like you. Yeah. All right. That's our Joe. Let's see. I've got some horrifying stats for you. Oh, boy. Eye opening, to say the least. OK. Did you know that one third of the global food supply goes to waste? Well, 1.8 billion tons around the world of food go to waste. What's interesting is it's not just developed countries. Developing countries waste about as much food per person as developed countries do. Yeah. I wonder if they waste, though, because they can't help it, because they don't have, like, the refrigerators and the storage that we do. I don't know. And here we just toss it away like so many discarded business cards. Wow. I was not expecting business cards. I was trying to think something you just get and throw away. You know what? Business cards. Anyone listening to this podcast, if you're expecting Chuck to say business cards, email them right now and let us know. Yes, and also, please don't ever give me a business card. And if you have in the past, I apologize. There's like a little dirty secret among grocery stores where if a fruit or vegetable produce is called collectively doesn't really look quite right, but it's totally fine. Like, examples I've seen is like a slight bruise to a tomato or something like that, or a carrot that's not straight enough. They just throw it away. Yeah, we've covered that in something. I can't remember what it seems like. We have, haven't we? Yeah, it's sad. They should have a I want to bring it out into the light again. Well, they should have a Misshapen fruit and vegetable store where you can buy a crooked carrot that tastes just as good. One of the drawings from the Far side owns and operates the store. You're people, they had like, crooked heads and everything. I bet people would buy this stuff, though. If you don't have as much money, you might want to buy a tomato that has a bruise and just cut that little part off. Sure. Just a thought. I think it's a good thought. So 1.3. I think I said 18. But \u00a31.3 billion tons of food is wasted every year. That's just food, dude. In 1960, the average American generated two point \u00a368 of waste a day. Today we're up to about \u00a34.6 a day. You know what it is in Chicago? We mentioned Chicago, and this article is being overrun with garbage. In 2010, the average Chicago produced \u00a315 of waste. \u00a315.4 per day. How is that garbage? I don't know. And I think Chicago is up 300% from the 1980s. So I don't know what's going on there, but they're like double what they are in the state of Illinois, period. That is really nuts. I'm really curious what's going on there. What are you guys doing? So overall, we're producing apparently most of it from Chicago, 230,000,000 tons of waste in the US. Every year. And there are some programs that are set up to where, like somebody who runs a landfill where all this stuff is going and decomposing and producing methane. They may capture that methane, burn it off or save it and use it for productive stuff. Sure. Or there's also things called waste energy facilities that just burn trash. And then the heat from that incineration creates steam that powers turbines that generate electricity, that make business cards that you throw away. That's right. The circle of life is complete. So, I mean, there are programs in place that make productive use out of trash. This is going to be trashed anyway. But like that waste energy facility that's just burning trash, that generates a lot of horrible stuff, horrible pollution. Sure. There are actually programs that are even better that could someday be used to power our cars through garbage. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. And of course, this article starts off with a little Back to the Future reference. How can you not talk about garbage fueling cars without mentioning Mr. Fusion? So you thought about that too? Yeah, immediately I told Yummy what we were doing. She's like, oh, back to the future. And I was like, really? Of course. I mean, I love that movie, but that's not what I think of with garbage powered cars. I forgot that he even does that. Oh, to me that was a big impactful scene at the end when he comes back in the spaceship, cracks open the Mr fusion and puts, like, a beer can, an old beer and a banana peel in there. I was like, oh, man, is that what the future is going to be like? And the answer is no. Well, not too far off, maybe. Well, let's talk about how Steven Spielberg got it wrong. That was Spielberg. It was Robert Zemeckis. He produced it. Did Spielberg produce it? I'm pretty sure he did. Okay. You just want to blame him for everything. I got a beef. Spielberg beef. All right. So gasification is what we're talking about, and it is actually possible in this day and age, right now, today, to create liquid fuel that you can burn in your car from garbage. Yeah. The basis of this is something called synthesized or synthetic gas, but everybody calls it sin gas, for sure. Right. And it's the product of, I guess, accelerated decomposition. Yeah. From what they call feedstock, which is basically just your source fuel. And in this case, feedstock can be everything from asphalt and sewage, fossil fuels, of course, we know about, to plastics, biomass and AG waste and garbage. Municipal solid waste. Yes. As long as it's not metal or glass and it's carbon based, you can make chain gas out of it. Yeah. That should be in your recycling bin, people. Yeah. That old bed frame of yours, recycling. Yeah. You mean the Bentle bed frame? Yeah. That cheap one that always yeah, it's so hard to put together and you like to pinch your fingers. It's the worst. So the process of creating sun gas uses not combustion, but intense heat. Way more heat than it would take for normal combustion, I think 2600 degrees Fahrenheit and about \u00a31000 of pressure. But it's in a very low oxygen environment. So this stuff doesn't ignite, it doesn't burn. It undergoes a chemical reaction called pyrolysis. Yeah. The key here is heat without flame, or one of the keys. And this is not new. This sounds like the future, but back in the 1600s in Belgium, they were using wood and coal to power street lamps. It was called Town Gas. And they did this also during World War Two during fuel shortages, they made some gas from wood chips and powered vehicles using them. So it's not like a new thing. No. Apparently apartheid era South Africa did the same thing because they were under international sanctions, cut off from the rest of the world. Yes. Remember that? Yeah. What was the dude from the East Street Band? He was a consultant for the Springsteen. No, the other guy. Clarence Clevens. No, the other guy. Steve Anzant. Yes. Little Steven. He's who I associate with. Don't play Sun City. Yeah. He's like a big proponent. I think he was, too. And then he did The Sopranos and forgot about Sun City. And now he was a consultant on the guy who created The Sopranos owed to being in a garage band in the 60s. Yeah, I want to see that. I heard it's good. Yeah, it's supposed to be awesome. Okay, so you take your feedstock, which is what we're specifically talking about is garbage today. You take your garbage, say your banana peels. Okay. Yeah. And you want to dry them out because that's how it goes. But you put them under in this thing called a gasifier, which, depending on whether you make one at home, which there are videos on YouTube for how to make them, or you could go down to Tampa and see one that provides power for 60,000 homes. But a gas fire is this low oxygen, high pressure, high temperature environment that produces pyrolysis, that chemical change, that chemical decomposition, where this carbon based feedstock, the volatile chemicals basically separate from it, and it becomes this thing called Char. And the Char is further reduced to carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Yes. And that is sin gas. And that sin gas alone could power certain types of vehicles. I think the Honda Civic in GV and apparently in Toronto, of course, in Canada, they're always doing great things like this. They have garbage trucks and buses, I think, or no, maybe just garbage trucks that run on compressed natural gas. So you could actually fuel it with send gas. In order to use that fuel more widespread, you have to convert it to ethanol. Right. And there's a company that's interviewed in this article how garbage powered cars could work. Coscada yes, I guess that's how you say it. Yeah. And they take sin gas and they feed it to a bunch of bacteria in a VAT of water. That's amazing. And this bacteria, equally amazing, are patented. Something disturbing? I don't think life forms should be patentable, but yes, it is a patented bacteria that eats sin gas and then expels ethanol. And then they add a little gasoline to the ethanol to denature it. So they don't have to pay a $27 a gallon liquor tax. Yes. That's amazing. To me, it's almost the same thing as moonshine until you denature it. Right. So they said, add a little gas to it and we don't have to pay that liquor tax. Spirit tax. How much is it? Like it's $27 a gallon. Wow. Yeah. And I mean, they're producing a lot of ethanol, as much as they can. That's a lot of extra money they don't have to pay just from adding a little gasoline. And then what you have is engine grade ethanol ready to be mixed with gasoline, which, if you go to a gas station, there's a pretty good chance you'll see a sticker that says, this gas may contain up to 15% ethanol. So your car that you're driving now can run on the sin gas created from garbage. Or if you have a flexville car that can use up to 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline. So we could use even more of this stuff. Don't they have ethanol only pumps? Like 10% or 15%, they say, or ethanol only. Oh, is that right? I think so. I might be wrong there. There may be flex fuel with just more ethanol. I have seen ethanol, but I've seen FlexField more frequently. And then you see like the 85 ten mixture, 85 gas, 15% ethanol mixture, like almost everywhere. Yeah, that's how I screw up. Like every weed eater I've ever had. Because you have to mix the oil they have the two cycles. Oh, man, I always do it wrong. I remember that I used to be like, Lawn Boy, why are you so difficult? So one of the things you want to do here is, well, first you got to separate all the garbage. That's one of the problems. But you want stuff that's uniform and stuff that if it melts, it's not good, apparently. So even though you can use things like diapers for gas and ethanol, it's pretty awesome. What you want is something more like wood, something carbon based that will just sort of disappear when it gets hot. Right. And wood is probably the best feedstock for gas because apparently it leaves about 2% char behind. And the rest is the rest becomes sin gas. And it's not all sin gas. Like there are other things, especially even in wood, something as pure as wood, there are impurities. If you're burning PVC plastic, there's a lot of impurities. But the beautiful thing about using a gasifier to produce thin gas from any kind of feedstock is it's this closed system, right. And you can control and separate all those different chemicals and impurities out. So you just have pure sin gas, which, when burned, has burns at a really high temperature. So it has almost no emissions when you use just a single gas. Yes. And that's no matter what feedstock is originally used, exactly zero emissions. Because whatever feedstock you use, you can sort these impurities out. And in some cases, you can reuse the impurities. Like if you use discarded tires, apparently there's 188,000,000 scrap tires just sitting around in the US. Breeding mosquitoes, catching fire randomly for eight months. Tire fires? Yeah. They figured out that they can use tires, scrap tires, as a feedstock for sin gas. And even cooler, after the sun gas is separated, you still have that char left over. You can use that and it's more efficient than regular coal. Really? Yeah. Wow. So, I mean, there's really not too many downsides to creating sing gas because especially if you're using garbage as a feedstock, because it's going to go to waste anyway, right, true. That's a good point. And I don't know if you'd count them as problems. There are some setbacks. The reason why this isn't so widespread is that there are setbacks. Like you got to sort through this waste. You can't just go to your landfill and dump a truckload of garbage. You have to separate it and make sure it's the right kind of stuff. So that costs money. You have to get rid of the bed frames, the glass, all that stuff. Yeah. And so I need to get it fairly uniform. So there is some money and costs involved in the preparatory stages that probably, I guess, aren't feasible right now in a widespread manner. And then there's also the thing. We've talked about this plenty of times whenever we talk about energy is the net energy ratio. You want more energy put out than you put into it, or else it's just not viable. And apparently a study of biofuels found that almost all of them require more energy. Really? Like the lowest they found is 27% more sunflower oil. Apparently, like a biofuel based on that requires 100% more. Wow. So you have to put in two to get out one or one to one. So that's the battle then, to keep making that smaller and smaller. Right. But the beauty thing with sin gas is that's not necessarily the case. Now, I don't know about this company. What is it? Kostaka. Koskata. How much more energy it requires for them to turn that sin gas into ethanol. And if there's an energy loss or gain or what. But if you're just burning single gas, it's very elegant, it's very clean, and I think it's a net energy gain. Awesome. Well, one of the other problems is you got to dry it out, too. You can't throw like you can use waste materials like biomass, like leftover pulp and stuff from wood mills, grass and corn, but that's moist. And so you have to remove the moisture, which is going to cost a little more money. And then the article mentions, too, on the other end, you're going to have a little issue with ash producing too much ash, right. Depending on what you use. Yeah. So that's like what you said, wood is the best because it only produced about 2%, but if you're not using wood, you're going to have leftover ash to deal with. But like we found with tires, burning old tires, you have that stuff left over, and sometimes it can be useful depending on what you're doing with it. That's true. And I know they recycled the water used in the little bacterial process, which is kind of cool. Another advantage of creating sin gas is I read a study that found you can take CO2 and inject it into a gasifier, and it actually produces more sun gas, more carbon monoxide. Oh, really? Right. So if you can sequester CO2 from, say, like a regular coal fired power plant and bring it to a single gas plant, you can use it for that, to convert it into something useful rather than just polluting it. Interesting. Yeah. Isn't it? Yeah. I think if this stuff, the more you work toward these problems, the cheaper it's going to get. I mean, one of the reasons petroleum is the way to go is because we've been using it for so long and it's become like, one of the more cost efficient ways to fuel a car. May not seem like it these days, but they've got the process down packs. They've been doing it for decades. Right. Like, think about 50 or 60 years from now where we might be with some of this stuff, using bananas and beer, just putting it right into our car. You never know. How about this dude? Chip Beam. Did you look this guy up? He's the guy that trooper. Yeah, he took an older Suzy Trooper and basically cut the rear covered portion out to where it has like, a pickup bed and has a big kettle there where he burns wood chips. And he has been running this 88 Trooper on wood for quite a while now. 45 miles an hour. Stop speed. Not too bad. Yes, it's a good city speed. Yeah, it's getting around town car. And apparently it's the original engine. Like, he didn't have to modify the engine at all. And it smells like a faintly of charcoal barbecue. That's really interesting. He didn't modify the engine. Not the least bit crazy. And he's working on 91 Mercury cougar his goal is to make the fastest wood burning car in the world. His goal. So it's 45. He wants to go like, 70. Doesn't that just evoke images of, like, granny Clampet, like, on a rocking chair on top of the Clampet family car? Yeah. I like this guy, though. That's pretty awesome. I do too. But I had a question about his set up. So if you're creating single gas in this closed environment, you're able to trap, impurities, and use them or sequester them or do whatever with them to keep them from entering the atmosphere. Yeah. If you're creating single gas as you're burning it, what kind of emissions are there from that? I had a question about that. I don't know. I bet we could get in touch with Chip Beam. Well, let's do it. He seems gettable. Yeah. You got anything? No, I think that's it. We touched on everything. Stop wasting food. What is wrong with you? Stop wasting food. Yeah, I think that's everything okay. If you want to learn more about garbage, powered cars, energy, all that kind of stuff, you can type any of that into the search bar@housedeepworks.com. Also try typing gasification, G-A-S-I-F-I-C-A-T-I-O-N into the search bar. That will bring up a pretty cool companion article that we worked off of as well. And I said search bar, which means it's time, of course, for listener mail. That's right, Josh. I'm going to call this yet another librarian email. Unless people don't hear from librarians anymore, I think they need to charge. I think I've read a couple of dismissed three guys. I graduated from library school in May and started to work at a small university library in South Texas. Like many librarians, I've always been very passionate about band books and censorship. While in library school, I was the president of my university student chapter of the American Library Association. Our group decided to sell T shirts as a fundraiser. Several of the officers created design ideas, and we asked students to vote on their favorite, where we started taking orders. The majority of students voted for a design, including quotes from out of copyright books. From out of copyright book. Right. Including many frequently challenged or banned books set over a drawing of an open book. I sent out several emails to students to promote the design and start taking orders. After receiving several of these orders, I received an email from a student who was upset about the design. He was most upset about a Kurt Vonnegut quote. I don't want to get into specifics of the email, but I was appalled that a library school student wanted to censor our library school group. As librarians, we are obligated to provide information not limited. We ended up using quotes about intellectual freedom, the freedom to read, and censorship in libraries to appease the naysayers. I'm still bitter about the entire situation. I can't wait to hang up my Band Books Week posters on my office store. So her plan, megan's plan for Ban Books Week is to read as many of them as she can. She encourages everyone to do the same and to eat the traditional Ban Books Week Swedish meatballs. That's right. So cheers from South Texas, from Megan. And enjoy those band books and Swedish meatballs. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Megan. Thanks to everybody who celebrates banned books week. If you have a suggestion for a band book, your favorite band book, we want to hear it. We'll tell everybody about it, just get talking about it. Okay, guys, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and you can visit our home on the web stuffyoushanehow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places." | ||
Polyamory: When two just won't do | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/polyamory-when-two-just-wont-do | In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck dive into the world of polyamory. Turns out polyamorists aren't weirdos and deviants, they're just regular folks looking for love from more than one person. Learn all you ever needed to know about t | In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck dive into the world of polyamory. Turns out polyamorists aren't weirdos and deviants, they're just regular folks looking for love from more than one person. Learn all you ever needed to know about t | Tue, 07 Apr 2015 14:28:39 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=14, tm_min=28, tm_sec=39, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=97, tm_isdst=0) | 42448931 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there. And this is stuff you should know. All of our wives and girlfriends are in the next room. How are you doing, man? I'm good. I found this topic to be super interesting. And I should say up front that our joke enos that we always include in every podcast almost is not meant to be disrespectful to anyone who is in a polyamorous relationship. Yeah. And we're not here to just kind of look at your relationship from the outside and poke at it and make fun of it or light of it. If you're enjoying yourself and everybody's on board and no one's being hurt, then we always say, to each his own. That's right. But from the outside, polyamory might seem like a very strange arrangement, but I think to most people it seems like swinging. That's right. But it's not. No, it is not a lot of things. It's not cheating. Right. It's not swinging. Right. It's not polygamy. It's not what was the other one? Well, it's not a lot of things. It's not dentistry. Right. Well, the point is we should it's not promiscuousness. Right. So what it is actually, and I had no idea I think my conception of polyamory was that it was basically kind of swinging and it was based on I got the root couple thing, but it was mostly like a swing kind of thing. But from research I realized I was pretty far off. Polyamory is, in a very odd way, a form of monogamy, but that it includes more than two people in this monogamous relationship. Well, not necessarily monogamous either, though, because there can be arrangements where you're allowed to go out and do what you want on weekends with people. So I ran across something that's technically considered monagamish, as Dan Savage coined it. That sounds like a very new word. It is new, yeah. I mean, Dan Savage coined it. Yeah, which means that I'm probably not going to put too much green, but from what I understand, I got this from a polyamory site called More Than Two. More Than Two. Great site. Franklin Vaux is how I'm pronouncing his last name. Vo V-A-E. And I'm not kidding when I say it's a great site if you are interested in exploring polyamory, it's super thorough and very helpful, I would think, just by going through it. And the impression that I got from him, from his FAQ at least, was that the people in a polyamorous relationship are committed to one another. That's true. And that in the same way that two people, a couple, come together to form a monogamous relationship, if you take that bubble and add another person or two other people or something like that, but there's still that bubble of monogamy, of commitment, of affection that is more close to the definition of polyamory. Now in real life, I'm sure it's different and that there are different aspects to it or whatever, but supposedly that's what I gathered. But I think polyamorous couples say, why would you even use a word like monogamy when it means mono? Right. Poly means more than one. Committed is the word I should say. Yeah, I think that's the trip and Sedan savage. Come on. Monogamish. I knew more about this just because there was a show I don't know if it was HBO, it's probably Cinemax that followed some polyamorous relationships. And so I knew that it was not just, hey, it's swinging, or hey, I just want an open relationship. I'm in a triad. I've got a man and there's a woman and there's another woman. Or in another case, it was two couples. They all lived together. They were all in a committed relationship with one another. Right. I mean, we'll talk about there is no standard for a polyamorous relationship. It can really be anything you want that works for you. Yeah. Sometimes it's bisexual, sometimes it's not. Sometimes we could go over a million scenarios. Really good. I was starting to break them all down. But really, whatever you can work out between yourselves is polyamory. But the point is to maybe put it on less fine of a point, but to get a little closer potentially to a correct definition. Polyamory is not monogamy because there's more than two people. Right. And it's not cheating because all of the people involved are on the same page. They find what they're doing, what they're doing with their partners, are doing what everybody's doing. Everyone's aware and consenting. That's right. So it's between those two things. So this is the opposite of the ESP podcast where apparently we never even said what ESP stood for. Yes. A couple of people were like, hey, didn't catch what ESP stands for. Can you tell us? And I'm like, go, listen. Again, enough people said it that I was like, oh, extra sensory perception, by the way. And then we have just now defined polyamory for the last ten minutes. So I think we're covered. I think we finally landed on it, though. Yeah. It's a very fascinating thing and here's how it works. Well, I think let's talk about why people are polyamorous. Right. So people who are polyamorous probably tend to think that monogamy is not for them. And if you're speaking from evolutionary perspective, monogamy is kind of a puzzlement. Yeah. Should we talk about that? Yeah. So monogamy, looking through the lens of natural selection doesn't make sense evolutionarily because it lowers a male's ability to lowers his number of opportunities to carry on his genetic line. And they're for the species. Right? Exactly. Yeah. And it was long thought by some that monogamy came about so males could assist in the raising of the young. But there are some new theories now that make that seem a little less likely, or actually a lot less likely. And ironically well, not ironically, but coincidentally, they were both published. They were both published around the same time. These two new theories, right. They came out in enough time to really kind of compete with one another. Yes. Because when you look around the animal kingdom among nonadian, there are more birds that are supposedly cockroaches that are monogamous. But if you rule out the birds and the cockroaches, well, specifically mammals too. Yeah, about 5% of the 4000 mammal species, give or take, only about 5% are monogamous or mate for life. Right. And so again, if you are strictly looking at it from the selfish gene theory, the whole point would be to run around and copulate with as many females as you possibly can so that you can have more and more chances of spreading your genetic line and then, like you said, hence carry on the species. So to not do that, to just couple with one other person and have maybe a few kids rather than 30, with a bunch of different males and females. Right. Again, it doesn't really kind of make sense. So they tried to explain this and there are some theories, like you were saying, one of them is that if you are a rival male, one of the things you have to do to get with another female, I think that's what biologists call it, getting with. You have to kill her offspring. Right. Because while she's nursing, she can't ovulate and therefore you can't reproduce with her. That's right. But kill her kids, she's going to stop nursing, she'll be sad. But then you guys can have your own offspring. If you are a male that's staying behind after you reproduce with a female, then you have the chance to defend your offspring from being killed by arrival male. That's good explanation for monogamy. Yes, and that was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and they found that out by studying behaviors of 230 primate species. And they felt so good about it that the guy who ran the study said this is it, we now finally know for sure. But that's not necessarily true because there's another really great theory where they actually published in the journal Science and studied 2500 mammals, which is way more than the other study, dieter Lucas and Tim Cluttenbrock of Cambridge University. And they said it's really about low density in females. It's that simple. Like when there aren't many females, that's where monogamy happens. Right. When they're spread out because they beat up on each other when they're in the same place, females. That's right. So they have to spread out geographically. Well, if you're a guy who's just running from female to female to female, you don't know what she's doing while you're not around. So you don't know whether those kids are yours or not. So the best way to make sure that they're your kids is to hang around and be monogamous. That's right. So it's really similar to the other theory, you're staying around to defend the kids. In this one, it's a little less magnanimous. You're staying around to make sure that the female doesn't run around on you. Right, yeah. But then I saw a third theory that also makes sense, too, and that is that the idea of males staying around to help raise kids was a strategy developed by lesser males in the primate kingdom. So, like, the alpha male, the top guys, they're having no trouble, they can go wherever they want, they're getting plenty of action. Right. But Les Neston's like, hey, I can care for the kids. Exactly. And that's a strategy that caught the attention of females who otherwise wouldn't have mated with these guys because they're less nestling, and instead said, yeah, he's a dork. I can't stand his bow tie and a short sleeve shirt, but he does do a pretty good job with the kids. So I'm going to be monogamous with this guy. So three pretty good theories to explain monogamy. None of them hold water for polyamorous. No. And everyone under the age of 35 is now looking up, who les Nestle. That was a great reference, man. Thanks. It just popped up. All right, so the benefits, I believe, is what we were talking about before we delved into the theory. And I've always said monogamy too is not a natural thing and that the reward of staying with one person is partly because of that. It's not a natural thing. You sacrifice something in some way by being with someone, but the payoff is rich. That is wise words, Chuck. So we'll see, if I end up married in 25 years, I'll confirm all this. Just kidding. Of course I will be. All right, so let's talk about the benefits. It is not just about having sex with more than one person. No, it's definitely part of it. It is part of it, but it is also about support. And it takes a village, they say. So if you have a larger village, then you're going to have more support and care and love and emotional support, all that stuff. Right, exactly. Polyamorous relationship or group doesn't necessarily have sex with one another. Everybody sex is a big component of it. But you also have what are called poly effective relationships, where, like, let's say you have what do you call it, a triad. Is that a poly? A triad is three people. Yeah. Right. But that's what polyamorous call it. Yeah. So let's say you have a triad where neither of two women and a guy, and neither of the women are bisexual, but they're still in a polyamorous relationship. They would be poly effective. Like they have an emotional connection to one another, like a couple would. But they're not sexually involved with one another. Right. They're poly effective. Right. That's another component of a polyamorous relationship. So the whole thing is not just satisfying every sexual need with a bunch of different people. It's also that I think they believe that you have a lot of different needs that one person can't necessarily satisfy beyond sex as well. It can be cultural interests. It can be pastimes, it can be what have you. And so the idea behind polyamory is you find those people in your life who combined make that single ideal person rather than placing all that on one single person, for better or for worse. Yeah, I looked at an example on the what was it? Two for one? No, two or more than two. More than two.com. More than two. More than two.com. I looked at one. They have a lot of just stories and examples of people, like real stories. And this one lady was married to a guy who quite simply was not into a lot of the things she was into. She was big into the theater, I think, in museums. Her husband didn't like that. They developed into a polyamorous relationship. And she had another man that was really into that stuff, an old high school boyfriend, I think. And he took up with another woman who had similar interest as him. And they all worked it out. And people say, well, why don't you just leave the husband then who you don't have these things in common with and go with the old high school boyfriend? That's a neat story. She was like, well, because he's really needy and my husband isn't, and we have a lot of great stuff. So it is literally, like you said, satisfying all my needs through multiple people, because who can expect one person to be that soulmate that gives you everything you need? Nice. And these suckers who are in monogamous marriages are just sacrificing certain parts of their life, like going to museums or whatever, if it was this lady. So, everybody, we're about to satisfy all of your needs with this commercial break. Hey, now. All right. And we're back. So, Chuck, we were talking about why people do polyamory. Right? Do polyamory, yeah, let's talk about polyamory, how polyamory actually works. Yeah. I mean, anyone in a marriage that things get more complicated as you get older. So I don't mean to talk down to people in their 20s, but relationships get a little more complicated as you get older and you get more responsibilities. So if you're married and you're in your 30s or 40s or 50s or any kind of committed relationship, it's logistically tough sometimes. Well, yeah, because you're like, I want this. And this other person who you share half of your estate with says, no, I want this, or I want to do this or I want to do that, or I want a vacation here there exactly. Just keeping up with schedules. It's all very complicated. It's all compromised. One big compromise and you're compromising between two people's opinions. Imagine just throwing in one extra opinion that differs from the other two that has equal weight. Exactly. So that's basically what we're getting at, is if you think your marriage is complicated, polyamory can be even more complicated. And they admit that it can be more complicated. And this is really what I gathered from reading that site and a bunch of articles, is that two for one, two for one. You want to meet a great communicator, go talk to someone in a polyamorous relationship. Yeah. So that's one of the chief requirements of polyamory. Got to be able to talk about all this stuff. I've seen it. But as you have highly evolved communication skills yes. I would not wait to put a good polyamorous. Oh, me either. No, man, I wouldn't. Last few days. No. I stink at communicating. I think I'm just doing fine. And it turns out I didn't say that. Chuck, is this bothering you? No. But it's really bothering you. Well, that's another thing, too. Not only do you have to be a great communicator and get your point across and read other people and listen and that kind of thing, but you also have to be honest about your feelings. One of the things that polyamorous face, just like anybody else, is jealousy. We did a pretty good episode on jealousy a while back. Yeah. Jealousy Much was the name of it. Yeah. With a question mark. Jealous Much. Right. And so they deal with jealousy and they deal with it, apparently, ideally. Again, this is from More Than Two.com, in a way where it would take a pretty intelligent, calm person to approach the feelings of jealousy like this, which is basically deconstructing it. So the guy at More Than Two.com kind of gave a good example where he was saying, you're in a polyamorous relationship, and it bugs you when your spouse kisses their other spouse in front of you. Right. And he says, the correct thing to do, basically here is to stop and say, okay, why does that make me jealous? Right. And if you are honest with yourself, you'll say, well, it makes me jealous because I worry that the other spouse and by the way, in a polyamorous relationship, the plural of spouse is spice. Is it really? Yeah. So if you're married to two people, you have two spice. Yeah. Which is kind of funny. Sure. You got a spicy love life. Anyway, when the other spouse if you're worried that your spouse is kissing his other spouse, he's going to think that that spouse is a better kisser than you and think, well, that spouses, if he's a better kisser, then he wants to be with him more than me. And if he wants to be with him more than me, then he's going to leave me. Yeah. I think jealous is often rooted in your own insecurities. Right. So what this guy was saying is, if you spell this out, you realize that there's a lot of hidden assumptions and you're jealous feelings. And then when you confront them, you will probably discard a lot of them if you find that, no, this is correct. This person really would leave me because that person is a better kisser, then you would ask yourself, do I want to be with somebody who would leave me because somebody else is a better kisser? Yeah. So if you can approach this kind of stuff in this manner, then maybe you'd be a decent polyamorous. Yeah. There's a lady named Terry Connolly, a professor of psychology and women's studies at University of Michigan. Go Wolverines. And she's so blue she's one of the while, not one of the only people. But there haven't been many studies on polyamory. One reason is because it's underreported in a lot of cases because some people may not like to be really upfront with it. Yeah. And for good reasons. Yeah, for very good reasons. But she did some studies and polls and things, and she found that jealousy is, in fact, she said, quote, much higher in, quote, among monogamous pairs than non monogamous ones. And I think for the reasons you just said. She also found she interviewed 1700 individuals I'm sorry, monogamous individuals, 150 swingers, 170 people in an open relationship and 300 polyamorous individuals and said that polyamorous tended to have equal or higher levels of sexual satisfaction. And people in open relationships tend to have lower sexual satisfaction than their monogamous peers. And polyamorous peers, we should say open is not the same as polyamorous. Again, in a polyamorous group, the people in the group form a closed hole. In an open relationship, it's like there's two people who are connected, but they're also facing outward and the whole world is up for grabs, basically. Right. In an open relationship. So polyamorous is not an open relationship. An open relationship is not polyamorous. But a polyamorous relationship could include swinging, from what I understand. Yes. And did you know that swinging apparently started among World War II air Force pilots and their families? You knew that? Yeah, because you supposedly if your husband died in battle, it was just sort of understood that that woman would then take up with another serviceman. Correct. I guess. But with another married serviceman or what? I don't know about that. Well, apparently it started out with, like we called it wife swapping in World War II in the Air Force. Specifically the Air Force. Not like, oh, American servicemen, like the Air Force. So I guess they know who it was. I think I've told the story about the Atlanta Swingers Club was very close to my phone number growing up. I was a kid. I had no idea what it meant, of course. And I used to answer the phone and people would be like, is this the Atlantis Wingers Club? They'd just be like, my mom. I just remember it was so troublesome to her and how bad she kept the whistle next to the phone and would blow a whistle into it. So funny to think about now. Shame whistle. Yes. So very funny. I still remember that number, too. Do you remember your original phone number? 3829-098-1919. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. I'm sorry for anyone who has those numbers today or to the Atlantic Swingers Club, which is still operational, I'm sure. Yeah. All right. Another thing we need to talk about are STIs sexually transmitted infection. You would think that it would be higher in a polyamorous relationship, and they don't have statistics that may or may not be the case, but what they are adamant about is lots of testing and lots of access to those results and being super open about those results. Apparently much more so than people in monogamous relationships, like new relationships. They found that people in new monogamous relationships are often very shy about talking about their sexual history and potential infections and things, whereas they're really upfront about it in polyamory. Yeah. And they kind of have to be, and they kind of just make it a normal, open thing. But that's part of the open, honest communication. That's kind of a hallmark of polyamory. Yeah. It has a practical application in defending against STI's. Yeah. There was one study in 2012 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that found that unfaithful, like cheaters not like a cheater, you're in a monogamous relationship, they're much more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior and to keep it a secret than someone in a polyamorous relationship. You go off and you cheat and you keep quiet and you do something super risky. Hook up with someone randomly that you don't know. And that's kind of like the opposite of polyamory from what it sounds like. Right. With polyamory, it's like, okay, it's time for your weekly STD test. Right. I want to see the paper. And we're not hooking up with some random person. If there are one thing that there's a lot of and a polyamorous relationship are rules. Yes. If you haven't picked up on that yet yes. You got to have the ground rules laid down. How much time are you going to spend with this person versus that person? All the way down to rules in the bedroom? It sounds a little gross, but fluid swapping. Well, it's a big deal. So there's a thing one of the ways they protect against STDs is well, let's talk about some of the arrangements. Okay. All right. Because I think we need to because these different rules that we're talking about here will apply differently to different types of relationships. So obviously there's a triad. You can also have a quad. I can imagine that. You could go up to six, eight, whatever. The point is when you have a group that are equal to one another where everybody's equal to one another yes. That's one form of the polyamorous relationship. Right? Yeah. There's another form that's hierarchical, which is based on a core couple that are primaries. Yes. They would be the primary and then say each of them has a significant other. Yeah. Like a boyfriend or girlfriend. Those would be the secondary. And then maybe they have another person that they're close to they see once in a while. Maybe they live out of town, something like that. That would be potentially a tertiary relationship. Right. Yeah. Like you break the Twister game out and they show up. Right. So the difference between the two is with the hierarchical relationship, with the hierarchical format, the person that your spouse, the core group, the core couple people, they're the ones who are going to get the most time, the most attention. They're going to have more power to say veto the others. Yeah. Veto is a big deal. Yeah. The other relationship that forms like a try it or a quad or six people or something like that, where everybody is equally weighted, there's no hierarchical structure to that. Yeah. And it depends on how you want to structure things. They're both completely valid as polyamorous relationships. It's just up to you, basically. And so you said the veto power is a big deal. Yeah. I think it's always to be honored. Right. So if somebody is meeting somebody new and wants to date them, they basically have to go to the rest of the group that they're committed to and this committed relationship with and say, I got this person, I'd like to bring them into the group. I don't know this, but I can imagine that is a huge thing. Sure. Especially in a long established polyamorous relationship like bringing a new person. And I'll bet that would be really big deal. Yeah. Can you imagine being that dude and showing up? Right. It's like the worst job interview of all time. Especially if you don't know what's going on. Yeah. Plus, in the hierarchical structure, then I can imagine the veto power probably just rests with the two core people. Maybe slightly in the secondary people. Right. Probably not at all in the tertiary people. Yeah. They're just there for twister. But with the STI thing, if you are what's called body fluid monogamous yeah. Which I was kind of joking about. That sounds gross. It's really not at all. That's basically saying that we can have sex with each other without condoms and I'm sorry, I'm saying you and me. I thought you were talking to somebody behind, but maybe the secondary and I have to wear condoms and we don't exchange those fluids so intimately and freely. Or if you're in a group, like everybody in the group might be body fluid monogamous, but if they are agreed that they can go outside of the group, they would not be. Or if it's hierarchical structure yeah. That primary couple would just be body flu monogamous and everybody else would be right. You'd have to wear a condom or something. Yeah. Or it may not even involve sex. Maybe your secondaries or you go on dates with and you can go to first and second base, and that's where it ends. It's really all about the people in the relationship working out what works best for them. Right. All right, so let's take a break here and talk more about the polyamory right after this. Okay, Chuck, we're back. One of the things that I found interesting about polyamory was that they had to coined some terms because they were really breaking new ground here and trying things with relationship. Yeah. There's a whole glossary at two or more spice. This is the plural of spouse. Yeah. And then there's a word called conversion that's very much associated with polyamory and it is basically the mirror image of jealousy. Yeah. It's being super happy that your primary has found someone else that they really love and are satisfied with. Yeah. And not just your primary anybody you're a polyamorous relationship with that they've found happiness with somebody else, you're happy for them because of that. Right. So yeah, that's not a normal thing for most people, especially people in traditional monogamous relationships. So polyamorous people kind of, I guess, stumbled upon this thing and had to come up with the name for it and they call it conversion. Yeah. And if you think to yourself as a monogamous person, well, this person goes off, your wife all of a sudden is sleeping with another man, what's to keep her from really falling in love with him to the extent that she no longer wants to be with you? Of course that can happen, but that can happen in your regular marriage as well. And if the only thing that's binding your marriage is that you've got bigger problems in your marriage, if the only thing binding you to that marriage is like the marital contract that you feel like you have to stay true to. Right. In a regular marriage, you should want to be with your husband and your wife. It doesn't matter what the piece of paper says. Right. I would guess, and again, I don't know, I would guess that polyamorists have some sort of structure or mechanism to deal with that, especially if that happens where somebody starts out as a married couple, but then they include a third person and become a triad. If one of them really starts to fall for the other one, that doesn't mean that the initial couple is going to break up and that couple is going to split off. That's not polyamory. That's not how it works. So I wonder what kind of mechanism they have to deal with. Checks and balances. Yeah. It's got to be something they did do. There was one study in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality in 2005 that said polyamorous couples who had been together more than ten years listed love and connection as the most important factors in their longevity. And monogamous couples listed. Religion and family as the most important reasons. And that's what I was sort of clumsily trying to say. The only thing keeping you together is the fact that your husband or wife hasn't slept with someone else or your parents are going to be disappointed. Yeah. Those aren't reasons to stay married. So we already touched on also the idea that if you are in a polyamorous relationship you might not share a lot of interests with your primary, but you've got the ones that your primary is not interested in. You get to share with your secondary or your tertiary or whatever. Right, right. So just having more people to spend life with, that's another benefit of it. There's a lot of drawbacks to being in a polyamorous relationship that I think any polyamorous would readily admit as well. Sure. In a quote, fringe sexuality, I think living your romantic and reproductive life as we'll talk about in a minute in complete contrast to societal values. That's got to be tough. Yeah. And over the years acceptance of this has been Zelch to say you better be saying peaked. No silks to confusion these days. A little more open minded about things. I did see one poll here from I think it was in April of this year actually, where they pulled about 1300 heterosexuals on how willing they would be on a scale of one to seven to commit non monogamous acts like adding a third party to the relationship. And depending on the scenario, 16% of women and 31% of men chose four or higher on that scale would ask if they'd be willing to pursue and try something like that out. Basically. I wonder who I was before. I don't know, lower. Did you say before that there was this 2002 survey that found that predicted as much as 10%? Yeah. That people that's high compared to other studies I've seen. Yeah, I saw like at the most maybe 4%. Yeah, I can't imagine. 10%. There's just no way because I mean I'm pretty hip, I know what's going on and I would just be blown away if it turned out that one in ten people were in a polyamorous relationship and just managed to keep it secret that much. Yeah. I agree. Secrecy is a big part of this and that's not to say that shame is a part of a polyamorous relationship, but secrecy is just out of necessity a pretty big aspect of polyamorous relationships. Mainly because like we said, it's in stark contrast to social values and if you got a kid, you're at risk of having your kid taken away. Yeah. Plus, I mean you'd spend half your life explaining this to everybody. Right. There was the one case, and I couldn't find up any follow up about this young woman, but April what was her last name? Divilbus. Yeah. She was on the MTV show in the late ninety s and had a child and had two men in her life a triad and everyone was happy. The kid was healthy and happy and everything was great. And the grandmother sued for custody and won it. The court basically made a moral judgment. This is a depraved lifestyle. Yeah. And this is in spite of the fact that the court sent its own shrinks to go evaluate the home and the family and didn't find that the kids were in anything but a loving, supporting home and were happy and healthy, still, it didn't matter because she was living a depraved lifestyle, so she lost her kid. I can imagine that in almost any state in the union, you would be at great risk of losing your kid if you came out as a polyamorous family. Yeah, probably. It's one thing, I think, as far as society goes, to be like, okay, you guys just go do your own thing. Whatever floats your boat, that's fine. Just keep it out of our faces. Keep your little polyamorous lifestyle quiet. But if it turns out that there are kids that are being brought into that, like, either they already existed or you're having kids with multiple partners in this polyamorous relationship. Right. I think society's threshold for understanding and looking the other way really reaches an end. For better, for worse. Right? Yeah. So I think there is a real threat. And there's a real threat still, in part because there's very little scholarship on the impact that a polyamorous upbringing has on children. Yeah. They don't know. No. No one knows. Polyamorous will say, look, dude, you have no idea how much our child is loved. Right. My wife loves our kid. I love our kid. Our wife loves our kid. Yeah. So not only does our kid get to be raised by two loving parents, our kids get to be raised by three loving parents equally. There's more of a division of labor. The kids great. And on the other side, you'll find blog posts by people who are authorities on the other side saying, no, there's just no way because you're at risk of a divorce. But it's a nontraditional divorce. Whereas under a normal divorce, we have a social structure to support kids who are going through that with this. It's like, that doesn't make any sense. And the kids going to be having all sorts of issues, and then if you don't tell your kid while you're raising them when they get to college and figure out what was going on, they're not going to trust you any longer. But almost none of it is based on studies. Right. It's all just moral judgments one way or the other. Yes. I think it's pretty funny. I bet the same people that don't think a child should be raised by a single parent also probably think three or more. They're like just two, not one, not three or four or five. Two was perfect. Yeah. So who are polyamorous? Elizabeth Chef is a sociologist who's done a lot of interviewing and she finds generally they are in their thirty s. Forty s and fifty s. Generally white and liberal and educated, many of them highly educated. Master's degrees to the tune of like 40% compared to 8%. 40% master's degrees? Yeah, that's what I saw. Well, compared to 8% in the general population. Got you. And she said, rarely are they religious, but when they do, it's usually paganism or Unitarian Universalism. Apparently there's a lot of overlap with the BDSM and Cosplay communities. And here's another term, hunting the unicorn. Did you come across that? No, I didn't. I'm disappointed in myself. She said that a lot of couples are introduced or interested in polyamory by start looking for a woman, bisexual woman, to enter their relationship. So I want a triad, I want two women. The woman's like, I would like a woman as well, so let's go out and find that. That's called hunting the unicorn. What else? I got nothing else. I mean, I did look up a little bit of the history of this kind of thing and have you ever heard of the oneida commune? Yeah, I think we touched upon that. Communism. Oh, really? I think so. Well, it sounds like a cult, but it's super interesting because it was in the 1840s in upstate New York and Onion in New York, where you usually don't in the 1840s, hear about things like free sex and polyamory. But that's exactly what was going on there. A lawyer named John Humphrey Noise basically started a free love commune in the 1840s in New York, and by some accounts it was a very feminist group, because women were encouraged to only have sex when they wanted to, which in the 1840s, that wasn't the norm. But it was also, as it turned out, not so great in many ways because they had sex with teenagers. And the more I read about it, at first it sounded like this commune, and then ten minutes later I was like, no, this was a cult, I got you. And I had religious undertones. And the weirdest thing out of all is onida Silverware that is still popular today. It was formed from that commune. Yeah, I remember hearing it as, like some sort of cautionary tale or whatever. Yeah, and there was only like 300 of them, but apparently I think it was all about having lots of kids. To keep that commune going was the main reason. But they did not encourage monogamy at all. They shunned it. If you were caught, like, really rooting down with one person, they were like, no, you can't do that. Go off and have sex with someone else right now. Get your priorities in order, basically, get your head together. Yeah, I'm sure there's a documentary on that plan that would be interesting. Sure. If you want to know more about polyamory and other alternative lifestyles, you can search those in the search bar@housetofworks.com. And since I said search bar. It's time for listener mail. Here's more on T. Hey, guys, listen to T. I'm a massive Tconnor for the last seven years. I was really impressed. I expected to listen and pick out a bunch of little mistakes, but I was pleasantly surprised. However, you guys did leave out what? I can't wait to steer them on this one. No, I don't think so. Aaron sounds like a nice dude. You left out one major category of T, though. It's spelled P-U-E-R-H. Puert is what I'm going to say. He said it's probably the most unique tea out of the six types. Tome to the unan province of China is the only tea to be fermented, not oxidized. What this means is that Pew Air is, and I know that's wrong, is able to be aged for years and years and tastes better as it ages, just like wine. And some PU air on the market that several decades old goes for thousands of dollars per disc. Yes, disc. Traditionally, Pierre is stone pressed into a disk form called a bing cha, and it's sold in that disc form and it has a forest floor flavor and is brewed at about 205 to 210 degrees Fahrenheit. I got to try that stuff. Yeah, it sounds good. He said I could go on and on, but that's just a great job. Overall, guys, I know it's tough to fit it all in one episode. He could easily be his own college class with all the cultural history behind it. Take care. And that is from Erin Krause, who's developer at the Society.org. That is thesocietea.org thanks a lot, Erin. And your cohorts at the Society sounds neat. It sounds like the one needed call. Yeah, I like it. Okay, if you want to get in touch with us, let's see what can you do? Chuck treat to us. Yeah, Syscast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychannels. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushineknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this charttopping series will have you hooked before you know. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." |
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