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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1233849915581hsw-sysk-toy-boat.mp3 | Why is it so hard to say "toy boat" three times fast? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-is-it-so-hard-to-say-toy-boat-three-times-fast | If you've ever tried to say "toy boat" three times fast, you'll know that these two words can quickly turn into one tricky tongue twister. But why? Unravel the mysteries of tongue twisters and language in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | If you've ever tried to say "toy boat" three times fast, you'll know that these two words can quickly turn into one tricky tongue twister. But why? Unravel the mysteries of tongue twisters and language in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:16:01 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=16, tm_min=16, tm_sec=1, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=36, tm_isdst=0) | 16558811 | 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. Josh. Hi. Chuck. I'm Chuck. Big Chuck. Hi, Josh. This could arguably be the worst intro we've ever recorded. Chuck, do you think maybe all right, but let's not do it again. No, let's keep it raw and fresh, baby. Okay, so Chuck sick. Toy boat, three times fast now. Toy boat, boat. Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat. Actually, at last one, when you correct yourself, that was pretty good. But the point is, you're not supposed to correct yourself. You want to hear me do it? Yeah, I can't do it. You just went into Tibet. Kind of, but Jerry, our producer, actually did it a few minutes ago when you were out of the room doing your push ups like you do between podcasts. It gives me pump shots. She did it on the phone. It's a big deal. Jerry does everything perfectly, but most people can't. I've never been able to say toy boat three times. It's tongue twister. It is. That's exactly right. And did you know, Chuck, that it's assumed that tongue see, tongue twisters are universal. Yes, they are. I did not know that until we did a little research. All right, so you have some from foreign lands? I do. I want to hear some, because I don't know any. I found a Chinese one, and there was actually, like, an MP3, maybe MP4, of this Chinese tongue twister. I was like, I'm not going to the trouble of learning that. Well, I will do my best. I have two Japanese tongue twisters. Nice. In their translation. So the first one is kairu pioco pioco me pioco pioco a wasate pioco pioco pioco. That is a tongue twister. It is. What does it mean? It translated loosely, means take two sets of three frog croaks, add them together, and they make six frog croaks. Beautiful. Like that? Yeah. And here's another one. It's just a word to the wise's. It is. Words to the Y's. And here's another one from Japan. It is kono kugiwa hiki nuke niki Kugi DA. And that means, this nail is hard to pull out. Yeah. Wow. So you can kind of see how maybe a tongue twister in Japanese doesn't really translate into a tongue twister in English. True, but she sells seashells down by the seashore. That's kind of silly, too. It is. But this nail is hard to pull out. It's more of like that's a statement. You're right. Seashells, sea salt. Jesus. Yeah. Descending into selling. Basically, Chuck, it's becoming increasingly apparent that as far as tongue twisters go, I have what you might call a phonological disorder. Wow. You heard of these? I have. Okay, well, I'll tell everybody else about it. You just sit there quietly. Okay. Okay. So a phonological disorder is basically any time where you're developing in such a way that you aren't pronouncing certain phonemes. And a phoneme, if you'll remember correctly, when we were back in second or third grade, there was Hooked on Phonics, remember? Hooked on Phonics worked for me. Right, okay. So instead of a phonic, it's actually called a phoneme, technically, but it's the same thing, like B Oi boy. Right. Those are two phonemes, two separate phonemes, and they're the way we pronounce words, and we learn how to pronounce different words phonetically. That's how we learn to read, usually. Right. And that's also how we learn to communicate. Now, if that development doesn't happen properly, you can end up with the phonological disorder. Right. Is that a speech impediment? Yeah, that's another way to put it. But a speech impediment could also include stuttering, which is not a phonological disorder. Right. It's actually extraneous. But this is specifically with the pronunciation of a phone name. Right. So let's say you didn't really get the g sound. You're going to have that apostrophe after the N and an ing, like nothing or something. Right, sure. And that's actually a sign that you may have a phonological disorder when you leave them off at the end, especially. Or when you substitute one for another. Right. Sarah Palin, give me an example. Well, that was just kind of the common joke, was that she never pronounced anything with a g on the end, but I think that was just more colloquial. I think so, too, and I think it was very well studied colloquialism, indeed. Yes. So the phonological disorder thing, apparently anywhere from seven to 10% of five year olds have one. Really? Yeah, and it can be really like leaving the g off the end of a word, kind of mild, or it can be incredibly severe, where no one understands a word you're saying, including your family. Right. You're essentially not making sense. Even though you know what you want to say, no one can understand you, so therefore, what's the point of communicating? Right. So that's severe. Not like when you hear, like, a little kid saying, my shoulder holds. Yeah. Well, actually, that's part of development, too, that's either they have a phonological disorder or they're still working out the kinks. Right, or their shoulder holds. Yeah, exactly. And there's two causes for phonological disorders. Right. Well, actually there's three. The third one is just beyond cryptic. The first one is structural. Right. Where your brain isn't structurally developed in the normal way, and therefore there's something missing there's some neurons aren't connected. There's something that's structurally different about your brain that's going to keep you from being able to say certain phoneines. Okay. The other is neurological, where your nervous system isn't finally tuned quite enough to be able to really get the real polished phone names, like A-Z-H sound or something like that. Right. You'd have trouble speaking French, I would say. Probably. And the third one just scares me. It's a phonological disorder of indeterminate origin. Basically, we have no idea. Okay. And the reason we have no idea is because we aren't entirely certain how we speak, how we hear, how we speak. We don't know. Did you know that? I did not know that. Well, give me something you got. Well, I thought you were going to talk about the tongue. Oh, yeah, we'll get to the tongue. Okay. Is now a good time? I think now is a great time. Well, the tongue is actually, as everyone knows, very important to your speech. And taste. And taste. Obviously, the tongue is connected to the base of your mouth by a piece of tissue. A vertical piece of tissue. Yeah. What's it called? Everyone wants to know that. And now we know that's called the lingual franolum. Is that how you would pronounce it? I know we constantly butcher pronunciations. I feel better. The lingual frenulum. That's what I went with. Okay. I like that. Thanks. And that's what the little thing is called. If yours is too short, you may get a speech impediment because of that, because your tongue has to have a certain amount of movement to be able to carry out to produce these phonemes. Right, right. But you can have it corrected. They're actually surgery. Yeah. A little bit of snip. Yes. A little snip here and a tuck there. You might as well talk about putting bamboo shoots under your fingernails. When I think of, like, snipping the lingual franulm I know. Yes. That's bad. So, yeah, the tongue has a lot to do with how you pronounce things, and so it has everything to do with it. So if you have a problem with the franur in there, then you're going to have some issues with your speech. And I imagine there's probably an opposite disorder to where you're maybe lacking a lingua franulm and your tongue just kind of walls around in your mouth. Interesting. Maybe you have, like, a very little control over it. I would think that would produce a speech impediment as well. But you just made that up, right? I did. But you know that somebody somewhere out there has that problem. Right? Yeah. And if you do, send us an email. Thanks for tuning in. Okay. Chuckers, you want to get back to the brain part? Sure. Because really your tongue is not doing anything on its own. It's obeying your brain. True. All right. So it all comes back to the brain, essentially, doesn't it? Always does. So there's this guy who in the 1960s, his name is Al Lieberman, I think he was a Yaley and he came up with this thing called the motor theory of speech perception. Okay. And basically this theory said that to produce speech, we use the same areas of the brain that we used to hear to listen. Right. So it's like a mimicking type of thing. Basically. What this guy's point was is that when we hear something, we hear it like we're speaking it. Right. Maybe we cut it into phonemes. But it's basically the reverse process. Right. Which actually a lot of people bought into for many, many years, and then it kind of fell out of favor in the 80s. Right, right. But then almost as soon as it fell out of favor, some studies started coming around that actually supported it, and now it's gaining strength again, especially since the advent of the MRI. Right. But you want to tell them about that 1982 study that really kind of suggests that we do hear the same way we speak. Right. The Haber study is all yeah. I can't figure out if they're brother and sister. I assume they're probably husband and wife. Ralph yeah. They did some research, and what they did was they got some college aged subjects and had them silently read sentences that had tongue twisters. Right. And then they also had them a control group. I'm sorry, the control group was a different sentence that did not have a tongue twister. Just a regular sentence. Right. Yeah. So they found out that it took longer to silently read the tongue twisters than it did for the sentences that did not contain them. Right. And these are all fully developed college age test subjects. Right. And so if we aren't using the same process in reverse, we shouldn't have any trouble silently reading a tongue twister. Correct. But it suggests that we read by breaking things up into phonemes, just like we do when we're speaking. Right. Which would suggest that the motor theory of speech is correct. Right. Which I agree with, because I looked up some cool tongue twisters and I have to read them slower in my head, just like I would when I say it. Right. Like what? Well, there's one. I believe it's the Guinness holds the Guinness record for being and I can barely get through this one for being the most difficult on twister. And that is how do you quantify that? I don't know. World record. Well, we'll have to ask in this about that. It is the six sheep. Six sheepsick. I can hardly get through that. So the six six I can't even say it. Can I try? Yeah, it's at the top there. Okay. So the six sheep six man, that's pretty good. Thank you. I just overcame the world record holder for toughest tongue twister. That's impressive. Yeah. Thanks a lot. And there's also something called spoonerism. Did you look into that? No. Spoonerism is when there's a transposition of it's usually an initial sound of two or more words. So, for instance, tons of soil versus tons of toil. That's a spoonerism, actually, a lot of times they're designed people make up a spoonerism that will get you to say curse word by accident. Like ICU P? No, not exactly. More like I'm not a pheasant plucker. I'm the pheasant plucker's mate. And I'm only plucking pheasants because the pheasant plucker is late. I got you. So that fast enough they might accidentally say a bad word. Yeah, I got it. We'll have to try that later. Once it's off, the recording button is off. And interestingly, I also found out they're also sign language twisters, and they call those finger fumblers. Wow. How about that? I didn't tell you that one. So that's a sign language spoonerism, a sign language tongue twister. And I did not find any. I tried to research and find some. So if anyone out there knows of any sign language finger fumblers, we'd love to hear about it. Well, that's pretty interesting, actually. That kind of leads us back to the whole toy boat thing. Right. As it turns out, there's no definitive answer for why it's tough for us to say toy boat. Right. Whether it's physical, like the tongue can't move fast enough. You just said it funny in saying it. Toy boat. Yeah, I'm from Ohio, and sometimes you can hear that every once in a while. Okay, so we don't know if it's physical, like the tongue is just incapable. We found a couple of phonemes that we can string together that the tongue doesn't move fast enough to say it three times fast, or if it's a brain glitch. Right, right. If there are finger, what do they call? Finger fumbler? Finger fumblers. Even though you're producing language, you're moving your fingers. Sure. So I would imagine you're using a different region of the brain for that, or maybe an additional region of the brain. So, yeah, we can't say for certain whether it's the brain or the tongue that's responsible. It could be the tongue. Think about it. Toy boat. Right. Going from the oi, the tongue is at the bottom of your mouth. To boat, your tongue has to go back up and kind of click on the sides along your molars. True. That may be just something that it can't do very quickly. Right. Or it could be your motor system in your brain is not working correctly. Right. These things really frustrate me. I don't know if it's a little kid in me from class coming out, but anything like this, or anytime someone rub your stomach and patch your head or any of those physical things, basically where you trick your brain. Right. I hate those. I just can't do them. Yeah. It reduces me, I feel like, to like the single cell organism. I just can't work it out. Well, don't feel too bad, Chuck, because I have one fast fact for you. What's that? That I think you're going to feel better about. Okay. The average speaker only makes about one error for every 1000 words spoken. Really? And I would say you're above average, so don't feel too bad that I have more or below average. Below average. Well, there's my one, right? Yeah. I think if you counted up the mistakes that I make in a podcast, that would be much higher than that, but I think that's all different than normal speaking conversation. Okay. I feel the pressure. Well, if you guys out there want to see the word lingual franulm, and by word, of course, I mean words. There's two for me. You can type in why can't you say toy boat in our search bar at how stuff works.com? But first, before we let you go, don't go anywhere yet because we have listener mail. Yes, Josh, we have listener mail. Yes. This is just one piece of mail from our fan, Lila Feldman. And Lila is writing in about her what to do with the dead body episode. Yeah, I love that one. She does, too, but she had a little bit of a problem with it. Okay, so we're going to read this because I don't want people to think we just cherry pick the kudos to ourselves. No, definitely don't. So she writes in and says that, I was a little disappointed with the recent podcast because you didn't mention some older and more traditional ways of burial that could be considered green, which is a very good point. For instance, Jewish burial, traditionally, someone was just wrapped in a shroud and put in the ground, and then that eventually evolved to a pine box. Right. But that would have been an old school way to have a green burial. Traditional Jewish burial. That makes sense. It does. Yeah. And another method, which no one uses nowadays, it's popular in Roman times around the Turkish Empire, is to just bury the body as is in the ground, wait for the flesh to decompose, and then dig out the bones. And then you usually put those bones into catacombs or taken with the family when they were trying to escape a tyrant or go on vacation, even though we get these bones or works really good for a nice soup. Yeah. A nice consummate. Yeah. So that was from Lila Feldman, and we appreciate Lila writing in, and I'm sure there were all sorts of ancient ways of dealing with dead bodies that we failed to consider, so we kind of had a modern take on it. Right. We just get so frantically caught up in the green movement that we just keep looking forward. Looking forward. There's a lot of interest if you look back at that. And if you'd like to take Chuck and I the task in a very puritanical manner, you can send an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com, phone, more on this and thousands of other topics. Visit howstepworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?" | |
How Ramadan Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ramadan-works | It's the holiest month of the Muslim calendar, and for good reason. It was during the month of Ramadan that Mohammed began to issue the Koran. Learn about the customs and traditions behind observing Ramadan in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | It's the holiest month of the Muslim calendar, and for good reason. It was during the month of Ramadan that Mohammed began to issue the Koran. Learn about the customs and traditions behind observing Ramadan in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Tue, 07 Aug 2012 19:29:59 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=19, tm_min=29, tm_sec=59, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=220, tm_isdst=0) | 29911317 | 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 Clarke. There's Charles W. Two. Chuck Bryant and Chuck. May I say kulu AMWA antum bayer. Come to you, my friend. So how can I speak Arabic to one another? Yeah. What did you say? I said, May you be well throughout the year. Okay. I should say that I want to qualify that, but that's the translation presented in the House of Folks article. It's not Babel Fish. I said, Peace be with you. Peace be upon you. Thanks. That's a general greeting. Those are very nice greetings. Yeah. They're particularly appropriate to say to one another. The whole reason we're speaking Arabic to one another right now is because you may or may not know this. If you're one of the 6th of the world's population who practice Islam, you're probably well aware of this. But for the other 56, it's Ramadan right now. That's right. It's a big month. 1.3 billion, I like to say second largest religion behind Christianity, of course. Are you sure it's Christianity? Really? Of course. What are you talking about? I thought they were way more Muslims than Christians. There's, like, over 2 billion Christians. I did not know that you thought that. It was the number one religion in the home. Really? That or maybe Buddhism. Christianity? Are you sure? Oh, yeah. I do Christianity. They're number one. They've got that missionary outreach program. I guess it's been effective. They got a down pat. Okay, so July 19 to August 18 this year, and we will explain why it's this year. Because it falls at a different time every year. Yeah. Well, we can explain why now. Because they use a lunar calendar. We got smacked down for this, remember? No. In one of our shows a year or two ago, we said something about Ramadan falls on this, and people wrote in her, said, actually, it falls at a different time every day. It was probably the fasting episode. Yeah, I think that was it would make sense. Yeah. And we were like, oh, wow, we need to educate ourselves. And we did. Yeah. We spent the last year and a half studying Islam. Yeah. This is the culmination of a year and a half of Islamic studies that you and I undertook to do the Ramadan episode. All right, so lunar calendar, that's where it all starts. Oh, okay. Is that where we're starting? Well, you already mentioned it, so I'm just bringing it back. All right. Well, we're used to the solar calendar, the one that is used in the west, the 365 day calendar based on the cycle of the sun. A lunar calendar breaks months down by when a new moon is sighted, and then the next time a new moon is sighted. And there's a lot of disagreement about what sighting a new moon means, but the point is it's based on the cycle of the moon. Yeah. In America. Muslims in America generally adhere to the Islamic Society of North America. And when they get together and they say this is when Ramadan starts this year. Right. So Ramadan starts as the 9th month of the Muslim calendar. So it's the 9th new moon of the year. And when it kicks off is the holiest, most joyful, most introspective, most charitable month of the year for Muslims. Basically, Ramadan, it's the name of the month, but it's also the name of this month long celebration is basically like the comeback to Islam month for all you Muslims. And those of you who aren't, maybe come get acquainted. Right. But it's all about getting back to your religious roots as a Muslim. That's pretty much the point of Ramadan. That's right. And the 9th month you mentioned is significant because in 600 and Ad, there was a camel trader named Mohamed traveling through the desert and he had a vision from Saudi Arabia. Modern day Saudi Arabia. Yeah. So Mecca and he had a vision from angel, the angel Gabriel and said basically you are the chosen one, dude, and you will receive the word of God to dispense to the people. And that was in the 9th month. So that's why Ramadan happened in the 9th month. Yeah, it's like the most blessed month because that was two Muslims, the most significant thing that's ever happened in the history of Earth. Sure. And the words that came through Mohammed ended up being the Quran. Yeah. It was transcribed. So as part of Ramadan, the entire Quran is read out loud at mosques around the world. And they read a little bit every night. And so about a 30th of the Quran is red. Then over the course of the month, the whole thing is red. Bam koran red ramadan done. And the prayer where they read them is called the Tarawi. And I need to say a special thank you to Kiedir Azali. Put out a call on Facebook. We got any Muslims out there? We need some help. Or I guess I could have said Arabic speakers in general. Sure. But I wanted it from the horse's mouth. Right. So Kyr emailed me and I had a list of words and he gave me his best shot at phonetic pronunciations. So thanks a lot, man. Yeah, thanks a lot. Key dear Big help, I mean, Chuck's doing great because of you. Well, I just don't want to stumble through this and offend people like we do. I'm with you. I think it was a good move. So the prayer in which in the mosque that you were reciting the Quran, or the Quran I guess is how I said it, is Tarawi. And you say that every night? That's right. That's the nightly prayer during Ramadan, right? Yeah. And I think it's not required this part, but it is highly encouraged that you do stuff like this? Well, yeah, it's the whole point. I think also I don't know, but I would guess that it's the same with say Christmas time among Christians. There's people who use the Christmas season to reflect and to be charitable and to go to Mass. Right. Or during Lent. Fasting. Sure. Does that equal like fasting every day or giving up chocolate or something like that for 40 days? Right. I think it probably depends on the depth of your adherence. But the point is Ramadan is there so that you can come back and just kind of get back in touch with Islam and yourself too. Because the main component aside from the nightly prayers and the reading of the Quran in its entirety during that month is fasting, which is really the big part. Yeah. So fasting is one of the five pillars of Islam. There's fasting, there's alms giving, there is daily prayer and then there's a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in your lifetime if you're able to. Is that right? Yeah. They give you a break if you can't afford it. Got you. Or you're infirmed or something. Right. And then there's Shahada, which is I guess the first pillar probably. It's basically the belief in the creed of Islam which is that Allah is God and Muhammad is prophet. So you've got this five pillars. So if the belief in God and fasting are on the same level, that's a big deal. And so this is the month that you really do it. And there are specific guidelines laid out for how you fast and when you fast. Right? Yeah. You start at the age of twelve, which is in Islam. I don't know if that's when they consider you an adult, but that's when you get involved in Islam. As far as fasting and stuff like that goes, I guess you're no longer considered like a child. So at twelve years old you can start fasting. And one of the big parts about the fast is not just that you say, you know what, I'm not going to eat during the daytime from sun up to sundown, I'm just not going to eat. I could lose a few pounds and it can kill two birds with 1 st. Right. The really important part, and really the only way for the fast account has to do with the word called NIH. Niyyah. And that literally means intention. What I gather from this is that if the fastest to truly come from your heart for the sole purpose of praising Allah, right. It's not like you said you want to lose a little weight or you're an IRA prisoner or something like that for political reasons. It's like you're doing it to be closer to God or to be a good Muslim. Yeah. And if you don't, in the scripture it says, quote, whoever does not make NEA before dawn would not have fasted. So unless you really feel it in your heart then it doesn't count. Right? So make it count. But everything counts, like a little more during Ramadan, apparently. So this is a very special month during this month, according to the Quran, the gates of heaven are open, so angels are coming freely down to earth to help out. But the gates of hell are locked and all the demons within are chained. So basically the path is cleared for you to really just kind of shed all of your baggage from the year. Your prayers that are done every night are a way to basically clear your conscience of any wrongdoing you've done. Yeah. They should make the demons locked away like twelve months out of the year. Well, here's the thing. There's an answer to that. If the demons were locked at twelve months a year, then it would be all on you. That's the point. During Ramadan, if you do wrongdoing or evil, that is all you. I can take that. I can take that pressure. Can you? Sure, why not? And not to make light of it, I'm just joking around. You know what? I'm cool. So the actual practice of fasting, what happens is you wake up early before dawn if you want to have anything to eat, and you eat a meal called sahur, and that gets you going through the day sun comes up, then you can't eat at all. Right. Or drink water or anything. Yeah, it's got to be like nothing. It's a good point. Then when the sun sets, you break the fast with a meal called Iftar. Not to be confused with ishtar. No, you shouldn't confuse anything with Ishtar. And this is your meal after the sunsets to kind of replenish your body. So you probably start off eating, drinking some sweet drinks. Dates. Yeah, eating dates. And basically that you want to give some energy to your body to get it going again. I was reading an article on the BBC about Ramadan, and it was written by a Muslim scholar and he was basically kind of chastising people who stock up, as he put it, for Ramadan, which is like, okay, we didn't eat all day. We're going to eat like two days worth of food at night. And he was like, that's not the point. You can't do that. Well, it says you can now eat however much you want. Right. You can. But this guy, he's saying like, yes, you can. He's a purist. He was being a purist. Yeah, he was saying, that's not the point. All right, well, so sissy, it's a rich meal because it's got to tide you over, obviously, unless you're just picking out a McDonald's at 200 in the morning, right. And it includes a dessert called a Kanapa. And the Kata if looks sort of like an empanada, from what I can tell. And the konaffa is a cake made of wheat, sugar, honey and raisins and nuts. And it looks sort of like just a sheet cake, like a single layer sheet cake, and they both look quite delicious. I would like to try each. There's other ones, too, like bachelor vase one. That's a good one. Classic. Yeah. So, Chuck, you've got your ishtar iftar. Yeah, I actually did confuse ishtar that's the night time meal, right? Yeah, that's the nighttime meal. You go to bed, you wake up, you have a sahar, and then the day begins where you're fasting. If you are sick, if you are chronically or acutely ill, the Quran specifically exempts you from fasting during Ramadan. It basically says, like, all, I want you to be well, and you need food and water during this time, so just go ahead and take care of yourself. Apparently a lot of Muslims still who are sick fast during Ramadan. Wow. So Muslim doctors or doctors in the Muslim world have had to kind of think on their feet a little more to figure out how to take care of these patients who are like, I'm not putting anything in my mouth the whole time I'm open. So they use like, time release capsules, transdermal patches, that kind of stuff, because you can't take a pill that's breaking your fast, but they don't consider that breaking the fast. I guess as long as it doesn't enter your mouth. Yes, that's good. That's how I took it. It's called a workaround in the modern world, but that's pretty devout. Yeah. Apparently it's most dangerous of all to diabetics, who are most women are trying to fast. Sure, you can give it a shot, but if your blood sugar goes low, you need to break your fast immediately. So you can't even take like, an insulin shot, or you can you could take an insulin shot, but I think you want to try to keep your blood sugar up naturally first. Well, I'm glad they at least take care of the sick. Well, it's specifically exempted in Koran. Well, I guess like the pilgrimage, too, if you're able to. Right. We don't want you to break your back or if you can't afford it, you can't go. Yeah. So fasting is a big deal, and it's symbolic. A, it means that you're not paying attention to your earthly needs. That opens you up to be more inviting for Allah, to have that personal connection with Allah. Right. Frees you up, which is a big deal. And it's also a one two punch because you are supposed to feel hungry and know what it's like for those who maybe can't afford food. A big part of it is the connection with the needy and those who might be going hungry because they can't help it. Right. Because again, it's one of the more charitable times of the year when it's kind of everybody gets a little extra. And then also, Chuck, it also practices self control, which is a good one. Yeah. Cleansing. You're going through Ramadan, you're going along at a pretty steady clip. And then the last ten days, you enter this time where it becomes basically the holy of the holies. As far as the year is concerned. As far as the Muslim calendars concerned. There's this knight called Lalatal Cutter. Did he give you the pronunciation for that one? No, I don't know anything about that. I think I got that one. I'm hoping so. That was the night that Muhammad first started reciting the Quran, as far as I could tell. Okay. I don't think it was the night that the Archangel Gabriel came down and said, hey man, prepare for transmission because you're about to get the holy word of Allah. Right. I think it was the night that he did start saying the Quran and what was eventually transcribed into the Quran. Okay. Okay. It's a very holy night. The thing was, it was not recorded, the date, so no one knows when it was, they just know that it was in the last ten days of Ramadan. Traditionally it's celebrated on the 27th day of Ramadan. And this is the day where you do your prayers. What are the prayers called during Ramadan? The Tarawee. Yeah. You do your nightly prayer on this night. They say that it's worth more than 10 months of worship. Like, if you pray and you're a good devout Muslim on this one night, it just takes care of everything. Wow. Yeah. And then after that, you've got a couple more days of Ramadan and then the end. A big party. Yeah. You fasted that long, it's time to celebrate. When you break the fast, you say the literal translation is, Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest. There is no deity worthy of worship but Allah. And Allah is greatest. Allah is the greatest. And all praise is due to Allah. And this can be said. There's a variety of moments in a Muslim's life on a monthly basis that they will say this. It's not just at the end of Ramadan. It could be battle cry, it could be in times of need. Basically, it's just an expression that nothing is greater than Allah. And when you have completed this really important task at the end of Ramadan, this is what they say. Men are supposed to say it out loud. Women are supposed to just think it. No comment on that. But basically that's the end of Ramadan. And then it's time for the celebration. The ID Alfateir. Right. Which is kind of a party. And everybody says Ed Mubarak, which means a blessed ed. That's right, yeah. Ed means festivity. The tier means breaking the fast. So this is the party where you break the fast. Everybody gets gustied up and dressed to the nine and they go seek out the poor. They chase them down in the streets and then give them money and food. Yeah. They light up their houses with lanterns and stuff. It's very beautiful. It's not Muslim Christmas. I know people in the Western world always like to say, oh, this is like Easter, this is like 4, july is the Cinco de Mayo in Mexico. None of this is true. Yeah, that's true. That is a good thing to point out, Chuck. I'm glad you did that. Yeah. And so what else happens after that with Edelfat? I didn't get from this article how long it lasts. I didn't need one night. Is it like a week long thing? Does it depend on how the economy is doing that year? That's a good question. I didn't get to that either. Well, I'm sure someone will inform us. I hope so. But it is a big party and lots of generosity and gratitude among each other. And like you said, toward the poor, which is pretty great. So in the end, Ramadan accomplishes a bunch of things that's going to strengthen your relationship with Ala. Very important. It's going to enforce patience and determination. I imagine going through a month long sun up to sun down fast. We'll do that. Yeah. I mean, there's got to be times where that month where you're like, I'm having a really bad day and I want a cheeseburger. Yeah, I'm sure. Promotes the principles of sincerity by making you shy away from arrogance and showing off. That's kind of cool. Sure. Like, I, like all these tenants. Promotes good character and truthfulness, which is a good one. Encourage you to do a way of bad habits, I guess. If you've got some bad habits, ramadan would be a good time to wash those away. Sure. Because the whole 30 days theory of starting a new habit plus you're practicing self restraint already anyway. Exactly. Enhances generosity and hospitality. Reinforces the commonality and the feeling of brotherhood with other Muslims, which is a big deal. Observance of the value of time. Which makes sense, because if it were me, I'd be watching that sun go down each night. Plus, also, you're not just wandering around looking for food and stuff in your face. You have more time, so do something with it. Yeah. Makes you value time, I guess. Right. And teaches children to perform acts of like servitude and obedience, be kind to the poor, that kind of thing. Yeah. Basically, get your life back in balance. Get your spiritual life back in balance. Be a good Muslim. That's what it's saying. That's why. So this year, since it's a lunar calendar, it falls on different times of the year every year. And not even like different, like, oh, this year it's July 1, and then next year it's going to be like July 5 or something. It's like in five or six years or something like that. It will be in November. Yes. It's all over the twelve month map. Right, right. So this year, if you're in the United States, the Islamic Society of North America, you said? Yeah, they said, okay, the new moon sighted on July 20, and they use astronomical calculations and there's a big debate over whether that's okay and they're saying yes, of course it's okay. It's actually more precise. You don't have to see it. There's nothing in the Quran that says you have to see it. Right. Other people say no, in the Quran it's when the new moon is sighted, you can't cite it with astronomical calculations. Right. Have to use your paper. So there's a debate. Apparently all this goes away. Apparently all this goes away. Like during once Ramadan on search service, like, okay, whatever, I'm quiet. Right. But there are two arguments on whether to like if you're in North America, that's not Mecca. Sure. So there's different arguments. In one argument for using a local sighting is, well, these are the people that you're celebrating Ramadan with your community. What's one of the reasons for it is to be part of the local community. But then the other argument to use, say, the Mecca sighting where when the new moon appears over Mecca is that it unites Muslims around the world in their Muslimness at the center of it. Those are both good points, but neither one settled in the US. They still use the Islamic Society of North America? Mainly. Is it a hot debate or is it I think it's an ongoing debate. Right. But again, I think once Ramadan starts, everybody says the important thing is that we're all together. Exactly. Yeah. Love it. Pretty interesting stuff and I didn't know much about it. I knew those fasting, but it's good to I've always said one of the coolest classes I took in college in Georgia was my religion class. Yeah, very interesting stuff. I think it's good to open yourself up to learn about stuff. Whether or not you subscribe to any of it knowledge. Just listening to this podcast is a good start. And if August 19 comes around and you have a Muslim friend, make sure to wish them Ed Mubarak because that's Ed Alfatir this year. August 19 in North America. Just remember that's. Right. Okay. That's it for Ramadan. If you want to learn more about it, you can type that into the search bar@housetofworks.com. Ramadan and I said search bar, which means it's time for listen or mail. No it's not, Josh. It is time for DNA. Wow. So this is going to span a couple of shows because it's pretty long. We've had an ongoing list or actually and that's just the one you've compiled so far. I still have like a backlog myself. So let me give you this page and I'll take this one and just sort of mark where you left off and we'll finish up. Wow, there's like three pages. All right, so first of all, Bobby Duke, my man, the woodcarver, awesome stuff. He carved us this handmade stuff you should know that I've promoted before. It's on our TV show and it's like it's really awesome. And if you're into wood carving, you want to support bobby Dukewoodcarving.com is where you can go. Yeah. Okay. I got one for you with the.com sanofsharpshooter.com. S-H-A-R-P-S-H-I-R-T-E-R. Send us some great, awesome t shirts of a man punching a bear. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Giving a bear haymaker, I believe. I love that. We got stickers of that, too. You can find him also at the eastern market in DC. That's right, Bailey, Denmark. You sent us dark chocolate and bacon cookies, which means that you know us and you love us. And they were delicious. And good luck at graduate school, Bailey. Jenny and Bryan sent us some spam flavored macadamia nuts from Hawaii. Gracias. Mine are still sitting up there. I know. I'm waiting for just the right moment. Well, I hope I'm around. Okay. Did you eat yours? I didn't get any. You didn't? No. You've been keeping them hostage. We'll split them. We'll get Jerry one, and we'll eat the rest. We got a book from Samuel Lidl called Gold Star, and we certainly appreciate that. Have not ready yet, but it's on the show. Thanks, Sam. I want to put in a special shout out to our buddies Glenn and Sonya for the bottle of champagne that they sent us, of course, for reaching the million dollar loan to Mark on kiva. And they sent me and Yummy a bottle of champagne to congratulate us for our wedding. Do they have a champagne factory or something? No. Bought it all and sells pillow mob. Everyone has seen the chuck pillow. There was a Josh pillow, but you haven't really I keep this thing in hiding. When I opened the box and I saw that it activated the part of my brain that would be activated if it had been a human head like that's what was activated when I looked in the box. It's scary. Well, I love my chuck pillow. It's made appearances all over my house to freak out Emily, like, in the microwave, because I know she could have put her coffee in there each morning. And sometimes I'll put it in bed when I go out of town and stuff like that. Anyway, pillow mob is I think they're out of Seattle. And they're pretty funny gifts. Yeah, they're awesome. You get one for somebody. What's their website? Pillowmob.com. I'm not sure, but it's pretty easy to find. Search pillow mob. Lazy. I've got one. Illustrator Kevin Cornell sent us his book six penny anthem, volume two. He specifically asked not to be plugged because he didn't want the gift to be disingenuous. Well, TS for you. It's a really good compilation on the comics he's worked on, and you can find it at bearskinrug Co. UK. Kevin Cornell. Heck of a guy. Awesome comics. Agreed. Yeah. Man of leisure for missoula Montana. Send us moonshine. Yes. Like four jars. And you tried it? I tried it at work, at my desk. I know. I watched you do it. It was delicious because I wouldn't touch mine until you drank yours. Yeah, I tried the cinnamon. Yes. Josh was like, Try it, try it. I want to seek to drop dead. And I tried the cinnamon, and, man, it was hot and delicious. I've got the citrus one in this just right. Have you tried it? Yeah. Okay. Let's see. We got a postcard from the Spam Museum. The Spam Museum from Julie G in Austin, Texas. Thank you. We got a book called Swing from Alan Gerstel, and he is a dude who found out that his birth father was Louis Prima. Cool. So he says, yeah, pretty amazing. Jennifer sent us a catball. Those went to you because I don't have cats. I use it all the time. Yeah. Catball.com. Yeah, it's basically what do you know? I'm sorry. Dcatball.com thecatball.com yeah, it's a big hollow open on two sides, sort of fabricy ball that the cats can climb inside. And my cat is just laying it, but otherwise, probably play more active. Cats play. Right. Liz, a little bit sweet as always. Your candy is delicious, and your chocolate is delicious. And we have an invite with next summer in New York to come by and learn how to make chocolate nice. And supposedly they're coming by on their book tour. Oh, yeah. So go to little bit L-I-D-D-A-B-I-T sweets and support them because they're, like, handmaking these delicious things and buy their book, which I don't have the name in front of me, but I'm sure they have the information at the Lid Sweet's website, I would imagine. Claire from Summit, New Jersey, sent us a very nice handwritten letter. Thank you very much for that, Claire. That's a dying art. And I got one more, and then I feel like we should probably continue this another time. Yeah. Maya from the Brooklyn Brewery, remember, they sent us a big box of stuff, including beach towels and stickers and coozies and books, including the Brew Master's Table and Beer School. So I've been drinking Brooklyn Brewery for a long time, since I lived in New Jersey many years ago. Nice. And it's delicious stuff. It is great stuff. If you're from that area, I'm sure you know it well. If not, seek it out. Thanks, guys. Thanks to all of you guys. Yes. More to come. I guess next time, if you send us something and you weren't included, you better listen to the next few podcasts. That's right. If you want to send us something, we're always happy when something comes for us. Always. Especially if it's not a severed head and it just turns out to be a pillow mob. You can get our address by tweeting to us at fysk podcast. You can ask us on Facebook. Comstuffydunow, and you can send us an email saying, hey, where do I send you cool stuff to? Stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other. Topics, visit howstofworks.com. Brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? 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 Alan 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." | ||
41cedba6-53a3-11e8-bdec-ff4d6615f373 | What's the gig economy? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-gig-economy | The gig economy is not new, but it's bigger than ever. Is that a good thing? We'll discuss that today! | The gig economy is not new, but it's bigger than ever. Is that a good thing? We'll discuss that today! | Tue, 11 Jun 2019 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=162, tm_isdst=0) | 41322863 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a global energy company with customers in different places on different systems? So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now data is available anywhere, securely. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change an industry. The Neogen device, developed by RSTC and Nexus 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 Neogenereleavespane.com. Your patience will thank you. Hello there. It's me, Josh, and I just wanted to let you know people living in Minneapolis or with access to Minneapolis, I'm going to be in your city doing my solo show, The End of the World or How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love Humanity. It's a gas, and it's pretty interesting, too. So on June 19, I'll be at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis. And the next night, I'll be at the Miracle Theater in Washington, D. C so, come see me. Go to themiricaltheater.com or theparkwaytheater.com for tickets. 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 is our guest producer today. Dylan. Yeah, Dylan. It's been a minute. Yes. We picked Dylan up by advertising on TaskRabbit saying that we needed a guest producer today, and here he is. That's not true. But it could be Chuck. It could be. That is true. It is true. The reason it could be is because whether you know this or not, Charles, we are living smack dab in the middle of what's called a gig economy. Sure. Partially. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of people are blaming the recession. And I think that's definitely part of it. Like, there's an abundance of people who didn't have jobs starting in late 2008, early 2009, and it's kind of become the tradition to give people jobs, but not give them full time jobs because there's a lot of things you can get around if you're an employer, as we'll talk about. So the gig economy has developed as a part of the recession, but it's also developed because there's been a lot of tech, there's been a lot of slow pace government playing catch up, and there's an abundance of workers, but it's nothing new. The idea of kind of being paid as an independent contractor working to fulfill a particular task and just getting paid for the task, which is kind of the basis of the gig economy, that's actually pretty old. From what I read, prior to the Industrial Revolution, that's basically how most people made a living. Unless you were like, a highly skilled crafts person. Right. Like a brewer or a blacksmith or something like that. A smithy. A smithy, yeah. I mean, things really changed at a certain point where it went from that to you get a job for a company and you work for that company for 45 years, and then you retire for that company. Right. And they take care of you in retirement and while you're working for them. And that was really how things went for a long, long time for our grandparents generation and even to a certain degree, our parents generation. Yeah. And things really changed again. And now we kind of are back in this place where the gig economy can mean a lot of things. Technically, any freelancer, like when I used to work as a film production assistant, that's technically part of the gig economy. Yeah. Because you were paid for the gig, you weren't a full time employee with the company. Right? Yeah. But when I hear gig economy these days, and I think most people associate the modern 2019 usage of it, you kind of think of the tech industry and you think of being a driver for a ride share company or working or selling stuff on Etsy or working for TaskRabbit or something like that. Yeah. It's basically synonymous with tech platforms that connect people to consumers directly. And gig economy, I think that's a really good point when you use the term gig economy yeah. That basically describes this modern incarnation of it. But gig work, like you were just saying, it's been around for a very long time. And remember all those temp services like Manpower I had tempted for a little while. Okay, so that's gig work, too. Basically, if you're a dog walker and you go put a sign on a street pole or a light pole at the corner and you've got, like a little tear offs for your phone numbers yes. Street poles. That's basically working in the gig economy. Now, if you took that street pole with the little flyer that you made and swapped it out for an app, that's basically what we're living with right now. Yeah. So here's a stat for you. There are all kinds of stats for the gig economy, but here's one. In 2005, the gig economy was about 10% of the US. Workforce, and just ten years later, that had grown to about 16%. And then just one year later, in 2016, 24% of Americans reported earning some kind of money from what they call the digital platform economy. And that's what we're talking about with, like, ride share or airbnb and TaskRabbit and stuff like that, right. That's a lot of people. And we'll get into other stats later about whether or not these are people that are doing this little thing on the side. Like, I work my day job, then I go drive for Uber at night. Or basically. More and more people are doing this as their fulltime job without the benefits of being full time employees and from the very sparse number of studies that are actually conducted on the gig economy and the ramifications it holds. Those are the people. The people who work full time in gig economy jobs. Especially tech platform jobs. They tend to be the most vulnerable as far as workers go. Yeah. So there's really a few well, there are three parts to this. There's the platform companies that are I mean, it's kind of funny, I guess it's genius in a way, but all they're doing is connecting people. Yeah. They're replacing those old temp agencies, but you don't have to go in and fill out stuff. You just log on, create a profile and start. So that's one appealing part of it too. Yeah. So what they do is they're going to draw that direct line between you, between the consumer and the producer. So everyone who's ever done a ride share knows you just click on the little thing and you can pay through the website and they get whatever percentage of money they get. 90%, I think. Is it 90%? No, the technology platform gets money and obviously the gig worker gets money. Right. And all they're doing is facilitating that connection. Right. But they're also one of the things that these apps can do that is totally new and revolutionary is that they can fulfill demand. They can connect supply and demand in real time. Like, you know, when you hail like a ride app or hail a ride through an app. I think it's the way all the millennials by the street bowl. Right. You have just entered like this world where you are saying, I need a ride right now. And they say, oh, we have a car near you right now. Let's send this person over. Like it's real time demand that's being fulfilled. Whereas if it were just that person who is in a car and saying that I could use some extra scratch, I want to take you somewhere, what are they going to do? Like, just drive down the sidewalk and be like, do you need a ride somewhere right now? No. Okay. Do you need to ride? Think about how much time that takes off of their plate. That's really the role that the platform performs is connecting consumers with producers. Yes. And as far as being a gig worker, there are a couple of big categories. It's either sort of if you don't necessarily have a college degree, you might be on the lower income side of a gig worker, which could be someone who delivers something to your home or one of these services where you can call a handyman to come over and do something like cut weeds in your front yard. Sure. Or it can be on the very high side. I got a list of the highest paying gig rates and the very top one is something you probably know a little about from your end of the world research. But deep learning jobs. Oh, really? $15 an hour. Wow. Yeah. What is that, like consulting or something? I think it's just any kind of AI specialization got you. Where that's the kind of rate you can command on an hourly basis. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yes. Blockchain was number two at $87 an hour. Robotics, $77 an hour. Number four was penetration testing jobs. What is that? Penetration testing jobs. Give me your best guess. I want to play a game. Like allowing yourself to be punctured by stuff or shot at. That bullet works. They needle sharp. Give me some money. No, it obviously sounds dirty, but all it is is it's like security to see if your security can be penetrated. I got you. That makes sense. That would be a cool gig. You just get hired on to just mess with somebody's cyber security and find weaknesses, right? Yeah. But then it goes all the way down to number ten, which was instagram marketing at $31 an hour. Wow. That sounds made up, but wow. It sort of does. But those are the highest paying gigs. There was one film industry job in their final cut. Pro editor. $37 an hour. I could do that. So those are on the high side. But what are these drivers making? Is it something like $12 an hour on average? That's the national average after expenses, but before whatever taxes they need to pay, and they do need to pay taxes. This is a hard lesson that some gig workers are finding, is that this isn't like tax free money. Just because the money is not so great doesn't mean it's not tax free. You still have to pay taxes on this. You still have to file, like, self employment tax in some areas, some cities, some counties, some states, you have to have a business license. There's a lot of hidden costs that a lot of people don't know about. And because, as I was saying before, governments from the local level up to the federal level have been so slow to pivot, I guess in Silicon Valley corporate speak to this new reality of tech platform apps that the gig economy functions on. There's a lot of people out there who just are unlicensed, who aren't paying taxes, and who hopefully will never find out the hard way that they did, but maybe find out the easy way, like through us, and then start and don't have to pay anything for back. Yeah. There are certain municipalities and is that right? Municipalities. Man, you nailed municipalities. The only way it could have been better, Chuck, is if you've done it with a horribly stereotypical Italian accent. Do it. No. Did you see that guy right in and said I sound like a cartoon chef on TV? And I was like, oh, well, that's right, yeah. I was like, you didn't think I was trying to pull off a real accent, did you? It's what I'm going for. I wanted you to know what it sounded like to hear Chef Boyer do you know? Yeah, basically. So a lot of counties now are getting involved, though, because, well, they say they want to help them transition into the gig economy and learn to put away money to pay taxes and stuff. What they're really probably doing is making sure that they pay their taxes right. And it's not just counties that are getting into it. States are the federal government's, kind of. But it looks like it's starting to become a patchwork of state regulations. And we'll talk about that in a minute. But first, Chuck, why don't we take a break? Let's do it. 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Don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness, new episodes of Marvel Studios Ms. Marvel, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series, and zombies. Three plus don't miss National Geographics. America the beautiful. From the awardwinning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. So we were saying that the governments are starting to get into this finally, years on, basically. I mean, the gig economy itself is many, many years old by now, and they're just now starting to pass legislation. But not all of it is, like, on the county level, putting up educational posters saying, hey, you're a small business. You need a license to drive for Uber or whatever here. It's not just that. There's also a real frequently overlooked component of the tech platforms that connect consumers and producers and that is that their profit margins are based largely on getting around labor laws that have been established throughout the 20th century and that are just outdated. The tech platforms, the apps that connect people, were built up around those laws and they skirt the law very plainly. I mean, there have been court rulings and federal agency rulings to say, yes, they're right, these aren't employees, these are independent contractors. And so they don't get overtime, they don't get unpaid, or they don't get paid vacation time. There's all this stuff. Insurance, health insurance is a big one. So that's a huge chunk of revenue or outlay that the companies like Uber or test driver or whoever don't have to shell out. That means that's profit, more profits for them. And it's also something that their competitors, like cab companies say have to pay. So it's one way that the cab companies lose against the ride hailing apps. But the people who are out there still need health insurance, they still need health care, they still need food. And so the companies that make these platforms tend to kind of offload the responsibility that used to be on the company's part onto local governments. And so what local governments are trying to figure out is, well with this influx of gig economy workers saying like, I need Medicare or I need food stamps or something like that, how can we deal with this? And there have been a couple of interesting proposals, at least, for how to get the companies to pay for benefits that companies traditionally have paid for, but in this new gig economy, yeah, I thought this one was really interesting. Portable benefits. So if you've ever changed jobs, or if you change jobs a lot on a full time basis, you know that it can be a big pain. Your benefits are always changing. Sometimes they're better, sometimes they're worse, but they're bound to be different. And that's just a hassle the idea of portable benefits, basically, that you own as an employee. So when you go to a new job as a gig worker, you take your benefits with you and basically just plug it into their system and say, well, you are now going to contribute your employer portion to my portable benefits. Yeah, it's kind of like the difference between a, an IRA, right? The IRA is yours no matter where you go. The 401K is between you and your employer. Imagine if all you ever had was an IRA, but your employer paid into that, but it was for health benefits rather than retirement. So it was always yours. But just depending on who you worked for, part of what you got paid was an additional premium that was a contribution to your benefits, whether it's a retirement package or dental or vision or health or whatever. And it was always you. It was associated with you, the worker, but everybody from each task paid into that. It's a great idea and apparently it works, too. Yeah, and I'm not super sure. The other idea is that of a dependent contractor rather than an independent contractor. And that's basically if you receive the majority of your income from one company, then they need to do things like pay your health or contribute toward your health insurance. Right. What I don't get is what's the difference between that and being a full time employee? There's nothing. It's basically just calling Uber out on its BS and saying, these are your employees, dude, without having to say, hey, federal government, you guys need to revise the independent contractor laws, because this is different. These are states or local government saying you want to do business here. These people are dependent contractors and you have to provide them with benefits. Sorry, that's just the way it goes. And if you get a big enough county or city or state and the app or the platform wants to do business there, they will do this, and it stinks. And you have to have different people who are experts in the different states you're doing business in. But eventually, if enough different states have slightly different laws that are all to the same effect, companies like Uber are going to go to the federal government and be like, can you please pass a law that says that we have to provide benefits for these people? And maybe they're not the greatest benefits. We don't want to give away the farm, but it will be more cost effective for us to just have one standard to adhere to nationwide than it will be to have 50 different laws that we have to adhere to nationwide. And how do they do that? Through lobbyists paying tons of money. It's true, but in this case, it would benefit people. But it's a ground up push from the local and state governments, basically agitating for the federal government to take action. Yeah, I mean, Uber certainly had its share of missteps along the way. And even if you cast those aside and not to pick on them, let's just talk about any app based gig economy or gig job or whatever. I guess gig is all you need to say, really. It's a mouthful, isn't it? You can't help but just picture a back room board room in Silicon Valley with these dudes just saying, like, here's what we'll do. We'll develop this app that connects people, and we take a cut and we're going to have tens of thousands of drivers all over the country working for us. And then the other person goes, yeah, but man, do you know how expensive that is with payroll and this and that and insurance and everything? Oh, no, the best part is they're not employees. Right. In the very first meeting, that was the big, like, oh, I get it. And they all laughed. I'm sure the room went breathless. It was literally world changing. I mean, that's the state of affairs now. And yeah, it had to start somewhere. I'm not sure where it started, but it started somewhere. But like you said earlier, and they've proven it with financials we're not just saying this stuff that is the reason they are profitable is because they're not having to pay this dough. Right. And unfortunately, it's also the reason why people who rely on gig work full time to make ends meet and who don't have any kind of higher education and are not skilled workers, that's why they are increasingly turning to taxpayer funded public assistance for things like health care and food and basically making the ends meet. Because from, like I said, the few studies that there are out there, what they're finding is that there's a segment of people who work in the gig economy who cannot make ends meet with gig work. And it's not just to pick on the platforms and the apps that make up the backbone of the gig economy, because it says a lot that if there are people in the vast majority of people who do gig work I think you said earlier, they don't work full time. They do it to supplement income, but they're not supplementing income. I saw somewhere somebody said they're not supplementing income to save up to go to Hawaii. They're doing it to buy medicine and food and pay utility bills. So that actually says a lot about the state of work in general, not just gig work, because if you have a regular job, whether it's part time or full time, and you have to have a side hustle, which, by the way, is a term that's been around since 1950, I saw side hustle. Yeah. There's a problem with work in general, you know what I'm saying, where you cannot make ends meet just with your regular full time job or even a couple of part time jobs. So you have to do gig work, too. But the people who just do gig work, those are the people who are the most vulnerable. And they usually, if you're a driver, you make about 1190 an hour. That's the national average. Yes. Here's some stats for you. The Federal Reserve did a report, and from 2018, 58% of full time gig workers said they would have a hard time coming up with a $400 emergency bill. Like if they had to go to the hospital and pay $400, they couldn't cover that. Nearly 60% of them. Yeah. And that's compared to 38% of people in just the regular economy, not the gig economy. Right. And they did surveys that said 5% of people said that gig work. And this is out of 11,000 people who did gig work at all, 5% of them said it was their main source of income, which is a pretty small amount. But that's growing, I think, between 2016 and 2021, they're projecting it to grow from 3.2 million people to close to 10 million. People, like working gig economy jobs. I saw somewhere 60 million fast Company predicted something like 60 million Americans are going to be working in the gig economy by 2020, which is far and away the highest number I saw. Yeah, man, it's crazy, but yeah, I got another stat for you. I saw, I think, in Barrons, I believe it's Barons the gig economy. Gig work accounted for 94% of net employment growth between 2005 and 2015. So that means that all the new jobs that came in and all the old jobs that went away, 94% of the jobs that accounted for the growth of work in America were gig work. That's astounding 94%. Yeah. I mean, I feel like every time I go to publix, 25% of the people in there are shopping for other people. Yeah, for sure. You can tell by their T shirts. Yes, they wear the shirts. And Emily's done that a couple of times. Two busy working parents. I can't remember the service that we use, but I don't like it because I like to chop for my own stuff. I do, too. I don't want people picking out my food. Yes. When they bring the bag, you hold up an orange, you're like, did you touch this? It's not even that, it's just you want to pick out your own stuff, at least I do. I'm just teasing. I like running errands myself, too, and it feels like it's never right, too. They'll be like, oh, well, I couldn't find the thing, so I got this. It's not what I asked for. I saw Questlove hadn't had peanut butter, cat and Crunch in, like, forever. And he posted something, I think, on Instagram where he ordered some from TaskRabbit or something, and the guy brought him regular cap and Crunch and a jar of peanut butter. He threw it down the hall of his hotel, which I thought was a little much, but it was a pretty good ending to the slideshow. It might be pretty good, though. I had something very heavy to move in my home recently that was just sitting there because I couldn't get a friend over and I had never heard of TaskRabbit. And someone said, you should try TaskRabbit, and I did look up and I was like, you get a young, strong man to come over and lift something heavy for you in like an hour's notice. I was like, Man, I feel like I should probably just get this done. And I got distracted and didn't do it and was able to get friends over, but I didn't even know it existed and that you could get that kind of work. Yeah, I think Task driver you can use about anything. There's something in the UK. There's a site called Fiverr. F-I-V-E-R-I think I've heard of that. I think. And all Tasks on it are for $5. Whatever you want the person to do, they'll either do it or won't do it, but the price you pay is $5. So it's like small, quick, easy tasks supposed what's worth $5? Like you'll get my mail? Sure. See if this needle is sharp. I want to do a puncture test on you. Back to that one again, I guess we should mention the strike that happened earlier this month. We're recording this in May 2019. Just very recently, there were thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers who went on strike not just in May, but kind of all year long. This has sort of been brewing, I think, and it sent Uber stock prices down for one dude by two thirds. They started out with $120,000,000,000 valuation and ended up, at the end of the day, I think, at 40 billion. Yeah. And that's where this whole idea of is it exploitation because the courts have roundly kind of said, like, no, you can't unionize. You're not employees. Right. And these are in some of the most liberal courts in the land. Right. You're independent contractors, so you don't get overtime, you can't unionize. There's all sorts of stuff that you just can't do because you're an independent contractor, and that's slowly starting to change. Yeah, but the whole idea of this strike was they're basically saying, you have intentionally misclassified us as non employees. And I'm sure they're like, yeah, that's exactly right. Right. I think that's, like, in our terms of use that we intentionally misclassify you. Well, they're they probably say, we have intentionally classified you as what you are, which is a non employee. But the drivers are saying they're misclassified, obviously. Right. So there's a big lawsuit. A few hundred thousand Uber drivers sued Uber, and they very recently settled, I think in March with like 13,600 of them, and they were given $20 million to split between them, which sounds like a lot, but it's actually like, less than $1,500 a driver for basically saying, we have been underpaying you. The other like 300 something thousand drivers didn't get squat because they all signed an arbitration clause in their agreement, which you should never sign if you have any say in it whatsoever, because it basically says, I can't sue, and any time I have a problem with you, we will go to a mediator who you pay to decide whether my claim has any value or not. So it's a terrible thing to sign. But on top of that, if you are a full time gig economy worker, you basically don't have a choice. And the company you're working with as an independent contractor knows that. So there's almost certainly going to be an arbitration clause. But that's a really good example of what happens when you sign an arbitration clause. You lose out on the settlement because you said that you are waiving your right to a trial. Right. And aside from stuff like health insurance, the drivers are angry because Uber in major cities has been cutting driver pay rates because they're trying. To get their bottom line down and say, hey, look, everyone. Look at our bottom line. How attractive is this? So, like I was saying, this is slowly starting to change thanks to regulation. And we'll talk a little more about that after this break. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. 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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, Chuck, New York really kind of changed things recently. That one study or a study I don't know if we talked about it yet. The study with 11,000 people was conducted by the Fed. Yeah, there's another study conducted by, I think, UC Berkeley in the New School, and they basically found, like most, I think, 58% of drivers driving for ride hailing apps in New York City. Not just Uber, but all of them, especially the big four Via, Juneau, Lyft and Uber, 58% of them work full time. So they're basically independent cab drivers who are not licensed cabbies. 50%, I believe, have families that they're supporting with that. They're working for about 1190 an hour, and 40% of them qualified for Medicaid and 18% qualified for food stamps. And this is shocking enough to the city government of New York that they passed the country's first and maybe the world's first, as far as I know, minimum wage law for ride hailing app independent contractors, and it's actually more than the minimum wage for New York in general. Yeah, I mean, basically, the New York came out and said, first of all, Uber, they could fix this. If they just had a very small fare adjustment that passengers would probably not care about, then they could pay them fairly and increased driver pay. But since they're not going to do that, we're going to step in. And I believe it was at this past January, they were required to start paying drivers, after expenses, about $17.22 an hour, which is about $5 more per hour than the previous almost $12 per hour average. Right. So that's a big deal. And, I mean, that was a huge win for the independent contractors who work for ride hailing apps, at least in New York. But also it set a precedent across the country, basically saying, like, yes, if you are a big enough town, you have the clout to look out for these workers who are being exploited by the tech platforms that they're partnering with as independent contractors. Yeah. And actually today, as we record this, the State Assembly in California passed legislation that required employers to recognize gig workers as employees with what they call the Dynamics. The California State Supreme Court said in May 2018 that this three part test called the Dynamics, would be used to determine if contractors qualify as employees. So to be exempt from labor requirements, an employer would be required to prove that, one, its workers have complete control over how services are provided. So, in other words, Uber can't give a minimum amount of hours that you have to work or say you have to drive every Tuesday or whatever. I'm not sure if they even do that, but no, I don't think they do. And I think that's part of their argument why they're not employers. Because the worker sets their own schedule. All right? And number two, the services provided are not related to the employer's main business. So that's a big one. Yeah. Because that rules out all the ride shares. Right. Unless they say that their main business is app development. Right, yeah, that is I'm not sure if that's a loophole. Yeah, I don't know about that one either. And then number three, the worker is engaged in an independently established role. So this is a big deal because a lot of states look to California because this is where a lot of the modern gig economy was born. And this is sort of the first big California legislation that's gone down the road. Yeah. Now that is a big deal because that's their home court making laws against them. Yeah. So that definitely kind of indicates like a turning tide. And again, it's not just like, governments looking out for their citizens, although I'm sure that's part of it, but it's also governments looking out for their own bottom line because those citizens are having to come and say, I need healthcare again. Right. Really important, frequently overlooked point. Yeah. But despite all that, and I mean, you said it's easy to pick on Uber, they're kind of a model for this kind of thing, but they're certainly not the only ones. But also when you just focus on that, you miss out on the other aspect of the gig economy, which is that it's a double edged sword for some people, freelancing and gig economy has allowed them to basically pursue their dreams and become quite successful at doing what they want to do on their own terms, on their own schedule. And there are supposedly a pretty decent amount of people out there who are doing it that way. But usually they're highly educated and they work in a craft or an artistic or kind of elite field. Specialized field? Yeah. Like AI or robotics. Sure. Or if you are a consultant of some sort, especially a very specialized consultant, you don't have to spend the time and money going out and drumming up business for yourself. You can go to platforms like Upwork and find people who are looking for the stuff that you do way easier than before. And that's a huge benefit of this gig economy. It's become way easier to find work, whether it's driving for a ride hailing app or being a marketing consultant from top to bottom, it's easier to find work than ever. Yeah, but it's also the people are in these situations a lot of times because they were unable to find the job that they wanted on a fulltime basis. Right. It's a very tough nut to crack because even in ride shares, when you get in a car, nine times out of ten, my driver is very happy doing what they do and they always say pretty roundly, like, yeah, it's great, man, it's set my own hours. And it sounds like I don't know if they're encouraged to say these things. Right. Yeah, but it sounds like an ad for when you sign up because they kind of pair it exactly the things that they try and entice you with, which is you're your own boss and you set your own hours. You only drive when you want to, but that is the deal. And no one's forcing them to go do this and you are putting money in their pocket. I mean, I always tip super big that's I think the only thing within your control or not use these apps at all if you think they're evil. Right. Which is another way to look at it, for sure. But then all of a sudden there's a lot of people that depend on that money that are being heard. It's tough. No, it is for sure. That is another thing about the gig economy, too, is you can say like, well, I mean, you're having trouble making ends meet, I get to hire you and have an impact on you being able to make ends meet. Right. It's such a first world thing to be like, oh, forget all platforms and apps because they exploit workers while they also help people make money where they otherwise couldn't. So it is very much a double edged sort. There's definitely exploitation, but there's also certainly an uplift of the middle class that wasn't happening before. There's also been an uptick in New York taxi driver suicides. Really? Yeah. That have long been blamed on ride share because it's put such a dent in taxi cab income, driver incomes. So I looked into that a little bit and then found out this whole other world about the whole deal with the taxi medallions. Yeah, like people buy the medallions as an investment and then they lease out the license to cabbies. Right? Yeah. We need to do a full show on that because it is way more involved than I thought. And I was going to talk about it some here, but it deserves its own episode. Right, but they're saying that that is a big part of the problem for the suicide rate as well. It's sort of both of those things contributing. Right. So taxi medallions, look for that one. Okay. That's the deal. There's two other things in New York that I want to point out, actually. Two other platforms, two other things you want to point out. The state building is very nice. Right? That's one. And take a ride on the subway. Right. There's a cleaning service called my clean. That's like an app where they started out with the normal Silicon Valley Valley model where they just have independent contractors and they actually converted and started hiring their contractors on as employees. And there's another one called Hello Alfred which is kind of like a personal assistant, a team of personal assistance that you can basically involve in your life as much as little as you want. What's it called? Hello, Alfred. It's just in New York, and it's only in certain buildings in New York from what I can tell. But they'll do everything from like keep your plant alive to walk your dog, to do your grocery shopping, to pick out clothes for you to have your shoes repaired, whatever, just basically keeping your life in order for you. But because they try to anticipate the things their customers need, they realize that they need employees. They need people they can't have turnover and frequent training and introducing their customers to new people. They need like people who are going to be there for the long haul. So they started out having employees too. And that really kind of underscores a big reason why having a full time employment is preferable to gig employment, especially if you're a company, because there's less turnover, there's less training involved. And usually the worker is a lot happier when they have a steady full time gig and then that's their only job and they get two weeks paid vacation every year or more if you're in Europe. And that has a benefit for the company because that's the person who's communicating with the public or making the stuff. And they don't hate their life or their job. So they're just producing better. Too. If you want to look at the Ickiest economic terms. Yeah, that's interesting. I thought so, too. Hello, Alfred. Yeah, I think he just became their spokesman. You got anything else? No. I do have one more thing. Chuck, you ready? This whole peer to peer platform thing reminded me we have Akiva team, and I went and checked on it. I did that just the other day. So you saw what, like, the big number? We're touching on total donations. I think you should take this one. Well, you had the most recent number. It was close to six mil the other day. Yeah. Still is really creeping up on $6 million in total loans loaned out. Dude, it had been a while, too. That's so funny. We both had that same thought, man. That's really something else. Yeah. So congratulations to the stuff you should know. Kiva team. There are people joining. I saw people joined yesterday, so it's wide open if you want to learn more about it. To search kiva kiva and stuff you should know. And not only will our Kiva page come up, but some blog post we wrote about in the past come up, too, which is hilarious and quaint. All right, well, since I said quaint, Chuck, it's time, I think, for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this ten Pan Alley follow up. I enjoyed that episode. Me, too. Hey, guys, if you asked me what Ten Pan Alley was prior to listening to this episode, I would have said somewhere in New York where music started to be popular. And that's about all I can tell you. And guys, I graduated with a bachelor of music in music education. What? It's not that I'm so far out of college either that I don't remember Music History. I'm only 25, and I'm finishing up my third year teaching orchestra to fourth, fifth and 6th graders. Didn't even really know much about Tim panel. I know the last semester of Music History in college had to cover late Romantic to present day, which is over a century worth of music. This is so much more interesting than the one slide in music history class at 08:00 A.m.. I am one of many listeners sitting in the DC metro traffic, so thank you for teaching me new things every day. And that is from Consuelo civilia, not Savilla. No, she wrote back even. Wow. There are two LS. Yeah, she said this is the Filipino pronunciation, not the Spanish. Got you. So thank you, Consuelo. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Consuelo. Glad to know we are rounding out your education even after you graduated. Yeah, well, it's kind of the purpose of the show, isn't it? I think so well, if you want to let us know what you think, the purpose of Stuff You Should Know is we're amorphous and wide open, so let us have it. You can go to steffygino.com and check out our social links, or you can send us a good old fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuffpodcasts@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, you know you're the best pet mom when you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistics made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics. For digestive health, find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com are you looking for an escape? An immersive getaway experience? Well, there's a place for all your wildest dreams. Perhaps you enjoy wrapping along the paperboy, or you believe that blessed be the fruit. Or you dream of one day smashing a glass whilst yelling who's a. 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 Hulucom for plan details." | |
Was Atlantis a real place? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/was-atlantis-a-real-place | While the search for Atlantis has been pushed to the fringes since the 19th century, archaeologists have quietly pursued cities that may have inspired Plato to fabricate the mythical city. It looks like a team in Greece has found it. | While the search for Atlantis has been pushed to the fringes since the 19th century, archaeologists have quietly pursued cities that may have inspired Plato to fabricate the mythical city. It looks like a team in Greece has found it. | Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:14:30 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=14, tm_min=14, tm_sec=30, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=101, tm_isdst=0) | 30837524 | 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. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from Housetofworks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark back in the saddle again with Charles W, chuck Bryant We share a horse. We do. I have the horse side car. Actually. It's a small mule that's attached to your horse and I have to lean into the corners. It's more of a hay cart than a side car. Okay, back in the saddle, meaning we are back from Texas and back in the recording booth for the first time in two weeks. Yeah, it feels nice, dude, to be back in this smelly little dimly lit room. Yeah. Strangely, at least it's not like blood colored. Man, that would be weird. So, Chuck yes? I guess we should get started, huh? You don't have an intro? Well, I mean, I was going to use the intro. It's the intro. Go ahead then. Have you ever heard of a place called Atlantis? I have. You read like, the triangle, the vacation getaway no where like Britney Spears stayed for free for a month when they opened to try to generate a buzz. Wow. I'm sure they were packing them in after that. I think they have been. I don't know. I can't discuss the financial estate of Atlantis, the resort in the Bahamas, but what I can discuss is Atlantis, the possibly fictitious place. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and go on record as fictitious. Are you? Well, after reading this and by the way, this was awesome, I had no idea about the secret surprise that's coming. Which one? Well, the other place. The real place. Got you. Okay. Which I meant to ask you before how we pronounce that, but we'll just get to that and I'll let you say it first. Okay. But yeah, I'm going to say it's fictitious and based on that. Okay. I think I kind of go with that too. Mainly because one of the things about Plato is he was the only person ever mentioned atlantis. Plenty of people have mentioned it after him, but it was based on what he said. Right. Which kind of makes you think like, oh, okay, this is an allegory, probably. It's about wickedness. Yeah. What was his book in Tommy's? Yeah, that was the book. Right. Where he first mentioned it. Yeah. And it was written in 360 BC. And Tomeus is one of his dialogues, I believe. And Plato has a thing where he likes to take real places, real people, real events, and then just kind of use some literary license. Sure. He's a philosopher. Okay. Yeah. He was not a documentarian of real things. Right. But along the way somewhere, that idea got lost. Right, right. So, for example, Sodom and Gomorrah, I would wager that a lot of people think that Sodom and Gomorrah, I love this guy. Something really happened and it was taken eventually. It was used as allegory that these people were punished by God. Right. But really, something really bad happened to him and somebody decided, hey, this is a great chance to use this as a life lesson for everyone. So there's a really strong possibility that Plato did the same thing because as he describes Atlantis, they had gotten kind of hubristic, I guess. It does mimic other things in the Bible, that's for sure. It does. And the great god Poseidon, who is the god of the sea end of earthquakes, decided that he was kind of tired of the people of Atlantis, which was the seat of a cult that worshipped him. Right. So he using the techniques at hand, he created an earthquake that generated a tsunami that sunk Atlantis beneath the waves. Lost forever. Yeah. I think the quote from the book was it sank into the sea in a single day and night of misfortune. Yeah, that's putting it lightly. And he placed it too, didn't he, actually? Where? Of Spain, the Pillars of Hercules, which is now called the Strait of Gibraltar. And there's people looking in Spain now, right? Yeah. They still think legitimate. Right. Bona fide archaeologists. They're fun. Yeah. So Plato, I guess part of the problem is he's saying, like, yes, this was at the Strait of Gibraltar. Right. In his parlance at the time. He's saying is that the strategy brought her. The problem is Atlantis was this magnificent ring city and it had, like, fantastic technology and architecture and it was just an amazingly advanced place. But he also says that this has happened 9000 years ago. Right? Right. 9000 years before him. So they were aliens. Well, that is thanks to a guy named Ignatius Donnelly. Yeah. So this guy so Plato writes about Atlantis, goes about his business. Right. And apparently nobody back then took it seriously. That's like, modern man were the first people to say maybe there wasn't Atlantis. Yeah. Back in the day, everyone's like, no, it's just Plato going off again. Right. It was this one guy, ignatius Donnelly. Oh, he's the one. He can lay it all at his feet. Jerk. Because in 1882, he published a book called Atlantis the Anti deluvian World. And in it he's saying, okay, the Azores. Man, I wish I put that one up. I think that's right. The islands in the middle of the Atlantic, that's actually the highest peaks of the highest mountaintops of Atlantis. And wait, there's more. The incredibly advanced civilizations in Egypt and high up in the Andes of Peru, pre Inca, those were colonies set forth by Atlantis that survived because they weren't there for the sinking of Atlantis. So basically, we have civilization to think we have Atlantis to thank for civilization. The problem is all this is totally unfounded, but it just kicked off the occultization. Atlantis. Yeah. It's been placed everywhere from South China Sea, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Canary Islands, Antarctica, supposedly Switzerland. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn't chase that one down, but I saw somewhere that somebody said Switzerland. Let's go ahead and say everywhere. Yeah, everywhere. Atlantis is everywhere. There's Edgar Casey, who is known as the sleeping prophet of Virginia Beach, who's a psychic. He said that Atlanta stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Spain. Yeah. And that the Bermuda Triangle. There are a lot of if there is mystery in the Bermuda Triangle, it's due to Atlantis energy crystals. I will say, though, he said it would rise off Bimini. And then when they discovered the Bimini Road, everyone was like, See there? Yeah. And then it's too bad Cherry is not here because she's like, I dove the Bimini Road. Yeah. Guest producer Mattie is in the house. Hey, Matt. We didn't mention that. So once Donnelly comes along and kind of takes up the mantle of searching for Atlantis and making it as far out as possible, it just becomes more and more the domain of, like, fringe dwellers. Right? Sure. But that is not to say that there aren't legitimate archaeologists searching for something like Atlantis. That doesn't mean that there isn't something that inspired Plato. Right. And we probably know what that is, actually. That's where my money is. Yes. And now you're going to make me say it, even though I asked you to say it. Heliki. Yeah. Okay. Haleki spelled he like yeah, I saw some weird pronunciation things that I didn't understand when I looked it up, so I just figured I'd hear it from you. That was Greek to you. It was indeed. So, yeah, the cat's out of the bag as far as I'm concerned. It is. Heliki. The podcast, it was a super interesting story, though. This was well documented by lots of people. Not like a single source like Plato. Single made up source. Exactly. And it was a lost Greek city. It suffered a fate much like Atlantis supposedly did. Yeah. So Haleeki was this very powerful city in ancient Greece and the Gulf courtesy very nice in that area. Yeah, I imagine. Have you been? No, I want to go. I just do. It was powerful enough to have its own colonies. So imagine if Atlanta had colonies in like, Germany. This is very much the case for Haliki. And it was the seat of power for a twelve city league called the Akian League, which is kind of like the Confederacy in the south. Yes. Would that be like having a bar in a different city? That's like your home bar. It's usually football based. There's, like, a New York jet spa in Atlanta. There's a Pittsburgh Steeler Spa in Atlanta. Maybe. Is that the same thing? I thought it was more like the capital of a number of states. Okay, I don't think it's the same thing, but I like that analogy. I'm just being coy. So the Achieve League. I now just realized that I missed something. That's a joke. Yeah. So Haleeki is the city or the center of the Ikea League. It controlled like the shipping around there. By the time Plato came about, it was hundreds of years old already. Yeah. Very active port. They had their own coinage. Yeah. And it looked very cool too. I looked up the coins, like dolphins and poseidon and not pitchforks. What do they call the trident? Trident, yeah. And it had Poseidon on the coin because this is like the seat of a cult of Poseidon. Just like Atlantis. Exactly. And it had a very prominent, well known statue of Poseidon. Just like Atlantis. Right? That's right. So the similarities are starting to mount up. They are. And they really mount in a big way in December of 373 BC. When the townspeople started noticing, wait a minute, all these small animals are scurrying for the hills? And that's never a good sign because we did talk about in another podcast how animals can sense underground trimmers. I had to have been in how earthquakes work. Yes, I think that's what it was. And sure enough, earthquake came in the middle of the night on the fifth day, and that was followed by an enormous wave. And just like that, overnight, just like Atlantis, it was submerged to the bottom of the sea. Well, not the bottom, but no, and not necessarily the sea either, as we'll see. This is getting more mysterious. So this really happened. It was a pretty well known event, I guess we should say. There were no survivors. Like people from the surrounding cities got together like a search party, a rescue party that set out at dawn just a few hours after this happened. I guess. Well, I think they walked as far as they couldn't be, like, oh yeah, there's now like a sea where there used to be this city gone. There was no one there. Apparently the only thing visible were the tops of the trees in Poseidon sacred grove. That's creepy. I would guess olive trees. Yeah. And there were ten ships and this will come up later, too, from Sparta that were docked there in the port, and they were gone as well. Just gone. And that will play an important part here coming up soon. Yeah. So imagine, like, there's a city. It's a very powerful, rich city, and you live out in the boondocks, and you just know something happened. There was an earthquake. So you go to check on the city, and then the city's gone, and it's just silence, and there's ten ships that aren't there anymore. Everything is just gone. Creepy. What was even creepier, though, is you could look down into the city underwater and see it all there still. Yeah. Including the statue of Poseidon, which apparently still stood erect and in place. Right. And local fishermen and ferryman reported having their nets get caught in Poseidon statue all the time, which is kind of ironic. So you could see Haleki for hundreds of years, which is one of the reasons why it's so well documented, because it was kind of like have you heard of than a tourism, dark tourism or death tourism? Yeah. So it was kind of like an early version of a dark tourism site. Most of this mass cemetery. Yeah, exactly. And you could go check it out, and travelers and writers and scholars did, and they documented what they saw pretty specifically, too, like in Stadia, they said, well, this is where the city is now. This is where it was in relation to this river or that river. Right. So the sources are pretty abundant, and they're pretty specific. Speaking of abundant and rivers and sources, look at you. That area was unique in that it had these three rivers that met there bringing freshwater in. So you got some good fresh water, you got some good sea water with tons of good seafood. You've got very rich land for crops. We've got irrigation because we got the freshwater. The weather is gorgeous. So it's right here on the lovely seaside. And that's what made it an ideal spot for people to say, hey, maybe we should settle down here. Yeah, let's hang out here for a while and get fat on shrimp. Unfortunately, it's also a bad spot because there are two fault lines that run parallel through the area, and they have been known to cause some major disruption over the years. Like the earthquake that destroyed Haleki exactly. And generated the tsunami. So it's kind of like this whole place is made to produce a lost city. Right. Yeah. Because there's other places around the world where there's violent tectonic activity, and it's coastal. So that means that it's in danger of a tsunami. Well, California tsunami, I don't think Japan, the Malaysian tsunami, there's a lot of places. But to produce that will ruin a coastal city. Right. Yes. But for it to become lost, it has to be covered up somehow. And Haliki is in a really unique situation for this because of those three rivers that form the Haleki Delta, where Haleki was situated. Right. So you've got the earthquake, you've got the tsunami. So you have a ruin city now, submerged, and then these three rivers bring a lot of silt to the area. And so eventually Haleki was covered up over the centuries. Yeah, you put it in the article about how if you bought a house or not bought a house, let's say build a house along the shore in 1890, it would be 1000ft inland, which I imagine is quite a rub for people that build that lovely house right on the water. Yes. Because within a century or so, it's going to be a couple of streets back and there's like ten jerks in front of you that have built houses. Exactly. And it's kind of like what's that game where you, like leapfrog? Yeah, I think Monopoly where you build bigger houses than the other guy. Oh, yeah, that would have worked, too. Sure. The world doesn't need just another Chardonnay. What it needs is Martha Shard. The Martha Stewart chardonnay. That's the newest addition to the 19 Crimes family of wines. Martha Shard is a contemporary lens on 19 Crimes. It's the wine that disrupts the Chardonnay category. Brought to you by Martha Stewart. The original influencer, martha Shard is light and drinkable with a medium straw color, satisfying the palette with bright notes of citrus and round stone fruit with a crisp, clean finish framed by a distinctly sweet oat character. Martha Starr 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. 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 are in 50,000 advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on. So fasten your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see and the Cityadvantageplatinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with Cityadvantage. So you've got the tsunamis you've got the river, you've got the silt. You also have the delta itself, because of this violent activity, is moving up. They're finding over time it's rising. So you have a rising delta, which is low. It's like, right at sea level, but it's getting bigger, and Silt is piling it up and making dry ground even further, jut out into the coast. Well, what it made was a nice little surprise for archaeologists. Right. And I imagine archaeologists just went berserk with this place. Yeah, they had no idea. They just thought Haleki itself was there. They knew it was there, and they suspected it would be kind of like a pompeii, but even more they considered it even more vital to archeology or the archaeological record than pompey, even. Well, what they found, though, as you know, Josh, but we're going to spring it on you now, is six other distinct occupied horizons besides six other ones, or seven total. Six total. Six total. Five others besides Hawiki. Yeah. Underneath one on top of the other that had been settled and civilized and wiped out and covered up and just kind of captured in time. That is crazy. Yeah. What were they? So there was one from the Byzantine period, which was pretty long. I think you ran from like, 200 Ad to the 15th century. And then beneath that, there is a Roman ruin, which is from the second to the fourth Ad. And that one even features a Roman road, which is the road that travelers and writers use to come look at Haleki, the ruins. And that one also chuck, this is blows in my mind. It's so captured in time that there's a human skeleton atop, like, a cattle skull. It was knocked on top of this beast and killed by rock and rubble and just kept there. So their skeletons are intertwined now. Isn't that nuts? So the Roman cities on top of Haleki, then, beneath Haleki, they found even more stuff. They found a settlement from the Bronze Age. Yeah. 2600 to 2300 BC. They kept digging and found prehistoric Neolithic period civilization, possibly as old as 12,000 years. Yeah. I wonder if there's something beneath that. Even. I don't know. This makes me think they should start digging in Los Angeles or other, like, seaside retreats to see what you could find. Well, there's this whole idea, especially among Atlantis hunters, that it's extremely intuitive because of rising sea levels, that anything that was established around the last ice age or even at about the end of it, the sea levels have risen, like, more than 100ft since then. So any coastal cities now underwater? Right. That's like a big thing that they hunt for now that archeologists are kind of starting to try to get into, is looking for human habitation underwater. Wow. Like, there's this whole area off of Wales, I think. Northern Wales. Northern Ireland, maybe. Or Scotland? Anyway, it's called Doggerland, and it's like just the submerged area that used to be above ground, and they're finding, like, Neolithic settlements there. Isn't that cool? Well, and the Earth has changed so much over the course of its existence that what here didn't used to be here. And what was there was something else. I think there's no telling what's down there, but that idea and the fact that you can find Neolithic settlements underwater supports, ironically, the notion that there could be something like Atlantis that's lost somewhere. Like Hilliki. Right. These guys, they found this area, and once they found Hulleyki, it all started to it was like, jackpot, jackpot, jackpot. But finding Haleki itself proved a little more difficult than they thought, especially considering all the documentation they had. Yeah. They supposedly knew where it was, quote, unquote. It's not like they were searching for a needle in a haystack. They were searching for a pool cue in a haystack. Sure. So in the late eighty s, a couple of Cornell professors started looking for it for real ZS. And they had a little bit of misinterpretation for the word, for the translation for body of water, and lucky enough to have a Greek woman with them. Well, she's one of the Cornell professors. Oh, she was? Yeah. Well, then lucky that she was Greek. Yeah. Because she translates. She was like, wait a minute. She's like, it may not be in the Gulf after all. It may be inland. And they were like, what? Yes. Everybody had been thinking that the Gulf had swallowed up the city, which would make sense. Right. It turns out it was an inland lagoon that did. So I think it was very much akin to the Noah's Ark episode we just did. Yeah. What is it? The Dead Sea, I think where they think that the Dead Sea used to be freshwater, now it's salt water because that's evidence of the flood happening. And probably what they think is the Mediterranean overwhelmed the street. I can't remember what straight it was. You're searching the reaches. Yes. Anyway, I think it was much the same way. Like, the city used to be around a lagoon, and then the lagoon got a lot bigger, thus swallowing the city. Right. So they looked under land and all of a sudden they had to ditch their scuba gear for shovels. And they found the first Roman city, the first ruins, like, wait a minute, 12ft. Just 12ft below the land, which doesn't seem like that far at all. No, it's not, because the Roman ruins are like four or 5ft. Yeah. I would think that someone would have accidentally found it before that even. Well, that kicked it off. There was a German archeologist who was traveling in the area and found a Haleki coin with Poseidon on it and was like, holy cow, this is significant. So I think that's kind of how it started. Got you. So they found a lot of stuff since then. Buildings, industrial buildings, kilns, looms intersecting streets. Yeah. With buildings along these streets. Yes. Like a real city. Yeah. What else? The coins, of course. Jugs. Jugs with the original contents. And those are from the Bronze Age. They found a storehouse of jugs of different sizes and types from the Bronze Age. So we're talking like 5000 years old. Crazy. They don't have any idea about the civilizations, but this was contemporary to, like, ancient Troy, which itself was considered a legendary city until hiring Schleman found it. Right. So just finding this stuff is amazingly awesome. And there's more, supposedly, yes. So they think that they found the outskirts of Haleki and that there's a lot more left and that it's intact. Oh, they're not actually at Halleki yet. No, they're in Haliki, but they're not in the city center. They don't okay, I got you. Yeah. So they're just out in the outskirts? That's what they think. Wow. Yeah. And when they were looking for holiki out in the Gulf, they found something cool too, didn't they? I don't think I know this. You do know it. They found a Sea Wallace wall of the city. Oh, really? And they also found what they think are the ten Spartan ships. Oh, yeah, that's right. I thought you were going to say the statue Poseidon. That would be like well, they'll find it eventually, the mother load, if they found that thing still standing upright under the earth. So they keep following. They started by following the Roman road. Right. So basically they're unearthing. Like, imagine this, dude. They're unearthing, like, three lost cities at once. That's crazy. Isn't that insane? Do you know what, like an archeological treasure trove that is? So they're unearthing them, and as long as they don't intersect right, as long as the Roman town isn't built directly over the statue of Poseidon to where getting to Poseidon would undermine the Roman town, then they should be able to get it all. And they're going to be doing it. They'll excavate this for decades. So this has been ongoing since the late 80s? Well, no, they really started uncovering stuff in 2000. Wow. But they started in 1988, so awesome. Yeah. Very cool. So that's Haleki, the world doesn't need just another chardonnay. What it needs is Martha shard. The Martha Stewart Chardonnay. That's the newest addition to the 19 Crimes family of wines. Martha Shard is a contemporary lens on 19 Crimes. It's the wine that disrupts the chardonnay category. Brought to you by Martha Stewart, the original influencer, martha Shard is light and drinkable with a medium straw color, satisfying the palette with bright notes of citrus and round stone fruit with a crisp, clean finish. Framed by a distinctly sweet oat character. Martha stard is exactly what the world needed. And what you need is to make this refreshing crowd pleaser the star of your next party or gathering. Because Martha Shar 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. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up, because Adventure is around the corner, and there's a card that's going to get you closer with the city Advantage Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you advantage miles and loyalty points, and two times advantage miles at restaurants and gas stations so your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, card members get access to built in travel benefits. For example, your first check bag is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs. And with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 50,000 advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on. So fasten your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see. And the city advantage. Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. So, of course, Chuck, this doesn't mean that anybody has stopped searching for Atlantis like the archaeologists in Spain. Yes, he's looking inland now, which comes from this theory. So maybe he's onto something. It's possible he's going to start digging up in Barcelona and people are going to say, what are you doing? Drink some wine. So you were saying that you think that Plato is inspired by Haleki? Sure. I think there's substantial evidence in what we said. But also keep in mind, Haleki happened in 373. Plato wrote his book in 360. 13 years later, and he lived in the area. This is a pretty well known catastrophe. I think you're probably right. But we would not have had the awesome TV show man from Atlantis had it not been for Plato. No, I guess that's true. Did you watch that? No, that was a little before your time. And there's an awesome HP. Lovecraft short story about a German Uboat that ends up in Atlanta. It's awesome. I tried to find YouTube stuff of man from Atlantis. There's plenty out there. You had the web hands when I was a kid. Oh, really? Yeah, he had web hands and feet. It's not Prince Nymore, is it? The submariner Prince Nymore? Nemo. No, Prince Nemore. He's a Marvel Comic guy. No, it was a schlocky. It ran for like, one year. Was he like, detective? Yeah, he had superhuman strength and could breathe underwater, had gills, and he had webbed feet in hands. And I think some government agencies snapped him up to do investigative undersea work for them. I know you're talking about welcome back, Cotter. This is a dude from Dallas, patrick what's his face. Patrick Ewing. Patrick Duffy. Patrick Ewing is the. Basketball player, right? Patrick Duffy. Yeah, that's it. It's good stuff. I have never heard of that. So yeah, it was only around for one year, I think, but boy, I was into it when I was like seven. Good stuff. Yeah. Web hands. Yeah, it got me into plato. You hadn't been eating it for years. Funny guy. Alright, so that's it. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Thank you for doing this one with me. It was awesome. Thank you for opening my eyes to coolness. Anytime. If you want to know more about Haleki, you should search for Was There a real Atlantis? By typing that into the search barhouseofworks.com. And I said that which means it's time for a listener. Man that's right. Josh, remember when we did a little TV pilot recently? We tried to get these bookings onto the show. They arrived a little late, we weren't able to. But I want to tell everyone about this project because that sounds very cryptic. This is from Mike. Guys have been a big fan for a couple of years and I especially like that some of your causes you have taken on and considered and done podcast about them. Kiva and the Cooperative for Education in particular. So our Guatemala podcast gave him an idea for a Facebook fundraising idea to raise awareness for co op our buddies Cooperative for Education Co op Cincinnati, who do the awesome textbook programs and computer center labs in Guatemala. And he proposed to them and they said, Hi, Kyle, let's do this. So his idea was to create, quote unquote celebrity bookends with just this basic idea. Take an ordinary set of bookends, although they are pretty fancy looking, I got to admit, and make them super famous pop culture icons through social media and then sell them for a million bucks and give it all to coed. So that's the plan. That's a good plan. I don't know if we added anything to that. We added at least $0.70. Okay, good. He says, I know it sounds crazy, but crazy is usually what it takes to get people to notice things. The rational thinking behind this is that to get famous, all you need to have are a ton of people believing that you're famous. Yeah. I mean, what else is celebrity? Yeah, exactly. So they're trying to drum up celebrity for these bookends to raise awareness. They have sent them around the world to meet people and to be on TV shows and in movies. They're documenting this on Facebook. The travels of these bookends and Twitter and blogs for people to follow. And our big audacious goal is to get as many Facebook fans as Kim Kardashian. She has 9 million fans. Can you please that sandle? Yes. Wow. So what we're hoping for your listeners is that they will like the idea enough to want to help. All you have to do it can be as simple as going to the Facebook page, follow you on Twitter, the celebrity bookings that is tweet about us, blog about us, tell your friends to like us and hook us up with any celebrity friends that you might have. They have been in the hands of Danny DeVito. Matt Berninger of the national. Right. I didn't know how to pronounce that, but I do love the national. And I believe I saw Jeff Bridges holding these things. Did you really? Yeah. Wow. And then before us. Yeah. Sweet. So we actually got a little DeVito Bridges stink on her hand unless they clean these things. And they sent it to us originally to get it in our cubicles on the TV pilot. But they arrived a little late and we weren't able to. So we just did some pictures and maybe on down the road, if we do any more TV stuff, we can get them on television and do our part to help raise awareness. Nice. So Facebook. Comceleety, bookends or Twitter at celebrity bookends or send an email to celebritybookends at gmail and that raises awareness to eventually sell these things to Danny DeVito to raise money for Cohen for a million bucks. Well, I certainly don't have a million bucks. Well, we also have our own Twitter handle. And you can get in touch with us, too while you're talking to Celebrity Booking. You can tweet to us whatever you want. There's no rules except that it has to be 140 characters or less. That's S-Y-S kpodcast. We're also on Facebook at facebook. Comstuffyshennow. And you can send us an email as well at stuffpodcast@discovery.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast stuff from the future. Join House department staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? 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44430f88-53a3-11e8-bdec-cf4f0d214ff2 | 10 Voter Suppression Methods | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/10-voter-suppression-methods | Voter suppression in the USA is as old as voting itself. Listen in to hear about 10 ways we stifle the vote.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Voter suppression in the USA is as old as voting itself. Listen in to hear about 10 ways we stifle the vote.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 20 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=294, tm_isdst=0) | 45513745 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's out there somewhere, wandering around. So if you see her, bring her back. And this is stuff you should know. A rare top ten. Yeah. Where we do all ten, although I'm sure we'll end up combining some and it'll be like eight or something weird like that, but we just don't even really do this anymore. Oh, I see what you mean. No, it's been a while. This one's an important top ten, too. This isn't like ten biggest things ever moved or anything like that. Do we do that? No, I don't think we ever did it's on how stuff works. Yeah, it is, right. It's a real thing. Yeah. Or maybe like ten heaviest objects ever moved or something. Maybe we'll do it someday. This is from our old website that we used to work for, though, How Stuff Works. And we've done stuff on different ways to suppress the vote and to rig the vote through gerrymandering and such efforts like that. We did one specifically called our election laws designed to suppress voting. And that's a good one to go listen to as well. It is, because it's very sad, but in the United States, suppressing the vote and trying to keep people and certain people and certain demographics from voting is as old as voting itself. Yeah. Which is sad. Because everybody has this impression that and it's pure estate in America. If you want to vote. If you say. This is my right and obligation and duty as a citizen. You can go vote. And it shouldn't be all that hard. And you just go and you vote and your vote is counted and maybe your person wins. Maybe they don't. But you voted. And there shouldn't be any barriers to that. Voting is the way that a democracy functions. So the most democratic way for the democracy to function is to remove as many barriers as possible. Unfortunately, there are a lot of barriers that are put up that do make things harder for people to vote, which is what we're talking about here. That's right. And they're not old barriers. The Brennan Center for justice, which is a think tank in New York, and advocates for civil rights, especially around voting, they said since 2010, 25 states have passed new laws making it more difficult for people to vote in the United States of America. Yes. And we should probably just come out and say, unfortunately to our Republican listeners, this is not one of those both sides do what kind of things. This is largely Republican controlled states and municipalities that create laws and regulations that do make it harder to vote. And the reason why, on paper is because it's to combat voter fraud. The problem is this voter fraud has been shown many times over by many different studies by groups from both sides of the political spectrum that it doesn't really exist. It exists in such minuscule amounts that it might as well not exist. That same Brennan setter, Chuck, that you mentioned a second ago, they're big time into voting. They did a study and they saw that between 910 thousand of a percent to 4100,000 of a percent, that's how the rate of overall voting fraud in the United States, and if you're like Brendan Center up at that liberal, there was actually an exhaustive inquiry investigation launched in 2002 by John Ashcroft, who is Bush Jr's. Attorney General, if you'll remember, heck of a singer. Remember when he sang about the eagle flying high? Yeah, man, I remember that. He was anointing feet with oil. So Ashcroft, his Justice Department launched a really thorough investigation into voter fraud in the United States. And out of examining hundreds of millions of ballots between, I think I don't remember what year they looked at it over, they managed to bring charges on only 120 people and only 86 of those were convicted. So there's really no evidence that voter fraud exists. And yet these solutions to voter fraud, which are obstacles and barriers to voting, are still established. They're still supported. Even though people are like, voting fraud doesn't exist, they say, well, we still have to protect against it anyway, so we're going to make voting harder. And that's kind of the big problem that we're dealing with right now with this thing. And this is why a lot of people point to this and say this is voter suppression. That's right. And in fact, even in our most recent election, if I remember correctly, donald Trump launched an investigative body to look into the because he lost the popular vote by roughly 3 million votes. And he said that there were at least 3 million illegal votes cast. That's why I lost that vote. Didn't he form a body to investigate that that just sort of quietly went away without any findings? It did, there were some findings, but there was a report, and it was actually kind of a scandalous report that said there's voter fraud everywhere. And then people say, well, can you show us your work? And they said, no. And that's when it kind of faded off into nothing. That's right. It's been shown voter fraud basically doesn't exist. And yes, any instance of voter fraud, especially purposeful voter fraud, meant to affect the outcome of an election, throw that person in jail, like take away their right to vote forever and maybe spend them on the bottom too. It's not a good thing. No one's saying like, who cares about voter fraud? What people are saying is that voter fraud virtually doesn't exist. So to institute all these draconian measures that make it harder for people to vote and seemingly weirdly, make it harder for certain groups of people, like minorities and poor people to vote, that's a problem. Because, number one, it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. And number two, again, it seems to be voter suppression. And other people would say, well, why would the GOP care? Why would they do this then? And apparently, if you look at elections in general, the Republican Party tends to be favored when fewer people turn out, when there's a large electorate that usually tends to favor the Democrats, when not that many people turn out to vote. The people who turn out to vote usually tend to be Republicans. So a lot of people point to the Republican controlled cities and states around the country and say, I think you're doing this to win, which makes it cheating. And you're cheating by taking away people's ability to vote or making it hard enough that they just give up and don't vote. That's right. So a lot of this is going to be historical as well. And I guess we should start with number ten, which is poll taxes. And early on, when voting kind of was in its early stages, they thought, you know, what a really easy way to keep people from voting is to have them pay a tax to have to vote. And it doesn't have to be exorbitant, but maybe just high enough to where most of the people that we don't want to vote can't afford it. Most of the Confederate former Confederacy had these poll taxes. A lot of this stuff was in the south historically, right. Unfortunately, Virginia charged about $150 a year, which was about $11 in today's dollars. So that's not a lot of money, but it had to be paid in cash. And back then, if you were a sharecropper or if you were a farmer with a small farm, you bought most of your stuff on credit and you didn't have a lot of cash lying around, you might have had two or $3 at any given point. Right. And you hit it on the head when you said a lot of this happened or started out. A lot of voters suppression tactics started out in the south during Reconstruction because all of a sudden there were a lot of black people who suddenly had the right to vote in the white dominated south. And so the white establishment was at threat of being undermined, replaced by black people or people who are friendly to black interests. And they didn't want that. So they started instituting things like poll tax, but they had to do it in ways where it appeared like it applied to everybody. So poll tax applied to everybody, but then they would institute things like grandfather clauses, which literally said with poll taxes, if your grandfather was able to vote before the Civil War, you're exempt. Well, black people didn't really have the right to vote, especially in the south before the Civil War. So it's impossible that their grandfather would have had that right with white people who might have been poor, but couldn't afford to pay the poll tax. But we're probably going to vote in favor with white interests in the south during that election. They would be exempted because their grandfather could vote before the Civil War, and that's how that was done. Yes. And in other Southern states, they had cumulative taxes on top of just being taxed. You had to do this several years in a row in order to earn that right to vote. So all of these things, of course, this was eventually rendered illegal in 1964 with the ratification of the 24th Amendment. They said, you can't do poll taxes anymore. After 100 years, we've determined it's not fair. Yeah, and it took a couple of years, too. So all the way up until 1966, dude, there were four states that still had laws on the books that had to be struck down in federal court that poll taxes were okay. Yeah, which is crazy. Another one that they did was literacy tests, which kind of went hand in hand again. A lot of this stuff started out in the Reconstruction and then Jim Crow South. And if you were black right after the Civil War, there was a really good chance that you couldn't read. Way more of a chance when compared to a white person. I'm not sure what the percentages is, but there were laws on the books that said it's illegal for you as a white person to teach the people that you have enslaved to read or write. It's illegal. Literacy among slaves is not legal. And so one way to prevent those people who were now franchised after the Civil War from voting would be to say, well, you have to be literate to vote. And this is sneaky, because if you're not literate, how can you possibly be an informed voter? You can't just come in and say, I want to vote for this person because I like their name. You have to be informed. And to be informed, you have to be literate. So we're going to test your literacy before we let you vote. Right. One good example is in South Carolina, even if you could manage to learn if you really wanted to vote, and you managed to learn to write down your name and your ballot, they said, no, you got to write down a ballot for each office. If you want to vote for governor and senator and anything else, then you have to be able to write down all of those and put it in the correct box that's labeled that you probably can't read. And we're going to shuffle these boxes around, too. So even if you have someone that wants to help you cast that vote, that's not going to be allowed to happen either. And, you know, forget the fact that people have learning disabilities and sometimes have legitimate problems learning how to read, even if they want to learn how to read, it's like saying that you can't vote if you don't have arms to cast a ballot. It's outrageous. And it gets even more outrageous if you go to Louisiana, where they had literal brain teasers that you had to be able to figure out in order to vote. And this one, I'm sure if I sat down long enough, I could figure it out, right, but not when I'm probably nervous about casting my first vote as a former enslaved person, right. So this one in particular and this one was instituted as more and more black people learn to read. Just buckle up for this one. Write every other word in this first line and print every third word in same line, but capitalize the fifth word that you write so you could conceivably, especially as a literate person, figure this out. It would take you a little while, but say that you went and so you wrote all this stuff, and then you got to the last part where it said capitalize the fifth word. Then you went back and scratched out the small case, whatever that fifth word was, and capitalize that one. Or maybe you capitalize all the words and you had to go back and put them in lower case. The fact that these tests were administered by white poll workers and that they were typically subjective, meaning that if that poll worker decided you failed, you failed. When you went back and scratched that out and made capitalize that fifth word, there was probably 100% chance that that white poll worker who didn't want you voting in the first place was going to just say, sorry, you failed. You can't vote. Yeah. And you think, well, sure, but this was the 1800s. No, some Southern states had these brain teaser tests all the way up until the mid 1960s, when the Voting Rights Act finally said, you don't need to do a brain teaser to vote. That's illegal, and it's kind of dumb. Yeah. So there was a lot of effrey, I think, as John Oliver would put it, that was going on in the south. But one of the mechanisms that really got used, that really just kind of probably the most effective one, was just straight up violence. Like the Ku Klux Klan. The Knights of the White Camellia. A bunch of different groups. Terrorist organizations grew up to terrorize black people and people who supported the rights of black people to send a message saying. Like. No. The white power structure is going to be staying in power around here. And we will go so far as to murder you and your family and make examples out of you. Like leaving you in a tree as a signal to everybody else. This is what happens when you try to vote. This is what happens when you try to register other people to vote. And it was a very long lasting legacy that went on from the end of the Civil War up until I believe Congress finally passed a law saying that no, this is illegal, you can't do this kind of thing. But it went on for decades like this. Yeah, they finally made it a federal crime, and more than 3000 clan members were indicted. Only about 600 of those were actually convicted. Because again, we're talking about juries in the south for the most part. Right. This seems like a good time to take a break. Okay. And we'll pick back up with number seven right after that. Number seven. Right. So just to give you a little historical background real quick, there's Reconstruction, where black Americans become enfranchised. They have the right to vote in response to that, there's terror, there's Jim Crow laws, and then in response to the Jim Crow laws that just overtly suppress the black vote. There was the Voting Rights Act. And for a long time the Voting Rights Act was really effective. And the reason why it was effective was because there was a section to it, Section Five, that said, hey, if you've ever engaged in voter discrimination on a statewide basis, on a systemic basis, you have to have us, the federal government, review any changes to the voting procedure in your state before you can implement them. And so any state that wanted to try to come up with some voter suppression tactic, it might be brilliant. But if the federal government said no, they couldn't do it, and so the vote would be saved in that respect. Well, in 2013, the Roberts Leg court struck down section five of the Voting Rights Act. So now we're seeing the results of that, where voter suppression tactics are starting to come back, and they're starting to come back in like this avalanche of tactics where across the country, if you put them all together, it's a real problem. But the Voting Rights Act figured in dramatically to save the vote of people, and the gutting of that Section Five in 2013 by the Supreme Court did the exact opposite to it. That's right. One tactic that they could use and use for many years was just making it, and still used to some degree, making it difficult to register or to vote. Here are some of the things they used to do, is you have to keep re registering. Many times you have to have a street address with an actual name and number. And if you were an AfricanAmerican living in the rural south, you may not have an actual street address on the dirt road next to the field that you farm. Little things like this, these technicalities to meet these requirements to vote that they knew that African Americans didn't have. And there were and are still literal conversations. Some of them these days are even on tape, where you hear public officials talk about making it hard for black people to vote. And if we do this, this is how many people we think we can keep off the voter registration logs. It's shameful, and I'm surprised we're not screaming at this point. We're trying to keep it together. It wasn't just in the south, though. In the north and the west in the early 1900s, there were immigrants and they didn't want immigrants voting. A lot of times, ethnic and religious minorities, they didn't want voting. So in places in the north and the west, like New Jersey and California, they made it tough for immigrants to vote by saying, you have to have your original naturalization papers at the polling place. Or maybe the interest of people who work in factories don't align with ours. So here's what we'll do. Those people work long ten to twelve hour shifts, can't make it to the polls, so we're going to close the registration offices before those factories shut down every day to keep them from voting. Yeah, and there are other ways. Like, they went back to close these loopholes, too. It was a real public private partnership between the government and other groups. There were groups that were dedicated to kind of preserving white supremacy in the south that would boycott businesses, where they found out that those employers gave their black employees time off during the day to go register to vote or to vote. Like, you could lose your customer base if they found out that you were doing that with black people or with your black employees. So there were like even if you say, well, so what? It was hard to get registered to vote. Figure it out. It was disproportionately leveled at black voters. And even if you did figure it out, there were repercussions for figuring it out too. Yeah. Or in New York, if you know that a lot of Jewish people might vote in a more liberal way, hey, let's have registration times on Saturdays and Yom Kippur, when we know that Jewish people won't be able to get out and register to vote. Right. It's high time that we make voting day national holidays. I agree, Chuck. I agree. It should be a paid holiday, a national paid holiday, or have it on Saturdays, do something but make it less hard. For sure. Yeah. People need to be allowed to vote. And we're not talking about voter fraud. We're talking about legal Americans having the right and the ability to vote in as easy a way as possible. Yes. And if you also say, well, if they really wanted to vote, they would find a way to do it. When's the last time you didn't log into a website because it required two factor authentication? We're talking about having to take a bus across the county to register to vote when you have to be working and your employer won't give you time off, so you have to take sick time to just go register to vote, and then you have to do it all again to go vote. It's more problematic than it appears. Just when you're saying it out loud. It was a good burn. Sick burn. Thanks, man. Number six straight up voter intimidation still happens to a large degree. In 2004, it was reported that in Florida, in the state election there, they sent plain close state troopers to the homes of 40 to 50 elderly black voters to question them for supposed election fraud. And that when they asked the state officials why they sent these state troopers. They said, well, we thought it might be a more relaxed atmosphere to come to their home and ask these elderly black voters about whether or not they participated in voter fraud, which, by the way, this investigation turned up absolutely no fraud whatsoever. So it didn't happen, which is like basically all investigations of voter fraud turn up no fraud whatsoever. And a lot of people say, well, these investigations are really just intimidation tactics. And this one, to me, is one of the more despicable ones because it directly traces right back uninterrupted to the Reconstruction era. And the fact that it's still going on today is just despicable to me. But it is. And it's not just state troopers showing up at your house to ask you personally. There was a really famous case that our dear governor in Georgia, Brian Kemp, when he was Secretary of State, because we need to remember he was Secretary of State running an election, that he was one of the two candidates for governor in. And a lot of people say, well, he did some shady stuff, which we'll talk about later. But when he was just straight up Secretary of State. He oversaw the arrest of the equipment Ten plus Two. Where two African American school board school board officials who were elected a couple of times in this one election in a runoff fair and square. They were arrested. And their supporters and campaign advisers were arrested and taken to jail and had mugshots of them put on the news because they were accused of voter fraud. And after years, the charges were finally dropped. Not a single person went to jail. No one was convicted. But a lot of people point to that and say, if you don't understand that as a clear message to African American, not just voters, but also office holders, that they shouldn't bother running or else their lives are going to be ruined, then you're really missing the point here. Yes, in 2014, there was another intimidation tactic, and this is just these things that aren't technically illegal, but where candidates just try and be very sneaky. And if they can trick 100 voters into doing the wrong thing, then their time has been well spent in their minds. Right. But Mitch McConnell's campaign sent out these mailers that were marked Election Violation Notice, and it had the warning, you are at risk of acting on fraudulent information, and you start to read it. And what it is, is just basically, here's my opposition candidate and we don't like what they say. So this is fraudulent information, but they dress it up in a way sort of like the Publishers Clearing House that makes our elderly citizens drive across the country thinking they've actually won real money. Right? Yeah. This is the opposite of that, but using the same tricks. Basically, it's like you get a notice in the mail, and it's usually preying on people that are older in our country, which is sad and awful, and they get a notice in their mail that says, oh, my gosh, I'm at risk of acting on fraudulent information. Yeah. And they were sued, but a federal judge said, no, I'm sorry. Rejected, basically, yeah. Also, intimidation, too, can be official and part of official policies, like some of those poll taxes in the south, they added the extra layer of keeping you from even trying by saying, the only place you can go pay for the poll tax is at your sheriff's office. You might say, especially if you're white. Well, big deal, you have to go to the sheriff's office. Well, imagine if you went to the sheriff's office and there was a really good chance that while you were there paying your poll tax so that you could go vote. And for that reason only, they said, hey, by the way, while you're here, we've got this case open. Where were you on Tuesday night? And you would tell them, and they would say, well, can you prove it? Just knowing that that was a possibility. If you don't realize that was a possibility, I would urge you to brush up on your Jim Crow. South history would dissuade a lot of people, I would guess, from going to pay that poll tax and then going to vote. Remember when Homer Simpson thought he won a vote and had to go to the police station to claim his prize? Yeah, that was a good one, though. Yeah, that was a good one. Another one. Number five is something that is still you mentioned Brian Kemp in Georgia, pruning names from the voter rolls. I thought that was a generous word that they used, pruning. Pruning. Because it makes it seem like methodical and well informed. Yeah. Well, this has happened time and time again before the 2000 election for president in Florida. Once again, state officials, republican controlled Florida, they hired a private firm to go through the registration roles, delete names, or people who had died, who were registered multiple times in multiple places, or convicted felons or declared mentally incompetent in court proceedings. And you might think, well, that's great, because you don't want deceased people on voter rolls, which is true, totally. But what about when you make mistakes and you delete a lot of voters who are fully eligible to vote? Then what happens? And the answer is, nothing. No, there's not. And by the time that it does turn out like, oh, we made a mistake, the elections long over these inquiries in their reports that they produce are usually a couple of years after the fact. But in Georgia in particular, they found out that, again, the guy who oversaw the purging of the voter rolls was one of the two candidates in the election. Just basic ethics says, you recuse yourself, you have nothing to do with this, or you say, no, let's not do this, or let's do it the right way. Let's purge this many people that we actually mistakenly removed, 200,000 people remove their right to vote in this election, 200,000. And then, just to add horrible irony to the whole thing, it was only by 55,000 votes that Brian Kemp beat Stacey Abrams in that gubernatorial election. Yeah, that was a bitter pill here in Georgia, because, remember, it was like, I think it was the week or it may even be the eve of the election when they lobbied the charge that the Republican system had been hacked and that they were launching a case against Abrams to look into it. And then after the election, of course, they're like, oh, we were wrong. They didn't hack us after all, right. Which, again, who said that they were hacked? Was it the Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, who was also running for governor against Stacy Rums? Yeah. What about voter ID? Voter ID, should we take a break? Oh, yeah, let's take a break. I'm pretty charged up here. All right, we'll take a break and we'll talk about voter ID and a few more things right after this. So we talked a lot about voter ID, Chuck, in the voter suppression episode, which, again, go listen to that, guys. It's a good one as well. But the upshot of it there's that word again, the upshot of it is that if you require someone to show that they are who they say they are when they go vote, you can make a good case that at the very least, you're adding an obstacle or a barrier to voting. But you could also say, well, if you have to pay for that, that technically constitutes a poll tax. And people say, oh, yeah, well, section five of the Voting Rights Act doesn't exist anymore, so go sit on it. Ralph Mouth yeah, I mean, in some states, it costs up to $60. That's unconscionable, man. That ID. And $60 for some people is their grocery money for the week. When you look paycheck to paycheck and again, it's really easy to say, well, just pay the money and go out and get your ID so you can vote if you really want to vote. It's a choice between that and putting food on the table for your kids. It's a barrier to voting, plain and simple. Yeah. And also, I mean, there are plenty of states that rightly. Who require a voter ID, rightly, offer free IDs that you can use to vote. Like, that's definitely the way that it should be. But that's still again, anytime you require somebody to potentially take time off of work, that puts an enormous burden on the working poor. Like people who just can't afford to take time off of work. They might be in a job where there's enough people who would love to have that job that if they take a sick day, their boss can be like, you know what? I know you weren't sick and you're fired. This is the last straw. So your job could actually be on the line. It could be more than just a loss of hours. It could equal the loss of a job. And again, we live in a democratic country where the barriers to democracy should be lowered, not raised. Lowered. And yes, we should vigorously prosecute any instance of fraud, but because that hasn't been shown to exist, lowering the barriers so people can legally vote is not problematic. And it's antidemocratic to do that. To raise them, it is. And when you hear these taped conversations, they're not talking about voter fraud. They're saying, hey, we can get probably a 2.5% reduction of African American voter turn out in this county if we do X. And again, we keep saying African American voter turnout. I think Miami purged their voter roles. I don't remember exactly when it was, but there was a commission that did a report on it, and their purge affected like, 65% of the people who are deleted were black voters, even though those voters represented just 24% of the population, whereas only 16.6% of the people who were purged were white, even though those people represented 77% of the public. So, yeah, if you look at studies of this stuff, it disproportionately impacts black voters, typically minority voters as a whole, but definitely black voters for sure. And that's not to say, like, the Republican Party just hates black people. The Republican Party knows that African Americans typically tend to vote Democrat, and they're a large group of people. So if you can make it harder for them to vote, you're probably going to affect the Democrats vote, not your vote. Yeah. Another thing that you can do is close polling stations and limit polling hours in counties where you think it might help your vote. There are a bunch of swing states north Carolina, Ohio, and some other states that have cut early voting days or hours. There was a report in 2014 that said they're more likely to inconvenience black voters who like to vote early and in person. Historically, in Maricopa County in Arizona, there were 400 voting locations in 2008. In 2016, there were 60. This is a huge problem. A huge problem. This is one way that this is going on, making it harder to vote, by making voting less available to people when it can totally be afforded it's being pruned. And it's not just Texas, although Texas has some egregious stuff going on since 2000. I I don't remember 2014, maybe texas has shut down 760 polling locations, places to vote, 760. And they currently have on the agenda. I don't know if it's been passed or if it's just been proposed or what, but if you want to vote by mail invalid, the drop off locations in Texas has been reduced to one per county. They said. That's it. There's one place in our 254 counties, there's one place in each of those counties where you can take your ballot to drop it off. The problem with this is that some of Texas counties are enormous. Texas has a number of counties that are larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island put together. They have something like 120 counties that are larger than Rhode Island. Granted, Rhode Island is small, but Rhode Island is a small state. These are counties in Texas we're talking about. And in one place in each of those counties, there's a place where you can drop off your mail invalid. That's a problem. And a lot of people are just going bonkers over that one. Yeah. And beyond closing polling places, like having to maybe take two or three city buses to get to your place to vote, when you finally get there, if you manage to go through all that trouble, which is, again, they're trying to make you say, you know what? It's not worth the trouble, then you're met with five, six, seven hour lines all day long. Right. And this is what you get for your troubles to try and participate in American democracy. Yeah. So going on your lunch break doesn't end up working out very well. What about trickery number two? This is pretty awful. You talked about that one by the people. I don't know if it was Mitch McConnell's campaign or just a group supporting him, or if it was one in the same. Who knows? Tricking people by saying you're about to act on fraudulent information or something that's long standing. I'm guaranteed we talked about this before. I'm almost positive. But in 2008, someone in Virginia sent a flyer out that looked like it was from the State Board of Elections that said, if you're a Republican, you should vote on November 4. If you're a Democrat, you vote on November 5, which is the day after the election, which is in one way hilarious. I mean, it's just hysterical that somebody did that in another way. And the fact that it could have, even if it didn't, but it could have impacted somebody's vote by purposefully confusing them. That's despicable. Again, that's the word I keep going to because I genuinely feel that way about going to any length to deprive or fool someone out of voting. Right. But if you get caught doing that, surely there is a massive debt to pay via jail time. Like in Maryland in 2010, a robocall campaign during the gubernatorial election told thousands of voters in African American neighborhoods that they could, quote, relax and stay at home. That evening because Democratic incumbent Governor Martin O'Malley had already won the election. Not true. The polls were closed. And this wasn't just tricksters. This was Paul Shurich, who was the campaign manager for the Republican opponent who ended up winning. And they caught him and he was charged and found guilty of four counts of election fraud. And you'd think, all right, throw the book at the guy. What did he get? What did he get? He got 30 days home detention, probation, and community service. Right. Which is really disappointing, not because that guy deserved worse, but because the penalties for federal election laws are breaking them that are meant to protect people's right to vote and punish people who try to deprive people with the right to vote. Those are federal laws, and the penalties are supposed to be pretty stiff. So 30 days of house arrest at his house when really he made a name for himself as like, hey, I'll make sure that you're going to get elected as a campaign manager. That's very disappointing, for sure. Well, because the message it sends is, it's totally worth it to do this. Exactly. Swing an election, little community service, who cares? There are two guys who are I don't know what's going to happen to them, but they have a lot of charges against them right now. But for this. I believe the 2020 election. They sponsored a bunch of robocalls. Tens of thousands of robocalls in places like Michigan. Chicago. And I believe they were targeting African American voters. Where it said. If you vote by mail. Your information is subject to be handed over to the police and run for any potential outstanding warrants or it may be added to the mandatory vaccine list. As if that exists. But just playing on people's deepest fears to prevent them from voting, to dissuade them from voting. You'd have to be a genuine scumbag of the highest order to do something like that. And they caught these two guys, jacob Wall and Jack Burkman, doing just that. And as a matter of fact, I guess when they registered these robocalls, they registered it to one of their phone numbers and they came out and blamed it on Democratic operatives because they wouldn't have possibly used their own phone number for this kind of thing. Just to add a little cherry on top, I should say all this is alleged because they're charged with this right now, but they haven't been convicted. Right. I'm sure they have some community service to look forward to. Yes. And some house arrest. So the final one on the list here is a controversial one, to be sure. But whether or not you should be allowed to vote as a felon or as someone who has ever been convicted of a crime and this one is kind of going the other way now. But for many years. In many states. If you have ever been convicted of any crime. Even if you went to prison. Served your time. Got out. And were leading a great beneficial life towards society. You are not allowed to vote anymore. Right. Which has started to become overturned, I think, in 2018. Yes, in Florida. Florida has this long standing disenfranchisement policy which most people have accepted for years. But then finally some people came along and said, hey, this is really affecting a lot of people who want to vote, who've served their time, who have become reformed. They want to be full citizens again. Can we give them the right back to vote? And in 2018, that was on the ballot, and Florida voters overwhelmingly said, yes, totally, let's do that. They have to have served their time and repaid all of their restitutions, but we're going to give them the right to vote back. And it was a huge victory. And then there was a Republican lawmaker who said, well, wait a minute, this is kind of vague. It says that they have to have fulfilled all of their sentencing obligations. There's a lot of these people who are about to get their right to vote back, who haven't paid all their fines and fees, which, as it's been understood traditionally, you have basically your lifetime to pay off the actual financial fees and restitution that come along with being convicted of a crime. You have to pay that off first that's in the law and actually got passed in the Florida legislature, republican controlled legislature, that you have to pay all of your fines and fees first before you can get enfranchised again. And that's proving to be an enormous problem for a lot of the former convicts. So it continues to this day. I know we got on our soapbox and pretty passionate about this one, but we're both believers in the right to vote and to make it as easy as possible for eligible voters to vote. I don't see any argument counter to that that's valid. Why wouldn't you, in a great democracy, want as many people to vote as possible? Again, the only argument you will see again and again is voter fraud. And if you can show that voter fraud doesn't exist, then you just knock the legs out from under it and it just exposes voter suppression then. So hopefully the more people who know about it, Chuck, the harder it is to do stuff like this. And I hope that that's the case, because that's why we share this, because I don't care what political persuasion you are. It's wrong to suppress the vote. It's just wrong. I'm sorry. If you want to know more about voter suppression, you can go try to vote and see what happens. And since I said that, it's time for and by the way, go vote. And I think by the time this comes out, most of the state's registration will be shut down. But for the future, even if you voted in the last election, like I check mine two or three times before every election, because I don't want to show up on election day at my polling place and be surprised to learn that I'm not on the roll or the register or that my polling place has moved. Just check it. Check it and check it and recheck it. Yeah, and there's tons of websites out there that legit websites that aren't affiliated with any party that can help you check that. And if you are registered to vote, please vote. Whoever you vote for, just vote. Like it's important that you vote. So go be a good American and vote. And since I said that, finally, I think, Chuck, it's time for listener mail. This is from Ellie. She says, hey, guys, live in Kansas working topeka. And I just listened to the episode on fallout shelters. I cannot begin to explain to you the nerdy level of excitement I felt while driving to a client meeting when I spotted a yellow sign with the three triangles, just as you said there would be in the episode. Nice. I wanted so badly to stop and steal the sign off of the old brick nondescript building, but I didn't think that would bode well since I work for the state and I was in a state licensed vehicle at the time. I think people would have just guessed that you were requisitioning it or taking it down. Yeah, it would have been official. You would have had to keep the nerdy giddiness in check. Not surprisingly, the shelter is just two blocks from the Capitol building downtown, because we all know in a crisis situation, politicians like to make sure they are taken care of. First love, random history tidbits. So you best believe I'm mentally cataloging and keep an eye out for more shelters in this area to randomly point out to my husband, who have no idea what I'm talking about. Anywho, thank you for your podcast and for keeping me company on my hour. Commute. Stay healthy and wear a mask, because the coronavirus is in fact, real. And that is from Le t or l, actually, I think L-E-L-L-E-Y-L-T. I'm going to try to suss out what kind of person l is. Did l spell any who with a WH o or an Hoo? Well, what's your guess? She's nerdy giddy over fallout shelter. So I'm going to guess who you are. Correct. Yes. All in one word. A-N-Y-W-H-O. Yeah, because I think that suggests a certain amount of attention to rules and details. Note that she didn't take the fallout shelter sign, even though she could have. And any who ho is much more like Whimsical and I'll take my shoes off and roll down a hill even though I'm in my 50s kind of thing. Right. But she also believes that masks save lives. Right. Attention to rule in detail. Well, thanks a lot, Elle. That's fantastic. And we appreciate hearing from you. Kudos to resisting temptation. And yes, wear a mask and go vote. Boy, oh boy, we have ticked a lot of people off with this episode. Chuck, if we ticked you off, we want to hear from you. Be nice but sure. Of course we want to hear from you. You can email us. And if you are happy with this, you can email us too. Either way, 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 ApplePodcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Vomit Phobia Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-vomit-phobia-works | No one - no one - likes to vomit, but there are some people who would prefer to die rather than vomit, people who spend their days worrying they will vomit at any moment and become so obsessed they curtail their lives to prevent it from happening. | No one - no one - likes to vomit, but there are some people who would prefer to die rather than vomit, people who spend their days worrying they will vomit at any moment and become so obsessed they curtail their lives to prevent it from happening. | Tue, 05 Dec 2017 16:41:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=16, tm_min=41, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=339, tm_isdst=0) | 28437598 | 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 there's Jerry over there. This is stuff you should know very soon. Special, surprisingly sad addition. I think so. Yeah, of course it's sad. It's really gross. It is gross. I'm going to have a hard time getting to this one, so we should give everybody a fair warning. We are talking about a metaphobia, which is a specific phobia, a fear of throwing up, and we'll get way more into all of that and what it means. But we're talking about vomiting. It's basically tied for first as the subject of this episode. So we're going to be talking about vomiting a lot. And I found from researching this reading, and I imagine hearing about vomiting for a good 30 minutes, 40 minutes stretch, it can make one queasy. So just fair warning, I don't think it's actually going to make you queasy, but it's possible. If it starts to happen, just plow through it. Just say Josh and Chuck would want me to plow through it, and your queasiness will magically go away. Oh, yeah. All right. So like you said, it is a specific phobia, and it is actually listed in the DSM. Now. Not sure how long it's been in there. Well, a metaphobia isn't about the specific phobia vomiting. Now, I think specific phobias are I don't know if it's specifically listed, Chuck. So when it says it is a specific phobia occurrence according to the DSM, what does that mean? I think it means that it falls under the umbrella of a specific phobia. Okay. You see what I mean? Not really, but that's okay. This means, well, you're afraid you might vomit. You're afraid someone else might vomit around you. You're afraid what people will think of you if you do vomit. Yeah. This article where did you get this stuff, anyway? Was this sort of cobbled? It was cobbled together from some pretty good sources, including Psychology Today, the American Association of Anxiety Disorders, the National Institutes of Health Library, the BBC Vice, and I want to give a shout out to the listener who wrote in to share her a metaphobia story. I had never heard of it before, and she had a very harrowing experience and overcame it just through sheer grit and willpower and came through the other side of this very serious phobia. Yeah. Which we'll get to how to do that later. But these articles make great pains to point out that it is, I think, all people think it's gross and are very much repulsed and turned off by the sound or the smell or the look or anything that deals with somebody getting sick like this. But this is different than that. This is a debilitating fear that can overtake your life. Yeah. That would specifically be a metaphobia. It seems like a spectrum where you can also suffer from what's called fear of vomiting, which is much less overwhelming. But still you're preoccupied with the idea of vomiting. With the metaphobia, your life does not resemble what your life would be if you weren't afraid to vomiting. Yeah, it's a real impairment to your life in a lot of different ways, which we'll go over. It seems like there's not a lot of study about it. I ran across a few studies, but even in the studies I found, they specifically say there's not a lot of not a lot of studies about us. So a lot of the guesses about the prevalence are guesses. But one thing I saw was that in the general population, I think that's actually fear of vomiting, I think a metaphobia is more like less than 1% of the population has actual amenophobia, but that it tends to be about four to one ratio of women to men. Right. Women suffer from it. They have a tendency to suffer from it more. Yes. And I certainly do not have it. But like I said, almost everyone in the world probably it is a trigger for most folks. Yeah. Nobody wants to throw up. But if you have a metaphobia, just seeing the title of this come through your podcast feed could have set off an anxiety attack, and I feel very guilty about that. There's nothing we could do, because even if we warned everybody in the episode before this that this was coming, that would set off a panic attack. Just the mere mention of the word vomit can set the anxiety disorder into full gear. Yeah. This one article you sent, one of the clinicians they interviewed who treats anxiety disorder said it is, in her practice, the most common fear among children that they see. Yeah, and that's typically how it starts. So it's a chronic disease, meaning that if you don't treat this, it's going to persist basically every day of your life, and it tends to get worse over time. And it usually starts with a traumatic experience of vomiting, most frequently of all in childhood. So it's more common, I think, among kids, but it can survive into adulthood and it can start in adults. But what seems to happen is you have a traumatic experience from vomiting. And just like with any other traumatic experience, whether it's surviving a violent crime or being in war, vomiting can have the same effect on the brain, apparently, and you develop something pretty closely akin to PTSD at the thought of vomiting, and it overwhelmed your life as a result. I had a traumatic experience with this when I was a kid. I might have told this story before for another reason, but I was on the bus going to elementary school, and there was a scary kid. Remember in elementary school? They were just the scary kids. I remember my scary kids first and last night. Yeah, right. And they're scary for various reasons, whether they were bullies or, you could probably diagnose something that was wrong as an adult. Right. But as a kid, they were just scary kids. Yeah. And I'm not talking about like I'm talking about, like, sociopathic behavior. Not something that like some they weren't goth, you mean? Yeah, exactly. Right. They had, like, real issues that were affecting other people around them. Exactly. So this one kid I remember his name was Tony something, but he on the way to school one day, many days, he would make himself throw up outside of with his face out of the window. And school bus was going down the road and it would fly down and land on the windows all the way down. Oh, my God. And then other windows, and he would make himself vomit. And it just scared the crap out of me, man. And it wasn't like I was scared, scared? Scared of this dude. Yeah. Well, that's really bizarre behavior, especially if you're doing it to intimidate or freak other people out. Yeah. And I think I might remember you've never told this story before. Story? Because you know how sometimes a certain event can tie something else in your brain? My dad was my elementary school principal. I don't know why I was riding the bus, because usually went to work with him. Oh, he wanted to normalize things, maybe. But I ran to my dad's office right when I got to school crying. He wasn't in there. And the secretary, Dot Jones, let me in the office and let me stay in his office because I was sad. And he had one of those big Cabinet stereo you put on the Rosie Greer record. So the stereo was already on. But the song that was on, weirdly, was the BGS. How deep is your love? Oh, that's good. And to this day, I hear that song and it makes me want to cry. Really? Yeah. It's just a trigger from that day with that guy. You know what? Isn't that weird? That's a sad story because that's a good song. I know. It makes me want to weep. It makes me want to weep for it. Thinking about Tony making himself throw up and I always wonder what happened to that guy? He's in Jim Rose's sideshow right now. Maybe. Is that still around? I don't know. Pukey Tony. Pukey Tony and Hippie Rob are in, like, a little jug band together. But anyway, that's a long way of saying that that was not enough even to traumatize me to the point where I have a metaphobia. No, but I mean, it could have been it seems to be like and it's not even necessarily like a type of person or the brain can just the synapses can fuse in a certain way, and all of a sudden you have this phobia. And the problem is this it starts from a traumatic experience. So let's say that had had this impact on you, Chuck. Right. What would have come next, if you were on the road to a metaphobia, would have been to start to fear throwing up. Seeing somebody throw up probably is how it would have started. And then that would have spread to throwing up yourself. Right. And then you would have become hyper vigilant. You would want to protect yourself from seeing somebody throw up or from throwing up. Well, how do you do that? To prevent yourself from throwing up? You're going to monitor every single weird feeling. You have to say, am I about to throw up? I need to tamp this down. Or I can't eat that food. It might make me throw up, or I can't read in the car. It might make me carsick and I'll throw up. Or that person looks kind of sick, I'm going to avoid them. And then let's just take it a little further and avoid everybody altogether because anybody could really throw up at any given time. And you start to become preoccupied with this and you adjust your life and alter it, and then you're constantly worried about throwing up. And once that happens, the phobia is complete. Your life has changed. You're constantly worried about it. And then the cherry on top of the whole thing is that when you finally are confronted with the word vomit, actually seeing somebody vomit, something like that, you enter a panic attack. An actual panic attack. Yeah. You can, for sure. And the only way to overcome that is to get away, to run, to get out of there. I'm not sure all the ways you can handle a panic attack, but then it calms down and your anxiety returns to normal levels, which is to say, high for the average person. Yeah. So in my case in elementary school, how that could have gone was I had another ride to school, but if I hadn't, I might have stopped taking a school bus and started skipping class and not going to school at all because I was afraid to get on the school bus because of pukey tony right. And gone weeks in a row. And then my parents get a call saying, chuck hasn't been in school for weeks. What's going on? And that's exactly what's going on. It can get that severe. And it all boils down to, at least in most cases, the anticipation of this, more so than the actual act in every case, because the people that are struck with this, by all accounts, are less vomitous than the general population. Right. Because they tried to avoid it. So much so that this one article said that most of these people can even name like, the three or four times in their life they have ever puked and what they ate that day and what they had on television and what they wore, because it stands out that singularly to them. So that's horribly ironic that the people who are the most worried about throwing up are the people who are actually, statistically speaking, the least likely to throw up. Right. But there's an even greater irony to the whole thing, and we'll talk about that after this break. How about that? So, Chuck, we were on the irony train, and I want to keep going. Okay? Yes. The irony of paying attention and being hyper vigilant about vomiting, especially when you are worried that you're going to vomit, because, again, there's a number of things that you're worried about. You're going to be worried that you won't be able to find a bathroom in time to go throw up. You're worried about throwing up in front of other people and embarrassing yourself or being teased for throwing up. You're worried about just the experience of throwing up. A horrible experience. But once you start to get a metaphobia, you lose perspective completely. I've seen multiple they call them a metaphor for people with metaphobia. I've seen multiple people say, you would prefer to die than to throw up. Yeah, that's how much they fear throwing up. And for the rest of us, it's like, God, that would suck to throw up, but I know I'll be fine on the other end of it. Not to a person with a metaphobia. So the irony of all this is the more you start to focus on this and you start to think about every gurgle in your stomach or every weird twist or turn, it actually produces more anxiety. And here's the ironic part. Anxiety can actually make you queasy when you're thinking about throwing up. That's right. So it makes the whole thing worse, and it becomes this vicious cycle. Yeah. And they recommend trying to tell yourself, like, I might feel queasy, but I'm not going to throw up. My anxiety might be making me feel nauseous, but I am not going to throw up. Yeah. Because there's a confusion of queasiness equals nausea equals throwing up. And that's just not the case. Like, you can make yourself sick with anxiety, but you can't make yourself throw up from being anxious. So the whole thing is just wasted worry. Yeah. Some of the other things you might do because of this fear, you might not shake hands with anyone ever again. I think a lot of people avoid looking at television puke scenes. Yeah. You cannot watch you really can't watch those at all. You can't watch stand by me now or the meaning of life Those are so funny looking, though. But still probably not. You might throw away food in your fridge that is not even past this expiration date. You might have a trigger there. You might overcook your food on purpose, and then before you eat it, you will lift the bread a bunch of times. Called checking behavior. Sure, you might not eat on vacation as readily because you only trust your trusted food sources. You might go into a place, and when some people go into a music venue, they check for the exits like you're checking for the bathrooms. You may not even make it to the music venue. A lot of people with the metaphobia end up being agoraphobic and just don't leave their house. Really debilitating. It's often confused for agoraphobia by counselors and shrinks. I've got another one. All right. Apparently a lot of people who have a metaphobia walk around with a plastic bag on them at all times. Something to throw up into an emergency throw up bag. They walk around with this because they're so afraid of throwing up, but they never need to use because they probably don't ever throw up. I know. And some of them will actually carry a change of clothes around with them as well. Really? For the same reason, if they throw up on themselves, they can change their clothes. Yes. And of course, air travel, drinking, alcohol, any of those things, or car travel, even any kind of travel is probably avoided. Definitely don't booze it up. Yes. They probably don't drink at all and subsist on things like pasta and bananas and very safe digestively speaking foods. Although a banana could gag you. Yeah. God, that would be a nightmare if you had a mere phobia. I wonder if they mash them up and eat it. Like mashed up with a fork. Maybe I could see it. Yeah. And I could see cutting your food up into the tiniest pieces because you feel fear choking. And that's one of the fears, too. I don't think we mentioned they're not just afraid of the vomiting, but they sometimes can fear choking on vomit and dying and asphyxiating or going into hospital or starting to vomit and the vomiting never ending. That's another fear of a metaphor here. One other thing that I saw people do is prevent getting pregnant because of a fear of morning sickness. Life is altered and curtailed because you're afraid of vomiting. Everywhere you look, there's some potential trigger out there. So it'd just be easier to stay home and eat your pasta and not watch movies, basically, and just lie there and monitor your stomach for signs that you're about to throw up. That's what they do. That's what you do when you have a metaphobia. That's your life. It's no way to live. It is not. This is not all just academic and stuff. We're grasping at straws and pulling together from different cases. There's actually a case study, we found that, of an eight year old girl who had a terrible experience throwing up and really kind of encapsulates the experience of a metaphobia. She had full blown a metaphobia. She had appendicitis and had been throwing up before the doctors figured out she had appendicitis and had her appendix removed. And that experience throwing up was well, it triggered a metaphobia in her. When she came to and was recovering from her surgery about ten days later, she started getting really worried she was going to start throwing up like that again. Yeah, it was a really sad case and pretty much covered everything we said and even then some, to the point where her father traveled for business and she didn't want him to travel anymore, her father to travel anymore for fear that he would get some sickness and then bring it back to the house. Right. I mean, that's pretty extensive. Yes. She didn't want to eat herself. She didn't want to eat any outside food. She had her safe food, but she also didn't want her parents to eat any outside food either, because she didn't want them throwing up. She stopped playing with other kids because she was worried about throwing up in front of them and being teased. That was her big thing. And as one of the clinicians who we came across in this research said, it's not the vomiting that's really the problem. That's the focus. That's the obsession. But the real problem is the worry, the constant worry. It's the worry that's altering your life, and it altered this little girl's life. Very sad. So let's take another break, and then we'll come back and put a silver lining on this thing and talk about treatment. All right, so we've talked a lot on the show over the years about CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy or exposure and response prevention. ERP basically exposure therapy. And this is definitely probably the way to go when it comes to a metaphobia. So depending on who you go see, you might undergo various kinds of treatments, ranging from starting out by literally saying the words vomit out loud or throw up or puke or just all the words, because that's literally the first step sometimes into getting over this, is just being able to speak the word. Yeah. You may have to start out by writing it down first before you can say it out loud for real. And so once you move past that, the therapies range from kind of all over the board from looking at a fake vomit that your therapist has made in a toilet. Yeah. Now you're starting to move into exposure therapy. Right? Yeah. I mean, this is all of this stuff, ERP and CBT, okay. But they'll make up some fake vomit, put it in the toilet, make you go look at it. They themselves, the therapist, might make the noises in front of you. Well, I imagine they probably prep them or maybe not. May go in the bathroom and jump up and say, I got to go get sick. And all of this is just exposing this patient over and over to the point where they can handle hearing the sound, seeing the thing, saying the word, hearing the word smell is another one, too. Sure. One of the recommendations for exposure therapy is you make your own throw up, like in the toilet, a little bit of cold soup or something like that, maybe mix in some oatmeal with it, and then pour a little vinegar in there to make it pungent and sit around and think about that being vomit. Maybe try to make the sound of throwing up yourself. Try to make yourself gag. All this is to show you when you have a metaphobia, that this is first of all, it's manageable. That's the first part. What you're trying to do is get to this point without having a panic attack. But then also that if you gag, it doesn't mean you're automatically going to throw up. And if you do throw up, it doesn't mean you're never going to stop throwing up or that everyone's going to ridicule you for throwing up. The point of any cognitive behavioral therapy is just kind of change your perspective and give you a more realistic view of the thing you're worried about. There's also a website called right. My Vomit. Have you heard of it? Yeah, I wouldn't get to mention that, but go ahead. You have heard of it before? No, I read about it. But yeah, it just sounds like I mean, that's like classic Internet stuff, right? Somebody's like, oh, let's put pictures of throw up on there, and you guys tell me how gross it is. Well, it's actually used by people with a metaphobia as exposure therapy at home to just go look at this stuff and see it. There's also videos of people throwing up. There's a lot of stuff. The Internet, unintentionally is a great place for people with a metaphobia to go get over their fears. And I'm sure if you have a fear of snakes, it's good for that too. But so is like a Time Life book. You're not going to find a Time Life book that's nothing but pictures of vomit. No, you're going to find it on the internet, though. Yes, you will. That's not in the Old West Series. No. And then I found this other type of therapy, Chuck, called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing EMDR. And it's used for post traumatic stress disorder. And it's the most bizarre treatment I've ever heard of in my life, but apparently it really works. Are you ready for this? Yes. So say I was your therapist and you had PTSD, and it's been used to treat a metaphobia a couple of times, but you're talking about the thing that gave you PTSD. You're focusing on the worst aspect of this traumatic experience, and you're talking about it out loud. But while you're doing it, I'm moving my finger back and forth and up and down, maybe in a slow circle. And I've instructed you to follow my finger wherever I move it while you're recounting this horrible traumatic experience. Supposedly just doing this over multiple sessions, but sometimes just in one long session, PTSD can be treated. And the way that they think this happens, if it actually does work, it just sounds like such totally made up in 50 years, you're going to be like, they actually thought this worked. Right? But if it does work, they think that it works because it taxes your working memory to follow the finger, and your recall then is not aided fully by your working memory. So the vividness of this horrible memory isn't as robust as it would be if your full working memory was working on it. And so when you reprocess it, when you file it away again, this memory, it's lost its luster. It's lost a lot of its bite. Right. Because you've gotten it out there and reprocessed it in a way that's not nearly as traumatic, because your working memory was being used in part to follow your therapist finger, supposedly at work. Wow. Yeah. Isn't that nuts? It's pretty neat. Yeah, I think so, too. I wonder if it really does work. You should try it. Anyone who has ever undergone eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, I would love to hear your story if it actually helped you or not. For sure. And if you have a metaphobia, God speed, we hope you get well soon. And to take this on, or any phobia really has so much courage and grit that just taking a first step towards treatment. My hat is off to you for life. Yes. And chances are you probably didn't even listen to this episode. Yeah. But if you have a different phobia, any phobia, and since I said phobia a couple of times, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this our second PSA in as many weeks if this releases the same week. Okay, but this one's about dogs. It's very sad. Hey, guys. Take me a while to write this because it's been very difficult to talk about your animal lovers, though, so probably a good majority of your listeners are. I thought sharing our tragic story would help prevent others from experiencing the same thing. We lost our dog, river about two months ago because I left a bag of chips out. We were at work while she got her head stuck in the bag, and we came home to find our dogs stiff and lifeless from suffocation. We've always been careful about plastic bags and stuff like that and kept them stored away for recycling, but it never occurred to us that a chip bag on the counter something would need to be concerned about. No, no one ever would ever think about that. Everyone we've also told said it was something they never thought about either. So now we keep all of our bag foods in the cupboard and cut the bottoms off of anything that goes into the recycling and waste bins. That's a good idea, too. Yeah, I started doing that since these guys rode in. Oh, yeah. We were, and still are extremely heartbroken. I hope no one else will have to go through this experience. It was the worst. And if I can help save just one other dog's life, it's been worthwhile. So thanks for being you guys thanks for being you guys. There's a comment there. There's not, but I think that's how I'm supposed to read it. I hope we make it into your next Seattle show. That's Jackie W from Seattle. Jackie, thank you for writing in. I'm so sorry about river, but I hope you guys are doing okay. Yeah, that sounds like a guest list. Yeah. Agreed action to me. Yeah. Right back in and we'll guest list. Yes. We're coming in January 15. Yes. So just right back in. We'll throw you on there. And she sent a picture of river. Beautiful dog. Very sad. The river looks very sweet. If you have a PSA that happened to you that you think we should share to warn everybody else about, we want to do that. You can tweet to us at syscast I'm at Joshua Clarke. You can also check out my website, Russeriusclark.com Chuck's on Facebook at charlesw chuck Bryant. And there's the official stuff you should know. Facebook too. You can send all of us and Jerry an email to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffychenko.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com." | ||
a6f5b5a8-5462-11e8-b449-df4644022943 | Dr. Seuss: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/dr-seuss-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly | The Seuss is loose in this episode about legendary children's book author Ted Geisel. The funny thing is, he didn't ever want children of his own, and his past work was a bit problematic. | The Seuss is loose in this episode about legendary children's book author Ted Geisel. The funny thing is, he didn't ever want children of his own, and his past work was a bit problematic. | Thu, 27 Dec 2018 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=361, tm_isdst=0) | 49421258 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. And this is The Dr Voice cast, our final episode of this year, 2018. So long in the books. Dr. Soyce. Dr. Soyce. That's right. You know what's funny? Well, we'll get to that. All right. Everything that's funny can wait. We're going to talk serious. Dr. Seuss was an author of children's books. He was so great and also kind of racist. Chuck, there's a lot of stuff in here I wish I didn't know. I know. I think we're about to ruin Dr. Seuss at the end of the year, right after the holidays, right? Yeah, but well, let's just talk about the man. Okay, so we are talking we keep saying Dr. Soy. Everybody knows him as Dr. Seuss, but apparently the correct pronunciation is Soyce. And the guy would know because Soyus is actually his middle name. His name is Theodore is it Geiso or geesal, it would be Geisel in Germany. You go with the second vowel. So Theodore Soy. Yes. And it's sort of when I saw that, everyone basically was like Seuss until he eventually was like, fine, I can't fight this fight any longer. Well, they're like, well, spell it differently then. But they're reminded me of Joe Thiezeman. Yeah. The very famous story of quarterback Joe Thieveseman who changed his spelling or his pronunciation to thisman to Ryan with heisman right. Which I think is the story. I think that's true. No, no, I think that's true. Oh, really? Yeah. What do you think that was just like an old football tale? No, I never heard I thought you were just being funny. Oh, no, that really happened. And that really came back to bite him in the rump when his thigh bone broke open. He's like, I guess my knee would have busted if he had just kept at thesement. Oh, is that not okay? Too soon? No. Obviously, once we get into Joe, thisman leg breaking talk, we're talking about Dr. Seuss. That's right. Like I said, theodore soy Geissel. Who is I can't really think of a children's book author that is more widely known. Maybe Charles Schultz. Maybe. I think comics trip. Guy Children's Book. Sure. Children's book. Yeah. Like Judy Bloom. Sure. But I don't know if I call her children's book young Adults. Y A. Like children's book, I guess. The Berenstein Bears. Not The Berenstein Bears. Yes. I would say that Teddy Geysel holds that distinction, for sure. At the very least, his work, his drawing is just immediately recognizable. His style. Yeah. I mean, that font we use that font for our live Christmas show shirts Xnay on the copyright K. No, it's not his. In fact, I looked it up. I was kind of curious. I was like, what is that great font that he uses for his book titles? And I don't know what he used. He probably just handdrew it, I imagine. But now there are fonts called Doctor S-O-O-S font or grinched that you can gang that off. Sure. Like we did for our Christmas shirts. I haven't heard that word in forever. I think I was wearing, like, huge Jenkos the last time I heard the word gank. You ganked my milk off my tray the last time I used it, too. So should we go back to the beginning? Yes. Back to Springfield, Massachusetts. That's right. March 2. As a matter of fact, fellow PISCES Dr. Soyce was born Teddy Geico, and his grandpa had come from Germany. In the mid 18, hundreds bought a brewery because they were good Germans. They knew all about beer. And originally, get this, the name of the brewery was Combo and Geysel, and they locally called it Combach and Gazell. I love that. Isn't that awesome? In German, no less. Yeah, whatever that would be. I think it'd be combat and gazelle. So he moved here, and it would end up becoming the Springfield Breweries Company, which his father then ran. And this is really like, we even did a show on Prohibition, and it never really hit home to me, some of the repercussions of that. I was just like, People can't drink. Right? But I never thought about a family business just being shut down. That's a good episode. It was, but that's what happened. Prohibition came along. They had this successful brewery in their family. They're like, sorry, you're no longer in business. Go find another job. These guys yeah. Who are secretly drinking. Right. So the job that his father did get was eventually became the supervisor of the towns parks. Yeah. Kind of cool. And there's a myth, an incorrect myth, from what I understand, one of the parks had a zoo in it. And so a lot of people say that drawings of the animals were some of the first at the zoo. Were some of the first drawings that little Ted came up with. Not true. No. His father became superintendent of the parks when he was already a grown man. Well, not a grown man. He was definitely not a little kid at the zoo. Did he go to the zoo and draw animals, or is that all false? I think it may be all false, but I'm making that part up. From what I read, he was grown enough that he wasn't a little boy drawing pictures of animals at the zoo, like people think. Interesting. Yeah, I thought it was as well. I love busing myths. I mean, we're a beret now. You should do a show. So World War One comes along, which I've been doing a lot of World War I reading lately with the anniversary of the Armistice. Yeah, you got it really interesting. I didn't know much about it. It's a pretty serious war, man. Brutal. Everything I know about it is from the Wonder Woman movie. Yeah, I kid. So they were German. The guys were like we said. And so, in the United States during World War I, there was a lot of anti. In fact, for a long time, actually, there was a lot of anti German sentiment in the US. They're like, we're not German. We just like beer. And her name is Geisel. So everyone, it was clear that they were German. And so I get the feeling that he felt like he was picked on and laughed at, seized, because he was German. Right. So if you can't beat him, join them. Turn that same kind of bigotry onto others we'll find. Right. So he starts at a very early age in high school, drawing cartoons, writing essays, funny essays, satirical essays. And he started using a pinname very early on, maybe because he was German. And he just reversed his last name, and he became Theo LASIK. Yeah. Actually one of my favorite books. Hooper Humperdinc Not Him is written by Theo Lace. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. I always thought this was a Dr. Seuss book, and then I saw this, and I'm like, it was a Dr. Seuss book. Wow. All right. Do you ever read that one? I don't think so. What's it called? Hooper Humperdink, Not Him. It's about this kid who's thrown a birthday party, and everybody is invited to the greatest birthday party you've ever seen in your life, except for poor Hooper Humperdinck. And I think he gets invited finally at the end, where your parents like, we should probably get Josh this and go ahead and get him ready, right? Pretty much. There actually was a birthday party I wasn't invited to. I'm Hooper Humperdink. Well, you know, my deal was I wasn't allowed to go to boy girl parties for a while. But you were still invited, right? Yeah, but that was even worse, because I was invited, and I was like I had to say, no, I can't go because there's girls there. Right. I got you. I mean, how humiliating is that? Especially in college. Yeah. And they were like, what's wrong with girls? I'm like, I don't know. Ask my parents. He seemed great to me. He's not told me they smell nice. All right, so he reversed his name, became Laceyge, went to Dartmouth College, and like many famous, humorous, I guess you could call them yeah, for sure. He wrote for his college humor magazine. It was called The Jackal Lantern, obviously, and it was just really solidifies that college humor magazines really have produced some of the brightest comedic minds in this country over the years. Letterman. I think he worked at National Lampoons, didn't he? I don't know if Tony certainly did. The Harvard Lampoon. I'm pretty sure Letterman did, as well. All right. At the very least, a lot of his writers did. Sure. Okay, fine. Okay. We'll settle on that version of the truth. But he got kicked off of the magazine staff when he was caught drinking on campus during Prohibition, which is kind of awesome. Yeah. But it wasn't for him. What do you mean? But he was like, Well, I want to be on the magazine staff. This is terrible. This is an unjustable yeah. Not awesome for him. Right? Yeah. I thought you meant he wasn't doing the drinking or something. Right. This did nothing to cut his career off, though. No, he just adopted a new pseudonym. Yeah. Soyce. Right. S-E-U-S-S again. But he pronounced it soiss right. But he was the only person who did. So he did graduate from Dartmouth and I think 1926. Which also further goes to show that if he graduated college in 1926, then his father's brewery wouldn't have been shut down until I don't remember when Prohibition started, but he was obviously not a young kid, necessarily. Got you. Okay. Drawn dumb animals at the zoo. At the zoo. But he went on to Oxford to, I guess, pursue a higher degree. I think he was going to be a teacher, was his original intent. And he didn't like Oxford, but Oxford brought him to his wife, Helen Palmer. Yeah. His first wife. His first wife. And they met, and she actually had a really great influence on him by saying, I think you are maybe going to be a better artist than a teacher, and kind of pushed him toward that. And he ended up pursuing a career in art largely because of her influence. Yeah. And he sort of did the student thing. He worked on the novel, and he traveled around Europe and sort of doing and he was with Helen, of course, this whole time. They eventually get married, and then he went to work for a magazine called Judge Drawing. Once again, like political cartoons, humor cartoons. This is where he added the doctor to his name as sort of a joke, because he, I guess, did not get that doctorate degree or whatever he was pursuing. No, he didn't. But later on in life, Dartmouth did bestow an honorary degree to make him an official doctor. When are we going to get one of those? I've been waiting a long time, Chuck. And are they as worthless as I think they are? Totally. Yeah. I mean, sure, you'll get, like, the discount at Wendy's that they offer, but that's really the only perk aside from saying, like, I'm a doctor. Can you really call yourself that, though? Sure. Like, only chumps do that. Right. Like, you have to call me Doctor now. Dude, you will see me telling people to call me Dr. Clark. Okay. I'll be more personable. I'll be Doctor Josh like a chiropractor. I could see you going off and getting your PhD one day. I want the honor to go from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The backdoor version? Pretty much, yeah. The free version. All right. So he got the doctor on the name, became doctor Soyce. And from then on, he never wrote under his given name again. He was always dressed from that point forward. Should we take a break? You can see me getting a PhD. Yeah. This late in my career. Yeah. This mid in my career. Sure. Am I, like Natalie Portman or something? Yes. Alright, let's take a break. Alright. Natalie Nat. I wish. Right? I bet Natalie Portman hates being called Nat. You think she seems like the type of Natalie who would hate being called Nat? Let's find out. Dr. Portman. Natalie Portman. Will you please get in touch with us and let us know whether you're cool with being called Nat or not? Well, hey, since we're on that, big shout out to Mr. Mark Ruffalo. Basically the male Natalie Portman. Yeah. He tweeted out our Navajo Code Talkers episode, which means that he's aware of this podcast, and we're a huge fan. So if you're listening, man, thanks. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks. Not just aware he liked it, he encouraged people to listen to it. He wasn't like, Steer clear of this piece of poop. Right. This is a good podcast, is what he was saying. Man. I remember when I saw you can Count on me for the first time. Oh, my God, that movie wrecked me. It was such a good movie. Yeah. Not just the first time. Just every time you watch that movie. It's wonderful. It's really great. So I have another show called Movie Crush. Mr. Ruffalo would love to have you on. We'll just leave it there. All right, here's what happens. Teddy Geysel starts doing ads. Yeah. And does quite well. Yeah. I mean, if you're an ad illustrator, you basically do what you're told. The client says, this is what we want. He was the kind of artist who, because of his distinctive style his style is what the clients wanted. Right. So as an ad illustrator, he became nationally famous. Yeah. Which is crazy to think of now. It really is. His first big break was for something called flit. It was a bug spray. And if you look at the Flit ads, they have a picture of the flit. And it was that old tiny Tom and Jerry pump. Cannabis couldn't be more poisonous. It pushed out like a cloud with obnoxious smoke that form like a skull and crossbones in the air, basically. Right. That's what he was drawing stuff for. And he came up with a catchphrase because he wasn't just illustrating, he was also copywriting in these ads. And he came up with quick. Henry the flit. And that just became a national catchphrase. Yes. Like, where's the beef? Right. Like somebody's pestering you. Just like, to somebody else quick Henry the Flit. That's how I probably would have used it. So he became known for that. And then a second AG campaign made him even bigger. Oh, right. So he did flip for 17 years, dude. Right. Which is like I thought, yeah, sure. He did that for a couple of years. It was almost two decades of doing those ads, made a lot of money, kept them nice and employed through the great depression. And then this one's even weirder. He went to work for standard Oil, who had esso oil and so gas. Right. And this was esso marine, which was their boat oil. Yeah. In, he has this PR idea to create a fake navy. The seus navy. The seuss navy, which is nothing. He just made it up out of nowhere to promote the esso marine oil. Yeah. And it worked. Yeah, because he basically drafted people into his navy. He would draw, like, famous figures like, say, Eleanor Roosevelt or something like that, dressed up in the seuss navy uniform or whatever. And it became a thing. Like, people wanted to be in it, so they would apply to be in it. And I guess Esso would hold a party every year and just pull out all the stops. There'd be this lavish seuss navy party, you know, it's called what? The seuss navy luncheon and frolic. That sounds so like 30s. They had 2000 admirals, and they included among them Vincent Astor and Guy Lombardo, famous band leader. And this is a grab. Our articles put it they were what you would call tastemakers today. Like, wealthy, influential Americans wanted to be in this fake navy to go to this luncheon and frolic. Right. And he wrote these little navy story booklets, and astonishingly, it was a big deal, and it actually worked. And when you look at them, they look like Dr. Seuss books. It's not like he changed his style. No, that is the thing he became famous for. Famous and sought after for his style. Yeah, exactly. And weirdly enough, he said that the only reason he went into children's books initially was because his standard oil contract didn't forbid it. Like, that was some of the work that he was allowed to do on the side. Got you. He was like, it's not like I had a great thing for kids. Well, he even said very famously, multiple times that he didn't write for kids. He wrote for people. And he also famously said, you have kids. I'll entertain them. Right. Yeah. He didn't want kids. Did not want kids. No. And he never had them. So his wish came true. He was already pretty famous by the time World War II came around, and he actually volunteered to become a soldier. But he was sent to Hollywood to work at what was called fort fox. Yeah. This is strange. I mean, I had heard of the signal core. Well, the signal core is everything from code and code breakers, really, all the way to psychological operations. I thought the signal core was just like the people that made documentaries and stuff. This is a division within the signal corps. Got you. And so he was basically in this division with Frank Capra and some other, like, screenwriters, actors, basically, anybody who had anything to do with visual entertainment was put into this group in Hollywood on the Fox lot at what was called Fort Fox. That's where he spent most of the war. Although there was a fascinating story about a time when he went to Europe because he had to go get approval for a documentary he had worked on from all the high ranking generals in Europe. So he went from headquarters to headquarters throughout Europe. And while he was in Luxembourg, he visited some of his friends, and he basically got the skinny, they think, on the Ghost Army. You know, the Ghost Army, where they had inflatable tanks, and it was meant to make America's military look way bigger than it was. And these guys were running psychological operations. Well, Dr. Seuss was friends with some of the higher ups in the Ghost Army, and they think that they showed him on a map, like, where to go to go see some of these. Well, in between the time he left and the time he got there, that was suddenly behind enemy lines. Yeah, the Battle of the Bulge literally started around him. Around him. And he was like I was just driving around thinking, like, it was just hard to find friendly troops as part of combat. Belgium sure is pretty but he ended up inadvertently spending three days 10 miles behind enemy lines during the Battle of the Bulge and just barely made it out with his life. Yeah, he was rescued by the Brits, but he would eventually become a lieutenant colonel in his short stint as a late 30 year old. He's, like, 38 when he first went in. Right. Which is really kind of interesting piece of backstory. Well, we left out a pretty big part of his formative years. Early on in his career, was he wanted to have a say in the direction America took in World War II. And he was very much in favor of going to war against the Nazis and Japan and Italy. And one of the reasons why he was in favor was because he was extremely anti fascist. He hated fascism, and he got a job at a liberal magazine, I think a newspaper actually, called PM that was founded in New York. And it was founded with the eye to basically call people out who are pushing other people around. Very liberal, very anti fascist, very pro World War II, although they didn't call it that at the time. And it was very antiisolationist, too. And Dr. Seuss was drawing editorial cartoons, very political editorial cartoons about seven days a week for this magazine. And he did some really good work in it, actually. Well, yeah. And then in the army, he actually made films. He was making documentaries right alongside Frank Capra. He had one series of training videos called Private Snafu that were animated, but they were the work of Chuck Jones, actually. It's just so crazy about all this talent that's, like, in the army producing these things at the time. But he went on to make live action documentaries. One called your job in Germany, another called our job in Japan. MacArthur stopped the release of Our Job in Japan, and apparently General Patton stormed out of a screening of one of the other ones. And I couldn't find the word, but it said he uttered one loud curse word. Oh, you couldn't find it? No. Did you? It was BS. Oh, okay. But he's trying to think of what it would be. Sure. I was like, but one word. So it wasn't the F word. Unless it was just a very long, drawn out time for you. All right. BS. That makes sense. Yeah. Which I don't understand. I don't know what the problem was, but they were both Our Job in Japan or Your Job in Germany was about post occupation life in Germany or Japan. Yeah. You can watch your job in Germany on YouTube. Yeah. And our job in Japan, too. Yeah. So he recut those, basically kind of rewrote and reset those later on and retitled them. Hitler lives and designed for death. No, he didn't. They were re cut around him without his say. Oh, no. He and his wife later got those films. Oh, really? And re cut them and won an Academy Award. Okay. Yeah. I had read that a producer went in and did some recutting against their witches and made it way worse than they originally intended. Well, that may have happened. And then maybe they then later on, we re cut out it got the Oscar for their version. Right. I don't know. Okay. But we left out a lot, actually, because he actually had previous to the army, had already written children's books. He went fully into this because of a ship trip that he took okay. In 1936. Let's walk it back a little bit. They went on a transatlantic voyage aboard the Ms kung's Home, and apparently the ship's engine had this beat, this hypnotic, throbbing sound that just really stuck with them, and they got into his head, and so he started composing rhyming couplets that match with this rhythm, kind of like that's my SS kung's Home impression. All right. Well, it ended up being what's called anapestic tetrameter, which is what he would make his career on this poetic meter. You know what that made me think of Chuck? I've never heard those words together in my life, but no one ever taught me how to read a Dr. Seuss book. It's almost like we have some ingrained thing in our brain to read things in that kind of rhythm or rhyme. You know what I mean? Or is it just that? My parents read that to me, and that's where I picked it up from. But who taught them? I never taught anybody how to read something in rhymes. It's just like you just intuitive. When you're not reading it in the right rhythm, your brain realizes it and corrects you, and you go back and reread it the right way. Right. Like, when you get to the next line, you're like, oh, wait, that's out of beat or whatever. You figure it out naturally. And I wonder why we're geared toward that. Yeah, it's funny, too, because I obviously read a lot of kids books every night now, and some of them are great, and some of them just like, they'll do a word that doesn't quite rhyme. And I'm always like, Come on, come on. Or they'll stuff too much in a line, and it's not, like, graceful in the read. I'm like, man, this is lame. Do better. Orange and Door Hinge. Hey. That's not bad. Well, that's Eminem. Okay. He very famously can rhyme something with orange, which I found out because I think I said nothing rhymes with orange. Well, everyone's always said that because that's true. Well, I meant it. Door hinge. That's funny. So he created a children's book on that anniversary tetrameter called, and this is a story no one can beat that was later changed and published in To Think that I saw it on Mulberry Street because he had an old friend that he ran into from Dartmouth that turned out to be a children's book editor at Vanguard Press. So I read an account of the story, and the person telling the story said, had he been walking on the other side of the street that day, he may have never become a children's author. Yeah, like, it was that fateful. His friend from Dartmouth was a new children's book editor at Vanguard, you said? Yes. And it was so new that he was looking for material, and Dr. Seuss happened to be walking around with the manuscript on him and just happened to be down there, and they ran into each other, and this book got published. And that was the one where he first made his name as a children's book writer. You're right. And shout out to Steven Barr, book agent. That's right. Yeah. So this and the Pestic seatermanter is what he basically stuck with the rest of his career. He would alter it here and there, use other meters here and there. But this is where he said that was his bread and butter. And it's very wall slike. You can count it off in three, four time. And it just was sort of perfect for kids books. Right. And with that first kids book, and I think I saw it on Mulberry Street, apparently, it's about a kid named Marco who sees a horse and cart on the street. And as he's retelling it, it just becomes this bigger and bigger and more, like, bizarre and grand thing that he saw. And this will come back later on in the episode. Yeah. So he's writing these books. He's doing okay. His fourth book was called Horton Hatches the Egg. I think that's where we first meet Horton, but he wasn't, like, letting the world on fire. And then that's when he goes in the army. Right. Let me tell you the story about getting caught in the Battle of the Bulge again. Here we go. So he makes it through World War II. He escapes with his life from the Battle of the Bulge, and when he comes out of World War II, he goes right back to writing books. And he wrote a few more in the believe. He wrote Yodel the Turtle, which I know is an allegory for Hitler. And he was on record, apparently, the early drafts of it. He had drawn a Hitler mustache on Yurtle the turtle. It's about anti authoritarian. Authoritarian. Is that Hitler or Michael Jordan? Does he have a Hitler mustache? He did very famously. And this is one Haynes TV commercial. And everyone was like, has someone not told him? I didn't see that. Yeah, I'll have to show you a picture. I have my head in the sand like I was Charles Lindberg or something. Oh, that's a nice circular rest. It was just for you and me. So he was writing some more, and he was selling, like, thousands of copies every time he released a book. He was a known children's author. He'd already established his style as something that was pretty recognizable around the United States. But it wasn't until the mid 50s that things really changed for him. Yeah. Oh, wow. It is a Hitler. There's no mistake in that. It's a decision. So I think in 1955 there was a book written called Why Can't Johnny Read? Right. Okay. And a guy named Rudolph Flesh and I realized why we've jumped over. We'll get back to you. Sure. I'm not ready for it yet. All right. A guy named Rudolph Flesh. Rudolph Flesh. Yeah. F-L-E. Was he a porn actor? That'd be a good one, though. Yeah. Rudy Flesh. Yeah. You'd have to call yourself Rudy too. Anyway. Rudolph flesh. He wrote. Why can't Johnny read? And it was basically like an indictment of the American public school system, the education system, and how we taught kids to read. And it was equally an indictment of, like, Dick and Jane. And the way that kids used to read or be taught to read was just basically hear our words on a page, memorize them. This is a red ball. This is the word red. Don't be an idiot. Red ball. Yeah. It's kind of the worst way to teach kids stuff. It is. And the guy in the article said he wrote an article in Life later on, too. He said, you know who'd be a great children's book author to teach kids how to read is Dr. Seuss. He's already kids. He's already writing books for kids. But if he just directed that toward actually teaching them how to read, kids would definitely. Want that. And it turns out that an editor, I think, at Hot and Mifflin or somebody, wherever Dr. Seuss was writing at the time, dunder Mifflin. Dunder Mifflin. You got me. He said, that's actually a pretty good idea. And that's where we got the cat and the hat. That's right. It was originally meant as a reading primer. I think there were 225, 225 words. And very famously, his editor bet him after that that he could not write a book with only 50 words, and he went, Take this book, Green Eggs and Ham, and shove it and shove it, and give me my $50. And that is supposedly true. His editor bet him that he could not do so. And that's where Green Eggs and Ham came from. Yeah. And it's 50 words exactly. That's right. So at this point, he went from ed says he went from being a well known children's author to probably the best known children's author in the world. Yeah. He'd shown not only could he write fun, whimsical stories with the disguised moral lesson in the middle of it, too, with great illustrations and hand drawn fonts and all that, he could actually teach the world's children how to read English, at least. Yeah. And then from that success, he wrote that same year, how the Grinch Stole Christmas. That's a big year, man. Very big year. So Cat and the Hat and the Grinch are the same year, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Which is just amazing. And then in 1966, of course, we get the very famous TV cartoon adaptation, which people still love and enjoy today, including me. Oh, yeah. And he ended up being so successful that they gave him his own imprint at Random House with his wife, Helen Palmer Geisel, who was kind of, by all accounts, the woman behind the man. Yeah. She was an author herself. She wrote quite a few books. One called. Do you know what I'm going to do next Saturday to you? One called I Know What You Did Last Summer. Right. Man, it's funny. Adding those two words just makes it threatening. The horror novel. One called why I Built the Google House and one called I was kissed by a seal at the zoo. That sounds great. So I didn't want to just kind of wash over her because she was an author, and very sadly, she ended up committing suicide very late in life. Yeah. Within a couple of years of an affair that he had. Yeah. And he apparently had multiple affairs. And her suicide note supposedly referenced this feeling that she'd kind of been overshadowed by him and his career. And like you said, she was very much the woman behind the man and I think expected to support him and all that thing. And she did. She put her own career away so that she could handle his correspondence and business affairs. She was in charge of correspondence to, like, sick kids that wrote them or entire classes. He was the artistic genius who just needed to be left alone so he could make these books every year. And she handled everything else. Right. And ask somebody to put their career away so that you can have yours. It's a big thing to ask somebody. Yeah. I mean, she was 69 when she and I believe I said, committed suicide earlier. I apologize. I know we don't use that term anymore. So we say now that she died by suicide, right? Yeah. Because committed makes it sound like, oh, my God, she committed a sin. Yeah. And people have written in about that, and we were both glad to be made aware of that. So she was 69 years old and apparently also suffered from Gilliam Bear Barr Giembar syndrome. Yeah, we got corrected on that some other time. That's how I remember of how to pronounce it. Yeah. Who knows why someone eventually takes that path in life? Could be a lot of factors, but yeah. October 23, 1967, she overdosed on medication after they've been married for 40 years, too. Yeah, man. And so shortly after that, he married Audrey Dimond. Yes. Geiso, who's his widow, who is, I believe, still alive and basically running his estate. Still. Yeah. Her name was Audrey Stone Diamond, but it was Dimond now a yeah, which is interesting. I wonder if it's very efficient, but yes, she became soyce. And he went, Just go ahead and get used to it. It's Soos. She's like, really? I've always said soy. He's like, I love you. And she had two daughters, and he said, I bet you they'd love boarding school. Yeah. And she went, okay. And she later on even said this is a direct quote she said, they wouldn't have been happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn't have been happy with them. Yeah. He really did not want kids or kids to be around. He just liked doing the books that he liked to do. It's pretty interesting that 1957 year, that was a big breakout year for him, and that was kind of the year that he became the Dr. Seuss that we see. But he kept writing for many, many years. I mean, up until his death in 1991. He apparently cranked out, like, a book a year. Some of them, over time, kind of took on much more progressive tones until he became the Dr. Seuss that we see today. So prior to that, though, in recent years, some people have kind of said, hey, you know, Dr. Seuss had some really racist bigoted stuff in his early work, and it's become kind of this national conversation to kind of figure out how to do this, because everyone loves Dr. Seuss. Loves Dr. Seuss. There's nobody who doesn't like Dr. Seuss work, I should say. Sure. But if you start digging into especially some of his early work, it becomes problematic. You want to take a break? Okay. All right. All right, let's take a break, and we will take part in that national conversation right after this. Stop your shoulders. All right, Chuck. So it's national conversation time. So Dr. Seuss, especially in his earliest work as Jack o lantern and judge writer, the humor magazine writer, a lot of his stuff was extremely racist, as Ed puts it. Not just racist for the time, but monstrously racist stuff. Yeah. Like full on blackface caricatures. It depicted African American characters as lazy as savages, have too many kids. He made jokes about slavery. There's one we can't even read on this show, but it's awful. Yeah, right. He also, especially after Pearl Harbor, directed a lot of his creative energy toward making ugly caricatures of Japan and depicting Japanese and Japanese Americans in really unflattering light. Too yeah. And apparently supported internment. And this isn't you don't want to drag somebody through the mud. Right. But if we're going to give a picture of the man, this is who he was earlier in his life. Right. So Ed makes a really good point. I think Ed is a great American for the way that he kind of handled this. Too he's saying that if you look at his early stuff, he was a younger man at the time. And I think we should also say Ed qualifies. None of this excuses anything. Sure. But look at the whole picture of the person. If you look at his earlier stuff or his most racist stuff is when he was youngest and his most progressive stuff that everybody knows and loves, his Doctor Seuss, is when the world was kind of changing. Too yeah. It's not like in 1989, he was like, I'm going to deliver. I'm going to serve up a good old racist cartoon. Right, exactly. It's not like he invented sea monkeys or something like that. Right. So he kind of progressed with the world. And not only did he progress with the world and kind of change his views to take on much more progressive stuff. Themes like Bigotry with the Snitches is about discriminating against people and just how ridiculous that is. How people are actually people a lot of people point to Horton here's. A who. As a bit of a Mia culpa for his treatment of the Japanese prior to World War II and during World War II. The Lorax is obviously pro environmentalism. He fully changed one of his books altogether, an earlier version of Thinking It's on Mulberry Street. Yeah. It had the word Chinaman in there. It was worse than Chinaman. And he changed that to Chinese person in the publication of the book for future printings. Right. So he definitely evolved. His works evolved. He never came out and publicly said, hey, I'm really sorry about all the racist stuff that I did earlier. By the time he died in 1990, I think that really wasn't the way that the world was turning at the time. But he does seem to have evolved and changed with the times and did go back and revise some stuff that had crept into his work. Yeah. And this has come to light more prominently in the past few years because there have been some book festivals and children's literature festivals that have either been boycotted or where they've sort of tried to make him a little less prominent. The Cat in the Hat, I think, was used, wasn't it? Like an official read across America. Right. Here's the mascot for it. Yeah. Did they officially remove the Cat in the hat? I think they backed a little bit away from The Cat in the Hat as a mascot, if not entirely. And I think that they've kind of like dr. Seuss's books are not like, the focal point of the Read Across America campaign. Like they were. Right. And then last year, Melania Trump made the news when she gifted a library, some Doctor Seuss books, and the librarian refused that gift and said, they are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures and harmful stereotypes. I don't know that that all is necessarily true, is it? Yeah, I think that might have been a little too harsh. Well, I mean, if I'm wrong, I want to know. The only thing that I've seen that could be pointed to in his work, like, his books, was the reference and drawing of the Chinese guy in his first book. And I think I saw it on Mulberry Street. I didn't see anything else. I saw some reference that maybe The Cat in the Hat was supposed to be blackfaced, but I saw that one place and nowhere else. It seemed to be as earlier work, not as children's books. And I didn't see any racist propaganda that was hidden in the books. If anything, the books that you would give a library I don't know what title she gave would have been the more progressive stuff. Yes. She didn't go there and say, here, look, here's the old jack o lantern. Here's the really dirty stuff. College humor, racist cartoons. And yeah. To say that his work was steeped in racist propaganda when talking about the children's books, I agree. It's not accurate. Right. What I'm trying to figure out is, is that librarian hip to something we don't know about. Right. Or not. I'm very curious to know if we didn't dig quite deep enough. I'm a little surprised because you know us. Yeah. But I want to know if we're missing something there. Yeah, for sure. I found an article where they were just asking a lot of professionals in children's literature what they thought about all this. Because I'm a big dummy. I don't know how to figure this stuff out on my own. And Anne Neely, she's a professor of children's lit at Vanderbilt, said this, just as every author illustrator is. I think Theodore Geisel was a product of his time. We should not judge him by today's standards, but we must evaluate his books that we decide to share with children using today's standards. That's a really great point. Yeah. We cannot wallow in our own nostalgia when we make choices for the books we share with young children. There's simply too many outstanding books available. Well, especially also if the books that we're raising our kids on, it's new to them. Right. If it is steeped in racist propaganda that we're not realizing we're sharing or perpetuating, then yeah, that shouldn't be the case. And Ed makes the great point that in the 1920s and 30s, it was the exceptional American who broke out of that mold and was very progressive, and I wish he would have been one of those, but he wasn't. Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons why there's such a cognitive dissonance when you find this stuff out is because that's what you think of Dr. Seuss based on his work. He would be that kind of guy, but he was human. His work is larger than him is, I think, what it is. And that's the case with just about everything, it seems like. Yeah. I don't want this to taint your reading of how the Grinch Stole Christmas this year, although another thing that he was called out on once was there was no female protagonist in any of his books either. Again, a product of the time. Yeah, he was a man writing about little male characters, but he went and created a daisy headed maisie after that. Right. Again, his books became more progressive further on in his career, and he handled things like segregation and discrimination, like with the Snitches. The Butter Battle book was a clear, glaring allegory for the Cold War and the mutual assured destruction and arms race. Kind of a haunting book that ends without any resolution with both sides, the Yukes and the Zooks, I think, with their bombs pointed at one another. And it's not like and they live happily ever after. It's like, what's going to happen? Yeah. And then his last book that he wrote and published while he was alive was all the Places You'll Go, which I had no idea was published in 1990. Did you? I didn't know anything about it. So it was his last book that was published while he was alive. It's also his top selling book. So some of these other books have been around for decades, longer than All The Places You'll Go. But All The Places You'll Go is this top selling book because it's given to grads. Every spring, there's a new batch of graduates who get All The Places You'll Go as a gift, and like 10 million copies have been sold because it's about your future and what it's you yeah. Just, like, doing things and taking risks and trying stuff, and you can do it, and it'll be hard, and you're going to run into problems, but you're a good person and you're going to make good choices. And I have a story about this. Oh, yeah. So last night I was talking to Yummy, and I was like, just out of nowhere. I was like, did you know that all the Places You'll Go was only published in 1990, but it's Doctor Seuss's greatest selling book? And she just looked at me kind of like a little flabbergasted, like, Why would you say that? I was like, well, we're doing a Dr. Seuss episode tomorrow. And she's like, that's really weird. I'll be right back. And she went into our bedroom and came back out with a copy of All The Places You'll Go and said, this has been under your pillow. She said, I was going to give it to you tomorrow for the last episode of The End of the World. Oh, wow. But I just happened to bring it up the day before and that's crazy. Yes. I thought that was really surprising and how things work out, but I read it as recently as last night. I'm like, this is an amazing book. Even for Seuss, it's an amazing book. An article I read said that somebody said you can tell that he knew this was the last book that was going to be published while he was alive, that he wanted this to be his swan song. Interesting. Yeah. I would not be surprised talking about his more progressive views and sort of catching up with the time if either Helen and or Audrey as the women behind the men weren't helping him along in that respect. Sure. And saying, like, hey, get with it for changing his views. Maybe I thought that as well. I could totally see that. Yeah. Because if you think about it, helen Palmer came into his life. I could see her having that influence on him. Yeah. He passed away, finally of cancer, september 24, 1990, 187. And I remember this because it was a rough week. I was in college, and he and Miles Davis died about five or six days apart. Oh, really? And I just remember being like, man, this is one of those tough ones for dudes my age. They were Beat boppers and children's book readers at the same time. I've got one last thing for you about Dr. Seuss. Do you have anything else? I've got one more thing, too. Okay, I'll go first. He was a voracious chain smoker. Oh, interesting. So much so that even back in the he knew he needed to lay off sometimes. So when he needed to lay off of smoking, he would take up the corn cobb pipe that he kept turnip seeds in. And any time he wanted to smoke, rather than light it, he would put a water dropper in there, and then when the turn up seeds started to sprout, he would go back to cigarettes. What? Yes. I don't fully understand that. He would start a little pod corn cob pipe, turnip seeds, and then rather than light it. He would just put a seed dropper in and puff on it, but nothing was going on. It's all just mental oral fixation. And then after about three days of doing this, the seeds will sprout germinate, and you'd be like, okay, I can go back to cigarettes now. So he'd take about three days off the cigarettes, and he used the crop of turnip greens as his indicator. I thought you were going to say that. That went on to feed, like, the children in poor neighborhoods or something who hate turnips. Kids don't eat turnips. Turnips are great. I agree. I'm a root vegetable man myself. So my last thing, in 2007, the federal judge received a hard boiled egg in the mail from an inmate in prison protesting his diet in prison. And the federal judge rendered a decision, and apparently it was worked up the ladder. I can't remember even what it was about, but he rendered a decision thusly I do not like eggs in the file. This is Judge James. Your head. I do not like them in any style. I will not take them fried or boiled. I will not take them poached or boiled. I will not take them soft or scrambled. Despite an argument. Well, rambled no fan I am of the egg at hand. Destroy that egg today, I say without delay. And they threw him out of court and fired him. Right. Because he was drunk. Yeah. No. I don't know. I wonder what came out of that. I don't know. It gave very little information about what the case was even on. I know the guy's like, no, really, this is a serious complaint. Please, you're focusing on the wrong thing. Someone helped me. Oh, goodness. If you want to know more about Dr. Seuss, go research and make your own decisions about the man, the work, all that stuff. Okay, agreed. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. No. This is our last show of the year, so no listener mail is just our time of the year to thank everyone here and here. Is this the end of ten years? Yes. Or it's sort of in the middle. April is the beginning and end of a year. Right. But the end of our calendar year. And we just thank everyone for hanging in for this long with us. It's amazing that we're still allowed to do this job. You hang in there. It will pay off eventually, and we're going to keep at it forever. Forever. And on a personal note, a very happy birthday to my dear, sweet wife, Yuumi. Happy birthday, Yummy. Birthday, Yumi. And thank you guys for being with us for yet another year. And we'll see you next year, everybody. 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 technicians 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." | |
How Fire Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-fire-works | Creating fire was possibly the most important human discovery, but it's easy to take for granted. But. Josh and Chuck get to the bottom of the chemistry of fire in their quest to explain everything in the universe. | Creating fire was possibly the most important human discovery, but it's easy to take for granted. But. Josh and Chuck get to the bottom of the chemistry of fire in their quest to explain everything in the universe. | Thu, 04 Oct 2012 20:02:59 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=20, tm_min=2, tm_sec=59, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=278, tm_isdst=0) | 27311608 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck O'Brien. TADA. And this is stuff you should know. Josh, will you let me stand next to your fire? Sure. Come over here right now. Okay. Sorry. It's nice and warm over here, isn't it? I'm feverish and smoking, and I feel like there's chemical reactions taking place before my very eyes. There are. That's why there's fire is nothing if not a chemical reaction. Yeah. Okay. Have you heard of the Weincoff Hotel? Yeah, but for what? Born and raised here. Yeah. The Alice Hotel was at the hotel fire. Yeah. You know, that it's. Now. The Ellis Hotel at the corner of Peach Tree and Ellis. Nice refurbished hotel. Back in 1946, it was called the Wine Coffee Hotel, and it was the site of the most disastrous, casualty wise hotel fire in US history. Yeah. In December 1946, 119 people died right here in Atlanta. Yeah. Very sad. 44. Just under 44 years later, in Las Vegas, Nevada, the MGM Grand had a hotel fire. 85 people died. Do you remember the MGM fire? MGM grand fire. Oh, it's a big deal. Not at all. I'm surprised because I kind of remember seeing footage of that. When was this? 1980? Oh, no. I don't remember. So both of these fires and all of the loss of life associated with them were the direct result of hubris toward fire. The Wine cough, their fire exits one stairwell for the whole building. I think it was like, 19 stories or something like that. Yeah. The MGM Grand, they didn't put up, like, $60,000 for a fire detection system in this one part of the hotel that would have saved everyone's lives. So part hubris, part financial shenanigans. Right. But isn't that kind of based on hubris? Yeah, I guess so. My point is that if there's one thing that we shouldn't have hubris towards, it's fire. Agreed. We think we might control fire thanks to Prometheus being given it by the gods, but fire controls us when it really comes down to it. That's right. If you got to face off a tet a tet with fire, you're going to lose, buddy, because you're combustible. Also, we should say here that this fire, it should be a prequel to the how wildfires work and how spontaneous human combustion works. Those two episodes are great. I agree. This will seal up our triumvirate. Now we're going to explain how fire works. Yeah, I do have a couple of quick stats. You're talking about the deadly nature of fire. Yes. It does kill more people than any other force of nature. I couldn't find that, any source for that, but I was searching for it and it brought up, like, a handful of plagiarized versions of this article on the Internet. Oh, really? Yeah. Those are always fun, especially when it's your own. This one's not mine. This is Bill Harris. Tom Harris. Tom Harris. But I do have some stats. In the US. At least in 2010, for residential building fires, over 2500 people died that year. And that's sort of in the wheelhouse. That fluctuates between 2200 and about 3200 a year from building fires. Wow. Cooking is far and away the leading cause of the building fire. And arson is number two, which I would have thought, like falling asleep with a cigarette would be above ours. And then total in 2009, and I guess it counts like any kind of fire in the US. There were close to 3400 deaths that year. That's a lot. Yeah. That's more than I'm sure killed by volcanoes in the US. Every year. I think you're right. Yes. That's just one or two people falling into kilowata from getting too close. Have you seen that footage of that scientist going, he's collecting some sort of, I guess, magma from an active volcano in Hawaii? And it was really nerve wracking because he goes up, takes a sample, he's climbing up the rim and then climbs back down. And right when he steps away from it, the magma comes up over the rim exactly. Where he'd just been climbing. Wow. Like five minutes before. And so it would have just completely disintegrated in my imagined man. What did he say? I don't know. See, like, holy crap. Did you see that? Well, the guy who was filming it was like, narrating, like, hurry up, get out. This is so stupid. Yeah, it's very cool. I don't know what you'd search, but it's up there on the Internet somewhere. Search Waponi wu. And that should do it. So, Chuck, the Greeks thought that fire was one of the four elements earth, water, wind and fire. Earth, wind and fire. And water. And Nash and Young. Right. Silly Greeks. The reason why that doesn't really hold up is because earth, fire, air, these are elements, they're matter, they're made up of atoms. Fire is the physical manifestation of matter changing form. It's pretty cool, like, when you think of it that way. We're going to describe how this happens. All right. I can tackle some of this. Chemistry is not my forte, but it is a chemical reaction at its core between oxygen and fuel, which, I mean, let's talk about like a campfire. Let's go with wood. Wood. Fire is probably the easiest way to describe it. Yeah. But the wood is the fuel. The wood is the fuel. Oxygen is found in the air. That's right. But for these things to make fire, you got to have something called combustion, which means you're going to have some sort of a spark. Well, actually, not always, because as we find out, some things can combust without a spark if they get hot enough. Like the heat is just so intense that it doesn't need any spark. Right, yeah. But for wood, you have to get it up to its ignition temperature, which is about 300 degrees Fahrenheit, 150 deg Celsius, which is where you're going to start seeing some smoke because that is cellulose burning away. And it just occurred to me reading this today, like, where there's smoke, there's fire. Not true. Yeah. Because things can smoke without there being a fire. Yeah. Actually, a byproduct of fire doesn't smoke. So I guess in order to if you're one of the people that now says bottom of the totem pole or instead of top of the totem pole yeah. Then we can further reinforce this obnoxious quality by encouraging you to say, where there's smoke, there is ignition temperature of a combustible fuel. There's volatile gasses. It's nice. Way to go, Chuck. All right, thanks. So, yeah, heat, decomposes fuel, what's the same wood. And in the case of wood specifically, it decomposes the volatile gasses contained in the solid matter. Right. So these volatile gases start to heat up themselves, and while they're doing that, the cellulose, the solid stuff is decomposing and turning into what's called char. Yeah, I got a little thing on cellulose real quick here. And then you can just take a home. No, man, because that's where I get confused. I'm confused, too. Cellulose about 50% of what is cellulose. And that's where you make paper. That's what you make paper from. That's what you make cellulose the catanol from, too. And it's what you make cellophane out of. Do you know cellophane is regenerated cellulose? So it looks like plastic, but it's not. I had no idea. I'm sorry. It's a natural polymer. Plastic is man made, obviously. Right. So cellophane is nothing more than regenerated paper in a way. Well, like, they had some other stuff to it, but that's why it's biodegradable. And I always wonder why, like, supposedly cellophane is biodegradable and it's like, that's impossible. It's plastic, but it's not plastic. There's this old cellophane ad from the 50s maybe, and it's like good things come in twos, and it's like this pair of twins wrapped in stellophane, and they're just kind of looking around, but wow. Yeah. You can imagine they only have them in there for 2 seconds before they snap the picture for you. Awesome. I did not know that about cellophane. The fact of the podcast right there. No, I don't know about that. Hats off to you. All right, back to charge. No, I know what the fact of the podcast is. You're going to save it for when it comes to save it. Okay, so you've got the cellulose, the solid matter of wood separating now from the volatile gases that are starting to lift off that smoke. Right? Yes. Okay. The wood, the solid matter is starting to turn into char. And that is basically, if you burn wood, if you heat it up and you separate the gases, which are the smoke, what remains is carbon. Yes. And what charcoal is is charred wood that had the volatile gasses burned out of it, which is why when you have a charcoal fire, you don't have smoke. Yes. Or not much, at least. Yeah, because the gases have already been burned off. Yeah. In charcoal, too. That kind of got me on charcoal filtering, because these charcoal is a filter and I think they use it as a scrubber, too, on smokestacks. I did some of those survival articles at one point, and one of the things you can do to purify water is take your char from your fire, put it in, like cool it down, obviously, and then put it in like a hanky and then running creek water through that to collect it underneath. That's awesome. And there's like real charcoal filters, too. But apparently charcoal has a quality because once it's pure carbon like that, it has a knack for filtering out things like impurities, like chlorine and letting other stuff get through. So that's why it's used as a filter. Yeah, because essentially what you're making is a carbon filter. Charcoal is like basically pure carbon with all the impurities burned off. Those impurities burned off as smoke. They're volatile gasses. That's pretty neat. Yes. That's pretty awesome. Little survival tip, man, you're killing it today. Well, this is when I go to sleep, though. Okay, so the third component of burned wood, you've got the volatile gases, smoke, you have the char, the charcoal, which is carbon, and then you have ash, which is unburnable minerals like calcium or phosphorus, I believe. Yes. And if you ever cook with briquettes, charcoal briquette, you're going to get a lot more ash with that because it has a lot of more, like, byproducts in it than if you use, like, real wood charcoal. Right. But they're not going to smoke, they're just not going to burn. It's just going to be leftover. Like you can't get rid of it, you can pound it into oblivion, but it's still there. Yeah, but if you use the real wood coal than char, then you'll notice you don't get a lot of that stuff. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Okay, but brickettes aren't nasty, are they? Synthetic briquettes? No, they're made from char and like binding agents and stuff like that. And saw that. No, I actually used to hear that, like, oh, you can't cook with briquettes are so nasty. But I looked into it, it's not super nasty. You probably should cook with somewhere in between nasty and super nasty. Yeah, well, it's not as bad as I thought. I thought it was like a bunch of chemical agents and glue and cement and that's not the case. I got you. It's not the hot dogs of cooking material. No, it's the corn dog. Okay, so we've got the components, right? Yeah. As these volatile gases continue to heat up to about 500 degrees Fahrenheit, 260 degrees Celsius, the molecules break apart. And when they break apart, they go to combine with oxygen oxidation. Right. And the same thing happens with the carbon in the wood, but this takes place much more slowly. But one of the stars of this chemical reaction, this change of breaking down of these molecules and then the recombining into other things like carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, water. Isn't that weird? That fire produces water? I know. That's why sometimes you have steam coming from a fire, right? Yeah. The star of all this chemical reactions, all these chemical reactions is heat is produced, heat energy is released, which allows us to cook and be comfortable and feel secure and all the good stuff that comes with fire. Exactly. And because of the heat that's released as these things are heated up, it is sustainable. That means the fire is sustainable so long as there's fuel and there's oxygen present. Yeah, that was the kind of creepy part. Or not creepy, but it's self perpetuating. Like that claim is going to heat up any fuel near it to the point where it can release those gases to recombine with oxygen. It's pretty elegant if you think about it. Yeah. Another big star of fire besides heat is light. And part of that is from the carbon atoms, right. That are combining, that are being torn apart, the molecules that form up, the char breaking down into their constituent carbon atoms when they combine with oxygen. Right. Recombine. Yeah. I think that would make carbon monoxide. But as they change, their electrons will go up in energy level, will change orbit, and when they come back down, they emit, they release some of that energy that they have and they release it in the form of photons. They produce light. Right? Yeah. It's heat producing light. Like we talked about bioluminescence, where basically you heat up a filament in a light bulb and it glows. That's the same thing with the fires based on the same principle, which is incandescence. Pretty awesome. And depending on the temperature, different colored light is going to be produced. Yeah. You remember the Bunsen burners back in chemistry class and how the Buns and burners have little slots on the side that you can vary the amount of oxygen getting in there? There's a little flickering orange flame of a bunch of burner and if you let a lot more oxygen in, it's going to be more hot. And that's when it's going to be that blue jet. The same as when you see like a jet plane right next to where the flame comes out. It's going to be like really blue and then it gets more orange and yellow. Like the batmobile. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? I know, exactly. The original Batmobile. No, we've seen a bunch of Batmobiles recently. There's a documentary about the batmobile. Oh, really? Yeah, that's why all those were there, for Comic Con. Okay. You mean I had a picture taken with it. With which one? The new one. The Tumblr. That's what they call the new one, is it? Yes, the crystal one. It's called the Tumbler. The crystal one? Yeah. Awesome. It's pretty cool. So, yeah, the reason why the blue one happens to be a different color and hotter is because there's more energy being released. That's right. The lower energy and slightly less hot part of the flame that glows orange yellow is at the top. And the reason the flame is pointed this is pretty awesome. Not the fact of the podcast. The space part is okay, I think. All right, go ahead, then. So a flame is pointed, and it burns upward because the gasses that are burning what you're burning right. There are volatile gases that are being burned off. Right. As they burn, they're hotter, but they're also less dense, and they're moving upward toward the less dense air above it, which causes it to be pointed. But if you were to let you take it for granted but it's kind of cool to know how that works. Yeah. That's why it always burns upward. It tends to burn upward? No, it always does. Always burns upward. And that's also why it's pointed, too, because the air around it is dense and it's pushing it in. Right. Pretty awesome. But if you were to light a fire in zero gravity, it would burn as a sphere. I want to see this. I do, too. Can it be done if we go into zero gravity? Sure. Yeah. But, I mean, they have zero gravity environments. Do they attack? Surely someone has started a fire in one of those just to see this. I think it's a really bad thing if a fire starts in a zero gravity environment. I guess so. I just got to think that someone has tried this. I'm sure there's video of it on YouTube now. There's probably a good reason why. And someone's going to write and say, you dummies. Don't you understand that when you start a firing geogravity that we all die? That's right. Yeah. Okay, so steam. Let's talk about steam, because we talked about the recombination of atoms when these gases are released. Same thing happens when you boil water. You get this gas mixing with oxygen in the air, but it's not going to combust, thankfully, or cooking would be much more dangerous. It's because some of these atoms aren't as attracted to each other in the case of water, for sure. Right. They're tepped toward one another. Yeah. If you're talking fire, though, they have carbon and hydrogen, which are really attracted to oxygen, and so they like to get together and recombine more easily. Right. Pretty simple. And then we've been talking mostly about wood as a fuel, but tons of things are fuel. Gasoline is a good fuel. Gasoline doesn't produce char. Basically, heat vaporizes gasoline into nothing but volatile gasses, which burn. Yeah. There you go. And I always heard, too, that gasoline ignites like the vapor ignites, not the liquid. Is that true? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's not the liquid, it's the gas. But heat causes all that liquid to turn into the gas, which goes kaboom. So different fuels are going to catch at different temperatures. And no matter what the fuel, it'll have a piloted ignition temperature and an unpiloted ignition temperature. Basically, the piloted ignition temperature is that point, that temperature where the volatile gasses are being released and they're heated up to the point where if you introduce a spark, it would blow up. That's right. One of the defining characteristics of a volatile gas is that it basically disperses at room temperature, I believe. Right. Okay. So at some point, introducing a spark is going to set that off at some temperature, which I guess means that if you have gasoline cooled to enough of a temperature, just lighting a match next to it won't set off the gas. I don't know if this is a question. We should be raising a general audience. Don't try this. I'm curious. So we'll have to check that out. Yeah, but the unpiloted ignition temperature is basically when something gets hit by lightning and the heat is so intense that there's no need for a spark. It just keeps it up to the point where now it's on fire, where it can bus. Right. Pretty cool. And I try to get to the origin of pilot, like a pilot light, which is the same thing, I guess. I couldn't find it. I don't know where that came from because yeah, think about it. You've got the gas burning and it's glowing, and then you just hit the spark and then bam, you just ignited the gas. So it's at the pilot at ignition temperature in your hot water heater. But I'm sure someone knows the answer to that. So if you do, send it in. We're raising a lot of questions in this one and giving some answers. The shape and by shape, usually they mean like surface area of fuel affects how efficiently it burns and how easily it burns, too. Yeah, this is pretty basic. Like if you have a big, thick log, obviously you're going to have way less surface area exposed and combustible than if you had like, a toothpick. Yeah. And it can absorb a lot more heat, too. Big, thick log. But yeah, if you have a bunch of little pieces of wood, it's going to burn more quickly and catch more easily because there's more exposed surface temperature and more of that fuel is exposed to the heat. Then, like you said, a big log or something. Yeah. And that's why when you're starting, if you ever watch the Bear Grylls do this thing or less stroud, they try to get the little tiny little shavings from the inside of like you peel away the bark on a tree and then get the shavings off of the tree itself. Right. And that's the stuff that's going to really combust easily through friction with like there's different ways of doing the little I've never done that. Have you started a fire using friction? Yes. Have you really? Yeah. That's impressive. I do that stuff when I go camping now for fun. Like in front of the real fire that we started with our big lighters. Got you. Yeah. And I'm sitting there with my beer and my Southern Comfort in my comfy chair. Right. And the steak is on the grill. I'll do some little survival stuff, just kind of for fun. That's cool. Until I get tired of it and go up. Yeah. But yeah, it's fun. I hats off to you for knowing how to do that. Well, it's pretty easy. I mean, there's different ways. There's the Plow method or the little bow, where you make the little stringed bow and do that little number. Yeah, I've seen that one. There's the castaway one. Yeah. That's the Plow method. Oh, that's Plow. Yeah. That makes sense. That we call it that. Anything else? I don't think so. Do you feel like we explained this correctly and well? Yeah, I mean, it's pretty basic chemistry. Basically, heat breaks down a fuel so that it can combine with oxygen and ignite and then burn. That's right. And it's self sustaining so long as there's fuel and oxygen. And then all you need is a bare skin rug and some Cinemax and you're all set for Friday night. Awesome. If you want to know more about fire, you can type fire into the search bar@howstephorcs.com, and that will bring up this article and plenty of other stuff, too. Maybe even some survival stuff by one Charles W. Bryant. And I said, search bar. So it's time for a listener mail. Chuck? Yes. We should tell everybody about something very special and dear to our hearts. New York City. That's right. We are going to ComicCon, and we will be doing a live podcast on Friday, October 12, at Comic Con at the Jabbit Center. It's like a new thing. We did San Diego. Now we're doing New York. That's right. Next up, Albuquerque. So if you are going to Comic Con, you should come by and see that. But after Comic Con, we have one of our famous, famous to us all star trivia nights. Right. Where is it going to be? The Cutting Room. It is at the grand reopening of the Cutting Room in the Flatiron District, which is what's the address? It is in New York. And it's in the Flatiron, you said? Yes. And doors open at 730. Trivia goes down at 830. And what is first come, first serve. Right? Free. First come, first serve. We will have a bar there that you can buy drinks. Yeah, you can buy us drinks. That's right. We're going to basically be having a really good time. If you're not familiar with our trivia nights, just come out and check it out. It'll be worth your while. Absolutely. And stay tuned for info on Facebook. And twitter about the makeup of the all star team. We are filling that out as we speak, but we will have some special guests that you will want to meet. Yeah. And at the very least, you can come take on me and Chuck, right? Yeah. Okay. This is fun. So what is that? It's Friday, October 12, right? Yes. The panels at when the panel is at, I believe, 645. Okay. And then we're going to be at the Cutting Room starting at 830. Trippy starts at 830, doors at 730. Be there, be square. You're good at this. Thank you. Is it time for listener mail? Yes. I'm going to call this email Bad to the Bone. So Jocelyn Stone here in Victoria, BC. Canada, apparently hates bed to the bone just as much as I do, so we are friends in that way, she says. A few years ago, my partner Tim discovered that he could set anything on his heart desired on his alarm clock for his cell phone. He searched for the perfect song and decided on that. Tim believed in order to slowly get himself ready for the day, he needed alarms at 05:00 a.m. 530 and six. I, on the other hand, wake up without an alarm at 630 without fail, which is what I do. All right. Every morning I was shocked by the full volume darn an errand. There's no way to wake up right there. I would blast up to a sitting position in bed, my heart exploding out of my chest, and looked next to me at Tim, who was sleeping through the whole event. I would punch him, get up, turn off the alarm myself, and then repeat this two more times. What kind of business partners are these? I don't think they're business partners. That was like An American Beauty. Remember that? I'd like you to meet my partner. He's like, oh, what line of work you guys did. Right. That was a quantum Bleep, meaning Lone Star. Wow. Yeah. For some reason, no matter how much I beg them, he wouldn't change the song or let me turn down the volume. If I secretly changed it before bed, he would change it back. If I tried to turn it off and hide his phone, he would find it and turn it back again. If I turn the volume down while he was sleeping, his spidey sense would start tingling and he'd wake up and turn it back on. It turned into a game that lasted a full year, finally ending. When I told him, the slipper of amusement I found in the game was gone, and I would throw his phone into the ocean if he didn't change it. So eventually, she just had enough. Yeah, this isn't fun anymore. We ended up buying an alarm clock radio, which he also sleeps through now, thanks to Tim. Every time I hear badded the Bone in public, I immediately leave the area lest I explode in a muddy, scalding rock going rage like the wamangu dicer. Wow, nice record. Yeah, she said PS. Do a podcast on accordion after all that. Jeez, who is that? Jocelyn. Thank you. Jocelyn from Victoria, BC, Canada. Thank you. And Tim. Tim. Good luck. Tim, Jocelyn. I hope you guys find a song you can both agree on. Agreed. And Tim, just get up, dude. For some people it's hard. I never understood the snooze because wouldn't you rather just sleep that time? No, I'm with you. But I'm saying instead of being woken up, everything then not that easy to just wake right up and bright eyed. Bushy tailed. I need to accept others as they are. Let's see. What do we want? Not for now. I don't know either. We'll have to figure it out. Yeah, send us anything. I guess it's a generic call out. You can send us anything via Twitter at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuff you should know and send us an email containing anything. And if you send us an email that just says anything, you'll be one of 5000 people that do that. So just stop. You can send that email that doesn't just say anything to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Com." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-03-08-sysk-faith-healers-final.mp3 | Why Do People Believe In Faith Healing? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-do-people-believe-in-faith-healing | Since a 1906 revival in Los Angeles, people around the world say they’ve been cured by the Holy Spirit after preachers with the Gift of Healing laid their hands on them. Skeptics scoff, but science’s explanations are kind of vague. So what’s going on here | Since a 1906 revival in Los Angeles, people around the world say they’ve been cured by the Holy Spirit after preachers with the Gift of Healing laid their hands on them. Skeptics scoff, but science’s explanations are kind of vague. So what’s going on here | Thu, 08 Mar 2018 12:00:04 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=12, tm_min=0, tm_sec=4, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=67, tm_isdst=0) | 51167490 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hello, 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. Cool. We're about to lay our hands all over you who knows what will happen? Maybe nothing. Who knows? Yeah, that was gross. How so? Lay your hands on me isn't that a Bon Jovi song? No. Hold on. Who was that? Wasn't that Bon Jovi? No. Thompson Twins, maybe? Jerry, did you hear? She just said Duff Leopard. No, I don't think so. That's right. Pour some sugar on me good cop. What is wrong with you? To pour some hands on me no. Lay your hands on me lay your sugar on me I think it's a Thompson Twin song or something like that. Well, that's not the one I'm thinking of. I don't know what you're thinking of. I'm thinking of the Bon Jovi song. I'll bet the Bon Jovi song is dirtier than this song than Thompson Twins. Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. Yeah. Thompson Twins were a real clean cut. Not Bonjovie. I ended up weirdly seeing Bon Jovi in concert two times. I'll bet that was weird. I bet you're like, what am I doing here? Well, one time they opened up for 38 Special. How did I get here? Wait a second. I'm sorry. I bet that's that one. Yes. Does that mean you intended to be at the 38 Special concert? Oh, yeah, dude. Okay. Yeah. I was like twelve way into the Southern rock scene back then. Okay. And still am to some degree. I still like me some 38 Special. Okay. And then Bon Jovi opened up. It was before they were before they were Bon Jovi. Like they were opening up for bands. Oh, sure, yeah. And then I saw them again. I won't name names, but I saw them again in high school at the peak of their fame, when a person at my high school had bought two tickets and could not get any of the girls at school to go with him. Weird. During the height of Bon Jovi's fame. Yeah. This guy must have been a real dog. I felt bad for this person, and so I went and saw Bon Jovi with this person. And that's just the kind of guy I was back then. These days, I would have said, Buzz off. Are you still friends with this guy? No. Okay. Does he listen to the podcast? Maybe. Well, let's just edit out me calling him a dog then. I'm sure he grew into a fine specimen. No. Okay. Well, as you know, I can play all of Bonjovi Slippery When Wet on the Quaker Oat boxes in my airband. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Although I never saw them in concert. Well, I got to say, that second. Like, I never would have paid to go see them, but it wasn't bad. Yeah, I wouldn't think it would be I mean, they're pros. They know what they're doing. Yeah. So the first concert not so great. I mean, for an opening band. I got Runaway. That was kind of the only notable song they had at the time. That Tom Petty song? No, she's a little runaway. Bon Jovi. I didn't know. I thought that was Thompson Twins. This has been a great opening. Yeah. Especially for people who are interested in face healing, are like, who are these guys? Let's get to it, shall we? Yes. Okay, so we're talking today about faith healing. We've actually talked about some of this before. I would refer everybody to our 2000 and 820 minutes long how Prayer Healing episode works. Wow. Remember that? Nope. That whole cardiology study about intercessory prayer didn't ring a bell with you at all? A little bit. That was where it found its purchase originally. Okay, so this is much bigger, broader picture that we're looking at. Right. But when you talk about faith healing, there are basically two types that people kind of lump into two different categories. One is prayer. Right. There's this idea, and it's a pretty widely held idea among people all around the world of different religions, of different cultures that by praying to God, you're kind of beaming some well wishes to God in the hopes that he acts as a bit of a satellite and beams them down onto the person you're praying for. Whether it be like that the ants that have taken up residence in their cast go away or that they get over their cancer, or that they have a better day than, you know, they're having. Whatever it is, if you step back and look at it, what you're talking about is completely senseless as far as science is concerned. And it's a form of faith healing. It's saying, I believe that by praying, I can affect something about this person's physical or mental state. That's one form of faith healing, yes. And for me, I'm not a religious guy anymore, as people know, but if someone says to me for any reason that they're going to pray for me, depending on who it is in the mood I'm in, it can vary from me just sort of call it like, I would never confront someone over that or say, don't do that. I don't believe in that. You don't burn your teeth and hiss at them. But it might in my own brain, either be like, yeah, whatever, all the way to you know what? I'll take that. Thank you. Well, depending on what kind of procedure you're going in for, somebody says that, you may want to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Just hold off on that one. Okay. What do you mean? So there was a study yeah, there was a study on intercessory prayer, and it was a pretty good study using the scientific method that cut people up into three different categories. It was 1800, and I think two patients, all receiving the exact same procedure, coronary bypass surgery at six different hospitals, and three groups of people who I think represented Catholics, non denominational, nationally Christians, and I think Caramelized nuns were all approached and asked to pray for these people. You said Caramelized nuns. Caramelized nuns. They're not nearly as delicious. They're regular nuns. Okay, so the three groups prayed for these people, and they said they prayed for them based on their first name and last initial. So please help John see you to feel better. And then specifically, all of them prayed specifically for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications. Those are the two requirements that they use their first name, last initial, and then they include that however else they wanted to pray is just totally fine. And they studied these groups that were actually prayed for, and they divided them up into three groups. Right. There was a group that did not receive any prayer. There was a group that did receive prayer, but we're told they may or may not be receiving prayer. Then there was a third group that received prayer and were told that they were receiving prayer. And then when they went back and looked at these 1802 patients, they found that the group that received prayer and knew they were receiving prayer fared worse than both of the other groups. And that actually the group that didn't receive any prayer at all fared the best of the three. So if you're going and getting a cardiac bypass surgery, you may want to say, just don't pray for me this time around. Okay? Yeah. And was this a Grabster article? Yeah. He points out and we may get touch on this a bit more later, but he points out that it's really tough to scientifically study an accessory prayer. And I don't remember if we covered that ten years ago or not. We did, but it's just sample sizes are tough. The measuring of the health outcome is hard because did they live for a week? Did they live for the rest of their what would have been a long, long life? He mentions the sharpshooter effect, which is there are so many potential outcomes that anyone can group something together and say, well, we learned this, and then who's doing the praying? How hard are they praying? How long are they praying? What God are they praying to? It's tough to study something like that. And if prayer actually does have an impact, if there's a group that's a control group that's not being prayed for, how do you control for the friends and family who are actually praying for them and interfering in the study? People have taken this quite seriously, seriously. But they keep running up into these conceptual walls as far as the structure of the study is concerned, and no one's been able to figure it out. But that coronary bypass study was about as close as any of them came. But even still, that one was fraught with methodological problems. So intercessory prayer, out of all of the types of faith healing, are probably the most investigated through science and scientific studies, peer reviewed, journal studies. The other side of faith healing is the kind that probably comes to mind when somebody brings up faith healing, and that is usually an evangelical preacher putting his hands on you and casting out the demons or casting out the disease or doing something to where the power of God is coursing through that person and getting rid of your disease or condition or whatever. That's the other type of faith healing, and that's the one that most people think of you in the last however many minutes. That was had a great band name, and I wonder if you can guess what it was. Cast the Demons out? No, that would be the album title. Properly lay evangelical preacher. No conceptual walls. Oh, nice. Okay. That'd be a good band. That would be kind of like a Thompson Twins cover being so you said he in the terms of the faith healers, and you generally see this more as a man that does this, in my research, at least. But there was a woman there's been a few in the very popular named Catherine Coleman who was a faith healer. And it looks like she should have been on Hehaw or something with those just great lacy. Long dresses that they were in the and in 1967. They did a case study. And again. These are problematic. But because of sample size. But they studied 23 people that she supposedly healed. And they found out later on that none of them were healed. And in fact, one woman, they do this old trick where they're like, you know, get out of your wheelchair and walk over to me. And this woman in a wheelchair had spinal cancer. She threw off her back brace and ran across the stage, and then they followed up with her. Her spine collapsed the next day, and she died four months later, mentioning that because all of these people are when you go to one of these performances, everyone thinks that they're healed, and no one hears the follow up story that's in that auditorium, right? Yeah. And a lot of the success stories are anecdotal for sure, with little or no follow up. And when there is follow up, it usually finds that that's not the case. So how about this, Chuck? Let's go take a commercial, and when we come back, we'll tell everybody what it would be like to go to a faith healing sermon, and then after that, we'll talk about the skeptical view of the whole thing. All right, so we promised to tell you what it was like to go to one of these faith healing what do you call them? I call them performances, but it depends on what type it is. It could be a service. A sermon or revival? Yeah, probably a revival is usually a good way to put it, which is also a sermon in the service. Sure. One thing you're going to have in your pocket is some cash money or checkbook. I imagine they probably take credit cards these days because there is generally some kind of money changing hands at one of these events, whether or not you have paid a fee to get in or made a quote unquote donation while you were there to get up on stage and have your chance to faint in front of thousands of people. Right. So usually we'll take Benny Hin as an example of what these things can be like. Oh, that guy. So Benny Hin is a faith healer. I'm not sure I believe he's nondenominational, but all of this stuff traces back, actually. I didn't realize this. I don't know if you did or not, but all evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity actually finds its source in one place, in the Azusa Street Revival. Have you heard of that? Yeah. And we should point out you said charismatic. Ed is quick to point out that charismatic religion doesn't mean, boy, that person up there preaching shares a lot of charisma. It's actually a form of Christianity that is rooted in Pentecostalism. Yes. That basically means that they believe that God is in the building that day and literally can do things in that room. Yeah, I didn't realize this either until I started researching this article. There's a pretty big schism, actually, in Christianity today between Pentecostalism, which is a form of charismatic Christianity, and traditional Christianity, and with Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity, because you believe that God is in the room, you also believe that God can operate through you. And there are certain gifts that are available to you. There's the gift of knowledge, which is you just know stuff because the Holy Spirit or God is telling you this. There's the gift of tongues called glossylalia, where you suddenly start speaking in tongues. Have we covered that in earnest? I don't think so, man. If not, we definitely should. We did snake handling, which definitely fits. That's a great one, charismatic. It definitely does, yeah. But the basis of charismatic is that God is part of your everyday life and can do things to you, imbue you with divine powers. And one of those divine gifts is called the gift of healing. Now, not everybody has it, but potentially anybody could have it if your soul has been baptized anointed to where you are saved. Plus, basically and that's a big theme that you find in charismatic religion, is that the more somebody speaks in tongues, the more somebody is able to heal through faith, the more somebody is wealthy. I think we need to do a prosperity gospel episode by but this ties into that as well. The idea behind all those things is that those people who are the wealthiest, who speak in tongues. The most who can faith heal are the ones who are saved more than other people. That's charismatic religion. The other side, the traditional religion that you're probably familiar with is like, whoa, the Scriptures, the Bible, that stuff doesn't talk about any of this. And when it does, it is not in the way that you guys are interpreting it. So there's a collision going on in Christianity today between people who say, God is part of your everyday life and other people say, no, God is in Scripture. And that's where you find your answers to God, not in holy laughter or glossy lolly or anything like that. And so there's this kind of traditional Christian group in America that is losing ground very quickly to charismatic Christians who are gaining more and more members. And one of the ways that they're doing that is through faith healing. Is that true? Is it growing? Yeah. Apparently one in every four American Christians is Pentecostal. Now, interesting, I think it's the fastest growing group in America by far. So none of this is new. This all started in the 19th century. As far as faith healing goes. People like John Alexander Dowie. People like Ruea. Hepetita. No, I like the second one more. Hepatita. I bet Ruea likes it more, too. Frank Sandford. Not Fred. Sandford benson, Idahosa. These are all faith healers who have done everything from said, I can raise people from the dead, to I am actually Jesus Christ. Right. So it kind of has run the gamut throughout history. People like Benny Hen and who's the other guy? Peter Popo. Yeah, Peter Popoff are some of the well, they've been around for a while too, but they're the newer version of this 19th century huxter. Yeah. And so as I was starting with the Benny Hin thing, benny Hin service, or revival is about 24 hours long, maybe actually a little longer, because I think it consists usually of six services each, about four and a half hours each. Okay, so we're talking like 27 hours of this revival. And the whole thing is basically staged or created or carried out in a way that you're getting more and more excited, more and more jazzed, and from the perspective of the believers who are there, the Holy Spirit is now coming to this place. And you've got all this appearances going on through holy laughter where people are just ecstatically laughing and they feel so great, or they're speaking in tongues, or they are writhing on the floor. The Holy Spirit is present in the building. Right. And after everybody is good and worked up and the Holy Spirit is present, finally Benihan will come onto the stage and the revival really, truly begins. Then that's when the healing starts. Yeah, but here's the thing. Growing up in church, the Holy Spirit was in the room every Sunday, but it's just a different thing with these more. I guess any kind of preaching is some kind of a performance or sermon is but like, in the 1920s is when especially with Amy simple McPherson, is when these really highly produced dramatic stage shows started to kind of take place. I was reading about her. It blows my mind that she does not have multiple movies made about her. Oh, yeah. She was extraordinarily interesting. And she was based in La. Too. I'm really surprised. There should be I'm trying to think of how I would cast. Whose career should I make? Jennifer Lawrence would probably do a pretty good Amy semple McPherson. You think? Yeah, I think so. I think she could carry that. All right, well, stay tuned. We'll see if you have the casting powers okay. As well. What if it turns out to be Hugh Jackman? Very brave performance. Yeah. She really got things going in the 1920s, and she used everything from props like ships and Trojan horses to motorcycles. Benny Hen, did you go into a YouTube rabbit hole with these things? I've seen Benny Hen before. Yeah. He's one of the most physically I was about to say charismatic, but I don't want to confuse it. But in the true sense of the word charismatic, physically aggressive and charismatic in that he's running all over the place. He's using his coat, his jacket. He will wave it over the crowd, and the first 20 rows of people will fall back into their seats, right? As if blown back by the spirit. He will put his hands on a guy who will jump up and kick his feet out and land on his back. He'll get up and he'll do it again. He'll get up and he'll do it again. And they have what's called catchers on stage, these kind of big men, usually, who catch these people and put them on the stage, help them back up again, right? And they're all a part of the if you've ever seen well, you never saw Fletch One, right? No, I didn't. Was there a preacher in Fletch? One. No, in Fletch Two. Okay. I'm waiting for you back. Oh, no, I saw the sequel. I don't know. I didn't fletch Two. That's what the story was. What's his face? Arleigh Ermey from Full Metal Jacket played a faith healer who was using we can go ahead and say it here. A lot of these people use tricks like ear pieces, and there's someone offstage reading them cards that people fill in and say, Hi, I'm so and so, and I have this ailment. And then they will put in the earpiece and they will say, I'm thinking of someone perhaps their name is James or Jim or Jamie, and they have something wrong with their foot. And then all of a sudden, the guy who filled out that card says, oh, you're talking about me. Get him on stage. Lay the hands. And by all accounts, these people are so caught up in this religious hysteria of the moment and the drama that sometimes they do faint. Right. I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's really important to get across. Like, the people who attend these revivals are true believers, and they are caught up in what they would say is they would describe all this to the Holy Spirit flowing through them, being at this revival, being part of the energy in the air. What Skeptics would say is, well, actually, this is all just part of a mass hysteria, mass delusion. Regardless, it's basically two sides of the same coin, whether it's divine or whether it's internal. These people are experiencing fainting. They are falling backwards, and to them, they feel like they're just being lifted right off of their feet. They are, like, experiencing this holy laughter or whatever. They're not faking in the sense that you and I would be like, oh, these people are faking. They're participating in something that is happening that's connecting them to everybody around them and the people on stage, at the very least, in the ones that are the most legitimate. Well, yeah, they're either that or sometimes they are actual plants. Okay, let me give you three examples. Benny. Hin, peter. Popoff and hobart Freeman. They represent three different versions of faith healers. Benny Hin, his thing is like, you're saying he runs around on stage and waves his coat. His thing is he is healing like a specific disease. At that moment, he'll be like, I can feel the cancer being healed in this room. And then after that, he'll be like, who's felt that? Whose cancer was just he'll come on up here and somebody will run up and be like, you just healed my cancer. Thanks a lot. Right. He was tracked by a documentary filmmaker and investigated pretty thoroughly back in 2000. He apparently does not use plants. I don't really know enough about the guy to know how true his faith is, but it says a lot that he wasn't caught using plants or any kind of technical assistance whatsoever. Well, people have planted people there, though, that are healthy. Like sting operations at Benny Hen shows. Yeah, they would plant it like, whatever some new show would plant someone in the audience, have them go up on stage and said they were healed, and he would tout them as being healed. And then when he's interviewed and said, hey, this person was a plant, they weren't even sick. And he said that she was sick and you healed. And his response was literally like, well, I'm just a man like you, and I'm trying to do better, and I'm always trying to do better. That's not an answer. So that's actually a pretty common investigation. What they're doing is remember how we said that God or the Holy Spirit gives you divine gifts? Right. One of those gifts is the gift of knowledge. Well, what they were doing was challenging the idea that God was giving them information based on the idea. Right. God wouldn't have given you this bad information. That was a lie. So therefore, you don't have this pipeline to God. I can see Benny Hinge just being like, hey, that happens. Right? Yeah. He's famous for saying that the second category is exposed. Legitimate, straight up fraud. Right. And the poster child of that is Peter Pop off. Yeah, he was exposed, 100% exposed at kind of the height of his earlier career, yet he still makes a ton of money today selling holy water. Holy spring water. He doesn't sell it if you send a donation and as a thank you gift, he'll send you your holy spring water. Get it? Right. And then people who have gotten this holy spring water come on and say, right after that, I got a check from the IRS that I wasn't expecting, and now my house is paid off. Thank you. Peter Pop Off. Right. That's what he's doing now. So he went bankrupt getting caught red handed. The amazing Randy. James randy exposed Peter Popoff on Johnny Carson's Tonight show in front of millions of people. Totally ended the guy's career right there. He went bankrupt very quickly afterward. Like, they were the ones using the earpiece. Right? Yeah. So Peter Popoff was getting, like you said, basically the premise of Fletch, too. His wife was going through prayer cards, saying people's names, saying the details they had written down about what diseases they wanted cured and what their prayers were. And Peter Popoff was being fed this information through an earpiece while he was pretending that he was getting this information from God. The gift of knowledge and wowing people seven days a week, six days a week. At his revivals and making a lot of money, james Randy went to one of his revivals, number one, inserted a plant in there a couple of times, a few different plants. So disputed his gift of knowledge, but then also made a recording of the radio transmission of his wife and then plays it on the Carson show. So ends this guy's career. This is in 1986. By 2005, he was back to making, like, $24 million a year through divine debt relief. How do people not pick up on that in the audience? I don't know. I think it's probably well, I know how they pick up on it. And that's part of what makes this so sad, is they are so desperate for health that they will believe anything. They don't think, oh, my God, this guy just called my name out of thin air and said all these details that, oh, wait, that I wrote down on an index card on the way in and handed to somebody. Right. Like, they don't make that connection. So I think that's a pretty good point. They're either desperate to be healed, or this is, like, their genuine belief that some guy has come in and been like, oh, this is what you believe. Well, let me figure out how to work that into my scam. Yeah. Either way. I'm not saying you are. I'm talking to you people out in podcast lane here, like, what suckers? What chumps. It's not for you to judge. These people are, in some cases, being very much preyed upon. Oh, yeah. Not in all cases, though. So far. We've got Benny Hen, we've got Peter Pope, Benny Hill. I know it took me forever to be like that's. Not not a typographical error. Right. But I can't tell you how many times I tuned in to watch Benny Hill. I was like, man, when am I going to learn? They're both very funny shows, though. And then the third type is exemplified by a guy named Hobart Freeman. You would call these people utterly and complete true believers. Right? Yeah. They are the ones who die because they're walking the walk. Actually, not Hobart Freeman. He died in part of complications from gangrene in his leg that he wouldn't go get medical treatment from. So he was actually preaching sitting down and not walking at all. But he died. He prayed over his sicknesses, his pneumonia, his gangrene in his leg, and he had something called faith assembly, I believe, in Indiana, and he was preaching that medical, not just come and get your faith healing, but medical interventions. That's evil. That's basically a sign of a lack of faith in God. Yeah. I mean, he was to the point where he was like, don't even clean my wound. Right. Like, that's medical treatment, and I refuse that. Yes. And so he died. I'm not quite sure how old he was. The problem is, this is like, he's an adult. He can make his own decisions, especially in the United States, where religious freedom is vehemently protected. The problem with him and his faith assembly was that he took. Like. 90 people with him while he was doing this. Including babies who were neglected. Any kind of medical care. Children who died of easily treatable diseases. Women who died in childbirth. 90 people they decided died. And I think between five and ten years at faith assembly. Who probably otherwise would have lived had they sought medical treatment as well as faith healing. Yeah. And this is where it can overlap with Christian science. They don't believe that medical science they issue medical science and medical assistance. Right. I guess, depending on there may be a range. I don't know any Christian scientists, so I don't know if some of them are if there are hardliners and other people, they're like, no, we will take a little medicine for this and that. But ostensibly, Christian scientists don't believe in medical intervention, so there is some overlap there. But what they will say if someone dies, even a child, is it's either God's will or in the case of faith healing, if it doesn't work, they will say that they didn't truly believe. They put the blame back on. The sick person and say, if you didn't get healed by my hand, then that means you didn't truly believe in that. You aren't devout. Yeah, that's one thing if you are a true believer, faith healer, but if you're a con man and that's how you're getting out of it, is saying you don't have enough faith, what a crippling thing to do to a person of faith. How despicable is that? Well, I think it was it Benny Henry pop off one of them's nephew. I read an article by him, and he's still very much a devout Christian, but he saw the light. He was a catcher for a while, and we catch the people on stage, and he was like, it wasn't until I met my wife and she couldn't speak in tongues and everyone was like, you can't marry her. She started opening his eyes to, I guess, the other competing Christianity, which says, you don't speak in tongues, you don't faith heal. And he has put all that behind him and said that he feels guilt now for this lavish lifestyle. That's the other part of this prosperity thing is they believe that God is blessing them with all these riches and these Italian villas and the fleet of Mercedes in the driveway and the helicopter and that it's all God's will. But he had a big, big problem with the fact that they would then in turn blame the people who didn't get healed because they weren't devout. Right. It's really sad. Yeah, it is sad. So there's a few really bad negative outcomes from this. One is you might die because you aren't going to seek medical treatment. And even if you're going to a faith healer and you're not say, like, a Christian Science adherent, but you are a true believer in faith healing. If you go to a faith healer and they're like, I just cured your cancer, you might be like, well, I'm not going to go spend any more money on copays for any follow up stuff. I'll just go home. I don't like going to the hospital. I hate chemotherapy. And then if that treatment was keeping you alive or prolonging your life, you might die because you believe that the faith healer has healed you. Another one is that you're losing money. If this stuff really actually doesn't work, then you're just throwing your money away or put a different way, it's being conned out of you. That's another negative outcome of it. And then, yes, the injuries like Catherine Coleman and the woman with the spinal cancer whose spine collapsed. Should we take a break? I think so. Man all right, we're going to take a break and come back and talk a little bit about psychic surgery and a bit more on Christian Science right after this. All right. So psychic surgery is something that we have not mentioned yet. I guess it's a kind of faith healing, but if you ever saw or if you know anything about Andy Kaufman or saw the movie man on the Moon with Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman, you remember the scene where or if you grew up in the remember seeing the stuff on like 60 Minutes or PBS. It seems like it was a big thing then. These psychic surgeons will use their hands. Most of the time it's on your belly, lay you down with your shirt off and it looks like they are reaching into your body with their hands and pulling out organs or tumors or something. Right. Pulling out some sort of fleshy meaty product. Right. So what's really going on with psychic surgeons is it is a complete fraud. They are masters of sleight of hand and they are covering up if you've seen the video, they're always covering up what they're doing with the other hand. And they have blood packets in their hand and they have like chicken gizzards or something tucked away that you don't see. And it's just a big sleight of hand magic show. And in the man on the Moon movie, it was very sad because Andy Kaufman was kind of at his wits end with trying to heal and get heal of cancer medically. And he took a chance, traveled to where the Philippines was in the Philippines and saw the guy palming the chicken gizzards, knew it was a fake. It was a very sad moment in his life and in that movie. So I wondered I remembered that being the case in that movie, too, but I had read an account of his experience there and from what I could gather, he left the Philippines feeling like the psychic surgery had worked, that the movie contrived or inserted that part. Yeah, because he spent, I think, six weeks over there getting almost daily psychic surgery. And he apparently improved. He started to gain some weight, his spirits improved. So much so that he left the Philippines expecting to heal. But when he went back to the United States, he died pretty quickly after. That was pretty sad in the movie, at least. Yeah, it really was. Because he starts laughing at like the whole cosmic joke of the whole thing. Yeah. So, I mean, what can happen if some of these people maybe he did feel better. Sometimes people do kick cancer and they will say it's because of the other intercessory prayer or the faith healing or both. What skeptics will say is, no, sometimes people heal from cancer. I do. Here's the thing, though, Chuck. This is where science is kind of falling down and allowed faith healing to continue on basically unabated. Science doesn't understand why some cancer spontaneously remits. They just don't. They know that some types of cancer are more likely to undergo spontaneous remission. They also suspect that people may actually develop cancer and their body might overcome it. And they will go their whole lives without realizing that they ever had cancer at some point, but they don't understand the mechanisms behind it. Where I feel like science has fallen down is this misunderstood. Frankly, faith based explanation has been used to replace another faith based explanation, which is that the Holy Spirit healed these people. They're saying that it was spontaneous for mission. Well, what is that? Well, we don't really know, but it's not the Holy Spirit. And I feel like that doesn't fly at all for people who believe in faith healing. When they hear spontaneous permission and they ask, well, how does that work? And science says, we don't know, but just trust us. That's what it is. That's not going to change anybody's view if you're a true believer in this kind of thing. Yeah. And it also points out that some of this could be due to the placebo effect, which I can't remember which show, but we've talked about that before, for sure. We did a placebo effect show. It was probably that one. And that's, of course, when fake treatments seem like they have actual positive effects for the patient. So some of that could be this, some of it could be they have comfort, therefore reduced anxiety. And it has been shown when you have reduced anxiety and stress, then that can help your case medically. Which is also actually, I think, why that first study you talked about with the bad outcome wasn't one of the explanations possibly that people increase their anxiety. Yeah, like it gave them performance anxiety. Like they didn't want to let the people who were praying for them down. Right. Or let God down. So they actually became anxious, which in turn created negative outcomes or complications from the surgery, which is just someone surmising what that could mean. That outcome could mean right. Again, if science is taking it upon itself to challenge faith healing, I don't think it's doing a very good job right now because the placebo effect is not explained very well either. The idea that anxiety can lead to negative outcomes, these are things that yeah, science, you're on the right track. Keep going. Don't just stop there. Well, I don't think they are stopping, are they? I hope not. I don't think so. But you do get the impression that if you ask a scientist about faith healing, they just throw out, well, that Holy Spirit thing, that's just mass delusion. There's spontaneous remission of cancer. So just leave it at that and you get a little pat on the head. I just don't think that works. Who knows? Maybe 20 years down the road, when we understand spontaneous remission, we can say, no, you were not healed. This is what your body did. I think in that case, then the people say, well, yeah, God made my body do that through the faith healer. I don't think it's ever going to end well. Yes. And there's also the case that the Peter pop offs of the world selling or sorry, not selling, taking donations for holy spring water. Thank you. At one point, I think he was an actual company. And then, of course, the government starts poking around the books and fraud claims, and then he re registers as a religious group. And there are religious protections in this country and exemptions from the IRS such that they can get away with some of the stuff. They don't have to show their books. Right. It's really tricky. Speaking of laws as well, too, there are laws on the books that protect religious groups. And I think like, nine states from criminal negligent manslaughter homicide charges for withholding medical care from children. Yeah, it's weirdly. Just came up today, actually, in real time, as we record today. That is weird in the news. Did you see that in Idaho? I didn't. The article is called in Idaho medical care exemptions for faith healing come under fire. And this was breaking news, like 3 hours ago. There is a cemetery in Boise called peaceful valley cemetery. 600 grave sites, and nearly a third of them are children. And while it's impossible to tell how many died because of negligent parents, they think that a great many of them did. They've tried together coroner reports, autopsy reports, advocates have tried to do this, but basically they estimate that 183 Idaho children have died since the 1970s. Wow. Because of parents withholding medical treatment. And I think they leave the nation in more children die of faith based medical neglect in Idaho than any other state. And so they had a rally, I think, today, where they had 183 child sized caskets delivered, I think to the capital steps in Boise, and they're calling on reform and saying, you can't do this anymore. I know that parents, these children can't advocate children's. Children can't advocate for themselves. So it's up to the parents to make sure that they get medical treatment if they need it. And again, though, these parents will literally watch their kid die and say it was god's will. Right. This country was founded on religious liberty. So there's just such a sticky situation where it's like, we have the technology to save your child and you're not letting us do it. In Idaho, like you said, it's the state that leads that. Other states don't have anything like that and haven't for a long time. Some have loopholes that allow that, but say, like, if this happens to multiple children of yours, like, you've let more than one kid die as god's will, we're going to actually come after you. And then other states, I think, like Florida, and I can't remember the other state, basically say, yes, we're not going to criminally charge parents who withhold medical care, but the court can still come in and be like, sorry, TS, your kid is getting this life saving medical care whether you like it or not. Well, apparently everything changed in 1974. There was the federal child abuse prevention and treatment act. And at the time, the Department of HHS interpreted that to say that states must implement faith healing exclusions. And so in order to get federal funding, a lot of the states passed these faith healing exemptions so they could get funding. And later on the department said, you know what, we rescind that interpretation. That's not what we meant. But it was too late at that point. Yeah, and I think it was 2003, was when they finally rescinded it. But all of these exemptions are relics from 2003 at the latest, I think in the lot of them were removed, too. So I have a feeling it's not going to be around for much longer. They'll probably be like one state that's like the holdout state, and I'll be surprised if it's not Idaho, but I don't think there's going to be too many states with it around ten years from now or five years from now. I watch a lot of YouTube today, by the way. Yeah? Yeah. We used to watch in college, we would go to my friend Clay's house, and he had VHS tapes of faith healers and Peter Popoff, for sure. And then although he wasn't a faith healer, do you ever watch Robert Tilton? No. The name sounds familiar. You've probably seen the Fart compilation. He was a televangelist in the 80s. He's still around, I think, but I think he might have been one of those that went broke and then got rich again. But he was a televangelist in the had this great show, something power, can't remember what it was called, but Clayton the Hour of Power. No, okay, I know what you're talking about. I know exactly what you mean. You'd probably recognize this guy, but Clay had a bunch of these dubs, and we would sit around late at night and watch Bob Tilton speak in tongues and stuff on his show. And he was I watched his punch today. It took a stroll down memory lane. Yeah, nice. It's really funny to watch Bob Tilton. I will say So what do you mean, the Fart compilation? Is he Fart a lot or something? Well, no, years later, someone did it. He would make all these funny faces and herky jerky movements, and of course, someone later on dubbed in Farts every time he closed his eyes real tight or made up. Funny move. And that's funny to watch, but it's also funny just to watch Bob Tilton got you because he is like, it's entertainment. It was hysterical. But people would write him big checks and go broke and not be able to pay their mortgages because they're sending him money. Because his whole deal was the prosperity. Things like, you will get rich if you send your money, it will come back tenfold. That kind of deal. Yeah, we definitely have to do an episode just on that. Back in the day, real quick, did you ever watch Cartoon Network when Adult Swim was just like an hour long block at night. Yeah, sometimes. So there was like Space Ghost coast to coast was like, I think, their first show. Yeah. Dave Willis. Yeah, friend Dave Willis was one of the creators. Right before Space goes coast to coast, they kind of dipped their toe in it where they would run old Space Ghost cartoons, just normal. But they would dub in, like, inappropriate laugh tracks. And it made it like one of the most bizarrely funny things you've ever seen. Like somebody would just deliver a line that was maybe mildly like 1960 Space Coast cartoon funny, but then the crowd in the studio audience would just start laughing. It was great stuff. Well, I just love that I'm almost 47 years old and I have put myself out there in public as a learned, researched man, and there's nothing funnier to me than Bob Hilton fart compilation. Nice. Hey, what's funny is funny, Chuck. That's right. Well, if you want to know more about faith healing, I don't know, like, go on to YouTube, maybe go check one out yourself. Who knows? Who knows what will happen? And since I said, who knows what will happen? It's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this using us in the classroom. We've got a few of these lately, which always makes us happy. Hey, guys, big fan. Recently saw you in San Francisco at Sketchfest. And it was even better than what I've been hoping for. And by the way, I want to point out to people when you come see us live, it is better than this. Yes. You get a free Dumb dumb sucker just for coming. Well, they're funnier. They're more fun. They're funnier shows. You get to hear say dirty words here and there. We drink 100% more than we do in the studio. That's true. Anyway, he went and saw him in San Francisco. The reason I'm writing is I'm an 8th grade English teacher. My class has been reading about Harriet Tubman for the past few weeks. This morning I woke up and saw that you released an episode about her. I knew it was meant to be as part of my lesson plan. I was a bit nervous with my morning class because I hadn't listened to the episode yet. Wondering if you might go off on some weird tangent that my students would be confused by. But you did an incredible job. I feel like that one was pretty tangent free. It really was. We stuck to the story. We were both a little awestruck. That's right. Despite all the distractions inherent in being a teenager, my students were absorbed and entertained by your explanation of this amazing person's life. And our contributions to America today was many of my students first time listening to a podcast. I'm so happy I was able to introduce them to Josh and Chuck. La la la. And that is President Rob Carter. So, Mr. Rob Carter's class I hope you enjoyed yourselves. I hope you started listening to our show regularly. You guys and gals are the best. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Mr. Carter. And Mr. Carter's. Class. Did you call him? President Rob Carter. No. I'm almost positive he said that was President Rob Carter. Really? Yeah. You just elected that guy to high office. That would be a weird thing to say. You're welcome, President Carter. I just got a gift of an Edible arrangement from Hugh Jackman. Yeah, so maybe he'll get this guy elected president. You can't wait for that. Amy simple McPherson role. I looked at her picture. I know you saw me over here. I would go with Amy Adams. She did good. Sure. I think just about any actress working today, any of the big names, would do a pretty good job with it. There's some pretty good actresses working today. Well, you know what? Your future is not in casting. You don't think? So who should it be, Josh? You don't think anyone should be pretty good, right? Just throw a dart. They're all talented. They are all talented. Who is the one in Lala land? Oh, wow. I want to say Emma Blunt, but that's not Emma Blunt. Emma Stone. Emily Blunt. Emma Lee Blunt was in Sakaro, right? Yes. And then Amy Adams was in arrival. Yes. Yes. She'd probably be pretty good at it, too, but I still go with Jennifer Lawrence. It sounds like my dad. I feel like your dad right now. Hey, well, at any rate, let's end this episode, shall we? Yes. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at xyskpodcaster. Joshua Clark. You can hang out with us on Facebook.com. Charlesovichokbriantepyshano. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyshaw.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com." | |
49655f16-88ec-11ec-a91e-87fe7eb830a9 | Short Stuff: Schmidt Stinging Pain Index | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-schmidt-stinging-pain-index | If you want to know how the pain from that yellowjacket sting on your arm compares to stings from other insects, you need look no further than the body of work of entomologist Justin O. Schmidt. | If you want to know how the pain from that yellowjacket sting on your arm compares to stings from other insects, you need look no further than the body of work of entomologist Justin O. Schmidt. | Wed, 09 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=40, tm_isdst=0) | 12366632 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. But he's here in spirit. So this is short stuff. Yes. I missed Dave, too. It's been a little while. Wow. I haven't seen his lovely, handsome face. I have not seen another human being in two years. Oh, that's not true. It's been a while. You know, a human being who I have never seen, but wouldn't mind seeing because he has a great mustache is a man named Justin Ochmid. He seems like a stash guy. Oh, he's a big time stash guy from pictures. So I've seen him in pictures. I've never seen him in real life. How about that? Yeah, he seems like a guy. I wanted to see if there were any interviews with him on video, because he seems like quite a character. You would have to be to come up with what he did, which is the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which is a scale that qualifies, at least, and I guess quantifies numerically the pain associated with the stings from different insects. Right. So we've talked about the hot pepper chart. I think we talked about the regular pain chart. Yes. With the faces. With the faces. And I think Schmidt realized that they knew about the damage a sting could cause, but not the actual pain level. Is that right? Yes. And he was already he works with hymenopterrans bees, wasps and ants. He's an entomologist, we should probably say. And he was getting stung already. And he's like, Well, I might as well be the one to just go ahead and start making something like this so that there is some sort of index of how painful these things are. And I think, ultimately, Chuck, he was trying to see if there was a correlation between the amount of damage done and the amount of pain inflicted initially. And where was Dr. Schmidt working at the time? UGA, home of our national champion Bulldogs. That's right. Feels so good to say. He was probably there not too long after the last time they were national champions. Yes. I mean, that was 1980, and I think this was in is when he first published the first index. He's now at University of Arizona. Known in Georgia. Cares. Oh, come on. Go Wildcats. Sure. I think that's wildcats, right? Yeah. Arizona State is the Sun Devils. So, as the story goes, he was going back to his office at UGA there on campus, probably north campus, where the science buildings are. I didn't go over there much. Okay. Not very good looking part of campus, but that's where the science buildings are. And you haven't been to Athens in a while, right? It's been a while now. You should check it out. You'll see people there, too. So you can kill two birds with 1 st. Oh, okay. People. Haven't seen them in a while. That's right. So he was coming back after a cross country road trip with his wife Debbie, who is a zoologist. And this is when he put out his Schmidt. It's like one of the few times you can name something after yourself because of ego. It's rather appropriate. He named it for himself, not just for all of the pain he endured. He was stung at least a thousand times by his estimate while he cataloged 83 different species, but also, like, the personality he associated with the index, too. It's not just like a sweat be a one. Moving on. He had to describe what the pain was like, or else it's basically useless. Yeah, I think we're going to probably spend the rest of this episode talking about this stuff and how brilliant he was in his descriptions, right? Yeah. So we do a couple of them before the break. Or should we break? I say we break and then we come back and just let them rip. All right, let's do it. 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. Swept is a one. I think that's surprising that it's even a one, but swappies are little tiny bees that are attracted to human sweat, as you probably know, and they don't sting very often. And I don't think we said chuck zero to four. Yeah, we didn't say zero to four. It's a big one. But also, Dr. Schmidt, he rarely tried to get stock, right? Yeah, but I think sweatpase might have been one of the ones that he basically had to make sting him. But he was induced. Thank you. But he said that the sting is light, ephemeral, almost fruity, as if a tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm. It's like a nice pinot grigio, too. Exactly. People very frequently compared the Schmidt stinging pain index to, like, wine descriptions. Love it. Tasting notes. How about fire ants? The fire ants you would think would be higher. But it's only a one. And you point out very astutely. And we should thank Business Insider, Atlas, Obscura, terminals and science blogs for a lot of this stuff. But you point out that it's a fire ant, not 1000 fire ants on your foot at once. That's a whole different jam. But even still, a fire ant bite hurts. So the fact that it's one is a really good reference point for all the ones that come after that. Sure, yeah. I mean, it's not a zero. So there is pain involved, and this is and of course you're not allergic. Obviously, if you're allergic, it's a whole different thing. But if you're not allergic, it's described as a sharp, sudden, mildly alarming sting, like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch. Okay, so far so good. I could handle those. Now we're starting to get into where I just don't want to have anything to do with these things. Like starting with the bald face hornet. That's a two. That's a two. And the way that Schmidt described it, also, apparently the Bald Face Hornets things will keep going for about five minutes. And I'm sure those five minutes seem a lot longer than actual five minutes. Yeah, but he said that the sting is like rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Well, yeah, that's exactly right. What would that mean? So he goes on to describe it as similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door. And all of a sudden it does kind of like take more shape, doesn't it? Sort of, yeah, I guess so. And he had to do that because a bald faced hornet is a two. A yellow jacket is a two. But he points out like their stings are much different. The pain associated with them feels much different. Yeah, because the yellow jacket can go on for about ten minutes, give or take a minute or two, and it described as hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue. There's also something I need to point out, and I know I've talked before about the time I was stung eleven times in the face and neck when I came upon a yellow jacket nest camping. They hurt according to how deep the stinger was. So the far and away, the worst one and the longest lasting was the hardest to get out. It was almost fully buried in that little is it the orbital bone right under your eyebrow. Oh, boy. And it was almost completely in there, and I barely got it out. And that one throbbed and hurt for way longer than ten minutes. Why did you do that? Why did I do what? Why did you get stung by eleven yellow jackets? They didn't do it on purpose, man. Were you like going after their honey or something? No, we were going down the side of a mountain toward a river, and they had their nest in the ground and we just disturbed it. And we got down to the river and all of a sudden we were swarmed. And I probably ran a mile through the woods. And they were probably not a mile. It felt like a mile, half a mile, and they were still coming after us. Like, we stopped and here come eight or ten of them still after us. Wow. Angry, angry yellow jackets. Wow. I should probably also point out to Chuck that I know that yellow jackets are wasps and wouldn't make honey. I was joking. Right. How about red harvester ants? Have you ever been stung by one of those? No. That's a three, though. That's getting on up there. Well, you could have, though, because you lived in Yuma and they're found in New Mexico and Arizona. But they can inflame your nerves for hours. It says, yes, bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail. Actually, I had a descriptor that I always said for years about the one in my eyebrow. Okay, let's hear it. Felt like someone had a thumbtack stuck on that bone and they were just tapping it with a little ball peen hammer. So I guess I kind of identify more than I thought I did with weird descriptions. There you go. Man, that sounds so terrible. I'm glad you made it. Yes, the paper wasp is next. The most pain I've ever seen my daughter in was this past summer when she got nailed by a watch. Oh, no. Awful. It's a 3.0. She screamed like I've never heard before, and I felt so terrible. The good news is it's only about 15 minutes, and then it completely went away. And the pain and this is actually what she said. She said it's caustic and burning with a distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut. That's crazy. So she's read Schmidt's book. No, I think she just improvped it. I was like, wow, that's really good description. Maybe Schmidt was astrally projecting at that moment and happened to find his way. I'm 50. I've never been stung by a wasp. You better knock on wood, buddy. Although you get the wasp. Yeah, true. But before that, eleven. And trust me, I paid for it with at eleven. But I had only been stung maybe a couple of times in my life. Really? I haven't been stung much. She's been stung like four times already and she's six and a half. Wow. Yeah. I think that has me beat, too. Yeah. What's your worst? I don't remember. I've kind of blocked it out and I think about it, but probably a b yellow jacket. I think it was a yellow jacket as well. They're ground dwelling, right? Well, yeah, these were in the ground. It's exclusively in the ground. But yes, I've been stung by a yellow jacket and it's not pleasant at all. The wasps look painful. They do. Yuumi. Found this one. I want to say it's a tarantula wasp, but I don't know if it is or not. But it was purple and orange, and it looks just mean. I know what you're talking about. And she was like, that looks like something that shouldn't be near Momo. So she got my way, and then she went and looked it up, and yes, it turns out it has one of the most painful stings on the planet. It actually is a four, I believe, which would make it tied with the bullet ant, which Schmidt apparently says it's a four because that's all the scale goes up to, but it's actually, like, off the charts painful. Yeah, it's listed as four plus central and South American and big and black and twelve hour pain. Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire walking over flaming charcoal with a three inch rusty nail in your heel, man. Yeah, I've heard that. There are videos of people purposely getting stung by a bullet ant on, if you want to see that. Yes, there's like, a whole group of people who go around using the Schmidt stinging paint index and purposely get stung and make videos of it just to see what it's like. Ride it out. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay, well, that's it for short stuff, everybody. Steer clear. Stinging insects. But if you ever do get stung by one, check it out on the Schmidt stinging pain index and see if he's right. And 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." | |
How Roller Derby Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-roller-derby-works | Nowadays roller derby is increasingly popular across the US -- but how did it get its start, and how does it work? As Josh and Chuck delve into the world of roller derby, they touch on skateboarding, women's rights and more. Tune in and learn more. | Nowadays roller derby is increasingly popular across the US -- but how did it get its start, and how does it work? As Josh and Chuck delve into the world of roller derby, they touch on skateboarding, women's rights and more. Tune in and learn more. | Tue, 28 Sep 2010 15:39:39 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=15, tm_min=39, tm_sec=39, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=271, tm_isdst=0) | 37031409 | 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. This is Josh Clark. Charles W. Bryan is clearing his nose out across from me. I was laughing at boogers because you were singing Dolly Parton before we went on air. Yes, I was. I love Dolly. I'm hoping that was never recorded by Jerry secretly surreptitiously. We had a little outtakes in a while. It's been a while, Jerry. Get on that. We haven't said anything funny in a really long time. I think that's the problem. Hey, Chuck. Hey, dude. Did you know that we are smack dab in the middle of roller derby playoff season? Yeah. Oh, you did? Yeah. Did you know that prior to 900 a. M. This morning? No. But I would say we're smack dab in the middle of a roller derby revolution. Yeah, we're smack dab in the middle of a roller derby playoff season that is situated within a larger roller derby revolution. Can we agree to that one? Yes. Okay. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Roller derby, it's kind of everywhere. If you are not into it, I'm sure you've at least seen some cool posters or stickers on cars supporting roller derby League all of a sudden. And if you notice that there really weren't any prior to 2001, you're pretty sharp person. I would say so. We have our own roller derby league here in Atlanta. The Atlanta Roller Girls. Have you been? I have not. I've seen them on cable access, though. Is that your Tuesday night? Just watching cable access? I know. I actually don't remember where I would have seen them because I don't even have cable access or cable or anything right now. We need to go. We need to make a point to go. It's like right down from my house. Tom Ponds, right? Yeah. The Yarab Shriner temple. Yeah, oddly. All right, we'll go saturday, September 25, which is probably before this will come out. Yeah. That's the next playoff. I bet if we took Jerry, she'd know like a third of the people there. Yeah. So, Chuck, the Atlanta Roller Girls are one of 98 sanctioned leagues and yeah. Because when did Tracy write this article? Maybe 2006. Yes. I think the w FTDA the Woman's Flat Track Derby Association has been around since 2004. So she did not acknowledge that in this. So it was probably 2003. Okay, so since 2003, Tracy cited there's about 30 leagues. Yeah. Now there's 98 sanctioned and another 43 that are apprentice leagues. They're up and coming. So there's a boatload of roller derby going on around this country. Sure. I was looking on the Flat Track Derby Association site and they have the links to all the different teams pages. So they have the logos of each one. And I found the best one. Which one? My favorite was the Dutch Land Rollers out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They have, like, an Irish woman with the head kerchief on with a black eye. Amish or Irish? Amish. Okay. Did I say Irish? Yeah. She might have been Irish, too. Did I say Irish? You did. That stinks? Because I really meant amish. That's right. So is that the whole get up? They all wear amish gear. I don't know. I just saw the logo. They probably do, because they go with the themes generally. Yeah, but that's for later, right? So, Chuck, let's talk about this. Let's talk about roller derby. And by let's talk about it, let's talk about its history. Yeah. From what I can tell, Josh, in the mid 1930s, there was a sports promoter named Leo Seltzer. Sounds very like sports promoter from the 30s, doesn't he? Yeah. We need a rolo derby. See, that's basically what he said. But initially they used to have all these endurance competitions back in the day, like the dance of funds and all those silly things you did before television. His was initially a roller skating endurance competition. Right. It's called the transcontinental roller derby. Yeah. And the idea was to do 57,000 laps, which is about the distance across the US. It's about 3000 miles. It's a long way to skate. Yeah. But they all kind of realize this kind of stinks and it's not very fun. Plus, skaters were skating about eleven and a half hours a day. Yes. No fun. Right. And I'm sure there's a pretty sizable cash prize during the Depression, so you could make people, like, wrestle bears and tattoos and do all sorts of crazy stuff to feed their family. So I'm sure that's why people skated eleven and a half hours a day for these things. The problem wasn't that it was too much for human constitution. It was that it was boring. It's just people going around the track again and again and again, and then ultimately it's like, wow, they just skated across the US. But in the meantime, it's boring. And there is a sports writer, a very famous sports writer named Damon Runyan, who in 1937 came to sell Term, was like, look, dude, this is a good idea. But the coolest part is when people run into each other. Why don't you make something like that? Really emphasizes that, right? And apparently Seltzer was like, I don't know, it seems kind of rough. And we'll give it a shot, and all of a sudden, the next thing you know, you have, like, 1930s ladies just beating the tar out of each other. Have you seen footage of it? It's pretty awesome. It is. I mean, back in the 30s, too, I think, of everyone so genteel and everything. No, it was just as rough and tumble as it is. And he only had the endurance version for a couple of years, I think, before he was like, you may be onto something. Right. And from that point on, that's roller derby. Yes, Josh. And it grew. It was very popular during the clearly, if you remember, like, Happy Days. I think those are roller derby on Happy Days at one point. Didn't Pinky Tuscadera participate? I don't know. I was wondering that earlier. Is that something she would do? See, it seems like she'd be too cool for that, but she would, like, beat up the girls after the match. Maybe that's pretty bad. I don't know. We'll have to look that up. Leather Tuscadero. Was that her sister? Were there two of them? Was Leather a nickname? I don't know. But it did grow in popularity up until about the think. A lot of things declined in the 70s because of this stinking economy in the gas crisis. And so people weren't going out and spending money on things like roller derby anymore. Right. Or skateboards. Skateboarding. It had an opposite effect that, didn't it? Yeah, it boomed, I think, because that awesome documentary, the Lord's at Dogtown. Is that a doc? Well, there was a documentary and then a feature film based on the documentary. Okay. But the documentary is better. Okay. Swimming pool. People couldn't afford to fill up their pools to the pools right out. And they skated skateboards in the pools. And that Stacey Perla was one of those who would go on to Found Skateboards, the greatest skateboard company of all time awesome. Who would sponsor the greatest group of skaters of all time? The Bones Brigade. Yeah, but that has nothing to do with roller derby, except for the wheels. Well, it does actually have something to do with roller derby in this case, that the Dock is always better than the feature film. You just hang on to that one. Sure. Put that on in your back pocket. Well, it's interesting, though, in that roller derby did decline in the 70s, but that's when it was actually probably the most visible because they had those televised I remember when I was a kid oh, yeah. They televised it on, like, a 25 year old kid. And I sent you the link earlier. We watched a little bit of clips of the YouTube, like 1970 roller derby. You can see some of the stuff. You can and you can hear the commentators when they tried to revive it in the 70s after it's declined. There was kind of an artificial revival where roller derby toured the country in civic centers, in small towns. Yeah, like an exhibition. Right. But there are different teams. But the announcers were the same. Right. And the announcers use a lot of colorful language. Like, there was one woman misogynistic let's just say that there was a woman who was like I think they cited her weight at about \u00a3200. She's like a big blocker. And the announcer said that she was roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island. And it was just kind of like even on the YouTube clip, the person who posted it said, I apologize for the announcer saying that one of the skaters is the size of Rhode Island. Anything went back there in the 70s. Pretty much anything you want. Pretty much. But even that didn't keep roller derby into the kind of fantastic misogyny and the kind of world wrestling look and feel that it had to it. Yeah, they took it sort of over the edge to where they would, like, fake hit each other and stuff like that. Right. But that didn't keep it alive. Right. And we should say also that that revival is significant in that it foreshadows the 21st century revival because it was all women prior to that in the when, like, during the heyday of roller derby. It was coed. Yeah. Well, not coed on the same team. They would have like the teams were coed. Really? We're not coed. So I thought it was women competed in the same night as men, but only against each other. I think teams were originally coed, which has grown from the first roller derby where there were 25 teams of one man and one woman. Right. And then that carried on. So I think the teams are coed, but different periods. It would be the male team or the women's team. Got you, I think. But the men kind of went away for the most part, and now the modern revival is all ladies. Right. In Austin, Texas, in 2001, a group of women got together and basically singlehandedly revived roller derby into this really huge incarnation that we're seeing now. Right? Well, yes. And like we said, in 2004, just a few years later, the women's Flat Track Derby Association was formed, and they pretty much run the show. And we should mention that flat track means that well, it's clearly not a roller rank at the Schreiner's Auditorium in Atlanta, but a lot of them use roller ranks. And instead of the curved bowls yeah, the bank bowls that they used to use, but they still have those in some places. And I get the impression that flat track and banked kind of go head to head. Yeah. The one lady, they interviewed, some women, Tracy did, for this article, and she said that they'll debate that, of course, but it's really all in the spirit of the sport, so they're still like sisters. And I should say there's a documentary about that formation in 2001 in Austin called Helen Wheels. Oh, really? And that's where I saw footage of the old timey 1930s roller derby people just beating the crap out of each other. Yeah, it is pretty awesome. But then there's a feature film based on that, chuck, I don't know if you remember, but on the way back from Guatemala, that's where I watched it. You were watching it, and I was watching you watch it, and every once in a while, just be like Ellen Page and Drew Barrymore in the same movie. That's a rough one. Drew Barrymore directed that, I believe and produced it and basically paid for it. Yeah, it was called whipped it. And it was set in Austin. And I hesitate to say I didn't like it very much because you never know. True. Barrymore is a listener, but I thought about that, too. It was good, too. I think it put it on the map. Faux show, definitely. It brought it into the mainstream. How about that? Yes. Okay. And Jimmy Fallon was just terrific as the announcer. Isn't he always? Future man was the coach. Class act. So that was with it. Let's talk about the spirit of roller derby, Chuck. Okay, it is fishnet stockings and tutus and knee socks and skirts, black eyes, big elbows, all kinds of costumes. Awesome names. Yeah, right. So just in this article alone atlanta Roller Girls susan B agony. That's my favorite. It's pretty good. Let's see who else is there? Chuck? Well, I saw Jackie Daniels, which is kind of good. Some of them play off the tough, like, liquor bottle thing. Well, we should also say to our friend Debbie Freakgirl freakgirl.com as her blog, and she's a freelance writer. She did not write this, but she is new to roller derby. And I posed some questions for her and we'll get to those throughout. But her name too bad we can't have her doing voiceover. That'd be cool. Her name is Molotov Cupcake. 100 proof. I like that one. She makes. She's a really good cupcake baker. So she's incorporating her love of liquor and explosives and cupcakes. All the one. And I should also mention, too, my favorite name of all time. This is from a listener about a year ago wrote in and her name was Suddenbeth. I thought just sometimes the simplicity of a name like that sudden death there was in the Helen Wheels dock. One of the original roller girls was Betty Rage. Betty Rage. I like that one, too. Yeah. Or Beyonce. Yeah. Apparently Beyonce, according to Molotov Cupcake is the worst biggest blocker you've ever heard of. Yes. In the history of roller derby. She's a big girl and she is like size. That's one of the cool things about roller derby that Debbie points out and that the league points out is that physique does not matter. You have a skill set you can bring whether you are a 250 pound blocker or you're like Juno and you can just zip through people real fast. Ellen Page. I know. Okay. Sorry. You look stupefied. No, I know. But that's part of the fun of it all. It's picking out your name and designing your uniform and your look as a team. The one from New York is they have one that's really cool. They all have like a checker cab theme. So they have checkered hose on and like yellow cab skirts and shirts. Like bowling shirts. Right. Cool. I think that the common theme. It's not physique, like you said. It's basically just cheer guts and ability to stand up to torture, including self torture. Right. Which is pretty much the basis of training. Yeah. Like Debbie was telling you in that little mini interview you conducted with her that she had to do plank position, squats, push ups, sit ups. What else? Well, all of this is in skates, by the way. Well, I was going to add that at the end. That's like the stuck. You can't put the kicker in the middle. They cover basic she said it was boot camp on wheels and squats and all sorts of, like, physical training. All on skates. There you go. Yeah. She's on the New Jersey Hill Razors with a Z team, and they practice 2 hours twice a week. And she's been training for four and a half months and just finished her basic skills test. Right. And so when you're training, she was just talking about basically calisthenics. But there's like, training as well. Like you throw yourself on the ground to learn how to roll and get up really quick. Sure. Because it's not just getting up. Like you're getting up with four wheels on each foot. Yeah. And people zipping by you that you have to learn how to jump over people. That's a tough one. Ever tried to jump in skates? No. Have you ever done any disco boogie or anything like that? I was an ice skater. Okay. Roll bouncing. No. All right. Did you see that movie? I saw parts of it. Really? Yes, it looked pretty cool. They still do that in New York? So I'm in the discuss skating, and they do everything in New York now that's off New York. You also have to skate at high speeds. Chuck. I understand. Yes. There's actually a bullet in this Tracy Wilson article. It says skate at high speeds. There's also one that says you need to stretch out beforehand. Yeah, that's a big one, too. And you have to start and stop and skate. Yeah, but I think to be fair, I think that means you need to start and stop on a dime. Got you. Precision, high speed skating, dodging, jumping, balance control, all on four wheels. Eight wheels. All right. So check this training part. And apparently there's a very delineated process to it. And you keep the newer people away from the more experienced people, according to Debbie. Fresh meat. And then you actually have to pass a test to become like an A sanctioned flat Track Derby Association participant. Yeah, I guess you can't actually participate in about until you're cleared by them. Right. Yeah. Cause it's dangerous. You know, they don't want you either getting hurt. Although people do get hurt all the time. Clearly. Should we talk about that now? We'll talk about that later. Well, let's talk about how to play. Yeah. Because even after reading this and understanding the rules, unless you really I think it's probably one of those ones where unless you're there or you're very familiar with the two teams, so you know, who's who. It's tough. It just looks like a muddle of elbows and fists and stuff. Yeah. In the tribute war movie, they handle that kind of clumsily just by having a segment where they explain the rules. Do they? That's like, did Ellen Page explain the rules? Because that's what she did in Inception, too. Remember, every 30 minutes, she stopped and looked at the camera and be like, okay, everybody, it's refresher. She didn't explain the rules. I think Jimmy Fallon did. But it's necessary in a movie like that, because when you look at a roller derby match, if you don't know what's going on, you might just think it's mayhem out there because it looks like mayhem. But there's actually not just rules, but there's also strategy to this as well, which makes it even more awesome, right? Yes. Let's hear it, Josh. Okay, well, Chuck, first of all, let's talk about the different kinds of players on the team. You have two teams, and these teams are going to play about five players each about is a series of shorter races, two minutes tops. But they can be shorter than that. They're called jams. Right. So you have a jammer, and this person is delineated by a star owner helmet. Right. The jammer. There's a jammer on each team, and the jammer is the only person on these teams who can actually score a point. Right. So here's the deal. You've got a jammer on each team. You have three blockers on each team. Yes. And the blockers don't have anything on their helmets. Right. And then you have pivots on each team. So if you're looking at the starting line going back, you have the two pivots. They have stripes on their helmet. Yes. Thank you, Chuck. And the pivots act as kind of like the catcher in Major League Baseball is kind of managing what's going on on the field. Same thing. Tracy also compared the pivots to, like, NASCAR pace cars. Yeah. They set the pace of the game, basically, but they're also, like, calling moves out to the rest of the team. They call me the bosses or actually plays. Okay, thank you. And coaches. Right. So Chuck going from the front back is the pivots, the blockers, and then the jammers. Right. And the pivots and the blockers all take off when the ref blows whistle the first time. And then after about 20ft actually, after exactly 20ft, the ref blows his whistle again, and then the jammers take off. Right. So their whole point is to sneak through the crowd and get ahead of them and come all the way back around, lap them and go through again. Yeah. I get the idea that the jammer is clearly the speediest and probably the most skilled skater and probably the most vet, slinkiest person who can kind of, like, get through. I would think so, yeah. But I would think you'd have to be extremely skilled because you're probably having to jump the most. Like, your whole job is to go forward yes. As fast as possible, while other times from going forward. Right. So you get a point for every player as long as everything is above the boards and inbound and we'll get to some of the rules and penalties yeah, in a second. But for every player the jammer passes after the first lap yeah. The first lap, there's no point, right? No, but that establishes the lead jammer. Right. And we'll get to why that's important in a second. But for every opposing player the jammer passes that their team gets a point, right? Yeah. So the lead jammer is the one who comes out of the pack first through the first lap, no points are scored. But the lead jammer has the ability to actually stop the jam when you act that out. Right. By putting her hands on her hips or touching her helmet and touching her hips a couple of times, I've seen as well. And that means the jam is over and there's a break in between, and then you start another jam, which is a part of the overall bout. Is that right? That's right. And we were wondering, I wonder if Debbie emailed me back, why you would call a jam before the period is over, the two minute period, and we both surmised that it's probably a strategy thing. If you feel like they're calling out the points. I believe if you're up on points, you can just go ahead and call the jam and you've won that jam. Right. You're locking the other team out of a comeback from that jam. Right. I think that's probably why they would do it. It's got to be. It's got to be. Why else would they do it? So that's pretty much like a standard jam. Yeah, that's how it's scored. And there's actually a cool flash animation on our site. Did you check it out? No, I watched the YouTube thing in the article. You can just click and you make all these little people that you're seeing from overhead go around and yeah, it's pretty neat. It's fun. It gets the point across very well. So, Josh, there are some other rules, specific rules, because it's not just a free for all. Like you can't trip and stuff like that. So we'll read a few of these off. You have to be in bounds. You can't go out of bounds to pass an opponent right. In order to score your point, like you said, I believe you can pass the jammer responsibility over to your Pivot. Is that right? You can match apparently there's something on the helmet that you can I guess the star comes off and you can pass it during the match, but the lead jammer status doesn't transfer. Oh, so you can't call the match right. Or the jam. Sorry. Yes. It's more complex than college football. You do not receive additional points. If you fall to the back of the pack and then pass the same player so you can't zip by everybody, then hang back and do it all over again once you pass that player, that's your point for that player. Right. You have to come all the way around again and lap them. Right. And if you actually lap the other jammer, that's more points. That's called the grand slam. That's called money in the bank, my friend. That's the big daddy move of all time. Okay. And I imagine that's pretty hard. I would say a jammer probably has to go down for that to happen. Or your jammer just has to stink it. Yeah, it could be a poor jammer. So what's the deal with the blocking? Because obviously you're not just skating through each other. Your purpose as a blocker is to keep them from going by you. Okay. So I think the rules slightly vary a little bit here. They're league to league, I get the impression. But some of the very common ones are you can't block with your arm fully extended. Right. Definitely no clothesline. Yeah. That stuff you see in the movies when they hook up together and close line, that's not right. No. Or they might do that to intimidate. I think you can hold hands, but neither person's arm can be fully extended. Okay. You can throw elbows, but you can't throw elbows above the shoulder. Right. Generally, you can't throw or below the way block. Actually below mid thigh. Oh, is it mid thigh now? You can't fall on purpose in front of somebody as awesome as that move is, especially. And the person jumps over you. Yeah, because it's like, burn. And what happens if you break these rules as you go to a penalty box? Just called the sin bin. The sin bin. So, like an ice hockey, you can spend, like, 30 seconds to a minute in there, which is like half a jam. Or if you commit a major, you can be completely removed from the scene. Like fighting from the scene. The police come, you have to live with us. Any kind of fighting. Or I think deliberate falling is a major infraction. Unless the person jumps over here and goes Burn. Not true. Or if you fall a skater while they're down, or if you give the referee too much guff, I think they can throw you out. Dramatic coordination. Yeah, I know. The roller girls sin bin is a waiting pool. Oh, really? And at least circa 2004, I should say, right. There's a picture of one of the roller girls in a waiting pool, and there's, like a wheel of fortune that you spend to find out what your penalty is. I got a few more things here from Debbie. Okay, chuck, she said that she had not been on roller skates since she was 15. Yeah, because that's a big deal. I don't think roller skating is like riding a bike, necessarily. No, it's like riding roller skates. And she's about my age now, which, I'm not going to say how old Debbie is, because I just want to be nice. She's 25 and 1975. So she said that there are other women there that have never been on skates before, though, in her training. Yeah. And I asked her about the bonding aspect of it, because I think Debbie did it because she was looking for something, something fun to do and physical activity to help her keep in shape and stuff like that. Plank position and roller skates. Well, she said it's the hardest thing she's ever had to do physically, but she said the bonding has been the most surprising and best part about it. She said that after feeling sort of awkward initially as being the new girl, she all of a sudden has 18 new girlfriends and they're really supportive of each other. I think she said one of the girls is in a band and they'll go and see her play, and I'm sure some of these ladies probably eat her cupcakes, I'm sure, too. So it's a good supportive scene there. Yeah, it sounds like it. And I think part of it has to do with the fact that men aren't allowed, and so women feel empowered to have a sport to call their own. That's rough and tumble. And her niece even remarked she thought it was cool that there's a sport that boys aren't allowed to play. Isn't that cute? Yeah, it's very cute. Another factor that Debbie likes, and I know that most of the women probably like, is that it's fun. You get to dress up, she says she gets to wear cute skirts and knee high socks and then go beat the crap out of somebody and then have a beer with her later on. Yeah. So sex and violence all rolled into one. You got it, Chuck. That's as American as it gets. I think you just came up with the new slogan, we should pitch that. And there is tons of violence. There's a lot of injury, although from what I've seen of 21st century roller derby, compared to 1970s roller derby, there's far less violence, but I think it's more frequently real. Yeah, there's a lot of injuries. A lot of soft tissue injury contusions. One of the roller girls interviewed in this article broke her tailbone twice. Wow. Have you ever fallen on your tailbone? You're just like yeah. You've come nowhere near breaking it, but it's really jarring pain. It's awful. Imagine breaking it twice. I can't. So it happened. You couldn't catch me out there, man. They're way tougher than I am. Yeah. What's the fish net injury? What's that called? It's called fishnet burn. It's where you fall and slide while you're wearing fish nets and it leaves, like the stipple burn on your leg. I got to tell you, it's not nice. It's not. Nice. I got hit in the face with a baseball when I was a kid and I had the baseball stitches embedded in my face. I don't know why I felt the need to tell you that. It's swollen, dude. I got hit in the face and dropped to the ground and picked my head up and my eye was already swollen shut. You looked like an Amish woman. I did. Chuck josh. I guess that's about it, right? Well, we should say if you want to support, we are coming into playoff season. Oh, wait, hold on. Let's talk about that. These leagues, there's like pretty much no paid professional roller girls. They pay for their own equipment. They pay dues for the league. Right. And a lot of times these leagues are pretty much de facto charitable organizations. It's awesome. They donate to local charities in the community. And even better, there's some corporate sponsors. Like PBR is a big corporate sponsor, which means that they just funnel money right to charities through these groups. So if you go pay to see a roller derby, you're going to be helping people. Yeah. They have raffles and stuff and they sell swag. And I think there's comic books. They sell schwag? Yeah, they sell swag. Is that funny? So like I said, we're approaching tournament season. The WFTDA has a championship tournament November 5 through 7th in Chicago and first and second and third place teams from each region. They have four regions east, north, central, south, central and west. Earnest spot at the championship. And there are big five tournaments in September and November to determine who goes to the ultimate championship. Yeah. So the Atlanta roller girls playoffs are going to be in Lincoln, Nebraska from October 8 10th. I was about to say, is that the closest one? But looking at these, that may be the closest one. Yeah. And if you're in Sacramento from October 1 3rd, check out the west region playoffs. Yes. The east region is in White Plains, New York, september 24 through 26th. And for all you scannies out there, I know we have a lot of Scony fans september 10 through 12th and Green Bay. You can go to the North Central playoffs and you should probably build a time machine to do that. So, Chuck, I hope you went you want to talk about roller derby and cinema? Yeah. I mean, whip it. What else is there? Is that Raquel Welch movie? Yeah. Kansas City Bomber. That's a very famous one. There is also the Jammer, which is a stage play by Roland Jones. It's about a love story between two members of a classic co ed team. Okay. And then there's an a and e documentary called Roller Girls. Yeah. That was a one year deal in 2006, I think. And then there's also, again, there's Hell on Wheels, which if you don't like paying for your documentaries, you can go on to SnagFilms.com and watch it in its entirety for free. Oh, really? Yeah. I bet Netflix has got that stuff, too. Yeah. I predict that no matter what happens to us, Chuck, we have at least careers as washed up sports commentators for roller derby in our future. Awesome. Okay. Have you ever seen the Sarah Live skit with the 70s commentators? Sports commentators. That's really good, Sedacus. And what's his name? Will Arnett. Now. Will Ferrell Wheaton. What's the guy's name? I don't know. McGruber? Is that his name? No. Oh, he plays McGruber. I know who you're talking about. Will Forte. Nice. You pulled that out of nowhere. Yeah, he and Sedacas do this sports commentary, but it's really off color and inappropriate, but very funny. It's awesome. All right, well, if you want to learn more about roller derby and play with the cool flash animation we have in this article, type in Roller derby in the search bar@housetuffworks.com, and that will bring that article up. And you will thank us a lot, I think. So. Do we have any listener mail? Josh, we're going to do what I like to call fan gift. Thank yous. And what you'd like to call administrative. Yes. We have a list here of things that people sent us that we're very thankful for. Nicole from Ontario sent us lego. Candies. What? You didn't see those? No. I'll show them to you. Okay. Joe Garden, our buddy from The Onion, he's a writer at The Onion, Joe, who has a terrific Facebook experiment going on his T shirt project. It's really cool. He wears a T shirt every day and says whether he should keep it or toss it. Nice. And he's on approaching his ninety th T shirt, and depending on what people vote, he will throw it away. That's really cool. It's funny, but that's neither here nor there. But he did send us, he and some other Onion writers, including his wife, I believe, wrote The New Vampires Handbook, a guide for the recently turned creature of the night. And he sent us that. And that's very funny. Thank you, Joe. Kristin S and his handmade candies from Dish Bistro and Bar in Pasadena. And I remember the homemade NuGet. Oh, yeah, that was good. With Pistachio. I didn't know I loved nougat until I had this NuGet. Oh, yeah. It was amazing. Chuck, where you've been? Have you ever had a Mars bar? No, but this is unlike that kind of NuGet. It's good nugget. This is supreme nugget. And she got onto us because this was a while ago and she didn't make the last cut, and she was like, thanks a lot. She's getting more nugget. Yeah. Well, do you think she'll send us more nugget now? I hope so. Mark from the band Red Pete sent us a CD with a song inspired by our Apostle Scheme Show. You wrote a song about it? Corey T of Massachusetts sent us a tick remover, which I didn't know they made tick key. A tick key. Yeah. Elizabeth made a flower pin for Jerry, which is very sweet. That is sweet. And Jerry has it in her office, if I'm not mistaken. Doctor Diane Hamilton. We supplied her with a cover quote, and she wrote a book, Josh, about being an online student, and I read it and I gave her a quote to nuts. Yeah. It's actually on the book, the first cover quote. Yeah. So if you want to read Dr. Diane Hamilton, it's called the Online student Users Manual. And if you're into online education, it's like really the whole deal there. Sure. Jim sue and Peter. Stephen and Lawrence. Wait, I have a question for you. Yeah? In your book, did you read the inscription? Our cover quote? No, but did you read the inscription? Oh, that she wrote to us? Yeah. Did you say, don't tell Josh, but you're my favorite? Yeah, mine said that, too. Mine said, don't tell Chuck, but you're mine. Really? I feel so betrayed because she didn't say that in mine. Oh, no, actually, she said, I wasn't going to tell you this, but Josh is my favorite. Jim sue. Peter, steven and Lauren sent us a postcard from Guatemala. They're doing volunteer work down there. Are those Jerry's friends? No. Okay. And Custominc.com sent us a real men way, two bills T shirt. And what's funny is that he said in the email you don't feel like you have to mention this. This isn't like a marketing point. We just wanted to do it. And then on the little packing slip, it said, Marketing rush. Send this quickly. No in pin. Yeah. That's hilarious. So custominc.com, we do want to plug you for that. And finally, Pauline does custom photographic prints on homemade abaca paper. Yeah. It's so cool. It is. I have a nice view of a lake in New York. I got a guy surfing at the Golden Gate Bridge, and Jerry has one as well. And if you want to see this, she actually prints the stuff on homemade paper. I'm not sure if that's getting through. She makes paper. It got through to me, though, and they're very awesome. And you can support her at www. Dot. Psphoto CA. And as usual, if you have sent us a nice gift and we thank you for it, you should feel free to post it on our Facebook page. Right? Yes, please do. Okay. We do have a Facebook page, which we should mention. Yes. Www. Dot. Facebook. Comstuffysheno. I can't wait for that minute. I know. I'm looking forward to it, too. Looks awesome. I love the kid who's playing Zuckerberg. He was in Zombieland. Yeah, he's been other stuff. He's good. And then we tweet. Yes, you do. S-Y-S-K podcast. And then we also have a blog stuff you should know that's a blogs@housestephorns.com. Yes. And we have our Atlanta Trivia event coming up. Yes. October 13. That's a Wednesday from just block out six to eleven and there's going to be trivia in there sometime. It's free. John Hodgman and Joe Randazzo are going to be playing with us. And Dave Willis, creator of Aqua Team Hunger Force and Squid Billies. That's right. On our team, we're going to be a team and we're going to take all you suck is on and we're going to beat the tar out of you. If you want to come and play for free. Yes. That is at the Five Seasons Brewery, West Side in Atlanta, on October 13, and come one, come all. It's going to be fun. So that's it, man, that's plug fest. If you have an email you want to send us, I would love to hear about your first brush with for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housetofworks? Check out our blog on the houseofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvent to 2012 camry, it's ready. Are you? Yeah." | ||
03039f42-3b0e-11eb-947e-db6c765e9ffc | SYSK Live: Koko, the Gorilla Who Talked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-live-koko-the-gorilla-who-talked | Recorded live before the pandemic in January 2020 at the Castro Theatre for San Francisco Sketchfest, Josh and Chuck explore the 70s movement that attempted to teach apes human language and the Ape Language Wars that erupted from it. | Recorded live before the pandemic in January 2020 at the Castro Theatre for San Francisco Sketchfest, Josh and Chuck explore the 70s movement that attempted to teach apes human language and the Ape Language Wars that erupted from it. | Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=189, tm_isdst=0) | 67761723 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's not here. But all of these beautiful people are at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, California. Got a Chucker sign out there. I think I know who that is. That's pretty great. It's a good sign. It is. Thanks, mom. We're definitely not coming. So we've asked you all here tonight to talk about being a child of the. Are those for us? Thank you very much. Oh, wow. Okay, let's just start over. I thought she was just like, I'm just going to put my stuff up here. So Chuck and I are children of the he was born in the very early seventy s. I was born in the mid seventies. It might as well have been the 60s, basically. I mean, you are right there on the cusp. And being children of this era, we were aware of certain things. Like all kids of the were like that vans could have carpeting on the wall. Every kid knew the precise amount of McDonald's orange drink that he or she could drink just before getting a crippling stomachache. That's like 70 to 80s kid knowledge. Or that your parents like to go to swinger parties where there were keys and fishbowls and weird stuff like that. Did your parents don't do that? And every kid of the knew that somewhere out there there was a gorilla named Coco who could talk. And if you've never heard of cocoa, prepare to buckle up and have your mind blown, because that is what we're talking about tonight. Coco, the talking gorilla, who is a local here. As I'm sure you guys know, this is actually a super local show. It is? Yes, because Coco the gorilla was born 4 July, just like Heraldo Rivera and Malia Obama and a bunch of other people I haven't heard of when I looked it up online. My dad was born on the 4 July. Really? Yes. Why didn't he say that the other night? It just didn't feel like it. All right. Tom Cruise was, if I'm not mistaken, I think, for the movie. He had been born for that movie. He's just so good. I bought it. Yeah, he really sold it. Coco was born on the 4 July 1971, just four months after yours truly was born. There would be a lot of mirroring here between my development and Coco's. Coco was born at the San Francisco Zoo. Yeah, 6.1 mile from here. And what was Coco's birth name in full? Hana Bico. So Coco is actually your nickname, and Hana bico in Japanese means fireworks child. She was named that after the fireworks going off. You think that's cute? On the 4 July. Just wait. Yeah. If that got you allwing already, man, you guys are going to love this one. So Coco was a western lowland gorilla, which was and still is a critically endangered subspecies of gorilla in Central West Africa. And Coco was born into a world in the 1970s, here in the United States, especially, where people thought two things about gorillas. They thought they were super scary, literally, because of King Kong, the movies kind of like Jaws with sharks, two very huggable animals. Movies ruined it, basically. And they thought gorillas were scary, and they thought gorillas were really dumb. Like dumb dumb. Like, even among apes, they thought gorillas were dumb. Exactly. This is the world that Cocoa was born into. And when she was born at the San Francisco Zoo, she had kind of a difficult infancy. Her mom wasn't producing enough milk to sustain her. And then when she was, I think, six months old, she caught Dysentery. She developed Dysentery and was basically a death store and had to be removed from her family unit so that she could be nursed back to health by humans who took care of her around the clock. Which is great, sure, because they actually did save her life, but they had a problem after she recovered, and that was that she had spent so much time away from her family unit and hanging out with humans instead, that they were worried that her family unit would reject her if they took her back. So now they kind of had a problem on their hands. And they had a gorilla. Yeah, the gorilla in the room. So it was a great movie. It's fantastic. So there was a Stanford grad student around this time. Bad joke, Jerry. Cut that one out already. I've only got three of those for the whole show, so you guys keep score. There was a Stanford grad student around this time that came on the scene. 24 year old young woman named Francine Penny Patterson. She entered Coco's life at this moment when Coco needed her most. And she said, you know what? I'm studying apes, and I think that I can teach gorillas how to speak using sign language. You've got a gorilla? I need my PhD. This is all kind of perfect. That's a verbatim quote from that moment. So she took control of Coco's care, and for the next 40 something years, they had a relationship that can really only be described as human mother and gorilla daughter. Very much so. Yeah, for sure. And so the whole point of trying to teach Cocoa or any gorilla sign language was to find out how or if a gorilla could acquire language and then compare how a gorilla acquires language to how human kids acquire language. And then we can kind of compare and contrast the differences and kind of trace back human's evolutionary history for how we developed language. Because it's still a mystery. We don't really know why. We just know we seem to be the only species capable of using language. That's right. Plus, it's a good party trick. It was the 70s. Yeah. So at first, coco and Penny were working together at the San Francisco Zoo. But it's a zoo, and there were people that were paying money to get in there and gawk at them. A lot of slackjawed yokels at the San Francisco Zoo. Look, mom. Yeah. What was my favorite line? Never mind. I can't get off track this early. We'll save the Simpsons for later. So people were gawking, and that's very distracting to a young gorilla. So she said, you know what? This is going pretty well, but I think I could do a lot better with my research and for Coco's benefit if we moved Coco to Stanford. And they basically said, sure, you can take Cocoa online and go do some serious research at Stanford University. Right. Where there's a lot more dope to be smoked at the San Francisco Zoo. You know what I mean? I'm sure we've got some Stanford grads here. Oh, really? That's surprising. Go Cardinals. I thought it was giant trees. Is there? Yeah, it was a little clunky. Okay. They moved to Stanford, officially launched Project Coco, and Coco suddenly is surrounded by a bunch of interesting people who are giving her their undivided attention. And she's raised in kind of this way that's similar to how you would raise a human child in an ideal home school setting where everything is about her and teaching her stuff and playing with her and keeping her attention going. And she really started to kind of thrive in this environment. And she started to pick up sign language pretty quick. In her first two weeks of being taught Sign, an adapted form of American Sign Language. She knew food, drink and more. And really the last one is the most important one. But she picked up these signs within two weeks. And again, remember, bear this in mind this whole time. Anytime we say something amazing about Cocoa, imagine that at the time when she's doing this stuff. She's the first gorilla doing this stuff and just amazing the world, because we thought gorillas were scary stupid to bear the mind gun silence was not what I was going for, but I'll take it. I'll take it. Whatever I can get from you guys. So things are going well at Stanford, but she said, you know what? This is great, but I think we even need more space than they have at Stanford for a gorilla. And so she founded the Gorilla Foundation and moved Cocoa and Project Cocoa to a six acre private facility that basically had a mobile home for Cocoa to live in. And that's where Coco lived her life. They retrofitted it, so they had to make the walls a little stronger over the years as Cocoa grew. And they made it so a gorilla could live in this trailer. Sure. And she loved it is her house. She made her little nest out of blankets every night and had a tire to sit in and had all sorts of toys to play and TV to watch. A lot more than I had, for sure. Although you did have to make a nest of blankets every night in your house, too. Or had you let that man touch your beard, that would have been your future. I think it's true. Coco was learning faster than I was anyway. Yeah, but you have that innate, like, don't let them do it. Don't let them do it. So Coco was taught sign language using a couple of different techniques. There's one called the molding technique, where they would literally take Coco's hand and shape her hand in the shape of the sign and do the sign while they're either saying the word or showing a picture of the object or whatever, or both. I know you have an example that you're pretty good at. The sign for cat is where you kind of demonstrate whiskers. You draw whiskers across your face. So you would take Cocoa's hand and squish these together. Get these two right. There you go. And then just be like cat. You're like the guy in the sky lounge all of a sudden. Right? So creepy. Right? So that was the molding technique. The other one invitation is way simpler. It's just you would show her cat and she would eventually be like and you go, yeah. So annoying. That's what Coco would have said, too. So within Coco's first four and a half years, she went through a couple of big language growth spurts. She added about 200 new words to her vocabulary each year. Again, way faster than I was. And she was developing language basically at about the rate of a child eight months behind. Coco a human child. Right. But she was acquiring signs at about the same rate as a deaf child her age, which is pretty astounding, especially considering she wasn't taught sign language until she was one. And she wasn't exposed to English until she was about six months old. So she kind of started from behind and started as a gorilla. But she was still picking up language at about the same pace as human children. And this is just knocking everybody's socks off. It's amazing. So Coco, I think, had a working vocabulary by the time she was an adult of about 600 signs and then spontaneously used another 400. So that's 1000 signs. And then could apparently understand about 2000 words of English. Right. So she could understand 2000 words, she could sign about 1000. And in the middle of sort of this early period is where Penny Patterson became Dr. Penny Patterson. Yeah, she got her PhD from Stanford and I think 79 or something like that. And Project Coco continued. Right. And one of the things that Coco taught the world is that not only could she understand sign language and use sign, she could actually use this to do things that we thought only humans could do, like joke around. Like, there's a really good example of her making a joke. It's a gorilla level joke, but it's a joke nonetheless. It still qualifies. You want to tell them just sort of a Josh and Chuck level joke? Sure. So they would go in with a white towel and try and get Cocoa to sign white. And Cocoa kept signing red and they were like owl red. No cocoa, what color is the towel? I'm just kidding. They were very kind. And Coco eventually went over and picked a red piece of lint off the towel and held it up and said red and laugh and laugh and laugh. And everyone just was pretty much the best joke of all time. It definitely qualifies as a joke. We did not know that gorillas were capable of joking. She also knew how to lie. That's actually kind of sophisticated. As wrong as it is, it's kind of sophisticated intellectually. We didn't realize gorilla is not going to make any trouble lies at all about the human. Sophistication it takes to lie. It just kind of instantly it writes itself. All right, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to get political. So there was a time when Coco broke the kitchen sink in her little kitchen and later on, Penny asked her what happened and Coco said, Kate did it. Which is the first lie children tell, literally is Kate did it. Yeah, Kate did. Always Kate's fault. Right? But she threw her caregiver under the bus, which is very human, if you think about it. She was like, Kay did it. You should fire her. She was also pretty good at making an improv, basically, and making up signs for things that she didn't know the signs for. For instance, a mask was an I hat. It's not bad. Yeah, it's fairly cute. Zebra. She called a white tiger because she didn't know the sign for zebra. Not bad. Why? They're going to lose their mind. I know when you know what interest the picture. A ring was a finger bracelet. That's pretty good. And a pinocchio doll was an elephant baby. This is a gorilla, everybody. Not bad at all. She also had are you asking me literally if you should say that? I think you should. Okay. Why don't you tell everyone about Coco's insults? So prepare to ask some more. She had her own little vocabulary of insults like bird and nut. You're a bird. You're a nut. That was their insult. It got even better. Rotten stink. It's also a good punk band name. It is pretty good. Dirty Toilet. Toilet. Dirty devil and face mother. That was the one. I'm sorry. I apologize before. I'll just apologize now as well. This is going to sound so sweet. Beeped out. When we end up releasing this episode, please come back. I said I was sorry and I love in the middle of it, you look over at me and point to Ffff and you go, I wanted you to be on the hook as well. All right, that's it. That's all the dirty language. It was worth it. That's a good quality joke because, see, Coco didn't really say that. That was Josh. So here's the deal, though. We've talked so far about Coco insulting people and making jokes and throwing people under the bus, but that was not Coco's nature. Cocoa was actually a very sweet gorilla. And everyone who came into Coco, especially Dr. Patterson, loved, loved this gorilla. Yes. And so in 1976, this gorilla foundation expanded. The Little family grew a little bigger when they brought in a gorilla male named Michael. And Michael, it's a weird name for a gorilla. It's kind of like have you ever seen somebody where you meet someone's dog and they're like, this is James or Alan or something like that? You can use a human name for a dog, but it's got to be just slightly off. I'm trying to think Harvey or name you could give a dog. Allen is pretty colin. Sure. Edward. Larry is pretty good. Larry. But no, if it was like a big sloppy bulldog named Larry, you'd be like, of course, Larry. James, though, who would name a dog Jane? Jennifer is a pretty good name for a dog, right? Yeah. Chuck. It's a good dog name, too. Chuck is on the cusp, but being goofy. Anyway, all right, that's another everybody shouting at the stage. We didn't ask for this. Anyway, Michael comes into the picture. Michael the gorilla. Michael. And he also learned American Sign Language, too, and he picked it up pretty well. Not quite as well as Cocoa, but still very well. He was also enculturated, which means that he was raised basically as a human and not as a gorilla, which means that he liked to listen to pavarati and paint very seriously. They both painted, actually. But Michael took it very seriously. But one of the big findings from Project Coco is that they found that Michael and Coco would sign to one another unprompted. They would just communicate through sign and that each one taught the other signs that the humans hadn't taught them. Right. So Michael learned some stuff from humans that Coco hadn't, and he went and taught Coco and vice versa, which is pretty big. Yeah, it's big. It's cute and a little creepy, especially if they develop their own sign language. Right. You got the chloroform. We should also mention those if you've seen the documentary. There's one on Netflix called Coco, I think. The Gorilla Who Could Talk. It might be that on the nose. There's a colon in there somewhere. Yeah, from the BBC. And there's a man in that documentary a lot. His name is Ron Cone. He came on the project very early on to document all this via camera and videotape and stuck around through the whole project because he was clearly in love with Penny Patterson. That was the whole subtext of that documentary. The whole time, I was like, even says at the very beginning, he was like, Papa, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. Yeah. I was like, oh, Ron really bad for him. It adds an extra kind of like a subplot to the document. Totally was. But Ron wasn't a gorilla, so he had no shot. He would even dress up like one sometimes and it just didn't work. So word got around, as it does in Around Woodside, California, where this gorilla foundation was, that there was a gorilla in their midst. All right, I would ask all of you not to encourage him. And by the way, this is just neither here nor there, but today, where Coco lived is just a two minute drive from a Ross Dress for Less. This is one of Josh's. When Josh puts together these things, you get these interesting little factoids like that. It's like two minutes away. There's a couple of them in every single one. Do the people who are sitting there, like, smelling soap, like, realize that two minutes away there's a gorilla foundation where there's sign language using gorillas? Probably not. I don't think so. Probably not. And by the World was introduced to cocoa in a big way when Coco made her first appearance of what would be two on the cover of National Geographic magazine. And if you've seen this very famous photo, what you see is a gorilla holding a camera. And you think, oh, that's cute. And when you look closely, you realize that the Olympus camera is backwards. And Coco had taken her own picture in a mirror and was the photographer of note for National Geographic. Yeah, it's like a well framed photograph. She's using it correctly. And, yeah, it ended up on the cover. The first three. Yeah, sure, I was trying to avoid using that word, but yes, that's one of them. The second cover, though, so that introduced the world to Coco. Inside there was like a pretty substantial article written by Penny basically describing Project Coco and how it was going. And everybody's like, wow, this is amazing. But in 1985, seven years later, she was on the cover again. And this time, the world just fell in love with Coco because in the cover photo, Coco is cradling her kitten. Her kitten? Not a kitten. Coco's kitten. Because Coco had a kitten. And that is what this whole issue was about. Yeah, it's super cute. I think we can all agree that inner species mingling is kind of like the best thing on the Internet. I could look at that stuff all day. I do sometimes just sit around and it's like, there's a parrot with an alligator. Isn't that adorable? They love each other. You can't deal with reptiles. No, not easily. Never cute. I have seen some cute, reptile stuff, but it's few and far between. Like a snake cuddling a turtle. That's no cuddle. Sorry to break it to. You got to rethink the stuff I look at on the Internet. So Coco, maybe because Coco had been taught the word cat incessantly cat loved cats and wanted a kitten, and I think it was birthday or Christmas one year, they gave Coco a very realistic stuffy, kitten. And that didn't work because Coco is no dummy. And they're like, all right, I guess we got to go for it and do the real thing. Yeah. So they brought in a litter of kittens and had Coco pick one out. She smashed ash. All but one. And that was the lexicon. That's not true. No, she picked out a little tabby. Manks. Mankside don't have tails. My brother's got a manks, of course, because he's my brother. And so Max didn't have a tail. And so Coco named this little ball of fluff, all Ball. Isn't that cute? That was the name of Coco's kitten. And Olball himself was a pretty interesting cat. He had been abandoned. His whole litter had been by his mother. And so he was nursed by a dog for, like, four and a half weeks. Not only just a dog, a Karen terrier, which is the same breed as Toto from The Wizard of Oz. And then he wanted to become the pet cat of a talking gorilla. Pretty wild ride. What is going on? Trigger warning, everybody. All Ball died. All Ball got out and was hit by car and killed. I know. I'm sorry to have to tell you that, but that's what happened. All Ball got out, got smashed to buy a car, and Penny told Coco this. We didn't hit them with our car. Really? Just ground them in there. It changed your name to All Tire. I can't believe I said that. I love cats. I have two cats. That was way worse than what I said earlier. Way worse. I was not on the hook with that garbage podcaster, garbage Human, frankly. Sorry. I just got up and left. Yeah. So Penny had to break it to Coco, obviously, because this was Coco's best little buddy. And Coco it's awful. For about ten minutes, she just turned her back and, like a child would ignored everything. I didn't hear that, basically. And then later on, Coco started whimpering and making these sad, depressed gorilla sounds, and I can even say this next part. You've got to then eventually she signed Sleep Cat. I know, and I think I'm so sorry. This is a great place to put an ad, if you ask me. So if you guys will bear with us, we're going to take a message break. All right, we're back, everybody. You've seen us before. How that works. It's like a roller coaster of emotion. I don't know if you remember where we were. All Ball has just been killed. You should not feel too bad, though, because Coco had two more sets of kittens throughout her long life. Lipstick and smokey and Miss Black and Ms. Gray. So Coco loved her kittens. She did. And I don't know what happened to the rest of them. Don't ask is what I say. So Coco had become a celebrity, and being a celebrity, other celebrities wanted to be around her, not the least of which was William Shatner, who was among the first to go visit Coco. Apparently he wrote about it in his autobiography, that it was kind of a publicity stunt, and he was scared to death about going to meet this gorilla, like, one on one, but he was determined he was going to do it. And then Coco touched his genitals during their meeting. It's true. Kept his little Shatners, get over here. Painful. She's touching my balls. I worked with Shatner on a Cheerios commercial. I worked with Shatner. Yeah. What? Someone just yelled out a bad name about him. He was nice the day I worked with him. I don't know. I mean, I'm not a Star Trek guy, but he was a nice guy. All right, ma'am, you need to quit calling me names. So, Fred Rogers. Mr. Rogers also paid a little visit, right? Yeah. I don't know if you guys have seen the Mr. Rogers documentary, but this is in that documentary. And if you look closely, mr. Rogers looks kind of scared, too, but he's like, no, I'm going through with this. But he's just a little, like, over eager to take direction from Penny Patterson. He's just a little nervous, especially when Coco cradles him like a baby, which she did. It's very cute. And it gets even better, because Coco and Michael were both big fans of Mr. Roger's neighborhood. So when he showed up, they freaked out because there's Mr. Rogers, and Coco took his shoes off like she's seen him do so many times before. Man, better and better. Yes, I'm serious. So Coco also got visits on separate occasions, I think from both Flea and Sting. I don't think they came together. Right. They've been doing a little lunch, did a little shopping at Rostress for Less, and then made their way over to the gorilla phone, maybe. So things like, why are you always just buying tidy whities and tube socks? Little red hot chili peppers humor, a little dated. It still works. All right. They both let Coco play their bases. They both brought their bases and let Coco slap at a base. Yeah. Peter Gabriel showed up, as he does situations like this. America's beloved treasure, Betty White went and visited. And Betty White was a board member of the Gorilla Foundation. So if you didn't love her enough before, love her even more now. It's true. And Coco was a fan of the Golden Girls, so they were fans of one another. Of course. Leo DiCaprio paid a visit. He heard there was a young lady that he should meet. And all of this is in the documentary, all these various visits, and in Leo, he didn't even get in the cage, at least from this. Like, Coco has her hand through there and he's just kind of like stroking her fingers. Not even with his fingertips. With his knuckle, I think. With an assistant knuckle, actually. But of course, the most memorable visit was Robin Williams back in 2001. Right, of course. San Francisco Zone. You've probably seen this footage. If you haven't, go watch it. Go watch it right now. We'll wait. Yeah. If only we had a big screen behind us where we could show this stuff, right? How could we? How could we ever do it? That would require 10% more effort. This is not going to happen. We challenge you instead to use your imagination. That's right. The world of the mind, everyone. So Robin Williams is the perfect person to go visit Coco because Robin Williams was not scared like a Shatner, he was not intimidated like Mr. Rogers. He was not disappointed that it wasn't a human like Leo DiCaprio. Yeah, he was Robin Williams. And he gets in there and just wants to play with an ape on that level. Gets down on the floor, they're rolling around, they're tickle, fighting. Coco takes off his glasses and puts them on and looks out the window. And you can just tell that he is legit having one of the best times of his life. Yeah, he was definitely into it, for sure. And later on, he was telling the story on one of the late night shows, I can't remember which one, and he said that they told him that Coco had indicated that she wanted to mate with him. And Robin Williams said it would have been a good story, which if you let that just kind of sit for a little while, it gets like, what? And years later, when Robin Williams passed away, they had to break the news to Coco as well. And Coco signed a woman crying. And it was very sad, which is pretty astounding, because Coco met Robin Williams. I mean, she watched his movies and everything, but she met him once, like 13 years before his death. And so for her to be affected by it, that's extraordinarily significant. And because Coco had people like Leo DiCaprio and William Shatner coming to visit the world, watched everything she did, and she became an ambassador for Earth, like, just this, a natural ambassador. Because here's a gorilla who can communicate with humans, and gorillas come from nature, so why not just have her talk for nature? And that's exactly what happened. She became an ambassador for planet Earth, basically. Yeah, it was at a very good time for that, too. It was here in America, it was in the early 80s when we were just starting to kind of come around to the green movement a little bit more. And Earth Day became a bigger and bigger deal. So it was kind of prime time for cocoa to step in there. I think. Penny Patterson wrote a book called Coco's Kitten. I don't think it ended in a car crash. I hope not. No, there was stuffed cocoa gorillas. I believe there still are. And like I said, she and Michael both painted, so they started selling prints of their paintings and Coco's painting of a bird looks like a bird. It's pretty amazing. I mean, you can't tell what kind of bird it is or anything like that, and you have to squint and again, use your imagination. But you can say, yes, that is a bird. I can tell. Have you ever held a chimp or anything or been around one? Yeah, I have held I'm not quite sure what kind of ape it was, but a little sweet one in a dress. It was very cute. And then where was this? Down in Florida. Okay. Everybody just walks around with apes that you can hold in Florida. Down in Florida. Of course. And then one time I was in Mexico, and I was walking down the street and I passed a courtyard, a gated courtyard, and there was a chimp on a leash that it could swing around the courtyard in, and I was like, Well, I have to stop and talk to this chimp. So I did, and the chimp put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, not painfully, but this chimp was in charge of me right then. Yeah. And then stared more deeply into my soul than any other being has before, and I'm just sitting there with, like, cartoon sweat jumping off of my head. And finally I realized he wasn't going to stop this at any point in time, so I just one finger at a time, slowly backed away. And then after ten minutes later, I was like, I got to go see my chimp friend again. And they had closed the door. Yeah, that's what I said, too. I worked another TV commercial with a chimp one time, and it was a lifelong dream to hold a chimp. I always wanted to. And so I went to the trainer and said, Can I hold the chimp? And she's like, of course. And so I hold this baby chimp, and it wraps his legs around me and arms around me. Yeah, it's wearing a little diaper. Nice. For a good reason. I don't think it was just to be cute. I think didn't want this chimp pooping and peeing on people. Was it wearing a diaper and clothing? No, just a diaper. It's okay. So that's all right. As long as it's not like a diaper and shirt. That's a terrible combination. Just a diaper? Yeah, that's no good. That's not a good look. Human chimp, doesn't matter. Yeah, you're right. But then later we were having our production meeting before the job where everyone kind of stands around and walks through what we're going to do for the day. And I was standing there, you guys, and I felt it before I saw it. This chimp walked up and held my hand, and I looked down, and this little chimp is looking up at me and just holds my hand. Best thing that ever happened to me, and I'm married with a human child. It's all right. She doesn't listen to podcasts. Where are we? Here we are in we are right. So Coco is an ambassador for Earth at a time where we're becoming more eco conscious. Coining dorky terms like eco conscious. She's like the ambassador for Earth. You have to remember, though, she didn't necessarily think of herself this way. So just keep that in mind because in 1998, she took part in the first ever interspecies Internet chat hosted by America Online. It does not get more 1998 than that. Very 1998. Here is the setup. Okay, so there was an AOL moderator who was the one working in the chat room on the phone with Penny, who was at the Gorilla Foundation. And so the AOL moderator would relay questions over the phone to Penny. Penny would ask the question or sign the question to Coco and then tell the moderator Coco's response. And then the moderator would type it in. And so when this whole setup was explained to Coco, coco said, Nipple. Just put a pin in that. Nipples will figure in quite a bit. But the point was, she wasn't like, this is the part I was born to play. I can't wait to get more eco conscious. She was just like nipple. Cocoa was a gorilla. Everybody got to remember that. So if you look at that transcript from that AOL chat, that means it's 1998 still, because you're not digging up transcripts from AOL chat rooms anymore unless you're in trouble with the law. And if you look at what's going on in this chat and the answers that Coco is giving, and then the responses that Penny Patterson is giving, you start to see a little bit of a trend where I guess the nicest way to say it is that Dr. Patterson was being a little liberal with some of these translations on what she thought Coco might be saying. All right, there's this really good example. One was AOL user Mini Kitty asked Coco, are you going to have a baby in the future? Mini Kitty here, by the way. Anyone. That would be astounding oh, God. Got a bunch of mini kitties? Sure. So Mini Kitty asks Cocoa, you're going to have a baby in the future? And Coco went, and it doesn't make any sense when you're reading the transcript, coco covered her eyes, and when Dr. Patterson kind of translates it, then it makes sense. She said, Well, I think what she's doing is signing unattended, but she doesn't see it. That's not going to happen. And you can't help but think that feels like a bit of a stretch. And when you read this transcript, you start to get a kind of clear idea why there are some people out there in the world who think that Project Coco was almost entirely BS. It was almost entirely made up and not true at all. That's right. So that first part of the show was a lot of fun, I think we can all agree. Super cute. We don't like to burst bubbles, but we do what we do. And we have to show the other side of the argument because we get into a section now called the Ape Language Wars, which was a real thing for some people. They believed that Coco was super smart in communicating and making sentences and using sign language and understood what was happening. Right. But there was a whole other group of scientists who basically ended up thinking that these experiments are BS and that Cocoa is basically like a bear you train to ride a unicycle in a circus. Sure. She's doing this for treats. Yes. Rewards or something like that. She was trained to use these signs in the same way you could train a dog to slow dance with you or something. It's very impressive, but it doesn't require or display human level intellect. And we should say none of this is proven. And there's a huge division in the field of science over whether the Ape Language researchers are right or the skeptics are right. And it's actually pretty fascinating. But you have to kind of step back and look at it in this larger context because it wasn't just Project Coco that this gets leveled against it. Project Coco was part of a whole other field called the Ape Language experiments that really started way back in the 20th century. Yeah. So it was a pretty hot thing for a while. There were a bunch of experiments going on where they would take chimps, mostly chimps. I think Cocoa was one of the few apes or a few gorillas. So she was the first. Yeah, the first one, for sure. And they would take chimps and they would raise them as children by themselves or with siblings or dress them up in little cute overalls and things and try and make them like little humans. A little later hosen. Maybe if they were feeling froggy, that is a good look. A chimp. And later hosen. Sure. Oh, yeah. Of course. There was one of the first ones in 1940s. It was a psychologist couple. And as you'll see, most of these are couples that lead these experiments. Which is why I still feel so bad for Ron Cohn because he was like Penny, like everyone else, literally is married except us. So Keith and Kathy Hayes, they trained a chimp named Vicky in the 1940s not to sign words, to speak for human language words. Vicky could say mama, papa, up and cup. And we figured they really dropped the ball on that fifth word because pup is just staring them in the face. She had all the tools there, but they stopped at four. But here's the thing, is that Vicky's experiment, even though she learned to speak four human words, was considered a failure. Failure. They taught a chimp to speak, and it was considered a failure because everybody's like, just four words. And the point was that, no, we should be able to teach them language. Like, the theory was that if humans were the only ones who could use language, maybe it was a cultural thing. So if we start raising chimps as humans, they'll pick up language, and you'll have a language using chimp. But Vicky proved, and some of the other ones proved that it's just not going to happen. And later on, we figured out that the physiology of the other primates, it just doesn't allow for speech. So some people were like, well, that's it, case closed. It's only humans who can use language. Noam, Chomsky, very famously, the famous linguists came out and said, I hypothesized that humans have what's called a language acquisition device, like a little seed program in our brain that allows us to start learning language and that only humans have that. It's a hypothesis. It hasn't been proven still, but he really kind of set the tone for the skeptics who say it's just humans who can use language. But then some people said, you know what, Chomsky? He's pretty interesting fella, but I'm not swayed by this. I think that just because an ape can't talk doesn't mean they can't use language. And somebody, I think Alan and Beatrice gardener, another couple, came upon this really novel idea. If you can't teach an ape to speak, you could teach an ape sign language. And they were definitely on to something, because it panned out pretty well. Yes, this was in 1967, and they had a was it a chimp? I think it was a chimp named Washo. And I think Washo was from Washington, if I'm not mistaken. I think she ended up in Washington. Ended up in Washington. Yeah. And things went pretty well for a little while, but it yielded a lot of findings. When they found out that Louie was a young male that was show, wasn't the real mama, but Washo just sort of adopted this young chimp as her own. And they found out that Washo was teaching Lily sign language, and they were signing to each other. They were signing to other animals. They would walk up and sign to dogs and stuff like that, I guess. Like, are you with us? It's going to go down, and we need to know if you're with us. You're either with us or against us. There's no middle ground. I'm licking my buttole, man. I don't know. It is funny. If you watch footage from some of these experiments, there is often a dog just kind of hanging out, like, you know, what the hell are you guys doing? Which is why we love dogs so much. They don't care. No, they just want scratches and hugs. They do. So Project Washo just changed everything because now all of a sudden, you had a chimp that was using sign language. Yes. Noam. Chomsky seemed like he was going to be wrong, and that kicked off this whole ape language experimentation. It became kind of like the hot research topic in developmental psychology. Just so hot. Well, you can see why it's cool. It's headline grabbing. You get to work with these apes. That's super cute. It was at a time when Three's Company was the number one show in America. It just made sense in a very 70s kind of way. Yeah, I guess. I thought so. There was one, and it wasn't just gorillas and chimps. It was in Rang tang named Chantek, who excelled at signing and would give directions whenever Chantek was in a car to the local Dairy Queen. Not bad. There's a very famous project, NYM. Do not watch that documentary. Josh tried to get me to, but he said it's a real bummer, man. Bummer is a very good word to describe it, so I did not see it. I refuse. It's a little sad, but I think this was at Columbia University in the mid seventy s, and they threw a little shade at NIM Chomsky. The leader of this project named Herb Terrace by naming his chimp NIM Chimsky, which is pre symptoms. It's so Simpsons. Herb Terrace figures are pretty big in this whole thing. He really does. And just like Washo and Louie and all of the other ones, NIM started to acquire sign language pretty quickly and was using a lot of signs, and things were going along as expected. But Herb Terrace, the head of this project, Project NIM, he wasn't convinced. He didn't believe that NIM was actually using language. He thought that he just knew some signs. And at the heart of this is this discussion of what constitutes language. Like, if you have a pie, you can point to a pie and say pie, and everyone will think, Can I have some pie? But all you're doing is pointing to an object and saying a word that's just using a word. Language is like where you take other words and put them together and describe to people how to make a delicious pie. So you can make something that literally doesn't exist yet out of other things. That's the difference between language and words. And what Herb Terrace thought was that NIM was just using words. So he did the normal thing that you would do and sent NIM back to his place of birth. Very grim. Ape Research Farm in Oklahoma. Which is a deeply not okay thing to do. No, there should not be ape farms in Oklahoma. Yeah, I hate to break that to you. So we got to say that Herb Terrace, he didn't go into this whole thing as a skeptic to prove everyone wrong. No, he was a star of the field. Yeah, he was a star of the field. He was way into it, and he looked at the science, and he was like, man, you know what? The more I look at this, not only do I think that they're not truly communicating and understanding what they're saying, he's like, I think these researchers are tipping them off inadvertently. I don't think anyone's trying to cheat it, but inadvertently, they're tipping their hand right before they would teach a sign or ask them to say a sign inadvertently. And I don't even think they know. Not only do I think they're not talking, I don't even think that they know what food means. When they sign food, they're just that basic that they're really just mimicking. They're just imitating people to get that food treat. So herb terrace again, he's one of the stars of the ape language research field, says that he changed his mind about his data. He publishes a big, influential article in 1081. He becomes the most vocal critic of his former field. And normally, when a scientist changes his mind about his data, it doesn't really amount to much. But this drew a really deep, clear line in the sand. What had once been like the hot research topic in developmental psychology was now considered possibly fraudulent, anti science, or at the very least, unscientific. And you had to choose one side or the other, like the dogs and the chimps, right. Versus humans. You had to choose, did you believe that ape language research was actually just fraudulent, and it was really the humans who were producing the study data because they were seeing what they wanted to see and believing what they wanted to believe? Or did you believe that they're actually onto something? And science still has plenty left to learn from studying apes, and you had to choose one side or the other, and a lot of kind of petty camps broke out along that dividing line. Yeah. And at the center of all this is a word that I have always had a very hard time saying. This is going to be beautiful. So I have broken it down into five parts. Anthropomorphism. Oh, you nailed it. You nailed this shot. Thank you, everyone. It says here, ann throw poe more. That's so easy. And I just left FISM all by itself. I didn't break that down into two parts. You don't see FISM spelled out very often. Black and white. Yeah. And for your throw, you added the w like throw, not just throw or throw e throw. FISM looks too close to fish, the band. It really does. So that's probably why I'm, like, naturally against it. I'm sorry, fish fans. I don't think san francisco like music like fish or anything. There's no great music traditions here, are there? Journey, hughie lewis. That's what I understand. I don't think anything in the 60s. No, it's not bad. You guys should be very proud of yourselves just for having huey Lewis in Journey. That's right. Forget the news. Just Huey Lewis alone. Sure. I thought that was Imply and his wiener. You know, he showed his wiener in a movie once. It's true. Robert Altman shortcuts. Huey Lewis shows his wiener. Am I having a nightmare right now? Just wake up. You're in the Castro. That's all good. Okay. We're talking about cocoa, the gorilla herbs. So of course, anthropomorphism. Jeez, that was a weird sidetrack. We're all guilty of it. You know what that is? That's putting human characteristics on animals. That's when you go home and you see your dog or your cat and you think you know what they're feeling. You think they have these inner lives and these emotions. I believe that they do. Sure, maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, but I don't care. That's what I believe. Okay? So, yes, it uses common sense and intuition, and you use your own eyes and your own empathy to see, like, yes, my dog is sad right now, or, no, my dog is very happy right now. You can see it's just common sense. But if you're a skeptic, if you're a scientist, a rationalist I'm not. You would pound your fists and say, no, science has never shown that animals have any kind of inner, subjective life like humans do. You are just projecting that onto your stupid face dog. That's right, because anybody who thinks like that hates dogs. On the other side, there are people like me and scientists that believe, like, honestly, like, we kind of believe that they do have these in our lives, and we will look at them and say, you're all blinded by the science like Thomas dolby. So what good are you? I'm on this side of the line in the sand. Right. So anthropomorphism is where, like, belief and rationalism, like clink teeth. Yeah, it's pretty good description, if you ask me. And I think that's another good time for a break. Yeah, you guys think so, too. Is this going well enough to release the thing? Okay, well, then we have to add a second Ad break just in case. So if you'll bear with us, we'll be right back. We're back, everyone. So before we took our break, there are a bunch of mean science people saying your dogs and your gorillas are just dumb animals. And then there are people that have human hearts beating inside their body that say, no, you're blinded by science. Like Thomas. Toby, that was a good recap. Thank you. So for some people, Penny Patterson included in other ape language researchers, they were like, you know, I don't think Herb Terrace changing his mind about his data actually amounts to proof that apes can't use language. I think we just haven't figured out how to demonstrate it sufficiently. So some people stayed in this field of research and risk being labeled kooks or frauds or hucksters or diluted morons or what have you, and they stayed in. But they were scientists still, and they wanted to stay scientific, so they had to jump through increasingly narrower hoops to prove that what they were doing was not actually them corrupting the study data. Basically, yeah. They couldn't just sit face to face and even risk their facial expressions giving something away. So there was a researcher named Sue Savage Rumbaugh at the Yorkies Primate Center in Atlanta, and she would do her experiments wearing a welding mask. Good way to behind your face, I guess. Sure. She couldn't explain why her monkey kept signing flash dance over and over. She would wear a welding mask and then off the shoulder sweatshirt. Oh, man. I just saw that last year for the first time. I've never seen it. It's fantastic. Is it? Holds up. What a feeling. It's amazing. All right, that'll make sense to me. Hey, don't do that. So there was another thing that people were prompted of or accused of, which was prompting. Right. Like what Chuck was saying. Herb Terrace concluded that the researchers or the caregivers were kind of showing the sign right before the chimp used the sign prompting. And so to get around accusations of prompting your subjects, sue Savage Rumbaugh and her husband Dwayne realized that the oh, yeah, another couple. This thing is lousy with couple. Poor Ron. So the Rumbas, they said, well, let's just not teach them sign language. Then you can't possibly prompt them. And they developed something called a lexicon board, which is like a trifold board of a couple of hundred little boxes, and each one has a symbol in it, and the symbol represents a word. And what they did was they taught their bonobos how to use this to speak. So you press the word, and the computer on the little box says the word for you. And so they would kind of punch out word combinations, and you can't prompt a bonnebo to do that. And astoundingly they tried to teach one of their first subjects, Matata, this, which I think means worries. I don't know. Wouldn't it? I haven't looked it up yet, but I think it would. Anyway, Matata was pretty interesting because they tried to teach her this, and she was like, I am not picking this up. That's right. But it got really interesting because Matada had a son named Kansi, and Kansi could pick it up, and he actually taught mom how to use this. So bonibos were exactly like human beings, children teaching their parents to technology. And this is after Matata got a CDROM at Staples called how to Use a Lexicon Board. She ordered it online, actually. Right. That guy with the bald head with a ponytail. Don't forget the ponytail. Oh, my God. But the thing is, about Kanzi, they never taught conesy. He just happened to be present while they were trying to teach Matata. And one day, he just started using a lexicon boarder, and they just lost their they were so excited. He knew how to use the Lexicon board to say, Come on, mom. So Kansas is actually widely regarded as one of the most intelligent apes in any of the ape language experiments, which he demonstrated when he wrote the movie Pay It Forward. Not sure I get that one so bad. It was written by an aide. You don't read it, just enjoy it on its face. There's a lot of good movie refs in this one. I like it. So pay it forward. That was the bad man, right? Wasn't that spacey? Yeah. All right. Yeah. Did you hear that? Way to bring my joke down, Chuck. Sorry. The space man. So where are we? I'm so lost now. Sorry. I'm genuinely lost in sherry. Cut all that out. You want me to swoop in? Well, since you put it that way. Now, there was some other controversy in that, and not just Penny Patterson, but other people in this field have been accused of manipulating the public over the years. Oh, yeah. And sort of doing things, especially when it comes to video of kind of cooking the books a little bit. It's very easy with video, obviously. There was one sort of famous one with Kanzi, the aforementioned bonabo. There's a video of Kansi putting together some sticks to light a fire and getting out of lighter cut two perfect drawing fire, that kind of thing. You don't know what happened in between those moments. No. But you don't even notice it unless you're suspicious of ape language research already. Because we're also trained to just overlook cuts and edits from all the movies and TV shows that we've seen. And that actually isn't harmful. It doesn't really do anything wrong. But it opens up legitimate researchers like the Rumbaughs, to accusations of illegitimacy. Even though they're doing legitimate science. The fact that they're kind of exaggerating, potentially, what their subjects are capable of. And the mind of the public opens them up to accusations like that. Well, and even Dr. Patterson would use words like coco has mastered sign language and stuff like that. And we love cocoa and Coco learned a lot. But Coco never mastered sign language. Right. And when you use words like that, these sort of unscientific descriptions of what's really going on, it doesn't do anyone in the field any favor. It doesn't. And it makes linguists go like, yeah. So today, the scientific community, basically this is kind of where we are now, since the lot of this research has dried up. They don't really work with apes and gorillas to teach them sign language much anymore. Partially because of this, partially because of the ethics of taking apes and gorillas and putting them in human houses, mobile homes and things like that, making them dependent on humans, taking them away from their family. We're in a different place now in the world where we don't do stuff like that as much, for sure, thankfully. But the scientific community does rightfully acknowledge that ape language research has shown apes are capable of using sign language, of communicating on a human level with humans, which is just astounding, and we're still learning more and more, and we'll talk about that a little bit more. It's produced some insights into the minds of apes that we did not have before. One of the things that was pointed to as why apes couldn't communicate, couldn't actually use language, is because they lacked a theory of mind. Theory of mind is like, I know Chuck has different beliefs, different views of the world. We're two different people. And they long thought that apes didn't have that. Well, in 2017, somebody thought to give apes theory of mind test that was developed for human infants, and all of a sudden, these tests started showing that, no, actually, they do have a theory of mind, and this was just a couple of years ago. So the field is still kind of going and developing, and it's pretty exciting that people are still researching this kind of stuff. Yeah. I mean, what they've kind of moved more into now, which makes sense to me, is maybe we shouldn't try and teach gorillas English even in sign language. Maybe we should just see how they communicate with each other, and maybe we can learn from that and see what guerrilla language is all about. Like, teach ourselves their language. Right. And that would give us kind of an insight into their worldview. Yeah. We can sidestep some other controversies. The Gorilla Foundation was sued at one point not too long ago by a couple of former female scientists that worked for them, because remember the nipple thing? Coco had a nipple fetish. There's really no other way to say it than that. Someone just wooed that. If you look at the Robin Williams video, coco's trying to get in that shirt and see his nipples. And Dr. Patterson would show Coco her nipples over the years, and then she would request that other employees do the same, both male and female. And eventually, some of those employees got uncomfortable with that. They took her to court, and it was settled out of court. So we really don't know when things are settled out of court, what the final result is. But that was one of the sort of controversies that they had encountered. Right. The big nipple incident. Yes, we're serious. Have you listened to stuffy shell before? Serious? Are they making all this up? Are they just riffing? This is amazing. Who are these guys? They're not funny enough to be comedians, but I don't think they're being truthful about their science. That was a really good impression of that person. Why am I here? Who are these people? So, Dr. Patterson, was that Jerry Seinfeld? Okay. Dr. Patterson, basically, when that line was drawn in the sand on one side or the other, she said, you know what? This is my gorilla. Daughter and I'm not going to leave her. She kind of shunned the scientific community in large part. She didn't do as many published papers. Those kind of dried up. The official research still goes on, or still went on for a while, but it just wasn't presented as science so much as she's like, screw that, I'm just going to do it on my own, then. Yeah, she was like, I'm just going to go directly to the public. The scientific community can rot in hell, basically. So her outreach to the public and her kind of pushing Cocoa and just kind of sharing all things Cocoa, that increased while her kind of scientific commitment went down a little bit. But there's this documentary in 2014, I think you mentioned it before. It is Coco, the gorilla who talks. And there is a colon in there, and then there's another colon called The Sad Story of Ron Cone in parentheses beneath it, but in it, Penny Patterson talks about regrets. And she said that her biggest regret is that Cocoa never had a baby. And Cocoa apparently wanted a baby. She used to tell Penny a lot that she wanted a baby and Penny really wanted a baby for Cocoa, but it didn't happen. Remember, they brought in Michael, and Michael was going to be a mate for Coco eventually. But what they didn't realize is that an incest taboo exists among gorillas and that they raise them together from too young in age. And when they finally got around to suggesting that they mate, both Cocoa and Michael signed you. Yeah. Was not happening. It's not. They brought in another gorilla named Indomai in 1991 to mate. They never produced a child either. So I think in Dummy went back to the Cincinnati Zoo and then very sadly, and you probably all remember this not too long ago, June 19, 2018, coco passed away in her sleep at the age of 46 years old. And the world, or at least America for sure, mourned Coco's death in a big way. Yeah, for sure. And she touched the lives of people, whether she knew language or not. And we're pretty sure she was a very smart gorilla who did know sign language. But whether she did or not, the ambassadorship for Earth really did have an effect, and not just for everyday people who actually did care about the Earth more because they knew about Cocoa and she kind of transformed their view of things. But also like scientists too. There was a 2014 symposium of guerrilla experts, like people who are experts in the gorilla field, and they were asked at the symposium, who is here? Because they were inspired by Coco, like, who got into this because of Coco, and half of the people in attendance raised their hands. So she really did have this major impact on the world. Yes, for sure. There is great value in that, to be sure. So there was a man named Charles Wesley Hume, a British man who founded the University's Federation for Animal Welfare, and he kind of laid the stakes on this kind of science out there pretty plainly. And he said this if I assume that animals have subjective feelings of pain, fear, hunger and the like, and if I'm mistaken in doing so, no harm will have been done. But if I assume the contrary, when in fact animals do have such feelings, then I open the way to unlimited cruelties. Animals must have the benefit of the doubt, if indeed there be any doubt. Right? And so what coco lives on as is this kind of litmus test. Because until we can prove or disprove that apes or any animal does or doesn't have a subjective inner experience did I get that? I think so. Then it's a matter of belief. Like you can believe whichever way you want, and CoGo kind of pushes people to one side or the other. And when she died, journalists around the world wrote headlines that used words like Coco, the master of sign language, coco the talking gorilla. And a lot of skeptics came out and tried to correct things with their own articles, but they were like a drop in the ocean compared to all the other articles. And it seems like the world does want to believe that there is something more to animals than we can prove. And perhaps that ultimately is best. That's Coco, everybody. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
f82a0432-6a28-11ea-a1bd-bfc60b1be128 | SYSK Distraction Playlist: SYSK Live: How Bars Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-distraction-playlist-sysk-live-how-bars-work | Join Josh and Chuck live from Vancouver as they dive in to the ins and outs of one of the oldest businesses in the world – the bar! Learn about the history of bars, cocktails and the good people who put them together in new and amazing ways. | Join Josh and Chuck live from Vancouver as they dive in to the ins and outs of one of the oldest businesses in the world – the bar! Learn about the history of bars, cocktails and the good people who put them together in new and amazing ways. | Fri, 20 Mar 2020 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=4, tm_yday=80, tm_isdst=0) | 48924054 | audio/mpeg | "Are you looking for an escape? An immersive getaway experience? Well, there's a place for all your wildest dreams. Perhaps you enjoy wrapping along the paperboy, or you believe that blessed be the fruit. Or you dream of one day smashing a glass while stealing. Who's. Ah. Whether you're sworn to Team Kim or you just want a good old fashioned, mysterious murder, there's a place that has it all. From Atlanta to only murders in the building, it's all on Hulu. So check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription is required. Terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles w chuck Bryant can foie gras for everyone. Wow. Good man. Yeah. I have to say, alcohol makes a difference in the energy level. Huge difference. Popcorn and Diet Coke just does not cut it now. So we're here today hanging out, just doing our thing. Yeah. And I have a question for you. All right, Chuck. Have you ever been to a bar? Yes. I know you have that was this set up? Yeah. Did you realize, though, that while you were at this bar, you were in one of the oldest businesses known to humankind? The oldest profession? No, not the oldest profession. This is the oldest business known to humankind. One of I did bars have been around a very long time. They have, but not as long, it turns out, as alcohol is. Anybody who's listening to our How Beer Works episode, it's entirely possible that bread was invented as a starter for beer, which is pretty awesome. That makes humanity as a whole like, a pretty awesome species. Booze was around for a very long time before bars. So there wasn't a place where you just went to go drink? You just drank everywhere you went? Pretty much, yeah. Literally. Like, you could drink at work, you could drink at school. There would be meetings and civic meetings. You would drink there. But there wasn't an establishment with four walls set up just for drinking at this point. Right. You would drink. It like the Saturday night ritual sacrifice or something like that. Yeah. As you do. So the first bars then that really kind of pop up are around the turn of not this past millennia, but the one before. And you can find them in Italy in a place called Pompeii. These aren't necessarily the oldest bars in the world, but they are one of the earliest established bars, and they were basically hot snack bars. That sounds gross. It does. Hot snacks. Hot snacks. Yeah. Well, it's like chicken wings. Sure. Poutine. Poutine is a hot snack. That's a hot snack. That's the hottest snack. Yeah, because they took a hot snack and then poured hot gravy. Right. And what is it? Cheesecurs. Cheese curds. Yeah. That's hot. Right? That is hot. This is more like, I imagine, hot olives. Hot. I don't know. Hot tomatoes. The point is, there was wine at these places, right? Yeah, they serve. And actually, if you've ever been to Pompeii, as I have, you can see these places. They're like bars or countertops with holes cut out and they put, like, jugs of olives poutine and wine and stuff. And you would go down to this area and hang out and drink and hang out with your neighbors. Sure. Like, look at Mount Vesuvius over there. Isn't it lovely? Think it's ever going to do anything? No, we're good. Don't be ridiculous. You were drunk. Give me some more time. So, again, these aren't the earliest bars, but they're among the earliest. And the Romans were really kind of big with bars. In Rome itself, there are lots of bars, like there were in Vesuvius, but the Romans also did something else that led to the spread of bars, and they built roads. Well, first of all, they conquered the world and then they built roads. Sure. And along these roads, there were ends for travelers, and in the ends there were bars. Yeah. Because if you were tradesmen on a Roman road, it was scary at night, you might get mugged and killed. So they would do their trading and traveling during the day, and then they would say, in these ends at night. And just like modern American business travelers, what else do you do when you're on the road like that? You go to the hotel bar and you drink your face off. Right. And that's what the tradesman did in ancient Rome. You celebrate not getting murdered. That day on the Roman road, I traded some spices, I didn't get killed. So bring them the drop off. Exactly. So out of this came the taverns, the ends, the pubs. They basically said, that's great, you've got an inn, but we've got a little town and we could use a couple more. But we don't need inn, so let's just stick to the bar part. That's how those evolved out of there. But the oldest bar in the world, probably. It's definitely the oldest bar in Ireland, but it could possibly be guinness is investigating as we speak. If it's the oldest bar in the world. Yeah, right now, yeah. It's called Shawns. Has anyone ever heard of Sean's in Athlone, Ireland? Yeah, you've been there? It sounds pretty neat. He's heard of it, though. He's heard of it. That's another cheer. Not bad. Sure. It was founded in 900 Ce, and actual, real live, no joke, Vikings used to get wasted there, and this place is still around, like you can go get wasted where the Vikings got wasted, which is pretty amazing. I guess they would eat mushrooms and then kill people all day. They would go berserk. Right. Remember that. So the coolest thing about Sean, actually, is it predates the town that it's in now. It used to be, for 250 years, just Sean's bar in this old Roman road, and apparently people got tired of having to drive home after getting wasted at Sean. They just built their houses around it, and that's where the town of Athlon, Ireland came from. That's true. Interesting fact. It's not true. Interesting fact about Sean's bar in it was owned by Boy George. Yeah, the Boy George. Not the one you were thinking of, d Boy George. Yeah, I guess. I don't know. He thought it was a safe investment. It had been there for that many years. It's not going anywhere. But he got out of it. He's like, no, I think he went broke. Someone in the first show said he went broke. That's mean. Yeah, but it could be true. Yeah, I think it's true. So we did a little research on your town, and we were very pleasantly surprised to find that, you know, your town was founded on a bar, right? You all know that. Gassy Jack. That's right. Gassy Jack. Within 24 hours of landing and founding Gas Town, gassy Jack built a bar. That's the first thing he did. He's like, I'm going to have a town. He woke up the next day and went, I'm going to build a bar. Yeah. And he built the Globe, which is not there. It was at the corner of Walter and Carroll streets, I think, in Gas town. A water live corrections water and Carol. Hey, I said Carol, right? Come on, give me some points here. Well, the way I look at it is we just saved these people from having to email us. We saved it's not Walter. This is actually kind of efficient. Yeah, this is cool. She just do every show live. So there's a statue of Gassy Jack, and we think very highly of them because of the fact that he built a bar. But he did things back towards Gassy Jack. Well, in Gassy, and we found out it's not Gassy. Like, you think that it was Gassy because it was talkative. Did you guys know that? Boring. Yeah, I was all pumped up. I was like, this guy farted a lot and owned it. He was clearly proud of it because he let them erect a statue that says Gassy Jack. That was just because he talked a lot. And they do have a statue there, right? Yeah. At Water and Carroll streets. So Vancouver itself would have older bars than it does if, like Atlanta, where we're from, it hadn't burned down in what was that? 1886? Quickly rebuilt, of course, because you're a strong city. But in Victoria we have the Six Mile Pub. Not too shabby. Not too shabby. And Garrick said pub also in Victoria, 1867. So that is not bad as far as old drinking establishments go. No. But Gassy Jack kind of thwarted convention by building the bar first and then the hotel, because that whole tradition of having a bar in a hotel survived long past the Roman roads. Yes, there were pubs and taverns and everything. But that didn't mean that there weren't bars and hotels any longer, and that made its way over to the new world, which is here. That's all of us along the way. One of the reasons why this whole custom and tradition made its way over was because you could make a lot of money being a bartender, because you probably own the bar. You probably own the inn that the bar was in, and you're probably making the booze that you are selling, so you are just making bank. The bartenders actually were among the wealthiest of the socioeconomic state. Yeah. They were the upper tier of society. Exactly. In America, we had the same thing like Joshua. We had ends that had the bars. But then in 1832, the US. Congress said, you know what? Let's pass a law. Let's call it the pioneer inn in tavern law. And let's just say you don't have to stay in the hotel to get drunk there. You can just come in, get south, and get on your horse and crash it on the way home. I guess somebody just clapped for the pioneer inn in tavern lally. Yes. We won't stay here. All right. But it was a cool on. It changed everything, because all of a sudden, you could just have a bar and a place where you could just go drink. Yeah. And the industrial age changed everything, too, because a place like, say, New York city became this beacon for immigrants to come to and be skilled laborers and work in factories. And they brought with them their love of bars, and they said, what the hell is going on with this town? Like, where are all your bars? We want a bar here, bar there, bar there, bar there. We want a bar there. Where are all your bars? We know how to make whiskey, too. Exactly. Yeah. Just leave it to us. We'll open the bars. And very quickly, bars sprouted in neighborhoods and became customary, like, pretty much overnight in the United States. Yeah. And they were sort of like they are now in the best towns at the center of civic life where people congregated. It was the center of politics. In fact, back in the day, it was untoward to actually have legitimate advertisements and political campaigns. That was no good. What you could do is get everyone loaded on election day. And they even had a name for it, which was swelling the planters with bumbo. Yes. Bumbo was a rum, and the planters were the voters. The voters and basically whoever got the most people drunk on election day. One, like, almost literally. That's the case. Yeah. Pretty solid. George Lamb george Washington, who's the father of our country, he made his first bid for the Virginia legislature and lost because he didn't cotton to that kind of thing. He didn't swallow the planters with bumble. No, he did not. And he learned his lesson because the next time he ran for the legislature, he spent something like 80% of his entire campaign fund on booze on election day, and he won big time. He figured it out. That's right. And to this day, well, it became rife with corruption. Of course, anytime you're getting people drunk to vote for you, eventually they're going to evolve as a nation and say, maybe it's not such a good idea. So let's outlaw drinking on election day altogether. And for many years that was the case. And in a couple of states, south Carolina and Kentucky, in America, they still won't let you drink on election day. Yeah, the bars are closed, which is weird and archaic, and it's on a Tuesday, which is strange. Yes. But they have, like, really efficient, quick elections. They get this over and everybody's like, let's get this over with. The bars are closed. This is awful. Yes, you're elected. They do their drinking at home. I think on election day, probably we'll be back to stuff you should know live in Vancouver, right, Josh? Right. Hold your horses, everybody. You know, buddy, I was just hanging out with my very cool nephew over the holidays, and he is a budding photographer, and he showed me his website and I said, that looks like a Squarespace website, and he said, Uncle Chuck, it is awesome. And it looked great, man. It's drag and drop. It's intuitive. You don't need to learn how to code. He has a great time with it. He's showing off his pictures and getting business. Yeah, well, plus, if your cool nephew gets into any troubles, he can contact Squarespace's. Excellent customer support. They have email support and live chat 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Yeah. And if you need a logo for your company, don't spend a ton of money. They have an easy logo creator, and you can get a really quality logo for your website at squarespace. Comlogo. Plus, all plants have commerce options. So from hosting an entire store to accepting donations for your personal blog, it's right there for you. Yeah. And it's going to look good on every device from your laptop to your tablet to your mobile phone. And folks, we got a deal for you. You can try the product risk free just by going to www. Dot. Squarespace. comStuff. You're going to get a 14 day trial with no credit card necessary. And if you like it, it's only $8 a month after that, including a free domain name if you sign up for a year and without offer code stuff. Josh you can also get 10% off your first purchase. So take our word for it. Get a free 14 day trial with no credit card necessary. Just head on over to squarespace. comStuff. So we're in New York City, let's get the way back machine. Okay? We bought a full size wayback machine so we can all get to go back to New York City. It's 1820, and the first celebrity bartender is he's not born because he's old by that point. Right, but his name was Erasmus Willard, and he worked at the city hotel in New York, and he was famous. And he had two really neat traits that turns out to be a celebrity bartender. He was ambidextrous, and he had a photographic memory. So he could make drinks with both hands and recognize your face as you're coming in the door and be making your drink with one hand and recognize his face. And then we say his, because only men were allowed in bars at this point, by the way. It's true. Right, ladies? It gets better. It gets better. It gets better. You guys hang in there with us. Eventually women could go to bars. I don't know if you knew that. So Erasmus Willard was the first dude, and he sort of paid the way. He was known as the best known man in the city, and he paid the way for Josh's hero, my hero, Jerry Thomas. Yeah, come on, give it up for Jerry Thomas. So, Jerry Thomas, are we supposed to name that guy? Yeah, everybody's like, tell us more about him. Why is that you're here? I'll clap later. Explain. They're always asking us to explain. Jerry Thomas was this dude who was flamboyant. Yeah. I like to say he had a little liberatch in him. Definitely. He would tend flashy guy, very flashy. He would tend bar with, like, diamond rings on both hands, diamond stick pin in his tie, literally a rat on each shoulder while he's tending bar. And this guy, rats. And this guy, his signature drink was called the Blue Blazer, which was scotch. And I think a little bit of sugar and some water. But you would pour it from wine glass to wineglass on fire with rats on your shoulders and diamonds sparkling in the flames. This is Jerry Thomas, which is pretty awesome. That in and of itself warrants mentioned 150 years later. But he also had the brains and the creativity to back it up. And basically in Jerry Thomas, you have everything that we know about cocktails and drinking and going to a bar in this one dude's person. Yeah, he bartendered in New York for a while, had his own place, and then the civil war started, and he was like, I don't like all this killing of each other's things. I'm going to go out west and do my thing out there for a while, and you tell me when that civil war is over and I'll come back to New York, which he did. He spent some time out west in saloons, I guess, applying a stray west coast. That is a place you just got pandered to, my friend. The west coast is the thing. That's right. West coast, good job. Isn't that what they do that works? I think that's east side or maybe this early on, I was so bad at it. This is West Coast, clearly. Right. So he goes back to New York and he says, you know what? I'm going to write a book. I'm going to spread the joy of my craft. He's going to take, like, everything that he's learned through his travels, all the inventions he made, and puts it into a book. Yeah. All the way back in 1862. It's really the first bartenders guide ever. You should do the honors here because it's the greatest book title. Well, there's three titles. It's called the Bartender's Guide or how to Mix Drinks. Or The Bomb vivant's Companion. I like the Bomb von's Companion. That's what I know for sure. Especially when you're wearing diamonds on both hands and rats on your shoulders. It's the bomb of a companion. So he had a lot of flash, like we said, and not necessarily the other bartenders have followed in his footsteps. Didn't really necessarily go that far. But what he did do was he provided craftsmanship and artisanship to bartending for the first time. And he was the first guy to really say, you should take pride in what you're doing here and making a good drink. Yes. And dress up. Will it kill you to dress up a little bit? Will it kill you to put a rat on your shoulder for once? So they don't bite much? And we'll talk a little more about Jerry Thomas and what he did. But while he's working, this is like the boon, the heyday, the initial boon of drinking. Basically, before then, everybody drank, and they drank all the time. But this is like going and getting a drink was a cool thing. But if you listen closely, while Jerry Thomas is mixing his blue blazer, there's a drum beat in the background. And if you listen, it sounds really, like, stupid and wrong minded. And if you really focus in on it, you realize it's the drumbeat of the Temperance Movement, which managed to get Prohibition passed, not just in our country, but in your country. Yes. Let's all booed the temperance movement. What a bad idea. And the Canadians knew it was a bad idea way before we did because you had Prohibition for a very short time, and this sucks. It's stupid. You had it for a couple of years during wartime from, I think, 1918 to 1920. Right. It was provincial otherwise, but you had a very nice Canadian loophole. If you have an ailment, you could get booze even during Prohibition. You could go to the doctor and say, doc, I got the shape. I need some booze back. I got to sit. So got the cold, I got the jimmy legs. I'm awake, Doc. I'm awake. Just give me some boots. And the doc would be like, yeah, sure. All you had to say was, I need some booze in Ontario in one year in 1923. Anyone have a guess on how many prescriptions for booze? Just in ontario. Everyone 41. What do you say? $400,000? No, double it's. 810,000. People were so sick that they needed boost in one year. Just an OnCare in one promise. Yeah. So we were really impressed by that number. So, as is our usual want, we went and looked at the 1921 Canadian census, and we found that you can do that. That 810,000. The number of prescriptions in that one year in Ontario alone was one 10th the entire population of Canada. And we were like, wow, the numbers really add up. Canada is pretty cool. That's when it really broke on us. All right. You are a very sickly people. We need to get better. And it is funny to see it play out all these years later with the marijuana clinics. Yeah, it's the same thing. I got the SIS, I'm awake, I got the shakes. Oh, you need some marijuana. I don't eat enough. You have the neuropath here, right? Like, you can just walk in and talk to a dude, a neuropath, and they'll say, oh, well, you clearly need some marijuana. So this is a very dark time, not only for bartending as a craft, because it was just sorting to become, like, a legitimate thing and respectable thing, but for booze, period. Prohibition was bad because there were a lot of bars, but they just weren't legal. I think there were twice the number of Prohibition bars. There were legal bars? Yes. There were 40 Prohibitions in 1927 in the US. There were 30,000 speakers, which was twice the number of legally licensed bars before Prohibition. Is it clearly working? So clearly, Prohibition was just a great idea all around because the mob was like, yes, come here. We can take care of you. Just look for the green door and you'll find us. Speak easy. Yeah. And it was bad for bartender, though, because whoever the bartender was, was the guy who could get the booze and who could get the booze didn't necessarily know anything about booze, for one, or making good drinks. And it wasn't necessarily good booze. It would literally kill you or strike you blind. You heard the saying, this will make you go blind? It's really made people go blind to a lot of people, yes. That's where the phrase comes from. There was a batch of industrial alcohol that I guess the US government thought was going to fall into the hands of bootleggers, which it did. So they decided to poison it, and a lot of people died. And the American government was like and walked away. It's not very much talked about. We found out about it, so we're like telling everybody, because that has messed up. But I think in what is it, Chuck? 1928 alone, 50,000 people died from bad liquor. And that's not including people who are paralyzed or struck. Yeah. What that means actually just occurred to me. That means 25,000 people died, and 25,000 more people were still, like, I'm going to give it a shot. All right, what are the chances? Anything to take care of the Jimmy legs? Yeah, I got the shakes. So the other cool thing about Prohibition is since all the rules are out the door, basically, women said, I'm going to a bar and you're not going to stop me. I've come a long way, baby. So women were now congregating in bars, and men all of a sudden went, this is great. I don't know why we never allowed women in here, because we've just been getting drunk by ourselves and sort of looking at each other and going home at the end of the night. And that's sort of weird, which, as we'll get to, eventually became a tradition at bars. That's right. Only home alone. But at least there were women now, and they were getting south right along with the guys. Right? Great. But it was because there weren't any rules. It was like a speakeasy was operating illegally. So a woman would come to the door and be like, what, are you going to not let me in? Like, you're not even supposed to be serving booze anyway. Yeah. And there's another unbelievable fact here that Josh dug up that I still take issue with. Apparently up until the 1980s in Alberta. Where is that? Is that east? That way? Apparently in Alberta, they had laws on the Voice up until the 1980s that still were gender specific with bars. I know. Hey, man, we're telling you guys about it. We didn't create the laws. Well, I think it might have been I don't know if it was enforced. Surely not, because they had the too. Right. So prohibition happens, right? And everybody's like, that was a really bad idea. Let's never do that again. Let's repeal it and let's go to war. So World War II happened, and that actually had a pretty significant effect on bars, too. Apparently up here, they send all of your guys over to Europe to fight, and your guys came back and said, there are these pubs in Europe that are awesome, so let's build them everywhere. And then after that, like, yeah, we got the pubs. How about some sports bars, too? Let's mix those in a little bit. And that's pretty much how things went for a while in Canada, in the US, our guys apparently all went to the South Pacific and came back and were like, tiki culture. And tiki was huge in the United States. Not a fan here. I don't understand this at all. How do you not like Tiki? There's like, fun shirts, right? All the drinks are good, very tasty stuff. The restaurants that you go to to drink are fun. It's just nice. Yeah, I'm a pub guy. I don't see why you have to differentiate. That's true. Anyway, so that's how things were in the US and Canada until there was a very dark time that settled over the land. Not as dark as prohibition, but pretty close. And this was the age of the fern bar. Does anyone know what a fern bar is? Have you ever heard of that? You know how you go to red Robin and there's, like, Tiffany lamps and terrible drinks and all that stuff? Well, you can thank the invention of the fern bar for that. Have you ever seen threes company? Remember the regal? That was a firm bar. And in the 70s, they were all the rage. Yes. There was a guy in San Francisco, and he went by the name of Henry Africa because that's a super fun name. His real name was Norman Hobby, and he opened his bar Henry Africa's because Norman Hobday is a really bad name for a bar as well. Plus, also he apparently all the time wore safari gear and, like, a helmet. And so he went by henry Africa and Jerry Thomas were sort of similar. I think they were both flamboyant. One ruined things, one did great things. So he opened up Henry africa. There was another one in San Francisco, too, in the early 1970s, and they called Perry's, and they were like, you know what? Let's get rid of these classy oak dark bars that everyone loves because they're awesome. And let's put in ferns and Tiffany lamps and fat chairs, and let's bring the lights up and let's serve nasty drinks, mix and machines nasty from bags of mixed chemical flavored things. Yeah. And I have an idea. This is going to make us a million bucks. I'm going to make a gun that shoots soda water and orange juice out of the same thing. And everyone apparently said, yeah, it's the 70s. Who cares about anything? Let's go this way for the firm bars. And they did. True. And it was the sexual revolution. So the ladies that were already going to bars now felt like, hey, I'm in a bar and I can be more aggressive. All of a sudden, it's the hip happening times. I'm Diane Keaton. This is what they said to themselves. I can look for Mr. Goodbar and have a drink and go meet a man. It was my lady from the 70s impression. I have to see Mr. Goodbar. Searching for Mr. Gerbar. Looking for Mr. Goodbar. No one knows. But, you know, has nobody ever seen that movie? No. Oh, my God. That was a pity class. They don't have Diane Keaton in Canada. Have you seen it? I think my three company reference is way more well received. Way better. But the point is, you could get bad drinks in these bars, and it's sort of a dark time for the craft of bartending, like the Bahama mama, the kamikaze, the mudslides. Yeah, the Harvey Wallbanger, which apparently was so popular it had its own mascot. It was like basically a drunken version of Ziggy just wandering around. And I guess you would get a sticker or something if you ordered a. Harvey Wallbanger. This is the level of thought people were putting into drinking. Yeah. If you sell the drink, you get a sticker out. That's not a place you want to be in. Especially Ziggy was like, X's for I was that what it was. Pretty much changed my mind. I think he has, like, one of those lines coming off of them. It's kind of nice. I'll get you one for Christmas. They have them on ebay. So this is the way things were going for a while until this very fateful meeting between this guy named Dale DeGraf and a dude who owned a restaurant, and he wanted Darwin to set up a bar for him. And he said, you know what? I don't want this usual firm bar crud. This is awful. This is New York City. We got to do this right. Yeah. Let's get back to basics. And he tossed Dale DeGraff a book, a very important book. What book? The Palm Beach Boss companion. Yes. From 1862, everything came full circle. Yes. And Dale Degrade was like, this is amazing. We can bring craftsmanship back into bartending. And let's use real ingredients. Let's get rid of these stupid swirly mixing machines and these bags of chemical fruit flavored things. And let's use real fruit because there is such a thing as real fruit. And we should put it in drinks again like they used to in the 19th century. Right. And that's what they did. And the bar was saved. So when you go to the Cascade Room or the Diamond I don't know if you guys have been to Boulevard. I know it's, like, pretty new. But if you finally do go and you enjoy a cocktail there we did our research, and I hope that was dead on, because I really put us out there just then. But if you go to a place where there's a decent cocktail and somebody's really putting thought into it, you can thank this Dale Degrade guy for bringing it all back. But really, you should thank Jerry Thomas, to tell you the truth. I agreed. Now do you understand why he's my hero? See. I love Jerry Thomas. Let's talk a little more about him. Right. So at the bars, as they're evolving and bartenders are evolving, they're going from diamond studded to just normal. Cocktails are evolving too. Early on, basically, everybody made their own booze and they had it in a jug with three exes on it, and they just turned it up. And that was like, their cocktail. It's how they drank. Yeah. Like Chuck. Yeah. Turn the three X chug up. And then when Jerry Thomas came on the scenes, like, we can do better than this. There's some cool ingredients that I want to kind of mess with and create new stuff. So originally there were punches, which is a huge bowl of hot booze that everybody drank from the bumbo that the planner swilled. Right. Then there was a toddy, which apparently, from what I can gather, is just like a single serving hot punch, right? And then there were swings, and slings were the ones that had the most promise. Those became what we understand now is cocktails. They are basically booze. A little bit of water, a little bit of sugar, and then maybe some fruit juice. And Jerry Thomas looks at the sling and he goes, I can do something with this. And he creates what's called the Baroque age of cocktails, where there's just like this great experimentation going on. Nobody knows what the hell anybody else is doing, but everybody's trying new stuff. And all of these the foundation for what we know now is cocktails came out of this area. Yeah. And the first cocktail was mentioned in print. The word in 18 Three in Amherst, New Hampshire, with the slogan it's excellent for the head because it was a morning drink. You were supposed to drink a cocktail. That's where it comes from. The rooster cocktail is where the word comes from. And if you drank too much of the night before, you would get up in the morning and make your little fizzy cocktail drink with bitters. And it's like the hair of the dog that some of us know and love, right? You drink your cocktail, get punched in the face by your wife, pick up your action, go back out there and work another day. That's what they used to do. Jerry Thomas said, you know what? I love a morning cocktail as much as anybody else, but why can't we keep drinking throughout the day? Let me see if I can mess with this. Why save alcoholism for the morning, right? So through this Baroque era of drink making, it was very nuanced. Like, you would have, like, a sour, and a sour was just booze, citrus and a little bit of sweetener. Usually maybe curacaw or something like that. And then you would change that dramatically by adding soda. And then all of a sudden, you had a fizz or if you wanted to use booze, a little bit of grenadine. I think there was a curacao sweetener and brandy or something. You would have a daisy. And then in Mexico, they added tequila to the daisy. And in Spanish, daisy is margarita. That's where the margarita came from around this time. Yeah, you got some margarita fans out there. So Jerry Thomas was very influential. But if you ever pick up a copy of the Bali Ville Companion and try and read this thing, it doesn't translate that crate to today's proportions. Like, what is a glug? Like, literally, like, three Glugs of this and a pinch of that and well, I guess pinch is easy enough. Well, no, I still don't understand pinch. I mean, yeah, it makes sense, but what if you're like a dog? That's a lot more than that. Good point. So it took, like, cocktail historians to kind of read the thing and bring it into the modern era. Because back then, sugar came in a big loaf and sugar wasn't refined like it is today. And ice was a big deal. Yeah, sure. Outside of the winter, chip it away exactly how you want it to. It's a cocktail historians to really kind of translate all this stuff, right? And they did. And along the way, Jerry Thomas dies, but he creates this great body of work that's added to over time. And then eventually we come to like the streamlined classic cocktails that we have today, like the Martini or the Manhattan. And all of this was from the work of these wonderful, genius people who are fighting on the front lines against the temperance movement and making life better for everybody. Heroes, real heroes, shirking out of like the Civil War and all that stuff, just doing God's work, basically. The Martini. We're going to talk about some of these classic cocktails. The Martini. If anyone here drinks martinis, it's always any martini fans. I love martini, says the guy with the PBR in his hand. I'm just going to put these back in my helmet and drink them from my straw. So the martini, if you've ever had a martini, it's very dependent on the individual, on how exactly you like it. Everyone says that they make the perfect martini, but the ratio for move to gin no, I make the perfect martini. Everybody thinks, how do you make it? Okay, I use two to 3oz. Okay, I use 3oz. Three, like scotch over 3oz of gin and half an ounce of vermouth. Okay. Stir it with some crushed ice because it gets colder faster. It's way better. Strain it sometimes if you want to get a little crazy and you want to go original, the martini is actually supposed to have orange bitters in it. A couple of dashes of orange bitters? Yeah. You say what and it seems weird, but you don't taste the orange. It just does something different to it. And then a couple of olives. Olive juice to drink my dirty. Do you really drink your dirty? Oh, yeah. I like it. It's salty. No. Is that wrong? No, that's the thing. Chuck that's the key. If you enjoy it, there's no wrong. Absolutely. Yeah. But the origins of the martini are equally contentious because everyone thinks they invented it. There was a drink in Martinez, California. I invented the Martinez. There was a place in California called Martinez. In Martinez. They made a drink called the Martinez and they claimed that the martini came out of the Martinez and that they are the inventors. But they are just one of several. Right. There's another one that said it's just named after martini. And Rossi, the vermouth makers. Does anyone else make vermouth? Oh, yeah, there's tons of other vermouth. Why is that the only one I ever see anywhere? I guess marketing. It's the worst kind of vermouth, too. Is it really? Yeah. Like every other vermouth on the planet is better than Martini and Rossi, and that's the one that everybody knows is Martini and Rossi. I feel like a heel. No, you're fine. Okay? You're fine. If you enjoy Martini and Rossi, it's cool. That's a nice me. I'm getting you back for that one, dude. West coast. Yes, we're on the west coast. Hi, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office when you could be using Stamps.com? Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Drinking. What about the daiquiri? Yeah, the daiquiri was invented in Cuba by an American who was there working in mines and was bored and went to a bar and said, you know what? Why don't you take some rum and some lime and some sugar and mix that all up and let's make a drink and let's call it a daiquiri. And that's how the daiquiri was born. Yeah. And then the firm bar making the frozen you take out of the freezer and put into a blender and put, like, a fifth of Roman and just get wasted. And that's the firm bar version. And your wife punches you and you get your axe and you go to work. You can't work on a blender full of daiquiri. Believe me, the Tom Collins has an interesting history. Kind of dorky now. But in New York in the 1800s, it was a big fun joke to tell everyone that this guy Tom Collins has been talking about you. Yeah, because apparently just going to a bar to drink wasn't amusing enough. Like, they had to jazz it up with hoaxes. They didn't have ziggy stickers at the time, so there was no Tom Collins. Of course. It was just a big hoax. But apparently it was a big laugh back then to tell people that the bartenders got the idea, like, hey, these people come around asking, where's his Tom Collins? I got to have a word with him. So let's make a drink called the Tom Collins. So when they come in and ask for it, we have to serve it to them and they have to give us money. Right. Easy sale, easy peasy, every time. What about the Mojito? Anybody here like a mojito? I like the mojito, too. Like a Mojito. It turns out the Mojito might be the oldest cocktail in the entire world. Yeah, it's mint. Little sweetener. Right? That's a different drink, actually. It's mint soda water, some sweetener and rum. But originally, the reason they put all this stuff in, because these are pirates drinking this in the 16th century, and the reason they put all this stuff in was because the stuff they were drinking, which is kind of like a proto room called tathia or Agua gadiente. Hey. Nice. It tasted so bad that you had to put all this other stuff into it. And so eventually they introduced copper stills to Cuba and started making really good rum there. But they were like, no, I still like the mint and this sugar. This is a really delicious drink. So that's the Mojito full drink. Here in Canada, you have a drink called the Caesar, another popular morning drink. Man, they love the Caesar drink. I know. We had eight this morning. I have been making those for years, unknowingly calling them Bloody Mary's the whole time. I did. My friend taught me a recipe. He taught me a recipe to have climato in it, and it was delicious. And so I was like, well, this is my Bloody Mary. It's with clamato. I did not know it had a different name. Right. So I'm going to call it a Caesar from now because it is delicious. Yeah, it is pretty good. And really, it's way better with the Komato, to me, than just regular tomato juice. It's good despite its origins. Apparently the guy, I think his name is Walter Chell from the Calgary Inn, he went to Venice and tried a spaghetti dish. It was like, I want a drink that tastes like that. And he came up with the Caesar, which you guys love. So you love spaghetti in the glass, the clam dish, basically, yeah. What would be really good in this drink? Great idea. It is a good drink. We just and then, of course, we figure you guys would probably beat us to death with your shoes if we didn't conclude this podcast with a lengthy discussion on Canadian whiskey, which you call Ride, which we're big fans of, actually. And in Toronto, for the first show that we did, we said, we're going to talk about Canadian whiskey. And everybody went, right? And we thought, everybody's going, Why? And we just, like, looked at each other like, oh, we just lost the crowd. This is not good. I thought they would love this. Yeah, it turns out we finally everybody calm down. One person basically raised their hand and addressed you guys for us and said, everyone is saying rye. We call it rye here. And we're like, okay, so just disregard the last 45 seconds of panic that you saw us go through. So we understand how you guys call it ride, but we call it Canadian whiskey. The first distillery here in Canada was open in Quebec City, you may have heard of 1769. That was number one. And then by the 1840s, there were over 200 distilleries, which is not too bad. You guys love making your whiskey because you had people from Europe and Scotland, Ireland coming over and saying, we know how to make this stuff. We know how to spell it without the E, like the rest of those dummies. And that's why you spell whiskey without the E was because of those immigrants. And a man named John Molson is credited starting the first distillery in Canada whiskey distillery. Your rye is very similar to our bourbon, except the process is different. Like, both of them have corn, a lot of corn in them, a lot of Malta barley and then a little bit of rye. The difference is, in Bourbon County, Kentucky, where they have the soberest elections in the country, they take the corn and the rye and the barley, and they ferment and distill. It an agent. Together, you guys take your barley and your corn and your rye, and you make liquor out of them, and then you bring them together at the end. Which is why rye is a blended whiskey. Like Scotch, actually. Yeah. And apparently the rye part of it is the smallest grain, the smallest amount of grain that they use, but it provides the most flavor. I guess that's why you call it rye. And so during the Civil War, our Civil War, when our country was torn asunder, you guys were totally fine. We were busy fighting. We weren't. Our forefathers were. The clerks were killing the Bryants. Yeah. I feel really bad. It's okay, man. It's all good. So during the Civil War, our distillery shut down. We have other things to focus on, but we still need boost. So Canada said, we got plenty of it. Here you guys go. And after the Civil War, when our distilleries went back online, there was an enormous amount of competition still, because everybody loved your rye. We were like, I just got my leg amputated. Give me some more of that stuff. And you guys were more than happy to oblige, so much so that the American distillers were like, congress, we need you to step in and do something about this. And Congress, it they said no, it's true. They said, any booze that's manufactured outside of the United States has to have his country of origin on the label. So in 1890, a very popular whiskey from Canada called Club whiskey became Canadian Club. And still around today because of a law, because of us, because of our Congress. Thank you. That's right. And Canadian Club remained super popular until to this day and in the 1960 is one of the reasons. One of their cool little advertising tricks was they had this cool campaign called Hide a Case. They said, you know what we'll do? Let's appeal to the rich junks of the world and let's hide a case of whiskey in some remote area and leave clues in magazines. And the rich drunk said this is fantastic. Yeah, exactly what I've been looking for something to do with my time. I've been wanting a free case of Canadian Club for a long time. I want to spend $50,000 finding that. They hid them in places like Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, the Great Barrier Reef, angel Falls, Venezuela and the last one in 1980, they hit in Washington DC. Yeah, from 1965 to 1980 they hit 25 cases and it didn't go quite according to plan. I think the first case that they hit at Kilimanjaro was found by accident, like ten years later. Like a guy that stripped over it. Yeah, he's like, oh, in case of Canadian Club is here, I guess it's mine, I'm taking it. Good fortune. And then the last one, by 1980 they kind of given up on the whole thing. It was in Washington, DC. And I think they let the people who found it, watched them just set it down and back away and they just walked up and they're like hide a case, catch the fever. But the cool thing is there's a bunch of them out there that have never been found, still hidden. So if there are any rich drunks out there with a passport and some spare time, there's some whisky that you could buy at the store or you could just spend a lot of money and go out and try and find it. Right. That's all we found out about Canadian whiskey. You got anything else? Man, I'm just glad that people can see your jazz hands live because they're doing a lot. He does that in the studio for me and I'm just like I wasn't even thinking about that. Did you bring a listener mail? No sir. No? Okay, we'll have to double in later, sorry. Someone prepared one to hand? Someone have a paper airplane or the listener mail? I encourage people to throw stuff up here. Okay, so I guess we'll wrap it up this part of the show. There's more everybody. It's in store. If you want to know more about bars, you can type that word into the search bar how stuff works, but I don't think it's going to bring anything up. You can try it anyway. And if you want to get in touch with Chuck and me, you can tweet to us at syspodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychannow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestephorse.com and as always, join us at our luxurious home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetepworks.com hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-12-08-sysk-computer-addiction-final.mp3 | Is computer addiction a thing? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-computer-addiction-a-thing | Computer addiction is really an umbrella term for the various addictions that can come along with the computer. We're talking video games, porn, gambling and the like. We dive deep into the world of digital addiction in today's episode. | Computer addiction is really an umbrella term for the various addictions that can come along with the computer. We're talking video games, porn, gambling and the like. We dive deep into the world of digital addiction in today's episode. | Thu, 08 Dec 2016 08:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=343, tm_isdst=0) | 45734847 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, San Francisco. We're coming back to see you. Yes. Our second year in a row, we're gonna be going to SF sketchfest. Mmhmm. What? I like to think it's the premier comedy festival in the United States. Well, in the world. You think so? Yeah. What about Beijing? No, it's a close second, but a second. Well, we love San Francisco. We love performing there. Everyone is always so kind to us. And by San Francisco, we mean the entire Bay area. Of course. Yeah. So we will be there doing our thing for a one time only show on Sunday, January 15, at 01:00 P.m.. Yeah, it's the rare Sunday afternoon. We're like the NFL of podcasters. Exactly. That's what I've always thought. So all you have to do is go to the SS sketchfest site, look at the old calendar, and there are tons of great people performing. Oh, yeah. So I suggest just doubling down and getting tickets to all kinds of good shows. For sure. And hurry up and get tickets to ours, because they've only been on sale for a week or so, and they're already half sold out. That's right. So please hurry. San Francisco. Please hurry. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. So this is stuff you should know. The computer addiction. Yeah. So computer addiction, as it turns out, is many things, and I'm going to include smartphone addiction in this as computer addiction. Yeah, for sure, because this was written before there were computers in people's pockets. But it is porn addiction. Online porn. Yeah, exactly. Is there any other way? There's gent. Well, that's like when poor Fred Willard went to a porno theater and was caught or something not too long ago, and everybody felt so bad because everyone loves foot Fred Willard. And it wasn't like some big scandal. Everyone was just like, oh, poor Fred. Somebody needs to explain to him how this is done. These days. You don't need to leave your house. How are there even porno theaters left? I don't know. Is it like a kitchy, retro vintage kind of thing? Maybe I would go to one of those. Okay. Just to go look around and be like, hey, nice to meet you. I just want to shake your hand. How are you doing? Everyone won't be shaking hands, but I think it would be interesting. Like, this is what it was like in the 1970s. Sure. And Times Square. All right, I got to find me at porno theater. I'm totally going. You know, Georgia theater used to be when that's how it started out. Really? In Athens. Wow. I don't think I knew that then. God burned it down a few years back because of that. And Dave Matthews built it back up. I remember when he used to play there. Seemed like every three months. Sure. When I was in school there before he was a big deal. Right? I was like, who are these guys? Why is your name always up on that marquee? They said you'll understand someday. I still don't. When is that day coming? Well, now it's not going to if it hasn't yet. So it is porn addiction. It is maybe gambling addiction, video game addiction, gaming addiction, for sure. Social media addiction, YouTube addiction. Yeah. And a lot of things wrapped up under this big banner of computer addiction. Right. And everything you just mentioned is what's called collectively computer mediated communication. Right. Or there's another subgroup called Internet Addiction Disorder. And we should point out right here that none of this there's some controversy with some of this, and none of it is officially listed yet. Still, as far as I can tell. No. There was a push to get computer addiction of some form or another, at least Internet Addiction Disorder put into the DSM Five, which they put together a couple of years back in 2013, I think, the American Psychological Association. But they said, no, we should do a show just on that. The DSM Five. Yeah. No, the DSM period. Because I was looking at the year, because I was curious when the next one was due. And then I looked at them throughout time and I don't think there is, unless I'm wrong, it didn't look like there was any set. Like, every ten years we're going to put one out. No, I don't know what schedule it's on. Maybe when enough of the stuff turns out to be bunched. Yeah. They're like, we should probably rewrite this thing. Yeah, maybe so. Yeah. Homosexuality isn't comparable to insanity any longer. We should probably rewrite the handbook. Right. And I wonder if they make Addendums or if it's like, no, it's locked until the next one comes out. You're insane because you're gay. But then the next day it comes out, it's like, oh, you're kidding. Anyway, so they tried to get something like that in the DSM Five and it did not. Correct. Apparently what I saw is that there's basically a note in there that says, we understand that this is a thing that people are researching, so we're going to keep an eye on it and we need to do more research on it. It's just too misunderstood or not well understood enough to warrant being included as, which is how it should work. All the different studies I looked at, they're all pretty lame, to be honest. There's a ton of them, though, right? Yeah. But everyone I saw was and we'll go over them, but we asked 20 people asked questions. Right. I saw others that were legitimate. And there are also apparently a lot of neurological studies as well. Yeah. Because there's a big controversy not just in whether you could actually be addicted to computers or if it's just an impulsive failure to control your impulses. Right. Some people say well, they're just lazy. They just want to sit around in front of a computer all day. That doesn't make them addicted. Is that what all addiction is, though? Is it failure to control your impulse? No. If you did our addiction show, I should go back and relisten. I think some people make the case that behavioral addictions, which are non substance addictions, are failures to control your impulse. Right. Other groups say, no, it's way off. These behaviors are still releasing dopamine in your brain, in which case it's following the same mechanism of addiction that heroin or cocaine creates. It's just a behavior. So there's still kind of like a little bit of butting heads over that, even. Which, of course, then that means that something as amorphous as Internet Addiction Disorder couldn't possibly be agreed upon at this point. Right. And you can tell this article is data, too, because it talks about instant messaging. So every time I said that, I just crossed it out and put texting. Nice. It's kind of the new Im. So one other thing that got me, too, is I went and looked at this citation. It was written in 2007. And what's scary, though, is a lot of the stuff he's describing is taken as, like, totally normal among the general population in the west now. Yeah, it is pretty interesting. All right, well, obviously, if we're talking about the smartphones and computers, laptops, desktops, whatever your device, we are talking about, basically, if you look down the list of what happens if you are computer addicted, it's basically the same as any alcohol or drug addiction. Do you stay on the computer for much longer than intended or notice the passage of time? You could say that. With drugs, do you make conscious efforts to cut back on computer time and repeatedly fail? That's a big one. Big one. Do you think about your computer a lot when you're not using it? We're constantly look forward to the next opportunity to use it. Drugs and alcohol. That is why I don't play video games. Back in May I? Oh, really? Yeah, in like, 97, 98, whenever the Clone Wars wasn't that Episode one? Who knows? Okay, well, whatever. Episode. The One with Jar Jar Binks Probably the greatest Star Wars character ever created. That video game that came out in association with it, I found myself thinking about how to play it better when I wasn't playing it was this on PlayStation, I think. Okay. And I was like, this is no way to live. I'm not doing this anymore. So I stopped playing games altogether. Well, they definitely like I think anyone who ever played a lot of Tetras had tetra streams or would look at the world in some ways as a tetris grid. Yeah, some games really have a knack for getting into your crawl that way. Like, I've been playing a lot of I can't even think of the name of it now, fallout. Four fallout is called four. They're very immersive, dude, especially now. I mean, like, that Star Wars game was cruddy. Yeah, that wasn't the first and only game I'd ever played. I'd played plenty of other games, and I can tell you that was not a good game. But I think that made it even more it strengthened my resolve even more that if I was sitting there thinking about how to play this Cruddy game better, I should probably just stop playing games altogether. Yeah. So you haven't played any games since? No, I don't play a lot. I think I've mentioned this before. I'll usually get every couple of years, I'll get one game that's the best reviewed game, and I will play that obsessively for a little while, then quit. So I'm sure you have tracked the progress of games these days. And now that we're starting to move into virtual reality, it's like, yeah, we're going to be totally lost as a species. All right, so continuing on how it mirrors drug addiction, hiding the extent of your computer use from family and friends. Yeah, that's a big one, too. Totally. Use computer as an escape when feeling depressed or stressed. That one to me, is kind of like, okay, I don't see that as a sign of addiction. But this is a Grabster article, so I'll take it as gospel fact. Oh, is this Grabster, too? Yeah. All right. Missing events or failing at non computer tasks because you're on the computer. Poor job performance, family activities. You miss that family reunion because you're playing Charge Our Banks. Charge our banks is Candy Crush Bonanza Rodeo. And then it could lead to things like marital problems, negative consequences, getting in trouble at work. Same can be said of alcohol and drugs for almost all these bra. And then, sadly, there have been cases where computer addicted or gaming addicted people have either died or had their children neglected such that they either had health problems or died. And if you look it up, just look up gaming death or game binge death. And there are all kinds of stories. It seems like Taiwan is one of the worst. Taiwan had two people die within two weeks of each other from gaming binges in 2015. Yes. Well, they had three total, and I think all three were in Internet cafes. Even so, not even at home where they can't be disturbed. This is out in public. Yeah. And apparently one guy was laying there for 10 hours before they realized. That's so depressing. I couldn't believe this. One other note that I saw in this article was that when the police and the paramedics came in to retrieve this dead body from the Internet Cafe, the other people playing didn't even stop. They just basically didn't even pay attention to the fact that a dead body was being removed from the Internet cafe. Wow. So there's a book called Death by Video Game, and it's actually not new. This happened in the 1980s, even. Ever since, there have been games, people have played them until they died. And I was just curious about Taiwan. And the author basically says Taiwan in particular have these Internet cafes, which is a cheap way to get online and stay online. You're thrilled. Yeah. So they've got these cafes. There's a lot of smoking going on. There a lot of caffeine drinking. The humidity in the country is really tough. And basically says, all of this adds up to and of course, you're not eating well, you're not exercising at all. And all of this adds up to really increased likelihoods of things like blood clots, because you think, like, how do you literally die from a 19 hours binge of a video game? It's all the other things that go into how you've treated your body. Really neglect, essentially. Yeah. I mean, a blood clot makes sense to me. I saw exhaustion. I'm like, is this the 1890s? Die of exhaustion from sitting around? Maybe die of the vapors blood clot. I get that makes sense. And it does, too, because your legs are sitting there immobilized. So of course you could get a blood clot. Pulmonary thrombosis, right? Yeah. Or pulmonary thrombosis. Not good. Not good at all. Because it travels to your heart or your brain, and all of a sudden your World of Warcraft characters just standing there not doing anything because you're dead. Yeah. I see what you're saying, though, about this article being written a while ago and then comparing it to today, because it says even when people do interact with friends, they may become irritable because they're away from their computer. And now people aren't away from their computer ever because of the smartphone. And it's just morphed into this thing where it's just accepted that it's okay to be having a conversation with someone while they're looking at something else. Right. And I mean, the idea that you're sitting there physically with somebody and they're hanging out online with other people and that's who they're actually hanging out with, even though they're physically with you in the room. Yeah, it's weird, but that's become that's accepted behavior now, even though it's not hard to step back one degree and say, this is odd. Yeah. And I wonder what the long term like. We're writing the infancy of this thing. We are like, what are things going to be like in 50 years? I was in a bar the other night getting some take out dinner for the family, take out beer, no take out food, bar, restaurant. And I go to this place all the time. I go sit out at the bar, order a drink, order the food, have my one drink, get the food to go. Nice. So I'm there for like, 25 minutes or 30 minutes maybe. And I used to love going to sitting down in a bar and talking to strangers. Oh, yeah. Next to me, yeah. Striking like a good bar conversation is like, it's the best. Sure. And I sat down. I was between these two dudes. I looked at my left, guy was staring at his phone. Looked at my right, guy was staring at his phone. People beside them were staring at their phones. Nobody was talking to each other. So I ended up having a good conversation with the bartender. That's good. Which was fine. How bukowski ask of you. Yeah, that's true. But I don't know, man. It just depressed me. Yeah, no, I know what you mean. When you step back and look around and stuff like that, you can make the case that they're still connecting with whoever they're talking to, who they'd rather be talking to, I guess. Right. And that was one of the things that it touches on in the negative effects of this, is that you start to prefer your online friends. Well, it's entirely possible that your online friends are better friends than the people you're surrounded with in real life. I don't know that that's necessarily a drawback. Right. But there is definitely a case to be made, and plenty of studies that suggest that we are growing ironically, more socially isolated the more connected we become. Yeah. But also get the feeling that in that bar, if I would have said, hey, man, let's get a conversation going, of course I wouldn't do it that often. It's a great conversation. Hello, sir. Would you like to speak with me? Hey, man, let's get a conversation going. What do we talk about? If I got a conversation going and these people put their phones away for a minute, they might be like, oh, well, I'd rather be talking to this guy. Because a lot of times, we're assuming people are interacting with friends on social media. They might be watching cat videos or reading news sites, angry about the election, just feeding into their anger over and over and over. They might be like, dude, thank you for talking to me, because that was so much more pleasurable than it's sort of the de facto go to of, well, I have 30 seconds to stand here and wait for the elevator, so let me check my social needs. The thing is, I don't necessarily agree with you. I think that the more we are drawn into our devices to communicate with others, the harder it becomes to talk to somebody. Let's get a conversation going. No, I agree. In real life, I agree with that. I think if people did it, though, they might be surprised and delighted, like, wait, I can still do this, right? Not me. I find I'm failing at it more and more these days, so it just makes me feel worse and worse. Come on. So we're getting way into the opinion category, and we're urging a few people. Let's take a break. All right, we are back with facts and figures. Okay. One of the other things that struck me, too, Chuck, was that losing touch with the people in your physical life in favor of people online that you're friends with. Yeah. You're also, in a lot of cases, doing way more spectacular things with the people online than you are in your real life, like going into simulated combat. You do interesting stuff with the people you're online with rather than well, especially if you leave kind of a boring life. Yeah, right. And that's all subjective, of course, but I don't know if your life is really boring, everybody can tell. I saw this ESPN Outside The Lines episode on this wrestler at University of Michigan. The Wolverines name is Marshall Carpenter, and I think he was a twin, if I'm not mistaken. But he would spend eight to 14 hours a day gaming on his computer and was done. He washed out a wrestling quit Michigan and went to rehab and had a guy come into his house every day to rehab him out of it. And there was a football player, two named Quinn Pick Cock that quit the NFL. He played one season for the Colts because he was playing Call of Duty and only wanted to play Call of Duty. Wow. It's sad. But it is like, how can you not call that an addiction? Right? No, it's true. And examples like that are the ones that people point to to say, yes, there is such a thing as computer addiction, and it does have pronounced effects, not just on your NFL career, but if you're just an everyday schmo, it can have pronounced effects on your relationships, too. For example, yes, you might prefer your online friends who you're playing Call of Duty with to your wife, but you are married to your wife, and if you neglect or ignore her long enough in favor of your friends for Call of Duty, she may divorce you. Yes. And there's never been, from what I've seen, a study that definitively showed it that, yes, online time equals higher divorce rates. Right. But I found one that came pretty close. It was a 2014 study that appeared in Computers in Human Behavior, a journal, and it found a 2.8% to a 4.32%. Those like decimal points that, you know, it's legitimate. Yeah. That level rise in divorce rates correlated with a 20% annual increase in Facebook use in a given area in the US. Right. So every 20% that Facebook increased up to 4% change. There was a 4% change increase in the divorce rate for that area, too. Yeah. It's entirely possible the two had nothing to do with one another. It's also entirely possible that it totally did. Yeah. But then there are people that say that. The people that say that it's no different than sitting down and watching TV every night for four or 5 hours. Well, you can be addicted to television, too, I think. Sure. But I think the Internet is a bit more immersive than TV, especially because you don't interact with the TV the way you do online, usually. Unless you're Elvis and Bob Guule is on TV and you interact with it with your handgun. Was it Bob Gole? It used to drive him berserk Bob Gule. Really? Yeah. Oh, man. Will Ferrell bob Gole thing was so great. Yes. Remember that? Yeah. I didn't know who was on TV when Elvis shot it. Bob Go away. And sometimes he would just be like, the TV wasn't enough. He'd shoot his toaster or the dishwasher. Yeah. Robert Guulet. Because he would see Gulay everywhere. Wow, elvis is on a lot of drugs. Yeah, but they were legal. God bless my grandmother, god rest her soul. They were from Memphis, and it was always like, oh, Elvis. He was still Memphis's son. Like all his doctors, they had him going every which way. His doctors killed him. He was a big, fat junkie. Love the drugs. I don't want to be the one to break it to you. So I never did. I just let her think that what's funny is the horribly ironic, but also hysterically ironic thing that he hated drug dealers. He would get wasted on prescription drugs and get so worked up thinking about drug dealers living in his town that he want to go shoot them. And his boys would have to restrain him and calm him down so he didn't shoot some drug dealers. Sit down. Come on, biggie. Sit back down. Well, wasn't he like an honorary DEA guy from Nixon? He tried to make that I think they know there's that famous picture of him taking hands with Nixon. He got that meeting arranged. Nixon didn't want it to happen because he's like, this is preposterous. I'm not going to make this guy a DEA agent. Yeah, but Elvis was offering himself as a DEA undercover agent because he could get close to the hippies and all that. Here's your junior badge. Anything I can do, just let me know, man. Right. There's a movie out about that now that I want to see. The Elvis and Nixon meeting. Yeah, I haven't seen it yet. All right, so back to addiction. I was not expecting Richard Nixon to make an appearance in this one. I wasn't either. I did find one study. This is Dr. Susan Molar at the University of Maryland. Go. Turps. She asked 200 students to abstain from all media for 24 hours. Call it 24 hours. Unplugged. Had a colon in there. Even. There's like a lot of that, too. There's, like, camps in Japan. They have fasting camps, they call them, where really you're just away from anything technological or connected. See, that's great. Yes. I don't think it's great if you're one of the poor teenagers whose parents put you in there. I bet at the end of the week. Though. You get these great stories about how I hated it going in. But I made these new friends. And then there are probably some that are like. This was the worst experience. But she basically just had these kids. These students describe things. And what it was like wasn't super scientific. But all of them said that they could not function without it. And across the board, all 200, there wasn't a single person that said, that was nice. All of them are like, this was one of the worst 24 hours periods of my life lately. Wow. But then you also make the argument like, this is how we communicate these days. It's how we get our news. It's how we communicate through work. You can't just take away everything like that and say, all right, now relearn everything, you know, over this 24 hours period, or keep up in modern society. Yeah. So it wasn't the most fair thing to do. It seems like drawing it out over time might have been more useful than 24 hours or something. And it also raises another point of contention as far as determining what constitutes computer addiction. The computer is not an inherently useless or evil thing, right? Like, Ed compares it to heroin. You could legitimately sit around and use a computer for 10 hours in a day in a very useful manner. Yeah. You got a deadline for work or something? Sure. You sit around and shoot heroin for 10 hours, you're not accomplishing anything. You can point to that and be like, no, that's not objectively good in any way, shape, or form with a computer. You can be like, yeah, you could be sitting there playing Candy Crush for 10 hours straight, or you could be researching new things or learning a new language or getting work done or whatever. So it's not like you can point to, yes, if someone sits down at a computer for ten straight hours, they're a computer addict. It muddies the whole thing. The usefulness of the computer and the ubiquity and necessity of using a computer for long stretches muddies the whole definition of what constitutes computer addiction. Well, yeah, and while they have determined and actually shown in the brain scans that it actually lights up areas similar to drug addiction and reward centers, it doesn't render those brain centers useless. Like when you do the heroin. The heroin, which is kind of another way of saying what you were saying when you ride the horse. Is that what they call it? I think it's what they call in the it's chasing the dragon, or is that something no, that too okay. There's this great MST three K episode, an early one with Joel, and they were, like, injecting a monkey with something, and one of them I don't remember who said it they go, yes, sir. A little horse for a little monkey. All right, should we take another break? Yeah. All right, we'll come back and we'll talk specifically about social media addiction right after this. All right. Social media, as Hodgman calls it. Well, he ended up calling it so mes by the end of it. It is a brand new world with social media, and I think a lot of the online addiction now is centered around studying things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat right. App addiction, I guess is probably a better way to put it. Yeah, it's a good point. So they've been studying for a little while. In 2012, some researchers from University of Bergen did a study where they looked at Facebook dependency, and they said that the very nature of the site is problematic in that they found that the parts of the brain associated with preservation of the social reputation are what's at play there. Oh, I believe that. And basically in this stuff that you sent me, and I found other stuff, too, the very way that those sites are structured are to get you addicted to them. Yeah. So there's this whole thing, basically it's called behavioral design. There's a guy named BJ Fogg who's an experimental psychologistcomputerscientist, and he runs what's called the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford. And this guy is like a guru, a god out there who basically has taken this concept that, yes, you can have a great idea, yes, you can have a killer app. Yes, you can have wonderful technology, but it doesn't amount to anything unless you get somebody to use it and to use it a lot to make a habit out of using it. And basically there's a push right now to make technology purposefully as addictive as possible, literally addictive. And we're at a point right now with the way the apps are designed were cigarettes were back in the 70s when they started adding things like ammonia and sugar to increase the amount of affect that nicotine had on the brain to make them more addictive. That's the point we're at with the apps that are being created, and it's all based on how they're designed. Yeah. This one researcher called N-I-R near EAL eyal. Great name. Yeah. Wrote a book called Hooked how to Build Habit Forming Products. Basically said it starts with this trigger in the hook, which is, in the case of social media and Facebook is loneliness, boredom, or stress. Okay. So that's the hook that they get you with. Are you bored? Are you standing there at the elevator for a minute? Hey, it's so sad, but it's, check out your Facebook feed. Are you standing the line in the grocery store? Don't talk to the nice lady next to you. Ignore that little kid making cute faces. She didn't want to talk to you anyway, so you're bored. And that's how they get you going. That's how they get you hooked to begin with. That initial little trigger. Okay. But then it goes from there. So I think boredom would constitute a motivation that would motivate you. Right? Yes. The trigger is something like if you open up Facebook and there's the news. Feed and there's like all these different stories or your friends like something. And so you are activated. You are motivated by boredom to go seek out the newsfeed. The news feed itself are triggers that you click and all of a sudden you are immersed in your Facebook app. Yes. And Fog actually come up with this kind of shorthand formula for it. It's B equals mat. So behavior, the behavior that you're after, which is interacting with Facebook is what Facebook wants you to do. It's where motivation. So you're motivated by boredom, ability. It's very easy to open up the app on your phone. You're able to low hanging fruit is what we call it. And a trigger all come together. So the trigger say is the newsfeed, the ability is just opening up the Facebook app. And then the motivation is boredom. But there are plenty of other motivations, there's plenty of other abilities, there's plenty of other triggers. And what they found out is that the key seems to be ability, where if you make it as easy as possible for a person to do something, they're likely to do it. And once they do it, you can start getting them to do it over and over. The behavior becomes a habit. Yeah, that's the key. That's the point. That's what they're after. And that's how they're designing apps these days. To make it habitual. Yeah. Well, the Facebook in particular, it's no accident that the, what's it called, not the alert, but the notification is in red. That's a color that they found draws like a more immediate reaction than response. Stop sign is red. Yeah, it's why a red light is red. It's why the Facebook alerts are red. Sure. So why I'm read when I'm mad this other guy oh, what's his first name? Something Harris. This is sort of the depressing part. He says you might say to yourself, it's my responsibility to exert self control when it comes to things like getting on Facebook. Right. He said, but that's not acknowledging the fact that there are 1000 people on the other side of that screen whose job it is to break down whatever responsibility you can maintain. Yeah, that's just dead on. And this guy knows his name is Tristan Harris. Yeah. He actually spent time under studying under BJ Fog. And he's kind of gone the opposite way. He's saying, hey, we actually are doing something kind of nefarious here. We should really kind of cool it with the behavioral stuff. So he's kind of launched a push for people to rely on technology less or to resist, interesting, the use of technology in their lives more. Basically. Some of it comes up in this article by Ed too, like doing things like setting alarms and when the alarm goes off, your computer is off, you just turn it off. Or just allotting certain parts of the day to using your computer, your phone. But I mean, it may have worked in 2007. It's just getting harder and harder today. Like we were saying before, have you ever been on LinkedIn? Yes, I've got like it's totally neglected. Like all LinkedIn accounts. Yeah, no, some people are super into it, I think. By the way, people I'm not on LinkedIn. Never have been. Nothing against it. Don't even fully understand what it is. But I don't need any more LinkedIn invites. Got you. Because I'm not on it. I get them all the time. But when LinkedIn launched, apparently they had a hub and spoke icon to represent visually what your network was, how big it was. And they said that that was a very intentional thing. When you look at it, that trigger to say, like, look at my wheel. It's lame. I can't have people seeing my wheel like that. Yeah. Connect to people. Yeah, like, Fogg says he's like, people couldn't have people thinking they were losers. Yeah. So yeah, they started using the site like crazy. Well, I'm surprised Facebook says how many friends you have. I'm kind of surprised that's not featured a little more prominently or even represented in terms of popularity. I'm quite sure that they studied that extensively and found that it actually led to reduction in Facebook. So I guarantee that wasn't something they overlooked. Yeah, because it seems obvious that they would be like, you would click on someone's profile and it would be like, this is so and so. They're super popular. Right. He's a hero. You're a hero. And then, sadly, I'm not on Snapchat at all. But dude, using Snapchat is one of the most difficult things you could ever try to do. Well, they said in here, they said that Facebook's behavioral design makes like it's cute compared to what Snapchat is doing. Yeah. Like Facebook, if you send someone a note right. Do you get some sort of alert when they read your note? Yeah. Well, not an alert, but you can see like a little check mark, like so and so read this at this time. So that sets it up for a social obligation for the person who received the note to respond. Because they know that you know that they've read it now. Yes. Or you see it as they saw this thing three days ago. Right. So that's been responded. That motivates a behavior. Yes. That's built in design. Snapchat has a feature that displays how many days in a row two people have snapped each other and then actually does reward you with, like, emojis and things. Right. People love gamification. Yeah. That's basically what it is, right? Yeah. So they said what Facebook is doing is just like kids play compared to what they're trying to do with Snapchat and other apps in the future. Right. It's an Atlantic article that pulls from they were saying that there's reports of people who are on the Snapchat streaks of X, number of consecutive days. They don't want to break their streak, right? So if they know they're going to be away from their device or whatever, they'll give their password and log in to a friend. Have them snapchat the other friend so that the streak will be unbroken. Which I mean, if you step back and there's plenty of people who are like, so who cares? It's fine. This is the way the world is now. Some teenagers are snapchatting each other so that they can get emojis. Is that really that wrong? And that's a legitimate response that is. At the same time though, I really feel like there's a lot of shirking of responsibility for taking the human species in a certain direction without the human species being largely aware of it. Well, see that's exactly crystallizes my problem with it. It's not that sure, that is sort of the world now and that's what people do, but it's the fact that we're being manipulated into doing so behind the scenes. Sure. When they have those meetings and they're like, hey, what if the Facebook feed, what if they auto played these videos? So before you know it, you're watching a video that you didn't even want to watch and then you're watching another one. Right. So let's put in the autoplay feature. And they call it Harris, called the bottomless bowl. That infinite stream that you get sucked into because they found there was a study where people eat 73% more soup out of a self refilling bowl than a regular bowl without even realizing they've eaten more. I want to see that bowl. I do too. You just keep eating the soup and that's essentially what they're doing on Facebook and your other social media, social media feeds. Social media is you get sucked in before you know it and then a half hour has gone by, right? Like you rationalize yourself. Like I can just go check. I sent a friend request or a message, it'll take 2 seconds. Let me just check and see if they responded. Right. 25 minutes later they found is 25 minutes is the average time that it takes you to get back to what you were doing because you get distracted because of that feed. I've never been more aware of how often I check Twitter than I was when I was checking Twitter while I was researching this article. Oh, really? Nothing to do with anything randomly. I just go open up Twitter and look. No change. Nothing we're seeing it is bizarre, the habits you can form from it. So what do you do, Chuck, if you want out? Besides having to completely fast or unplug or whatever? Well, like you were talking about the I should say if you are a bona fide computer addict, oh, I mean you can go through a legit twelve step program. You can go through rehab or people out there doing that, right. So if you feel like you need that or someone in your family needs that, like have an intervention. Like these cases I was talking about like this wrestler you're gaming 14 hours a day. Your life is suffering in some ways. In many ways there's just no way getting around it. No, there's not. Because again, you're not getting exercise, you're not eating right, you're creating blood clots in your legs. You're not hanging out with the people who you're physically around with. Of course there's problems. You could also this one was good. I thought you could put the computer in the high traffic area of the house. That is a good one. Instead of being up there in your bedroom in the closet looking like a guy from Reefer Madness. Yes. Sit out in the open where someone might distract you into a human interaction. Right. Or be able to keep tabs on like you've been at the computer for 6 hours now, which a problem. Yeah, I'm working. Okay, we'll keep going. Yeah. And I find that our lives are and I'm sure you're the same way they're busy enough to wear I don't have time to do that. What 6 hours at the six and 8 hours of fun and we do our research and our work online but I can't play Fallout for 8 hours. Yeah, I have responsibilities. Yeah, you do. But the fewer responsibilities you have, I guess the more prone you are. I think that was yeah, if you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you're toast when it comes to gaming. Yes, that's true. It says here that a 2012 study people who are more anxious and socially insecure appreciate the easy ways to communicate via the social media. But on the other hand, people who are more organized and ambitious, we're at a decreased risk of tech related addiction and would just use it right. For the things they need it for. I'd say that characterizes me. Yeah, it's a tool. Aside from chicken Twitter, what else, man? You got anything else? I got one more thing. I just saw this. Good. Well, it was an article, it's a research paper. Internet addiction colon a brief summary of research and practice from Hillary Cash, Lizette Ray and Steel and Alexander Winkler. And I just read the summation but it's interesting. They said from our practical perspective, the different types of Iad that's the Internet Addiction Disorder. Right. They fit into one category due to various internet specific commonalities. So you talk about porn addiction or gaming addiction or any of these various addictions except probably social media in some ways because anonymity and riskless interaction are two of them and then commonalities in the underlying behavior which is avoidance, fear, pleasure and entertainment. And then the overlapping systems I'm sorry, symptoms, increased amount of time spent online and preoccupation and other signs of addiction. But in the end they say more research, more research, more research. Yeah, that's what we need. Which I mean, of course it's coming like this is probably the premier addiction of the 21st century. The thing is, we seem to be looking at it as less and less of an addiction and more and more of normal life. So, I don't know, maybe there will be less study of it. I'm just going to encourage people to you don't have to go out and give up everything, but just try to spend a little more time talking to people. Yeah. Just go to somebody and say, hey, make conversation with me just a little bit here and there. Let's get a conversation going. Pepper it into your life here and there, and see if it does not provide reward. Yeah. Another good one that I found at least makes you cognizant of it, is when you are standing there waiting for that elevator or whatever, and you go to grab your phone, just think and stop yourself. At least do it to just poke yourself for fun. Think of it as a gun. Yeah. You're going to get tackled for waving it around in public. Tackle the best. I've tried to do some of this lately, too, where I do just start talking to people and it freaks people out a little bit these days, whereas definitely, I don't remember it freaking people out, like when I was in college. Yeah, I think you're trying to talk to people. Yeah, it's definitely changed. And I was like, what do you want? Why are you talking to me? If you want to talk to somebody who wasn't around, you had to go to a payphone back in your day. Yeah, they still have those. I see them from time to time. They're neat. It's like being in a living museum. It is. Well, I don't think either one of us have anything else. Instead, we're going to suggest that you go on to howstepworks.com type in a search bar computer addiction. If you want to know more about this, there's plenty of other stuff you can look up to. And since I said search bar in there somewhere, it's time for listener mail. Yeah. And, hey, sorry if it was a little soapboxy on that one. I didn't want to get too soapboxy, but I kind of missed folks talking to folks. I'll talk to you. All right. You just tap me on the shoulder. All right. I'm going to call this syntax beef. Hey, guys. Small issue I had with the syntax episode discussing the colonial American reaction to levees, like the sugar tax. You dismissed the purpose of the taxes making the king richer. It is a common misconception that the taxes were imposed on the colonies. Arbitrarily. And this was certainly the patriot narrative used to support independence go pats. But in fact, the taxes were levied to cover the cost of the devastating French and Indian war, which the colony survived only due to the British Army's resistance. Revisionist history nowadays tends to focus on the without representation part of the no taxation request. As well as the effects of other laws, such as forbidding settlement in the Appalachian regions and restriction of trade rather than taxes alone. But I want to clear it up, because portraying King George Five as greedy ignores legitimate political motives on the part of the British Empire, which are often ignored in the revolutionary narrative. Did this via email come from the UK? No. Oklahoma. Okay. Okay. Sure. So close. Love the show. Keep up the good work, guys. Sincerely, Thomas from Oklahoma. Thanks a lot, Thomas. Thanks for sending us straight. Yes, I think we kind of just did the Nickel sketch of the king. I think it's pretty easy to fall into that trap. Sure, that's what they teach us in school. Exactly. You want to get pushed on by the King of England? No, I saw Schoolhouse Rock. I was a jerk. Schoolhouse Rock with Jack Black. No, that was school love rock. Oh, that's right. If you want to get in touch with me or Chuck, you can hang out with me on Twitter at joshua clarke. You can also look us up the S YSK podcast. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at charleswchuckbryant or facebook. Comstuffyteau. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, hang out with us at our home on the Web stuffyturname.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetepworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. 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." | |
c31b4e02-5460-11e8-b38c-c39c6b1005d4 | SYSK Selects: How Sign Language Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-sign-language-works | It wasn't until the was developed and despite its co-existence alongside English, a user would be hard-pressed to sign with a British person. Find out about the independent evolution of sign language in the U.S. and how intuitively sensible it is. | It wasn't until the was developed and despite its co-existence alongside English, a user would be hard-pressed to sign with a British person. Find out about the independent evolution of sign language in the U.S. and how intuitively sensible it is. | Sat, 23 Mar 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=82, tm_isdst=0) | 43291047 | 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. 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. Hi, everybody, it's Saturday. And I'm Chuck. And that means it's time for another stuff you should know. Select. This week I picked out how sign language works. It's a great one. It's from 2014, February 6, and I just remember at the time being fascinated with sign language. I think that's why it was on the list to begin with, and we learned quite a bit ourselves. I know you will, too. Very fascinating. There's not just one sign language, everybody. There are many, many kinds, and that's just one little prefect to give you before you listen right now. So I hope you enjoy it. How Sign Language works. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. And the three of us together are stuff you should know. Hey, buddy. Hey. How's it going? It's going pretty good. I have to say. This was one of the better articles I've read in recent memory wow. By Mr. Jonathan Strickland, our nemesis at Techstop. Yes. He wrote a great article in sign language. Arch nemesis. Who knew? Yeah. I had no idea that he knew anything. It's like there's nothing about the future of sign language and here it's just sign language. Yes. And this is one of those where I knew really not much about it and it was just a delight to learn. Yeah. And he basically just did American Sign Language. I have the impression that if he tried to expand it, it would have really gotten unwieldy quick. So it's a good editorial decision, good writing. Well, that's one of the things I didn't know. I didn't even know that there are hundreds of sign languages. I kind of thought it was all the same. But he makes a point even that you may be better able to communicate with someone speaking French sign language, because that was the basis of American Sign Language than to speak sign language. If you're American with someone speaking British sign language. Yeah. Because it's different. Sharing a common spoken language with another country does not mean there's nothing to do with that. They share common sign language. And that's a really good point, because it reveals that the deaf community has, over time, just basically said, we're going to do this ourselves. Yeah. And it even gets to the point where regional dialects just like a regular spoken language. It basically just is a regular language. The more I read it, the more I was like, this is just like speaking English or speaking Southern English or Midwestern English. Sure, yeah. Depending on your community, the community you're raised in, the type of house you're raised in, that's what will necessitate what kind of sign language you learn or develop or whatever. Pretty cool. Yeah, it is. And let's talk about the history of this a little bit first. Okay. So, Chuck, humans have a long and storied history of mistreating groups that are different from everybody else. It's what makes America great. Not just America. It goes back even further than humanity. The deaf community, up until shamefully recently, we're kind of one of those groups that were just kind of mistreated. The Torah, for example, forbids deaf people from fully participating in some of the rituals in the temple. The ancient Greeks wouldn't allow deaf people to be educated. Augustine, st. Augustine. He's a saint, for goodness sake. Yeah. He taught that deaf people were evidence that God was angry at their parents. Wow. Yeah. It wasn't until about the Renaissance that anybody finally took a stab at educating deaf people, and they found pretty quickly that, oh, they just can't hear right. That's the thing. They can learn very quickly and just like you and me. So that kind of became the springboard once people figured out that you can educate deaf people to them being included more into a normal society. But for a long time, they were mistreated. And as a result, I think they kind of well, I'm speculating here, but I think they kind of said, we're going to handle this ourselves, like I said. Right. Like, we're going to develop our own language, take matters into our own hands, literally. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where sign languages started to come from. Just necessities the mother of invention. Sure. You need to be able to communicate with people around you. And so sign language developed in communities where there are deaf people who were accepted and not just kind of put to the side. Yes. Before they were getting official with it, people were using sign language. Right. Because they were like, well, I don't care if you're going to make some official language or not. We need to talk to each other. Exactly. We're going to figure it out. And not only do they need to talk to each other, they need to talk to the community at large as well. Sure. And there's actually a really cool story on Martha's Vineyard. There was up to a quarter of the population when they moved over here from England. They were an isolated population, so they suffered what was called the founder's effect, where the population just kind of bottlenecked and these families intermarried, but they didn't marry outside of their group. So hereditary deafness was a trait that was passed along the group. So up to a quarter, one in four people in this community were deaf. Really? Right. As a result of this community on Martha's Vineyard in the early 18th century, having up to a quarter of its population deaf, a specific type of sign language called Martha's Vineyard sign language developed. And not only were the deaf in the community proficient in it, everybody in the community was proficient in it. Wow. And up until 1952, when the last deaf Martha's Vineyard resident, martha's Vineyard Board resident died, that's when it became extinct. So they were purchasing it from about 1700 to 1952. And apparently Oliver Sacks went and interviewed some of these people for part of a book. Man, he's always on it. He is. And he reported that some of these elders, these Martha's Vineyard elders, reverted to sign language while they were talking. So they were coming in and out of speech and sign language, and they apparently weren't even aware that they were doing it. That's awesome. And they were not deaf. That might be the fact of the show, martha's Vineyard Time Language. Yeah, it could be one of them. I think there's a bunch in here. Yeah, agreed. So if we're talking about history, we have to go back to the early 18 hundreds to a dude named Thomas Hopkins, and he was a minister to the deaf. And he went to Europe because, like we said, in France is where it sort of originated officially, and he wanted to learn some techniques on how to teach this stuff. Met a guy named Roche Ambrose Kukuran CICAD who was in Abe. Abe CICAD? Yeah, it's a title. He's like a clergyman. Right. He was the director of the School of the Deaf in Paris, and he learned some stuff from him and then plucked one of his students, Lauren Clerk, and said, hey, there's big money in this. Let's go start a school in the United States. That probably wasn't his motivation. I hope not. Although you never know. Nothing wrong with making a little money by starting a school. Sure. So they established the American School for the Deaf in 1817 in Hotfood, Connecticut, and went on like they incorporated what they learned in France with what was already going on in the United States. Right. Which is why, like you said, if you are an American Sign Language speaker and you go to France and you're speaking with a French sign language speaker, you'll probably be successful because American Sign Language is partially rooted in French sign language. Yeah. More so than, like, going to England. It's so weird to think about. And they ended up finding as well. Gallaudet University in DC. Go Bisons. Is that right? Yeah, they got a football team. I played for the Beverly Bisons in elementary school. Really? I'm a Bison. It's pretty cool, though. They got a football team all deaf or hard of hearing, and it's cool to watch the video. Like, the coach is given, like, the motivational speech, and he's signing at the same time and things. Kind of neat. That is cool. And I thought about this, too. Probably not affected by homefield advantage or not. Oh, the noise. Yeah. I wonder, though, like, the trembling of that much just sound. The sound waves. The physical waves hitting you. Well, yeah, true. But it's not the same as NFL teams. When they go to visit, like, Seattle, they work out all these sign language for each other. Oh, I see what you mean. I thought you meant getting psyched out by the crowd noise. No, I mean, like, not being able to hear when you are changing a play at the line of Scrimmage signs. And these guys are like, Dude. Yeah, there's a way in ASL or something. So, anyway, go Bisons. And that is a school of more than 1500 students today. Although they're not all deaf. About 5% may consist of hearing students, which I thought was interesting because I guess it's a good school. Yeah. And it says here in the article that there was a controversy among the students and some of the faculty. And I looked it up, and apparently there was an incoming president in the mid 2000s who was born deaf but had been raised to speak rather than sign. And apparently most of the students were not very happy about that because they didn't think she was planning on emphasizing sign language. And they wanted to make sure that sign language was, like, the main method of communication. Yeah. Interesting. So, like we said, we're going to be talking about ASL mainly, which has its own grammar and syntax and phonology, which, if you're talking about speaking, it's study of sounds, signing. It is the hand movements and signals and motions. Phonology. Yeah, yeah. In the 60s, some researcher discovered that sign language isn't made up of a distinct sign for everything. Right. There's a discrete set of hand gestures, movements that you can change and alter to make different words or concepts. And that would be phonology. Right. Yeah. I don't think we pointed out sign language. American Sign Language is not literally trying to translate each word someone speaks. It's about the concept of getting the point across of what someone is saying. Right. And we'll get into that. It'll make more sense in a minute. But that's phonology. And phonology, as far as speech goes, would be syllables. Yeah. The study sounds this is like hand gesture, whatever. Yes. Okay. In morphology, which, if you're speaking, that is how words are formed from basic sounds. And in sign language, that's the way your hand and motions represent the concepts. Right. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. And you were saying that American Sign Language does not follow English necessarily. It doesn't follow English? Yes. In fact, they try to avoid sounding like English. Yeah. Like they abandon English syntax. There's no use of the word am or b. It's pretty simple and straightforward. And some of the stuff also, some of the signs are conceptual. Like, there are some that are symbolic, but some are like a concept or an icon, I guess is a better way to put it. Yeah. Like, if you are doing deer, if you're saying the word deer, signing the word deer. Deer, yes. You stick your fingers up and put them close to your head. Like antlers. Right? Yeah. So I was curious, like, how you would sign the word moose. Yeah. And I looked. What is it? It's the same thing, but rather than having them up against your head, they're out off to the side a little bit. Because the moose has, like, antlers that are bigger than a deer. Well, and that illustrates a very important point with ASL. It's not just the things the signs you make with your hands. It's body language expressions. And the space, how you use the space around you, like, to take the antlers away from your head represents something, and as we'll learn later, where you hold your hands represent different things, like further away from your body or closer to your body. And we'll get to all that. But basic nuts and bolts. You can call them speakers, even though they're signing, but generally you call the person receiving the sign at the time the receiver. The person being spoken to. Yeah. And the receiver. If you're a receiver, you don't just stare at the hands. In fact, you don't focus on the hands at all. You focus on their face and sort of keep the hands in the periphery. That's how did you hear about the guy who was signing at Mandela's Memorial? I thought that was going to be your intro. Actually, I went with the Mistreating people intro instead. No, I like that this guy was a fraudulent sign translator. Now, was he really? Did they get because I thought he was like, no, I'm not fraudulent. He's fraud. Okay. What's unclear is he suffers from schizophrenia, and he was hired on, officially to do this. And they think that the way he was hired was because his rate was about half of what a normal sign translator would have been. So they basically just went with the cheaper option and didn't do their due diligence and figure him out, because he'd actually done this before, where he doesn't know sign language and apparently has no malicious intent or anything like that. I don't know if he just needed money or if he thinks he knows sign language, or if he wants to know sign language or he feels like he can get it across. But during Mandela's funeral, he was doing all the sign language, and it was total nonsense. So none of it was real at all? No, it was utter gibberish. And one of the ways that the deaf community, who were understandably upset at all this, I bet some of them got a good laugh. Sure. But overall, they said, if you're doing fine, you don't just sit there with, like, a stone face, which this guy was doing. He was all hand gestures, and the hand gestures didn't mean anything. But then also, you express most of sign language with expressions, with facial expressions, with movement. You don't just stand there because it doesn't do anything. You're not getting your point across. So this guy, one of the ways he was found out, like, stone faced. Yeah. Wow. And if you go and look at it, he's not moving his face at all. Like, he's completely solemn. He was found out pretty quick, too. Yeah. Because I'm sure there are people watching it. Yeah. What's going on? This guy's talking gibberish. So weird. Yeah. If you were signing actions a lot of times, but not always, you just mimic the action. Like Strickland points out, if you want to sign eat, you hold your finger and thumb like you're holding, like, a little piece of chocolate, and you go to put it in your mouth. That means eat. Pretty straightforward. And there's also something, I think it's kind of neat and efficient about sign language, is that same sign for eat? It doubles for other signs, too, depending on what you do with it. Yeah. It can get confusing. It can, but I don't know, it makes the whole thing more elegant to me, that one sign, when delivered in a certain way, changes the meaning. And you really have to pay attention. Yeah. For instance, if you want to sign food, it is the same a lot of times. You will double assign to indicate something else, to indicate a noun. Well, it depends. That's why it can get confusing. So the sign for food is the same as doubling the sign for eat. But if you want to sign eating, which is a verb, you would also repeat the eat sign. So that's where if you're receiving sign language, you understand it. It's all about your context. Like, what are you talking about? Yeah. What do you mean? You guys went out and you were food. Yeah, exactly. Right. I should teach you something. That'd be fun, but I need to learn it first. But apparently, also, the verbs or action words or signs are bigger, whereas nouns are smaller. Right. Like, the gestures are bigger or smaller, depending on whether it's a noun or a verb too. That's true. That's another way. So again, you can't just sit there with your hands directly in front of you, moving within a very small box. Yeah. You wouldn't be speaking at least as far as American Sign Language goes. You wouldn't be speaking correctly. That's true. There is an alphabet too, as every 13 year old girl knows. Why don't you remember that? It seems like in like the 7th grade, every girl I knew went through a phase where they learned to sign alphabet and would like, spell out things with their friends that no one else knew they were talking about. What, you never saw that? No. Oh man. I remember the big bubbly cursive writing bands with the different yes. I just seem to remember a lot of young girls learning the sign language alphabet and they would sit around and spell things about people had not run into that, not until it up. Maybe it was a Georgia thing. Maybe. Anyway, there is an alphabet which actually it's called finger spelling, but it's only used to illustrate a really specific concept or to indicate like, a person spell a name. Yeah. If you're going to be telling a story about Josh, all you got to do is spell out Josh at the beginning and then you don't have to keep doing it over and over. Right. One way to do that too, especially if I'm not present, is to indicate an empty space by you spell out my name, point to that empty space, and then from that point on, anytime you point at the empty space, you're seeing Josh. Yeah. If you're there, it's called indexing. Use your finger. You just point to Josh? But yeah, if you're not there, you just make an imaginary Josh. Right. And you keep pointing to that space to refer to Josh. It's pretty cool. Another reason that you would use finger spelling would be to ask somebody what a sign was for something you couldn't remember. So if you're saying something and you couldn't think of moose, you might spell out in finger spelling, what's the sign for moose? Yeah. And then they would say, hey, fingers up, away from the head. Yeah. I wrote I read an article from the Washington Post earlier about Washington DC. They call them terps interpreters. I hadn't heard that. Yeah. Are you sure? They weren't talking about University of Maryland. They were talking about Turps. But it's a big deal in DC. On any given day, there's like 1500 people in DC signing for clients. I can see that. Yeah, of course it makes sense because it's law. First of all, federal law requires reasonable accommodation for a deaf person. Yeah. But this one guy that they interviewed, what's his name? Painter. He said that spelling is your back door. Yeah. And it's tough in DC because he basically try signing a speech by Bernanke when they're saying like very DC specific political jargon. That may not have a concept. You can represent like fiscal cliff or it's not your first rodeo, or kick it down the road a little bit. And so they basically invented political jargon for people to do that. And he said, or if you get stuck, you can always just spell it. And that appears to be a hallmark of sign language, is like new signs are created all the time. Just like new words are created all the time. And just like with speech, there are prescriptivists and there's descriptivists, like people who say, no. American Sign Language is sacrosanct. It is what it is. It's not to be added to. If you add to it, it dilutes the language. Go come up with your own language if you want to add fiscal cliff to it. And then there's other people who are descriptivists who say no. A language is a living, breathing, evolving thing, and we need to get the concept of fiscal cliff along across. So here it is. It looks like Moose kind of I would just do a little guy walking and then falling off a cliff. Sure. And then making a dollar sign. If you have seen people do sign language and you see them looking upset or puffing their cheeks out or raising their eyebrows, they're indicating an inflection. This was called a non manual marker. Like if you wanted to ask someone and that's also true with punctuation, you could do the little question mark sign, but more likely you would just say the sentence and then raise your eyebrows. Right. Give them an example. Like movies. Do you like the movies? Right. You would say you like movies and then raise your eyebrows. Like, huh. You're basically like a Russian. You like movies. That's basically what's going on there. Any yakov smearoff reference is hilarious. It doesn't matter what it is. Do you ever see that king of the Hill that he cooked on? No way. They go to Branson and I think Bobby ends up hanging out with him. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Another way you can modify sign there's basically a couple of ways you can modify action is by directionalizing. So if you had a nice leisurely meal, you would do the symbols for the signs for eating very slowly. If you want to tell someone, I had to wolf it down real quick because it was late for a meeting, you would just do the signs for eating very fast. It's pretty easy. Yes. Or if you wanted to say, I'm going to give a gift to you, you would just do the signs for give gift and then indicate that I'm giving it to you. Right. Or to someone else. The direction of it is going from I to you. So it's implied right there. Give gift is going from I to you. I give you a gift. It really cuts through all the chipper jabber. I kind of like it. Yeah, it really does. And there's also rules with syntax are just totally out the window in relation to English, too, there's something called the topic of the sentence, and that's frequently a pronoun, like I. Right. And it genuinely doesn't matter where that goes and go at the beginning of the sentence, the end of the sentence, or both. And I haven't figured out where both come from, why you would say the pronoun twice. So, for example, like, I am an employee here. You would just say, I employee or employee i, or I employee I, and I can't figure out hopefully somebody out there can let us know why you would want to say what the purpose is for saying it twice, but it's allowable structure wise. Interesting. Yeah. So within that structure, I think you said it was topic comment structured. Generally, the comment is the predicate. Man, this took me, like, down memory lane. Yeah. I was like, what's the predicate again? It says something about the topic or the object if you were talking about English. And then there's the tents. Of course, if you want to talk about when something happened, you can do it in a variety of ways, but generally, you would announce the tents at the beginning, and then you wouldn't have to keep saying it over and over that you're like speaking in the past tent. Right. Until you change tents. So you would start by saying yesterday, and then you would start talking about how you went to the store and you saw this TransAm, and you're like, hey, that's a great TransAm to the guy, and he said, thanks a lot. But then today you'd sign, today I saw the TransAm again, and it had gotten an offender bender. Right. And it was sad. Right. So in the middle, you have signed today, and it's changed tense. Yeah. This is something you have to pay attention to, like sign language. American Sign Language relies on you to be a smart, non lazy person. Sure. Because you have to pay attention. You have to keep up with what you're saying. So you can't just drift off or just start staring into the middle focus. You have to be paying attention. And it's not just because you're watching the signs or anything like that. It can change and switch very suddenly, going from yesterday to today, and then everything after that stays the same. And you have to look for a change in tent so you don't miss it and get confused. Yeah. And they're quick, too, and it relies on you to understand context as well. So, for example, if you were saying, I had lunch today yes, I went out for lunch today. You can't even speak it in English. I went out for lunch this afternoon. Yeah. You would say, Today I go to lunch, is what you would say in sign language. And depending on when you were saying it, the receiver would know what you were talking about. If you were talking about in the morning, they would know, oh, you're going out to lunch this afternoon. Or if you were talking to them that night, they would know. Oh, well, you're saying you went to lunch already this afternoon? Yeah. Now you're going to you already went, right? It's all context as well. Yeah. Like you said earlier, you won't get confused if you're understanding what they're saying. Yeah, like I said, makes total sense, doesn't it? It really does. It's smart. Yeah. We talked about using the space. If you sign close to the body, it might have been something that happened recently, or might happen soon if you sign further out. Maybe it was something that happened a long time ago, or might happen way far in the future. Yeah. Again, super interesting and smart. And that kind of runs into the calendar. That some sinistites report around them all the time. I thought of that same thing. Didn't it make you think of that? Totally. I wonder if Strickland did that on purpose. He is an evil genius. Alright, so I think maybe we should take a message break and then get to the etiquette of sign language. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa like jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours, takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that roll up their own sleeve. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comitomation. 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 twenty four seven. 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 teletoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's teladoc.com stuff. For JDPower 2021 award information, visit JDPower comAWARDS. All right, chuck, where you're going? To talk about Mr. Manners etiquette. Yes, there is etiquette. Like with regular speaking language, you need to wait for the speaker to finish signing, and then they'll look at you and say it's your turn to speak. If they look away, they're still talking or signing. You know what I'm saying? I know what you're saying, so don't take that as your queue. To jump in there. In fact, that can be rude. They will actually give you the signal that it's time for you to respond. Right. But if you watch two people who are signing with one another kind of frantically yeah. Arguing. Yeah. That's one as a tactic in an argument using sign language, you don't wait until the person stops and points to you. You could just cut in and what you're doing is interrupting them. Interesting. Yeah. Another thing that might happen if you are a receiver of sign language is the person signing might suddenly turn and start signing to somebody who isn't there. Right. So you're not supposed to take a couple of steps over. They know where you're standing. What they're saying is that they're basically saying, like and then I was talking to Todd. Right. And this is Todd all of a sudden, this is what I was saying to Todd. Right. So they're addressing you still, but they're talking about what they said to Todd. Yes. Or what Todd said. If Todd said that he has a sore back, you would look at the imaginary Todd and say, I don't know what you would say. Probably back sore. Sure. Or sore back. But the proper etiquette there is to just keep watching their facial expressions and gestures just like they are talking to you. Yeah. You don't just wander off. Right. If you have nothing to do with any of this and you just see two people signing on the street, they say, according to Dr. Bill Vickers, who owns a company I'm sorry, he's president of a company that creates sign language programs, he said it's not rude to walk between them. If you just kind of just walk quickly between them and like, it's no big deal. So there's that. Right. But you don't want to be like, yeah, sorry everybody, you see me? I'm about to walk through here. So you just go through. Yeah. Or I would say just go around if you can. That's Chuck's recommendation. Go around. I wouldn't walk between two people having a conversation either. Speaking conversation. Yes. I absolutely had I thought that was a little rude, too, but apparently deaf people are cool with it. All right, so good to know. So, Chuck, we talked about American Sign Language, and obviously that's far from the only sign language in the world. There are hundreds. But in the States, American Sign language is the dominant sign language. There's other types of sign languages that are also practiced enough to warrant mentioning. Here one is signed Exact English. Man, this sounds tough. It is, because it's slow. One of the advantages of American Sign Language is that it gets rid of a lot of the crud. Yeah. So, like, you just say give gift, and by the direction you're moving, you get the point across that I give you a gift. All of these other things that you can do with the gesture, you're cutting out two, three, four words in a sentence. This whole thing made me feel like I waste a lot of words. We do, especially in English. English is a very strange, technically difficult language, and American Sign Language gets rid of a lot of that stuff. Or I should say it doesn't get rid of it. It evolved without that stuff. Yeah, that's better. I said and signed exact English is like trying to literally get English across and all of its weird syntax and order and M and B, and is using sign language. So it can be very slow. Yeah. Like in ASL, if you wanted to sign beautiful, that could mean pretty, beautiful, lovely to look at. But they get specific with signed exact language. If you want to say someone was pretty and not beautiful, you might sign the letter P and then the sign the ASL sign for beautiful, which I guess is if you're being set up on a date, you might want to get specific. No, I said she was lovely, man. What's the sign for good personality? Strickland points out that hearing teachers who interact with deaf children prefer signed exact English to ASL, because I guess just when you're at that stage in life to match up with the English spoken language, I think that has some benefit. Oh, yeah. There's one way of looking at educating deaf children is this whole immersed education where it's like you learn speech reading, which lip reading, you learn sign language, you learn to speak, you learn finger spelling. Right. You learn reading. Because that's another thing, too. If you just are raised on American Sign Language, you're going to have trouble reading English. Yes. Because you're going to say, what is B? What is is what are all these extra words? What's with the syntax? It's not going to make sense. So there is definitely a school of thought among educators that if you have a deaf kid, they should learn everything, including sign language, but also all the other stuff so they can effectively communicate with non signers. Right. And that's as opposed to someone who loses their hearing later in life. No, I think that's opposed to people who think, like, well, we're a deaf community, and sign language is enough for us. We don't have to know how to speak. Why don't hearing kids learn sign language? Why is it on us that we have to learn all this extra stuff? Why is there not a balance? Right. So I think those are two camps. I don't know if that's the whole thing, but I think some people think you should learn everything where other people are like, my sign language is good enough. Right. Interesting. Well, there's one more we'll get to in a second called Pigeon, signed English, right after this message break. 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. 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. Twenty four seven. 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 JD. Power.com Awards. All right, so pigeon signed English, which is what we were talking about, is the other common form of sign language in the United States, and I don't fully understand this one. Do you? It seems to be the middle ground between signed, exact English and American Sign Language. So they try to follow English syntax, but they don't have, like, b. Okay, so there wouldn't be like, I give you a gift. Right? It might just be like, I give you gift. Okay, yeah, that makes more sense. They do not require, in pigeon sign, English prefixes and suffixes like they do in Se. And they say it can be easier to learn than either one of the other two versions because it does match up with English syntax. Yeah, and if you're one of those educators who thinks that kids should learn everything, you would be teaching C, or I imagine at least pigeon sign. Yeah. And they say you can speak out loud and sign at the same time easier, because you're not going to get ahead or fall behind because it'll match up more. Makes sense. And then there was a push, because, like we said, if you're deaf and speaker of American Sign Language and you go to Great Britain, you're going to have trouble communicating, just like an English speaker would have in France. Yeah. What's a garage on our lift. So there was this push in the mid 20th century to create an international Sign Language. Yeah, that's what I thought everything was. Yeah, I kind of did, too. Yeah, I was very naive about all this. Yeah, same here. The American or International Sign Language. It came out of the World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf from 1951. They said, let's do this. And then 22 years later, they got around to doing it, and they created something called justino, you should say. It just uno. Yeah. And it's an Italian word that means unified sign language, appropriately enough. And I think Strickland says it's very much like the spoken language Esperanto. It exists, some people know it, but it is very far from an international language. Yeah, I looked a little more into it. I think they use it at international meetings because they kind of probably have to. And they say it can be useful for world travelers to pick up, I guess, just like you would visit another country to pick up some phrases and things got you to help you out. Yeah, but yeah, it sounds like it's far from codified. Right. Do you say codified or codified? Codified. You do. Cod. All right. And then there's babies speaking sign language. And I want to say, if you want to see a creepy picture of a baby, check out this article on how stuff works.com, how sign language works. I missed that on the last page. The baby Sign language page is a picture of a baby signing, and it's staring right at the camera. It looks way too young to be thinking the things. It's obviously thinking murderous thoughts. He looks like he's doing karate to me. But look at his face, though. It's like, sinister. He's a scary kid. Sinister. It's a great word. So that is a baby sign language. Well, yeah. There's a school of thought that if you start your baby out before they can speak English words or whatever words, that you are going to get them ahead in life by signing things that they need, like teach them to sign for hungry or peepee or daddy or mommy. Right. And they say in about six months, kids can start picking this stuff up and learn, like, dozens of words. Yeah, they can learn it at six months, but it might take a couple of months before they start signing in return. But they're still absorbing it. Yeah. And like you said, they learn obvious words that have meaning to them in their life. Right. But apparently a lot of parents report that their kids, once they figure out what they're doing, that they're communicating, they want to learn more and more and more, which is pretty cool. And there was a little bit of concern when this was first introduced, that kids who are learning sign language would become deficient in speech. Right. And they did a study, and they found, oh, actually, the exact opposite is true. Like kids who are learning sign languages, babies have better speech abilities and language abilities than their peers who didn't learn. It interesting that's at least one study found, but the same researchers recommend that if you're teaching your kids sign language, which I didn't know it was a thing, but you and I went to go visit a friend of hers. You didn't know it was a thing. And they started signing to their baby, and I was like, what is going on? Is your kid deaf? Yeah, kind of. And apparently it's a thing. I didn't realize it. I had seen it before, but they're saying if you teach your kid, you're hearing child sign language, we speak the word as well. So the kid comes to understand that speaking and signing, they're saying the same thing. Okay. So there's not a reliance on just one or the other, I guess. Yeah. I'm glad to know that it does lead to better speech. Maybe later on. Because when I first saw people doing that, it was kind of like one of those doubters, come on, what are you doing? Really? Yeah, but now I get it. Yeah, it makes sense. Plus, it's kind of cool. Like, if you can get your seven month old kid to sign things to you, it's almost like the same thing, but on the opposite end of the timeline of getting messages from the grave. You know, like babies can't talk for a reason. They know stuff that they're not supposed to know. So if your baby does the sign for Area 51, you're in trouble. Right. I got one more little fun thing I was talking about. The guy in DC, painter is his last name. He said that a lot of times they'll get hired because they have to get hired under federal law, but there won't be anyone there that's hard of hearing. Right. But they still have to stand up there and sign. And he calls that and the terps apparently call that air guitar. That's awesome. Pretty good. Yeah. Cool. So sign language. Yes. If you have a friend who is deaf or hard of hearing and is sign language person or signer, I guess, and you want to ask them how we did, if you go on to Stuff you should know.com and go to the page for this episode, it will have a full transcript for it, too, so everybody can check it out. And if you want to know more about this article, see the scary, scary baby. You can type in sign language on how stuff works.com and it will bring up Strickland's article. That's right. So there's two websites for you to go to. STUFFYou knowscom and howstep workscom. Boom. And since I said two websites, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this HIV. Hey, guys. I recently went to visit family in Louisiana for Christmas break from San Francisco, and during a conversation with a quote friend from high school, I mentioned the fact that I had recently started my medication for HIV AIDS. And this quote friend became visibly uncomfortable and clearly was looking for an excuse to leave. I received a text later where I was accused of endangering his life by not immediately disclosing my status with him, giving examples of risky behavior. Like, what if I had drank after you? Or some microscopic speck of your spit had gotten on my face? 2013 14. Now this is what's going on. Still. Have you seen Dallas Barry's club yet? No. I can't wait. It was a stark reminder, guys, of just how little people know still about how HIV works. Not only are neither of those things a possible vector of transmission, but modern medication can so effectively eradicate HIV from your blood and semen that you're practically not even contagious anymore, reducing the risk by as much as 99.9%. I had end age AIDS in May, and by August, my viral load was undetectable and my T cell count was normal. But there were complications with medication side effects, such as liver damage. There's so much information out there about HIV that people who don't have it are unaware of. When it comes to HIV, ignorance can cause positive people some serious pain when the uninformed make us feel like a biohazard. Yeah, I imagine. And it would be awesome if you guys could do an episode how HIV Works. And that is Jesse in San Francisco, and he works with the LGBT yeah community out there. I can't remember where he works, but he was like, yeah, man, read this and do a podcast on HIV. And I think that's a great idea. I do, too. And we should get that together forthcoming. That's right. Thanks, Jesse. Yes. To your friend boy 2014. Get with it, dude. I remember hearing something. I remember being a kid, we were, like, the generation that was just scared to death of AIDS and HIV because we're the ones who are, like, on the schoolyard when this thing was becoming a thing. And I remember being afraid of that kind of thing and then learning as I got a little older, like, you'd have to drink something like a gallon or two gallons of an HIV patient saliva to possibly contract HIV through saliva or something like that, and you're like, I just drank a Quart, so I'm good. I'm good to go. Isn't that Brody and the whole toilet seat thing? Remember that? Yeah, I remember. That just ridiculous. But I have one for you that's surprising. We'll do a podcast on it, okay? Okay. Oh, man, that's suspenseful. Okay, so look for an HIV podcast, too. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with Chuck or me, you can get in touch with us via Twitter. That's right at s yskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychannel, send us an email to stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com, and as always, go check out our home on the web stuffyoushouldnow.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 four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're the best pet mom when you growl back during 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." | |
2a6f1768-3b0f-11eb-a672-73d91e29b4f2 | Rock Paper Scissors: Decider of Things | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/rock-paper-scissors-decider-of-things | Rock Paper Scissors is a child's game. But it's more than that if you can believe it, and it has a pretty cool history as well.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Rock Paper Scissors is a child's game. But it's more than that if you can believe it, and it has a pretty cool history as well.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 18 Jan 2022 14:48:19 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=14, tm_min=48, tm_sec=19, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=18, tm_isdst=0) | 46796054 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry Jerome. Roland St. Jerome herself hanging out. And this is stuff you should know. Just the three of us. We can make it if we try. I think we should detail what happened right before we recorded it's very illustrative. Illustrative. I like the way you say it. Frenchy. Of this topic I think you should share for sure. Well, we were debating on which episode to record first of our two. This one is about rock, paper, scissors. And as a joke, I said, why don't we use rock, paper, scissors to decide? But we don't use video. So we would just be throwing rock, paper, scissors and going on each other's word. And as soon as we did it, none of it felt right to me. I shared what I shot, and I was truthful. I know. And I stopped myself because, A, I didn't throw anything because I thought we were kind of kidding. Okay. And then you said that you thought that people jerry said, are you really doing this as an episode? And you said, a lot of people might think the same thing, but I want to defend it out of the gate as part of a two part series that I came up with of seeming children's games where there's a lot more there under the surface. And I'll go ahead and preview and say the next one will be followed as tug of war. Wait a minute. There's a third one, isn't there? I thought you requested yet another one I gift up. And when I sent Dave the idea, I accidentally sent TicTacToe, right? And he was like, there's not much on this, after researching it for half a day, and I went, oh, dude, I'm in today rock, paper, scissors. I'm so sorry. No. Okay. Because there is a lot to rock, paper, scissors. I don't think there's as much with TicTacTo. No. Poor Dave. Okay, good. Got it. So tug of war and rock, paper, scissors. That's a winning combo, if you ask me. Then apologies to Dave ruse for the mid game shift. Yeah. And many thanks to Mighty Dave Rose for helping us out with these two MDR. It's better than The Rooster, which remember how we were like, oh, yes, of course, the rooster. And we talked to him about yeah, they've been calling me that since, like, first grade. Guys is not new. So we're moved on. Now we're on the mighty Dave Rose That's like someone saying Up Chuck and then laughing as if it's original to me. That is genius. I've never called you that. Oh, of course not. Okay, so today we're not talking about tug of war, Chuck. We're talking about rock, paper, scissors. And I feel like we should at least kind of explain, because unless you've been living under a rock or a sheet of paper or a giant pair of scissors. Everybody knows what rock, paper, scissors is, right? Yeah. Should we do that and then tell Dave's little story? Because I think it's pretty fun. Sure. Yeah. Well, it's a game, a children's game, namely. Although I would argue that if more adults decided some things this way, it would be a better life for everyone. Agreed. Because I think kids don't bring emotion into decision making like adults do, and they don't fight fight like adults do. So I think it can be a very egalitarian way to settle something fairly easy. Totally. And quickly. Very quickly. But yeah. It's a game where some people count one, two, three. Some people say Rock, paper, scissors. And on that third beat, you each throw out a hand indicating a fist for rock, a flat hand, palm down for paper, or mimic a pair of scissors with your index and birdie. Bird finger. What finger? I always call it the birdie finger. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. They're the Bernie finger. Oh, sure. Well, that, too. The Bernie Sanders finger. Yeah, because he's so well known, whenever he gets heckled on stage, he just throws a couple of birds high up in the air and it says, Read them in. Weep. It's pretty good, Bernie. Thank you. That was actually my Phil Hartman doing. Sinatra no, I thought it was Larry David doing Bernie. No, but it works. Both but that's the game. And you generally do best of three. But that has to be agreed upon beforehand. Okay. This game is so basic and simple, but it's also so widely played around the world that there's variations to almost everything you just said. I've seen plenty of people who do it on the fourth count. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. If you are playing on a pro rock, paper, scissors tournament, you would not put your hand down palm down. You'd have it palm out to the left or the right, depending on what hand you're playing with. There's all sorts of little variations. But ultimately the point of it is that for each one of those possible choices, those three choices you could possibly make, it has one it can beat and one it can lose to, which makes it incredibly thrilling. With just three little hand combinations, you can either win or lose. And it happens in the blink of an eye. It's a really great game. I'm with you totally. It is. I think, generally, to settle a dispute, not always. It never struck me as the kind of game you would just sit around and play. Yeah, I know. You're right. Maybe if you were practicing if you're a weird kid practicing rock, paper, scissors. But yeah. Nobody's just sitting around playing that like they're playing cards or something. Right. And it's between two people, because if you have more than two people, you'll probably go with an enemy, meaning money mo or an engine. Engine. Number nine. I don't think I've ever seen three people playing Rock, Paper, scissors before at once. I don't think you can. That's the whole point. I don't know. We should try it. I wonder if the universe would crumble around us. Yeah, but who would like, you have to be matched up against a person. Otherwise, I guess if two people did paper and one person did rock, you would eliminate that person. I don't know. Maybe you're onto something. I might be. I feel like I've just kind of upped the evolution of the human species. I think so, too. So you mentioned a story Dave came up with, and you're talking about settling disputes. You can also use it to make decisions, too, especially if your name is Takashi Hashiyama, who was a Japanese electronic firm, c suite executive, I think maybe the CEO of one of those companies. And he used to like to use Rock, paper, scissors to basically make important decisions when everything else is essentially equal. And he ran into the same thing in 2005, didn't he? Yeah, and I guess it worked out for him. If he was a clevel executive, if that's a measure of success to you, sure. But he was an art collector, and he had about a $20 million art collection of some very noteworthy artists and was going to auction it off and said, Should I choose Christie's or sotheby's they're both great, and I don't know what to do, so I'm going to make them play each other in Rock, paper, scissors. For the account. Yeah, because that's what Japanese electronics executives $20 million art collections do. They make other people play rock, paper, scissors for their own amusement. So apparently Christie's recruited a pair of eleven year old twins, alice and Flora, who are the twin daughters of the international Director of Impressionist and Modern Art for Christie's. And the reason that they turned to these 211 year old twins is apparently they were rock, paper, scissors dynamos. They played all the time, and they also understood the psychology behind it, too. And it actually paid off in aces for Christie's turning to these two. Yeah, because in the interview, I think the New York Times interviewed the girls, and Alice said, everyone knows you always start with scissors because rock is way too obvious and scissors beats paper. And I kind of laughed at that at first, like that's such a thing as a kid would say. But rock, there may be something to an adult being an aggressive move with a rock, there may be something to that. So that's actually what they did. They started with scissors on the day of the whole Rock, Paper, scissors play off to see who would host this auction of this $20 million art collection. Christie went with scissors, and just like the twins predicted, sotheby's went with paper, because apparently they thought rock would be too obvious, and they thought that Christie's would go with rock. So they went with paper, but instead, Christie's went with scissors. And that actually demonstrates what you were saying earlier, that there's a lot more to rock paper scissors than meets the eye, because it's these twins assertion that you would want to go with scissors every time. First, because the psychology of your opponent can be kind of relied upon. Other people say you would never want to go with scissors, and so on and so forth. And there's actually, like, game theorists that study this. There's a whole lot to this topic. So I guess what I'm saying is, good idea of picking this one, because I don't know if I ever would have. Well, what I did think was interesting and what would have been a funnier ending of the story is that he didn't have them actually play the game with their hands. He had them each write down the Japanese word for rock, paper, or scissors on a piece of paper. And I thought this would have been funny if they didn't know that little hitch. Christie had someone who spoke Japanese so that he's didn't right. So they were like, yeah, we forfeit we don't know. But yeah, I think there's something about the simplicity of it that just end the future tug of war episode that just grabs me, because when you start talking Game Theory and we'll get to that I've wanted to do an episode on Game Theory forever, but it's just it breaks my brain a little bit when you really get into it. Yeah, I think it's made up. So I think this might be a good way to just satisfy that. Good thinking. These two topics grab you and say, let's play. As far as where this came from, of course, anything like this people are going to say came from an ancient Egypt, because you can look at almost any mural or set of hieroglyphics and say, this is what I think they were doing here. It's very vague. I think that one's giving me the bird, and I think that's kind of what happened with the Beni Hassan burial murals. Right? I don't know. I think that the scholars typically agree that they're doing something like what's called a finger flashing game, that there's something like that. It's not rock, paper, scissors. I don't believe scissors were invented yet. Right. But that doesn't mean, as we'll see, there's a lot of other games that aren't rock, paper, scissors. They don't have to be rock, paper, or scissors. You can kind of substitute just about anything for your hand gesture. And it's possible they were playing that. I think what keeps it from being definitive is that there's nothing that we figured out from transcribing hieroglyphics using the reset of stone that said, hey, you guys of the future really missed out playing this finger flashing game that we didn't bother to really put down. But it's definitely the predecessor of rock, paper, scissors. There's nothing like that. So it's just kind of like it's possible it goes back that far. Yeah. And I looked like Dave did to try and find a picture of that specifically. And there were a lot of pictures of this mural or set of murals, but I saw a lot of wrestling. Yeah, a lot of wrestling going on. A lot of gaming type stuff. But I could not find the specific finger flashing game there's. Also, did you ever do the even odd thing? I never really understood that one. What is that one? When you throw you like, one, two, three. And you throw one, two, or three fingers for what? To decide something. It's a finger flashing game. Okay, so it's basically what we're talking about. It's basically the dolard's version of Rock Paper Scissors. Well, I don't know. It may be regional. They did it on Seinfeld. I remember. And it's like, evens are odds, but no one I knew ever did that. No, that's odd. Or maybe old timing, too, because I remember movies set in the feel like they did that some, too. That's very weird, because by that time, from what I can tell, Rock, Paper, Scissors had made its way to the United States from Asia. It had been around for a while. So why would you go from Rock, Paper, Scissors to something as boring as one, two or three fingers? I don't know. And I think the thing with that game is you call even or odd beforehand, and then you put the two hands together, and whichever wins, wins. Does that make sense? I'm probably explaining that poorly. I think that deserves its own episode. Like, you would say even. I would say odd. We throw fingers. I throw two, you throw one, and that's odd, so I win. Does that make sense? If you add them together, it's odd. Yeah, but then if you added any odd to any even, wouldn't it always be odd? Well, if we both did one, that would be even. Oh, yeah, but no, but if I threw four and you threw five, that would be odd. I think it's only three fingers. Okay, that's really interesting. You don't remember that from Seinfeld when they were trying to decide on, like, a lane moving into one of their apartments or selling an apartment or something? No. I genuinely don't alternate reality here. But back to ancient Egypt, we agree that they either may or may not have. But if you go to China during the Ming Dynasty, they definitely played some sort of iteration of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Yeah, it was called Sushi Ling, and it appears imprint. It's like what I was saying. The Egyptians didn't do the 17th century Chinese, and the Ming Dynasty did that. They wrote history books, and they said, we've been playing this game called Xu Xi Ling, a finger flashing game for at least 1001, 400 years, maybe even longer than that. And so that is definitively. What we kind of understand is rock, paper, scissors finds its root, if not in ancient Egypt, at the very least in ancient China. Right. And then, of course, that made its way to Japan, and they had a sort of a collection of hand throwing games called San Sukumi ken. Very nice. Which means kenneth Fist san. Or San? Is it San? Yeah. San is three or three ways, and Sukumi is deadlock. And they found a pretty fun translation of San Sukumi kin. That is, three are afraid of one another, which I think is kind of beautiful in its simplicity. I love it, too. So we have, like, a delineation where these things started in ancient China, made their way to Japan. Japan said, I really like these. Let's make a bunch of different games. And one of them was called Mushy Ken, which is pretty awesome. And it demonstrates how it doesn't have to be rock, paper, or scissors or just one, two, or three fingers instead. In Mushy Ken, your thumb is a frog, or you could throw a pinky finger, or you could throw your index finger, the pinkies, as poisonous centipede in China. And a snake is your index finger. And by the time it made its way to Japan, the centipede had been translated, apparently incorrectly, into slug, because Chinese and Japanese share the same characters, but often they have completely different meanings. So in Japan, it was a slug instead of a centipede. Right. And in that game, frog beats snake, snake beats centipede or slug. And centipede beats frog. Right. Or slug beats frog. Yeah, that makes as much sense. Snake would beat frog, I would think. I think snake would beat all of them. Unless that centipede sneaks up behind the snake. Yeah, but that's the thing. I mean, it doesn't work unless you've got one you can beat and one you can lose to. That's right. And then there was another version called Kitsunikin, and this was a two handed game, and I guess it's just a little more complex. You get a supernatural fox, a village leader or a hunter. Fox beats village leader, leader beats hunter. Hunter beats fox. Yeah, that's as the old saying goes. That's right. But we know that it didn't start anywhere besides China and then move its way to Japan and then eventually make its way to America. We know that we got it here in America from Japan or possibly Chinese immigrants. Because as late as the 1930s. Even. I believe if you read Western literature. Western reporting that mentioned this stuff. You'll find that the author feels compelled to explain what's going on and what the rules are with one of these sansukumi ken games that they're describing. Which clearly demonstrates that a Western audience. You couldn't just say the kids were playing rock. Paper. Scissors and leave it at that. You would have to explain what they were doing and explain the rules, because the Americans hadn't come across this yet. Right. And in the late 18 hundreds, japan was literally playing a game that looked exactly like rock, Paper, Scissors called John Ken Pawn. Yes. Which they still play. I quizzed Yummy about this, and I was like, did you ever play any sansukuni Ken games? And she's like, no. I was like, what about Kitsuni Ken? No. It's like, what about Jan Kampo? And she's like, Jack campaign, of course. Of course. And just started playing with me. They definitely play it still. That's nice. Who won? She won. And I thought, this is interesting, too. Remember how you were saying, like, when you throw, you throw on the third one? And I said, well, some people throw on the shoot. Like they go, rock, paper, scissors, shoot when she does it. She said that as a kid, she and her friends would say Jack Capo, and then we'd throw it on the poe. But there were still four hits to the fist. You were hitting the palm of your hand with your closed fist that you were going to throw the sign on. Still hitting it four times even though there's five syllables in there. That's why it was interesting. I've seen four more universally than I've seen three. Yeah, I think we did it on the third. And I definitely hit the other hand when I did it. I wouldn't just throw it out in the air. Yeah. Almost like there's a platform stage or something for it. Stage. Should we take a break? Our first break is to do here. Will we come back? We'll see. Okay, Chuck. So we're talking about it finally ending up in the United States. And it seems like it probably came in to the Pacific Northwest, possibly San Francisco, where there has long been a strong Chinese and a strong Japanese immigrant community. And of course, these are two of the countries that have been playing these finger flashing games for centuries by the time they started arriving in the United States. And it also ties in with a kind of a linguistic quizzical puzzle about why some people call it roshambo. They think those two things are tied together the arrival of Rock, Paper, Scissors, and the beginning of when it was called Rochambeau, which is a kind of a regional word for that game. Yeah, I had heard that word. I've never known anyone that called it that, I thought. And then until we did this research and I saw that it was sort of san Francisco is one of the pockets. And so I texted our pal Jesse Thorne bullseye with Jesse Thorne and Judge John Hodgman and the Maximum Network because he's the only native San Francisco I know. And I'll just read it to you. I said, we're doing an episode on Rock Paper Scissors. Do you call it rochambeau? Yes. Are you passing this along to your children? He lives in Los Angeles now, so I know this paints him but his children are technically Angelinos, are you passing this on to your children? Can I reference all this in the episode? Yes and yes. And then he went roe shambo with exclamation points. So I think they did it like, yummy does it, and he says none of this one, two, three, shoot nonsense. So I think they call it Rosem Bow in South Park. That's where I've heard it predominantly too interesting. That's Colorado, right? Yeah. Which is technically west to Western state. I think it's still influenced to be really regionalized to Northern California. Yeah, but I've heard it outside of that. I've spent a few nights in San Francisco, but not enough to pick up that the kids call it Rochambeau there. So I'm almost positive I've only heard it from, like, South Park or whatever. Sound like you're writing a song there for a minute and a few nights in San Francisco. Yes. Have you ever heard that John Denver song saturday night in Toledo, Ohio? Jeez, I don't think so. It's hilariously. Mean, he said you can go to the park and watch the grass die. Like, he just talked about all the just boring, stupid stuff you can do in Toledo. Or if you go in November no, don't defend Toledo. Thank you for the gesture, but it's true in a lot of ways, but it's a really cute, funny song that's worth going and listening to. It's catchy, too. All right, I'll check it out. But anyway, like, linguists still today or why you stupid kids, were you calling it Rochembeau? And why didn't you explain to anybody why you were calling it Rochembo? Because it's a linguistic mystery still to this day. Yeah. I mean, some people say it's from the real life person from history. How do you pronounce the first name? Was it Compto the comp the Count? Okay. De Rocheinbeau, the Frenchman who fought alongside the patriots in the Revolutionary War. And interestingly, that may hold a little bit of water, because there was a book called the Handbook for Recreational Leaders where they literally spelled it as roe shambo and not how he spelled his name. And that book was published in Oakland. Yeah. I don't know what that means, though. Just because it was published there, it doesn't mean it was like a regional book. Or maybe it was. Yeah, I mean, I could see the author living there. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I don't know. But I think it's kind of interesting that Recreational Leaders book was published in Oakland at about the right time. I think it was a 1936 book. And it was about the time in the 1930s when they think that school kids started picking this up in San Francisco. That makes sense. And you know what? Now that I look at the title of the book, handbook for Recreation Leaders, not recreational. Right. It was probably like a handbook for local rec centers. Right? Instead of being like, are you a leader? Only recreationally. I don't take it seriously. Weird. Well some people think it's from the original Japanese name. Right. Yeah. Either Jacob oh so apparently just barely pronounced the N on the jan and the poem so it's Jack Campo and then in Chinese it's Jing Jiang. No, either way there's that hard bow or PO sound on the end of it. And they think maybe American kids in San Francisco who were meeting these Chinese and Japanese school kid immigrants, we just kind of turned it into something else that sounded vaguely familiar which to me that's what my money's on. I think the Brits and the Aussies call it paper scissors stone or paper scissors rock. And then weirdly if you live in Manchester, first of all you're a mancunianan, which is kind of weird. Secondly you don't clap except at the very end of the show. Yeah, we perform live there. They enjoyed it, but they were quiet about it. Right. And then apparently they called this either Zip Pop brick or SiSpa brick. Just in Manchester? Yes. But they have all sorts of cool made up words around that place. Okay, so the point is, Rochambeau, it still probably will forever be a mystery exactly where it came from. That's right. Should we talk about game theory? I don't see how we can get around it, Chuck. I really tried to figure out a way but I don't think we can. Well, maybe you can embrace it. This is the kind of game theory that War games was about. Sure. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yes. Game Theory at its most basic level we're talking in this case about the Nash Equilibrium or a Nash Equilibrium and that's from John Nash of a Beautiful Mind fame and sort of the simplest way to say it. They found a pretty good definition. Which is a set of strategies. One for each player such that no player has an incentive to change their strategy given what the other players are doing. In other words, it's a game where you reach an equilibrium because there's no strategy essentially that will get a better outcome. Right? Well, yeah, we'll put equilibrium is a really important term because even though you're in an adversarial situation where you're competing against somebody it also has a sort of like cooperativeness that naturally trickles up from that gameplay. And there's not a pure Nash equilibrium in rock, paper. Scissors. In The Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a famous Game Theory kind of thought experiment there's a pure Nash Equilibrium where it's like this one choice is the thing to do. It's not quite the case in Rock, paper scissors. Instead, what happens is that if you eventually choose, if your strategy is to choose doing each rock, paper scissors one third of the time, 100% you can plan on over the course of hundreds of games to finally shake out to winning 33% of the games. And that is the best you can hope for so long as everybody else is cooperating or acting rationally throughout the whole thing. But that's a mix. That's called a mixed Nash Equilibrium, and it doesn't really count. There's a lot of problems with applying or trying to apply a Nash Equilibrium to rock, paper, scissors. Yeah, I mean, humans play it, and when they play it, they do two out of three, usually, or just one. So you're not doing it hundreds of times to let this play out. And also, humans are humans, so we have instincts, we have psychological tendencies at play. We have biases, unconscious and conscious biases, even with a silly game like this. And that one thing might be better, even though one really isn't. Like they all have an equal chance of equally losing or winning. Right. So the Nash equilibrium, it applies. It's not like you just can't make sense of it in the terms of rock, paper, scissors. It's just as far as explaining a rock, paper, scissors strategy goes, it's not your best strategy because the best you could hope for is to win 33.33% of the time as long as you stick to your guns and play the same one, two, three every single time. There's another strategy called a conditional response that they've studied that actually produces an overall winning score 10% more often than a Nash Equilibrium. Well, yeah. So this came from a study in China in 2014 where they did kind of the largest study on rock, paper, scissors ever done, where they got 360 students, divided them up, they each had to play, I think, 300 rounds apiece. Unit operative a lot of rounds of rock, paper, scissors. And the pattern they discovered, the conditional response, was, as humans, we instinctively and it makes sense we instinctively stick to something that wins, and we change it when it loses. So if you lose on paper, you're probably not going to go throw paper. Right. Again afterward. And if you win with rock, you're instinctively going to want to at least throw rock is the next one. And this played out in the experiment. Yeah. And so with that, they found that the conditional response, if you use that strategy, where if you win with one thing, throw it again the next time. If you lose with one, switch to the next one. And apparently also people follow the pattern depending on how you say the name of the game. Like if you call the game rock, paper, scissors, if you switch in a conditional strategy, if you lose with rock, you'll go to scissors. If you lose the scissors, you'll go to paper. You'll follow the pattern of the name of the game, too, which is pretty interesting, but also you flop that, but yeah, rock, paper, scissors. So you lose with rock, go to paper. Oh, yeah, you're right, you're right. But I think everyone gets it. Okay, so you don't want me to start over and. Completely explain again. No. Okay. I don't think we need to retake that. But all that combined kind of really points out how humans aren't rational actors and we don't pick things at random, and we do kind of fall into patterns, and that can be kind of used to your advantage if you're really paying attention to this kind of thing, depending on who you're playing with. Well, yeah, I mean, if you want to follow that model and technically give yourself a statistical advantage, you would know what they won or lost with, obviously, and then what their instinct to follow would be, and then you would combat that then with the appropriate gesture. Right. But here's the thing. It's a fast game, and part of the reason this game works is because you don't sit there and go, all right, let's think about what we're going to do here, and let's throw on five. You just go quickly. So you got to be really fast to, I think, remember what they did or see what they did, remember what's next, and then combat it in that second. Right. Like to consider your opponent's psychology in that fast of a time span. Gifted is the word I think you're looking for. I think so. Or maybe professional. And should we take a break? Sure, let's take a break. All right. Because people do this maybe not for a living, but there are tournaments, and we'll talk about that right after this. All right, so I spilled the beans. There are not professional rock, paper, scissors players, but in the 2000s, especially the mid 2000s, there were tournaments sponsored by sponsors that had prize money at hand. Yeah. And actually, I think the prize money got up to, like, 50 grand one year at the peak of 2006 or 2007. Not bad. Yes, it's not bad for playing rock, paper, scissors. And one thing that we should kind of preface this with when we're talking about the world of professional rock, paper, scissors players is that it is a really facetious, tongue in cheek, self satirical world, and they make up a lot of stuff that is just absolutely not true. And it's really tough to figure out to separate truth from fiction when you're talking about it. And in fact, one of the sources Dave sent was a blog post of a linguist who was posting about the origin of the rock, paper, scissors World society, I think, and how they actually were founded in 19th century London. And all of this was totally made up and didn't realize it until some of the commenters on her blog post was like, hey, this world is not real. They make up a lot of stuff. And she had to go back and revise the post. So if we accidentally say something that is not true and we say it credulously than apologies ahead of time yeah, I mean, it's kind of fun. They make up a lore. Supposedly the first one was in a bar in Toronto, in Toronto in 2002. But whether or not that's lore, like once the media starts covering something and Bud Light starts sponsoring it, then it is a real thing. And that's exactly what happened. And they would make up fun names. Sean Wicked finger. Sears was one of the players. Unless that's completely made up. But it was all very tongue in cheek. Yeah. Another good example of it being tongue in cheek is there's this great article from Alex Miassi on Priceonomics where they were talking about how very frequently on like forums and just basically hangouts for rock, Paper, scissors aficionados. They'll mention the book The Trio of Hands by Voyex Small SOA and that it's basically like the bible about rock, paper, scissors and wisdom about rock, paper, scissors. And I've seen that small SOAS compared to Lautzoo, he was just this great rock, paper, scissors kind of champion. I guess. This person is totally made up. The book is made up, none of it exists, but yet you'll find it everywhere. So it's almost like they wove this kind of alternate universe, hilarious alternate universe to kind of make rock, paper, scissors more important than it possibly could have ever been. Yeah, and see, now I'm looking at these pre planned throws and wondering if this is all a joke too. I don't think so, because they actually make sense. And I was watching one of the tournaments and they were doing it like that. Okay, well the idea is that you can't just stroll in there as an eleven year old girl and say rock is obvious. So you always start with scissors. That's playground level stuff. So apparently the pros and the tournament will sort of like an NFL team will prescript their first drive a lot of times on offense and just go with these plays and then they start calling the plays by Gut or whatever. They have pre eight preset gambits that they are going to play and I guess they mix them up. Obviously not everyone is playing the same order. Oh, I'm sorry. So I think these are real, but I'm not sure they're real. I thought you were talking about the actual way that you're supposed to hold your hand. No, we'll talk about that. I don't know. It makes sense. It makes sense. They got great names. Yeah, for sure. Should we take through these? Yeah. There's the avalanche, which is rock, rock and rock. Right, of course. I love it. What about the Bureaucrat? The Bureaucrat is paper. That makes sense. We have Scissorscissor Scissor, which is the toolbox. Yeah, I like this one. Fistful of dollars. Paper. Rock. Paper. So it's like you got money sticking out of each side of your hand, your fist. Okay. I like the Scissors Sandwich. Paper, scissors, paper. Yeah. And the point is if you are playing and you kind of do your three tries out of this because you play best two out of three. And then in a tournament, that best two out of three. So it's game and then match. Best two out of three games and the best two out of three match. So I guess you could play a whole game with just one of those gambits, depending on as long as there are no draws. Right. But what you were talking about earlier with the way they do it, it is different. And you mentioned it at the beginning of the episode. When you throw paper, you don't turn your wrist and go palm down, you just go straight out, like you would rock or scissors with your hand. Because if you were really fast and intuitive, you could technically probably see someone moving their wrist in such a way to give yourself a slight advantage on paper. Yeah. Your biggest tell is if you're throwing paper and you're throwing your paper horizontal, so palm down, look at your elbow when you're doing that, it's off to the side. Not throw paper with your palm to the side, like vertically, your elbow is still at your side. So you would be a chump to try to throw it palm down because your elbow is going out and they'd be able to see it every time. That's interesting. I could throw it with my elbow at my side. Really? Sure. I mean, I can, but it looks like I don't have use of my shoulder any longer. I guess I could do it like that. And if I were playing for $50,000, I would do it like that. But it's much easier to just throw the paper sign vertically. And then the point of it all is all of it comes from that one rock fist. So you've got the rock, and then you stick out all four fingers. You've got the paper, you stick out just your index and birdie finger. You've got the scissors, but it's all generally the same thing. And the motion is just in your fingers rather than your whole hand and maybe your elbow. Right. And they programmed a robot to actually be so fast that it could see these micro moves. And this robot was perfect. There's no way to beat this thing. If you watch a YouTube of just Google or put in YouTube, a robot almost a tic TAC toe Rochambeau. And this thing has a high speed camera and it can see their little micro move, and it can change their things so quickly. It's kind of a frustrating watch, actually, because they're doing it really fast and the wins every time, no matter what the person does. Yeah. Because it's cheating. It's watching that movement and then throwing a sign that's going to beat it. So there's actually human players, like you were saying, who say people have tells, you can see what they're going to do. And again, all of that happens way too fast for my puny brain to keep up with. And throw a sign that's going to beat what I think they're about to do. But there's been studies that suggest that actually we do pick up on what other people are going to throw, and that a lot of times that probably explains draws, that we're actually mimicking them. There's something called automatic imitation, and they think that it has to do with the fact that we have a complex of mirror neurons, which we talked about years and years and years ago, where our motor cortex basically sees what somebody else is doing and makes us do the same thing. Your neurons. That accounts for draws. And some researchers in London actually blindfolded some study participants. Hopefully it wasn't the same poor kids who had to play 300 rounds in the Chinese experiment and now they're just kind of like pigeonholed into rock, paper, scissors experiments. Hopefully a whole new batch of people. But they blindfolded, some of them. And the blindfolded ones, if both participants were blindfolded, they had a draw both through the same sign, like 33% of the time. But if one of the participants wasn't blindfolded, the draws went up to, like, 36%. Right. What do you do for a living? I do rock, paper, scissors studies, mainly. Right. I didn't want to. I kind of fell into it. Pays not great, but it's cool. They mentioned this on stuff you should know. Yeah. Exactly what you would think happened. The Nash equilibrium sort of play out. When they were all blindfolded, it was 33.3%, and then when it wasn't, how much did it kick up? 3.3% to a draw. Yes. Which is statistically significant. Say that again. It is statistically significant. Oh, goodness. It certainly is. So I think we got to finish on the Side Blotch lizards because this is just amazingly cool. Yeah. To me, this was like, what a way to end it's kind of the perfect thing, because there is in nature sort of an evolutionary game of rock, paper, scissors being played out in front of our human eyeballs. And what is it? The Side Blotch lizard, because there are three varieties with the color of their throat. The males have either an orange, a yellow or a blue throat. And each of them have their own advantages and disadvantages, which we're going to go over, but none of them have won out over time, as far as evolution is concerned. So they switch, like the dominant species switches out. Is it yearly or just like, every few years, it seems like, over very long spans of time. Right. It plays out because there's not one advantage over the other. And I just think this is super awesome. Yeah. Because just like in rock, paper, scissors, one can defeat the other, but is defeated by the third one and vice versa. So in this kind of evolutionary game of rock, paper, scissors that these lizards are locked into, orange throated ones are dominant over blue throated males, but yellow throated males are dominant over orange throated males and blue throated males are dominant over yellow. So each one has a foil and one that it can conquer, which is not so amazing. But with orange males, they're super dominant, they're super aggressive, they defend their territory to the death. And so they command large territories with lots of females that the orange threaded males mate with frequently all the time. They can't stop. So you would think, well, then why wouldn't the orange third of males have taken over and there only be orange third of males? My friend Chuck is going to explain that part. Are these the yellows? Yeah, I think the yellows okay, you got your yellow throated males. They are. Well, I think it's interesting. It's sort of like a picture of humans in a way, the orange throated. I think we should mention the blue throated. They have smaller territories, but only one female, and they all work together to get things done and to defend against attack. So these are two different, really different societies. And then you've got your yellow throats. They don't have any territory. They are mercenaries and rogues. They don't have any females to call their own. But their evolutionary trait was they evolved to be able to sneak into enemy territory and secretly mate with the females. Right. So for the yellow ones, if the orange ones are dominant, that's good for a yellow throated male because there's plenty of territory and plenty of females to sneak in and mate with. And so over time, the yellow throated males start to outnumber the orange throated males because they snuck in and mated with so many of the orange throated males mates. Pretty awesome, right? So the orange numbers shrink and the yellow numbers grow up, but the yellow tend to be shrunk. The numbers are shrunken by the blue because the blues cooperate with one another to defend other blue throated males against yellows that sneak in. And so blues do best when I think when there's a lot of yellows. Yellows are most successful when there's a lot of oranges because they can sneak in. And then orange does best when there's a lot of blues around because they're defending the oranges territory inadvertently from those sneaky yellow guys. That's right. And I think the perfect end of this is in 100,000 years they'll go to study these and they will just see a wasteland of orange, blue and yellow throated males dead on the ground with all the female sidebott lizards standing there having figured out how to reproduce without sex for males. I think that's a grime song. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, everybody, that was rock, paper, scissors. And again. Good pick, Chuck. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. If you want to know about Rock, Paper, Scissors, go play some Rock, Paper, Scissors or jacquempo or whatever you want to call it. And in the meantime, I say it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this funny mispronunciation. So we got to cover this because we got a lot of emails about that. Oh, yeah. Cookie. Most of her. Hello from Smithers, BC. I'm a big fan, guys. Can't get enough random knowledge squeezed into my brain. Even bought myself your Trivial Pursuit game for Christmas. Very nice. Which hopefully we'll be back on shelf soon. By the way, end of January, I think they're saying. Okay, great. I had a good laugh the other day listening to the cookies episode. I think it was Josh had the most hilarious, unique pronunciation of well, I think it's the nanaimo. Cookie is correct. Right? Yeah. What did you say? Nanaimo. Okay. Well, it got a Japanese flair to it. That makes sense. It was a very naive way of putting it. Side note, I don't think bars are cookies. They're bars, especially if they have different layers. I had to think for a second about what he was trying to say. Even this bar is named after the city on Vancouver Island. It does pronounce Nanaimo. Nanaimo city. I guess you can put that in the list of funny Canadian names only Canadians know how to say, like Saskatchewan, Mississaugua and Tuktuyak. Very nice. I'm sure you nailed all three of those. So I did. That is from Anna Ziegler or Zeigler. Thanks a lot, Anna. If one of those two if you have a nice, gentle correction like Anna did, we love to hear those kinds of things. And you can send it to us via email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, myheartradio, visit I heart radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How did 168 conquistadors take down the Inca empire? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-did-168-conquistadors-take-down-the-inca-empir | Just before Francisco Pizarro arrived in South American in 1532, the Inca empire covered 350,000 square miles and boasted a million inhabitants. Yet Pizarro managed to take down this vast, powerful and advanced bureaucracy with only 168 men. Find out how | Just before Francisco Pizarro arrived in South American in 1532, the Inca empire covered 350,000 square miles and boasted a million inhabitants. Yet Pizarro managed to take down this vast, powerful and advanced bureaucracy with only 168 men. Find out how | Thu, 29 Aug 2013 14:50:08 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=14, tm_min=50, tm_sec=8, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=241, tm_isdst=0) | 36402259 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the allnew 2014 Toyota Corolla. Welcome to stuff you should know from housekeeporxcom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. This is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Right. Jerry's here, of course. And this is stuff you should know. Welcome, friends. Yeah. Oh, before we get started, I want to do a little plug. We want to do a little plug for co ed, the Cooperative for Education, our friends in Guatemala, of course. Yeah. By way of Cincinnati. Right. If you haven't heard them, you want to go listen to our Guatemala Adventure parts one and two. Jerry gives a big speech in the second one. It's very dramatic and moving and basically Coed is a group that is dedicated to ending poverty in Guatemala by basically funding them in their schooling. Yes. Through education. Yes, through a textbook and then computer program where your donations go to buy textbooks that are rented by the families and that rental money goes into escrow accounts. And then when the textbooks wear out, they can buy new ones. Self sustaining program. That's exactly right. And I think the textbook rental is something like $2 a year. They did a lot of surveys to find out what the average family in the living and the conditions that they live in can afford. And they've got it down pretty much the science. Yes. They have another thing, truckers. That's their scholarship and youth development program. And it takes it several steps further where certain kids who are showing a lot of potential, they get their tuition paid for. There are programs, additional programs that are all paid for through the scholarship program. And so Coed has developed this program. They're reaching out to some Shinola listeners who have apparently shown up in force to help Coed ever since the Guatemala and Adventure episodes. Yeah. They've had people go on tours with Jerry even, and yeah, it's really neat. It's been just a great friendship over the past few years. It has been. So you can go to www, dot Cooperative for Education.org, slash help kids and become a scholarship sponsor. And there are two levels of sponsorship. There is the diploma sponsor, right? Yeah. $70 a month. Yes. And then the honorable sponsor, half, $35 a month. That's very valuable. And that is taking a kid literally as directly as you can without physically going down there and picking them up, but lifting a kid out of abject poverty and giving them the chance for a real quality education. Yeah. I mean, we see in action and your money is going to a great place to be used. It well. And we mentioned this before in another episode and as a result, some stuff you should know. Listeners became scholarship donors. That's right. Who are they? Well, we pledge to read these names. Yeah. Anybody who goes on and becomes a scholarship sponsor with co ed and agrees to let us say their name if you want, we are reading your names out and thank you on the podcast. So here's the first batch. That's right. Thank you, Andy Hoe. That is A-N-D-I-E-Y. Right. Thank you. To bendick buck sauce. Nice. Thank you to Erin nice or nice? I don't know. N-I-E-S niece. Nice. Let's say both. We did. Thank you to Ian Murray for having a normal name. Thank you. To Jordan Weiker. You want to read the last three? Sure. Thanks to Katie. Apple or appell? Appelle. Thanks to Kelly Andrews. And thanks to Zoe herdavig. That's right. And it sounds like we have people from all over the world helping and chipping and judging from these names, so that's really great. Yeah. And a name that you'll probably recognize because he's all over social stuff. Caleb Weeks. Yeah. Caleb Wick. Super volunteered. And he is a programmer, and he basically helped take the coed website into the 21st century by leaps and bounds. By volunteering as a programmer. Yeah. You can always get in touch with them if you don't have any dough, but you've got some other skill. They'll take help in all kinds of ways. Web programming and video work. And Jerry's done some videography work for him. I've done some voiceover stuff for him. It's a real live charitable organization. The Creed. Yeah. So go help them. That's www. Dot. Cooperativeforeducation. Orghelpkids and check it out, see what you think. Okay. All right. That was a good one, though. We like to talk about coed every now and then because there's good folks. Sure. So now we can talk about sort of a relatedish topic. I guess it is. It's down there. I recognized a couple of these words. Did you? Yeah. Well, we'll get to it. But there was one of them. It's actually a town in Guatemala, I think. Which one? Ketchiko. Yeah. That sounds familiar. It's a language. It's a language, Jerry says. Yeah, but I remember when I was in Guatemala hearing that. Right. So we're talking Inca. Yeah. This is Josh Clark jam. This was back when I was, like, sorry eyed over anything that had anything to do with 1491. No, man. You wrote a series of Charles Man related articles. Yeah. And for those of you who don't know, that is Josh's favorite book. We've talked about it a lot on the show, and I'm still going to read it one day. I just need to do it. It's great. You will not be disappointed. I feel like if I read it now, they'll be like, oh, I know that part. I know that part. I'm sure you will. You'll recognize a lot of it, but it's so much more fleshed out. You got your stank all over that book. 1493 isn't bad either. The sequel. Yeah. Mania. It's manish. You can definitely tell man wrote it for sure. So we're talking about the Inca people who not a habit. They had a practice. They had a practice in their culture of child sacrifice. Right. Which sounds horrific and based in our modern day culture. It is. But we've long pointed out the tenets of cultural relativism. I would like to say that I officially renounced cultural relativism on the whole. Oh, really? Yeah. I have since changed my viewpoint. I think there are absolutes that are universal or should be, and that a culture can be judged as barbaric, perhaps, yes. For certain practices. Yeah. Cultural relativism. I know we've explained it before, but that's basically, you can't look back at some old culture that did these things and judge it. By today's standards. It's a foundation of anthropology. You couldn't have anthropology without cultural relatives without this. Oh, yeah. I mean, as an absolute, there was nothing that you could do that was out of bounds as a culture, because you can only judge a culture by its own standards. Therefore, everything is self justified. Right. I still believe it to a certain degree, but I think in certain cases, maybe I could say, because people could make the argument for a lot of things being, oh, no, that's just the culture of things. Right. I'm exactly where you are. I would say 98% to 99% of things are bound by cultural relativism. But I do think there are a handful of things, and I don't even know if I have them fully explored yet, but I think there's a handful of things that you just shouldn't do, and if you do it, then you're not as great as cultures that don't do that. Yeah. Because you know what? We had a fan take issue with us on the Facebook wall when I posted about the posthumous pardoning of Alan Turing, the code breaker and inventor of the Turing Test Scientist in England that was homosexual and chemically castrated, and England recently pardoned him posthumously, and it was pretty cool. And I posted about it, and this one guy was like, well, you know, back then, they were doing the best they can. They were trying to help him out because they thought being gay was a disease. And I was like, Listen, man, you can't just sweep it under the rug by saying, this is just how things work. So I think that's sort of an instance where I don't believe in it, even though it wasn't an ancient thing. It was like the 1950s, sure. But it was a different time and a different culture. So I guess I'm with you, then. Yeah. Cool. There's a long winded way of saying that cool. I like the long winded way. So we're on the same page. So how do you feel about child sacrifice in the inc and culture? The weird thing is, in this particular instance, I do think it's bound by cultural relativism. I think so, too, because it was so long ago. It was also so extremely well thought out. Yeah, it was venerated. It wasn't brutal. Right. Well, I mean, it depends. Let's talk about this. Well, how about this? It doesn't matter what I think of it. That's true. I think we'll leave it to each listener to decide what they think of inc and child sacrifice. First of all, ink and child sacrifice was used very uncommonly in cases of really dire circumstances where they really had urged the gods and needed to appease them, or on a very special symbolic occasion. For the most part, it was guinea pigs that were offered as blood sacrifice. Oh, really? Yeah. So children and then sometimes women were very infrequently sacrificed, but of course never the men. Yes. When they were, however, there was an elaborate ritual and process that was followed, and the kids were basically like demigods for being offered up by their parents. Yeah. You point out it's not that they didn't like they had any animosity toward kids at all. They were actually revered. And that's why it was such the ultimate sacrifice, because kids were so revered. Right. Well, it's kind of like, we value our children, we're going to kill one of them. That's how much we want to appease you. Right. That's how much we need these potato crops to survive. That's right. So there was a big ceremony. They built a chamber, they gave the kid a little corn alcohol to soothe them, I guess. Yeah. And it's they have a fear. You said that they knocked them on the head with a cushioned blow to knock them out. Yes. Which I imagine is probably done while they were not really paying attention. But the point is they wanted to prevent suffering as much as possible, so at least they would be unconscious. Right. But they think they died of exposure, basically. So it's not like they drove a stake through the heart or anything like that. Kind of leave them at the top of the highest point, and they went out of their way to make sure the children didn't feel any fear or as little fear as possible. And I think for those reasons, because it was infrequent, because they tried to make the child comfortable and not fearful, because it was a relatively painless death, I think that it kind of I don't know, it falls within cultural relativism. For me, the thing that I do take an issue with was that the parents who offered up their kid was in the kid's decision. Oh, of course not. They immediately gained higher status in the society. Great honor. It was, but it was a way to gain status. You know what I mean? Got you. So I think that it was in that respect, you can really kind of cast a shadow upon it, too. Yeah. And the fact that children died to get potato crops to grow yes. It wasn't a cute thing. It's not like Tom Hanks and Met Ryan jumping in the volcano to a piece of wood. It's a great movie. Yeah. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using Stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off Ups 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 they must have thought that things were working, because the Incas were like a super successful people. Yeah. Very quickly too. Like a million people. That's a lot of people back then. In the span of how many years? Just a couple of centuries. Yeah, a couple hundred years. A million people back then. You're doing pretty well, and you're spreading far and wide. Right. And it wasn't like a couple of Inca, the initial Inca got together and just had a million offspring. Right. The Inca very much came out of nowhere as a civilization and just dominated everybody else who is living as loose tribes, unconnected tribes in the Andes at the time. Yeah. They were smart. They were technologically wow. Technologically advanced. They were. The Andes are a very inhospitable place. It's an arid climate, and it's really high up. Yeah. I mean, just surviving there is something else much less thriving. Yeah. And getting crops to grow. Inca figured out irrigation techniques. They figured out terraced farming. And we have the potato, peanuts, quinoa. Quinoa. Quinoa. Types of squash, peppers, and beans. All thank we have other Inca to thank for all those. Yeah. Do. I love quinoa. Well, thank the Inca. Thank you, Inca. Or at the very least, thank the people of the Andes that the Inca eventually came to subjugate. Okay. That doesn't seem as heartfelt, but the Inca technology was very advanced. Yes. Super advanced. They had a very strictly rigidly defined class system, starting at the top, of course, with the royals, and then on the way down, all the way down to the workers and the labors and the commoners and the military. Right. And the Inca royal line was perpetuated incestuously. An Inca ruler would marry his blood sister, full blood sister, and then they would have offspring, and those offspring would be the Inca. So you can imagine there was some strange Inca that emerged over time. What's staggering is that there were Inca that were incredibly smart and capable, who built the civilization through an incestuous line because it really was protected like that. And then the incorre ruler would also have dozens of other wives that he wasn't related to. And then from those offspring would be the second tier of society. The highest rulers, bureaucrats, advisors. I bet there were some ancestors, kids too, that you don't hear about as much either. They were just sort of hidden away, I'm sure you know what I'm saying. Isn't that bizarre though? I know if you're basing your royal family on incest, you're already at a negative, I would think. But the income is far from the only group to come up with this idea of protecting the royal bloodline by only producing offspring with that pure blood, man. Crazy world. Crazy. So they were big time expansionists. They liked to spread out to the suburbs and the exurbs and it ended up being a problem, which we'll get to, but they were spread far and wide geographically, which can be trouble eventually, as we'll see. Sometimes they were crushing people with their military forces. Sometimes they were tempting people with like, hey, look, we have roads, we have technology, we have farming systems and irrigation that you're going to thrive with. Right. The nobles of the ones that they kind of colluded with, those groups would become part of that second tier aristocracy as well. So it was either might persuade him with technology, like you said, or saying, hey, you got a pretty nice spot over here. If you come, bring your people under ink a rule. So this also it sounds great when you're getting all these different tribes, these hundreds of tribes together under one more powerful group. But again, just like spreading out far and wide that would also eventually be one little knock against them in their eventual downfall. Because when you've got people that were gathered together like that, they're still ultimately fractured in a way. Right. But the Inca took great pains to get around this. And these are tactic that Stalin would later use. You take people from the conquered lands and move some of them over here and then you do the exact opposite with some people from the other conquered land. And what you do is you rule through dilution, cultural dilution. So you're mixing up the tribes basically. Exactly. You're breaking up families, you're breaking up villages, you're breaking up tribes. Yeah, that makes sense. Shuffling them all together and giving them all a common language and a common ruler. And through that you're forcing a new cultural identity on them. That's what the Inca did. That's how they were able to, I guess, gain a population in a territory as big as they did in just a couple of centuries, like 2500 miles long. That was like their linear distribution. Yeah. From Ecuador to Chile. That's crazy. The 350,000 square mile territory after just a couple of hundred years of putting it together. Yeah, but again, you're setting yourself up for problems. Back then, they didn't have telegraphs, they had runners. They did. And eventually the runners are even at 250 miles a day. Okay, so I need to correct myself. That's not right, is it? I didn't think it was. I already emailed Tracy Wilson of stuff you missed in history class who handles changes to articles and said, I need to change this. It says in the article, or originally said, that these runners, highly trained runners that would deliver communications throughout the kingdom of the Inca, could cover 250 miles in a day. I thought that was wrong. It is wrong. That's 400 km in a day. That's absolutely wrong. Instead, they would use a relay system of runners that could cover 250 miles in a day. Well, it made it sound like each runner covered 250 miles. And I was like, I see what you mean. Wait, that doesn't sound right. So I specified a relay using a relay system. I kind of assume that nobody can run that much of the day. Right. Well, I'm kind of dumb except force comp. So my point was, though, even with those runners covering that distance, when you're that spread out, it's eventually going to lead to fracturing and some problems and communication and just a breakdown of the society. Right. And also, Chuck, I don't know if you mention or not, they didn't have the wheel. Well, yeah, they had one of the most highly advanced civilizations to ever pop up in the Americas, and they didn't have the wheel. That's crazy. And it's not like the wheel wasn't in existence. They were just an isolated group. We're talking around the 13th century to the 16th century. The Incas were around, and the height of their power was in the mid 13th century under a ruler named Pachawdi, who has a great name. And Pachikuti was the one for whom Machu Picchu was built as a royal estate. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn't know that. But since the government was a really big factor because of the way the class system was built and so rigid, it was people that were largely dependent on the government because they had the smarts, and people like having bountiful crops and gold. Well, they probably didn't have much gold. Well, there's definitely plenty of gold. Well, no, not the commoners well, no, but there's a definite tradeoff. It was like you were under Inca rule now, but you also have as many potatoes as you need. Right. You got great roads, your family's going to not die young. Probably porn liquor, evidently. Yeah, exactly. And, yes, it was a very strong bureaucracy. So India, modern day India, is a very bureaucratic state. And there is apparently 1662 government workers for every 100,000 people in India. Wow, that's a lot. Yeah. Under incorrel, there were 1331 government officials for every 100 people. Wow. That's a staggering bureaucracy. But that's how they ran this thing so well. This huge system was run through bureaucrats. That's right. Up to a point. Of course, we all know bad things are Coming our Way, because the title of the podcast are coming their Way. And in the 15th century, they had a big boom in expansion, and basically it became just a little too unwieldy and chaotic. They were spread too far and wide. Whenever you're that far apart and have that many different tribes that make up your people, you're going to have insurgencies and rebels that they quashed. Did a pretty good job of quashing those for many years, but it was just too big and too spread out and to maintain, basically, at that time period. Well, I guess probably the real crippling blow came in 1525 when Huuania Kupak, he was the Inca ruler. He was a very strong ruler. He died, but unfortunately, within just a few days of him, his successor died. Okay. I was going to say, why didn't he name a successor? He did, and that's what he did or died. I also emailed Tracy about that, too. But yeah, he named a successor and they both died within a couple of days of one another, which left a power vacuum. And there were two sons that moved to Phillip, and a seven year civil war ensued. That really Fractured Inkan society. Yeah. That was ata holpa and Huskar. Yeah. Which I think is inkan for Oscar. I think so, too. It's like George and Oscar Blue. That's right. And there's a seven year civil war. Civil war of any type is going to fracture society. Seven year one is real bad. Especially when there's nobody in control during the time. Right, right. I guess Huskar ultimately lost. He was executed by his brother Altualpa in 1532. But the damage was done. After all, two Hopa Consolidated Power Incense Society was on very shaky ground already. Yeah. The cracks were showing. And right about that time, a Spanish conquer named Francisco Pizzado arrived. And he didn't have a lot of dudes with them. He had less than 200 men. Yeah. And we will tell you the story of just how those 168 men says Charles Man took over this vast empire. And reason number one is what we just said. He got there at the right time. They were weakened, they were fractured, the cracks were showing. Civil war had broken out. So it was a good time to go in and do a little conquering. Right. And he followed in the footsteps of Cortez hernan cortez. Cortez, right. Who conquered the Mesoamerican Aztec civilization. The Triple Alliance. Right. Yeah. He went to South America from Cuba under the Spanish flag. And even though Diego Valesques was the governor of Cuba, he didn't want him going down there. But he did such a good job, Cortes did, and came back with a lot of gold. And king Charles the fifth said, you know what? You conquered the aztecs. You brought me a bunch of wealth. You are actually okay in my book. And pizza, I saw this and was like, hey, I want to get my hands on some wealth. I feel like I'm a conqueror. I'm a conquistador. So Pizzado was a European, and because he was European, he had a very helpful tool. And this is the number two thing that helped them. Top of the ink is called a gun. Yeah, that's a big one. Very big one. The boomstick. Yeah. Because on top of the very obvious killing power that the gun provided big advantage. It was also it provided a huge psychological advantage too, because the inca, like the aztecs, had never seen anything like that before, and we're very scared of it. That's right. So they're messed up in the head. Right. So you've got superior firepower. You have the tactic of divide and conquer that cortez use pizzaria used as well. He identified groups that were under ink and rule, but were maybe the most rebellious. The ones who were most opposed to inc and rule identified them and colluded with them to turn them against the incan power structure, the central core of it. Yeah. The other thing that helped them too, when he arrived, when Pizzado arrived, they thought that he was the creator god vera trocha. And they thought the same thing about cortes, actually. They thought he was quizzicol, which Jerry says is a language, but it was a similar thing. They thought these guys were returning gods or creator gods. So immediately they kind of revered them and trusted them, and they had confidence in them, which was a big mistake. Right. Jerry is talking about ketchikal. That's the language. Right. That's a mayan language. Yes. But I think it's spelled the same. No, I don't think so. Ketchikato. Yeah. Okay. Sorry about that. So when picado gets there, he's got this trust. They think he's a returning god. And what does he do with it? Well, he captures their ruler. Yeah. He captured Alta Walpa, who just executed his brother and consolidated power. And all of a sudden, Pizzaro shows up like, I fight for seven years, finally captured my brother, execute them. I'm the inca now. Right. And pizara shows up with his boom sticks. That's right. So I think he's a god, and I'll go see what he has to say, and, oh, he's holding me ransom. He's asking for a room full of gold. No problem. I'll give it to him, and he'll let me go. But he doesn't. Pizarro hangs onto alto alpha and ultimately finds that he's not able to command the inca through alto wall. But he was sort of a puppet for a little while. Right. So he executes him. Pizarro has him strangled and then beheaded. Yes. That'll do it. It will. So you still need an inca ruler if you're going to rule the Inca, because, again, Pizzara only has about 168 guys with him. So he sets up another guy, another Inca who's strictly a puppet ruler. Yes. Manko Kuback II. Yes. That's in the throne. He was the son of Juana Kubak. Right, of course. So Manko rules for a little bit, but he notices some cracks in the Spanish power structure. Some new Spaniards have arrived. They're not the original 168 conquistadors. These are some new guys, maybe some carpet baggage, you could call them. And they're not entirely happy with Tazaro and his rule. So Manko notices a fracture among the Spaniards, worked it to his advantage, and eventually escapes Lima, which is the new capital city of the Inca kingdom under Spanish rule. Right. And goes off and founds his own city, which is successful for a little while. So how many years is this? 36. Okay. So it's a slow takeover. They didn't get off the ship with 168 guys. Oh, no, they did. No, but and assume control of the yeah, I'm sorry, I misspoke. Within a year. Okay. So 1532 they land. By 1536, they've already killed Altaalpa, installed Mango the Second as the puppet ruler. So they were essentially in power at that point. Oh, totally. Okay. And then by 1536, Manco flees and founds a rival, Ink and State. Now that Ink and State survived for 36 years. Okay. And by 1572, the Spanish were very tired of all of the assaults and the sieges on Lima. Sure. There were insurgencies going on, and they said, you know what? We're just going to get rid of this rival Inca State, Vilkabamba, headed by Manko for a little while, until the end. The last inca was named tupac Amaru. Tupac. Seriously? Nice. And the inco when they stormed the Spaniards, when they stormed Vilkabamba, they captured Tupac Kamaru and beheaded him, and effectively, with that stroke, ended Inca civilization forever. And I said, no, he's just a hologram. We got the wrong guy. Right. Yeah. Okay. So it was a bit of a I get it now. It was six years. That makes sense. I really just condensed things into a very brief sketch, and it needed more fleshing out. Maybe I'll go back and flush it out. If not, if I don't, you should go read the account. Actually is a really great brief account of the downfall of the Inca from the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia. They have something good in there. Yeah, that's what you sent me. Yeah, that's good stuff. So they also got a little bit more help, because even with all these things going on, it's still less than 200 men. Like, even with the cracks and even with the collusion and even with the guns and everything going on, it's still less than 200 dudes, and it was a population of a million. So they needed a little bit of help from Europe's old friend, smallpox. This is what really set the stage for the. Inca downfall at the hands of 168. They did not know about smallpox. They had no immunity against smallpox. Spaniards did. They didn't live around livestock like the Spaniards did. They had alpacas and guinea pigs, but apparently they never carried smallpox. It's an old World disease that was introduced to the New World and avaged it. That's right. That's what they believe killed Hunna Kupak and his name successor, which left the power vacuum in the Civil War. Yeah, they think it killed a lot of inkans who may have otherwise revolted against the Spaniards and fought them, and they inadvertently brought smallpox with them. Right. It wasn't like early chemical warfare or anything like that. No, they had no idea about the existence of smallpox until they saw what was going on and became aware of smallpox and that the native populations had no defenses against it. Then maybe in the late 18th, early 19th century, europeans started using it as biological war. Yeah, we covered that in something, I remember. Tainted blankets to Native Americans and things like that. Jeez. Yeah. Because once it got introduced, it just ravaged the Americas. Just ravaged it. You can't even say decimated because we'll get too many emails from misusing it. But apparently somewhere between 90 and 95% of the indigenous populations of America, which by some estimates was at 100 million by the 1490s, a fifth of the world population, 90% to 95% of that, was wiped out within 130 years of Columbus's arrival in the Indies. And that is how 168 men can take over such a vast population. That's right. As Paul Harvey would say, that's the end of the story. Or is it? Yeah. Okay, man. You're like? No, I got one more thing. No, I don't. That's it. Paul Harvey comes in and punches you in the face. Nice one, Chuck. For those of you that don't know Paul Harvey, for those of you who are under age 60 yeah, probably. Now look him up. I'm not even going to tell you. Who is this? Paul Harvey. Yeah. Look them up. Okay. And in the meantime, while you're looking things up, look up this article I wrote. Hopefully it will be updated by the time this episode comes out. Just type in Conquistadors C-O-N-Q-U-I-S-T-A-D-O-R-S in the search bar@housestuffworkscom and it will bring it up. Since I said search bar, it's time for a message break. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? 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's, 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. Now it's time for listener mail. Yeah, and I've got to say, I really love our jingle. Yeah, it's good. It was a great gift. All right, so this is from a former quartermaster in the Coast Guard who sort of bridged the gap between sextants and GPS. He was around. He saw both worlds. Wow. Very interesting. Yeah, that's quite a transition. All right, guys, great podcast. I was a quartermaster in the US. Coast Guard and worked with charts and navigation. My last duty station was aboard the bui tender US. Coast Guard Cutter sundew in Duluth, Minnesota. In our area of responsibility was Lake Superior, and I feel fortunate to have participated in the transition from positioning buoys using sextants to using GPS. GPS was new at the time, and because there was a built in error to the signal, it had to be removed by a differential military system. Few civilian applications were using it at the time. The GPS unit that we had only provided a latitude and longitude, which we then plotted on a chart to get our position. Because our charts were using old Datum, they were inaccurate, and in some instances, the GPS coordinates had us driving the ship over land. Although GPS was quicker and in most cases more accurate than sextants, we didn't fully trust it yet. So we had to plot out the position of each buoy with sextants and the GPS to compare the two. After a couple of more years comparing the two, and after the charts were updated with a more accurate data, we eventually switched to all GPS positioning. Do you remember that Pavement album? What is it? Westing by musket and sexton besides. Great visit. Love that. And every time I hear the word sexton, I think about it. Yeah, me too. When navigating in the Great Lakes, we use radar and bearings to fix objects on land to charter position and use GPS coordinates alongside the traditional methods of navigation as a check, GPS became very valuable to navigating, and software improved to plot the position on an electronic chart. Even back then, I could see all the writing on the wall. I knew the Coast Guard would probably replace quartermasters with GPS units in the future. In 2003, the Coast Guard stopped training quartermasters, and soon after, the existing quartermasters were offered different positions within the Coast Guard and they smashed all the sections. Now we can all go out there and say that we learned today what a Quartermaster does. Yeah, or did. They didn't smash the sexes, by the way. No. Navigating by means of sexton, radar and visual bearings is becoming a dying art. But I am proud to have been proficient in navigation and feel fortunate to have experienced the transition from old to new, old school to new, fair winds and following seas. Jared Parks, former quartermaster, second class US. Coast Guard. By the way, I should mention, you got a lot of flack for not knowing what orienteering was. Orienting maps podcast. And I posted the brown map, too. I need that because everybody on Twitter is asking. Okay, yeah, please do. Right now. Thank you. I will tweet that directly. So thanks to Jared for that email. Yeah, thanks, Jared. But you make yourself obsolete. If you have made yourself obsolete in some way or have contributed to the obsoletion of anything, that's pretty interesting. Stuff. Great. obsoletion, right? Sure. Yeah, I think that's right. Orienting. We want to hear about it. You can send us a tweet to SYSK podcast. That's how Twitter handle you can join us on Facebook.com. That's facebook. Comstuffynow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and you can join us at our home on the web STUFFYou shouldhnow.com for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Brought to you by the allnew 2014 Toyota Corolla. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, my Favorite Murder from exactly right media, my Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarra and Georgia Hardstar, 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." | ||
96e8639c-440c-11e8-82c5-83e53d19befd | Is the Pied Piper About a Real Historic Tragedy? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-the-pied-piper-about-a-real-historic-tragedy | In the German town of Hameln a tragedy that took place on a specific date in 1284 and befell specifically 130 children is commemorated every year. Aside from those two details, the event is cloaked in mystery... | In the German town of Hameln a tragedy that took place on a specific date in 1284 and befell specifically 130 children is commemorated every year. Aside from those two details, the event is cloaked in mystery... | Thu, 31 May 2018 13:42:15 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=13, tm_min=42, tm_sec=15, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=151, tm_isdst=0) | 39046682 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. This is stuff you should know. Fairy tale hail edition. Jerry is supposedly on vacation. Yeah. What's going on? But she came in here just for us. Why Jerry? I think she feels beholden. That's nice. Which is weird, because we've had guest producers. I don't know. Maybe she feels like her job is threatened. Is today the day I die? Oh, jeez, I hope not. Jerry knows it. Can you at least get these two in the can first? Yeah, probably. Unless something really crazy happens in the next hour. And two. Yeah, that'll give me time to get in touch with the five people I have on my list to replace you. Yeah, I know. The five. Bono, right? Obama, right? Michael Stipe. Michael Stipe. Bobby Fischer. I think there was one more I can't remember. Bobby Fischer. Chess player. Yeah. That's a little random. Well, I want to correct that episode. And Optimus Prime. That's the fifth one, right? That's right. Yeah. Have you ever heard of fairy tale before? Yeah, we did two very good episodes. If you say so yourself, huh? No, these are good. I don't often say that, but in November of 2015, we did a back to backer with the dark origins of fairy tales and how the Grim's Fairy tales work. Or the Grim Brothers. We had fairytale fever. We did. But, man, we licked it. So did you go back and listen to them and you're like, wow, these are good, or you just remember them being good? I remember them being good. Okay. And being especially kind of proud of this, too. Really? That's fantastic. Yeah, that's how I feel about your limb is Torn off now. What? That was a good one. It's a good title about reattachment surgery. Remember that? Yeah, I think that title is all you. That's the Josh Clark title. You've got some good titles out there, too. Yes. What's the deal with Blank? You know who's really good at coming up with titles? Bono. Yeah. Where the streets have no name Right. Where the streets have no drums. How's that for Damn, dude, you just did it. So we're talking about fairy tales today. Specifically? Specifically, we're talking about the fairy tale of the Pie Piper of Hamlin. And as far as fairy tales go, it seems to be a little different than other fairy tales. Okay? And the reason why it's a little different is because horrifically people think scholars, not just average trucks, right? Like, real deal scholars think that something actually happened that formed the basis of this fairy tale. Right. Whereas with Hansel and Gretel, it wasn't based on some witchy lady who ate children. No, but that one might have had some basis in fact, too. How about, like, Rumple Stiltskin? Probably not. Based in fact. Probably not. Right. You remember the little guy? You trick him into saying his own name backwards. The little guy with a big heart. I don't think he had a big heart. He had an insatiable sexual appetite is what it was. Oh, the little guy with a big heart was Bono. Right. We're going to get so many emails from people being like, layoff Bono. What's with the Bono references? Who's Bono? They must work with that Bono guy. I wish. So, Chuck, the Pie Piper, the reason why we say it might be based in fact is because there's actually, like, historic evidence that kind of supports this thing, and you can find it in this town of Hamlin, which is a real place. It's not a made up, like, fairy tale land like odds. There's your first clue. Yeah. Most fairy tales are not set in an actual place, right? I don't know. Are they? No, they're just made up. Yeah. Wonderland. Or they're in a very vague place. Or they take place in a larger place, like, oh, in Germany one day, or in Bavaria one day. Not like in this town that actually existed at the time we're saying it did. Which is another thing, too, because if you look at the actual fairy tales, which we'll get to in a second, there's, like, a specific date. Yeah. That also is very unusual for the point fairytale. So the more you dig into it, the more you're like, yeah, this might have actually happened. And then once you think, oh, this might have actually happened, then you're struck with some of the greatest dread a human being can experience. Because something bad happened is what happened. Yeah. Let's talk about it. All right, well, let's get into the original fairy tale, the Grimm's Brothers tale of the Pied Piper. Irish? Not at all. German jane McGrath, good old Jane from back in the day, wrote this one. Sure. And she points out that it is a tale, a cautionary tale about governance as well as taking responsibility for financial agreements. She's right, but putting it that way seems a little funny. Yeah, but it is 1284 in Hamlin in Germany, and there was a rat infestation in the town at the time, and the mayor and this is the fairy tale you're going over, right? Yeah. And so the mayor of the town didn't know what to do. The Burger Meister. Oh, yeah, meister Burger. The stranger comes into town and wore and I didn't know what pied even meant. I didn't either. What is it? Multicolored? Yeah, he wore multicolored clothes. Multicolored clothes. That's all he was. He was a Piper who wore colorful clothing, had nothing to do with eating pies, or, I thought, walking on his feet. You thought that's what that meant? Yeah. Why? Because I think pedestrian comes from pied. Well, maybe Italian or something. That certainly makes more sense than me having no clue. Yeah, but I was way off, so it doesn't matter? He walked. He did walk. You're kind of right. That was the other reason. I thought that too. So his outfit looked a little weird. Apparently multicolored people didn't dress like that. I reckon I saw, though, that it was also a splendid outfit. That he attracted a lot of attention. And people were like, I wish I had the kahni's to dress like you dance around with a pan flute. And he had called it a musical pipe or some kind of flute. Not a smoking pipe. Hot heads. No. And he hears about this rat problem. He comes into town, he drags his fingernails along the chalkboard and gets everyone's attention in the town meeting. Says, I'll kill that shark. Oh, you got to do it better than that. No. I'll kill the rats. Yeah, but in the voice. I can't do quint. Whatever. You can do anything you're like. The rich little of this company. Jerry's laughing at us for no reason. She's so sick of this, man. She's really tickled the day. Jerry, are you stoned? No. She's been smoking her own magical pipe. So they agree on a price to get rid of the rats. Piper takes out his little hand flute. Yeah, I don't know if that's what it's called, but the price is important. Can I go into the price for a second? Sure. So he initially said that he would get rid of the rats for 1000 Florence which is either coins or money from Italy or France or the Netherlands. But money 1000 a lot of the time. Thousand pieces of money. And this town of Hamlin was so overrun by rats apparently all their cats had died. Yes. They beat the cats. I didn't see explain what happened to the cats. Just that the cats died and that's why the time is overrun. Okay. Which is a weird little thing, don't you think? Yeah. Because my first thing was like, Why a Pied Piper just get some cats? The cats had all died. All right. Good thinking, Chuck. But they say, 1000 Florence, we'll give you 50,000 Florence if you get rid of these rats. Our problem is so bad. And he says, Done. But was that a facetious offer? I think it was a desperate boast. Okay. But the piper was like, all right, I'll agree to your terms. I just wanted a thousand, but 50,000 of it. And they went, I think we overspent. I regret saying that, but you should hear the guy. So he pulls out the instrument, he starts playing. As the story goes, all the rats congregate around him and he leaps about and dances through town into the Western River. Which the rats drowned. Which is complete fabrication because rats are very good swimmers. They really are. I thought about that too. I even looked it up. They're good swimmers. Not just rats. You've seen it's. Rats in general. Yeah. I mean, the first thing, honestly, when I heard that the first thing that made me think that was like, wait a minute. First blood. He's in that abandoned mine shaft. Those rats are swimming all over the place. So I looked it up, I was like, Is that true? And apparently rats are really good swimmers. Yeah, some better than others. It's in there, too. So this fairy tale stinks of BS already. Okay, but the story goes that the rats followed this guy in a trance to the river where upon they drowned. Maybe they were in the trance and that was why they couldn't swim, because they were just so lulled by his hand fluted. Yeah, his smooth jazz should take a break there and finish the story after. Oh, that's quite a cliffhanger. All right, let's do that. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics. Students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get handson, experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast. And start taking charge of your future today. All right, Chuck, we're back. Lay it on them. Man, that was high class. Well, they drown all the rats. The Pied Piper is successful. Everyone parties German style, which is to say, they probably got hammered on 88 ounce beers. You ever been to Germany? Sure. You ever had the beers there? Yeah, they got big old beers there for sure. And they have lids on their mugs, too, because there's so much of it, you can just set it down and save it for later. But I don't think they save it for later. The beer garden I went to did not have the lids. Maybe I've just seen those on TV. But what they did have was a four and a half foot tall woman with popeye sized forearms carrying six of those giants. Sure, like a pro. Not like a pro. They were pros. Well, she was probably sold to the beer garden at a young age and was raised to serve like that. Please tell me that's not the case. All right, so where are we? Townspeople are partying. They're getting hammered. They're singing, they're posting songs as they're one to do. And then Pink Cadillac dude says, what's up with all those floorings? Yeah, he's like, Everybody, I'm really glad you enjoyed my work, but now it's time for me to go pay me. And did they just stiff them or did they say, well, let's go back to the 1000. They said, we're not giving you 50,000 floors. We thought you were going to get rid of these rats through hard work. You just played some flute. That's cool that you can do that with the flute. But that's not really work. So, no, we're not going to pay you 50,000 Florence. He's like, well, in 1000 Florence, at least that's what I originally agreed to. And they're like, how about this? We're going to give you 50, and if you're not happy with that, then you're getting nothing. And he was still so mad that they're like, fine, nothing. Get out of town. And he says, you will regret this. You know what that's like? That's like hiring the critter remover because you have a raccoon in your attic. You agree to a price, he comes over and shoots the raccoon and says, game over. And you're like, wait a minute. I expected a little more. Like you were going to hypnotize them or coax him down from the roof with your smooth jazz. Right. Not to shoot it. Anybody could shoot it. I thought you're going to step on it or something. Yeah, like I would have shot it. I'm looking for a peaceful solution. Right. I have a bullet hole in my house now. Have you ever had to call one of those people a raccoon remover? Well, just those dudes. I'll do snakes and raccoons. Oh, sure. I haven't either, but a lot of my friends do that. I'm overrun. I think I mentioned with cockroaches right now and it's getting bad still. Yeah, dude. Because I don't know what to do. Hire an exterminator. Yeah, but we're not into the poison stuff. But I think it's like we got to do it. I think there's green exterminators that are not quite as deadly. Jerry's nodding. But will they kill all the cockroaches? They'll kill problems with their magic flute. I need to do something. It's gotten out of hand. Yeah, you got to do something else. I'm going to tell you what happens, but I feel like people judge me on how disgusting it is. We can always edit it out later. All right. I'll go in and this is not like it's not like food is out. I will clean the kitchen. Sure. I will go in there to get a glass of water at midnight and I'll turn the light on and a dozen will scatter. Wow. Jerry's going, no, I will hear them going, sure. Yeah. That's one of the creepiest things. And as soon as they see that light, they're gone. And it sounds like we live in filth, but it doesn't matter. We're infested. They're just like, I don't know what to do. Yeah, well, I think you may want to call an exterminator, but find one. You live in Decatur. I'm sure you'd be hard pressed to find an exterminator that did use deadly plants. Yeah. You throw a rock indicator and you'll hit a lavender dust. Yes, I think it might be time. All right. Sorry about getting sidetracked so much. They offered, what, 50 50? Not 50,000 or 1050. And so what does he say? He says he did everybody, you can't see me, but you know where you flick the underside of your chin, feel like it's Italian? Oh, I mean, this is Germany. It's Lower Saxony. It wasn't too far from Germany. No. But is that Italian? I was just wondering. Yeah, it feels like a very Italian thing to do. Yeah, right, exactly. You got to say it like that. All right. So he gives them that number and says, I'm going to come back. Does he even warn them and say, I'm going to come back and get your kids, or, I'm just going to tell the story is all. Good. You'll see me again. It depends on the story. Some say he vowed vengeance. Some say he came back a month later. Some say he came back a year later. Some say he just immediately started playing his flute. Some say, and I think the brother's Grim version is that he waited until the town went to sleep and then came through the town and started playing again. All right. But this time he's wearing hunter's clothing. He did not see that anywhere. Oh, really? Is that BS? I don't think it's BS. I think the story has just been added to so many times over the but, yeah, I shouldn't have. All right, so he comes back regardless of what he's wearing. Let's say he's buck naked, which makes it even more fun. Well, you just added to the legend just there. He starts playing this flute again, but this time the children are entranced. He leads, like, 130 kids, supposedly. Yeah. Pay attention to that number. It seems a little specific, doesn't it? It does. Okay. He leads 130 children out of town up a mountain to a cave. They supposedly enter and are never heard from again. Right. And the mountain has a landslide and covers up the cave mouth. And supposedly it was a magical door that opened in the mountain that revealed the key. They go in, doors closed, landslide gone, never heard from again, like you said. And the townspeople are like, there goes our labor pool. Yes. There goes my baby. There goes our labor pool. Who's going to service at the beer gardens? And supposedly, in one version at least, the mayor's grown daughter was among that group. And this feels like a specific jab at the mayor, even though your daughter's grown. I'm going to entrance her with my flute as well. Yeah. Which I don't think that was in the original Grim brothers. One either, but two children survive. Correct. Or they come back. I think in the Grim brothers version, it's just one. Sometimes it's up to three, but in a lot of retellings, there's a kid who either is deaf and so can't hear the magic flute sound. So it's not entranced, has some sort of physical disability, and so he or she can't keep up with the rest of the kids and survives from that. Or I think is blind and can't see their way. Either way, some kid who had some unique characteristic that kept them from being entranced or whatever is like the eyewitness that comes back and tells the parents what happened, or in another version, is just a skeptic. Child skeptic. This can't be happening. Lewis the child skeptic. That's funny. All right, so let's get into this. It may not be fiction, as it turns out, because a lot of historians and scholars have looked into this. You talked about the specificity being a little weird. One thing we do know is that at one point there was a stained glass window in the town church that depicted and this was around 1300, after it would have happened. But, I mean, 16 years in memory, living memory, is when they first erected that window, which kind of makes sense as a memorial. And on that window, it said, on the day of John and Paul, 130 children in Hamlin went to Calvary and were brought through all kinds of danger to the Copen Mountain and lost. Yeah. So the Calvary thing that I thought was another word for heaven, isn't it? I'm going to Calvary, the hill where Christ was crucified. You know, if I know this, surely you know, I used to know this. I know it looms large in Christianity, but I can't remember exactly. I think it's like, shorthand for I'm going to meet my maker. I saw elsewhere that they referred to the mountain as Cavalry. Yeah. They also referred to the area that the children went to, Cavalry, as the execution place. I never saw any explanation of that. And then the Cop and mountain, I don't understand why that would be also named Calvary, and they would mention it the same place twice with two different names. So it's a bit of a mystery. But the point is, about 1516 years after this event supposedly happened, or the fairytale takes place, the town of Hamlin, Germany, in Lower Saxony, or West Folly, I think, is what it's called now, put up a stained glass window commemorating this and the window did not survive. But apparently there are accounts of that window in more than one place. Yeah. You can understand that it would be because it was in the town church for hundreds of years before it was destroyed. No one knows how it was destroyed, but there is documentation that this window existed. Obviously, no living historians saw it with their own eyes. Sure. But there's enough documentary evidence that it seems to be yes, there was a window that was erected in 1300. That is a very weird thing to do. Yeah. To just make up. Right. Very weird. Especially in the church. Yes. You don't lie no. You go to hell for that. So that was the first documentary evidence, right. The next one I saw comes 100 years later in 1384, and it's in the Hamlin Town Chronicle for that year. All it says is, it is 100 years since our children left. Yeah. Kind of weird. What is that, just a blurb? I guess. So you'd think 100 year commemoration? They might add a little more than that, yes. And what is this? The Loonburg manuscript. This was about 100 years after the window, and this was a monk who wrote it, heinrich of Harford. And he says he writes an account and says a man about 30 years old came to town playing a flute and led the children out. Pretty simple. Yeah, but what's noteworthy about that one? There's a couple of things. So the Piper doesn't show up in the window, right. But he does show up in the lounge of manuscript. You mentioned the Piper, but no rats in any of these, right? Not yet. But the other thing about the Loomburg manuscript is that Bloomberg is a nearby town. So there are other towns that are talking about this event that happened. I'm sure we're getting right in their own chronicle. Right? It was real. One of the reasons why. But it supports the idea that it's real, because if it's just this one town that's diluted, even if other towns are talking about it, they'll probably be by the way, they're all nuts. But other towns chronicles seem to be verifying that this happened or recounting the story in, like, a credulous way. So something happened in 1284, and the evidence is starting to mount. The other thing about the fact that this is another town is that this town, Bloomberg and other towns cited, that Hamlin came to be known to commemorate things counting backward or forward from the date of 1284. So, for example, they put up a gate in 1556 in the town. Right. This is what they inscribed on the gate. Chuck. In this year of 1556, 272 years after the magician led 130 children out of the town, this portal was erected. That's like saying we're putting up the sewer. 262 years after our children were let out of town by a magician. Enjoy the sewer. That's a weird thing to inscribe in something. And apparently the town became known for that kind of thing. What, just these random inscriptions about this weird, mysterious event? Yeah, just like dating everything from 1284 on based on their children leaving. And again, you'll notice it mentions 130 children. Things changed over the retelling, but the one thing that remains the same is the 130 children leaving even before the Piper shows up. In the story, 130 children are sighted each and every time. Yeah, but in what? We don't know, is that, like, some symbolic things? Is it all metaphor? Should we take a break and get to the theories? Yes, sure. All right, let's do that. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get handson, experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K twelve.com podcast, and start taking charge of your future today. All right. The theories are varied. One of the common ones that makes a lot of sense is that there was some disease that killed all these kids, and then this story is some sort of metaphor for what happened to their children. And the fact that rats coming to play at some point have led people to speculate that it might be the bubonic plague. Yeah. There's a guy named Count Frobin Christoph von Zimmer. Can you say it like that? Frobin? No, I don't know. But I know that that guy will steal your soul in the middle of the night if you're not careful. Right. Yeah. So Count Frozen christopher von Zimmer. You can only say all of his names. He wrote a chronicle in 1565 from another nearby town, and he was the one who seems to have introduced the rats. Okay. And so at that point, the piper goes from just a weirdo magician to ratinfonger. Yeah. Rat catcher, which is a job. It was. And I mean, this town would have had rats. Any town would have had rats. So it would have been it's understandable that the rats would come into it. And it's not like that's just a totally outlandish addition to the story. But the fact that it doesn't show up until 1565 and this has been documented for hundreds of years up to that point, it seems a little fishy. And it certainly seems weird that it would have been the plague because the plague hadn't come around yet. Right, right. And it also seems fishy that it doesn't mention anything about adults and any sort of rat caring or diseased rat would seem like it wouldn't just affect kids. No, it doesn't make any sense. No, it doesn't. But the idea that 130 kids were taken from the town in one form or fashion, you could say, well, it's like some sort of disease. One of the other diseases that got put up was Parkinson's, I believe, or no, Huntington's. I'm sorry. Yes. Which is a stupid theory. It's a terrible theory. Huntington's disease is an inherited disease. Yeah. That doesn't make it that would mean that every kid in the town had inherited Huntington from their parents, who apparently weren't showing any symptoms to put that fourth I don't know, I couldn't find it. But it's a terrible one. And then the idea that so it's not infectious, it's rare, and everybody's symptoms coming on at the same time and dying. The reason why they said that, though, is because supposedly the shakes from at the palsy would account for the dancing of the children. Seems like a pretty dumb thing to zero. And that's a stretch. Huntington disease we're crossing off the list. All right. One of my favorites is that the children left on their own as part of one of the Crusades. And apparently the one thing that doesn't quite align is the timeline because a few decades previous, there were, in fact, young people, children, probably teenagers out there, like eight year olds participating in the Crusades. One of them would have a vision from God and say, we should totally cover the Crusades. I don't think we know. Have we done that? No, not yet. There's a really good article on the site, too, that be a pretty dense single. Yeah, we might do two. All right. Two parter on the Crusades coming at you. So one of those kids would have a vision from God and then all the kids would follow and say, all right, we're going to take our broadswords that we can barely lift and go fight the good fight. Right. So that's one theory, and that's actually pretty that's a little more rooted in reality. Like, yes, there were children's crusade before documented. It's possible it happened a decade or two later. If it was in the area and well known, some other kid could have been like, oh, okay, let me try my hand at it. Right. Changes his name to Jim Jones and says, follow me to Jerusalem. Right? That's right. So that one could have happened. It's possible. The other one, and this is supposedly the most widely held theory, Chuck, was that this is all part of the O-C-D. This is a tongue twister, O-S-T-S-I-E-D-L-U-N-G which is basically an exodus or an eastward expansion from Germany to Romania area, which was being newly settled by Western Europeans after conquering, like, the whole Dracula era. So the idea is an adult came and said, hey, kids, why don't you come with me and we'll go populate Eastern Europe. Pretty much. Right. And there is evidence that this definitely happened. There was a migration eastward. And the big thing about this one is that we're misinterpreting the word kids or children, that it could have been the town's children, but it's like they're children. They weren't kids. They were young adults who would have represented a lot of the workforce. So that would have been a big deal had they left. So that's, I think, the most widely held one. Right now. Well, one of the traditions you're hanging on to is and I kind of teased it with that dumb Bono jerk. Poor Bono. Poor. It was a great bonus. That Bono joke earlier is today still, the street where this supposedly all happened is called the Bungalows and StraussA Street with no Drums. Street Without Drums. And to this day, they won't allow people to play music or dance on that street. Right. The rest of the town and including that street. But really, the whole town is dedicated to this legend. Yeah, I thought you can say dedicated to music and dancing. Except for the street they do. There is a musical called Rats that's put on in the town. Seriously? And there's, like, a Pie Piper Statue and Recreations every Sunday in the summer. Really? Oh, yeah. It's a huge tourist town for this. There's, like, I think, a rat's blood cocktails that they serve. I saw a mental false article. I mentioned that. But the town is dedicated to this. But the fact that they're still talking about it is not just legend. It's like they're still telling that story to an extent. You know what I mean? Well, yeah. Keeping it alive. Not just for tourist dollars. Right. Because it looms large. Because this is their ancestry. Right. Well, there are some more theories that haven't gained as much traction. Like, there was a pedophile that came these children were just maybe just simply sent away because they were very poor. Because that happened. That's my theory. That was just sort of the regular thing that would happen, is we're all so poor, you go away and live a better life somewhere. Yeah. And that's where Hansel and Gretel is kind of rooted in reality. The idea of child abandonment. Remember we talked about that. I believe in one of the fairy tale episodes from before that if you fell on hard times just taking your kid out to the woods and being like, Best of luck. It was a viable thing to do during the Middle Ages. And it's possible that this town basically said it'd be like a combination of the guy coming from Romania and saying, Follow me, and the parents being like, Maybe you should go with him. Right. And then it would explain why the whole thing is written in, like, such vague, flowery language. To me, that indicates that they're working out guilt. There's guilt by this town. That makes sense. They're not direct. Other towns are talking about this legend in much more explicit terms. But in the town of Hamlin, it's all very flowery and poetic and vague. And it makes me think they're covering something up that they have to get off their chest, but they can't bring themselves to actually say what it was. Well, that sort of jobs, then, with this dude. He's a children's poet named Michael Rosen. He sent that one article. Yeah, he actually went to Hamlin and hooked up with a guy named Michael Boyer from the tourism office there, and Boyer says that he thinks the rats were added. And this makes sense with your theory. Was that just sort of an attempt to wash away what he said were bad memories? Like a cover up to draw attention away from this awful thing? They're like, hey, let's tell this rat story. Right, but if you'll notice also in that story with the rats, there is guilt by the town. The town is guilty of something, and they lose their children as a result. Right. So if the rats were actually part of the original story, even if it wasn't documented, even if there weren't real rats, it still is putting some veneer of guilt onto the town. It wasn't something that just happened to them. This thing befell them because they did something wrong. Wow. I feel like there could be a deeper mystery, though. Yeah, I think there is. Like, for real. I think something really happened in Hamlin in 1284, and they lost 130 kids somehow, and the town was psychically damaged by it. Are you going to title this one pied Piper Cold Case? That's a good one, actually. Not bad. Okay. You got anything else? No, I want to know more. I know I got sucked into this. I can't remember which of the articles I sent that got me, but I don't remember how I came across it. But it was like, oh, I never thought of this. And it's not like you can do this with every fairy tale. Right. There's probably no rapunzel and probably no rumplestiltskin. Hansel and Gretel, just so vague. Probably happened to multiple children. But this one, this happened in Hamlin in 1284. Something happened. We may never know what it was, but it's pretty interesting. My mind goes really dark and thinks, like, what if there was just a mass murder? Well, these parents one more thing. One more thing. I'm glad you brought that up. So the execution place, the Copp Mountain or Cavalry Mountain or whatever it was, supposedly that was where they buried people, too. Oh, that's right. They were saying that could be code for a mass grave, where they would have buried people, which would suggest a mass death that happened in a short period of time. Man. Can you imagine if there was a discovery made of children's bones in a mountain somewhere north of Hamlin? That would be neat. I say north because it's mountains. I just think that means they're north. So one more. You keep bringing up this awesome stuff, dude. You're ready? I'm ready. I think they discovered it a while back, but they recently publicized it. The discovery of a I believe it was definitely in Peru. It wasn't inkin. It was one of the Inca rivals, but it was a mass sacrifice of hundreds of kids that all happened on one day, one after the other. Like, they found this, and you're reading it and you're like, this probably has never happened in the history of the world, anything like this. Nothing like this. There are definitely child sacrifices, but they would do it, like, once in a while or something. But imagine a town going that berserk that. They just let their kids, like hundreds of kids just killed in a day in one area. It's really rough, man. But reading about it, you can't help but pull yourself back into that day and just see it and want to be like, stop, what are you doing? You've lost your mind. And if it happened once, it could happen again, I guess. So maybe the parents were all maybe they all drank bad beer one day and it made them temporarily insane. That'd be really bad. It sounds like a Blumhouse movie to come. What is that? It's just that production company that makes a lot of the horror movies now. Like what I think they did get out, among many others. Good movie. Yeah. Okay. You got anything else now? I got nothing else, Jerry. No? Okay. Well, if you want to know more about the pod piper and all that stuff, you can type that word in the search bar@houseofworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this a double quinceignetta reply. We heard from a couple of people with some good insight. First, Alexandra. Longtime listener from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Loved episode on Quintinhas. As usual, you did a great job approaching a cultural tradition that is not your own while providing a balanced information, well rounded contextualization of the celebration and its influence. She's like, in it was the opposite of the vaping episode. Oh, man, we've gotten beat up about that. For my own quinceignetta, my mother gave me the option of the traditional coming of age party or a trip. What do you think she chose? I'm guessing a trip. Yeah, I would do. I chose to travel. It's been a month in Germany, the summer I turned 15. Looking back, it's amazing that she trusted me enough at such a young age to travel on my own. Although I did stay with family. Like, it's the greatest regret of my young life. I wish I would have partied. Just wanted to clarify a few things you brought up. L-A-T-I NX is pronounced. She says Latinx. Okay. It refers to those from Latin America or Latin American descent. Hispanic refers to Spanish speaking persons. And your pronunciation of quintanilla was great as the era is a soft r sound. No need to read this on the podcast. Yes. Sorry, Alexandra. And then this other follow up. This guy says, this is Tyvon. Plenty of I recognize that name. I think he's on Twitter or something. Oh, really? Yeah. Great name. He's localist. He said disclaimer I'm a white person from Georgia, so I have no authority here at all, but will be referring to the opinions of actual Latino latina. Latinx people I know or have read the writings of, I personally only heard that word pronounced with confidence in the following two ways latinx and Latinx. Okay. However, some people say Latinx or Latinx. Latinx sounds right because it's Latino. Latino Latinx. Yeah, that makes sense. Or Latinx. Rhymes with sphinx. I don't think that's right. Or something else entirely, as evidenced by this Twitter poll. And he shared a Twitter poll, which was from a media brand for Latino millennials. Interestingly, there appears to be backlash against the term by some who view it as an attempt, intentional or not, to anglicize Spanish. They say this is part of a larger movement to paint Hispanic Latino Latina Latinx people as sexist and ignorant. Mexican American person who introduced me to the term was still sorting out their feelings about the whole situation. Tyvon Plinsky if you want to get in touch with us, like Ty and Alexandra did, you can tweet to us. I met Joshmclark and at S yskpodcast and Chuck at moviecrush. You can join Chuck on Facebook@facebookcom. Charleswchuckbryantandstuffysheanow you can send us all an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at home on the Web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housedefworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. The sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from exactly right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen 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." | |
http://netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1215463561643sysk-new-taxi.mp3 | How Personal Rapid Transport Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-personal-rapid-transport-works | Personal rapid transport combines the best traits of subways and taxis, and costs less to build than light rail. Could this be the future of transportation? Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast and learn more about personal rapid transport. | Personal rapid transport combines the best traits of subways and taxis, and costs less to build than light rail. Could this be the future of transportation? Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast and learn more about personal rapid transport. | Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:26:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=18, tm_min=26, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=0, tm_yday=189, tm_isdst=0) | 5783957 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from Housetopworkscom. Brought to you by Consumer Guide Automotive. We make carbine easier. And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer. Here@houseworks.com with me is the writers editor extraordinaire, mr. Chris Palette. How's it going, Chris? It's going great, Josh. Thanks for asking. So, Chris, I noticed you shaved your goatee. It's startlingly different. Yes. I'm not used to the air conditioning on my chin, but I'll get used to it. Well, we're not used to it around the office. We're actually lamenting the loss of it. We're sitting Shiva over Chris'goatee. We've got the mirrors covered, but we have to soldier on, don't we, Chris? Yeah. So I'm thinking we could soldier on by talking about whether or not there's going to be a new kind of taxi cab in the future. What do you know about this? Well, I do know that gas prices are going up and people are looking at all kinds of alternatives, even something that might seem like it's right out of one of those 1940s, 1950s art deco. This is the wave of the future. Like tomorrow. Disney World, right? The WEDWay people mover. So what we're talking about is personal rapid transit, or PRT. And it's actually not a new idea. It does find its roots. In the 50s, an American urban designer started toying with the idea. What it does is it takes the best of both worlds of subways and taxis and puts them together. It's personal rapid transit because there are so many cars on this rail line that you don't have to share with anybody. So people who are unsettled by the homeless or are xenophobic to a clinical degree can rest easy on this ride. And it also takes you pretty much exactly where you want to go. Surprisingly, it's less to build than light rail by a long shot. They're doing one at Heathrow Airport in the infamous Terminal Five, and it costs about 16 million for a mile of track. Total cost. Most light rail costs about 40 million, which is amazing. It's got it beat by that. Why don't we have this installed everywhere now? Well, I would guess that even though they're claiming that it is less expensive than light rail, that there's just so much more infrastructure involved in building a light rail system. From what I've read and researching for the podcast, the cars we're talking about here for these PRT systems are small. They're like a personal automobile rather than a big honkin train, which I'm sure costs a lot to build. Sure. Plus, the track would probably need to be considerably wider for a light rail train. So it sort of makes sense that it would be a little bit more cost efficient, even with the number of stops going up. But even with hard numbers, there's a lot of people who aren't swayed. Personal rapid transit systems have found vocal opponents everywhere that they've been proposed. You watch the Simpsons, right? Oh, yeah. Okay. You've seen the monorail episode. It's one of my favorites. It is a great episode. It has it all has Leonard Nemoy opossums. It's a spoof of the music, man. But really, when I was researching personal rapid transit, I realized that the monorail episode of The Simpsons is a subtle indictment of PRT systems. And while in the episode Homer Simpson is the conductor of the monorail, what better metaphor for a failing computer system than Homer himself, right? That's true. Yeah. And that's one of the big criticisms of the PRT system, is what happens if one of the cars fails, if you're on the same track as everyone else, and especially if they're moving in as close proximity as it suggests that we will be. If we use these systems, it will be essentially bumper to bumper. And they are unmanned, they are computerized, they are computer driven, which is good because they can run 24 hours a day. But if they're unmanned, then what happens when they stop? Like you said, you've got all the cars behind you stop behind you. It could be just a complete nightmare. It's like being stuck on a roller coaster, but you're not at an amusement park. You're trying to get home or get to work. Maybe they'll install horns in them so at least we can have the satisfaction of honking if you right. Yes, that'd be awesome, actually. But I was intrigued that they're being installed in some places in Sweden and Abu Dhabi, which is sort of ironic considering that they would have gotten the money from that from oil. Yeah, that is ironic. But they're actually the United Arab Emirates and Dubai and some of these other areas are really starting to lead the charge on going green. And the city called Mazdar City, it's a development outside of Abu Dhabi. They're aiming to become the first zero carbon footprint city ever. And part of that is the personal rapid transit system they're implementing. And this is not a test. I mean, they're putting in a whole 1500 stop system. So it's a huge deal. And there's going to be a lot of eyes on Abu Dhabi to find out if this can really work and if it will fail like people expect, or if it could be the wave of the future for taxis. That's fascinating. It'll be exciting to see that this may be a real solution. Yeah, I hope so, because we're drowning here. If you want to learn more about personal rapid transit, reed will there be a new kind of taxi cab on how stuff works.com? For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@houseworks.com brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you." | |
d6464158-3b0d-11eb-aa42-cb1f3eadb188 | The Disappearance of Lars Mittank | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-disappearance-of-lars-mittank | In 2014, a young German man walked into an airport in Bulgaria with a flight booked, then suddenly ran out leaving all his posessions behind, never to be heard from again. This is the story of Lars Mittank. | In 2014, a young German man walked into an airport in Bulgaria with a flight booked, then suddenly ran out leaving all his posessions behind, never to be heard from again. This is the story of Lars Mittank. | Tue, 16 Feb 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=47, tm_isdst=0) | 41114729 | 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. 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. And there's Jerry. And this is Stuff you should know at another true Life mystery edition. A true life mystery? Yeah. Okay. I don't want to say crime because I'm not 100% sure crime was involved. I'm sure it still falls under the umbrella of true crime, but it's a mystery of disappearance. How about that? Yeah. And this one can be frustrating to research. And this is our caveat in that this situation, as you'll learn, happened in Bulgaria to a German man. And that's part of the reason it's hard to get great information. There are plenty of people on the Internet telling this story with different details, and it's just sort of one of those cases where we can't get our hands on Bulgarian case files from the cops, right. And read it ourselves. So we did find a Redditor who did something last year who claims that he got information from Lars's mother, who you're going to meet Sandra. She's not going to be on the show. You're not going to really need her to meet through our words. But who knows? This is someone on Reddit, and all his sources were in German, so I couldn't double check those either. Right. Yeah. No, I mean, that's a caveat that works for just about any true crime or disappearance case these days just because there are so many people who take a story and run it through their own grinder. And like you said, little details, little facts get changed here and then somebody else picks up the same fact without double checking it, and now all of a sudden, it's all over the place. And you can't tell if that's because it's real or because a bunch of people just repeated the same incorrect facts. So we're going to definitely do our best. But one of the things about this story is there are enough totally verified facts to it that you don't really need to get completely lost in the details. People have gotten completely lost in the details, but they've still not solved the case. That hasn't helped anybody yet. So just the facts that are known are kind of strange enough. Yeah. And I think it's always more comfortable for us when it's like when there's a book that's been written about it published by a real publisher like Beverly Cleary. Not just Internet dudes. Right. But a lot of times, these more recent sort of missing person cases, it is just Internet dude. So it is what it is. And the dude that we're talking about is named Lars Matonk and he's known as the most famous missing person on YouTube. I hate that. He is pretty bad. It should have probably just scared us off of this episode to begin with. What was the name of that con? The YouTube convention we went to that one time. It was something like Internet con, but it wasn't that. It was close to that. I can't remember that almost put me off of YouTube forever. We blocked our memory bank this week. We did our biggest show ever there in front of about twelve people. Yeah, it was pretty bad, I'll think of it. And by the way, we should thank Dave Meischner, who's a listener who turned me onto this quite a while ago. So sorry it took so long to get to Dave. So we're talking about Lars Batonk, and he vanished from the face of the earth, as his mom put it. It was like the earth just swallowed him up. Back on July 8, 2014, in a town, a resort town in Bulgaria on the Black Sea called Golden Sands, which, looking at pictures of it, it looks like a pretty charming little place. VidCon. VidCon. That's it. It might as well have been called Internet con. Yeah. But did you look at pictures of Golden Sands to get a feel for the place? Yeah, looks like any lovely seaside hamlet. Yeah. And I couldn't get the impression of whether it's more like destiny or more like Panama City Beach. It seems like a big party spot, if that's what you're wondering. Okay. But it also looked like it was fairly like clean and well run, and not just like, you know, just whatever kind of thing. I don't know. I place it between the two, from what I can tell. But that's where this event took place, where the disappearance took place. It's actually Varna, Bulgaria, which is the main town that Golden Sands resort beach town is right outside of. Yeah. So as far as Lars, the young man who would go missing, he was born in February 1986 in northern Germany. He was an only child. He was a handsome kid, very popular. He was athletic, he was smart. He did well in school. After he graduated, he ended up getting a job at the GDS Suez power plant, about 100 miles from where he grew up, fixing small electrical machines. He was an engineer and it seemed like he had a really good life and he enjoyed his job. He loved, and this will figure in. So put a pin in this. His one big love was his football club, his soccer team that he followed, which is this is not how they would pronounce it, but the Verder Brimman Football Club. Oh, really? How would they pronounce it? Well, it's always just a little more German. Let's see. Like the guy, the redditor, he narrates his own documentary and he said it in a way that I'm not even going to attempt. Okay, all right, fine. So that whole football club thing actually plays a role in this because it may be at the center of his disappearance, we're not 100% sure. But to kind of give you an idea of what kind of guy Lars Metankank was, or Matonquist, his dad had a stroke a couple of years before he disappeared, and his mom had to take care of his dad full time. Larry was an only child, and he would come home, I guess, about 100 miles from where he lived and worked almost every weekend to help take care of his dad, which is not every guy in their late 20s would do that. And apparently he was dedicated enough that his mom had to kind of encourage him to go along with five other friends of his two week long vacation at Golden Sands in Bulgaria in July, the end of June, beginning of July. He wasn't going to go, and his mom said, no, you should totally go. You deserve a week off like this. So he went. Yeah. So it's a big party scene. Like I said, it is well known for young people from all over Europe going to take advantage of the resort deals, all inclusive places, the cheap booze, plenty of drugs to be had. Mars was the life of the party, according to his friends. I saw anywhere from three to five friends I know for sure two guys, and I think these were his high school mates who were most prominent named Tim Schultz and Paul Roman, but they were hanging out, going to the beach, playing soccer. The one weird thing that I think people may have made too much about online, as far as Internet sleuthing goes, is his friends remarked that he didn't have much of an appetite on the trip, was eating, like, soup and salad and fruit, whereas it was an all inclusive resort. So they were just, like, feasting on everything. And I think they thought it was odd that he wasn't, but I don't make a whole lot about that. Yeah, neither did that one redditordocumentarian who said that he apparently had kind of gotten on a health kick, so he was kind of watching what he ate a little more. Some people have been like, there's your answer right there. That explains it all. Yes. Basically, the week went by pretty uneventful. I think one of his friends later said on TV or in an interview that it went by really quick. On the second to last day, they went to watch a World Cup match. The World Cup in Brazil was going on at the time. And you may not know this about Europe, but they're really crazy about soccer. So much so that they have their own word for it, football, which is goofy, but that's the way it goes. And so they went to this bar, rock Bar. R-O-K-B-A-R. Which sounds like a cool place. And they watched the match, I think. Costa Rica and the Netherlands. And while they were there, there were a bunch of soccer fans there watching this from all different clubs and countries. And there were some kids, I guess, who were recent high school graduates and were fans of F C byron, which is the rival to Vertebruman. And I guess they kind of got into it verbally only with Lars and his friends. Yeah. And I also saw places that there was an actual physical confrontation. Oh, yeah. We don't know for sure, but we do know that it wasn't the biggest deal and it wasn't the big fight that happened later on, right after this night out. The guys apparently go to this McDonald's, which is kind of an open air order at the open air window kind of thing. And Lars didn't want to eat because I guess he was on that health kick and he sort of just stood nearby while his two buddies were ordering. They got their food, they turned around, he wasn't there. They don't see him for the rest of the night. But like I said, it's sort of like spring break party central. So if one of your friends disappears for the night and you're a bunch of dudes, you might just think like, all right, well, maybe he ended up meeting somebody or maybe he just went out and partied some more. But it didn't send up these huge alarms that he didn't come back that night. Yeah. So when he did show up again, I don't know if it was later that night or the next morning he said that he had been beaten up, actually jumped by three or four Bulgarian guys and that he had gone to Duck when one of them threw a punch and had actually taken a punch in his ear, which is a terrible place to get punched. And he said that he was quite convinced that it was those kids, those high school kids who were fans of Byron, FC. Byron that they got into it with at the bar earlier that night because apparently they had said I only saw this in one place that they had said that they had shouted that it's easy to pay somebody to beat other people up in Bulgaria. And so this happened close enough and close enough proximity to that other altercation that he just assumed that's why those guys jumped him. I mean, apparently there was no other explanation for it. So that was his story. He showed up with an injured ear in the story that he had been jumped by some local Bulgarians. Yeah. And his friends apparently didn't necessarily believe that story because he didn't have black eyes or bloody nose or anything. He looked fine and he was acting fine. So they weren't too sure about that story. Again with the internet sleuth. I've seen people saying that he totally made up the story about the fight, but that is all just people speculating online. I know. If you ever want to see people just take a piece of information and then spin it to the nth degree, the most extreme possible interpretation of it, you could do worse than hang out on the Internet. So he goes to a doctor, he gets the diagnosis of a ruptured eardrum. Apparently went and saw a specialist at a hospital who confirmed it, said you should get surgery. And Lars was like, great, but I'm not getting that here. I'm going to go back, come to Germany if I'm going to get surgery. And then this is sort of one of the keys. He was given an antibiotic name Sephiroxine, and he was given the strongest possible dosage, which was about, I think it was 500 mg. Yes. And that's just a general, I think, a Cephalaxin based antibiotic that doesn't really usually have many side effects. And if it does have side effects, it's typically something like an upset stomach. I saw that there's a condition where it turns huge patches of your skin, very dark, all over the place, almost like your highlights have been shaded. It's really interesting to look at, but it has nothing to do with anything that Lars exhibited, any behavior exhibited. It's just antibiotics. I mean, if you've ever taken antibiotics, you know that there's not really usually many side effects to it. Right. So Lars catches, well, again, different information. I saw that his friends were going to stay with him. He insisted they leave. So his friends eventually do catch that original flight out and Larry stays behind because of his ear. He was a little concerned about, obviously with changes in the atmosphere and on pressurization on a plane. He didn't think it was a good idea. And I'm not sure if that original doctor told them that might have been a problem, but he knew it was going to be a problem. So a little bit about that original doctor. I saw that from the redditor who said that he spoke to the guy, to his mother, that his mother said that Lars said that the doctor didn't really treat him. The first one did and said you should go to a specialist. But then when he went to the specialist, the specialist said wouldn't speak to him in English. And Lars felt he had mocked him and that apparently Sandra thought that that was really significant because that was not a word that Lars typically used, but he still managed to get the antibiotic from the doctor. The thing about the perforated, or ruptured eardrum is I was looking on the Internet, it turns out, and the National Health Service says that if you have a perforated eardrum, it would probably actually make flying more comfortable, not more dangerous. So I can understand laws being worried about that, not being a trained medical professional, but if he's encountering at least three other medical professionals in Bulgaria, you would think one of them would be like, actually, no, you're actually better off flying like this. Or would at the very least be like, you don't have to worry about that at all. That's not a thing. Interesting. Yeah, I thought so, too. All right, well, let's take a break, and we will come back and talk about what happened after his friends left Lars alone in Bulgaria right after this. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create learn More@ibm.com these days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US. Based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's LifeLock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. All right, so Lars'buddies go back home to Germany. Lars is left there by himself, which is pretty key as far as understanding that they weren't worried about him. He wasn't behaving weird. He seemed fine. He seemed like Lars. Otherwise, one of them probably would have raised some sort of alarm bells and been like, hey, maybe we should stay here. But they said he seemed relaxed, he was in a good mood, and so they took off. Being summer, Lars had a hard time getting a hotel room because everything was booked up and he was staying on extra. So he ends up having to check into the hotel Color Varna, which was a really seedy place that this cab driver takes them to. Apparently a lot of drug dealers, a lot of sex workers, but that was kind of the only place available. And we don't know a lot about what happened that night other than these phone calls and texts that he exchanges with his mom. So one thing, though, about the hotel car, I looked at it. TripAdvisor gives it a four out of five and Booking.com has it at 7.8 out of ten. And it is definitely cheap. I think rooms are like 25 American dollars a night, which is suspiciously cheap. There is like probably some criminal activity there, but that it's not like a trap house hotel or anything like that. But the fact that it was his only option, I think, kind of tells you quite a bit too about it. Sure. So he goes to this hotel, he checks in. Apparently the person behind the counter made a copy, a photocopy of his credit card. And according to his mother, that did not sit very well with Lars. At 11:00 p.m., after he's checked into the hotel, he calls his mom. I think it's the first phone, first of many phone calls that evening. And he tells her that he wants her to block his credit card because he's kind of sketched out by this hotel who has made a photocopy of his card. He's worried that they're going to use it for fraud and he can just unfreeze it when he gets back. That's the first phone call he makes. Yeah. There ends up being another call where he has left the hotel. He said that he was hiding on a hill and I think even said that he was at risk of falling. So it must have been sort of some sort of a really steep type of situation, I guess. But he said that there were four men after him that were trying to kill him or that intended to kill him, at least. And he said, don't call me back because my phone, I don't want my phone to ring. I'm not sure. I knew he didn't have a smartphone with him. He left that at home and brought sort of a cheaper phone. So I don't know if it didn't have a way to turn the ringer off or not, or if he was just not thinking clearly, but he said not to call him back. He eventually texts his mom, what is Serapham 500? Which was that antibiotic which you might think means like, he's feeling weird. And what is this? I've taken that to me, says that if he was behaving weirdly or experiencing some different behavior, that he guessed that that's what it was. That's the only explanation for that, because they found that he had taken three of them. So he knew that he had that in his system, which I guess if he was acting weird, maybe that's what he thought it was. That's what sticks out to me. Yeah. And it was either that night or the following morning when he asks I think it was the following morning. She had booked a flight home for him. He doesn't get back in touch with her, which really worries her. But the next morning, he does get back in touch. This is two days after this bar fight. She's relieved. He says he's going to go to the airport and can he get \u20ac500 wired money, grammed or whatever? Western Union. Did they have Western Union over there? Yeah. Supposedly there's a real detail in there, and that it was Western Union. Well, what makes Western Union important? So his mother had never heard of Western Union, and Lars hadn't either. But apparently he talked to another German tourist at the airport who had told him to use it. And he was able to describe to his mom how to use Western Union in a way that she understood how to use Western Union after he explained it. Which said to his mom that he had his wits about him. He wasn't out of his mind. He wasn't wasted on drugs or anything like that. He was pretty much with it mentally. All right, I saw two different things here. Either his mom urged him to go to the airport doctor just to make sure he's good to fly, or there was some requirement that he do so. But either way, he goes to the airport medical center, and this is where things get a little confusing, because it's really all over the place, whether or not he goes in right away or whether he goes in later. But he apparently calls his mom, tells her, hey, they said I shouldn't fly or drive. But he hadn't even gone to see the doctor at that point. And then once he does see the doctor, the doctor ends up getting a few different versions of what happened while he was in there, which is either some people think that looks really shady. I think it could have just been, like, at the time, this doctor, you're not making some really big mental notes about the random patient that comes in, like, this guy is going to be an international mystery in an hour. Yeah. So it could have been innocent that his story changed, or it could be JD. It could be. So from what I saw, that the doctor changed the story three times and that an airline employee came in, and then later it was an airport employee came in, which I think kind of across the Internet, became a construction worker because the airport had recently undergone or was undergoing renovations. And then I guess the third story was that the doctor said that no one had come in and that Lars had excused himself to go to the toilet and did not come back. The doctor was expecting him to come back. He just never came back. What the Doctor didn't know if that was in fact, what happened was that Lars wasn't coming back because he was sprinting through the airport and running out of the airport and into the surrounding countryside. Yeah. And then the version where someone does come in, what that means is that literally a human being, another person, walks into the examination room and apparently really freaked out, if that version is correct, really freaked out Lars, who was already obviously feeling a little bit paranoid sure. And was like, what is this person doing in here? In the one version of the story, the Doctor tries to explain, hey, it's just a construction guy. Or no, this is an airline employee that's going to actually walk you to the plane. It's a little frustrating to not know the exact truth. But no matter what happens, we do know that he sprinted from the airport because that part is actually on YouTube and on CCTV, and that's why he's the most famous disappeared person on YouTube, because it's very compelling to watch this young kid drop. And you don't see him drop his stuff, but clearly he walks in with a backpack and a duffel bag, and he sprints with nothing in his hands at, like, full 21 year old athletic gallop out of there as if someone is chasing him. Yeah. But there's a couple of weird things about it. If you watch the video, and again, you can go anywhere on the Internet and see this. I think it was a good 30 seconds of it cut together that he is running in the airport, and then when he gets outside, he kind of, like, walks and then jogs a little bit and runs some more. But then I saw somebody on I think it was Reddit, too, on a different post. Their Unresolved Mysteries group is just really good. But somebody pointed out that if you watch him, he's not really, like, looking behind him. He's not looking to see somebody coming after him. And it kind of puts a different spin on things because you do think, well, surely he's running for his life. But if you're running for your life, it does seem like you would be a lot more concerned about who is coming after you and would probably look behind you a little more. He doesn't quite do that, actually. It's a very strange run, but it's also not like the run of a person who's out of their mind. That was what stood out to me, is that he doesn't seem to at all be out of his mind. Yes. And another couple of details here that was tough to verify. Supposedly in the Doctor's office, he said, I don't want to die here. I have to get out of here. I don't know if that's true or not, but supposedly that's what he said. And then the mom, Sandra, evidently saw she went over there to do her own investigating, obviously, right after it happened, and supposedly saw footage directly from the airport that had a lot of different stuff that was not included in the footage that went to the police. And she said in the footage that she saw was that when he leaves the airport, he stands there, like, checks his pocket as if he's checking to make sure he has his passport and his wallet and stuff, and kind of looks around and oriented himself for a minute, like, should I go this way? Should I go that way? If you look at other places on the Internet and you just look at that footage, it looks like he just bolstered from the airport and then continues to either kind of walk or jog and never stops, never checks his pockets, never orients himself at all. Yeah, so he actually walks within 20ft of a couple of cops who are standing talking to one another in the parking lot. He walks past them. He goes behind a sand pile and then eventually goes over, I think. Is it actually on camera, him going over the fence, or is it just presumed that he went over the fence? No, it's on camera, but it's one of those things where it's like they had to circle and highlight him because he's so far in the distance. But he goes over a barbed wire fence into a full bloom sunflower field, which are very tall and literally disappears, never to be seen again. Now, on the other side of that sunflower field, very importantly, is the A two highway, so who knows what happened? And then beyond that, there's a lot of woods. I wouldn't call it, like, the most densely forested place on Earth, but there's a pretty decent sized woods around there. There's also a lot of farm fields, too, that's exposed and out in the open. But there's a highway on the other side of it, and that's, to me, is extremely important. All right, should we take another break? Yes. All right, we're going to take another break and bring it home with what happened from there and then some of the theories about what happened to large MIToc. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyberattacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can. Be dangerously easy, which is not good. 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It's a lifestyle and a pet bomb thing. Find Halo Holistic at chewy amazonandhalopets.com so, Chuck, just to recap, lars Matonk has fled is a really good way to put it. The airport leaving behind in the doctor's office all of his stuff, including his wallet, phone, and passport. Now, is that verified? I saw that basically everywhere, including except for his mom speculating that she saw him checking his yeah, I did. I thought that was very confusing, but I saw it in The Sun, which I realize is not the most credible source, but sadly, it is one of the most credible sources when it comes to researching this case. I saw it on a Yale article. It's basically everywhere that his wallet, passport, and phone were left behind. But, I mean, that's a really good point. We're lost in The Sunflower field as far as that stuff concerns. We don't know. We got to get our hands on the police report. And even that I read when Lars'mom hired a Bulgarian lawyer as an investigator, they got weird conflicting information about what was found with him or not or what was left behind by him or not. So even his mom probably couldn't say for certain what was there. Yeah, I get the picture that it was a frustrating experience working with the Bulgarian police. It seems like Germany got involved with Interpol, but they had some frustrations as well. There's some speculation that they intentionally kind of kept this story on the download because they didn't want it to affect tourism. Yeah, I could see that. Other people say that. Well, maybe not that, but it just wasn't widely known. It was some German kid. It wasn't all over the newspapers. And so people, they didn't necessarily even know what was going on. If they saw this flyer or maybe they didn't even run it on the evening news. Yeah, and so if it was three weeks, four weeks after the disappearance that news started to really spread. Or maybe news never really spread. If you were a driver and you gave a kid a ride on the a two highway outside of the airport, you might not have ever put two and two together. Or if you saw some kid running through a field into the woods, you might not have ever heard of lars matonk, either. So it's possible there are people out there with information who just don't know to cough it up. Although that's probably exceedingly unlikely these days because of the exposure that this story's gotten. Yeah. One interesting tidbit is that they did find that those \u20ac500 were untouched in his account. And I don't think we mentioned I think some people speculate the fact that it was \u20ac500 on the nose and that it was western union and he had never used it meant that he was being told by somebody to get \u20ac500 wired via this way. But, again, that's just internet speculation. Well, I also saw that it was his mom's decision. He just asked her to wire him some money, and then she had decided that that was according to that documentary. And who knows? We really need to get sandra matonk on here, dude. One of the cool things that happened through his mother investigating this is various leads came in over the years, like, hey, there's this guy that speaks german. He could be laws. She would go check it out. There's this other guy. Over the years, she has ended up finding 15 german expatriates in bulgaria. Some were addicts. Some were mentally ill. Some were actually reunited with her family. Some didn't want to be reunited, but she found all these people. So every time that happened, it gave her hope that even though the chances with a case like this is if you don't find this person within the first few days or the first week, it's, like, very slim to no chance. All of these things gave her hope that if she just kept at it, that she might eventually find her son. Yeah, I was really surprised to see that there was a stat in here that said that something like only 3% of missing persons cases aren't resolved within the first year in germany. Not even in germany, but among german citizens. Yeah, I thought it would be a lot higher than that, but that's actually not bad as far as I can tell. Yeah. So, one of those people, by the way, who was found that was thought to be there's, like, a whole thing where people are following this case, and anytime something ends up on the internet, it ends up being passed along to sandra matonk, who will basically post on her instagram, like, hey, this was sent from this town. Can somebody go see if they can find this homeless guy and get me more pictures of them so we can figure out if it's lars? Like, she does this kind of frequently. There was one where a guy turned up in Brazil who looks a lot like Lars. But disheveled with a beard and his hair kind of crazy. And that turned out to be a different man who was missing from British Columbia named Anton Pilpa. Who was reunited with his family after five years. And they think that he hitchhiked and walked from British Columbia down to Brazil and then kind of lived around Rio. I think Rio on his own for a while during a mental break. So some of the theories over the years that have been formed. The one that seems most obvious to me is that along with the ear injury. There was some sort of a head injury. Maybe a concussion left untreated that led to erratic behavior and paranoia. Maybe. And that once he had left and had no money and no phone and no passport. He sort of was just sort of perhaps lost his memory and lost in Bulgaria. And still lost in Bulgaria. Yeah, that's entirely possible, especially if it was a head injury that was getting worse and worse by the hour. That could definitely explain the erratic behavior of leaving his stuff and running through the airport and jumping the fence into a sunflower field. Because if you think about it, everything up to that point you can explain by him being intimidated in a hotel he didn't feel comfortable in by some guys who aim to rob him. Even if those guys didn't aim to rob him, just him thinking that they were going to rob him explains everything else up to that point. The thing that makes it inexplicable, as far as I'm concerned, is him leaving the airport the way they did and potentially leaving everything behind that throws everything out the window and actually makes the idea of a traumatic brain injury a lot more possible in my mind. The problem is, if that's what happened to him, it's really possible that he's up there out in the woods somewhere still and just hasn't been found and is dead probably by now. Yeah, I suppose he could have just wandered into a town and assimilated. Well, his mom apparently does believe that he's still out there, which is why she tries to shake down every lead she can, but thinks that he does have memory loss, and that's why he's still out there just and has never contacted her. Another theory is that maybe everything he said is true. Maybe there were men following him. Maybe it had something to do with that fight and these guys that may or may not have been hired to beat them up. Apparently, the human trafficking in Bulgaria is a problem, and maybe a young, handsome, fit man like Lars could have been a target for human trafficking and that he really had every right to be anxious and nervous because otherwise he seemed like he was okay. It's all very confusing and frustrating. I can't imagine what Sandra Matak has been going through for these years. Oh, dude. When you don't have closure like that, your imagination is left to just fill in whatever blanks. And in a situation like that, people's imaginations tend to go to the darkest places. I can't imagine the stuff that she's come up with or that people have suggested to her to being caught up in it and forgetting like, this is the mom. Like, this is real to her. This is her life. This isn't just something on the internet. What about the trucker? That's one of the leads that there was a trucker in. Where was it? Brandenburg. There was a trucker in 2019, picked up a hitchhiker in Dresden and drove him all the way to Brandenburg, I guess. And he said later on he didn't know about the Larsen On case at the time, but he said later on he found out about it and said, oh man, that's got to be the kid that I picked up. And so his mom shook down the story and I don't think that she ever got in touch with the truck driver or else the truck driver was just like, here's what I think, but I can't say either way, and I don't know where he went. So there's like a beyond the Lookout among Lars Matonk watchers in Brandenburg from that story. Yeah, stuff like that. That kept her going. Totally. I thought there was another one about a man in Dusseldorf that the whole thing lasted for about 2 hours. That's how fast things get done. She posted pictures that somebody had sent her of a man, a homeless man in Dusseldorf and asked for more pictures. And within 2 hours, the cops in Dusseldorf had picked the guy up and verified that it was not ours. Yeah, I mean, I think the head injury and loss of memory, like he would want to get back to Germany. By all accounts, he had a good life, enjoyed his job, was a pretty happy guy, and loved Germany. So the idea of him choosing to stay there of his own sound mind just doesn't seem likely at all. No. Unfortunately, that really strongly suggests foul play as a possibility too. The fact that he has not turned up. He has every reason to, like you say, turn back up again, get back to his life. I saw that on the State Department's website for Bulgaria and human trafficking. Bulgaria does have a human trafficking problem, but it seems to be typically targeting Bulgarians, especially Romani people, who end up getting forced to beg on the streets or forced into hard labor if you're a man that it doesn't necessarily target tourists. And I think the Bulgarian officials would probably not put up with that because it would harm tourism so dramatically. So it's fairly unlikely that a blonde German guy named Lars would end up begging on the streets of France at the behest of the Bulgarian mafia. And I also saw another theory that he was a drug mule, and he flipped out and was scared he was going to get caught and ran out of the airport. Drug thing, too. What really kind of undermines that theory is that no drugs were found in his stuff. So it's possible he took drugs. A lot of people are like, well, clearly he was on drugs. Why else would you do that? That's a possibility as well. But again, if you really look at some of his behavior, yes, the fact that he ran out of the airport and jumped over a fence, that's erratic behavior. But if you look at the way he was behaving during that erratic behavior, he's not acting erratic, if that makes any sense. It's one of the most bizarre mysteries I've ever heard. So kudos to you and Dave Meischner for coming up with this one. Yeah, I knew nothing about it until Dave said it. Way to go, Dave. Yeah, we need to spend more time on YouTube, I guess. We totally missed this one. So we can go back to VidCon, right? You got anything else? No? All right, well, if you want to know more about Lars Matant, go out and solve the mystery, William. At least for his dear mother's sake. And since we said his dear mother's sake, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this. This is another kid writing in. This is actually from dad. My son Hans colored a picture of you podcasting today. Unprompted. Did you see this picture? No. I got to bring it up. It was very cute, which I thought was awesome. I said we should send it to Josh and Chuck, and his eyes lit up. He wrote out what he wanted to type in an email to you, and I thought it was better to just send you his note. I've been listening to the show for the last ten years or so and introduced my son a few months ago. We read books before bed, including yours, and then listen to the podcast as he falls asleep. I'm thankful that I'm able to share this with Hans. He's a smart kid with incredible memory, so we'll often bring up facts he's learned from you guys, which I had already forgotten. Nice. And the picture is adorable. What's the name of the guy who sent it? I'm looking for Sam. Okay. And it's a picture with magic marker. And you are sitting upright at a table. And he actually nailed it because you're on the left. Back before times when we were actually in our studio. Yeah, he has it right. You're on the left, I'm on the right. It looks like I'm passing out, though. I'm kind of slumped over. But he's got two little microphones and then two little pieces of paper with a handwritten thing that says notes pointing at the paper. It says, I listen to your show almost every night. And then there's a handwritten letter, which is great, which I'll read as best I can. I love your show. Chuck and Josh. Today I listened to your SYSK about earwax. I told my mom and had some of your tips. Hey, have you guys made a football episode like Touchdown? But if not, can you make one? I listen to almost all the episodes except ones that my parents don't let me watch. I also have your book. I have read some of the chapters in it and they are great. I like that you guys have different types of episodes, like short stuff and just regular episodes. I'm your biggest fan. I am the second grade. Yours sincerely, and that is Hans, last name Redacted, because he's a kid. Hans, that was amazing. I'm going to find the picture. I haven't been able to find it yet, but that was a beautiful letter. And you have a super cool name, by the way. Yes, I love it. And thank you, dad, Sam and whoever else is in the family helping to support the show. We really appreciate it. Yeah, well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Hans, maybe try drawing a picture. What are you waiting for? We love pictures. You can send them off to us here at stuffpodcast@ihearteareartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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. Hey, it's Delilah. We can all use a hug now and again. I wish I could deliver them all in person, but since that's not possible, my daily podcast, hey, it's Delilah is the next best thing. It will wrap you in ten to 15 minutes of happy, heartwarming, hopeful radio content every Monday through Friday. At what time of day you need it the most, find hey, it's Delilah and get your radio hug." | |
How Zero Population Growth Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-zero-population-growth-works | In 1968, Paul Erlich published The Population Bomb, predicting coming famine and mass death. Erlich's predictions didn't pan out but his ideas launched a debate still raging today. | In 1968, Paul Erlich published The Population Bomb, predicting coming famine and mass death. Erlich's predictions didn't pan out but his ideas launched a debate still raging today. | Thu, 16 Apr 2015 17:27:24 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=17, tm_min=27, tm_sec=24, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=106, tm_isdst=0) | 49313416 | audio/mpeg | "This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney Nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Summer school's out. The sun is shining, the daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant is the stuff you should know. Podcast. Jerry's over there. It's pretty much the norm. Yes. How're you doing, man? How you feeling? It is spectacular. It's a little rough, sir. You'll make it through, won't you? Yeah. Yesterday we celebrated the beginnings of gin and tonic season. It's definitely that kind of weather, for sure. Yeah, it's hard to not sit on the deck and have a citrusy delightful drink. Nice going. So I'm just a little sleepy, but I'm feeling good. I feel like this topic is all about being sort of down in the dumps a little bit. All depends. It depends on where you land yourself. Pretty squarely in the gloom and doom camp, my friend. No, I'm actually not in the doom and gloom camp. I was about to say, which, if I remember correctly, in our episode, was malthus. Right. About carrying capacity. Yeah. You overtly said that. You are an optimist. That's right. Not a malthusian naysayer. Right, yeah, I forgot about that one. We've touched on this a few times. We did a whole profile on Norman Borlog alone on our very short lived and reasonably so live webcast. Yeah. Do you remember we did basically a book report on Norman Borlaug? Yeah, he was well, I think he's even controversial. He is, very much so. You win a Nobel Prize, but for saving a billion lives. But still, people are going to poopoo you. Yeah, you get poopooed interesting stuff. So if you don't know what we're talking about, you should probably press pause. Go listen to the malthus episode. Go to Stuffiestoe.com podcast. I think it's plural. Archive. Yeah. Make that your homepage and all 700 and change episodes are there. And then do control F. Is everybody doing this so far? Yeah. And then type in Malthus. M-A-L-T-H-U-S. It's going to highlight that link, click that and press play and then come back to us. That's right. We'll wait. Boom. So we're back. It's been an hour. What we're talking about is carrying capacity. In part, but carrying capacity checkers is just kind of a reflection of a larger issue. Yeah. And that larger issue is population specifically overpopulation? Yeah. And is that a thing or not is the big question. Because, I mean, at any given point in time, they have like the CIA World Back book has pretty good assessment of how many people are alive. It's a total guess, it's a total estimate. We could be at 10 billion right now. We could be at 100 million. And everybody just is really terrible at counting. The point is we don't specifically know. Yeah, it's probably pretty accurate. Sure. But it's still a guess. The point isn't to shoot holes in the estimates of how many people are alive on the planet. It's to point out that there are so many people we don't know and we can't possibly know at any given point in time. And that has led a lot of people to say, well, wait a minute. There's this thing called carrying capacity, which is the Earth's ability to support and sustain us humans and really any creatures, but really we're just kind of concerned with us humans at this moment yes. With a quality of life. Right. And sustainably. Yes. Those two factors have to be met or else you're putting a tremendous amount of stress on Earth and you're eventually bringing about your own demise. So a lot of people are saying, like, we're probably past carrying capacity and we just don't know it yet. Right. Or other people are saying there's really no such thing as carrying capacity, thanks to human ingenuity. Anytime we come up against it, we'll figure out a way around it. And Norman Borlaugh was the way to go. But before Borlog really became famous, there was a lot of people who were legitimately concerned that we were all going to die. Yeah. Borlog, if you haven't listened to that one, if you didn't follow Josh's instructions, like a good little podcast listener, he was one of the leaders of the green revolution in the in which we made great advances in agricultural than agriculture, in yields. Yeah. New types of wheat in Mexico, new types of rice in India that yielded much more than they ever had. And plus, they were drought resistant, flood resistant. They could stand up and hold more grain. They could stand up and say hello. Basically. They could pick the daily double at high layer. So Borlaugh was, by all standards, a very smart guy. He cared very much about people. He wasn't doing it for fame or riches or anything like that. This guy felt like he was working against the clock. And if he didn't and he wasn't the only one doing this, he's the most famous, but if he didn't do it, then yeah. A lot of people were going to starve. Yes. And I think I proposed to you before this that we do just one on the Green Revolution. And I think that would be a one, two, three podcast suite. I can't believe this one. I love this stuff. Ecology, population. That was another one we did, too, with how population works. Yeah. And it sounds so, like, eyeballedingly boring, but it turned out to be really interesting stuff. So go read that too. We'll wait. Go ahead. And we're back. And it's everybody's a little nervous. Everyone is nervous. And Stanford biology professor Paul Ehrlich. There's another famous Paul, ehrlich? This is Paul R. Ehrlich? I believe. Oh, it's a different one. Well, there's two dudes. I did not realize that. What do you mean? I mean, I'm familiar with the other eirolk then, I guess. Well, who was the other one again? He wrote some other famous books. He's a biologist, I think. It's not the same guy. Yeah, the other guy was a German physician who worked in chemotherapy immunology. Oh, yeah. That's not what I'm thinking of. Yeah, different guy. So this guy, he wrote other things besides The Population Bomb. Yeah. So in 1968, he writes, the Population Bomb goes on The Tonight Show, it explodes as huge hit. Apparently he was on more than once. Yeah. And everyone got super nervous because his book started with these words the battle to feed all of humanity is over. Oh, good. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon. Now, no, that's not so good. That's how he starts his book. He basically says there's going to be a Malthusian collapse. At one point in the book, he said, if I was a betting man, I would wager by the year 2000, England won't be around. Boom, he drops the mic. Yeah. And we should probably mention who Malthus is. Thomas Malthus was a very forward thinking, smart, mathematically inclined minister, I believe, in the early 19th century, 18th century. Yes. An economist. And he was the one who said, we have a problem here, everyone. I've just done the math. And population grows exponentially, but our food supply grows linearly. Right. And so we are destined to outgrow our food supply. And that's where the idea of carrying capacity came from. So Malthus and Malthusians are the people who think, like, we're going to exceed the food supply eventually and die from famine. And Ehrlich was one of the most vocal and alarmist neo Malthusians around. Yes, absolutely. And he scared the pants off of people back then. In 1968, there were about three and a half billion people, and the birth rate we're going to talk a lot about birth rates and such. Has a lot to do with this. Buckle up. The American women had three and a half babies on average, and the global birth rate was five babies per woman. Seems like a lot to me. It was a lot. Five kids, supposedly in the 50s, we were at six. The global average fertility rate was six babies per woman. And that's not just per woman. You want to talk about fertility rates? Sure. So fertility rate basically is the number of live births that a population has assigned to the population of women thought to reasonably be a reproductive age. So 15 to 44. Right. Times 10. So you take all of those, figure out how many women there are, and then you multiply it by 1000. So you have something like 50 births per 1000 women aged 15 to 44. And that's your fertility rate. Yeah. Okay. You can figure out how many actual births are taking place. Yeah. With reasonable detail. Yeah. So, like Malthus Ehrlich did the math in the said, you know what? Our food production isn't keeping up. Just like Malthus said, we're in big, big trouble. Wrote the Population Bomb and co founded Zero Population Growth, which is an organization that is now called what are they called now? Population Connection. Population Connection. Very little. Sunnier sounds electric company is. It does. And you should check out their website. It's good. They have a lot of good information on it just to help you figure out what you might want to believe. So people are scared. The Zero Population Growth group, their aim is to their big thing is contraception and giving women control of their reproduction, basically. And their fertility. Right. That's you decide how many kids you want. Exactly. They have that many. They've identified that there's an issue that could easily address overpopulation, and that is cutting out unwanted pregnancies or pregnancies or having unwanted kids. They've identified that plenty of people there are two different fertility rates. There's the Wanted Fertility Rate and then there's the Unwanted Fertility rate pretty much across the board in any country in the world, the unwanted fertility rate is higher, whether slightly or largely than the Wanted fertility rate. So they're saying that if the unwanted fertility rate is, like, 3.8 babies per woman in a given country and the Wanted Fertility rate is like 2.5 well, if we can just figure out a way to only have the wanted pregnancies right. Then you are doing a lot to control overpopulation. And the way that they figured out how to address this is to just basically spread awareness and access to contraception. Yeah. Right. The two pronged approach what their goal is they aren't saying that people should not have babies like you said. They're saying people should only have the babies that they want to have. Exactly. And their ultimate goal is to have a sustainable global birth rate below the replacement level, which means there's a lot of different factors. But it basically means that the world is not growing when it's like working a club at a door, being a doorman. One person goes out, one person comes in. Yeah, you got a little clicker. That's basically what that means is someone dies, someone can be born. Right. And of course, it's not that one to one, but if you're a bouncer and you're tasked with keeping it an even ratio, you just have to remember that you can't keep people inside until a new person comes along, because that's called kidnapping. They still have to leave and you have to deal with an imbalance for a little while. That's true. Right now, the replacement level fertility rate in the US is 2.1 babies per woman and 3.0 in other developing countries because they have higher death rates and shorter lifespans. Which makes sense. We're under the replacement rate, basically, right? Yeah. The replacement rate is the number of kids a woman of reproductive age would have to have to replace herself. And she's not just replacing herself, she's replacing herself and her male mate, who she's reproducing with. You guys can have babies. Yes. And it's kind of gross to think that a woman is giving birth to a boy and a girl who can mate and reproduce her. That's not the point. You want them to go mingle with other people's babies. But the replacement rate you would think then is two, right? Yeah. For every woman, 2.0 kids is what you need to have to have an even replacement rate. That means as people die, new people are born and the population never grows or declines. It stays the same. The replacement rate is never actually 2.0, though. Well, it's 2.1 right now. And the reason why is because we humans tend to have more male offspring than female. Apparently, for every 100 girls that are born, 107 boys are born. So the actual replacement rate is 2.7 and then they round up to 2.1%. Yeah. Plus there's a lot of other factors, too, for sure. So those other factors include things like you said, like infant mortality rates, lifespan, immigration into a certain area. And the thing is, of birth rates or fertility rates and replacement rates, the replacement rate tends to be a little more stable. The fertility rate has a lot more to do with social attitudes, access to health care, education, and it can change dramatically from place to place. Whereas, say, anywhere in the Western world, the developed world, the replacement rate is about 2.1%. Yeah, exactly. That's in the 3.0 for the developing countries. All the monographers just stood up and were clapping. So clearly Eric was not correct in his dire predictions. It's a little off. Here we are in 2015 and there are problems, but England is still around. That was a bad prediction. 4 billion people haven't starved to death. But does that mean that he was wrong? Altogether. No, not necessarily. Because right now, and this is a pretty startling stat to me, over the past 110 years, we have grown from 1.6 billion people to 7.2 billion people in 110 years. Well, we're expected to get up to 9.2 in another 35 years by 2050. And so one of the reasons we have this many people, most of the reasons are positive because of advances in healthcare, the lifespan in 1900 was 31 years old, and now it's 70 or maybe even a little bit higher, because that was 2012. Yeah. So imagine it's a little bit higher. And the infant mortality rate globally in 1900 was 165 deaths per 1000 live bursts. In 2013, it was down to 34. So that's why there's more people, because we're doing better at taking care of ourselves. Yeah. And those are two huge factors when it comes to demographics and population, because the longer you live, the more old people you have. So therefore the less babies you need to replace those people and the fewer babies that die or that survive infancy will be adults one day. Exactly. Yeah. But these are the really, if you're a demographer, the sweet spot is that working age. So when you're a demographer, especially one that's economics minded chuck yeah. That sweet spot, the reproductive working age people, that's a good sizeable population you want to have. If you have a lot of babies, well, then you have a lot of people who are raising those babies. So those babies are dependent on so say you have a lot fewer women in the workforce, so your workforce is depleted. If you have a lot like an aging population, you have a lot of older people who have already aged out of the workforce and are now dependent on the taxes paid by that workforce. So a large population of either babies or old people, and God forbid, both at the same time, it puts a lot of strain on the middle. You know what I'm saying? Sure. So when you have a longer life expectancy and a lower infant mortality rate like we have now in the developed world, you want to have something closer to the replacement rate. Right. Which makes sense. Right. I got some more stats, too, that would seem to back up eric's predictions are not predictions, but at least his gloomy outlook. He was a gloomy dude. Currently, I couldn't find much on what he felt today. Yeah, I'm curious. He's still around. I'm curious. I bet there's some good interviews. I'm going to check that out. You know what? We'll post it on the website because now we're posting links to the research that we do, stuff you should know. A bunch of great links on that on the podcast page for this episode, guys. So, currently, as of last year, an estimated 805,000,000 people go to bed hungry every night, more than half of which are in Asia. One in four people in sub Saharan Africa was chronically malnourished. 750,000,000 people worldwide lack access to clean water, contributing to about 850,000 deaths per year. And here's the thing, though, is we're living in cities now more than ever, right. People are moving into cities, which is a good thing in one way, because it provides a lot of economic opportunity for people, especially in developing countries. But when you look at these cities, a lot of them are full of slums and sweatshops in these developing nations, something like half of the population. And a lot of cities live in slum conditions. Yes. Right. So you think sub Saharan Africa, I think rural in a lot of ways. Right. So, yes, I'm aware that they lack access to clean drinking water, and that's an issue that Sub Saharan Africa faces. Yeah. You don't think about that being an issue in a city. But the problem with slums is they very rarely have access to clean drinking water in the exact same way that places like rural Africa have the same problem. Yeah, that's clean drinking water and, like, sanitation and shelter. We're not even talking about education and health care and, like, all the things that people need to live a fruitful life, you know? Yep. So cities are a problem. Even if Eric was wrong, there are clearly issues. Some people will argue, and we'll get to the critics and stuff later, but a lot of people argue that it's distribution of food and stuff like that. Like, we have the resources. We're just not dividing it out properly. Right. And apparently I read that if everyone lived like an American and consumed like an American does yeah. The carrying capacity would be something like 2 billion. So we would have already far exceeded it. Sure. But if everybody lived with just the minimal amount that they need to live, the carrying capacity would be something like 40 billion. We've been able to sustain the carrying capacity as it is right now because not everybody lives like an American. But if you're an American, that means that a lot of the other world, especially developing world, thinks that you are over consuming by a lot. Sure. And that's really evident. There was a graph that went around recently that shows water use in agriculture by type of product. So everything from, like, soy to beef, it showed how much water yeah. Did you see that? I didn't see that, but I've seen stuff like that. Beef is like a huge consumer of water. Right. 106.28 gallons of water used to produce 1oz of beef. Yeah. That's a lot. That's a lot of water. And so that's part of the point. Whereas if everybody's and apparently in China and India and these ascending countries with ascending economies, one of the great benefits of being part of the developed world is you can get steak anytime you want, baby. And I want a big one right now. Put it in front of me. I'll give you some money. Here. Here, just take this and put it in your pocket. There's some money for you. Give me my steak. And you don't care how much water it took. Yeah. And these people who are saying they don't necessarily agree with Eric, but they're saying he wasn't totally off. Right. He was alarmed. Clearly their problem. They're saying, this is one of the problems. This is one of the problems with too many people. Yeah. And so getting back to contraception and Zero Population Growth or now the Population Connection their big goal. They say there are 222,000,000 women in the developing world who have an unmet need for family planning. So they're not saying, we want to put our ideas on you, and you shouldn't be having kids. They're saying, there are that many women that are like, I don't want these five kids. I would have wanted to. And I either don't know about contraception, don't have contraception, or I have literally no idea how conception works. Right. For a lot of them, I shouldn't say a lot. The first idea that women just need access to contraception and they will use it. They're working on that. Right? Sure. But they found in studies that something like 10% or less of the women who are defined as having unmet contraceptive needs cite a lack of access as to why they're having unwanted kids. Yeah. Instead, they're saying it's things like family pressure or societal pressure to have a bunch of kids. Like, you're saying, like, not understanding contraception or how conception works. Yeah. They say they don't believe that they need contraception if you have sex infrequently or after birth. After I've had one kid, we don't need to use contraception anymore. Got you. Like, literally not knowing how conception works. Right. So that's a big educational hurdle that Population Connection is trying to overcome. Right. So they're saying it's not just getting contraception to women, it's educating them on how to use it and changing their social outlook. Yeah. Changing the culture, largely. Men saying, one more babies. Right. Like Revolutionary Road or something. All right, so we're going to talk a little bit after the break about what the critics of Zero Population Growth have to say. 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 comousk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code S YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's Squarespace.com sysksk squarespace. 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. So we're back. Yes, we're talking about solutions to overpopulation, but not everybody thinks it's a problem. Some people say overpopulation is a myth. They say that Eric, in and of it himself, damaged his own argument. Yes, he got a lot of personal heat, still does, because of the language he used. It was so alarmist starting his book off with that. We've already lost. No matter what we do, billions of people are going to die. And then it not panning out. Saying that England wasn't going to be around in 30 years, I mean, that was putting a lot on the line. Sure. And so a lot of people said your specific landmarks or milestones were unmet, therefore your whole arguments out the window. Yeah. And some people believe that other people are like, that's not necessarily true. That is alarmist as well. Possibly your reaction area, at least. But some people say, I still don't agree with Ehrlich because humans are smart. We can figure out way out of any problem. That's right. Critics will say that humans are not parasites to the Earth. We are the saviors of Earth, and we are the ones that are coming up with these solutions, like the Green Revolution and longer lifespans and progressing medically to help people live longer. I don't know about saviors of Earth. I think that's stretching it a little bit. I think we extract a little too much to be called saviors of Earth. Well, I guarantee you there's a lot of people that think humans are saviors of Earth. Sure. I would see us more as like homer with pinterest the lobster again and the saltwater and freshwater trying to strike the balance. I wouldn't call him a savior of either the goldfish or pinchy at that moment. He's just keeping them both in stasis. How many times have you referenced Pinchy? The last? Probably seven. Yeah, it's not bad. It's one for every 100 shows, roughly. Other critics will say that low birth rates are no good for the economy. Like you were talking about earlier, older people and babies. Well, I guess low birth rates wouldn't affect that. But older people are more of a tax on society than they are spenders and investors. Right. But in the same way, if you have too many babies, that's a big tax. Right. Eventually those babies will be a workforce like I'll spend money. Exactly. So the baby boom and the post war boom, economic boom in the United States, it's not coincidental that they went hand in hand. There's a bunch of people having babies and eventually they grew into the workforce and they made a bunch of money in the 80s for the United States. Yeah. And it's also supported in developing countries. More than 70 countries are categorized now as low fertility, with two babies or less per woman. And those areas are expected to make big economic gains in the coming decades because there are going to be people to spend money and be in the workforce. And there's kind of a few ways that the workforce and wealth in the economy and birth rates are all kind of tied together, too. It turns out that if you give a woman right to her own contraceptive decisions yeah, sure. The birth rate tends to inevitably fall as a result. And then when that happens, it happens because some women have more babies than they want to when they don't have right to their own contraceptive decisions. Another reason is, when they have those kind of rights, they usually also have the right to an education. When they enter school, they will tend to put off having kids because once they graduate from school, they'll usually enter the workforce. And so, just by nature of getting to the whole thing later on in life, they're having fewer kids as well. When you have more educated women in the workforce, your economy is stronger, too. So directly and by proxy, lower birth rates are associated with the stronger economy. But again, you don't want to get too low, because if you get too low, then all of a sudden, the generation before it started to taper off is going to be bigger than the generation that's working. And if it costs $50,000 in tax money to keep the average retiree afloat, say, in the United States, well, that divided by 10 people is a lot easier to bear than divided by 100 people. 100 working people. You know what I mean? Yeah. We got to keep up the old folks and keep them in steak and ovaltine. Right. So if you're an economist, a demographer, whatever, everybody's kind of saying, like, you want to get a country developed and you want to get them at the. 2.1 replacement rate and everything will be hunky dory from there. Yeah. And the other thing a critic might say, too, is this is what we were talking about earlier, about the environment, the impact on the environment. Like we're just going to destroy our world with so many people. Right. It turns out that impact carbon emissions aren't really tied to population growth rates. It's tied to per capita income levels by evidence that China and the US. Have some of the lowest fertility rates right now, and we are the worst polluters. So it's not because we have all these people, it's because we're consuming too much as Americans. Exactly. And I guess in China as well, which actually makes it seem kind of nerve racking that India and China with these enormous populations, are starting to become wealthier and wealthier, because that's just going to make it even worse as far as the environment goes. Did you check out the Population Connection site? No, I didn't. They have a pretty interesting FAQ that if you don't know where you stand, I mean, it's helpful to read like they say things like, instead of, we want to focus on quality of life, not quantity. And instead of saying, how many people can the Earth support? Maybe, how many people can't the Earth support? Because right now all these people are dying from lack of clean water and sanitation and food. Right. And there's the counter argument that you hear from critics a lot. I've seen a stat thrown around that the entire world's population could live in Texas. I've seen that before. It's so mind boggling, I have trouble believing it. Well, I think somebody forgot to carry one or something. No, it's true. Population Connection says, sure, you could fit everyone in Texas, you could also fit 40 people in a phone booth. But Texas, they said, no way has the carrying capacity to take care of those people. So it's a little bit of a hollow fact that you throw out when you say that. Right. Like, sure, you can jam everyone in there. Texas would be like, what are you guys doing here? Exactly. But it's pretty interesting stuff. I recommend people read their FAQ. It seems like they definitely have the right mindset because what they want to do is make sure people have a good quality of life all over the world. Well, I will go read their FAQ because I suddenly feel under prepared. But I will tell you that the impression that I have from researching them without going on their website was I didn't find anything like beware Population Connection or the Population Connection myth or anything like that. There's definitely debate on the other side saying overpopulation is a myth, but no one seems to be attacking Population Connection. It's like a nefarious organization. Yes. Because they're not saying, don't have babies. Right. And that's a really sticky situation to be in because a lot of people are like, well, God wants us to have as many babies as we possibly can. Who are you to be meddling and that kind of thing. Yeah, it's a fine line that a group like that has to walk, and they seem to be walking. It fine. They're just saying, like, here's some contraception, maybe. Let's not have unwanted babies. Let those little angels stay in heaven, and we'll just go from there. Yeah, I think that's on their homepage. 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. Comsysk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace. Comsysk. Squarespace. 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. The Behavioral Sync. Where did you find this? I don't remember where I ran across it, but I've read it a while back. But I have to give a shout out to Josh from Jersey, the original Jersey, not New Jersey, who recently wrote in to suggest we do an episode on that and have perfect timing, because he wrote in after you'd selected this one. Oh, yeah. And I was like, these two would go great together, hand in hand. Yeah. So thanks, Josh, for reminding us. Well, thank you, Josh, for thanking Josh. Which Josh? I'm thinking all the josh's okay, so in 1972, this dude named John B. Calhoun, this is one of his experiments. This guy, what he liked to do was build rat and mouse utopias. He's been doing it since the basically with the aim to see what would happen to a population, in this case mice or rats if you gave them a perfect mouse world. Right. And he called these world Universes. Yeah. And the one in 1972, the one that really made all the headlines, I guess was called Universe 25. 24 under his belt already and it was pretty good size. It was over 100 inches square. The walls were 54 inches high. It had space for, let's see, what's, 256 times 15? Chuck I'm going to go with about in my head, I'm going to say like close to 30,000. It is exactly 3800. Yeah, that's what I meant. I meant 3000. 3840. Okay. So there was enough room comfortably for 3840 mice. Yes. And long before that he introduced four breeding pairs. So eight mice he first introduced to Universe 25. Yes. And it was well stocked, by the way. They had everything they wanted, food, water that was cleaned out. They were all disease free, no predators. Yeah. He threw a cat in there, right. Just to keep them on their toes or something. Yeah, it was mouse heaven is what they called it. Yes. And he actually did in papers about these universes, he would refer to them as heaven or utopia and he would use words like that. So he introduces these four breeding pairs of mice to Universe 25 and after 104 days, it took them to finally settle down and be like, okay, this place is actually pretty great. It's not too good to be true, despite the fact that it seems to be built by human hand, which is weird, and the temperature never changes, but we're just going to say it's probably fine and start breeding. And they started breeding pretty quickly. Oh, yes. They started doubling in population every 55 days after that. Right? Yeah. Like you said, because it was so great. There they were just like, hey, let's eat and do it and make a little baby mice like there is no end in sight. Right. So you're doubling every 55 days. This is all a big study to study what overpopulation what would happen. And what he found time after time was that things went bad. Yes. Which is really something because remember Paul Ehrlich released a population bomb in 1968, but for decades before that, john Calhoun saw firsthand what the real problem was. The real problem wasn't overpopulation, leading to scarcity of food and conflicts, conflict and resource wars and famine, starvation. What he found was that the real problem was overpopulation itself. Yeah, just too many mice and not enough valuable roles for mice to play. Exactly. So there comes to be a point in any mouse population as far as Calhoun was concerned, and again, this is Universe 25, and he wasn't making like one a week or something. These were detailed or smart studies. He was hired by the national institutes of health. He spent like 20 or 30 years working there. He was a bona fide legitimate researcher, and he would find that at some point, the abundance would lead to overpopulation rather than scarcity. He never ran out of food. They always had enough food and water and everything. What came to be an issue with space and social interactions? There were just too many people. There are too many mice. I should say to the mice. They're people. Sure. And they're rubbing shoulders up against one another, constantly moving past one another. There's not enough room. And like you said, there were too many mice to fulfill the number of social roles needed. Right? Yeah. It says by day 315. So this is close to a year. A lot of mice are living in there, and they said there were more peers to defend against. So males were stressed out and stopped defending their territory. They abandon it. So normal social discourse broke down completely. Social bonds broke down. There was like randomized violence for no reason. It seemed like the female mice, the mothers saw this and would attack their own babies. Right. And it was procreation, slumped infant abandonment, increase mortality, sword. Then he talked about the beautiful ones, which I thought was hysterical. There were these male mice that just they never fought, they never sought to reproduce or have sex. All they did was eat, sleep, and groom and just sort of loaf around. So all these social barriers are completely being destroyed. The social norms, I should say. Yes. And the females that could reproduce went off by themselves, sequestered themselves away from society. And the males that were capable of reproducing became those beautiful ones and didn't seek sex either. So over time, they lost their ability to carry out these complex social interactions that lead to reproduction. And they just stopped reproducing it. In general, yeah. By day 560, and this is, I guess, that's close to two year mark. Well, I guess 18 months. They had 2200 mice. And then growth ceased. Yes. Which is even close to the 3840 that this place could conceivably hang on to. Yeah. So how many was it? 3838. 40. Yeah. So at 2200, they stopped reproducing. Very few my survived past weaning at that point, the beautiful ones were still secluded. The females, they basically called this the first death of two deaths. He did specifically call a social death essentially exactly like the death of the spirit, the death of the society. Yeah. And then eventually the physical death. The second death. Yeah, the one leads to the second. Like, there is a point that you pass and he came up with a great name for it called the behavioral sync, where I think they refer to it as the event horizon. Once you pass that it's all over, right. There's no coming back from that. And once there's no coming back from that, not only has your society collapsed or does your society collapse, your population becomes extinct because reproduction becomes impossible. Even he found, which is pretty startling. He found that even after enough of the population dies off that it returns to those possible ideal numbers of the early days in Universe 25 or any of the universes, reproduction doesn't start up again because, remember, social norms and bonds have broken down. Yeah. They were so messed up, so they can't even figure out how to reproduce. Once there's room for people enough again. It's crazy. It is so interesting. He said that he wrote this really kind of blockbuster paper called Population Density and Social Pathology, and it was published in Scientific American in 1962. And he said that the individuals that are born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Wow. So they can't even feel like they're not connected to society anymore because there's no society for them to ever connect or disconnect from. It's frightening. It really is. And a lot of people jumped on this and said, whoa, what's going on here? Because if you look at his data, every time he ran this experiment, the results became the same. There was an abundance of resources. There was never scarcity. Population became overpopulation. Once they reached the point of the behavioral sink, the population slid into extinction. And on the way, there was violence, cannibalism, infanticide, just like all the horrible things you can possibly think of right on the way toward extinction. And so a lot of people said, these mice kind of are reflective of our own society, don't you think? And Calhoun was kind of like, yes, I would say that's probably correct. Yeah. And there was a big boom at the time because of this experiment in literature and movies with a lot of doomsday scenarios. Tom Wolfe, the great writer, wrote in the Pump House Gang in he actually referenced the behavioral sink in reference to New York City, and he said it was easy to look at New Yorkers as animals, especially looking down from someplace like a balcony at Grand Central at the rush hour Friday afternoon. The floor was filled with poor white humans running around dodging, blinking their eyes, making a sound like a pen full of starlings or rats or something. And there are all these movies that came out. There was one called ZPG, right? With Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chapman Chaplin. It was called zero population growth. Yes. Like, for a generation, the government said, no one's allowed to have babies. Here's your robot baby, right? And they're like, no, we're going to have a real baby. And they're like, no, you're not. I didn't see it, but I'm sure it ended very portly. I didn't see it either. Yeah, I saw it. On IMDb, though. And, of course, Silent Green. Great movie from the novel Make Room. Make Room. There is no idea what's called. I didn't either. There's another novel called Stand On Zanzibar. And there were people called Muckers who ran amuck and just suddenly went crazy and started killing a bunch of people. I don't know. It happens from time to time in the news. Yeah. A lot of people were saying, yeah, this stuff that Calhoun's finding is clearly extrapolated onto human society. Yeah. And at the time, too, there was a lot of discussion about what to do about inner city overpopulation crime housing projects. There's this really great documentary called The Pruitt I go myth. And there was the Pruitt IGO project in St. Louis. I've heard of this. I think we've talked about it before. But it became like the poster child for how no matter what you do for poor inner city people, they're going to screw it up and it's going to become crime ridden. And it's them. It's not their quality of life or education or anything like that. It's them. And this documentary just totally demolishes that idea. But it's still a long standing idea. And there are a group of policymakers who looked at Calhoun's research and said, clearly, we need to do something. There's too many people. There's a lot of people who don't have valuable social roles and they're turning to crime and everything. It was very much open to interpretation because Calhoun, even though he was putting these things in terms like heaven and utopia and hell and behavioral sync and that kind of stuff, he was still just kind of putting data out there. And it was up to society at large to interpret it. And it really said a lot about your attitudes towards your fellow human, how you interpreted it. But Calhoun himself actually took something of an optimistic view of all of this data, which is kind of mind boggling. Yeah. I was surprised to read this, actually. It makes sense, though, if you think about it. Yeah. He found that there were outliers and that not all the mice descended into a hellish violence and mouse looting. He found that some could actually handle this, and what he called the ones that could had a high social velocity, mice that fared well with a lot of high number of social interactions. That is not me. I'm a type, A blood type, blood personality type. He said that basically these mice will thrive. And he said, and even the ones who don't, what he termed the losers found ways to be more creative. And he was sufficient. Yeah. Son of your outlook. Basically saying that man is essentially a positive animal and we will create and design our own solutions. Right. And his solution was, and it makes sense because he found that it's not scarcity or famines or anything that leads to trouble. It's overpopulation itself. His idea was, well, let's go find more space. Yeah. And so he was a member of this group called the Space Cadets, which is a group of thinkers that were trying to figure out how to establish colonies on, like, Mars or the moon or wherever. Right, which is exactly what Calhoun's point was, that we just need more space. Right. As long as we can sustain ourselves, that's fine. But even if we don't stress agriculture, the planet or whatever, we're still going to run into problems. Let's go off to other worlds and TerraForm. Oh, Anne, did you see the thing about the rest of NIM? Oh, was that taken? It was inspired by this. It was based directly on his research. Oh, really? Isn't that cool? Very cool, Mrs. Brisbane. The Rats of NIM. Nice. Yeah. So go see that again. And also go read the behavioral sync. Super interesting, an article on Cabinet by Will Wiles that informed a lot of this episode. Yeah, this stuff is fascinating to me. I agree, because I see kind of both sides. Clearly, there are some issues going right now, but I also think that there are solutions around the corner. Yeah. I ultimately don't have a strong opinion either way, and I think if I think about it, it's because I think humans will become ingenuitive. You can have steak tonight. Tons. Me, too. Grassfed. Only it doesn't make it any better. I mean, that's why beef it uses so much because it eats so much food. That also requires water. Yeah, right. It requires water, like, two times over, at least. Dumb cows. Unless you feel bad about her steak consumption. Chuck, I don't eat much steak. Good for you, buddy. It's because Emily doesn't eat beef. Yeah, usually I just will cook chicken because it's not like I'll have a steak and I'll cook chicken every now and then, but usually it's just easier because chicken comes in, like, a two or three pack. Right. Plus, you cook it until it's dry as a bone. So you can feel better about the water consumption. That's right. If you want to know more about population growth, and specifically zero population growth, type those words into the search bar athoustofworks.com. And don't forget to go to Stephyseno.com and listen to this episode and check out the extra great links on there, too. And since I said search bar in there somewhere, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Linguist sticks up for us. All right. Right. Hey, guys. I studied linguistics in college, so it always tickles me when you guys go on tangents about words and language. The main reason I'm writing is because I want to offer you a counterpoint to the language police that have been harshing your vibe. Grammar nuts are what we call in the biz prescriptivists who like to dictate how people should speak. Linguists, on the other hand, are descriptivists who make their careers out of how people actually speak in real world situations. Oh, I didn't realize. I thought linguists could be one or the other. I didn't realize that, like, linguists tend to be descriptivist. That's what she says. Who wrote Infinite Jest? David Foster Wallace. Yeah, he was a big time prescriptivist. Oh, really? You used to drive him crazy. Like how people should speak? Yeah, like that. There is a specific way that humans are supposed to speak and write and communicate, and if you deviate from that, you're about as bad a human being as you can be. And that would be like, the downfall of society? Pretty much. Come on. We don't use the term good or bad grammar. Instead, we prefer standard and nonstandard. Linguists recognize the social functions of nonstandard grammars and observe their uses and functions rather than to try and micromanage them. A final point. I'm certain your listeners still know what you mean when you say things like, there's a lot of something, even if it isn't standard grammar and the laws of linguistics. As long as you're interlocutor, which is a listener interlocutor. Yeah. As long as they accurately understand what you mean, you have successfully communicated. Okay. And that's why humans invented language, isn't it? So go be free and know that I will always love your show, no matter how you speak. And that is from Kristen. Thanks, Kristin. The supportive linguist appreciate that. That's funny that Kristen mentioned that as long as your interlocutor understands what you're saying, you're communicating correctly. Sure. Someone else, I don't remember who it was they wrote in and suggested we do an episode on shorthand. Oh, interesting. I was just talking about that with Emily last night. Bam, it's all over the place. I took speed writing in high school and she was very surprised at that. So, like, speedwriting with hand? Speed writing is like stenography? No, with your hand. It's basically a version of shorthand, but not exact shorthand. Got you. It's a kind of shorthand. It sounds like shorthand, but like more aggressive. Yeah, like Max Power or something. The joke was, my friend Shannon won't say her last name, but she would cheat in class because she didn't learn the shorthand. So the tests were they would just read a long passage quickly and you would have to do it and then transcribe that into long hand. She was just super good at writing really fast, so she would just write down everything in longhand super fast and then figure out how to transcribe it back to shorthand and then back to long hand. And she got caught doing that. And the teacher is like, that's cheating. Yeah, it sounds like it. She was like, well, that's not speed writing, that's just writing fast. Yes. If you want to get in touch with us, either to show us support, criticize us, and even something neutral is fine, you can tweet to us at sciskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychano. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestepworks.com. And as always, join us at our luxurious home on the web stuffyshknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstoffworks.com summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today you want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural, science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo Elevate at Petco pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores." | ||
How Big Bang Theory Works, with Neil deGrasse Tyson | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-big-bang-theory-works-with-neil-degrasse-tyson | There are a number of theories for how the universe evolved but none are more widely accepted than the Big Bang theory. Learn about the mind-boggling details of the early universe and hear Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about what it will take for us to kno | There are a number of theories for how the universe evolved but none are more widely accepted than the Big Bang theory. Learn about the mind-boggling details of the early universe and hear Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about what it will take for us to kno | Thu, 14 Apr 2016 14:35:21 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=14, tm_min=35, tm_sec=21, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=105, tm_isdst=0) | 64241265 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Chipper Josh Clark. Chipper Charles Priyant. Oh, that's your new nickname, chipper Charles. Yep. Yeah. And then there's Jerry. She's not Chipper. She is actually Chipper today. I'm not Chipper. I'm crumpy because this man, oh, man, my head is already melted. You guys should see the vein in Chuck's forehead. It is protruding. We'll do our best. Of course, we're not astrophysicists, but we do have an astrophysicist coming on as a guest at the end of the episode, don't we? Yes. My friend you interviewed, Doctor Neil degrasse Tyson, or as I like to call him, NDT. Sure, that's what I call them, too. Ndtino Mike. Yeah. But I was unable to be on the interview for various tooth related reasons. So you took it upon yourself. And I think an interview like that is probably just better for one person anyway. It gets a little clumsy. It's two people that don't know anything about astrophysics are trying to glean information. Here is my question. Yeah. What do you eat for breakfast, Doctor? But yeah, it was very kind of him to come on. And we want to thank our friends at the Fox Theater, where he's going to be on April 20 here in Atlanta. That's right. For hooking that up. So thanks to everybody who made that happen, because it's a great interview, as you guys will hear at the end of this episode. Yeah, I loved listening to it. And I'm going to go ahead and say my two favorite parts are probably one that won't make it in. When you said that you're happy to plug the Fox Theater show and he was like, don't bother, it's going to be sold out. Yeah, I like that, too. And then at the end when you thanked him for advancing our understanding of this light years, and he was like, that's not nearly enough. Yeah, he's like, A light years? Not very far. Thanks. Yeah, so I changed the parcels. He's like you're getting closer. I know, it was very funny, actually. I hope you leave that part in there. I hope so. And later on, I immediately regretted not saying, well, you advanced our show billions and billions of light years. He would have appreciated that. Yeah, you would have. And I didn't do it. I wasn't sharp enough. It was a good interview, though, so thanks. Feel free to skip right ahead to that. We'll wait here and go to sleep. So we're talking about The Big Bang Theory and not the TV show, so settle down. Nerds. I think he was on that show that, wasn't he? I'm sure, yeah, sure. Yeah, he made an appearance. I think all you have to do is say, like, you will further science if you appear on this. He's like, I'll do it. Yeah. I've never seen one episode of that show. I guess I've maybe seen some here. There I think literally the most popular show in the world. Or it was like last season or the season before it's just taken off like a rocket. And hats off to them, too, because they mix actual science and science jokes and all that stuff. It's like, Smartening up the world. Well, I'll tell you one quote I got from Mr. Tyson, dr. Tyson from the Internet, and it was actually heard him say it, so I know it was a real quote. He said that people ask, do you believe in the Big Bang theory? And only the way that he can. He was like, well, it's not a matter of believing. He said, I only believe in things that are evidence based. And he said, the question should be that you pass it to people. Of all the data and evidence out there, what theory is best supported? And he said it's the big bang theory. Sure. Right. And our colleague Jonathan Strickland, who wrote the article that this is based on, and kudos to that cat, because he took some really difficult concepts and explained it really well. Yeah, he explained it in a way that I came close to understanding. But he makes that same point, too, that not only is the Big Bang theory a theory which obviously cannot be proven, can only be disproven, but that there are other competing theories out there, too, which we'll talk about later. Sure. But that for the most part, it has the most observational evidence backing it up, including the recent confirmation of gravitational waves, which made a huge stir. And as a result, it's the most widely subscribed to theory among scientists as describing the early universe. And that's a big thing. There's a big distinction about that. A lot of people think that the Big Bang describes the formation of the universe. Not true. No. The Big Bang describes the time starting very soon after the universe formed, but it does not go back into where the origin of the universe came from, what came before it. And it actually doesn't even go all the way back to that point where everything started. It just can't. Because science falls apart as we'll see the further you try to go back in time, because time ceases to exist at that point. Yeah. If the universe were a human being. The Big Bang theory sort of describes the point where the sperm and the egg meet up. It describes the time a trillionth of a trillion of a second after they met up. What about that? Yeah, which is close. It's a pretty great time. It is. So another misconception, Chuck, is that the Big Bang was an explosion. That's not correct. No. In fact, a man named Sir Fred Hoyle is the one who gave it a name, almost. He gave it to it in jest as sort of an insult because he was a believer. I don't know if he always was, but he was a believer at the time in the steady state theory. Sure. And it was like, yeah. This explosion, this big bang. But it's not an explosion at all. So Chuck, it's a rapid expansion. It was, and the best way to think of it is like this. So, like an explosion. Let's say you have a planet, and that planet is actually the universe, and it's just floating there in space. Sure. And Darth Vader shoots it with the Death Star, and it goes right, and it goes everywhere, starts scattering everywhere, but it's scattering within the boundaries, the confines of spaces. We understand it. Sure. That would be the popular conception of what the Big Bang represents. Not at all. What the Big Bang actually says is that space itself inflated. Yeah. It expanded. And that all the stuff that was in it was in this very tightly wound, dense, incredibly hot core that was a singularity, basically, that expanded into the universe. That's as big as we understand it now. Yeah. Something that was so tiny and hot, it had an infinite amount of density because everything we know was crammed in. You know what it's like if Neil degrasse Tyson listens to this, he's going to love this. Okay. You know the little pellets that you would get with your fireworks? A little black pellet, and then you light it a smokesnake and then it snakes out to, like, several feet. Right. That's like it. Except if that pellet were like thousands and thousands and thousands of fraction of the size of ahead of a pin. Right. I think that's a great analogy. And I'm just going to leave the room and I'll come back in 40 minutes. But even still, Chuck, take that analogy. Right. When you imagine that, you imagine that snake growing on a sidewalk and maybe there's kind of grass in your view, and it's at night and there's a car park there because you're outside. Right? Well, sure. That's where our brain wants to take us. Yeah. We want to confine what we know within the boundaries of our universe. What we're talking about is the universe itself growing and expanding in nothingness. He points out in the interview. I don't want to spoil it, but he kind of blows my mind when he starts talking about, like, this goes beyond what our human senses can understand. Right. Sight and sound. Like, forget about it. Yeah. And that's how nobody's going to be able to pin anything on us because we'll be like, well, we just can't comprehend that. So how could you blame us for getting it wrong? Yes. Now I'm going to leave the room. Okay. And you need, what, a half an hour? It may take a little longer than that. Now, I get parts of it, so I'll just chime in when I feel confident. There's a line right, that Strickland had in here. He says at the earliest moments of the Big Bang, all of the matter, energy, and space we could observe was compressed to an area of zero volume and infinite density. Doesn't that sound like the line from a religious text or something like that? Isn't it just like right there on that border between science and religion? Basically, yeah. And now take this drug and everyone takes their clothes off and follow me right into the grand room, and we'll understand what I'm talking about. Yeah. And you know what? When strickland and scientists and cosmologists talk about that, that is what is known as a singularity, that thing with zero volume and infinite density. Right. I think it bears repeating at least one more time. What we're talking about is all of the matter, all of the energy, all of the heat, all the radiation, everything in the universe that is here or ever was here over the last 13 point, roughly seven to 9 billion years was in a point that was 23 orders of magnitude smaller than the diameter of an atom. You just caught yourself going to say it's like a little ball, but there's not even circularism. Right? Yeah. Is that a word? Yes. There was nothing circular. And so at this time, at this point, we know that it was very hot. Sure. Makes sense. Mind bogglingly hot. Like, you can't even think of all the zeros associated with the degrees of Kelvin or Fahrenheit or Celsius. Right, right. And it was incredibly dense. And then something happened. We don't know what that was. Science simply isn't equipped to explain it or understand it or detect it. Right. Something happened to make this incredibly dense ball or whatever it was. Yeah. There was no ball expand. Yes. And it was not like the smokesnake. It wasn't a child with a lighter. You don't know that. Neil degrasse Tyson doesn't know that. Nobody knows that. So this expanding happened really fast, and we'll talk later about just those first few seconds afterward. That's how fast we're talking. Well, few, like trillions of a second is how they break it down. So much happened in that first, literally the first second of the origin of the universe, that there are different ages and epochs that happened in trillionths of a second. Yes. It's really mind blowing. So as things expanded, though, in those first few seconds, and today, things are still expanding. Right. Things are expanding and things are cooling down even as we speak, literally every second that we're on the Earth, we're expanding. And well, not us, but the universe is expanding and cooling. Right, exactly. And as a matter of fact, from what I understand, our region of the universe, which is something like 90 billion light years across, is no longer expanding. But other parts of the universe are expanding. Right. And there's a really great article about cosmology and where it stands right now. It's in Aon. Not cosmetology. No. Cosmology. Yes. And it was written by a guy named Ross Anderson, and I think it's called in the beginning, and it's incredibly well written, but he makes a really great analogy. He says that 90 billion lightyear across portion of the universe that we inhabit, that we consider our own is but a small section of one tiny bubble that floats along on a frothy sea whose proportions defy comprehension. Isn't that neat? And that's just our section of the universe. Right. That's our little neighborhood. So the universe is unknowable large. We sound like HP. Lovecraft here, describing this stuff. And still some parts of it are expanding. And apparently, in the early universe, when it was a singularity, the four forces, the four fundamental forces, the dark side oh, wait. Yeah, I thought, you know, the Star Wars universe. Yeah, I was okay. Yeah. So the force, the dark side, midichlorians and Mark Hamill's Hair prequels. The four basic forces, as everyone knows, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and gravity. Right. And that singularity, before the universe expanded, began to expand. All of them were coupled together into a single unified force. Yeah. Which we don't understand how. No, we don't. And as a matter of fact, trying to get them back together is one of the great pursuits of physics. Because if we can figure out how they were all unified, we can start to understand the science we need, the paradigm we need to understand the origins of the universe, but we just can't figure out how to do it. Right. Yeah. One thing that kind of blows my mind with this is when we get to the stuff later on about, does it defy other laws of physics and stuff? Basically every answer is like, the further you travel back toward that singularity, the less all these rules that we think we understand apply. Right. It falls apart, will probably never understand this stuff. Yeah. That very singular moment. Yeah. I don't know. I disagree. I think that we are maybe a century or two away from understanding it. Well, you just clearly pulled that out of your hat. Well, I totally did. Okay. But we've made another 126 years. No, we've made some incredibly huge strides in the last 100 and 5200 years in our understanding thus far. Right. So I think that's not a bad guess. Right. So it'd be a string theorist right. To marry all these I don't know, probably. I don't know. And that's what NDT said. That's what we call them now. Yeah, that's what he said. He was like, who knows? It could be string theory. Maybe someone will be able to come up with a unified theory, or what's called the Theory of Everything that unifies the four fundamental forces back into their single version of a force. Or maybe we just don't understand quantum physics enough quite yet. And when we figure that out a little more, that will unlock some keys for us. Unbelievable. So, Chuck, before we get into how we started to come to understand the Big Bang and the origin of the universe. Let's take a break real quick. All right, I'm going to go wipe my brow. You're doing great. All right. I sort of get this part. So the history part, I'm going to talk a little bit about it, and this makes a lot of sense to me. Go back in time. Let's get in the way back machine. Oh, yes. Boy, it feels so safe and comfortable in here. Thinks of Kerosene. It does. Weirdly. It's one eight hundred s. And astronomers started using something called a spectroscope, which is pretty nifty. We've talked about light waves in here before. A spectroscope is something that divides that light spectrum up into the wavelengths. Blue on the left, red on the right. And as you go further toward the red, the wavelengths grow longer. So that's part one. Right. That was spectroscopes. Yes. That's light waves. Right. And then around the same time, a guy named Christian Doppler was tinkering with the frequency of sound waves. Right. He was studying this because he's a smart guy. He is. And he said, you know what? It's weird that when I sit by a train, it sounds different as it goes by me, approaches, then goes by me and goes further away from me. Right. It sounds different then. That doesn't really make any sense. Yeah. And whereas most people would just eat their figgy pudding and go about their day, he wanted to try and explain it. He was like, anybody else would have been like, this new Charles Dickens book is top notch. So he said, you know what? As this noise approaches you, the sound waves it generates compress is going to change that frequency, or at least how you perceive it, in a different pitch. So as it moves away from you, those waves are going to stretch, that pitch goes down, and I'm going to name this effect after myself. Right. Well, I'll let my wife do it so I don't look like a jerk. Right. So basically, you marry these two things light wavelengths and the Doppler effect. And it sort of led us down this path to where we could understand the Big Bang theory. Right. It would indicate that something that was emitting light out there in the universe, whose light moved toward the red end of the spectrum, would be emitting longer wavelengths, which would suggest, based on Christian Doppler's findings, that it was moving away. Right. Yeah. And they found that they said, look at these stars. Some of the light is falling into this right hand side, and does that mean it's moving away and it's getting faster? Right. And that wants to get away from us. That's where Edwin Hubble came in. He basically said, yeah, this is really weird, guys, because some of these stars appear to have a velocity that's proportional to its distance from the Earth. Like there seems to be some sort of rhyme or reason here. To it. Yeah. And it suggested to Hubble and later on to everybody else, including Einstein, as we'll see, that the universe itself was expanding. And this is where we came to the genuine origin of the Big Bang theory the idea that the universe was expanding and at a certain rate, too. Right, yes. Is that the idea? Is that the hubble constant? No, the Hubble constant is the proportion between or the relationship between how fast something is moving away from us right. To its distance from us. Well, yeah, I guess it is a constant rate. And actually, no, the universe appears to be expanding more quickly than it was before. Yeah. So it's increasing. That's what I meant. But a lot of people really in their relationship yeah. The Hubble constant has to do not necessarily with the inflation of the universe itself or the expansion of the universe itself, but how fast, say, a star is moving away from us and the further away from us it is, it appears to be moving faster than others that are closer. Yeah. And we should point out you said inflation and or expansion. And apparently, if you're an insider, if you're a scientist, you probably say inflation. Sure. So expansion is the basis of the Big Bang theory. It's the idea that the universe has expanded over time. So that, by logic, since time is one of the four dimensions that we live in right. You've got the three dimensions plus time. So therefore space time describes the fabric of the universe and the reality we live in. Right? That's right. So by logic of that, if you went backward in time, the universe would be smaller and smaller and smaller. And the more they started looking into it, the more their mind started popping as they realized, like, wow, this thing was really small once. And that's the basis of it. Inflation theory comes in and suggests how that happened, how that expansion happened. And it fills in a lot of blanks that we'll also talk about. Yes. You mentioned Einstein earlier. He's a noted smart guy. Yeah. And he actually had some issues because it conflicted somewhat with his general relativity theories because he subscribed to his own theory that the universe was static. It's not expanding. Right. I think he was like a member of there's a way of viewing the universe that it was always this way, it was always spread out this way. It wasn't getting bigger. That's nuts. And so he figured that his general theory of relativity would prove this. And actually he was extremely surprised to find that his own general theory of relativity actually said, no, the universe is either expanding or contracting. It's certainly not steady. And then Edwin Hubble came along and he had his findings and Einstein said, you know what? I was wrong. That's big enough a man to admit it. Yes, that's the kind of guy I am. And one day people are going to keep my brain in a jar and a barn and slice it up. It's going to go on a car trip. That was a good episode. We did, too. Yeah. Did we do one on that? Oh, yeah. On its own. Einstein's brain. Yeah, that's right. Boy, those were the good old days. Einstein's brain episodes. Sure. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about some of the predictions that rose from the theory that the universe is expanding. One is in strickland says the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, which is a fancy way of saying it's made up of the same materials and completely uniform. Yeah. Here's one of the first times we run into something where you're like, what are you talking about? It's funny, if you read Strickland's article and I sent him an email saying as much, that I was like, this is really well written, but if you just read the words you're saying, it sounds like it was written by someone who is totally insane. Yeah, I know. And he makes the point, too. It's like, well, yeah. All you have to do is look out into the Milky Way or anything like that. Anything we can see easily and see that it looks different, like there's not a star that looks just like our sun with the same number of planets looking around. Right. The point is that if you go out of several orders of magnification and look at the universe outside of any given galaxy, you're going to see that actually yeah. Everything's distributed pretty evenly throughout the universe, and so that makes it homogenous. And then secondly, it's isotropic, meaning that there is no center to the universe. There's no central point yeah. Which some people posit that the Earth is the center of the universe. Well, we'll talk a little bit about that later. Okay, but that's wrong, right? It hasn't been disproven, but it's just extremely unlikely, I think. Yeah. I think it's a very human centric thing to say. But the reason why some people say that is that if you look around, the expansion that we're seeing is everything's going away from us. Right. Which is like, why is that happening? We should be going along at least with something else. But the idea is that we're not, because we're the center of the universe, but the implications of that are so mind boggling that it's just not possible, almost, that we're actually at the center of the universe when we're just a small segment of a tiny bubble in a frothy sea that defies proportions. There's no way that's the center of the universe. So another prediction was and we talked a little bit about the intense heat at the very first moments of the Big Bang. And if that were true, then you would feel and see this radiation I guess not see it, but you would have this radiation expanded over the entire galaxy in roughly equal proportions. Yeah. Because, again, remember, the Universe is homogenous and isotropic. So if there was radiation, it should be evenly distributed. They call it an echo. I've seen described in some make circles. Right. Okay. So apparently back in the 40s, they detected the stuff and didn't know what they were looking at. And in the 60s, they figured out, holy cow. This is the cosmic microwave background, which is basically I think of it as more like a fingerprint, the fingerprints of the Universe, right? Yeah. And it's evenly distributed. It's this trace radiation that's still around from the Big Bang, which is pretty amazing. So when you put that in, the discovery that the Universe does seem to be homogeneous and isotropic, along with the fact that we discovered this cosmic radiation background that's evenly distributed throughout the Universe, it really gives a lot of credence to the Big Bang theory. And so too does this gravitational wave, the gravitational wave discovery. They apparently found curls in the cosmic microwave background that were remnants of gravitational wave from the Big Bang, too. So it's just getting supported all over the place and everybody's super happy about it. Yeah, there's like, real observational data there, right? All right, we tease those first nano moments after the Big Bang, so let's talk about them right now. The earliest thing that scientists can even talk about, like, with a straight face, like later on when they're having drinks at the bar, that they talk about before this. Right. But if they're, like, on a podium in front of an audience, they can go back as far as I'll just say the equation, even though it will make no sense to anyone, t equals one times ten to the negative 43 seconds. May I? Yes. Okay, so T yeah. Equals the time after the creation of the Universe. Yup. And as far back as they've gone is second after the creation of the Universe. That's how far back they've been able to trace the Big Bang. 43. Nice work. Isn't it amazing that fraction of 1 second is how far back they've been able to figure it out. And so much happened in that 1st, 2nd Chuck, that just fractions of that. Fraction are, like I said before, like, different epochs in the era or the age of the Universe, like, entire epochs happen in trillions of a trillion of a second. I know. It's just so mind boggling. I know. I love it, though. Like, I've really given myself over to this. I was fighting at first like, well, it doesn't make sense, I don't want it. How does that make sense? And I did look plenty of stuff up, but I also kind of was like, I'm just taking this submit on faith. Despite what NDT says, you do kind of have to take this on faith, especially if you're not an astrophysicist. And I just kind of gave myself over to it and I love it. You know what happens when my mind gets bent like that too far. I just have some pie. It's good stuff. Yeah. Just kind of stare at the wall and have some pie. What do you recommend? Doesn't matter if you can. Okay, so something super sweet, not fruity. What's a fruity pie? Like a cherry pie or apple pie? I like a good apple crumble pie. Oh, yeah, I do too. But not like the one with the crisscross pastry on top. I don't really discriminate against pie. Sure. I tend more toward the fruity section of the pie spectrum, and I tend to think of pecan, like, right in the middle, but then on the other end, you have, like, your creamy and chocolate mousse pies and stuff like that. I tend to be on the other side a little bit. Or good lemon pie, lemon ice cream. It's good stuff. What I don't get is the cheddar on the apple pie. I've never gotten that either. I've never tried it. Maybe I should. Those people are obviously crazy. I like sweet and savory together, so maybe I should give it a whirl. Yeah. French frying a frosty and call it a day. All right, so at that point that you described that don't say all the zeroes again, but at that point, the universe was small and dense and hot, and the area of the universe spanned a region of about 3.9 by ten to 34 inches. Everything and that area right. Ten to the negative 33 CM. Again, the average diameter of an atom, or roughly something like that, is ten to the negative ten. Yeah. This is that much smaller than an atom. And everything that's in the universe now was encapsulated in that tiny little thing, whatever it was. That's right. And again, surely astrophysicists and cosmologists, when they were coming up with these calculations, they're, like, just can't be right. And I guess over time, they were like, it seems to be right. Either we're all just totally off our rockers and really, somebody forgot to carry you one and everybody forgot to carry one, or this is really how things started. And it's just mind boggling to think, all right, so in that very first moment, theorists think that those four primary forces that we mentioned are still hanging together, they're still united, and that matter and energy were inseparable at this point, which is another don't feel bad if you're sitting there going like, how is that possible? No one knows. Yeah, the calculations bear that out, is another way to put it. That's right. But that's how it was. Matter and energy were one and the same. And as things expanded, we'll go into these in detail. We go through something called bareogenesis particle cosmology and then standard cosmology. Right. And as this time passes, things become a little more easy to understand. And when I say easy to understand, I mean extremely difficult. But at least your mind can wrap around it. Yeah. Start to at. Least, right? Yeah. So remember, we started at T, which is the time after the creation of the universe. T equals one times ten to the negative 43 seconds. The next big part where things start and actually in between the two, gravity separated from the four fundamental forces. Just a little thing like that. Right. But the next big one that came along was at ten to the negative 36 seconds. And this is where Burial Genesis happened. And around this time, also, this is where the electro weak, which is electromagnetic and weak force combined together, separated from the strong magnetic force. And apparently here at that ten to the negative 36 power seconds, that was where inflation happened. That's where the expansion began. Right. And that's where we actually could begin to observe some kind of matter. Yeah. And I think that what happened was a tremendous amount of matter and antimatter were created. I don't remember a lot about the details, but remember we did a podcast on antimatter spacecraft. How amazing those were. Sure. But antimatter and matter like to destroy each other and effectively cancel one another out. But apparently at the beginning of the universe, at the origin of the universe, is suggested by this that there was a slight imbalance in whatever makes matter and whatever makes antimatter. So that there was slightly more matter that was created than antimatter. Right. So that that stuff survived. Had the balance been the other direction, there'd be slightly more antimatter than matter now. And who knows what kind of loopy bizarro universe that would have created, seriously, or if there would have been anything at all. So all that matter that survived is the matter that we see in the universe now, and that's a lot of matter. So imagine, since this is just a tiny fraction of the matter that was created and destroyed by the antimatter that was also created, how much matter in antimatter was created at ten to the negative 36 seconds through Burial Genesis? Again, this is mind boggling. And that was the result, Chuck, of energy and matter uncoupling as well, right? That's right. Okay. All right. And this is the point where we did one on the Large Hadron Collider. It's a particle accelerator, the biggest and best that we have on the Earth. And this is where you can actually use a particle accelerator to recreate and look at this stuff. Right. So we can actually observe this at this point. Yeah, we can smash things together and be like, kaboom, look at that early universe. That's what they do at CERN. All right. People should listen to that one, too, by the way. Oh, yeah. That would be a good primer. That was one where we wondered whether it was going to end the universe or not, right? It did not. Not yet. So at this point, there is still no light. Things are too dense, and it is still just a dark, dense area right. Exactly. And I think during the particle Cosmology epoch the electromagnetic force and the weak force break off into separate forces. That's right. And we still can't at this point, these subatomic particles still can't bond. They're there, they can form, but they can't hook up and party. Right, exactly. That actually didn't start to take place until we reach the standard Cosmology age, which is the age that I believe we are in now. Right. Yeah. Which started zero one seconds after the initial bank. Right. 100th of a second. So we've gone through that many ages and we haven't even mentioned them all within that 1st, 2nd. Yeah. It's crazy. It is crazy. So that standard Cosmology. This is about where the astrophysicists and Cosmologists say we understand it from about here on out. Right. Everything else is a little shaky, but we've got some observational data that backs it up. But here is where neutrons and protons were formed. And a little after that, they started to be able to form nuclei through nucleosynthesis. Right. And they would ultimately be the building blocks of atoms. Right. So at this point, things are still expanding and cooling at a rapid rate. And we can actually there are no atoms yet. But like you said, it's too hot at this point for electrons to complete that process. Right. Still too hot in the hot tub. Yeah. I mean, after 100 seconds, the universe had cooled to a temperature. Cooled after 100 seconds to one 8 billion degrees Fahrenheit or a billion degrees Celsius. That was how hot it was. Still, after 100 seconds. Should we take another break here? Less. All right, let's do that. And we'll come back and explain the rest of it in great, easy to understand detail. All right, buddy. When we left off, things were expanding and cooling. And they still are, actually. The end. Yeah. No. Good night, everyone. And everyone here is Neil degrasse Tyson. So 56,000 years after the creation of the universe or after the Big Bang we were at a temperature of 15,740 deg Fahrenheit. Nice and cool. Or 8726 deg Celsius. Right. After another 324,000 years. So at 380,000 years after it cooled down to 4000. Just under 5000 degrees Fahrenheit and just under 3000 degrees Celsius. And finally here, atom started to form because protons and electrons could combine. And the other thing that happened too was the density had expanded out enough. The volume had increased is a better way to put it. And the temperature had cooled so that suddenly the universe was now transparent. We could see through it up to this point, 379,000 years, you still couldn't see through it. It was too dense and too hot. And at about 380,000 years, it hits that point and you can see it like we do now. Yeah. We finally have light at that point. Those cosmic microwave background radiation that we talked about earlier, it's locked in. I don't think we mentioned earlier where we're at now, temperature wise, just to kind of put it in perspective, we currently are at roughly negative 454.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Negative 270.4 degrees Celsius. Yeah. That's the temperature of space right now, right? Yeah. So it's definitely cool. Apparently, it's still cooling. Like, it's still not at absolute zero yet, which is the lowest temperature or the lowest activity that Adams will move at ever. Right. So it's still cooling and still expanding. All right, so here's when things really heat up or, I guess, really cool down sorry, bad fun. Strickland points out, for the next 100 million years or so, this is when the universe is really cooling. It's expanding, and then you have matter clusters together yeah. Eventually forms gas. And this is the quick view. We'll dive into it. Those gases form stars. Those stars cluster into galaxies. Those galaxies cluster together into solar systems. Right. That's the overview. And so what they think happened was because this really doesn't make any sense, as a matter of fact, one of the criticisms of Big Bang theories, that it violates the law of entropy, that organizations become more disordered and chaotic over time. Right. And the idea that planets and galaxies and things formed, it seemed like it became more ordered, the opposite. Right, exactly. And so they've really kind of looked into how anything would have formed at all. And what they think happened was that back in, say, the ten to the negative 43 2nd era, there were quantum fluctuations, little vacuum energy fluctuations within this universe, this tiny little universe. And as the universe expanded very quickly, those fluctuations grew tremendously in size. And the vacuum energy in the cosmic microwave background, those little fluctuations that are on there were just different enough from the other spots in the universe that they had slightly more density and thus exerted slightly more gravitational pole than other areas. And so more matter started to attract around them, and they started to form stars, and the stars started to form galaxies, and planets started to form around them. And all of a sudden, what had just started out as little vacuum energy became ultimately universal, hotspots, where you could find matter clustered together, which explains why so much of it is deep space is just void and why some of it has stuff. Apparently, it all began with these little tiny quantum fluctuations way back, trillions of the trillions of a second after the universe was created. So, like, a really cool dude at a party the size of all humankind, and he's so cool that people start hanging out with him, and then his party grows a little bigger. Sure. Is that a good way to describe it? I think that's better than anybody could ever hope to. It's an attraction, basically, that drew things together ever so slightly enough to form larger bodies and then larger bodies. Yeah. And the reason why they think this happened is because these tiny little fluctuations little details in this little universe grow bigger over time. Right. Especially if you look at this inflation growing as a process of time rather than just, like, volume expansion. It's also time is a dimension to it. Right. Yeah. So it makes total sense in that just these little things would get bigger as the Universe itself got bigger, too. Well, does that mean that the universe being coy here, does that mean the Universe will ever expand for all of time? Infinitely. So, I mean, you're talking about, like, that debate, right? Yeah. There's a whole debate over whether or not it's ever going to stop. And all of it comes down to how much matters in the Universe, which we don't quite know yet. That's right. When they calculate the matter we do know about, they realize that there's actually some that you can't account for, and that's dark matter, because we know that there's something that's making stars behave differently, or there's clearly some matter that we can't detect that's out there, so we can't account for all the matter in the universe. So we don't know how much matters in the universe. Right. But the idea is if there is enough, then that gravity will reverse and things will start to contract again. Right. Right. Because gravity is this force that attracts matter to other matter. And yeah, eventually, if there's enough matter, it'll counteract that expansive force that came out of it, and then yeah. Probably will either stop is one school of thought, or the Universe will contract and form what's called the Big Crunch. And some people say that's what our Universe is. It's just the cycle of expansion and contraction that takes place over many billions of years, but we're just one part of a cycle that is ongoing, perhaps forever. When we talk about like that, it makes it sound like the Universe is just breathing. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. In a creepy way. And, Chuck, that has to do also the reason why they don't know if it's going to keep expanding or contracting. They don't know if it's what's called a closed universe with positive curvature or one with negative curvature. Right. And it also has to do with the shape of space to a certain degree. And Strickland also wrote a really top notch article called The Space Heavy Shape. Yeah, that's a good one. It really is. And something from studying this that they figured out is that really, it doesn't seem like it has a positive or a negative curvature. It seems flat. It seems like it has a zero curvature. Right. And this is what's called the flat problem of the Big Bang theory. Why should it be flat? That doesn't make any sense. Because if you look at the spectrum between positive curvature and negative curvature, there's a lot of places on that spectrum where the Universe could fall one way or the other. But it's so close to the middle that astrophysicists and cosmologists have no idea if it's positive or negative in its curvature. And they've started to wonder, like, why should we be almost exactly in the middle? It doesn't make any sense. It would suggest that the early universe was so finely tuned that we're only slightly off of center. So it would have had to have started almost completely at center because, remember, small fluctuations grow bigger and bigger over time and on a larger scale. So since we're still so close to center right now, with the universe as big as it is, it would have had to have been basically on top of exactly in the middle, between a closed negative and a positive curvature at the very beginning of it, which is kind of puzzling in and of itself. That's like, well, that indicates some sort of weird fine tuning. So does that mean that the astrophysicists are off a little bit and their own fine tuning of the Big Bang theory and inflation or what? Who knows? Or is there a little kid with a lighter who set the snake off? That's right. And the snake was very well manufactured. Well, that's just one thing that we can't quite explain. We talked earlier about the fact that at the very beginning, that the Big Bang Theory wasn't meant to address a lot of questions, one of which is that we touched on was what happened before the Big Bang? And we just don't know. It doesn't even try. It can't right now. Trying to explain time before timing existed is futile, right. Because you get into stuff that I just suggested, which is basically amounts to intelligent design or whatever, and that's beyond science. Like, science isn't equipped to say, oh, well, what about this? Or what about that? And I tried really hard to get Neil degrasse Tyson to say something, and he was not going to bite. Well, no, and smartly. I think a scientist looks at the observational data and extrapolates from there. And like I said, I'm sure, and I think even said in the interview that, sure, people like to talk about these things, right. But it's not like hard science. Right. And also to answer that flat problem that I brought up, apparently inflation theory does answer it. It does satisfy it by saying the universe appears flat to us because we're looking at it strictly on a very local level, even though we're looking at 90 billion light years or something like that. Right. It's really just a very small segment of something. So if you take a balloon and you blow it up, it's still curved, but if you're just looking at just a pinpoint segment of it, it's going to appear flat to everybody looking at it from just that tiny perspective. So it's basically our perspective that we're looking at the universe right now makes it seem like it's flat, but it's really, actually curved one way or the other. Right. That's the answer to that. Well, should we talk about some of the problems with the Big Bang theory? Sure. There are criticisms, and there will continue to be. One was that it violates the first law of thermodynamics that you can't create or destroy matter or energy. And proponents will say that's unwarranted for a couple of reasons. One is, like we already said, it doesn't address the creation of the universe. It was never meant to, but just how it evolved or inflated over the years. Over the years, over the 60 or 70 years. Right. And another reason is kind of like we said earlier, is that the further back you go, the rules don't apply. So maybe the law of thermodynamics is just completely moot. Right. When you go back that far, like it didn't come into being until later. Yeah. If matter and energy are like one and the same, I can imagine that some of our current laws don't necessarily apply. Yeah, well, probably a lot of them. And then one of the other things, too is that inflation, that supposedly happened when the strong nuclear force decoupled from the electro weak force and the universe suddenly expanded within that 1 second. It just kept growing and growing and growing way faster than the speed of light. And a lot of people are like, wrong. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Well, there was no light. Well, nothing you could see. Yeah, there are definitely photons, but the proponents of Big Bang have the same answer. They say, well, again, dude, you're talking general relativity. That wouldn't have applied at all. Yeah, the answer is kind of consistently don't even come at me with that. Right. Your laws. Yeah. Should we finish with a few other alternative explanations? Yeah, like we said, there are alternative models. Right. One of them is that same one that Einstein was a proponent of the steady state model, that it is not actually expanding. And apparently this is hard for me to wrap my mind around the people who say that it's not expanding explain away expansion by saying that matter is created as in proportion to the original density of the universe. Right. So maybe the universe is expanding some and more matter has to be created to keep the same density. So I think what they're saying is I think that's what it means. The universe has been at the same density all the time and ensure it's expanding, but it's also creating more matter. Right. Which holds it static. Yeah, I guess so. The epyrotic I know those two letters should not be Echyrotic Pyrotic model. Yeah, I think that's it and we're the worst. That suggests universe is the result of a collision of well, that's the one you brought up earlier of two three dimensional worlds. And there is some hidden fourth dimension out there. Well, that's part of the fourth dimension is part of standard astrophysics and cosmology. But this thing says our universe came out of two universes colliding right in the fourth dimension, which that defies me a little bit. But the idea that there are four dimensions and one of them is time is definitely part of standard stuff still hard to think of. Sure. And then plasma cosmology, I like that one a lot because it's just totally different from the way we think of the universe. It seeks to describe it based on basically its electrical charge state. Okay. Rather than, like, the temperature of it or the density or anything like that, it's more involved in the plasma aspects of it because plasma is ionized gas, and it's like a fourth state of matter. And plasma cosmology looks at it through that lens, which is basically totally alien to everything we just talked about, from what I can gather. Did you say there's totally aliens out there? There's aliens out there. And the universe was started by a little kid with a lighter. Wow. That's my stand. Well, if you like this, then stick around, because right now, Chuck, we have an interview with Neil degrasse Tyson. We weren't joking. Yeah, great job on that one too, buddy. Thanks, man. We missed you. He was like, Where's Chuck? Yes, he did. Well, how are you guys doing? Good. How are you doing? Are you assuming I know how stuff works? I have an inkling that you may have a clue. Okay. So I guess my first question is then how do you specifically, how do you think of the universe? When you think of the universe as a whole? Do you think of it as something like a speck of dust underneath a giant fingernail? Or is it part of a branching multiverse? Or is it a bubble that kind of pushes up against other bubbles? What is the universe when you think of it? I think of the Universe in a fundamentally different way from that of my colleagues. What you want to do is separate the things we have data and observations to support and the things that live and thrive on the frontier of theorizing about what the universe was or will one day be, or what larger system it could be a part of. So if you live in the realm of data, then we are in an expanding universe, and it's been expanding for nearly 14 billion years. And it was smaller in the past and hot in the past, and it's getting larger and cooler by the minute. And we exist on this planet we call Earth, born 4.6 billion years ago with the rest of the solar system in some undistinguished part of an undistinguished galaxy we call the Milky Way. And this scenario, this picture, was very hard earned, and it's no more than about 80 or 90 years old in total. Edwin Hubble, the man in this particular usage of the word Edwin Hubble in the 1920s, 90 years ago, discovered that there are other island universes, if you will. Not the way we might think of that term today. But back then, there were these spiral fuzzy things in the night sky. Imagine to be just spiral fuzzy things in the Milky Way. He would show that those spiral fuzzy things are not in the Milky Way, they are entire other Milky Ways, other galaxies. And that was a profound expansion of our world view, if you would. And then just three years after that, he would show that these spiral fuzzy things are rapidly moving away from us. Coupled with Einstein's general theory of relativity, we would learn that it's not just galaxies spreading apart within a preexisting space. It is the fabric of the space and time itself that's expanding. All of this is supported by data. So if you have discomfort thinking that the Universe had a beginning and that we will expand forever, then too bad. That's just what the Universe says. And the Universe I've said this before the Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you, especially when what we learn of the universe comes to us from methods and tools that completely transcend our native inborn biological senses, which in fact, is the great ascent of science. Sure. What are all the ways we can decode the operations of nature without having to rely on the limits that our biological senses force us to occupy? So when science is furthered decades down the road, and the vision we have or the view we have of the universe we live in is magnified by orders of magnitude from what we're looking at through right now, what shape do you suspect it's going to take? Do you have suspicions? And if you don't, how do you keep yourself from making that leap? Like, yes, of course, this is what it's going to be. This is what we're really living in. Well, we all have biases, and let me not call them biases. Let's say we all have longings for how we think or want the universe to be. And if you begin to believe your longings too strongly, then you might miss some realities that don't fit your expectations and someone else will catch them and make the discovery. So it's okay to lean in one direction or another, but don't do so while being blind to what else could be true, in spite of how you think it might be. So now the scenario I gave you is sort of very well established in terms of observations and data and basically a century of thinking about and observing the universe and posing questions and answering them. So beyond that we can ask, is there a multiverse? This seems to come naturally out of certain thinking about the behavior of the Universe. When you try to bring together quantum physics and Einstein's general relativity, there are good arguments to suggest that we could be in a multiverse. And it's not obvious, at least to me, how one would test that just yet. But the theories of the universe that point to a multiverse are themselves well tested. So this is what gives you the confidence that maybe our multiverse folks are onto something. And there are other frontiers. For example, the quantum physics, which is the theory of the small, and general relativity, the theory of the large. They work perfectly well in their own regimes. General relativity describing the large scale universe. Quantum physics describing with very high precision atoms, molecules, nuclei, particles, this sort of thing. But in the early universe when the entire universe was the size of an atom, then we might suppose that quantum forces override whatever was going on with general relativity because now the entire universe is of the size that quantum laws significantly manifest. And right now, we do not have a good way to merge those two theories. And we got top people working on it. These are collectively the string theorists and others in that realm who are thinking long and hard about these are a third theory that needs to be introduced that will enclose quantum physics and general relativity into a deeper, broader understanding of what's going on. Or will quantum physics absorb general relativity? I don't know that people know just yet. And it involves very high levels of math and higher dimensions and this sort of thing. And some people have criticized string theory for not really being a legitimate theory because you can't test it in any traditional way. But it's the only game in town, and they're not very expensive. You give them a pencil and a pad throwing a laptop and a string theorist is in business. So let them go as far as they can take it. So it does seem like there is either. Like you said, quantum physics may be the answer to all this. We just don't fully understand that field yet enough to get back to the moment of the Big Bang or what happened before the Big Bang. But it could also be, from what I've seen, the unified field theory that gets us back to that point. But either way, to get to a point where we go further beyond our current understanding, further back in time in the Big Bang, including before the Big Bang and what was before, it seems like it's going to take a vast leap forward. Do you think that leap is going to come from a genius that hasn't been born yet or has been born but hasn't been educated and entered the field yet? Is that how it's going to happen? Or is it going to happen from this person combining this work with this work and that work in this work, and then suddenly the pieces are going to fall together? In that sense, that's a great question that also has a philosophical dimension to it such that in modern times, great leaps in science do they happen by the lone genius burning the candle at midnight coming up with a eureka moment? Or do they come about because you have huge, expensive, highly collaborative scientific projects such as LIGO, discovering gravitational waves such as the next generation space telescope. It's called the James Webb Space Telescope, not yet launched, but that will enable us to see galaxies being born in the early universe as well as a host of other frontier observations that were not possible with previous telescopes. Well, that telescope had to be designed by whole teams of people with questions that they had in mind that they want answered by the new data. So I'm not convinced that we're just waiting for a new smart person to come along and have it all make sense. I think we're waiting for someone to obtain new data that we've never seen before that then force us into new ideas and understandings of the universe. Maybe there's some new theory that maybe, I'm not discounting it. But what I can tell you is we're in an era. Look at the Higgs Boson for example, that required the Large Hadron Collider and thousands of scientists and tens of thousands of engineers who built the thing in the first place. So we're kind of in a collaborative era right now. So if I were a betting man, I would say that the great discoveries to come will come about from huge collaborations, possibly even international collaborations. Now that doesn't remove the question as to whether there is an Einstein walking among us who happened to have been born into poverty in a developing country and then we will never know. Well, that would be one of the great tragedies of modern civilization. So I, as an educator feel very strongly about what kind of access people of the world should have to knowledge, to learning, to health. A person should be able to live a day and not have the entire day be preoccupied about whether you have food or whether or not you're going to die from a disease that your neighbor just died of. I think we should be able to measure our state of our civilization by the extent to which we are in the position to discover another Einstein rising up from the midst. That's one way to get an Einstein and other one is to wait around until one is born into the right circumstances. Right? We got 7 billion people on earth, somebody and there's got to be bad ass to help us out. So you brought up your role as an educator and you're a world class science popularizer and explainer what is it that got you into science as a kid, I was nine years old and it was a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium right here in New York. But my local planetarium, I think most big cities have planetariums, even medium sized cities will have a planetarium. And my family, my parents took my brother, my sister and me to all the cultural institutions of the. City every weekend. So one weekend it was the Natural History Museum, another it was the zoo, another it was the aquarium. We even went to other things that sort of talented grown ups did. Like we go to a baseball game or the opera or the theater. And that exposure enabled the three of us to see what is possible beyond the traditional. You want to be a doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, the three traditional options that you're given as a six year old or a seven year old. And so out of that arose my interest in the universe that really got cemented. By time I was eleven, I knew that in fact, I was so convinced that I wanted to do astrophysics that I began to question whether or not it was in fact the universe that chose me. That's really cool. Well, thank you very much, Doctor Tyson. We appreciate you joining us. This is like you just took our Big Bang episode and moved along light years, so thank you. Oh, okay. Thank you. Lightyear is not actually very far in the scale of the universe. I feel better if I take it along. Billion. How about a parsec or something? Parsec is only 3.26 light years so that's still won't even happen. A parsec is not even far enough away to get to the nearest star to the sun. Okay, so you're just in the wrong zone there. Okay, well then how about billions of parsakes? Nice. Thank you very much. What a guy, huh? Great job. Yes. Man, he's just such a cool customer. That's why he is where he is now. Yeah, and if you want to hang out with him, head on over to the Hayden Planetarium. I'm sure he'd be happy to see you. Sure. You can see him on tour. You can see him with Star talk live. He's got a podcast. For those of you who don't know, with our pel, Eugene Merman. He was on our TV show. Even he was. I didn't get a chance to ask him if he remembered that. Sure he didn't. So I didn't get a chance. Yeah, that just would have been embarrassing. Well, if you want to know more about the Big Bang, type those words into the search bar athouseoforce.com and they'll bring up some great stuff. And since I said search bar is time for listener mail, I'm going to call this is Russia European? Remember that debate? Sure. Well, I wasn't so much a debate. We just kind of wondered in the Continent episode. Hey guys, thanks for cracking me up with the show. Astonishing how many film references you can fit into a geography lesson. Yes, Russia is definitely a European country exclamation point. Historically, it's always been considered a part of Europe. For example, it was named as one of the six major European countries in World War I. The Tsar was closely related to other royalty in Europe. This is very different from China. Or India, always much more distant and mysterious to the east. Also consider that maps are very deceptive. Over 75% of Russia's population is on the European side, including every major city from Moscow to St Petersburg, from Milan to Mint. I knew you were going to say that. Very nice. I would have been so disappointed. Have you not? Most of the land you see to the east is empty and largely uninhabitable, only there to look pretty on a map. That's what the little kid with the lighter put it there for. So, cheers. That is from Timothy. And that was one heck of a seinfeld record. Timothy or Timothy. Is he Russian? No. Good point. Yeah, it's Timothy Moscow. We just wrote using a pseudonym. Timothy Milan Dement. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck and Jerry, you can tweet to us at s y escape podcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffystoe and you can send us an email to stuffpodcastohouseparts.com. As always, join us at home on the way@stuffysheno.com. For more onto this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com." | ||
How PTSD Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ptsd-works | With Post-traumatic Stress Disorder the sufferer relives, over and over again, the worst moment of his life. What's worse is medicine still doesn't know how to treat it. Learn about this condition and how it's leading to an understanding of memory. | With Post-traumatic Stress Disorder the sufferer relives, over and over again, the worst moment of his life. What's worse is medicine still doesn't know how to treat it. Learn about this condition and how it's leading to an understanding of memory. | Thu, 23 May 2013 14:26:16 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=14, tm_min=26, tm_sec=16, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=143, tm_isdst=0) | 38142603 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You weren't about to let any cyberattacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt, and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell. Anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comcysk, and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know from houserforkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and across from me, as always, it's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And that makes us say again howdy this is Stuff You Should Know. Go ahead, jump the gun there. That's okay. Awkward. I was talking a little fast. That's right. It's a little weird. How's it going? It's going good. This is a long awaited podcast. It is. We've been putting this off for, like, a year at least. Maybe even two or so. Yeah. There is a guy who we need to give a huge shout out to. His name is Will. Sovey is that who wrote us? Initially, yeah, initially. He is a clinician who studies PTSD. Started out at Walter Reed Hospital. Army Hospital. Basically, he's like right there on the front lines, not just treating, but learning about PTSD. Right. And not only do we have to thank Will for go, basically we handed him this document, this article, and said, hey, how up to date is this? And he sent back this great annotated copy with all this new stuff and basically said, don't say this, don't be stupid, that kind of stuff. So we have to thank not only Will, but we have to thank his wife, Meg, who was the one who originally turned Will on the Stuff You Should Know. So without Meg, we would have no Will, and without Will, we would probably have a grossly, out of date and laughable PTSD article to work from. That would have haunted us. We probably would have released a podcast and just pissed us off still. Exactly. Yeah. So you have now taken his information and redid your original article, and now we are pretty much up to date. Yeah. And I need to go onto the site and update the actual article, which is harder than it sounds. Yeah. But since this, listen to this podcast for the time being. Okay. And this is really good timing, Chuck, because I found out after we decided to do this, june is PTSD Awareness Month. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And specifically, June 27 is PTSD Awareness Day. So if you have a friend or a loved one or coworker who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, be extra nice to him on June 27. Yeah. So we're talking about PTSD, which is, of course, the abbreviation for post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And it's not a new disorder. I can't imagine, like, when it really first came about. Although it was first described in the Civil War, my guess is that it came about the first time people started encountering big time stresses and traumatic events. Yeah. They just didn't know what the heck to call it. Exactly. But it wasn't, I guess, until about the Civil War that we saw casualties on such a colossal level that somebody, a doctor named Jacob Mendes de Costa, described what he called soldiers Heart. Yeah. Before that, they were just like, what's wrong with Goody Johnson? Exactly. Just always freaking out. Right. Yeah. Whenever he hears us play this song. Right. Well, goody is short for good wife. So there's a lot going on with Goody Johnson. Yeah. He calls this thing soldier heart. Soldier's Heart. And it basically is like, you seem to have some sort of heart failures, technical, cardiac. You're very much stressed out. And DeCosta said this is probably a result of some sort of trauma from the war. Right. But they initially, like you said, thought it was cardiac based, because I'm sure dudes were like, My heart is racing. Exactly. I'm freaking out. Right. It's your heart, then it can't possibly have anything to do with your mind, which we know pretty much nothing about. Right. That came about during World War One when it was famously called shellshock. Charles Myers in 1019 described it as and he was actually onto something here, that it could have been resulting from pressure from artillery shells exploding nearby and how it affects the brain. Like, physically affected the brain. Right. And that's actually what he's talking about, is called today mild traumatic brain injury. Yeah. Which is the symptoms of which kind of overlap with PTSD. Yeah. I think we covered that in concussion some, didn't we? I think we probably did, too, because some NFL guys are former NFL players are, like, committing suicide here and there. Probably the same thing. That was an interesting episode, wasn't it? Shell shock. Yes. Charles Martin describes mild traumatic brain injuries and calls them shell shock. So if you just go slightly further afield and kind of get a little more into the psychology behind it, you arrive finally at PTSD, the modern diagnosis of which first came about in 1980. Yeah. Thanks to they really started doing a lot of studying post Vietnam, and in 1983, they did a case study that really just opened up a wealth of information to kind of get the ball rolling. Right. And since then, we studied a lot, and we continue to because we're still not exactly sure the best way to treat it. And we've learned many things since 1980 right. About it. Well, there's the part of the brain that stores memories of fearful incidents. I think it's a ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The size of that can have an effect on whether or not you're at risk for PTSD. Sure. Some folks are more prone than others. We'll get to all this in more detail, of course. Like, women may not get it as much as men, how much danger you perceive yourself to be in, how intense the danger was, how long the danger went on for. All of those are contributing factors to the development of PTSD. Yeah. And like you said, perception is the key because it's your perceived reaction to it. It's not necessarily the guy next to you might not have had any reaction right. And gone through the same incident. Maybe two people are in the same car accident. One person can have it, one person might not. Right. And that can be exclusively based on the perception of the event. Yeah. You're saying we're still learning about it? It's true. We don't have even numbers on the number of people with PTSD. That's shocking. Yeah. I think the VA estimated as many as 800,000 veterans alone have PTSD. Well, I say it's shocking, but it can also be confused with things like depression and just generalized anxiety. It's very specific, PTSD, so I sort of get that. Right. But it has a huge effect on people like depression and anxiety disorders in general. Do PTSD specifically is known to increase unemployment, failed marriages, domestic violence, and homelessness and suicide. Yeah, suicide is a big one, too. We have no idea how many PTSD sufferers commit suicide, but in 2010, I believe, Chuck, 22 veterans a day, active and former military a day, 22 were committing suicide. And I believe 2010, not all of them are necessarily PTSD related. But once we have a better idea of how many people have PTSD, how many people who have PTSD commit suicide, I have a feeling the numbers are just going to get bigger and bigger. Yeah, I think you're right, because we're still we're only, like, a few generations removed from the concept of shell shock. Yeah. And then even more from soldiers heart and even more from what's wrong with Goodie Johnson? The lake. Right. She swims. Okay, so I guess let's get down to brass tacks. Simply define it is a set of symptoms that result from a trauma. We hear about a lot in military, obviously, because they experience very intense trauma more than most folks do. Right. But it can come about from accident, an assault, natural disaster, anything that you perceive as traumatic, it can come about. Yeah. It can be the death of a loved one. It doesn't even necessarily have to be a trauma that happens directly to you. It can directly affect you, and you can still develop PTSD from it. That's true. But the thing is, if somebody experiences a trauma who's not going to develop PTSD, they normally shake it off. Right. There's actually some criteria for an actual PTSD diagnosis. So the symptoms basically have to present themselves over a certain period of time, for a certain length of time. And certain symptoms have to appear in the cornerstone of what's called the symptom cluster of PTSD. All the symptoms you put together to form a diagnosis. Yes. The cornerstone of those is reexperienced. Yeah. And some of that can happen. But the thing I kept coming across in these studies is what they call excessive retrieval. So just like, you know, it's one thing to get in an accident and be a little weird next time you drive in the rain or more careful or whatever. Right. But excessive retrieval means that it's like consuming your life. Nightmares, day, terrors, you name it. Like a song can spark it, and you're just reexperienced this thing over and over in your mind. Yeah. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be from something like a song. Like the song that was playing on the radio when you crashed your car. Right. To trigger. It can just come without any apparent trigger whatsoever. And the big problem with this is not just like, oh, man, that was such a bummer that happened to me. Your brain is remembering this in such a way that the same chemical cascade takes place as it did when you were initially going through it. So for all intents and purposes, at that moment, you're fully going through that same experience again. And this happens again and again and again. And that's the reexperience of the trauma. And that's the cornerstone. Symptom of PTSD. Yeah. That's one of what they call symptom clusters. One of four. The other three are avoidance, which is obviously speaks for itself. You're going to avoid thinking about it. Avoid? Let's say you're in the military. You might not go to 4 July celebrations or other places where there are big booms. Right. Numbness. Doing anything you can to numb it. Withdrawing alcohol and drugs. Yeah. That can be a big problem with PTSD going into it and afterward. Right, right. And if you already had a drug or alcohol problem and you developed PTSD, that can be a really hard thing to treat and separate. And the last one there is hyperarousal, which basically, when you see movies, they'll portray this way, movies, a lot, as a soldier that's just jumpy and irritable and can't sleep. They feel unsafe, sort of paranoid, always on guard. Yeah. It's like your fight or flight response is always on. Yeah. It's got to be exhausting. Yeah. Well, we talked about you can die from that kind of thing, from prolonged stress, heightened stress. Like it depletes your immune system, and you can die as a result. And that's one of the hallmarks of PTSD, is you're just constantly on guard. I can't imagine how tired you must be. Plus, you can't sleep on top of that. Exactly. Yeah. So it's a pretty awful condition to have. And one of the criteria for diagnosing this is that it's not short. This can go on a very long time. Right. There's three different types. There's acute, which is acute PTSD. The symptoms come on and last about three months. Right. Yeah. To BTSC. It has to go beyond the one month period right after that. Most people, I guess, shake off a trauma within a month. If it keeps going on after that, then you're in PTSD territory if it lasts three months. That was acute PTSD. Yeah. And you probably should consider yourself lucky that's all it was. Yeah, that's true. You could also develop chronic PTSD, where the symptoms last more than three months and possibly a lifetime. And then there's delayed onset, where the symptoms don't show up for at least six months, and then I guess it could be acute delayed onset or chronic delayed onset. Yeah. And you point out here that kids can get it, too. We talk about adults oftentimes, but kids can present differently really poor behavior, really needy behavior, drawing things out. And that's something you always see in movies, too, like the kid drawing the plane cracks or acting it out with dolls. Oh, yeah. That's another one, too. But as they grow up, they become a little more just regular adult symptoms if they haven't gotten over by then. Which is super sad. Yeah. So for a very long time, Chuck, researchers thought that everyone is at equal risk of developing PTSD after going through trauma. Right. But they found, I guess, from studying really hardcore since that 1983 Vietnam study, that there's actually risk factors and protective factors that can keep people from developing PTSD or can make you more likely to develop PTSD. Yeah. One of the big ones is if you've already experienced the prior trauma yeah. Because it's additive, so it can actually mount up these things over the years, and then there could be one final trauma that finally triggers the PTSD. Sure. And you're more likely to if you've experienced these things. Exactly. And you were saying, like, the military is at greater risk than the average person because they are experienced to prolong intense trauma. And it seems to me that PTSD is moving very quickly toward an almost entirely brain based model. And one of the reasons why is they're finding all these chemicals and genetic markers that are responsible for different aspects, and it's like this clear picture is emerging. One of the big ones is glucocorticoid. Yeah, that's right. I got it now. That's a good skill. It's a class of brain hormones, and they help control our stress response. We were talking about how if you experience one trauma, your Glucoco corticoid levels are depleted because it's like, come on, let's just hang in there. We'll hang in there. If you get another if you experience another trauma and those hormones are depleted already, then you're going to experience the fear and stress of that far more acutely than you would have had your Glucocorticoid levels been normal. Yeah, that's why it's compounding and additive. Well, and they also have found that Cortisol, which is the Glucocorticoid, elevated levels of this can affect your memory in a negative way, which can be positive if you have PTSD. So they did a study in 2008, three months blind, double blind, placebo controlled study, our favorite kind that sounds like a real deal, where they gave these three soldiers low doses of Cortisol or hydrocortisone, and they found significant effects with no side effects and even evidence of prolonged effect. So I know later on in the article you talked about, one of the things you're doing now is injecting people with hydrocortisone. Yeah. And like the Er. Yeah, like, immediately after an event. And it's basically shown to decrease your memory. Like you just don't remember that stuff as well. Yeah. And it lowers the stress response. I mean, think about this. The stress response is part of your immune system, right. Where it's at least connected in some really close way. Right. Hydrocortisone is like an dampens your immune response. So they think that PTSD is like, maybe a heightened stress response or heightened immune system response. And just giving somebody, like, a regular shot of hydrocortisone. It's working. Yeah. It's so weird. Well, because it has to do with memory. If you're decreasing your ability to remember something, you're going to increase the likelihood that you won't suffer from bad memory, for sure. 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 in industry. 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So some other risk factors and protective factors, like what type of personality you have. Risk factors. This makes sense. If you're an optimistic type, you're probably going to be less likely to suffer PTSD. Yeah. You have in your belief that there's order to the emergency, is that specific to like, a belief in God? I think that that's one of the accepted definitions of optimism or the optimistic personality. It's interesting. Somebody who believes yeah, it's not chaotic, that there's reasons for things. Things happen for a reason. So I wonder if an atheist is more likely to get PTSD. I could see that interesting. But it's also that other people are generally good. It's like the second part of that definition. Right. If you are someone who tackles things head on and don't put your problems on the back burners, obviously this is going to wait. If you're not putting it on the back burner, that means you're going to have a less likelihood. Right, yeah, I got all confused there. Yeah. Because avoidance is one of the yeah, you got to deal with it. And if you have problem avoidance behavior avoidance behavior, or you just don't like to talk about problems or don't like to think about things, you just rather just kind of push it off. It's probably true for any mental disorder. If you're not prone to tackle it head on, then it's just going to get worse. Yeah. Well, that's one of the things about PTSD, is like, your memories become exaggerated and bloated and way worse even than the actual experience. Right. If you are college graduate or maybe even just went to college, then you're going to be less likely to have it. And we also pointed out earlier that women are less likely to experience it than men. Yeah. They're not entirely certain. Why? I don't know, but that's strictly from the Vietnam study. I think it was something like 36% of Vietnam veterans who experienced hardcore combat. I don't know if that's the term that used, but you know what I'm saying? Hardcore combat? Yes. 36% of males in that situation had PTSD and 18% of females did. Right. So what? That's like twice as likely if you're male than a female. I think genes may have something to do with it. They're looking to a gene called the Serotonin transporter gene. And there is a paper out there that indicates that if you have a mutated gene, serotonin transporter gene, then it could impact your attention to environmental threats, which could impact whether or not you get PST, PTSD. Right. Jeez. So you remember we did that episode? Can my grandfather's diet shorten my life? About Epigenetics. Yeah, that was a good one. Well, epigenetics possibly factor into PTSD as well. So Epigenetics is basically where the function of a gene is affected in somebody's lifetime, like, changes, basically. Right. So it's like evolution on the basis of years rather than generations and generations. Right. And there is a study in Detroit of 100 people who fit the criteria for PTSD diagnosis, and they found that they had six or seven times the epigenetic changes of the control group. And that a lot of those epigenetic changes, most of them had to do with genes that were responsible for keeping up the immune system. Interesting. Did they factor in the fact that they lived in Detroit? Well, what was funny, I guess, in some horribly dark, comic way, is that the researchers were from New York City, and they traveled to Detroit to find 100 people with PTSD. I'm sure they could have found that in New York. I guess they cast a lot in Detroit for some reason. We love Detroit, by the way. We've been getting a lot more emails lately because I think people pick up newly and hear us crashing Detroit, and they don't realize it's been a running joke now for five years. Almost six. Almost six years. We love Detroit. Yeah. Who doesn't? Exactly. And then. Of course. The most important factor with this or any other mental disorder is what they call a trauma membrane. Which is that support network. Your friends and your family. If you've got a strong one and a strong one in the right way. Like you point out. They can be well meaning. But the person receiving that membrane and that protection. It has to do right by them. Yeah. And they can't just be like, Well, I told you, on the bright side, don't worry about that. However you're experiencing this or getting over it, you're doing it wrong. Do it this way. That's not going to help. Right. But basically, the point is, if you are a single alcoholic veteran that is a loner living by yourself, he doesn't like to think about your problem. Yeah. And, like your tiny little apartment, then that's, like, the worst case scenario for PTSD. Yes. Yeah. Like we said, the military is at a greater risk just from being exposed to these situations and being exposed to them over and over again. But one of the other reasons that the military, especially the military of late at risk is because brain injuries were the signature wound of the Iraq War. You don't remember? Thanks to roadside bombs, IEDs. There are a significant amount of head injuries. Our treatment of head injuries advanced enough so that we could save lives where they wouldn't have been before. Right. Like, people were exposed to head injuries and countless other wars. But now we've gotten to the point where we can save those people's lives. The problem is that their brains are changed. They've undergone what Charles Meyers called shell shock, mild traumatic brain injury, which, again, is almost indistinguishable, and possibly one and the same in some cases as PTSD. Yeah. And I imagine the uncertainty of guerrilla warfare and things like roadside bombs, you can be prepped somewhat for battle, and we'll get to that here in a little bit what they're trying to do even more and more these days with that. But with these guerrilla tactics that are going on the Middle East with suicide bombers and car bombs and things like that, kind of the perfect prescription for eventual PTSD. Yeah, I'm trying to take the trauma out of it. Yeah. We mentioned earlier, you remember, the optimistic personality is less likely and the optimist believes in order in the universe. Well, guerrilla warfare is like the opposite of order in the universe. Are you starting to see this pattern? Like, all this stuff is on the table. It's just now a matter of connecting it. It seems like neurology is going to be the field that does that, I think. So counseling, obviously, is step one. And this goes down in a couple of ways. The old favorite cognitive behavioral counseling, which we've talked about quite a bit right. Which apparently, I'm told by Will survey, is not really called that. It's cognitive processing therapy, I think he said. I haven't really seen it called that, but okay, in his note. So we'll stick with the cognitive processing therapy. Well, a couple of the aims there are to basically limit the amount of that excessive retrieval to sometimes it's like, hey, every day from nine to 930, you can think about this in a healthier way, and then you put it away for the day. So that's one way they can do it. Yeah. Another way is to just lessen the memories impact on how bad it was, maybe by pointing out some of the good things. Like, what about the valor you showed during battle? Right. By saving your buddy's life? He died and you watched him die, but you also tried to drag him to safety, so you tried and you put yourself at risk. And you really need to commend yourself for that. Like, carry that around, too. It's going to balance out the horribleness. So not like you need to forget all this, but you need to bring it back to an acceptable level where you can live your life. Exactly. And one of the reasons it's not an acceptable level is because this memory has become so grossly exaggerated right through the process of this, I guess, memory retrieval, fearful memory retrieval over and over and over again. And I think I think most memories are enhanced, good or bad. Like, you remember that prom in high school was way better than it really was, or that break up that you suffered was really actually those usually get better with time, but you know what I'm saying, right? Yeah, but I think Chuck imagine that while you're see, whenever you retrieve a memory, you're adding to it. That's how sens go from what you initially thought of right, to what, ten years after smelling the thing. You think of the same thing with fearful memory retrieval. But when your memory is being retrieved and your life is in the gutter and you're addicted to drugs and you're scared out of your mind, and then you compound that onto the original memory over and over again, then it's just going to get worse and worse and more and more exaggerated. Or the point of cognitive processing therapy is cognitive restructuring. Like literally reordering the brain by taking that memory head on and saying, no, this didn't really happen like this, and you're not paying enough attention to that. Right. Another type therapy of that is not as fun, although I don't know if the other is actually fun. But exposure therapy is pretty hardcore. It's like to pull your knees up to your chest and just rock back and forth kind of therapy. Yeah. I mean, it's basically to relive it over and over in great detail, sometimes taking you to the actual place that it took place with the idea that eventually that fear extinction will happen and you'll get over it. Right. Well, remember you were saying, like the song that was playing on the radio when you got in a car wreck? Right. I like to play that. Well, welcome to hearing that song over and over and over again. When you're retrieving that memory in a certain context and bad things aren't happening, and there's somebody reassuring you saying, look, you're okay, like, everything's okay. Right. Then you're relearning that memory again without the fear associated with it. Yeah. You have to go through hell to get there. Yeah. And it also stops avoidance in its tracks, which is if you're avoiding something, the complete opposite of that is immersion therapy. Like that? Yes. And then what they're finding is the best results are coming from a combination of therapy and medication, of course, because it helps to not be freaked out of your mind when you're having to go through exposure therapy and reliving it. And a class of drugs that helps with that are SSRIs. Yes. Our old friend SSRIs. The two approved by the US. Food and Drug Administration are Zof and Paxil. And those are actually the only two drugs approved by the FDA to treat PTSD on label. Not just the only two, SSRIs. So use those with your therapy. They also have something called Dclycocerine. And is that the one that's an anti tuberculosis drug? Yeah. And they found that it also helps with PTSD. Yeah. They noticed that, like, it cut down on fear by basically it agonizes your Nmethild aspartate receptors. NMDA. Yes. Now, that enhances learning. So if you're going through exposure therapy, you got a little Zolof going to keep you calm and chilled out and able to go through therapy. And you're taking DCs at the same time to make you learn faster, then that would probably be a pretty good treatment for PTSD for some people, yeah. Beta blockers. Like, propanenol has been long known to decrease stress levels. Yeah. And kill Michael Jackson. Really? Was that what he was on? That was the one he was milk. He called it. Oh, he had, like, the drip going. Yeah. I think that's a little different than, like, prescribed a pill. But this drug specifically goes in there and basically disconnects neurons so that you don't have that memory any longer. I read a paper once on using this drug to treat PTSD. This guy was like, this is so effective that you're basically rewriting history. It's like transhuman. It has that level of impact on some people. Interesting. Yeah. Well, we mentioned earlier, the army preparing soldiers for battle. It is not just happening in a physical training way, like learn how to shoot guns and do things like that. Now it's happening very much on the mental level. It was formerly called battlemind. Is it not called that anymore? No. That surprised me that they changed it. Right. When was it from? That was from Walter Reed hospital, too. Yeah, exactly. Now they call it resilience training. That's way better. Exactly. And it actually didn't even start out as something to help with PTSD, but they're learning that it can't help it's. Basically, they handle the seven phases of deployment mentally. They prepare you mentally for the seven phases, like pre deployment deployment, post deployment redeployment and everything from, hey, when you're out of the army or the Marine Corps and you're driving your car around, you can't drive like you're angry, like you were over there. If someone addresses you in an aggressive manner, you can't handle it like you did when you were in battle. You didn't have alcohol over there. Now you're back home. There's booze everywhere. You can't go crazy with that stuff. And so all of that put together, they figured out, ends up helping out with PTSD. Like, rely on your family. They're trying to encourage stuff like this. Right. Well, also, they think it works because they're using it ahead of time, like pre deployment as part of training as well. Right. So I think being exposed to horrors ahead of time will kind of keep you from going through, I guess, as much of a trauma when you see it, the real thing a month later or whatever. Yeah. What's interesting, Chuck, is the IROQUOI had something like this yeah. After going to war, they were basically sequestered from everybody else after they came back and were reassimilated. Yeah, exactly. There's, like, a step down cooling period wow. That the aircraft used because they would go totally insane while they were in battle. Right. That makes sense. They would go berserk the Vikings berserker. Yeah. But I think that you're quite did, too. Okay. Okay. So we're talking about neurology being the key to this. One chemical that they have been studying is called staffman. Jason staffman. And that basically allows us to form fear memories from our experience. So they're obviously working with us in mice, finding that lower levels of that are going to decrease our fear memories or our ability to form them, at least. So that's pretty they're fighting us on a lot of fronts. Yeah. Well, they're doing a lot of research and just need to put it together. What else? Gastrin releasing peptide. Yes. They found that apparently this chemical, like, signals the brain, like, calm down, calm down. Right. And if you have not enough of it, you have an increased chance that you're going to become fearful. Right. So that's another one. Neuropeptide. Why? What did we talk about that in? I don't remember. I know we definitely talked about it. It's basically our own body's anti anxiety drug. And the levels of this are going to fluctuate depending on what kind of stresses and traumas we've been through. And once again, if that one's depleted, then you're going to be less prone to overcome obstacles mentally, naturally. They're trying to figure out how to synthesize it. So if it's as simple as, like injecting some neuropeptide Y into somebody's brain following a trauma, just to get that little extra boost so you can take this on and process it and shake it off, I guess. Ecstasy. That's another one. MDNA. MDMA, yeah. Not surprisingly, when they treated people with PTSD, they felt better. Yeah, but it was long lasting though, right? Or is that the mushrooms? I know we studied that. Hallucink mushrooms. Yeah. I don't remember which one went back more easily. Yeah, I can't remember either, but there was a guy in that study, the MDMA study, who was suicidal for three years or two years. Oh, no, that was something different. The stellar ganglion block. It's like an inoculation of just a local anesthetic. Right. But just above the clavicle. So it interrupts the nerve transmissions of your sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight response. Yeah. So it physically blocks it. Yeah. And it works, apparently. And it can last. There was one guy in that study who was suicidal for two years, and he felt immediate relief. Wow. Yeah. The Ecstasy. I think you said that some people that experience relief had never experienced relief with therapy or any other drugs. Right. So it's pretty interesting. And then our old friend, the thinking cap, the trans cranial magnetic stimulator. I don't know if that's what they call it. Is it? Yeah. Okay. It's better than a thinking cap. Yeah, that's true. They did a study in 2004 of 24 male and female patients suffering from PTSD, and they hooked up the magnets to the head, stimulated blood flow to the brain, and they found out that it had a nice effect for the people. Yeah. They think it increased metabolism or something like that. I think it's a complicated thing. So it takes a complicated cure, because it's not just like well, it's just one thing. It's like all over the brain and it's emotions and it's like fear and memory. It's crazy. Well, yeah. Go in and undo a memory the way that somebody formed it. Yeah, it's pretty interesting stuff. So thank you very much to Will survey for his help on that. And remember, it's PTSD Awareness Month, so we hope we've made you a little more aware. Yes, I'm very interested to see how the research pans out. Yeah, me too. It seems like they made a lot of headway in recent years. Yeah, for sure. If you want to learn more about PTSD, you can go type those letters into the search bar athouseofirst.com It'll. Bring up the old version of the article, but I'll work to get it updated. Okay? Okay. And since I said updated, it means it's time for is it time for message break? Oh, yeah. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You called IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now your systems monitor themselves. 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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. Now, what's your name? Yeah. Okay, I'm going to do a couple of D and D mails over the next couple of weeks because we did a podcast on Dungeons and Dragons. Boy, people loved it. They did. That was a good one. Good feedback. Even like, the uber nerds were like, you guys did a great job. Yeah. There are a couple who are just like, you use the basic rules, but for the most part, people liked it. Well, this is from Christina, and she was very nice. She is from Cleveland, and that is Christina with a K and a Y, and she says, God, I love your show. I'm Christina from Cleveland. I'm writing about the recent DNB podcast because it reminded me of something that happened recently. Both of my parents are huge nerds and as a result, had awesome nerd gaming daughters that is me and my sister, of course. Anyway, when they were dating, my mom and my dad and my dad's four best friends, my Uncle's Bill, Larry, Calvin, and Carlton would get together on weekends, play D and D all weekend long. Nice. Recently, when Uncle Carlton was in town, he brought his old reel to reel tape recorder player and a bunch of recordings of their DNA weekend sessions from the mid 80s. That's awesome. It's like Brian posing now. It was a hilarious trip in the time machine, and every session had its own unique flavor. Anytime there were Carlton's house, you'd hear jazz playing in the background, for example, and they always say Larry was a god among men. As Dungeon Master, it was a ton of fun listening to my young dad and his buddies and their girlfriends and wives joking, drinking, even a little talking oh, my God. And talking crap to each other while they played. The one story that they always tell is when Carlton brought a friend who was new to the group and loaned him a super awesome leveled up axe since he knew he didn't have anything good starting out. When the friend wouldn't return it, uncle Carlton killed his buddy's character, got his axe back, and they continued on. Thanks for everything, Christina. That's pretty awesome. That's a great DNA story. I would love to hear those tapes. Thanks, Christina. Yeah, really. You know, Brian posting is doing this podcast where he plays Dungeons and Dragons with some friends and they just record it. Same thing. Oh, really? He releases it as a podcast. I have to hear that. Yeah. I love that guy. Well, if you want to tell us a great story about your parents, we love to hear those. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyoushunknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasted discovery.com. And by the way, thanks for the letter, Christina. I forgot to say that. Yes. And as always, you can join us at our home on the web, stuffyshadow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Jacktards 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@jackthreds.com. Know Stuff. That's jackthreds. Comnostuff. 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. 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Cryonics: Hi, Frozen Body! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/cryonics-hi-frozen-body | In 1964 The Prospect of Immortality laid out a plan for placing humans in suspended animation. The first person was placed in cryonic suspension three years later. But how does it actually work? Learn more about cryonics in this chilly episode of SYSK. | In 1964 The Prospect of Immortality laid out a plan for placing humans in suspended animation. The first person was placed in cryonic suspension three years later. But how does it actually work? Learn more about cryonics in this chilly episode of SYSK. | Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:40:14 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=14, tm_min=40, tm_sec=14, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=242, tm_isdst=0) | 41162370 | 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 Cityadvantageplatinum select card. Learn more at citi comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. What if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the awardwinning podcast from iHeartRadio and salesforce.org about tackling some of today's biggest challenges like climate change, education, access, and global health. Listen in as host Barrattende 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. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff you should know from Housetopworks.com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and that makes this Stuff you should know that free podcast that comes out twice a week faithfully. And you don't pay a dime for it, do you? I don't. I certainly do not. No one does talk it's right. But we're so glad that you listened to it, even though it is free. Hi. Frozen body. Yeah, that was your idea. It seemed like a no brainer for our Simpsons fans to call this cryonics episode high Frozen body. Dr. Nick, that episode has one of my favorite Simpsons lines of all time. The old guy, Jasper sidekick, he's a frozen body. Yeah, he's the one in there. He comes out, he falls out and he goes over and picks up a moon pie, and he goes, moon pie. What a time to be alive. I love that line. He's great. Yes. So if you haven't seen that episode of The Simpsons, we strongly recommend you do. Right? Yeah. He just gets stuck in the freezer, right, and freezes by accident or something. Yeah. And poo. Starts charging admission to see or guess what's in the can that lost its label a long time ago. So the concept that you can freeze body and reanimate it, it's not just Simpsons lore. No. It is not just cartoon TV lore. No. Actually, there's a guy who kind of came up with this, I guess, in a guy named Robert Edger. Edinger and he just died a week or so ago. Chuck that's right. Like ten days ago, the man died, which is really weird that he did, because we had no idea that he was it didn't spur the idea for the podcast. Yeah. You picked this one, and then it turns out the guy who created the field of cryonics, who coined the word cryonics, died a week before. Yeah. I felt kind of bad because I picked this out last week, or maybe it was earlier this week. Maybe he tapped you on the shoulder. It's like, Maybe so. And then I always look at the news just to see, hey, if there's anything relevant, and I saw that he died. You say, hey, and I saw that he died today. And my first instinct was, oh, awesome, how relevant. And then I thought, well, that's kind of sad. Yes. Actually, that was very nice of you to share his obit with me, though, as an intro. Yeah. He's 92 years old, and he is now frozen, per his wishes, in Michigan. Yes. So he not only established the field of cryonics, which is basically the attempt to store human bodies at very low temperatures in order to eventually revive them. Yeah. They're technically not frozen. Right? Yes, you're absolutely right. To store human bodies at extremely low temperatures without freezing. Yes. That's called vitrification. We'll get into that. But he came up with this whole prospect, this whole idea in a book called The Prospect of Immortality, which is why I just used the word prospect twice. Right. And he wrote it in, and it had a pretty sweeping effect in three years. Three years later, the first person entered cryogenic suspension. Yeah. That was pretty forward thinking, I would say, back then. Sure. Because this sounds like something from the future now. And imagine in the early 60s nuts. Right. But within three years of him writing this book, they already started carrying out his procedures that he kind of came up with and described. He's a physics professor, and he founded the Cryonics Institute, I believe is what it is called, and he joined two wives and his mother in suspended animation in a nondescript building outside of Detroit. Yeah. And the first guy they froze, I'm going to say freeze this whole podcast. Right. James Bedford, he was a 73 year old psychologist, and he is supposedly still frozen in good shape in Arizona. Yes. And we should probably let's do a disclaimer here. When we say frozen or freeze or frozen. When we really screw up, we're not talking about freezing, we're talking about, like we said, vitrification, which is a process of cooling the body down to extremely low temperatures without freezing. Freezing is the forming of ice crystals. Right. That's not good for the cells of your body. No, but what they found supposedly says groups like Alcor Life Extension Outdoors, they say that if you vitrify a cell or group of cells, aka tissue or a body or whatever, you can preserve it, not indefinitely. There's actually a length of time. Do you know the time length that they say you can preserve a body cryogenically. I'm going to guess 1000 years. 10,000. 10,000. Do you know why they say that? No. Actually, because just being on Earth for 10,000 years, the body is exposed to too much cosmic rays and it just destroys the cells on its own literal death by cosmic ray. Wow. Yeah. But it takes 10,000 years. So they're hoping that and this is the whole point of cryonics is that the people that we freeze or vitrified now will be able to be reanimated and cured of any disease, whether it be age or heart attack or whatever killed them in the future. So there's a lot of stuff floating around about cryonics. Cryogenics. Walt Disney was not frozen. He actually died a year before the first guy was frozen. Vitrified. Okay, so that's a complete and total rumor. But let's talk about this, Chuck. There's a lot of people who are skeptical of this, you realize. Oh, yeah. But there's a lot of rationality to it as well. Sure. Okay, so go. Well, I think dad is where we should start off, oddly enough, at the end. It's actually the beginning when we're talking about cryonics. It's very clever. Thank you. I just made that up. Alcohol is one of the big companies in Arizona, and they have a, quote, dying is a process, not an event. And I don't know if that's, like, their huge Terminator style quote when you walk in the lobby, but it should be because, no, they don't have it on a sign or anything. Some guy comes up to you wearing, like, nothing but a lab coat and cowboy boots and shakes you while he says it and then runs off. That's how you're greeted that's good. He should get a job at Walmart. But their whole point in that is that when your heart stopped speeding, you are legally dead. But there is still some cellular and brain function for a short time. Yeah. And their goal is to NAB you in that instant and get the process started in that instant and preserve what minimal function you still have left in your brain in that instant. And that's based on good science. Science is starting to realize that death is a gradual process. It's not, like they said, an event. It's not just like one moment you're living, next minute you're dead. Yeah. It's the whole thing. Remember we talked a lot about organ donation, about brain death and cardiac death? Sure. And legally, in the United States, if your heart stops beating, you can be declared dead. But as far as alcohol is concerned, your brain is still functioning. Right. So therefore, if you can be preserved, you can be eventually reanimated. Like I said, this is sound science. Hypothermia research has led to a new understanding of heart attacks. Right? Right. So a new technique of reviving a patient with a heart attack is to lower their body temperature to, like, 91 degrees very gradually. And then revive them by letting the body warm back up. And they've also found from this research that you can't just inundate it with oxygen, because oxygen goes in and just kills all the cells I mentioned. Yeah, because there's this horrible caveat to resuscitating a heart attack victim is that when you resuscitate them successfully, you give them oxygen. It's just standard procedure at a hospital. Sure. And they're alive and happy, and everything is good, and then two days later, they die. And so they started to look at why people died, and they found out that it was because their cells were perfused with too much oxygen too quickly. So they found that if you lower body temperature and then gradually reintroduce oxygen on its own, you can bring a person back effectively from death. Well, it happens all the time, and I imagine that makes sense. It's probably a traumatic event to be brought back to life on your body itself. Physiologically, sure, that makes sense. Yeah, but I just said it happens all the time. People's hearts stop. People are trapped under ice and, quote unquote, dead, and they're brought back to life and function normally. Sometimes they don't function normally, but this isn't so much different than that. No, it's not. And it's based on that. It's based on the concept. It is. So, Chuck, you're saying that let's say you are a member of Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Right. Which apparently is not that expensive. They liken it to a lifetime of smoking cigarettes or having cable TV or the like. It's pretty expensive. It is, but still, I mean, it's not as much as you would think. I think I got the fees okay. Right here in front of me. If you're a first family member, here's the deal. You got to sign up, and you got to pay for life, and then you got to pay, I believe, for the process on top of that. Right. Because it's a membership club, and then there's going to be a spike in pay when you die. So the first family member is $620 a year. Each additional family member, if you want them on your cell phone plan, is $310 a year. Minor. Family member is $155 a year. Minor. Like just an aunt, I guess? Not like, not siblings? No, not me as a kid. Oh, really? No, because it says no, wait, you're right. It says under 18. Totally. Right. Like an aunt. You don't really care. That's why your family all right. And if you're a student, good news. It's only $310 a year, but I imagine your rate jumps up when you graduate. Sure, because they always screw you when you graduate. So that's just the membership fees. The actual body freezing is up to 150K. This article says alcohol is 200 now. Is it really? And the brain is 80. And there are surcharges, if you're in England, of 15 grand outside US. Canada and England, it's 25 grand. I wonder why. And then you can also get if you're not a member, you can pay for a family member. Like, let's say none of us are members and you want to freeze your father, the herbal Elvis, upon his expiration. You'd have to pay 50 grand because there weren't any membership dues. Yeah. So it's a $50,000 surcharge if you just want to say, hey, I want my dad frozen, and none of us were ever members. Got you. All right, I'll have to talk to dad about that, see what he thinks. So let's say you are a member in good standing. You've got minor family members totally insured under this plan, or as members as well. And we should also say we keep saying Alcor is far and away with the most widely known cryonics group. Yeah. But there's like, at least two others. Yeah. The one in Michigan just go to their websites if you want to compare them. The Alcor looks pretty they're both legit. But the one in Michigan's website, it looks sort of like a MySpace page. It does, yeah. My advice to the Michigan Institute is to just pay somebody to do your website seriously if you want to be taken seriously. But that's the one that was founded by Robert Editor. Well, and I think he did the website in 1967. Yeah, I think so, too. He's like Sunday, there's going to be an Internet, and this is going to be the first thing on it, and it's never going to change. Okay, let's say you're a member in good standing at any of the cryonics groups or foundations or labs, and you're about to die, right? Yes. What happens to you? Chuck, take us through the process. Well, the first thing that happens is they are literally at your deathbed. The team is waiting for you to expire. I want RVs. And as soon as they do that, as soon as you die, rather, they will, as the article says, spring into action. And also, Chuck, we should say they have to wait until you declare debt. It's illegal to put someone into a cryonic suspension. Or as the Michigan website says right now, it's illegal people. Okay. So I think they envision the future where if you're on life support or something, you could probably or if you're just fully healthy, they also envision a future where we reanimate dead people. Yeah, that's true. So what they do is they spring into action. They stabilize your body by getting blood flowing and oxygen, but I guess not too much oxygen. And they pack you in ice and pump in some heparin, which is an antiquagulant, so your blood doesn't clot. And then they rush on the opposite of calf stomach. Yeah, exactly. And then they rush you to the facility where the real science begins. Right. And it's about here that things get a tad cutting edge, I would say. So basically, what they have to do is remove the water from your body, right. And not just like your Pea or your saliva. They got to literally get the water out of your cells. Yeah, I read at least 60% of your cells. Okay. So it must be all the organ cells and all the vitals, and they go after the brain in particular. Your brain is of the utmost importance, and you can actually have your brain alone cryonically suspended for something like fifty K. Eighty K. They raised a stat in the past five years. This article written I don't think it was that long ago, but, hey, it ain't cheap. And they still sort in your head, by the way. It's not like futurama. Oh, cool. They said it does too much damage. And why bother? Your head is a great bowling ball case, essentially awesome. You cut your head off and preserve the whole thing, but it's really just your brain that's undergone the vitrification process. Yeah. That is neat. Ted Williams head is floating somewhere his whole body wasn't. They removed the body. They're in two separate chambers. Oh, that's right. So when you're on the table, they remove the water from your body. And how do they do that? I didn't understand how they remove water from your cells. You're asking me? Yeah. I don't know. Is it a pressing? I don't know, man. The doctor just pressed down on you. I tried to find out the literal process of how they get the water from the cells and replace it with the antifreeze. But they do replace it with antifreeze. A glycol based basically a human antifreeze. Yeah. Chiropracticant is what they call it. A Cairo cryo. Cryo. We got there eventually. Cryo protect Jerry's. Like, this is not their best day. Yeah, it's a cryoprotectant. So they pump you full of this stuff, basically, like embalming fluid that will never freeze. And then they lay you on a bed of dry ice. And this is astounding to me that you can even get any tissue down to this degree. But basically, they freeze your body. I'm sorry. They vitrify your body down to negative 130 degrees Celsius, which is negative 202 degrees Fahrenheit. Negative 200 degrees Fahrenheit? Isn't that like absolute zero? I don't know. We've called out on that before. Right. I will figure it out. No, we've been called out on whether 40 deg 40 is the same in Celsius or Fahrenheit, which it is. All right? And then once your body reaches that temperature, you are vitrified, you're ready to go, you're ready to be stored for up to 10,000 years. And what they do is they put you in a tank. Right? Yeah. Well, first of all, that means that your molecules have slowed down to the point where the chemistry stops. Right. There's no metabolism going on whatsoever. Nothing. It's called the glass transition temperature. So everything kind of goes that's suspended animation. It's a perfect example of it. Thank you. That's great. So they stuff you in a tank, right? That's right. If it's just your head, it's called a neuropod. Right, okay. And then if it's your body, it's called, I think, a cryopod. I'd call it a full body pod. Okay. And then they put you in a container that can hold maybe four or five bodies because you're not by yourself. Yeah. That's a little weird. Yeah, I thought so, too. Especially if somehow you're still cognizant, like, if that was possible and you just didn't really like the people around you, you stuck with them for $10,000. That would stink. Yeah. So there's a pretty nice picture of an alcohol container that holds four whole body pods and six neuropods. Right. So it's like a freaky futuristic nursing home in there. Yeah. And there you go. Your online says it was for 10,000 years, and then every once in a while, they have what are called perfusion thresholds, I believe. Oh, yeah. And they have software that measures that, like the concentration of liquid nitrogen, because that's what you're in. You're in a bad liquid nitrogen that's being cooled down, ultimately even less than 202 degrees Fahrenheit. When you're in cold storage, as it were, you are stored in about negative 320 degree Fahrenheit, and liquid nitrogen at that temperature will eventually evaporate. So they have to keep adding some. And they have software that monitors this. And there you go. You are officially in cryogenic suspension. Head down. Upside down. Yes. Which I thought was pretty clever. Back to the podcast for me. If there's a leak, you want your head down because you want your brain. I guess if it leaks, the bottom obviously will be the last bit to contain any of the liquid. So that's where they want your head. It's very clever. Yeah. But again, if you're the least bit conscious or cognizant or anything like that, you're dead. Yeah, but man, can you imagine? That gives me a headache just thinking about being upside down. I'm sure it's awful. Yeah. All the frozen blood rushes to your head. That's right. And one giant block. Icy blood. Yeah. Vitrifying. That's right. 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. 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That's K twelve.com podcast and start taking charge of your future today. So what's the deal with all this, Chuck? As we said, there's a lot of people who criticize this stuff, and it seems like for good measure, they're saying, like, this is a nice fancy process that you guys have come up with, and we're sure that you're doing everything you're saying. And yes, it is based on real science, but you can base anything on real science and it's still just pseudoscience. Sure, if it's not science, it's pseudoscience, it's trickery. Right. Well, they get a lot of heat, obviously, places like alcohol do. And one of the problems they say is that, first of all, it's based on three very different scientific fields. So the reason why most scientists don't come out and say this can work is because they're scientists in a single given field and they don't understand that this involves three very different disciplines. They're like podiatrists. Yeah, exactly. One of the other problems is that one of the reasons why are they called cryobiologists or yes, cryobiologists. People who study low temperature biology. Yeah, they say that they don't come out and say it can work because they feel like it has been given the pseudoscience moniker, and so it will overshadow the real work they've done, quote unquote, real work that they've done with other kinds of cryofreezing. So they're just like, I don't even want to talk about that stuff. Right? I mean, your professional reputation is at stake. Yeah, sure. But again, that doesn't necessarily mean that just because skeptics have labeled this fraud that it doesn't necessarily work. The other big point as far as cryonic groups or boards or whatever, the point that they tend to make usually, is that we have no idea how to reanimate anybody. Yeah, they're upfront about that. Yeah, they're saying, like, what we're doing, and this is what Alcohol Life Extension is known for is basically they know how to vitrify tissue and then just keep it that way indefinitely. And so that's what they're saying they're doing. Basically, they're just the keepers of these bodies that are in suspended animation or dead, depending on your view, until we come up with a way to revive them and repair anything that might have been wrong with them. And the great white hope, apparently, among cryogenic adherents is nanotechnology. Yes. Which makes sense, right? Nanotechnology, they can get down to the single atom and do mechanics work, essentially, right. Repair work on themselves. So they think that that is the future of being able to reanimate people like this. Yeah. Which, again, that's all well and good, but you can't just be like, oh, yeah, we heard about nanotechnology, and that's probably where it'll be. And how about this? Not only will it be in the field of nanotechnology that reanimates people, but it will be in 2040, which is apparently the number that they throw out. Dubious there. But it seems like if they stick to the fact that, no, we're putting people in suspended animation, and there's a good chance that if death is a process and we're getting to this process, we're interrupting this process, then we can reverse it. Yes. They're not saying we're promising eternal life or promising that we can bring you back from the dead. They're basically pretty upfront about saying, we are a high tech storage facility, period. So when we talk about reanimating people, this is not new. The idea of reanimating a corpse is extremely old. There was this cool little movement in the 19th century called galvanic reanimation. Basically, it amounted to hooking recently killed executed criminals up to, like, huge batteries via cables. Wow. And during public display, like, applying the electricity and making them, like, twitch and making their eyes open or making them grimace horribly. And that was like, how you reanimated a corpse, which, look at the World's Fairs. By definition, that is reanimating it, but it's the technical definition. It didn't imbue any life into it. Sure. But it did give Mary Shelley a good idea for Frankenstein. Is that where she got it? Yeah, that was the whole idea for a very long time, that if you could, under the right circumstances, introduce an electrical current to life to a dead body, you could bring it back to life. Which is pretty clever, if you think about it, because this is before the time of neuroscience or about the time it was. Nathan right, yeah. And neuroscience, if anything, has given us the awareness that everything is the result of electrochemical conduction throughout the body. Right. So it was pretty smart to think of electricity as a way to reanimate bodies. Although it doesn't do anything. Yeah. Well, that's also the reason why, obviously, the brain is so important. And they say you can just opt for the $80,000 head freeze, because maybe in the future, if we're far enough along where we can reanimate a person from cryogenic freezing, then we should be at the point where we can clone you a body to go along with that head. Why not a hot body, too? Yeah, sure. I wear Daisy Dukes all the time in my body. You don't even wear shorts now. Well, I don't have a hot cloned body. I've seen you in shorts once, actually, when you came over to my house to borrow the lawnmower. You had on shorts. Really? And I saw your bare leg. I've seen you in boxer shorts, too. When I think on one of our trips. Like you changed clothes in front of me or something. I think you should get a little more specific for the audience. Well, we didn't have, like, a dress up party, but it was like, hey, we're late for something and you're changing your clothes or something. I don't know. I mean, I didn't mark it on my oh, in Guatemala. I'll bet it was in Guatemala. Lake line. Okay, sure. That one crazy day. Anyway, that was happening there. That was possibly the wildest tangent we've ever been on. You've seen me in my boxers and in shorts. I've seen your bare legs and they're fine. I don't see why you don't like shorts. No, not for you. No. But it could be for a cloned body, right? Yeah. Let's just get back to it, buddy. And again, back to the reanimation research I think we talked about before max Planck Institute back in 2000. There's this one thing on the web, and I can't find any follow up stuff or any lead up stuff, but basically they're talking about what therapeutic hypothermia. Research has shown that it's not death that injures cells and tissue and makes them unreadimatable. It's trying to reanimate them and doing it too quickly. And they were working on reanimating dead bodies. And apparently since then, we have figured out how to reanimate some cryopreserved tissue. Like a rabbit kidney. Yeah, that worked. In 2005, apparently they vitrified a rabbit kidney. They took it out of a rabbit, they said, you wait here vitrified the kidney, brought it back, put it back in the rabbit and said, Go urinate. And the rabbit did, and the kidney exploded. They have also reanimated a nematode worm. Big deal. But, hey, it worked. But no other mammals. Yeah, they said dogs and monkeys, they've had their blood replaced. Well, remember that supposed Russian research film from 1941 of the Dog's Head? Oh, God, that's awful. Yeah, but dogs and monkeys, they've had their blood replaced with the antifreeze, essentially cooled it to below zero degrees and rewarmed it and revived them successfully. But that's zero degrees is a long way from negative 300 Celsius. Yes, but they're pointing this to this and saying, hey, look, this could be possible. Right? And it wasn't even vitrified, was it? It was just brought to a low temperature. No, it said their blood was replaced. I don't know if all the cells were, but the blood was at least yeah. So there are things to look for in the future when you are successfully re animated, possibly given a cloned body that wears Daisy Dukes a lot. And there's going to be some legal issues that people are already starting to think of about reanimating. Yes. For example, when you are taken off to the cryonic facility, as far as society and the court system and Social Security administration is concerned sure. You're illegally dead. Yes. I didn't think about that. What happens when you come back. To life, you'd have to apply to be a new person again, I guess. So they figured that probably somebody who's presumed dead and wasn't right. But they were declared legally dead and they come back after that. Nobody says, well, sorry, and nobody is going to say that somebody who's reanimated. But one of the other propositions that they're considering is a possibility is issuing you a new birth certificate. Really? Isn't that cool? That is cool. So you would be literally reborn as far as the law is concerned. And then also what happens, Chuck, as happened in the when there were, I think, six big cryogenic suspension companies in operation and that number dropped dramatically in the late seventies, early eighties. What happened to those bodies, do you know? I do know. They were left to rot. Really? Yes. The company went bankrupt and said, we don't have any money to keep these things going. Wow. And since it was a corporation, they could say that and the person walked away, but the bodies were just left to thaw and rot. And that's what happened. Alcohol supposedly has a fund set aside to where if anything happens to the company, it will provide a bridge to continue care until they figure out what to do with these. That's where a lot of the 200 grand goes, supposedly. I think about half of that goes into that trust. And I was researching them. Apparently they have a self perpetuating board, which they're frequently criticized for. Right. Because there's no new blood in there, as it were. But the board is generally, or has been very transparent about how much money is paid. Like in 1990, supposedly they announced that they were going to slash their staff pay across the board by 25%. The average staff worker there made like 25 grand. Yes. Board members don't get paid at all. Right, right. Supposedly these people are just into it, like to further cryonic research and keep these bodies suspended. Right. That's what you'll see on their website at least, right, yeah. But I was reading some outside links. There's this blog called Depressed Metabolism, which is just about all that, and they were going over a 2009 El Core report. But they seem very conservative, but not good at generating their own income. They rely a lot on donations. All the technology they use is licensed elsewhere. So there's like bleeding money, but they manage to stay afloat because of donations from wealthy members, which is kind of unfair. But they're very conservative too. Right. Whereas the Cryonics Institute was always kind of criticized for being like a little reckless, a little cutting edge, but they were looking at cryonics is not necessarily a way to keep people in suspended animation, but how do we apply this medically and get these people reanimated again? Right. Not just indefinitely in suspended animation? Well, and how do you get mainstream medical science behind this period is one of their big battles. Yeah, I know that alcohol is in Arizona, and in 2004 there was a bill passed by the House there in Arizona that basically was going to put them under the regulation of the state funeral board, which would have effectively, probably shut them down. And it was pulled from the floor, but they said it was a really nasty debate on the floor because there's a lot of religious ethical ramifications here that I guess we could talk about. But they said that we don't know, this could come back and they could shut us down. You never know in Arizona, at least. Yes, but the ethical concerns is alcor on their website, again, has addressed some of these, because a lot of religious folks might say, this is not something you should be doing, you shouldn't be playing God. And they say that patients are theologically equivalent to unconscious patients in a hospital with an uncertain prognosis. Theologically speaking, they've had people right into, like, people in the Catholic Church and Protestant churches and even the churches of Jesus Christ of the Latter day Saints. They've written essays supporting it. Some people have, yeah. It's like if you're on life support, you're playing God, or somebody's playing God with you. But other people in religious circles have blasted it. So it depends on who you want to listen to. Yes, it does. And they said it's not just for the rich. That's one of the myths. They say it's not an indulgence of the rich. And they say most of the membership is middle class. Yeah. And paid for with insurance. Yeah, life insurance. Is that true? I didn't get a chance to research that one, not for myself. But 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 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. Paul Rud's making a movie about this. Did you see that? It's been done. What, Iceman? No iceman. Two the Return of Iceman. Iceman. Three. The Iceman Lil Iceman Jr. What else? Well, this one is bona fide. Aaron Morris, the awesome documentarian. He's making his first non documentary film since the early 90s. Fiction, I'm sure, but it's not fiction because it's a true story. First feature film. Wow, man, that's awesome. Yeah. He came out with a new documentary recently, too, didn't he? Yeah, it's about the tabloid scandal when that woman kidnapped the Mormon. I don't know, I think this woman kidnapped some Mormon guy and took him away to some cabin and forced sex upon him for months and then came back and was a celebrity because of it in the 70s. Wow. Yeah, it looks really good. So his featured film sorry for interrupting. That's all right. It's based on the memoir by Robert F. Nelson called taken from this American Life segment. And IRA Glass is producing this? Isn't everything taken from this American Life segment. And the name of this American Life was cold as Ice was the name of the show. Personally, I think high frozen body. Little better. Way better. Chuck. Way to go. So paul Rudd one of my favorites. He's playing this dude. Yeah, good for him. Good for Iris, too. We need to talk about Ted Williams real quick. Oh, yeah. Good Lord, that was close. Well, as you said, Walt Disney was not suspended in liquid nitrogen, but Ted Williams, the famous hitter, last hitter to hit 400 in baseball is yeah, he's an Alcor member. In 2002, they put him on vitrify. They set it to vitrify, and he was like there was a legal battle over it. Apparently, his daughter was accusing his son of having him vitrified, put in cryonic animation or suspended animation because he wanted to later sell his dad's DNA. Which apparently his son was like, yeah, maybe, but dad still wanted to we had a sign pact, me and our other sister. But not you. Yeah. He didn't even know him until he was 30, though. He was a half brother. Is that right? Or a half son. Okay, well, Ted was running around telling people all sorts of different stuff, apparently. Yeah, he told his daughter that he wanted to be cremated and have his cremated remains scattered over the Florida Keys. So it says she the daughter. The son said, no, we had a pack, the signed pack, which apparently he was able to produce. So the judge said, okay, Ted's going to stay frozen. You can't sell his DNA. Bang, boom, bon Jovi, case closed. Yeah, and banging a gamble. He was painted in an unfair light because of the Sports Illustrated article by Tom Verducci that basically slammed him as, hey, this kid didn't even know until he's 30 he's going to sell his DNA. And it was apparently he got one version of the story, and that's it. And stopped his fact checking there. I've seen follow up reports where this guy was like, that ain't what happened, and I did not want to sell his DNA, and we really got to be close after I met him later in life and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, you got anything else? Just if you want to know how popular this is. As of June of this year, alcor has 950 members and 106 quote unquote patients. Yeah, that's what they call them in Michigan. The Cryonics Institute, I believe, has over 100. So there's a couple of hundred and change people currently in the United States upside down, upside of liquid nitrogen with other people. Yeah. One of them might be Ted Williams. I wonder if they're like, hey, check it out. Yeah, the Yankee Clipper. No, that was Joe Demagio. Ted Williams was the boss. Was he Red Sock? It was like the monster. I always confused him with Johnny Bent. Didn't they play at the same time? Or Collier Stransky, maybe. It may have overlapped. It was like the big hitter or the monster hitter. Well, he was the last player to hit 400. Yeah, I can't remember. Anyway, if you want to learn more about baseball, we encourage you to type that word into the search bar@housedefworks.com. You can also type in cryonics. Cryonics. And that will lead you to some cool articles. Also, if you have not gotten around to reading HP. Lovecraft's brilliant short story, herbert west reanimator. Oh, yeah, check it out. Probably his best. And I said reanimator, which means that it's time for a listener mail. That's right. Why? I'm going to get hammered by Yankee fans and Red Sox fans for that. I back off of that one. Joe DiMaggio is the Yankee Clipper. K Williams is the monster. Well, the Green Monster. Is that what you're thinking? Yeah. I mean, that's influencing it, but there's something there. All right. Today, Josh, I got on Facebook, I don't know if you saw, and I was like, I can't find any good listener mail, so tell me some stories. And I just got a few of those to read off. Nathan. I'm sorry, Nathaniel. Jerkovitz got hit by a car while walking home from work earlier this week as I was listening to one of your episodes. Cool. Which one? I don't know. He said he rolled off the hood and checked to make sure nothing was broken and then scrolled back to what I had missed. Nice. That was Nathan, Nathaniel. So I hope you're okay. Yeah. Hang in there, Nathaniel. Elena said my doctor says I mispronounced letters when I speak, not because of a list, but because I have a heart shaped uvula. To be honest, until we pointed it out, I didn't have any idea that everyone else's uvula did not have a split in the center. How about that? Yeah, split UVLO. Yeah, I've heard of that. And Angie, I said, when I was seven years old, my mom spotted a wood tick in my ear while eating in the subway. I screamed hysterically. My stepdad tried to remove it with a variety of plastic cutlery and an acetylene torch. I attracted the attention of a cop who tried his best with keys. I started to bleed from my ear, and the subway told us to leave. The subway did weird. My mom sat me on a bench outside, continued the quest. The man sitting next to us asked about why I was screaming. And once my mom told him, he asked if he could try and produce a hook for a hand. What is going on with this story? I'm so confused. She had a tick in her ear. No one could get it out. They went outside, and this dude the subway told him, dude. And then this dude with a hook on his hand said, can I give it a shot? Okay. This guy's in New York I screamed even louder as my mother held me down, and the man plucked the tick from my ear. So I thanked him for saving my life. And I still smile every time I encountered a person with a hook for a hand. And they think that she's laughing at them, I don't know. And then finally, congratulations to our buddy Andy. John Cox. Yeah, with the mustache. He got engaged. Oh, hey, congratulations. Yes. And she said yes, and he's getting married. And Andy is one of our boys. And way to go, dude. That is fantastic. Way to go. I'm sure you shaved off the mustache and it said, Will you marry me? Underneath it. And Ben. Yeah, that was a great idea. Chuck stories. You got a story? You want to hear it? Wait until Chuck asks, not forget it. Just go ahead and let us know. Go onto our Facebook page. It's facebook. Comstuffyturnnow. You can also tweet a stories if they consist of 140 characters or less. That'd be good. That's a great idea. We want your 140 character story. That's fine on Twitter. Good idea, Chuck. S-Y-S-K podcast is our Twitter handle. And then you can also send us email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join Housetofwork staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon music that's so good, it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today you know you're 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." | ||
Pickpockets: Artists or Crooks? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/pickpockets-artists-or-crooks | There aren't many criminal pursuits that are as storied as pickpocketing, and some people fondly reminisce over its heyday. Learn why some consider pickpocketing an art form, how to protect yourself from this art and more in this episode. | There aren't many criminal pursuits that are as storied as pickpocketing, and some people fondly reminisce over its heyday. Learn why some consider pickpocketing an art form, how to protect yourself from this art and more in this episode. | Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:53:19 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=17, tm_min=53, tm_sec=19, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=38, tm_isdst=0) | 31604484 | 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. Who's. Charles W. Topic. Brian Witness whistle. That's right. And the stuff you should know. This is the podcast. Yes. This is off to a terrible start yet again. That's what, 450 consecutive bad starts? No, we haven't hit 400 yet. Yeah. What, bad starts or just shows? Okay, maybe bad starts yet. Shows. We're coming up on it got to be close to 450, right? No, coming up on 400, I think. I thought we were over that. No, not yet. No, we would mentioned our 400. So my goal is for us to make it to 500, and then after that, I'll bet you're all that's exactly right. Brian, I think I might know what your intro is, but it would be a wild stab in the dark. I'd like to hear it because I don't have an intro. Oh, really? Yeah. What's my intro? Well, I got one, then. Okay. The origin of the word sidekick. You ever heard this? What does that have to do with Pickpockets? I'll tell you, my friend, okay. Back in the old days in London, which is obviously Oliver Twist made Pickpocketing very famous in London. Charles Dickenstein. Yeah. His character, they had different their own language, we'll find out, as Pickpockets have their own language, period, all sorts of lingo, like multiple names for everything. Right. And back in the day, each pocket had its own name. The Jerve J-E-R-V-E or the Harvey was the vest pocket. And the kick, sorry, the Pratt was the back pocket and the kick was the side pocket. And the kick was the most difficult spot to pickpocket because it was on the leg and it was always moving. And so people soon realized that that was the safest place to put their stuff was in the sidekick. And so the sidekick, years later, becomes a term for someone helpful and maybe protective. Tanto, like tanto. So that's sidekick, that's your first interest, is it really? I believe it is. Jeez, I would have picked a better one. No, that's fantastic. That one's going to go down and stuff. You should know more as the sidekick. And that was my first not the sidekick, but I don't know, fairly appropriate. Do you remember when we used to argue about that? About whether you were or not? What did we settle on? That you're not. Okay, but I know where it originates from Oliver Twist now from the sidekick. Well, what's funny is there's a lot of stuff that has to do with Pickpocketing, Chuck, that did originate from Oliver Twist. Oh, really? Yeah. Like you were talking about Pickpocketing, it's only go, like you said, big time, and it's kind of storyed and almost legendary. And if you dial the clock back a few decades, it was kind of looked upon the way that maybe today people look upon pirates. You know what I'm saying? Like they're criminals. Sure. But there's so much art to what they're doing. Maybe like somebody who could steal a painting from a museum right. That you have to at least grudgingly respect them. Well, not talk to we'll talk about some people who studied this. Yeah. I wish someone was here. Is that what this guy is doing? Exactly. He's lifting your wallet. In this article you found from Slate, there were some experts on pickpocketing, and they definitely think of it as an art. Almost art. Specifically, I want to mention the guy's name Bob Arno, whose job it is to travel the world and pose as a mark as a dungeon. Yeah. And then catch people and figure out what they're doing. Interesting to keep abreast of it. Yeah. So, Chuck, let's talk a little bit about the basics of pickpocketing. Right? Yes. Which will, I think, kind of give us a better view of why people think that it's an art form. Sure. You've got a few different kinds of people involved. Like, there's the low level pickpockets who are really just basically somebody who has a moral compass that's off and an open bag next to him. Yeah. The opportunist. Right. Like, hey, there's a co ed studying Econ 101 on the lawn, and she's got her iPad sticking out of her open backpack right next to her. Right. Which she has her headphones jacked into. It turned up all the way and is not paying attention because she's been drinking. Well, if the headphones are on her attached to the iPad, then right. The person is grabbing the iPad. Well, sure. Oh, I thought you meant, like, there was a person next to her that was open. Yeah. And the iPad is in there. She's not studying with the iPad. Oh, got you. Those are only for Netflix. That's what I thought she was deserving. She's studying. Right. Maybe we're talking about a different person. Which one? I think we just convoluted the easiest mark that there is. Right. Okay. Which is the unassuming college student right. Or you're at, like, a coffee place or something like that, and there's somebody next to you, and it's the kind of place where you would expect somebody is going to be next to you and you're not really paying attention. You're involved in your computer and their hands in your bag. Sure. Grabbing your wallet or whatever. Or you're asleep on the beach. Right. Very common one. Yeah. That one stinks. Because you want to be able to sleep on the beach. Heck yeah, man. If you have your bag open next to you and your wallet sitting in it at a coffee house and you're not paying attention to it, you got what you deserved. If somebody steals, I mean, it stinks that there are people out there stealing in general and that you can't just go through life like that. But we all know full well that you can't go through life like that. And if you do, then you have no right to complain. You can't even cancel all of your credit cards. You have to leave one of your credit cards open because punishment yes, it's punishment for yourself. Well, we actually skip to why people pickpocket to begin with. It's mainly because it's pretty non confrontational crime, and you're never known or confronted, and you're not, like, holding a gun, so there's no although we did find out it's a felony in a lot of states, even just non weapon involved. Pickpocketing. Yeah. But that's pretty new. Is it? Yeah. For a very long time, it was like if you picked somebody's pocket, you got very it was a small sentence. You had to return the money and apologize. Pretty much, yeah. The cop brought you over by your ear. Exactly. But for the most part, like you said, it's not confrontational. So the person who loses his or her wallet to a pickpocket will probably have no idea who took it, won't know for a long time, and it's fairly safe. If you're good at it, it's safe crime. Yeah. Plus, there's no weapons involved, which is why the sentences were traditionally not very big. It's almost victimless except for the victim. Well, it depends. If you're touring Europe and you have everything, including your passport and your wallet in your back pocket, and all of it is taken. There's a victim in that one. Yeah, there's a victim in all of them. I knew a girl who had her sunglasses ripped off her face in Rome, Italy. Okay, that's not artful, Natch. Guys. Yeah, that's not artful. You're just a jerk. True. At the Starbucks by my old place, there was a rash of kids just running in and stealing people's iPhones right off the table and running out or out of their hand or stealing the computer that they were working on the laptop and running out the door. That's not pickpocketing. No. And there's a guy who has a coffee place in Grant Park. There was just a robbery, and everybody was robbed in that manner. Like, people just ran in and stole and ran out. So the guy is getting locks for the table so you can slide your laptop in and lock it in place. Really? Yeah. Wow. That's sad that you have to do that. I agree. All right, so where are we? Crowded subway. Yes. This is the slightly higher in the hierarchy of pickpockets. Maybe a sound effect here. Well, how about this, Chuck? One of the things I think that kind of gets the point across when you're describing pickpocketing sure. Is saying when you're talking about a scam, saying the old first. Okay. Right. And having maybe, like, old timey ragtime saloon music playing in the background while you're describing it. So go ahead with that, Jerry's. Like, on the fly, crowded subway car, which is called the old sandwich. You got it. Or sandwich, for those of you who are a little more proper. And a lot of times these pickpockets work in teams because you're counting on the benefit of distraction. Yes. So tell them how the old sandwich works. Well, the sandwiches say you got a person in front who's called the stall. And the stall suddenly maybe stops short and the person, the target bumps into them the mark. Yes. And then the hook or the pick or the wire okay. Bumps into him. It's expected that somebody behind you would bump into you because this is the jerk's fault in front of you. Right. So you're paying attention to the jerk in front of you while the guy behind you, you turn around and apologize to. And after by that time, the guy's already stolen your wallet. So the person in front of you ends up stealing it. No, the person in front of you is the stall. Okay. You're like, Why did you stop? And while you stopped, the guy who bumped in behind you, the hook stolen your wallet. I thought they turned around and said, boy, I'm sorry for the jerk in front of me. They might have been seeing I guarantee you that's a variation on it. That's called the sandwich wrap. The low carb wrap. Right. Chuck there's also the people who do the sandwich work in teams. The team is actually called a canon. So it's a group of organized pickpockets like Oliver Twist and his buddies. Exactly. Lead, appropriately enough, then by a fagin, which is an old hook, an old master pickpocket who is named after the crime boss and Oliver Twist. Right? Yeah. And the fagin teaches younger pickpockets the ropes and absorbs them into the cannon over time. What was that movie that they mentioned? Oliver Twist. Well, no, there was another. Oh, harry in your pocket, I think. Yeah. Is what it's called. I haven't seen it, but it's a James Coburn movie from 73. You got no, I believe that I will be. Me, too. I've got no complaints there. So a canon is probably going to be the people who are really good at what they're doing because there's an old venerable guy leading the whole thing. Then you go down, like, a couple of notches. You've got bag workers who go for purses. Right. Yeah. Mole buzzers or I guess it might be the English version. Yeah. Well, that takes some skill because you're getting close to somebody. Right. Lush workers not that hard on the subway. A lush worker would just target somebody who was coming home drunk on the subway. They just, I guess, open up their vest and take their wallet out and close their vest, smack the guy in the face of the wallet and then wait for the subway to arrive at it. Stop. Yeah. Not very hard. No. So they were viewed kind of lower level. Sure. But did you read about the Fob workers. Yeah. And it's hard to say respect again, because these are criminals, but the Fob worker really puts in his or her time. Right. So this person just uses nothing but his index finger and his middle finger. Boom. Yeah. And just walks through a subway on a ride and just grabs, like, a couple of quarters, a dollar, whatever's. Easy to grab. Crazy. And apparently this one guy estimated I think it was an old subway dick he estimated that Fob workers could get, like, $400 out of a single subway ride. That's crazy. Yeah. Well, that's probably from Wall Street to Coney Island. Sure. But this is like the 80s. Yeah, true. 1980s. Exactly. Not even 1880s. Right. Well, I saw where one guy actually went to class in the don't know if it was in this article or another one. Okay. But paid a fagin to teach him the art of pickpocketing. That was probably in that Popular Science article from the sixties article reference. Oh, I know what it was. It was from the New York Times, but it was an archived edition. Nice. Yeah. So what do you learn? How to pickpocket. Right. Did he write about it or did he say, like, no, I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you? Well, the article was just on the lingo. Really? Yeah. And then it source of where the guy got the lingo from, and it was this dude that said he went to school. Nice. Yeah. What else do we have? Children, sadly, in a lot of countries. Remember the human trafficking episode we talked about children being forced to beg? I guarantee that there are some out there that are forced to pickpocket. Well, distracting. Once again, the working in pairs. Look at my shiny toy. Or while they're begging you, the other kid will come up and reach a little tiny hand in the pocket. The old tiny hand. The old tiny hand trick. This one was my favorite truck. Apparently, it's fairly common to throw bird droppings on somebody surreptitiously, then offered to help clean it off. I read this because I didn't believe that, and I saw people on TripAdvisor who it's not bird droppings. It's like fake bird droppings, and they'll sling it on people, and then they come up and go, oh, God, I can't believe that happened. Are you okay? Like, here's the towel. You know, it's crazy. It just dawned on me. You mean? I were in New York once. I think it was when we were on the Whatever show that trip. When you and I were on the Whatever show? Yeah. And we were standing in line at the Shake Shack. Is that the name of the place? I don't know. It's in one of the parks. What is it? Oh, sure, front park. I can't remember. Yes, I think that's what it is. Okay, so I think it is a Shake Shack. Anyway, we're standing in line and this guy got bird droppings. It fell right around him in a circle, didn't hit him, and it made no sense physically how that happened. And now I wonder if somebody was trying to pick his pocket and failed, or else if they did and just distracted them and then offered to help clean it off. Well, the other trick I saw similar to this could have happened there too, because apparently, ketchup and mustard, they'll squirt that on you in a food line and then say, oh, you know, I got ketchup on you. Here, let me wipe that off. And while I do, let me take your wallet. That's called the old mustard trick. They'll stage a fight, maybe. Yes. A couple of different guys will stage a fight, and while you're distracted, the third guy will come around and pick everybody's pockets. Basically, if something suddenly happens out of the ordinary in public, you want to cover up your valuables, but you want to be smart when you do that, because sometimes that is a ploy in and of itself. You think you're one step ahead of the pig pocket? Sure. No, tell me, Chuck. Well, sometimes you'll be on that crowded subway, and someone will say, hey, somebody just took my wallet. So, of course, the instinct for everyone around that person is to pack their pocket with their money or wallet is. And of course, the other pickpocket on the train is going, okay, left front pocket. Exactly. Sidekick. What is it? Hervey peace, Harvey. Whoever has the best pocket. Which would be in Brooklyn, I guess. Yeah. Little hipsters with vest. Sure. And boom, done. You just told them where your money was. And I think an even funnier way is when somebody warns you to look out for pickpockets as a way to get you to pat where your wallet is. Really? Yeah, which is a pickpocket telling you to look out for pickpocket. So you'll show them where your wallet is. It's beautiful. Joshua said anything unusual happening to you? For instance, a very attractive woman came up to me hitting on me. That would be very unusual. I would probably know, to feel around for my wallet, because men can be dummies when it comes to the charms of an attractive woman. Yeah. You know the way to get around that one? How's that? Morals. Have morals? Yeah. What do you mean? Just be like, Madam, I'm afraid I'm taking oh, well, if you're taken but if you're not, you're like, hey, you know what I'm saying? Oh, yeah. I wasn't saying me, obviously. Single check years ago. Oh, got you. Single check on the beach. Or compassion. If they're on the beach, you might have someone pretend they're drowning. Like, everyone rushes out there, and then all of a sudden, you have blankets full of purses and beach bags. Or you might drop some change on the floor. You're like, oh, I'm so dumb. Or your shopping bag. Somebody might drop their shopping bag. And as a nice person, you're going to help them out. So it's good on one hand to have morals if you're in a committed relationship. It's bad, on the other hand, to have morals if you help people pick their bags up. Yeah, true. It's a strange world we live in, Chuck. It is. You also probably can't pick a pickpocket out in a crowd. Apparently one of the long standing traditions is to dress very well. Sure. Like a wealthy business person. Or at least a business person in this economy, right? Yeah, exactly. Or tourist. Yeah, that's a good one. Sure. Walk around with a map and a camera around your neck. And they'll also frequently have things to hide their hands, whether it's a newspaper, a coat folded over their hands, or a baby, a live human baby. You mentioned when you would tell them inadvertently where your money was located, sometimes they will just call it the stroke or the fan or the old stroke. And that's when they will kind of prepick pocket you and just sort of feel around where your wallet might be bulging from to set you up for a soon to be picked pocket. Right. So how do you get around this? Carry a gun and shoot people that get too close. Yeah. That's one way. I think that's the Bernard gets way yeah. Charles Brunson way. Thank you for doing that. Sure. On behalf of everyone listening to this episode, thanks, Chuck. No problem. Basically, the best way to prevent pickpocketing is to be aware. Like I said, if anything unusual happens out in public, you need to be aware. You should be aware anyway. If you look like you're confident of where you are, even if you're a tourist, if you look like you are aware of your surroundings, they're probably going to pass you over. For Ned from Wichita Falls, who has, like, sunscreen on his nose and like, a fisherman's cap, whether you're trying to prevent pickpocketing or just in general, you should never, ever wear socks with sandals. Yeah. That's a dead giveaway. Yeah. You're an instant mark and you got that looked at for all sorts of crime. That's right. If you're traveling in other countries and other countries is where it's likely going to happen. Because we'll discuss here in a minute how it's not as big of a problem here in the US. Anymore. Eg. Canada. That's right. But in really all over the world, except for North America or at least United States and Canada, it's still a big problem. So you don't want to carry your wallet in your back pocket like a big dummy. Right. Front pocket is safer. Money belt is even safer than that. Money belt under your clothes. I'm wearing one right now. Really? I did when I traveled through Europe. Did you really? Yeah. I just can't bring myself to they're so stupid looking now. They are. When you go to pay for something, and you got to reach down in there, right. And it's like flesh colored. Like what? They're trying to make it look like your credit card is just levitating against your stomach. But I did because I was all paranoid about all this stuff when I went to Europe. It's a smart thing to do. And little did I realize that me and my buddy were fairly tough looking dudes walking around and probably not easy marks, or at least there were lots more around us that were way easier than us. Yeah. And my friend Chappy, too, I remember at the time, said, I almost want someone to try and pickpocket me. He'd be like Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal. He would, like, chase them down and beat them down into the ground, and that would be all over for that pickpocketter. Hannibal Lecter didn't do that, but he did stab at gypsy to death for pickpocketing him. Fanny packs don't do it. Yeah, those are easily unzipped, especially if they're turned around to the back, which you would do to look cool. Yeah. On the rear. I locked my zippers together, like, in my backpack with a little tiny lock. Yeah, but that helps. But they can still have a hard about people, like cutting into a backpack, even. Man. Yeah. You got to have some quick hands to do that. And some Kahnis. Yeah. They recommend to carry a dummy wallet. I've heard this. I've never heard that. Yeah. Does it pull up with, like, cards that say, sucker, you didn't get my wallet? If you want to go to that trouble, you could. I think I would. If you look around and pay attention to your junk mail and your normal life, you're going to find things that look like fake credit cards and fake money that you can stuff your dummy wallet with. The thing is that's kind of outwitting these pickpockets, which is kind of fun in and of itself. Absolutely. At the same time, it seems like it's going to a lot of trouble just to let them steal something. Yeah, that's true. Your wallet, even if it's a dummy wallet, like it's an actual wallet. That's true. It's just filled with fake stuff. So you're saying don't let it happen at all. Yeah. Dummy wallet or smart wallet. Yeah, but I mean, dummy wallet is the way to go. That's true. If you're traveling, as always, they'll remind you to keep a list of everything you have, including your credit card numbers. Don't put everything in one place. Have a friend at home. Have access to all your documents so they can send them to you in case it does get nicked. That kind of thing. I call it common sense traveling. That's great advice, Chuck. Yeah. In my suitcase, Chuck, keep photocopies. You can't call them Xerox because that's copyright infringement. Right. Like my passport. Like, basically everything I have photocopies of. And you keep it. Like I keep it in the liner of the suitcase. Well, everyone's going to know this now when they see you traveling, but it's a good idea to keep them at the hotel. Sure. Keep them at home so that you can call a trusted friend who's watching your dog or whatever and say, hey man, not only was my real passport stolen, my photocopies were stolen out of the hotel. Can you give me my passport number? And that will help. Yeah. And don't carry things like your Social Security card and stuff like that. I actually used to carry my Social Security card back in the day. Like a big dummy. Really? When I was, like, 16. I thought I was important or something. Take this. Exactly. Do you take Social Security cards as credit? Just knock it off my bill. So onto the Slatecom article. I think we've arrived there. It's one of my favorite websites. That's a good one. It is. So who wrote this? Joe Keohani. He's Hawaiian. I'll bet he is. Kohani. And when was this? This is this year, february of last year. So this is current and up to date. It is a dying art and a dying crime in the US. Yeah. And why? Where is pickpocketing going? Why is it vanishing if you can make some money off of it? Well, a bunch of reasons. They list crime as a whole has fallen since the 90s. People don't carry as much cash. It's harder to rip people off with credit cards and debit cards because there's more security involved with those. I would say closed circuit cameras everywhere might dissuade some guys from doing this. Yeah. What else? Well, we talked about the penalties traditionally being fairly small. Sure. But in some cases in some states they have raised it to where it's the same as armed robbery, basically. Wow. So it can be a felony. And suddenly you're not just looking at three months in the pokey, which anybody can do standing on their head. You're looking at like five years for pickpocketing. It's going to make you rethink your trade and it has in a lot of ways. Sure. Also, apparently Fagins are dying out and the new generation basically is being blamed for the loss of the art of pickpocket. Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny. Basically they said these kids these days just don't have the patience to learn pickpocketing. So it's easier just to get a gun. Yeah. Well, not even just patients. They're not as fearful of confrontation. Again, true. Thanks to the gun, kids are all stupid stick up men these days. There's no finesse to it. There's not. The New York Times in 2001. They had a stat. In 1990 there were about 23,000 reported pickpocketing crimes. About five years later that number had fallen by half. And then by the year 2000 there were less than 5000. And sadly today they do not even track it. No, it's so low. Statistically. Yeah. That's good rejoicing in that that's Giuliani's work. Yeah, he helped a lot with the crime thing. Yeah. Well, Time Square in and of itself changed entirely. Have you ever seen Basket Case where the guy carries his mutant brother around in the basket and, like, his brother goes on a killing rampage, he stays in Times Square. And I've never been to Times Square until, like, way after the crossover, I guess, is what you'd call it, to where it's now very family friendly and safe. And I was like, that's what Times Square used to look like. Holy cow, it looks like Detroit. Yeah. I was in New Jersey when it was crossing over. So when I first started going to New York, there were still, like, peep shows and other businesses I won't mention on the podcast. And it was just starting like the first family theme restaurant went in while I was living up there. I wonder how many tax breaks that family theme restaurant got giving it a shot. Yes. I can't remember what it was, but I remember thinking at the time, Times Square. Look at it. They're cleaning it up. Yes. Sadly, yes. No more brown bagging it. Now. What does that mean? Walking around drinking beer out of a brown bag. Oh, got you picking pockets. I thought it meant bringing your lunch from home. Yeah, or lunch pail in it. Okay. Chuck there is one place where the art of pickpocketing was revived recently, say, around 2007. What is that? Europe as a whole still is rampant with pigpocketing, thanks to the apparently, according to the Slate article, the entrance of Romania and Bulgaria, two places with legendary pickpockets into the EU. So now people from Romania and Bulgaria can travel around Europe much more easily and pickpockets wherever they stop. Interesting. Yeah. Well, good for them. I don't know about that, but that's pickpocketing, that's how flesh colored money belts work. That's right. I own one. You got anything else? No. Well, if you want to see some late 90s staff members of how stuff works posing in photos is that who that was? To demonstrate I was trying to see one of them is how to stuff Catherine Near. I think she's the mark in the photos. Interesting. You can type pickpocketing in the search bar athowstepworks.com and since I said search bar, it's time for listing. Josh, I picked this one out especially for this one because it involves Kleptomania. Okay. And I know that's an old show, but this was pretty fascinating, I thought. This is from Anonymous. It's a girl. Okay. You know who it is? Well, sure. I'm not going to read it, though, because she's a criminal cancer. I recently listened to your podcast in cleptomania, and I have to thank you for giving a name to the disorder that has plagued me for the past four years. I guess she didn't know she had never heard of it. I first started to steal. When I was 15, I was at a Pizza Hut with my family and felt a very troubling, consuming urge to steal the silverware. After secretly putting the knife and fork in my purse, I felt relieved and a little guilty. That day was the start of a theft rampage. I've stolen silverware, especially spoons, from every restaurant I've ever been to and even one that I worked at. Right now I have a collection of hundreds of sets of software. At one time, I even began to label them with a restaurant's name and the date that it was stolen, but that became too much work. That's like the pickpocket and the tintin movie. Oh, really? He has all of the wallet he's stolen, like, labels at the date and all that. Interesting. So, like you said in your podcast, I keep this hidden, and I felt tremendous tension and guilt over the years for it, but never once mentioned it to my therapist. I'm in therapy for depression and anxiety, which I learned is actually comorbid with Kleptomania. Yeah, the therapist is going to be like, why didn't you tell me this years ago? Exactly. I could have cured you already. I felt that I must apologize to the businesses I feel that I must apologize to the businesses in and around Kalamazoo, Michigan. So if you're a business in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a restaurant and you're missing spoons, it's this lady's fault. I can tell you who it is. I could. However, I'm making a change today. Your podcast and my guilty conscience has inspired me to tell my therapist and hopefully be free of this nasty habit. I emailed her. I was like, hey, can I read this on the Internet? She was, sure. That's awesome. I Kalamazoo, Michigan. Anonymous from Kalamazoo. Yes. Very nice. Congratulations on turning over a new leaf. Yeah. All your shrink about it. He'll probably be very fascinated. And if anyone out there has not heard how Kleptomania works episode, it's pretty good. I magically transformed Chuck into a tube of lipstick. That's right. Yeah. Do you remember that? You are great. If you have a revelation about yourself or you're turning over a new leaf, whether it's for the new year or not, it seems appropriate that you tell us about it. We're your old pals, Josh and Chuck. You can tweet to us which our Twitter handle is S-Y-S-K podcast. You can put it on Facebook. That's facebook. Comwcno. Those two are much less private than just sending us a regular old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstep works.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The House of Work iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the 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 Kilgaref and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to news. 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Is it legal to sterilize addicts? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-it-legal-to-sterilize-addicts | It's a controversial idea, to say the least: If evidence shows that addicts tend to be irresponsible, abusive parents, then why should they have children at all? In this podcast, Josh and Chuck explore the practice (and legality) of sterilizing addicts. | It's a controversial idea, to say the least: If evidence shows that addicts tend to be irresponsible, abusive parents, then why should they have children at all? In this podcast, Josh and Chuck explore the practice (and legality) of sterilizing addicts. | Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:57:58 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=20, tm_min=57, tm_sec=58, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=69, tm_isdst=0) | 36359190 | 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. You know you're the best pet mom. When you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients plus probiotics for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. That makes this stuff you should know. The podcast. The addiction, right? Yeah, I was there. I just realized I was giving all kinds of awesome sign language, but no one can see that. I can see it. It's having a beneficial effect on me pumping you up. Yeah. Chuck. Josh. How are you doing? Good. Almost good. I'm great. It's Friday afternoon. Glad to hear that, dude. You're about to go on vacation too. I am. You're probably pretty excited, right? I am. Very. Y'all leaving tonight? Tomorrow morning. Awesome. Yes. You ready? Yes. Chuck? Yes. Do you know the economic cost for child abuse in the United States? I do, but it won't ruin it. It's massive. Let's talk about it. Because you can charge anything. Yeah, they're pretty good at that. They're really good at that. You've got direct costs like foster care programs, law enforcement, hospital care, medical costs, that kind of thing. We've got indirect costs like funding the court system. Right. Loss of productivity for all the people who have to go to be on a jury, all that kind of thing. $104,000,000,000 in 2007 is what child abuse cost the US. Right, Josh? That sounds almost like more money than we spend on education in the United States. It was that year. Well, the year before, yeah. Isn't that interesting? It's interesting and sad. Yeah. So if you have no heart but dollar signs really make sense to you, you can agree that child abuse is a bad thing, right? Right. If you do have a heart, then child abuse is a bad thing. Exactly. Either way, it's a bad thing. Right. Child abuse, though, is not necessarily all just battering children or sexually molesting children. There's also and most of them are cases of neglect. Yeah, they have a stat here. 86.6% are neglect and they surveyed some child welfare workers and it's an awkward stat, but it is 80% of them estimated that about half of their neglect cases were from drug addicted parents. Right. Which makes sense. It does. Drugs, you're not going to provide care for your child adequately. Another study found that children who are born addicted to drugs, meaning that they have drug addicted parents who did drugs while they were pregnant or drug addicted mothers. At least those kids are two to three times more likely to be abused than non addicted children. I would argue that they're already abused. That's a good point. But even 100% later on that they are much more likely to become abused, probably through neglect. Because if you are like, I really need to score some crack, you're not going to be like, but first I need to make sure my child has a healthy dinner. I got a pump and dump before I go out and hit the streets. That's another thing, too. So what we've just done, and what is not very difficult, we've connected drug addicted parents to child abuse. Yes. We started out with child abuse as bad. Right. Why don't we just sterilize drug addicts so they can't have any kids? That sounds like a great idea. Does it? It sounds like an idea that's actually being done, is what that sounds like. Yes. And I have my dancing shoes on for this podcast. Do you? Because this is tricky business, dude. Yeah. You can see both sides. This lady, Barbara Harris, makes some points where I think interesting points. Plus, she has some cred. Let's talk about her real quick. Barbara Harris is the founder of something called children Require a Caring Community. Crack. Because community is spelled with a K. Yeah. I can't believe she stretched that. She is a former International House of Pancakes waitress who is a mother of biological mother to six children and an adopted mother to four African American children who are born to a drug addicted mother. She adopted them. She walks a lot. She spent her days driving the United States in an RV, promoting her organization, the main purpose of which is to carry out what's called Project Prevention, which is what we just mentioned, Chuck. Sterilizing addicts. Yeah. And we should say that her RV is not any ordinary RV. The whole thing is decorated with a huge picture of a dead baby, a line of crack cocaine, I believe, a razor blade, and then some things just don't go together, is the quote. Is that right? I couldn't find that one. I read that in a Time article, I think. But I saw a picture of the one that she's using in the UK. And it's a picture of a baby crying, and it says she has her father's eyes and her mother's heroin addiction. So she has a knack for getting her message out there. And one of the ways she has done that, aside from her RV, is a string of billboards in the 90s in Los Angeles that had tag lines like, don't let pregnancy ruin your drug habit. Yeah. It's going to get some attention. Yeah. Or I think there's another one that's like drugs are you pregnant? Get sterilized, get $300, or something like that, which basically is like, get sterilized and we'll give you $300 in drug money. Well, there you go. The cat's out of the bag. That's what they're doing. Well, there's a lot of ways to look at this. It's a bribe to drug addicts who will, in most cases, spend this money on drugs to give up their fertility. This woman is buying drug addicts fertility through her program. Another way to look at it is that she is taking a lot of the burden off of the state who are going to eventually be charged with caring for these children who are not yet conceived. And like we said, originally, there were billboards flyers, aggressive methods, like hanging out at AA meetings and NA meetings. Right. And basically, Barbara Harris view is that if you've ever been addicted, even if you're clean now, just go ahead and get sterilized because you've kind of given up your right to have children. She doesn't see reproduction as a right, which is what makes her very contentious to most people. Very controversial thing that she's doing here. Yes, clearly. So, Chuck, how does this work? Do you know? Well, Josh, it's important to point out that she will only accept someone into the program that already has one child. At least one. At least one child. Yeah, you're right. And the drug addicts will have to fill out the paperwork and have their counselor, probably social counselor or judge appointed counselor, sign something that says they are, in fact, drug addicts or social worker or an arrest report. You have to prove your drug addict, first off. Got to prove it. And then you can either be sterilized or you can go on long term birth control. Right. And if you go on birth control, you get $200. You get 100 upfront. Right. 100 when you sign a contract that says, I will do this and keep it up cash, 100 after you prove that you're doing it, or you get $300. Here's what they do. This is a bystander organization. They don't provide any kind of clinics where they perform sterilization. Basically, what they do is say, prove to us that you're a drug addict, okay? We believe you're a drug addict. You're not qualified. Sign this contract that says you'll go do this now. Go do it. Get Medicaid or Medicare to pay for your sterilization program. So you and I are paying for this free sterilization. And then come bring us a note from the doctor that says that this happened, that proves that this procedure happened, that you're sterilized, and here's your $300. And, hey, if you bring back one of your crack attic buddies, we'll give you another $50 if they do it. Yeah, I always got to pay the referral fee no strings attached, no counseling except for a contract. That's another problem, too. There isn't any kind of cash counseling. No parent classes, no parenting classes, no drug cessation programs. It's just, here's some money to go give up your reproduction, your ability to reproduce. Yeah. And since it's founding I'm sorry. Within 13 years of its founding, she has worked with more than 3700 drug addicts in the United States. And about a third of those were sterilized. From my math, roughly. The rest, I guess, are on long term birth control. Wow. And now she's making her way to the UK and she wants to go to Kenya for women with HIV and AIDS. Yeah. So that's pretty successful in the US. In 13 years in the UK, she's finding a much harder time of it. Well, sort of. Well, she's getting a lot more flak. Yeah. But she got support to begin with. The reason she went over there, some anonymous donor gave her 20 grand. Right. And she got a lot of the BBC did a special on her, and she got a bunch of phone calls saying, please come over here. And then the anonymous donor came along, gave her 20 grand. She said that she took that as a sign. 20,000 signs. She started to set up in the UK. And if you go on the Project Prevention website, it says there's a UK tab that you can click. So she is set up in the UK. And then you also mentioned Kenya. She's getting probably the most grief of all for Kenya. Understandably. Basically, she has decided that not only can you break the cycle of addiction by taking away the ability to reproduce among addicts, you can cure AIDS by just letting everybody who has AIDS die out and not reproduce. Basically children with AIDS or HIV. Right. In both cases, it depends on who you are and how you're looking at it. Right. Because there are definitely people out there who support the Kenya AIDS Initiative and sterilizing addicts, because in both cases, what you're looking at is an end to a perceived cycle where everything else is failing. It's not necessarily the case, though. There is drug treatment for drug addiction. There are drugs that can treat HIV. There are also educational programs that you can teach people to take better care, take preventative measures. This lady is not interested in that. And in the UK, it's all free, too. I mean, it's a part of the state, the government medical program. Well, same here. Yeah, I guess you can get birth control for free here, can you? Medicare and Medicare. Yeah. That's how this thing is functioning. Right. Addicts go get these procedures or their birth control for free through taxpayer funded programs like Medicaid and Medicare. She's giving them $300. Right. Just talk about Kenya for a second longer. Did you look at that? No, I didn't look much into it, actually. She found a doctor who said that he'll insert IUDs, which is long term birth control, but it's temporary. It's reversible for $7 a pop. And then her organization will pay women with HIV AIDS $40 for it. So $47 a person. She's just buying their reproductive abilities. Wow. In Kenya, there are a lot of people who are frustrated by that. I'm sure. So, Chuck, how is any of this legal? Well, Planned Parenthood is one organization that says, you know what? This is possibly illegal if you're talking contract law. Because there's something when you have a vasectomy or any kind of sterilization that says informed consent, like, you have to be in there of your own free will. It's not daddy isn't out in the car forcing you to go in and get your tubes tied. Right. That kind of thing. They basically are saying that this $300 is coercive. It's a bribe. And it's not informed consent going on. No. Because if there's a bribe involved, yeah, informed consent can't exist. Medicaid and Medicare requires informed consent. But here's the loophole. The informed consent has to be between the patient and the provider. Right. Project Prevention is a third party, an interested third party who is really not involved in that equation. And the court protects the lady going in to get her tubes tied. Yes. And the court is protecting the lady who's paying the person to go get their tubes tied because even though it's extremely unethical and immoral in some people's eyes, it is still technically legal. Right. Because the provider of the sterilization service is not giving this person $300. Someone else's. Here are two of her arguments, which made me at least sit back and think for a minute about what the heck is going on here, because, like I said, this is a narrow line this lady is walking. Some might say she's way, way over it. One of the arguments used against her is that these women are not in their right mind to decide to have this procedure done. They're on drugs. You're giving them this money. So her argument back is so they're not of sound mind enough to have this procedure, but they're of sound mind enough to decide to have a kid. Yes. It's a good argument. Her other big argument against her is that you're taking away a woman's right to choose to have a baby, essentially. And her argument in reverse is, well, why is that right. More important than a child's right to be born into a normal environment and have a shot at a normal life. Right. So I believe that she is not necessarily trying to create some pure race of smart white people. I think she is trying to stop crack babies from being born. But the way she's doing it is definitely stirred the pot. The impression I have is that even this lady's critics say that she's a true believer. She's not a social engineer. She doesn't see it like that. Right. The problem is, I think a lot of people are worried about where she's getting her funding. I'm sure her largest donor, apparently Crack and Project Prevention have about $500,000 a year in operating budget. Okay. Which I guess is enough to fuel the RV around the country and keep the website going and pay as many addicts as possible. But most of that money is coming from a guy who is a billionaire named Richard Mellon Scaffe. Right. Scaff. Never heard of him. I hadn't either, but he's apparently on the right hand of the spectrum. Okay. Politically. Yeah. He runs the Pittsburgh Tribune, which is a right wing newspaper as far as it's leanings. And the idea of a billionaire funding a project like that scares the tar out of people because it gives it a classic bent. Right. Even if this lady is a former IHOP waitress, if the people who are giving her the money to do this indefinitely are billionaires, then what you're talking about is how one person put it. You have a structure in which the economically privileged can and do dictate who will and who won't have children, end quote. Which means you're on crack or you're black or we've decided that you're unfit to reproduce, but instead of forcing it, we're going to pay you. But really, what's the difference? Yeah, I mean, it's a nonprofit, quote unquote, but a non profit funded by a billionaire. It's a different kind of nonprofit. You know what I'm saying? 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. 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 flaming flamers chip? Would you love to quench your thirst with a delicious tranquilum house smoothie? Did you see blood analysis as an investment opportunity? Would you wear one of Dave's wooden shirts? Do you smash glasses whilst yelling Hoosa? Well, then there's a place that has everything you love, from Atlanta to the Kardashians to only burgers in the building and everything in between. Hulu is your entertainment. Getaway Hulu check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription. Required terms apply. Visit Hulucom for plan details. Another criticism is that it is racially disproportionate. She will point out that a thousand clients were African American, whereas more than 1800 have been white. But as far as percentages of population goes, it's skewed heavily towards black. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense in hard numbers. It's like, well, there's way more white people than black people who have taken part in this. But if you look at the proportion of the population, 70 something percent of the US population is white, whereas only, like, about 13% is black. Right. So those numbers actually are very disproportionate. Right. And also the original billboards targeted low income, predominantly African American areas of Los Angeles at the beginning. I think ultimately what scares people is that even if this is an addict's choice, even if you agree this addict is making their own decision. And in some cases, in this Time article, there's a woman named Joanne Shivaria, and she's just like this model participant. There's a quote from her that said, when you stop having kids, it makes you think about what else you can do in life. She already has five kids. The state has custody of them. She got sterilized and took her $300 and bought Easter presents and educational toys for her children who she's trying to get back. Yeah. She already had three kids. And then she gave birth to two drug addicted twins because she was addicted to meth. She started doing meth at eight months pregnant. Yes. Which is not a good time to start doing math. Never. It's a good time to start doing math. That's a particularly bad time to start. I would agree with that. Yeah. So she's the poster child. She is. But even if she's walking around right. The whole idea that reproduction and reproductive rights should and could be controlled by other people, whether they're a private organization funded by a billionaire or the government smacks of the eugenics movement, we've already done this before, and it proved horrific. Right? Yeah. We need to talk about eugenics. We definitely do. Let's do it. Well, remember it came up in the crime scene photography podcast, right? Yes. It was a big deal in the US. Yeah. When did it start? Turn of the century. Yeah. Early 20th century. Eugenics was a movement, a concept that you could create a fitter human species if you removed undesirable traits like chronic disease, low socioeconomic status. Do you want to hear with this model law for eugenics? Yeah. We'll say what the model law is first. Who was it that came up with that? A guy named Harry Laughlin. He was the head of the Eugenics Record Office. Now, remember at the time this was 1914, that he came up with the model law. There was this idea that, like you said, Chuck, you could create a fitter human race by basically weeding out the undesirable elements and just letting the healthy, robust ones reproduce. Simple as pie. Right. You get yourself a nice Aryan race, boys from Brazil. Right. So to carry this out, most people who are unfit don't really consider themselves unfit. And even worse, in a lot of cases, one of the sure signs that they are socially unfit is that they're sexually promiscuous. So you got to take matters into your own hands and the government has to force sterilization through the courts and not just promiscuous. Should we read out some of the things in the law? Well, these are the undesirables take it, Chuck. The feeble minded, the insane, criminalistic, the epileptic, the inebriate, the disease, the blind, the deaf, the deformed and dependent and orphans near dwells, tramps, homeless and palpers. The only thing I don't see in here is skullduggery. I'm surprised. That's probably in here somewhere, actually. So that was the model law for forced government mandated sterilization people who are targeting us. And by the time this model law was created, a couple of states already had their own compulsory sterilization laws based on the idea of eugenics. Right. I think Indiana and Connecticut were hot on the trail. Right. Yes. California came fairly late to the game. In the early to mid 20s they had a law. But by that time, by 1924, 2500 of the 3000 people who'd been forced to be sterilized under this law were in California. And one of the ideas behind it was that it was a tax saving measure. Right. Really interesting, considering today's it sounds very familiar. Yeah. The US supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Homes very famously said something that might also sound familiar as far as logic goes. He said, quote, is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbacility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. And he finished up and we'll talk about this case was saying, three generations of imbeciles are enough. He's talking about Carrie Buck. And she was a 17 year old in Charlottesville, Virginia. She was the first person chosen to be sterilized in Virginia under the new model law. She had a kid but was not married. Her mother was in an insane asylum called the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and the Feeble Minded. It's not a place you want to visit and not leave. And here's her story. She was picked because they thought that she shared hereditary traits with her mother of feeble mindedness and sexual promiscuity. They thought it was genetic. She already had one kid and they thought, you know what? It's probable that she's going to have a socially inadequate child after this and let's sterilize her. Let's make her case number one in Virginia. Yeah. They went to court. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. People testified against her that she had a record of immorality and syphilis, prostitution and untruthfulness. So the judge said, okay, let's sterilize her. And it was upheld. And it was upheld because that oliver Wendell home's decision. That quote came from the majority opinion that, yes, we should go ahead and sterilize this girl and she's sterilized. But what happened? Josh afterward. What do we know now? Her kid was studied tremendously. There was popular, widespread support for eugenics in the US. But there are also plenty of people who are like, what are you doing? This is the worst thing we've ever done. Right. So her kid, Vivian Buck was followed. A lot of stuff was not entered into the public record when during carry bucks trial or hearings. For one, she wasn't promiscuous. She was raped by her foster parents relative. That's why she had vivian. Right. And then Vivian was not an example of a third generation feeble minded person. She was a solid B student apparently, and was on the honor roll. That was her first grade report card. So basically this woman was the test case to keep sterilization going or to really get it going, prove fraudulent in the end. Well, not only that, but her defense lawyer it turns out this was later uncovered conspired with the lawyer for the insane asylum to guarantee that it would be upheld. So it was completely fraudulent, but it was upheld in Virginia. And 8300 Virginians were sterilized after that. Buck versus Bell case. Yeah. $8,300. Yeah. Harry Loughlin, the guy who was running the eugenics record office and who wrote that model law in 1914, he went on to get a medal from the Nazi government in 1933 for his contribution to the science of racial cleansing from the University of Heidelberg. Yeah. Got an honorary degree. And I didn't know this, but apparently the Rockefeller Foundation funded the German I can't remember the name of the research facility, but funded the German search facility where this was being born over there where Mingala is, that the guy? Rockefeller center was funding them at the time too. And then Nazi says, this is a great idea, and we'll go on to sterilize 350,000 people and turns out that's not even enough, so we're just going to start killing them. So if you start people that say like, oh, what could something ever lead to? You never know what it could lead to. Well, in the US. In the United States it led to 33 states with compulsory sterilization laws on the books that continued into the sterilizing, the mentally retarded. In the US. I was alive, I was born and this was going on. Yeah. And ultimately about 60,000 people lost their ability to reproduce at the hands of the US government. Unbelievable. And the guy who wrote this great paper, he's actually pretty much an expert on the eugenics movement in the US. His name is Paul Lombardo. He is a University of Virginia professor. He points out that the Kerry Buck case that basically allows compulsory sterilization of feeble minded people is still on the books. It's not overturned. Oh, really? Yeah, but it's one of those. You shouldn't do it today. But wouldn't that be interesting if that came up when somebody ultimately challenges project prevention? I have a list of people who supported eugenics. Are you going to call them out? I am. And this is not to say that they supported sterilization because eugenics had a lot more to do with it was broader than just sterilization. But Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, who is the founder of Planned Parenthood. That's right. It was a lightning rod herself in her time. Big. Now Planned Parenthood is criticizing Barbara Harris, which really says something. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Obviously, we mention him. H. G. Wells, Teddy Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, and George Bernard Shaw are just a few who thought eugenics was a pretty good idea. Charles Lindberg, did you see him? No. Was he in there? Remember, he was all about that was Darwin. Ann Lindberg. Really? I didn't know Lindberg was in there. It wasn't that one article you sent me? No, that was for transhumanism. Right. But it was for certain people just based on genius. Dang. So, Chuck, like you said, you had your dancing shoes on, and I can appreciate that. Should we talk about Jack Skinner real quick, though, or do you want to well, yeah, because that was when it was actually struck down in 1942. Oklahoma criminal. They were going to start sterilizing criminals. Or they had been already. Probably right. Repeat criminals. Repeat criminals, yeah. And he was a chicken thief and an armed robber. And this went to court and Justice William Odglass struck it down and had a very good point. He said, you're not going to essentially, I'm paraphrasing, you're not going to sterilize a three time embezzler. Right. But you'll sterilize a chicken thief. So it comes back to class once again. Yeah. And that's where we are. Again. You did a good job with your dancing shoes. Yeah, I'm dancing. Nice. 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. Are you looking for an escape or a relaxing getaway or a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of it all? Well, we know just the place. Maybe you want to solve a murder in your building. Or you're just all about that paper boy. Perhaps you want to watch Hollywood's biggest monitor. Or you crave the thrill of a classic American story about horror. Or is your stomach grumbling for a MILKSTAKE flaming flamers chip? Would you love to quench your thirst with a delicious Tranquilium house smoothie? Did you see blood analysis? As an investment opportunity, would you wear one of Dave's wooden. Shirts? Do you smash glasses whilst yelling Hoosa? Well, then there's a place that has everything you love from Atlanta to the Kardashians to only murders in the building and everything in between. Hulu is your entertainment getaway Hulu check into your obsessions hulu subscription required terms apply visit hulu.com for plan details depending on how you feel about it, this isn't going anywhere. This lady has been doing this for 13 years and it first got attention, like, right when she first started doing it. She gets attention every once in a while. I just heard about her, like, a couple of months ago. I reckon if you've seen that RV around town, you don't pay attention. Yeah. And if you're in the UK, look out for it, because they're already investigating her people for very aggressive tactics. Apparently this woman came out of a clinic with her kid and one of the Project Prevention people ran up and was like, hey, how would you like \u00a3300 to be sterilized or \u00a3200 to be sterilized? And she's like, what? She wasn't a drug addict, which caused a tremendous amount of offense, and now it's being investigated. I'm wondering what kind of reception she'll ultimately have there. And she's got her sights on Australia next. Really? Yeah. So Project prevention Sterilizing Addicts The answer to the question, technically, yes, it's legal reeks of eugenics. Yeah, but that's not illegal. That's right. And apparently you can go out and compulsory sterilized a feeble minded person as long as you can provide that they were feeble minded. We should do some podcasts on some awesome things that America has done. I feel like we're always dredging up these awful things that we did in our past history, but a lot of people don't. I was never taught about eugenics in high school. Oh, no. Neither was I. No, that didn't always sterilize 60,000 people. But I think that's why we have to do this sometimes, Chuck, because we know a lot of the good stuff. You're right. We do need to come up with some great, awesome stuff to talk about, too. But I think people generally think that way. And I think that a lot of the dirty, nasty stuff just gets covered over and it can't, because we're in the midst of a case of history repeating itself. Yeah, absolutely. And if we don't talk about it, if people don't know about it, then you don't have the luxury of hindsight or to make an informed decision to that, sir. So sterilized addicts will bring you the article, which we just pretty much did to death. But if you want to see some pictures of heroin and a methodicted couple with their child, you can type in sterilized addicts at the handysarchbarhouseofworks.com, which means it's time for listener mail. Not so it is time for what do we call it? Administrative detail. Administrative breaks on. That was a really good breakdown, Chuck. Thank you. Quick announcement, everyone. We are coming to south by Southwest in Austin, Texas. You need a badge to get in to see us. We're going to do a live podcast. You need a gold or platinum level interactive badge. I think it's a Krypton level, right? Kryptonite? Yes. No, it's not. But we're going to be podcasting live regardless of the Drisco Hotel. Okay? 11:00 am. Monday, March 14 and we'd like you to come down and see us. We'll podcast and then do a little Q and A. Plainly, we would like you to come see us. So just come see us. What is your problem? Get your hands on a badge. You can do it. Yeah, just take a look. Most of the people wearing the interactive badges are going to be tasty. Maybe a little weak to just get a badge. Exactly. And we'll see you there. All right, back to it. Yeah. Okay. We like to take time every couple of months to thank people who send us gifts in the mail because it's a really nice thing to do. Sometimes people are plugging their little Etsy site. We'll plug that away. It's fine. Local. Travis sent us tickets to the Village Theater here in Atlanta. Improv. Yeah. And I haven't gone yet, but I got my tickets. We should call on the same night. Let's do it. But don't tell Cherry we'll double date. Okay? Sounds good. Let's thank Becca E and her two dogs, Frey and Freya for the homemade doggy treats that our dogs enjoyed. Yeah, mine are still enjoying them. Mine, too. I still have a few left. They love them. They're delicious. They're like Scooby Snacks, but made from home. Joey sent his personalized ghostbuster shirts. Yeah, and it's like the Tuxedo T shirt. It's as if you are wearing the ghostbusters uniform and it says Bryant on it. Mine says Clark. That does it. Yeah. Okay. Thought it might say Roland. Yours, says Rowland, because I think you got Jerry's. I'm just kidding, stinkfreedirect.com. Send us some nice over control stuff. Thank you very much for that. We actually need it mary Magenta, which she has a great name. She sent us homemade calendars, and I have mine hanging up in my cube. I use it. And tomorrow is full radish on my calendar and I think that means full moon. Jnolen of Jnolenfilmcom Homebase Cookies. I guess we should say again that's Jay Nolan of J. Nolanfilmcom. J-A-Y. Cookie bribe. Tony from Wisconsin. He's a scanner. And he sent us lovely drawing of a butterfly. And Tony, I think, is young because I think it's a crayon drawing, but it's from the heart. Yeah, VFP sent us a postcard from Dubai. Very nice. Send us each one, I believe. Oh, really? Yeah, we got two. Kate and TC sent us a homemade valentine of a Trex holding a heart. And we like homemade stuff. It was very cute. Yeah. Kate. NTC. Victor sent us a postcard from Malta. Lindsay and Nick, they sent us a real picture. Yes. It's been a while since I've held a real picture like that of us with them. We met them at the Brooklyn trivia event. And Nick, I think it was army, was leaving to go to Afghanistan, I think, the next day. And they took time to route themselves through Brooklyn to come to our trivia event. We met them both. And he is back in two days from today. Is that right? Well, two days from the day she wrote the letter. Right. I think he's back. I think he said high on the Facebook page. Oh, really? So he's back? Yeah, he's definitely back by the time this is out. So, Nick, glad you're back safe and sound, buddy. Thanks for the picture. Lindsay and Nick, we got a huge awesome assortment of Christmas cookies from Mona Colentine. Oh, yeah, Mona's, she's a big fan on the stuff, you know, Facebook page. Yeah, Mona's, nice girl. And she sent us tons of Christmas cookies, which were awesome. Same girl a lady. She's Joe Garden. Our buddy Joe Garden from The Onion definitely sent us Onion t shirts and hoodies because he promised them months and months ago. And you can support Joe if you like funny things, by buying his books, the Dangerous Book for Dogs, the Devious Book for Cats, and my favorite, the New Vampires Handbook, a Guide for the Recently Turned Creature of the Night. And Joe writes these with other Onion writers and they're all obviously very funny. And speaking of The Onion, chuck was used for a photo for an Onion article on a hunter being busted for not having a license. Right? Yeah. So the fulfilled, the hunter becomes the prey. That's right. Yeah. How could we not thank Erin Cooper, who made us some super cool Magnum Pi. T shirts with our images on them. Yeah, that was actually a t shirt contest submission. That was just so awesome. He made them anyway and sent them to us. So awesome we couldn't use it. Yes. Licensing rights and all that. And Coop, I always think coupe just because it's awesome. Photoshop. Because you saw the full metal jacket one. Yeah. That's pretty good. Yeah. And off putting, of course. Andrew and Janelle for their Christmas card, right? Yeah. Ben and Leah sent us a Christmas card to Abigail. She's a twelve year old who sent us four handwritten letters. Nice. And it's always nice to get a handwritten letter because it reminds me of being twelve years old. Yes. Emily not my wife. Emily sent us 15. I'm sorry, she is 15. And she sent us a letter because her mom took her computer away because of overuse. Wow. So she had to write a letter. Tony in Hawaii sent us a handwritten letter as well. And Martin Van Nostrin, of course, weirdo send us twisted friends. He sent us some of our best stuff ever. Yeah, he always sends us great stuff. Bacon related things. CDs of comedians and weird bands. And he basically sent us a box full of goodies from Merchbot.com, which he said, make sure you think Merch bot support those guys. Yeah, Merchbot.com. Thanks to everybody's sense of stuff, whether it was a postcard, a letter, a bacon tuxedo, what have you, we appreciate you. If you want to go say hi to us, you can check us out on Facebook@facebook.com stuffychnow. We also tweet at sysskast. And as always, you can send us an email. Oh, wait, go join our Kiva team. Kiva.org teamstuffyturnko. And then you can always send us an email stuffpodcast@housesteporks.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 Housetoporks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. 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. Find us at chewy, amazon and halopets.com. Com." | ||
True stories of survival cannibalism! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/true-stories-of-survival-cannibalism | Cannibalism is the macabre practice of eating other humans. But sometimes, people have no choice if they want to survive. It's called survival cannibalism and it tastes like chicken. | Cannibalism is the macabre practice of eating other humans. But sometimes, people have no choice if they want to survive. It's called survival cannibalism and it tastes like chicken. | Wed, 11 May 2016 19:26:23 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=19, tm_min=26, tm_sec=23, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=132, tm_isdst=0) | 40176833 | 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 bike. There's Jerry. And this is stuff you should know. All right, Chuck. How are you, sir? I'm good, how are you? Great. Just toothless and happy. Good. I'm halfway there. To your tooth? To the permits. Heavy. Yes. Nice. When is your next visit? Well, going tomorrow to make sure the implant is looking good. I can tell you that it looks great. And then in August is when I'll actually get the post and crown. Man, I'm really sorry that you have to do all this. Thanks, man. It sucks. Yeah, that's why I'm sorry you have to do it and I can't. Not that I wear my flipper much anyway, but right now he was like, don't even wear your flipper while the implants in there. And I was like, all right. Is that why you're wearing overalls today? That's right. Let's see. Chuck. Chuck, have you ever tasted human flesh? No, but I think you asked me the same question when we did our regular Cannibalism episode. Yeah, probably. This is the subject so nice. We had to serve it twice. Well, we've actually talked about some other stuff, too. Like we did a whole Donner party episode. Yes. We talked about the Essex and the whaling episode. Oh, yeah. We've talked about Cannibalism a lot. Like if there's a tag cloud, it'd be decent size. Okay, Chuck, we should say if you guys didn't get this from the title, we're talking about Cannibalism. And some of the stuff we're talking about gets pretty graphic and grisly. So if you have a weak stomach or you're a little kid and you don't want nightmares, maybe don't listen to this one. Very good, sir. And now let's move on to survival. Cannibalism. That's right. So again, people go listen to our Cannibalism episode because it was a particularly good one, if you ask me. Did we talk? Surely we talked about the Uruguayan rugby team. I don't know if we did or not. Is it just that I'm so familiar with the story that actually we probably did, but we're going to revisit it today. Okay, well, let's go back, way back in time. And the Uruguayan national rugby team is flying through the Andes on the way to play the Chilean rugby team for a match. And they don't make it. They don't. Plane crashes on a mountain, something like 13 0ft above sea level, basically in the middle of nowhere. That's right. A fair child. F, Uruguayan air force had 40 passengers and five crew members, including that rugby team. It was pretty much mostly just the rugby team, right? Yeah, they chartered it. Okay. But I think there were some other folks there were some kids there. Really? I don't think I knew that. Yeah. So here's the deal with the Andes mountains. It's only 170 meters wide, but they're very tall and peaky. I got you. So the tallest one is almost 7000 meters and it's the highest peak on the American continent. Wow. And the Fairchild, as a plane, could only ascend to 7000 meters, so they had to find like, low spots to make that passage. It's called poor planning. Well, I would guess that the Uruguayan rugby team would agree with me that that was poor planning. No, I don't think so. Like this pilot had made this passage. I had the number in here but many times before, say, 80. So I don't know if it was poor planning, but here's what happened. Okay. They're flying. They take a sharp descent at about 330 in the afternoon and they dipped below the clouds because of these strong air pockets. So the captain was like, everyone fasten your seatbelts, this is a little bumpy right now. I don't think they felt like they were in real danger yet. And then it entered a strong downward air current and it said violently dropped several hundred meters. So following that there was a second sharp fall. And at this point people looked out the window and saw they were below the clouds and they saw mountains in their face and they realized, this is not good. They tried to gain altitude, could not. The right wing broke off when it hit a mountain. When that broke off, it went backwards, cut off the tail, and then at that point, several, like four or five people were just pulled out at that point and died. Sucked out of the plane, sucked right out, immediately fell to their death. Then the left wing was ripped off and what you've got is just part of the fuselage remaining and it goes sliding down the mountains like a toboggan. And by all accounts, they thought they were done for sure, like, there's no way we're going to stop. But as luck would have it, they did slow down. They entered a valley and slowed down, but with such force that the seats ripped from their bolts and they crashed through, like, the luggage compartment wow. And came to arrest. So how many survivors there were? I'm not quite sure. I know there are 45 people on the plane. 27 people survived the initial crash out of the 45. Okay, so that's bad enough, right? Yes. And they're like, okay, we're stranded up in the Andes. The temperature is like negative 30 deg, which is negative 34 Celsius. That's right. Too bad it wasn't just negative 40. Right. So they're like, but at least we have the fuselage of this plane to act as an impromptu shelter while we figure out what's going on. Yeah. Let's take stock of our supplies. Let's see, we've got some wine and we've got some chocolate and that's it? Yeah, very much. I said a few more snacks, but it was very little food. Right. And then a short time after they crashed and they had taken stock and were trying to figure out what to do. An avalanche came and buried the plane, buried some of the people alive inside of it. Yeah. So eight more people died I think. Yeah. And previous to this they actually had a working radio and there was a search party and after ten days they literally heard on the radio that they're presumed dead and the search was called off. Oh man. So your spirit is broken then the avalanche comes and that kills eight people right off the bat, I think you said, including the guy who was the team captain who had merged as the leader of the survivors. Yes. He died in the avalanche. So then they're trapped in there for a few days and as people are dying they start making pets. There was a team, first of all it was a rugby team and then there are family members among the rugby team, so it was a very tight right. And so they started making packs that if I die you guys eat me so that you can try to survive. Somebody's got to make it out of here alive so be sure to eat me. Yeah. And they had cleverly found a way to get fresh water by melting snow, using metal from the seats and dripping it into those empty wine bottles. It was remarkable that they were surviving at all. So they were all very religious, they were Roman Catholic and you're not supposed to eat people. So for religious reasons a lot of them had a lot of problems with the notion of doing so, but they did what they had to do in the end. So they sent out, I don't know if you'd call it a search party. What's the opposite of a search party? Two brave dudes. Yeah, but those were kids and they went on like a ten day trek and finally were found by a Chilean shepherd who was working the mountain and he went and got a search party mustard and brought them back and they found the guys. Amazing. A bunch of them survived through impart, survival, cannibalism, but definitely more than just that. These guys didn't just lay down and die, their spirits were still up somehow. That's right dude. In the end 16 people ended up surviving this ordeal. Amazing. Yeah. Weeks and weeks and weeks in the Andes mountains and freezing temperatures. And they made a great movie called Alive. I've not seen it. Is it good? Yeah, it is good. Of course in typical Hollywood fashion it was all white dudes. Yeah. Isn't Ethan Hawk one of the guys? Ethan Hawk is one of the guys. Vincent Spano is Italian. Oh. But hey, you don't know the difference between an Italian and you're Glenn. Yeah, they were all white dudes. Or maybe not all, but the lion share of them of course. Got you. So aside from that it was a good movie. And we definitely talked about this because I remember telling the story, being a kid. And the book was a really big best seller, and I thought it was a soccer team because I didn't know the difference between rugby and soccer. Right. If you listen to our soccer podcast, you might think, I still don't know the difference. So up next, Chuck is Jamestown. This is actually a fairly recent revelation. Apparently, if you were a scholar and historian of colonial America, you were in the know that there was persistent legends and rumors that the people in Jamestown had resorted to cannibalism during the winter 16 nine to 1610. Yeah. There were five historical accounts over the years that people appointed to, and these are like, first person diaries from the people who were there at the time saying, it was so bad that we ate anything in sight, including dead people. The end. But there was nothing to back it up. So I guess the historians were like, these colonists are just trying to show off, or they're using hyperbole, maybe like they were saying, I was so hungry I could eat a horse. But they were using cannibalism instead of the horse because they actually did eat the horse. Well, then finally, a couple of summers ago, in 2013, some archeologists who were excavating Jamestown came upon a trash heap where they found the butchered bones of horses and human teeth and a partial skull. And when they examined the teeth in the skull, they realized, like, oh, wow, these are butcher marks right here. They weren't just exaggerating or showing off. They really did engage in cannibalism in Jamestown. Yes. And this is the only artifactual evidence of cannibalism by Europeans ever, supposedly. Really? That's what it says. And with science, it's pretty remarkable what you can do these days. They actually did 3D reconstructions and examined this skull and learned a lot about this 14 year old girl that they called Jane. She was found buried a couple of feet down, two and a half feet down, but in a trash heap. There's a huge giveaway, a 17th century trash heap right in the seller inside the site at James Fort. So 80% of these columns died in the winter of 1009, and they found what they called multiple chop marks on the girl's skull, clearly interested in cheek, meat, muscles of the face, tongue, and the brain. And they think that the person who at least was responsible for harvesting the flesh and the brain from the head was not an experienced butcher. Right. The marks on the forehead are hesitant, and apparently they couldn't stand or staring at them while they were doing this. So they turned her over, and then from the back of the head, that's when the marks became a little more confident and where they finally cleaved her skull open. So they've turned her over, and that's when the butcher marks start to get a little more confident, and apparently that's where they managed to access her skull by cleaving it in two from behind. That's right. They also found cuts and saw marks and stuff along her lower jaw that they said was made to get the meat. Who said that in this article? I read arby's. But here's a remarkable thing. They use isotope studies to find out a lot about this girl. So they know from examining her shinbone that she was 14. Really sad. But the good news is she wasn't murdered. No, she starved to death. Well, good news bad, I guess. It's sad anyway you look at it. Although that's not necessarily true. There's a lot of disease that was spreading through Jamestown at the time as well. So it's possible she died of other causes that aren't quite as bad as starvation. Well, here's the deal. Jamestown was it's not what you learned about an elementary school. Like, it was doing very poorly at this point. People were starving. The local Native American tribe that were once friendly with them had cut them off, and they actually showed up in during the worst drought in the region in centuries. So it was a really just inauspicious beginning. And they called this period especially during the winter 16, nine, and 1610, the starving time. It was capital S and capital T. So, you know, it was significant. So in, they're already in bad shape, and then 300 new settlers show up what's for dinner? On these six ships? They were in bad shape when they got there because they had a rough crossing. And so they believe from studying isotopes in this girl's teeth, that a few things. One, that she came over on those six boats, that she hadn't been there long. Right. Two, that she was either served as a maid to a family of high status was from a family of high status, because they found that she ate a lot of protein. And then they determined that. It's amazing what they can determine. I know that she was from probably the southern coast of England, because the water that she consumes while she's got her little baby teeth are forming in infancy. You can tell years later where that came from. So cool, man. Leave it to the Smithsonian. This guy's hats off. So after eating horses, dogs, cats, rats, mice, they ate leather, they ate they ate anything they could get their hands on. They finally did resort to eating humans. Yes. Now we have evidence of it. And by spring of 1610, only 60 people had survived. Isn't that amazing? It is, because 300 came over on the boat, so I don't know how many are already there. Yeah, man. It's a bad jam. That is a bad jam. All right, should we take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. All right, I need to regather myself. So, Chuck, I believe we talked about this one before, too, because it's so astounding, but there was a guy named Richard Parker, and he was working aboard a yacht that was sailing from England to Australia. And the name of the yacht was the Miniont. Yeah. Do you know why it was sailing there? No. A rich dude bought it in Australia and it was just, like, literally being delivered to him. Oh, yeah. I guess I did kind of know that. Yeah. I didn't know. I just thought it was some expedition or some like no, I do kind of remember that from when we talked about it before. When do we talk about this? Cannibalism. So the Minion had a sailing to Australia. A couple of months into the trip, it sank because it's not supposed to sail from England to Australia. It was not built for that. Oh, really? Yeah. And they even kind of fortified it, apparently, and didn't work on board with a raincoat on it. There's a cabin boy, 17 year old named Richard Parker. Have you ever seen Cabin Boy? The movie? Sure. Great movie. Yeah. You kidding me. Chris Elliott? Yeah, I think I saw that in the theater. I was so excited. David Letterman's in there, too. Sure. He has a weird cameo. So cabin boy Richard Parker, 17 years old. And there's an old tradition called the custom of the sea, where you are in bad shape and you draw lots, and whoever draws the short straw says, kill me and eat me. Well, they say, all right, I won't hold it against you. When you guys get that's probably how it goes. Yeah. So they consider drawing lots, and then the captain, Thomas Dudley, said, no, let's not even bother. Look at Parker. Smells like onions. I don't like how the kids looked, ever. Well, it's pretty sad. They literally were like, I don't think we even need to draw lots. Like, he's clearly the one that needs to go. He was malnourished. He was skinny. It sounded like, from the accounts I read, that they were having to kind of care for him. Like, he fell overboard at one point and they had to rescue him. More trouble in his work. He drank Seawater and got himself sick. And everyone's like you don't drink seawater, Richard. So they said, I think we're just going to take care of this without a vote. And he didn't have family or anything like that. He was a kid who'd miss him. So Dudley jabs a pin knife in his neck. Not a good way to go. Joe Pesci style. If you're going to dispatch, be dispatched. That's not a good way to go. A pen knife in the neck? No, I don't know how they were on a little dinghy at this point. I don't know that. You just like, go chop him out of seagull and then hit them over the head. Then you can stab him with a pen knife once he's out. And I just go from zero to penn. Knife in the neck. Hey, I agree. No arguments here to go. Pescistyle is barbaric. So they kill him with a pin knife, ate his flesh, drank his blood, and just a few days later, they were found. I don't know if they would have survived those few days or if that haunted them for the rest of their lives. They were rescued, ironically, by a German ship called the Montezuma, who was the famous Aztec king who ate people and made them poop. That's right. Oh, really? Yeah. That's interesting. It gets even more interesting, though. Well, they were tried for murder I know where you're going. And found guilty. But people felt pretty bad for them. They were like, yeah, we've all met Richard Parker. He did smell like onions. And so six months later, they were released from prison. But here's where it does get a little weird. Oh, me? Yeah. So I love this. This is 1884, right? When this happened. Yes. In 1838, a little guy named Edgar Allen Poe wrote a short story about a boat that sank, and some guys were in a lifeboat, and a guy got killed in Eaton, and the guy who got killed in Eaton's name was Richard Parker. Isn't that awesome? It's pretty weird. The narrative of Arthur Gordon PIM of Nantucket was the short story, and I saw something that pointed out, like many other things didn't match up. I was like, that's really all you need, right? To call it a startling coincidence? Sure. Yeah. Pretty weird, apparently. Also, the guy who wrote The Life of Pie named the Tiger Richard Parker as well. Did you know that? I haven't seen that movie. Or read the book. I haven't read the book. The movie is really good. I heard nothing but good things. Yeah. I've just never been in a Life of Pie mood. You know what I mean? Sure. The name sort of is kind of like, yeah. Who's Pie? Do I care about his life? No. It's a good movie, though. All right, moving on to Alfred. Or Alfred packer. Who knows? I heard it was Alfred, but I've seen it both ways. Yeah. Illiterate gold miners in the Old West. Who knows? That's right. February, 1874. Alford, he's a gold miner. He's a prospector, and he wants to go to the high mountains of Colorado to find gold and apparently makes, like, half of the trip and then stops in the winter and stays with the Ute tribe. And they're like, you need to just stay here until spring. Don't go any further. He says, no, I got this. I'm going to continue on. Thanks for the warning. All right. So he goes on with his friends and eventually wanders out of the woods alone. Yeah, he went in with five other dudes, came out alone. That's right. And said, who, me? Oh, I'm just the sole survivor of the group. A storm hit, and everybody went their separate ways. Let's not talk about it again. Yeah. He said, My feet got frozen and I couldn't keep up, and I don't know what happened to those dudes. And they're like, oh, really? He's like, okay, fine. All right. Yeah, I killed one of them, but it was in self defense. And they're like, what? He's like, all right, we ate some of the other dudes, but they died naturally. Well, the reason they first said, Wait a minute, what's going on here? Is he said that, I don't know what happened to those guys. They said, well, why do you have their personal belongings in your pack? Right? And he went, oh, well, I know I've got wallets full of money from these guys, right? So maybe I should come somewhat clean. So story keeps changing every time they ask him. They eventually he's in jail. Cagey he's in jail at this point, obviously, while he's being questioned and all this stuff. But the jail was basically a log cabin. No jail can hold Alfred packer. No, especially not a jail in 1874 in Colorado. So he busted out, goes on the lamb for nine years. They catch him in Wyoming, leaving under the alias of John Swartz. Actually, somebody who was part of another expedition that he was on, a guy named Frenchie recognized him. Really? Just happened to run cross paths with him. It was like, you no way. Yeah. Wow. That's bad luck. Sure, I guess. Good luck. So he was convicted of manslaughter, incentives to 40 years. Released on parole in one after 17 years. Yeah. Supposedly died a vegetarian at the age of 65. No. That's what they say. It sounds to me like somebody might have a little buttoned up. Yeah, that's what I think. Well, he's become a beloved figure, I guess. There's a statue of them on the campus of UC at Boulder. Well, yeah, they named their cafeteria after him. And with the subheading, have a friend for lunch. Terrible. Those college students back in the 60s, they had a real sense of humor. And of course, the South Park guys wrote Cannibal the Musical after him. So Alfred Packer, survival. Cannibalist to what degree, we don't know. That's right. I need another break, sir. I'm hungry. Is that awful? We'll be back right after this. Okay? Did you get something to eat, buddy? No, not yet. Your forearm is looking pretty good, though. I'd make a nice meaty meal. Well, you know, one of the great revelations in my adult life is that when you're eating meat, you're not eating anything but muscle. Do you realize that? When did you realize that? When you told me on the show I know. That I go over some stuff more than once. That's all right. But it was a big revelation. I know. And that's why red meat is red, because it has more red blood vessels. Those are muscles that you use more often. Dark meat. I'm sorry. Okay, so, like, in a chicken, the dark meat are muscles that the chicken uses far more frequently than, say, like the breast, which is white, so there's fewer blood vessels. So it's dark compared to the white meat. Interesting. It's mind blowing. Do you like dark meat? I like it all, yeah. I used to just be like, oh, no, white meat only, please. And then I really started trying dark meat. I'm like, yeah, that's good stuff. Now I'm just like, bring it on. Right. Service choice, that's what I always say. Really? White or dark, service choice. And then I'm like, no, mixed. I'm not going to leave this in your hand. And they say, this diner is so wacky. The Franklin expedition. Yes, this is a good one. Sir John Franklin, at the age of 60 had already taken two expeditions. Dangerous ones. Yeah, six ft. Also, we're talking about 1840. That's old. Yeah, that's an old dude. So hats off to him for doing it again. Yeah. Salty old swarthy seaman, by all accounts. So they were looking for the Northwest Passage from Europe to Asia, up in the Arctic, I guess, right. That would be going westward. A westward northwest. Northwest Passes. I never thought about that before. But there's no Southeast Passage or Northeast Passage, is there? I don't know, who cares, right? Anyway, Franklin's leading this expedition and there were 134 dudes. Yeah, I've seen another couple of numbers, but we'll go with that. And they're never heard from again. Yes. And they were pros. They weren't a bunch of dummies that just said, let's take a bag of rice and some beef jerky. They had five years of food. They went to a provisioner I didn't really know this how this works. I figured they just went shopping, but you would find someone to get all your provisions for the trip, they would win the bid. Right. And you would hire them. So they hired a guy named Steven Goldner, and he apparently was in a rush because I guess they just cut it close time wise and hastily put together five years worth of food and tens soldered them shut. 8000 tens of food. He soldered them shut? Apparently, that's how they say it in the UK, so shout out UK. All right. And here's the quote I saw was that the lead dripped like melted candle wax down inside the surface. That's a bad soldering job. It is. And we just did an episode on lead. So you know that if lead is in your canned goods, that is no goods. Right. So this expedition had two ships, and they were really well outfitted ships. They had internal heat, hot water was piped throughout the cabin so that they could stay warm. They had railroad engine screw, propellers they were fitted with they were ironclad in parts to break through ice. They were really nice ships. The Arabis and the terror. Yeah, very poorly named. Yeah. The Terror is not what you want to name a ship on an expedition, right? No, in the Arabis, I looked it up because I was just curious, and apparently in Greek mythology, it's the place where you would go right after death. It's the personification of darkness. Terrible name. Yeah. The terror and the Arabic. Right. So, Chuck, they found at least one of the ships. Yeah, just two years ago. OK. They discovered the wreck of the HMS Arabis, offshore of King William Island. Underwater or trapped in ice? Oh, no. Underwater. Okay. But they think that it was trapped in ice is how they originally perished. Yeah, because they were stuck. There's a big mystery with the Franklin expedition, because even if they were stuck, they had plenty of supplies. Five years worth of supplies to wait until it thawed enough to sail, at least go back. Right. So why would they abandon these ships? It's a huge mystery, and a lot of people say, well, it was the lead. Look at the behavior. They apparently took lifeboats, dragged them across the tundra. They had non essentials on board with things like silverware. You'd have to just be totally off your nut to be on, like, a survival expedition to go find help, and you bring along silverware. So everybody pointed to what was the dude's name? Richard Goldings. Work. Terrible. Soldering work. Stephen Goldner. And that the lead had poisoned these guys and clouded their judgment. Yeah, they kind of went mad, but apparently some of the bodies have since been found. And they did some forensic analysis of it and said, actually, no, these guys have lots of lead poisoning, but it's distributed evenly throughout their bones, like they were just poisoned by lead throughout their lives. It wasn't acute poisoning from the soldering work. Yeah. So it just remains a mystery. I guess it does. And some Inuit tribes reported seeing about 40 guys, 40 white men that were in bad shape that they sold some seal meat to. And when one of the search parties came across the Inuit tribe, they told him the story. And I think over the years, they've been finding piles of these bodies in different locations. And the Inuits first were the ones who said, yeah, we actually saw one of their camps after we ran into the guys, we think we found them again, all dead, like, the following year. And there was, like, human bones and their kettles and stuff like that. So they definitely resorted to survival cannibalism at some point. Yeah. It said the direct quote was, from the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative cannibalism. Kind of dramatic. Yeah, for sure. So, Chuck, let's do one more, huh? Okay. Our famous top ten, consisting of six tops. Boy, this one is super sad. Yeah. There's not much joking about this. I mean, none of this has been funny, but we're trying not to just oppress everyone. Right. But the siege of linenrad is one. Of the saddest moments in world history. It's when the Nazi forces invaded, bombarded over three years against what is now St. Petersburg, and basically for 900 days, cut them off in an effort to starve out a city of 3.3 million people. And it worked. Yeah, it did. It's a great effect. 3.3 million people. A million died over the three year siege. Yeah. And 800,000 of those died from starvation. 800,000 people. Nuts. The government, nobody could get to it. The Nazis had formed a ring around the city and were defending it and just trying to they were bombing it every day. But they were also well aware that they were purposefully starving the population as well. Inside, the people had a ration of bread once a day, a piece of bread about the weight of a bar of soap. Yeah. Manual labor has got 250 grams of bread, but apparently the bread was cut with pine shavings and they were subsisting on 300 calories a day. Yeah. And if you were in the army, you would get things like fern leaf soup and cream of nettle. Probably not even cream, but like, broth of nettle soup. So people were joining the army just for that? Just to have that every day. Yeah. Here's some of the things that they use as food substitutes. Cotton seed cake macaroni, which is, in quotes, made from flaxseed for cattle meat. Jelly produced from boiling bones and calf skins. Yeast soup from sawdust fermented, sawdust joiners glue, boiled and jellified toothpaste, cold cream. Basically, they said they even licked dried paste of wallpaper. Yeah. Because there was a rumor that it was potato based. Anything for calories. I mean, that's how desperate things were. Yeah. And not just even calories, but, like, vitamins, too. Apparently, they were sweeping the tobacco shavings from a tobacco factory ventilation system, because tobacco has vitamin C in it. Unbelievable. Vitamin B is one of those, too. So what happens is a crime wave starts breaking out, as you would expect in a city that large that's starving to death, like, people literally just laying dead in the street, like, everywhere you look. Right. And apparently not just laying dead in the street. They were half eaten, some of them laying dead in the street. Yeah. And they kept this under wraps for many years because they didn't want people to know the world, to know how ugly it was. But we have a lot more information now, but you would have these ration cards to get the tiny allotments of food that they had, and so if their relatives die, they would hide the bodies so they could still use a ration card. And then these gangs, these teenage gangs of teenage boys started breaking out where they would mug you for food in your ration card. 118 year old killed his two younger brothers for their cards. One guy murdered his grandmother and boiled and ate her liver. And a 17 year old stole a corpse from a cemetery and put it through a meat mitzer. Wow. So it's one of the most shocking things that I've ever heard in world history. And it isn't much talked about. I mean, you hear about the siege of Lennon Grant, but the details of it are just horrifying. Yeah, it was pretty whitewashed, I think, when I studied it in college. Well, that's because the Soviets just denied the horror of the whole thing. 2000 people were arrested for cannibalism. 586 were executed for murdering people and eating them. And it said most people arrested were women. Apparently, mothers would smother like their youngest kids to feed to the other kids. Got you, man. What a horrible time. All right. That's a nice uplifting way to leave people. Yeah. There's others that we haven't touched upon, so if you want to learn more about it, you can just type survivalcannibalism into the search bar@howstoughforks.com. And since I said that, it's time for Facebook questions. I can't think of a more inappropriate way to end this show than to take social media questions and laugh. But maybe we need to laugh now. Let's all right, I've got a hilarious one. All right, this is from LuJean. If you had to eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be? Fried chicken. Oh, yeah, easy. Mine would be either a really good Indian curry or really good Japanese curry. Either one of those I'd be happy with. So a curry. A curry. A good one, though. Great one. Well, in food, fried chicken, if it's a meal, I'm going to say fried chicken. Mashed potatoes with gravy and cornbread or biscuit or something. What about green? But dealer's choice, like you said. Okay, green beans, collards, whatever. But that would be my meal for sure. Okay, good one. That was hilarious. This is from Jeff Ruth. Why doesn't John Candy get comedic props that he's due? Great question. I agree. One of the great, great comic actors of our time. Sad. Sad that we lost him. He was huge at the time. I mean, everybody knew John Candy. He was in some major motion pictures, many of which were surrounded by him. I think he's gotten tons of problems. So what are you saying, Jeff? Wake up. Wake up. Also because he's Canadian. Okay, good answer. Here's one from Lilly Higgins. What is it like for Jerry? Producing stuff you should know. Well, here's Jerry's answer. All right. Yeah. Nice. Illuminating kid answer as always. Russell Redmond. What's your favorite breed of cat? And don't lie, because I'll know Russell. I think I'll probably go with the breeds that I have right now because they're dear to me. So I'm going to say a tabby and a mancoon. Okay. Yeah, those two. Are you ready for this question? Yeah. Charlie Manson asks, chuck always wears a baseball cap. Is there a reason for this? Chuck, I think you should tell them right now. You're not wearing a baseball cap. I'm not. Because as most of you know, my beloved Last Chance Garage hat that I've had for 20 years was lost in Austin, Texas, and is in a dumpster somewhere in Austin, Texas. I don't know if that's true. I think it's adorning the hat of a hipster in Austin, Texas. Seriously, if you're in Austin, keep an eye out for that thing. It says Last Chance Garage. It's black, circle smell. Circle emblem. Smells like 20 years of Chuck. No one else would want to wear that hat, I guarantee you. But now I don't wear a hat that much anymore because of that. I love that hat. Okay. Jack Mayhan says, what is your favorite automobile and why? Mine is probably the AMC Pacer just because it's pretty cool looking. I'm not a big car guy, but I'm going to go with the 1960s VW Beetles because I drove them and I still love them. I saw a beautiful looking Beetle the other day, cherry restored that this guy was driving, and I was just like, man, I'm getting another one one day. Totally do it, Chuck. I am. I'm going to have a real nice one. Okay. Brian tarbell. Oh, tarbell. Why do you tempt me? So describe the flightgate in one word. We go at it a lot on Facebook. He's our friend from Boston. All right. And one word. Two words. Three words. Tom Brady cheetah. Moving on, I think. Score one for Chuck. Tara Dickinson asks, is ketchup a sauce or a condiment? I think it's probably both. I don't think it has to be one or the other. I did a Dumpy dumb on the origin of ketchup, though. Did you know it's Vietnamese in origin? I had no idea. Really? CAtsu? Is that how it's pronounced? Yeah. Really? And is that why it's spelled as cats? Upset her? Yes, that's exactly right. That's the traditional spelling. Yeah. And did you know originally, before tomatoes weren't introduced until the late 19th century, but the British were making versions of this stuff from the mid 18th century, and they were using things like walnuts and anchovies and all sorts of weird stuff. Mushrooms. It was more like a fish sauce. That's how ketchup started. Really? Yeah. Is that why it got vinegar in it today? Probably. I don't remember why. I think it might have been originally a preservative. Got you. I'll do. One more for me. This is from Caleb. James Wyatt. Would either of you ever consider running for public office for me? Not a chance. No way. Never had any interest whatsoever. And I wouldn't be allowed to anyway. They would expose me so quickly for past crimes against humanity. They would dig stuff up on me. Sure. And I would be disqualified. So now, for many reasons, I think that's a great way to end it. Great. If you want to get in touch with us, you can visit us on Facebook@facebook.com. Stuffyturnknow you can tweet to us at xyskpodcast. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housepressworks.com. As always, join us at our home on the web stuffyouhow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseupworks.com." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-10-04-sysk-soda-fountains-final.mp3 | The Amazing History of Soda | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-amazing-history-of-soda | The soda we get instantly mixed at a fast-food joint owes a lot to a rich history going back to the Roman baths, that features drugs, diseases and explosions. Learn all about soda and soda fountains in this surprisingly interesting episode. | The soda we get instantly mixed at a fast-food joint owes a lot to a rich history going back to the Roman baths, that features drugs, diseases and explosions. Learn all about soda and soda fountains in this surprisingly interesting episode. | Mon, 03 Oct 2016 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=0, tm_yday=277, tm_isdst=0) | 45931855 | 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. 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 episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Squarespace. Whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, a professional blog, or an online store, it's all possible with a Squarespace website. And right now, listeners to Stuff You Should Know can start a free trial today. Just go to Squarespace.com and enter the offer code st UFF and you'll get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace set your website apart. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry. And this is stuff you should know. You're going to love it. I think I just said this is remarkably interesting right before we hit record. Well, you're right, because what are you going to call this thing? How so? Sounds like you trailed off. It's not the best title. Well, it's a well, that's been gone to before. Oh, sure. It's really the history of soda. Kind of just think it's interesting. I never really thought about it. I didn't either. And this is Chuck, to me one of those great examples of how you can take anything and really tease out all these different parts to it. Sure. And that just about everything is more interesting than it appears on the surface. Yeah, because soda, as we will learn, affected America in the world and continues to yeah. Basically all American dominance from the mid 19th century on is because of soda. But you are from Ohio, so do you say pop? Used to. Yeah, you depopt. I don't even know. I'm saying soda now. And now I say coke. Yeah, I do, too. You even say Coke when you want a Sprite. Yeah, in the south. I want a green Coke. Can I have a Coke? What kind? Sprite. Yeah. Well, we're in Atlanta. You know, this is the birthplace of Coke. It is. Which we'll talk about. We'll talk about. But the initial, I guess, thread that we took into this topic was soda fountains. Right? Correct. And when you think about a soda fountain this is a good example of what I was saying. When you think about a soda fountain, you think about like bobby Socks teenagers. Right. Bill Haley and the Comets. Yeah. The fawns. Sure. Hair like perfectly in place. Yeah. The fawn is all drunk. Penny, did he get drunk? No, that was the joke. Like Happy Days is so squeaky clean. Wouldn't that be a great episode if the fans are just hammered motorcycle, everybody just tried to avoid them. Yeah. They'll break the jukebox again. Yeah, that would be great. Did you know that's what Laverne and Shirley spun off of? Yeah. Morgan Mindy. Yeah. That's just bizarre. That morgan Mindy and Jonny Laschachi. Well, sure. Yeah. But Morgan Mindy was set in the 70s. Yeah, very weird. Oh, thought it was the 70s based on the down vest. It was the seventies. Alright. I'm pretty sure. Alright, so regardless when you think of soda fountains, you think of the 50s. Yes. Not the 70s. Right. And happy days wasn't in the 50s. That came out in the 70s. Yeah, man. There was a big revival of 50s culture in the 70s. There always is. People tend to reflect back 20 years or so. Nostalgia. Yeah. With nostalgia there's a great things were so much better back then. There's a great podcast episode. One of the funniest things I've ever heard in my life from the great Andy Daily that centered around Shawna and I can't remember who he did it with, but it was might have been Matt Besser. No, I can't remember. But they did these characters and was all about trying out for Shauna and I drinking egg creams and being a professional water skier. It was very funny. They're just making it up. Yeah. I mean, I'm not doing it justice, but just seek it out. Just type in Andy Daily, Shaun on and just sit back and get ready for Delighted for an hour. That's awesome. I'll check it out. I will check it out. But yeah. 50s purity. Bobby socks, soda fountains. Good clean fun. Here's the thing. You're totally wrong if that's your conception of soda fountains. That's right. By the time the 50s rolled around, soda fountains were already so far on their way out. Yeah. That basically by the 50s. What would happen to bars in the 70s thanks to the fern bar had already happened to soda fountains by the that's right. What was once handcrafted drinks made from freshly prepared ingredients that were mixed there on the premises yeah. By soda jerk. Right. Have been replaced by pre mixed stuff and canned ingredients that were put together by people who didn't give a darn about you or your family. That's right. The were not the heyday of the sort of fountain. It's actually much older than that. Yeah. Boy, that's a set up from the old days. It's getting in the wayback machine. And go back to Europe when everyone was like, you know what? These mineral waters, we've been drinking this stuff for hundreds of years. And even before that, the Romans bathed in it. Yeah, it's great for you. You drink it, you bathe in it, you splash it on your sister, you want her to be well, delivery, right? It will cure everything. It's the cure all back in the days where they thought, like, drink this one thing, it'll cure up your STD and your headache, your hangover, all at once, all at one time, when really all it did was cure an upset stomach. That's right. That's the dirty little secret. But the idea, though no, they didn't. They didn't for centuries, as a matter of fact. Yes, but the idea that you could drink, like, naturally carbonated mineral water and that it could cure your health, or at the very least, it was delightful. People wanted to figure out how to get that if you didn't live near a naturally carbonated spring. That's right. Which, by the way, I was researching this. Did you know pellegrino is not naturally carbonated? I don't know anything about pellegrino. Well, it's a natural mineral water, but they carbonate it there. I didn't realize it wasn't carbonated. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. It surprised me. Are you boycotting? No, I love the stuff. I was just surprised. Is anything these days naturally carbonated and bottled? Dude, now that you say that, you just give me a great opening to mention this book I just read called The Dorito Effect. You have to read it? Yeah. Good. It's about the food we eat today and just how incredibly manufactured it is. But the really refreshing thing about it is that anybody can read this book. It's basically apolitical. It doesn't lay this at anybody's feet. It doesn't blame anybody. It doesn't suggest there's anything nefarious going on. It's just like, here's our food right now. Wow. It's really interesting. I'll check it out. Really approachable. Interesting book. They don't even blame big Dorito. No, I mean, they basically trace the origin of our current food standards back to the invention of the dorito, hence the name. But it's a really great book, definitely worth reading. I'll check that out. And people ask us for book wrecks all the time. That's one. Yeah. Pay attention. Yummy. Got that for me and I read it in, like, two days. Will she read it? She hasn't read it yet. I grabbed it first. Oh, I got you. Yeah. So she bought it for the family. Oh, yeah, okay, sure. I thought it was a gift. Like, I read this and now I'm going to give it to you. No, she read about it. Got. You thought about me. Mine bought it and I said, give me. All right, so mineral water was very appealing, and human beings said, you know what, that would be great if we could bottle this junk ourselves. Right. Even though bottling isn't really a thing yet, or at least not anything that worked. No. Carbonated water, stonewear and a cork yeah. Does not give a hole in is. When Joseph Priestley we've talked about before no, two. Yeah. More than once, british chemist, he said, you know what? I figured this out. Fermented some yeast mash and put it in this water, get you pretty messed up. Yeah. And look at it bubble. It's delightful. Everybody's like, Whoa, that's a decent approximation to semicarbonated water. Yeah. Not a bad first step, though. Nice going, Priestly. So 16 years later, there was a Swiss scientist named Johan Jacob Schweb. Yeah. Sound familiar? He said, you know what? I actually built a device, this hand crank compression pump, and I can make this stuff, and I'm going to found a company called Schwepz, because that's my name, and you're going to be hearing it for centuries. Yeah. And he was definitely on to something. What Schwep figured out was not just this invention that he made, but he also realized that to carbonate water, which let's talk about carbonating water, shall we? Artificially carbonate, I should say, to carbonate it. There's some conditions that are most conducive to carbonating water because CO2 molecules and H, two O molecules do not like to get together. Yeah. You don't just throw it in there and they'll start hugging it out and say, great, now drink me. Yes. As a matter of fact, their bond angles, I believe, are totally different, and they're at such an angle that they just do not go together very well. But Yakov Schwep said, you know what? I wonder if you use really cold temperatures, like near freezing water, that would help. He was correct. Correct. And also, if you put it under pressure, maybe, say, seven atmospheres yeah, it would help. He was correct with that, too. That's right. And that's what you need, cold and pressure. And if you get that going, then that gas dissolves into the liquid and those molecules start to party and hug it out. And it's pretty amazing that someone figured that out way back then, but it's even more amazing that it wasn't like he's like, I'll just take the CO2 canister and this cold water and put it together under pressure. This dude had to make his own CO2, so he used the old sulfuric acid and powdered marble combination, that old trick. Right. Which is we'll talk about is kind of dangerous to put together. To create carbonated water, Schweppe had to first create carbon dioxide. So he had a lot of stuff going on. He was the first guy to come up with a mechanized version of creating carbonated water. Yeah. Pretty amazing. Yeah. But it took many more years before it became even close to a perfected process. Yeah. As you'll see, it happened. Many people chipped in over the course of a lot of time, namely Mr. Charles Plyth in 1813. He invented the I don't know if he invented I think he might have invented or at least he perfected the soda siphon, which, if you've ever seen an episode of the three stooges, we've got one. You don't have this? No, I don't have one. You got to get one. I got a soda stream. I'm all good. Okay. Yeah, you don't need one, then. 1813, and that means he could either squirt someone in the face and have a comedy routine, or he could serve you some carbonated liquid. Yes. Which is great. But you had to keep refilling that thing at the source. Yeah, that was the problem. And especially if you're having to make your own CO2, it's one thing to just use those little chargers today. It's not much of a problem. But if you have to make your own CO2 first before you create the siphon, that's a big process. Sure. So, again, these guys are kind of like poking away at the edges of the problem of coming up with mass produced carbonated water. Big problem. Right. And they're contributing and adding to this nut cracker. But no one's actually cracked the nut yet. It would be 1832 when a man named John Matthews yeah, he's American, born in England, best of both worlds. He developed a chamber, a lead line chamber where he could actually mix, he could actually generate that CO2. Right. So swept had already generated the CO2 before. Yeah. Got you. Yeah. I thought Matthews was the first to do that. No. Okay. Schwetz actually was creating CO2. Got you. He didn't have this self contained apparatus that Matthews came up with. That was his huge innovation. Who, Matthews? Yeah. I mean, he mixed it together without water, and he created carbonated water, and you could bottle it. But bottling wasn't like a big you couldn't mass bottle it at this point. No, what he came up with, this invention that he came up with was it was big enough to serve a decent sized clientele. Going from the Schwepps era invention, where you could make 20 of these a day. 20 carbonated drinks a day. Sure. All of a sudden, with Matthew's invention, you could make, like, hundreds. Yeah. But it was immobile. So it was either good for bottling, which at the time, bowling sucked in America, the glass wasn't good enough to bottle stuff under pressure, or you could make carbonated drinks there on site. And that's what it led to, was directly the creation of the soda fountain, the place where you would go get a soda. Hooray for him. Yeah. So we'll take a little break, and we'll come back with one final gentleman who, although he failed, he had a big impact on the soda fountain industry. You know how when you get something done with just the click of a mouse, and you get to put it off of your to do list once and for all. It feels so good. Yes, buddy. That's the feeling of stamps.com, Chuck. I like that kind of simple action, my friend. You can get your mailing and shipping done without leaving your desk, thanks to stamps.com, because it turns your PC or mac into your own personal post office that never closes. Yeah, right there. On your own personal post office that never closes. You can buy and print official US. Postage for any letter or any package using your own computer and printer. Then you just hand it off to your friendly mail carrier or drop it in the mailbox. You'll never have to go to the post office again. That's right. And we have a pretty sweet deal right now if you sign up for stamps.com, all you have to do is use our offer code stuff, and you get the following special offer a four week trial plus $110 bonus offer, including postage and a handy dandy digital scale. Yes. So don't wait. Go to stamps.com. Before you do anything else, click on the microphone at the top of the home page and type in S-T-U-F-F. That's stamps.com enter stuff. All right. Benjamin silly man Sullivan, I believe, is probably how he preferred to have it pronounced. Don't you think? He was very serious. He probably was. He said, you know what? I may be a failure in my businesses, but I'm going to go down in history as maybe the guy who had the most to do with the creation of soda in a massive, ubiquitous way. Right. He was a professor of chemistry at Yale. Jeez. What is Yale? Hoyas. Right. Or bulldogs? Hoyes is Georgetown, so I think it's the bulldogs. Yale bulldogs. Got you the Yale hodgman. That's your mascot. He's a Yale he, isn't he? Yes. He went to Yale. You don't say. Yeah. So because he was a chemistry professor at Yale, he didn't make a ton of money, wanted to make a little dough on the side, and his whole jam was kind of going back to the old days. This stuff is medicinal. I'm really going to move all my chips in on the medicine angle. Right. Which turned out to not be the best move. No. And it wasn't necessarily that he just focused on the medicinal aspect of it. It was apparently he didn't know how to create, like, a fun time establishment. Right. He was a Yale chemistry professor, so he created two of the first, basically, soda fountains in New York city based on Matthew's design, which, again, was a lead chamber where you put the calcium carbonate and the sulfuric acid together, created CO2. It bubbled up through water to purify it, and then that purified CO2 entered a very cold spring water chamber and bubbled up and created carbonated water. Right. That's making me thirsty. So silly man. Created two of these houses, and he set them up at two very elite places in New York, the City Hotel and the Tantin Coffee House right there on Wall Street. Right. And he started serving this stuff, but again, he was serving it as medicine. And the impression I have is that it was kind of like, please give me your money. Great. Here's your medicine. Drink it, please get out. There is no fraternizing. There's no talking. Some other people noticed this and said, that's a really great idea. Costs have finally come down enough to where I can get some investors and we can open our own pump house, our own soda fountain. But we're going to throw in some books, we're going to promote people talking, and maybe they'll stick around and order a second one. Right. Yeah. I don't see that's weird, though, because the Tantin Coffee House was like a very social place where people hung out. Well, then he did something wrong that other people didn't do or that did better. Well, maybe they were just drinking coffee because he went under. Well, the whole thing competitive soda fountains buried him. But he was the guy who came up with the idea, so he created the legacy. He just wasn't very good at business. That's right. Hats off to you, silly man. Hats off. All right. So these other gentlemen opened up more successful shops. Then they started popping up. Of course, once it happens in New York, the next place is going to be Philly Baltimore. Yeah. And it was a legit business. It was a thing. But it was tied to pharmacies as well. Yeah. Which seems weird, but not when you think about it. No. And one of the big reasons why it was tied to pharmacies is because it took tremendous skill to properly create carbon dioxide. They blew up. Yes. You could die at a soda fountain hanging out. They blew up. The sulphuric acid could leach into the finished product, and you could be served a cup of sulfuric acid. Not very good. There were a lot of things that could go wrong in mixing this. So this is technical expertise that pharmacists already had. So it made sense for them to say, we got this. Which is why it does become less weird to associate the soda fountain with the pharmacy, which it would very soon become basically like hand in hand with. Yeah. I grew up in Stone Mountain, and the old village of Stone Mountain had a pharmacy straight out of Happy Days. And it was like the it sounds like the would to, like, walk down there and get like, a Coke float and they would put it on my parents tab. Oh, yeah. And this was literally Happy Days Time. Sure. But it was 80. It was 85. Yeah. I was like twelve or 13. It's pretty great. Walking down to the old pharmacy, thinking about how cool David Hasselhoff is. Yeah. Actually, I didn't watch Nightrider. I didn't either. I wasn't on the Hasselhoff train. Big fan of his music, but not Night Rider, but yeah, they would just jerk me a soda. And I don't even think we said why they were called soda jerks, because that's the motion that you would make. Yes. You jerk the tap handle. Yeah. Or soda jerkers. I've seen them called that as well. Or soda throwers. I saw it, too. I like that. The reason they were called soda throwers is because it took a lot of skill to mix these drinks on the level of the bartenders that we're working at the time. And as a matter of fact, some bartenders, especially during Prohibition, became soda jerks. Yeah. There was a lot of showmanship involved. Right. It's kind of like a cool job to have. Yeah. But we haven't reached that point yet. We're at about the mid 19th century when it's really starting to get popular and it's spreading through the major cities of the US. Correct. So they're in pharmacies, like you said, because they had skill at doing this, and it just made sense. And it had the old medicinal tiein, right. Like, here, drink this tonic that I've made for you, this ginger ale or this root beer. And apparently by this time, everybody knew that carbonated water didn't have any real medicinal properties. Oh, yeah, that was kind of the joke. Not the joke, but joke was on them. So the pharmacist would say, well, I'll put some real drugs in here, then let's see what happens. Yeah. Like, it didn't have to have minerals at this point. Right. But people love the fizz. Right. They were crazy for the fizz. Still do. Right. And putting, like, herbs and drugs and stuff into a drink was not an American mid 19th century invention. Right. It goes back really far. This is folk medicine. And actually, in Europe, there was all sorts of stuff that we brought over. Like, the idea of root beer is actually way older than Charles Hires invention. It goes back to native America, indigenous European groups, just basically anybody who ever put roots embark and boiled up, boiled it. And the reason they were making this stuff was because the water supply was questionable at the time. So you were basically purifying water by fermenting it, by brewing it and making an alcoholic drink. And it would be called small beer. And small beer was a drink like that, like the original root beer, the original ginger beer. These were small beers, and they were used to basically drink instead of water. And kids would drink it, everybody would drink it. It usually had pretty low amounts of alcohol in it. But taking that same idea of using things like sassafras or sasparilla ginger yeah. Or whatever, and putting it together with this new sparkling water that you could get from a tap at a soda fountain, that was the big innovation. Remarkable. Yeah. And pharmacists at the time, they were adding some booze, not negligible amounts like alcoholics. If they were broke, they might go to the pharmacy to get what amounts to like a shot of whiskey and their little elixir, because it wasn't taxed like alcohol was so they could get a cheaper drink. And I guess it was more socially acceptable too, because you were going for medicine rather than going to the bar for leisure. Let me get my medicine. Right, exactly. What else? Drugs. Like not just alcohol, drugs. Drugs? Yeah, like drugs. Just go ahead and say it. Drugs. Heroin? Yeah, heroin, morphine, opium, cannabis, strict nine. Yes. And this is prefoodandrug th of this is going on. So if you wanted to pick me up, you would trot down to the store in the morning, to the pharmacy and you would get your cocaine drink. Yeah, and I guess the heroin wasn't to pick me up. That was a take me down, take me down. You had that at the end of the day. Yeah. Well, you remember in the bars episode we talked about bitters and cocktails? These were originally like medicinal, supposedly. Well, people still swear by that stuff for like a tummy ache, right? I guess I could see Bidders giving you a tummy ache if you had too much, but you'd be the one to know. You like your bitters, right? I like bitters. You know me, I don't drink a lot of that stuff, but just the name itself turns me off. So I came across something in here. Phosphates. Right. I'm like, what is a phosphate? A type of drink that you could get around this time mid to late 19th century and even up into the 20th century, it was a very famous type of soda fountain drink. Like your son have a nice cold. Phosphate. Yeah, exactly right. And the phosphate usually was some sort of sweetener, usually a fruit, maybe like cherry syrup or something like that, and carbonated water and then the stuff called acid phosphate. And acid phosphate is this compound that gives, it brings out like the sour notes in whatever drink it's in. It gives you a little bit of a tingle, a little bit of a kick. It's weird. And I looked, I'm like, is this stuff still around? Surely enough it is. So I am going to get some and try to figure out what to do with it. It's going to be awesome. But phosphate, that was another thing you would put into originally phosphates were thought secure things like hypertension. So like all these things that really just kind of came to form a taste or a flavor, a mouthfeel of what we now see as a soft drink originally started out as medicine, booze or drugs. Right. And then all of them would be put together and you would go drink in the morning and say, I'm just getting some medicine. Well, and this is a time of course this article points out where did you get this, by the way? This is really good. This is actually we should have given a shout out already. This is a Collector's Weekly article. Yeah. Hunter Oakman Stanford, who just has written some pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. Collectors Weekly is like, really bizarre that they put out some of the finest articles on the Internet. Why is that bizarre? Just because you would think it would be so niche that it would just be too narrow. But they're actually really good at taking in the expansiveness of whatever they're talking about, the history of stuff. I bet this is a time, they point out in the article, in the late 1800s, when the quote here is, cocaine was a wonder drug when it was first discovered, it was marvelous medicine that could do you no harm. Right. The early days of cocaine, when they were like, this stuff just makes you feel great. Right? What's the problem? Yeah, it's great. It's embracer. Yes. Which was what people thought all the way up until, like, 1990s. What I thought was funny was that the person who was talking about how much cocaine was usually found in a drink, 100th of a gram. And then the person goes on to say about a 10th of a line of cocaine. Right? Yeah. And then they say, or a bump. Right. Not that I would know. They also said, I'm joking about the bump part, but they did say a 10th of a line. That's bizarre measurement. It depends on the line, I guess. Too right, sure. I mean, it's a weird thing to quantify, right? But I've seen, you know what I mean, like a ten of a line, like a normal line, like a hog, just like, you know, a respectable way. It's a little rail. Yes. I thought that was an odd quote from that guy. Too and here's the thing as far as cocaine being and we'll talk about Coca Cola coming up too, but I found a lot of varying amounts from negligible to significant. I found one thing that said it took 30 glasses to produce an actual dose of the drug, but I've also seen this guy says it's like a bump, so I don't know who to believe. And I think the secrets probably died with the people that had these recipes back then. Right. I don't know if we can know for sure how much cocaine CocaCola still officially says that there was no cocaine, but no. Did they? I think that's their official stance. Well, everybody else says there was definitely cocaine in it. You want to take a break then, and talk about Coca Cola? Yeah. Alright. Josh whether you're wearing suits, sweatpants, or a Canadian tuxedo, you're going to spend 24 hours a day just about in your underwear. That's right. So if you're going to spend so much time in your underwear, you might as well make it excellent underwear. Which means you might as well make it me undies. That's right. Every pair of me undies underwear is made from sustainably sourced modal to fabric that is twice as soft as cotton. And, boy, does it feel good. Yes. And me undies is so sure that you're going to think they're the world's most comfortable underwear if you don't love your first pair of me, Andy's, they're free, no questions asked. Yeah, and not only do they feel great, they look cool. They have dozens of styles, lots of limited edition prints. They're going to help you make a statement with your underwear. Yes. And shipping is free in the US. And Canada. Plus, you can save up to $8 a pair with the me and the subscription plan. You can get that subscription plan or even just a single pair. Either way, you'll get 20% off your first order. So, Chuck, we were talking about how you could find everything from heroin to cannabis to, well, cocaine and drinks. And most famously, you found cocaine. As far as everybody, apparently. But Coca Cola says in Coca Cola yeah. And if you work at Coke or something like that, please write in and explain to us how everyone else in the world says that there was cocaine in it and apparently unearthed recipes for Coca Cola that involved cocaine. But how is it not in Coca Cola? Want to know if that's the case. That is straight, unless they change their stance. But this thing I found that says their official stance is that it did not. Okay, so we'll see. All right, so it's 1886, hundreds, and there's a former colonel in the Confederate Army, civil War vet named Doc Pemberton. They call them Doc. His parents didn't name him Doc. He went on to be a pharmacist, John Pemberton, and he's trying to find a solution for Civil War soldiers who were addicted to narcotics. Painkillers. Right, because they did pretty lousy battlefield treatment. Sure. Well, they did the best they could. Yeah, well, it wasn't good enough. Medicine wasn't far along back then. Right. And so he concocted this thing called Coca Cola. That was the original Coca Cola. Is it true that you have in there that it was originally made with still water and that no one liked it, and then he tried it with carbonated water? This seems senseless because carbonated water was all erased. Yeah, it didn't make any sense. I could see that, though. A misstep, perhaps. Maybe. And it was first sold at Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia, for a nickel. Where is that? That was downtown. Okay. That was all there was of Atlanta back then. Sure. Like Emman Park was a suburb. Was considered a suburb. And for those of you who don't know, emman park now is just a neighborhood right off of downtown. In the suburbs are 40 miles outside. 40 miles in a four hour car. Right. So Doc Pemberton makes it, sells it at Jacobs Pharmacy. His partner, Frank Robinson, was a bookkeeper and partner. He's the one actually named at Coca Cola. He designed that script that they still use today. Oh, wow. He came up with the first, I guess, slogan, which was the pause that refreshes. And they started giving away coupons for the stuff for, like, a free Coca Cola, which got its name because it contained elements from the cocoa plant and cola nuts. Right. From Nigeria, I believe, is where they originate. So it's like a very on the nose. And Coca Cola cola plants have, like, tons of caffeine in them. Yeah. So cocaine and lots of caffeine. Right. So it's doing the job, basically. Yeah. And in 1916, they developed that distinctive contoured bottle, which it took a lot longer to get that patented, I think, like, the 70s or something. Oh, really? Surprising. Wow. But I think they said the idea was they wanted you to be able to tell it in the dark, groping around. Yes. If you had a Coke bottle in your hand. So Coke wasn't the only one putting drugs in their drinks. No, of course not. Like we said, there are plenty of other drugs. Seven up very famously had lithium citrate in it until, I think, the 50s or 60s even, maybe. Lithium, of course, is a very famous mood stabilizer used to treat things like bipolar disorder and depression and all sorts of stuff. Interesting. So you could drink seven up. So we jumped ahead a little bit, going back again to the early 18 hundreds, is when these flavored sodas really first kind of came on the scene, and they started a lot of citrus drinks. And the theory was that people used to eliminate being a refreshing thing. Well, plus, also, again, this is a medicine. Citrus was used to treat scurvy. Yeah. And you could get those citrus oils pretty easily. Right. So, yeah, there was a lot of, like, orange and lemony flavored things early on. What else? Cherry, vanilla, or some of the early flavors? Wintergreen was a big one. I don't know about that. I wouldn't want wintergreen soda, I don't think. Grape, nutmeg, pomegranate, cherry. I used to love the grape drink when I was a kid. Oh, yeah? Like Fana or Nihi grape. Sure. Fago was what we had up in Ohio. Yeah, we didn't have a lot of FAO. I remember Faggo grape, but Fago had a pineapple drink. Is it good? It was so good. And then their red pop was really good too. Yes. I never got into the reds either. I still am an orange guy. I'll drink a Fan of orange. I'll drink, like, ten of them a year. And it's just such a treat. Nice, delicious, like, all ten at once. One day a year, I do, I get so sick. You're like, I don't even want to see this again. My dad, man, he would drink the knee high peach like it was going out of style. Oh, yeah. Never have one of those. I'm not into the peach that much. Dude, we just got back from Japan. They got peach down pat over there. What do you mean? Growing the trees? No, the flavor in candy or whatever like that? Yeah, because it's very delicate. It's not like punching you in the face. It's almost like your tongue is chasing after the taste because it wants a little more. Oh, wow. Really good, man. That should be their motto for whatever. All of it. Right. They were using generally simple syrup. Very sugary, simple syrups. And like you said, they would mix them up right there. They had cool names. Whose? This guy DeForest Sachs had a book called Sax's new Guide. Or hence the soda water dispensers. Like all the books back then, there was an or in the title. He would serve you an opera bouquet or an almond sponge or sizzle fizz. That's a good one. They just sound delicious. Swizzle fizz. It's amazing how this relates to our bartending episode. Well, okay, so I'm glad you brought that up, because if you walked into a really great hotel bar like the Waldorf Astoria in the 1880s or 90s, you would just be like, oh, my God, this place is amazing. Even still today, they're pretty great. But they were like brand new marble. Brand new polished wood and brass and mirrors and onyx and all sorts of just beautiful stuff, right? Yes. And if you looked a little further along the bar, you would say, all you'd have to do is put in a row of carbonation taps and you'd have yourself a soda fountain. Yeah, because they were the same type of establishment. It was just one served alcoholic drinks and the other one served what are considered soft drinks. Right. As they got further and further away from medicine, especially after the Food and Drug Purity Act, they took drugs out and replaced it with sugar. And this was the big American innovation. But at the time, the bars and the soda fountains competed with one another, and the best ones looked very similar to one another. And they would have equally capable bartenders or soda jerks who could mix up some amazing stuff that would knock your socks off. And then that made it ready made to be, like, the champion of the temperance movement. Yeah. So when the temperance movement came along in the late 19th century and really started to get some traction all the way up until, what, 1919? The year before Prohibition. That was 1920. Right. The last good year, people were like, soda fountains are the place to be. Yeah. And a there's lady there's this woman that wrote a book called Soda Shop Salvation named Ray Catherine or I May. And she kind of makes a case for the good that it came out of Prohibition, which was pre Prohibition. There were this bar and saloon culture where the men went and drank and left their families at home and left their kids at home. And she argues that because of Prohibition, the soda shops won out, or at least for a while, and there was a big boom. And all of a sudden women and children were going out to eat more as families with their dads, and there was more dining out. There was a big rise in sugar as a whole. Like, this is when ice cream really started to boom, right. Maybe part and parcel to the floats, like soda floats with ice cream. Right. But, yeah, she said some good things came out of Prohibition. She said the USA needed a reset, was how she put it, on drinking, just period of the cultures that came around because the Prohibition was we were heading down a dark road, she thinks. I see with the saloon and bar culture and leaving the families out of it. So, yeah, I thought it was a pretty interesting take. Yeah, I remember that from our Bars episode two, that after Prohibition, because the speakers didn't have any rules to follow. It was like a new thing, right. Women started showing up and they've been going to bars ever since. But before that, it was strictly like male interesting. And so even before, but during and including after Prohibition, chuck the soda fountain was just immense, huge. I can't remember somewhere in the 19th century, the mid 19th century, new York City had like 600 something soda fountains in it. Just New York City. Right. There are thousands and thousands of them around the United States. In 1929, there was something like 60,000 pharmacies in the United States. 75% of them had a soda fountain. Amazing. There was one in New York called the Pennsylvania Drug Company. It was at Penn Station. They sold the name of it all. They sold on a good day, they would sell drinks to 9000 customers. Wow. They made 250 grand a year selling soda soft drinks, which is like three and a half million dollars in sales in 2015 money. And then all of a sudden, it starts to dry up. Like we said, by the they become quaint. By the 70s, they were down to I think a third of pharmacies had a soda fountain. Still now, today. I mean, good luck finding them. There's just a handful around. Go to CVS and ask for, hey, jerk me a soda. They'll throw you out of there. There's a kind of a revival going on now, but they just virtually disappeared. And what's interesting is they've actually tracked what killed the soda fountain. And there's a few factors that were pretty interesting. Yeah, one of them, and we've talked about car culture and the culture of the expressways and highways in the suburbs and how America grew, shunning public transportation in favor of cars and highways. And that was one of the big things. The little downtown Stone Mountain Pharmacy wasn't as popular because people didn't live anywhere near there anymore. Right. I mean, some people did, of course, but people were flying the coop, basically. Yeah. Spending time out on the open road, you didn't really have that. You didn't want to spend as much time, like, hanging around a soda fountain. Maybe you just wanted some refreshment to go. Right. The drive through culture. Yeah. And then probably the bottle cap was the thing that really killed the soda fountain. Yeah, because I could enjoy it at home or you could buy it on the road and just take it with you. The bottle cap, probably, more than anything, killed the soda fountain. I read a thing, too, that said Coca Cola invented the six pack. Is that right? Yeah. At one point, they started selling them in six packs, and that became, like, the number. That's really surprising. Yes. Or at least they like to claim they take credit for that. No, cocaine came up with the six pack. I don't know what the truth is anymore. You ever been to the world of Coke? Oh, sure. I haven't been to the new one, though. I haven't been at all. You've never been to the World of Coke? No. It's one of those things in your hometown that you ignore. Have you been to the center for Human Rights? The Human Rights Museum? That's amazing. The MLK Center? No, this is newer. Okay. It's just a couple of years old, but it's like the aquarium world of Coke. The Human Rights Museum? No, I haven't seen that. You got to check it out. It's a downer. But in all the oh, I'll go to that, but I'm not going to the World of Coke. Yeah, it's like New Yorkers. They don't go to the Guggenheimer. Central park. What? It's just one of those home town things you ignore. Yes. Hitting. Of course. So you got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to know more about soda fountains and soda pop and all that kind of stuff, you can search the Internet for it. You can type those words into how stuff works.com on the search bar. And also we want to give a shout out to, again, collectors Weekly, the Art of Drink. And today I found out all three of which we used as some source material, too. Yes. Along with our own house supports article how Soda Fountains Work. So thanks to you all for making great stuff. And as I said, that it's. Time for listener mail. I'm going to call this we changed a life. Hey, guys, I want to say thanks for all the great shows. Let you know that you had a big impact on my life some time ago during a listener feedback I'm sorry, Facebook Q, and a young listener asked advice on career paths, and you said that you should do what they love. Trust me, that's not like, the most innovative advice ever, but that's what we said at the time I was being made redundant from a career in buying, but knew it wasn't what I loved. I took your advice, got some experience volunteering at school, having always learned to love and share ideas, and that started a whole new career path. Now, I've just finished my teaching qualification, which was really tough as a mature student, raising my own kids, and next week, start my first job as a class teacher at Y Six Primary. Nice. I think this is the end of elementary school for you guys. Ages ten to eleven, kids. I hope I can engage and inspire children in my class the way you do with your listeners. So I wanted to say cheers. You can use this in the classroom. That's one good way. Yeah. And that is from Catherine Aka. Mrs. Young. Thanks a lot, Mrs. Young. That is very awesome. Congratulations. Way to go. Yeah. And she was gutted to not see us in the UK. We gutted a lot of Brits. Yes. I think it's hilarious. It's a popular term. They all said the same thing. They were gutted. Interesting. Well, thanks, Mr Young. Again, nicely done. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at Sisk podcast. Or Joshua mclark. You can hang out with us on Facebook at Charlesw Chuck Bryant or Facebook.com, you can hang out with us on Instagram and you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyouw.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. 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 the NSA Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-nsa-works | Chuck and Josh dive into the secret world of the National Security Agency, from the origins of the snooping outfit, to the recent revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden. | Chuck and Josh dive into the secret world of the National Security Agency, from the origins of the snooping outfit, to the recent revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden. | Tue, 12 Aug 2014 14:26:31 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=14, tm_min=26, tm_sec=31, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=224, tm_isdst=0) | 42271206 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry with her stories she makes up. And this is stuff you should know. Yeah, we have a Jerry story, but not for this one. For the other one we're recording. Right. Hint spoiler coming up. What's the spoiler like? He just gave a spoiler about a spoiler. Jerry has a personal story relating to the second of the two shows we're recording today. Got you. Not much of a spoiler. Now. People love any nugget from Jerry. They're like, oh, my God. What is it? Right? Especially when you talk. Yeah. Chuck. Yes. So if we weren't on any sort of watch list before, after researching yesterday and today for this episode, we most decidedly are on some kind of red list. Yeah. If that's the highest list, I would guess we're probably on it. Yeah. I don't know if that's the highest, but it's a list that we're probably on. We're at least on the same list as Glenn Greenwald, who I think is a righteous dude. You read his book, right? Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. I think that we should point out a few pieces of required readingviewing for this one. If this episode strikes your fancy, read Glenn Greenwald's book no Place to Hide. Awesome. Like, all sorts of new revelations in there and his take on the media and how it's just a great read. Have you read it? I have not, sir. You should. I will. You should also read Why Privacy Matters Even If You Have Nothing to Hide, which is an article by Daniel J. Solov in the Chronicle for Higher Education that is a must read. Because I think that's a lot of people's argument is that, well, if you're not a terrorist, why do you care? Exactly. It does matter. He demolishes that argument. Well, it's not an argument. And then you should also watch parts one and two. I think they're both online in the United States of Secrets, which is a front line. I haven't seen that documentary. Cool. It's amazing. Yeah, it's so good. And frontliney, which is always good. Yeah. Just like a great non fiction magazine article, but for your eyes come to life. Yeah. Thanks, man. Sure. So was there anything in here that you didn't really know about the NSA? Well, yeah, I mean, I imagine we'll cover it in this order, which is a little bit about the organization and then all the scary things that they do. Right. But, yeah, I read a lot of Edward Snowden's revelations, but there are so many. I think you have to read a book. Yeah. I mean, when we were researching this, there were things that I didn't know about. Sure. And it's such an ongoing, like, ever evolving story, too, that if I was reading an article and it was from longer than a year ago, it was virtually useless because that was pre Snowden revelations. And then even the stuff that came out in June 2013, they seem so naive now. It's just like, oh, the NSA has admitted to this. It turns out that they were totally lying. But so now they've admitted to this. It just kept expanding and every time they were just submitting just the bare minimum. And then there was another revelation and it just showed that whatever they admitted to could be magnified times 1000 or whatever. Yeah. Listen to an NPR thing on just the policing of the police, essentially, or the policing of the NSA and how it's virtually possible because their whole deal is to and I guess this is the beginning of what they do. It's not only do they try and crack codes and intercept messages, but they're also charged with safeguarding their own and a lot of the government agencies own important information. Right. So to police an organization like that, it's just an exercise in futility because their job is to avoid that. Yeah. They encrypt and decrypt. Yeah. Right. So it's tough and there's no checks and balances, it seems like, and it's scary. Yes, they're supposed to be. But we'll talk about that in a minute. So let's talk NSA. The whole thing came about in 1952 under Harry Truman that stood for nothing. Yeah. And I want to go ahead and point out now, I'm not going to get too opinionated, but I don't feel that there should not be something like the NSA because they serve a valuable service, but you have to do it in the right way. Sure. And I don't think they are right. And that's the last thing I'm going to say opinion wise. Everything else will be just that. I just don't want this to come across as like poopooing, like they should shut them down forever. Well, yeah, I think you just overtly said you don't feel that way. Okay. Harry Truman. Harry S. Truman. Yes. And the s for nothing. That's right. He created the NSA basically to try to get electronic information eavesdropping on other countries. Yeah. And do some encryption. So basically from the beginning, the NSA had the same dual mission that it has today. Yeah. Officially that's called SIGINT, which everyone loves the acronyms in the intelligence agencies in the military. Signal Intelligence. That's the eavesdropping part. Yeah. And then Information Assurance, which is trying to assure them all that their information is safe. So safeguarding by encrypting it. Yeah. So they've been doing that since the beginning. Yeah. The thing is, even though they've been around since 1952, they haven't been publicly acknowledged as existing until the mid 70s, thanks to the Church Committee hearings, which sustain all sorts of intelligence community abuses, like the CIA experimenting on unsuspecting Americans with LSD. And what the NSA was up to until that point, it was just outright denied that the NSA even existed. Yes. And a lot of people might think the CIA is the same thing, but NSA is generally just intelligence, and CIA is acting on that intelligence. Exactly. Out in the field, NSA, they're holed up in some room somewhere and they've been keeping in lockstep over the years. Well, especially since 2001 I shouldn't say over the years, but really since 2001, they've been kind of symbiotically growing with the Internet. And as a result, they become incredibly more prominent as far as the 17 agencies tasked with gathering and collecting and analyzing intelligence for the executive branch goes. Maybe even more so than the CIA these days because their job, what they do, fits so nicely into the expansion of the Internet. Basically, they can do their job just by tapping into the Internet, and they've spent the last decade or so figuring out how to do that more efficiently. Yeah, they love the Internet and to gather as much stuff as possible. That's right. It's basically like they used to have to and I'm not saying it's not hard work, but now, basically they said, well, all the information we need for the most part is now gathered in one big corral exactly. Called online. Yeah. And everybody just tell your friend whatever you want. It's secret. Yeah. Share what you like on Facebook. We can't put it together with all the other data and create a complete profile on you and know you better than your mother. That's why numbers stations, buddy. Yes. It's going to go back to the past. I wonder. I can see it. I'm surely bad people realize that the Internet is not a safe way to do business anymore. Yeah. But there's such a reliance on that kind of communication that it's no, I know. I mean, have we passed the point of no return or it's like people just don't talk on the phone about stuff like that anymore. People don't talk on the phone anymore. Right. Or they don't talk over email anymore. All right, so the NSA works alongside something called the CSS, the Central Security Service, and they are basically the military side that does the same thing that the NSA does. Right. So from what I understand, as of 2013, there was 30,000 military personnel as part of the NSA. So maybe that's what makes up the CSS. And then 60,000 to 70,000 contractors working for the NSA. So basically it's like 90 to 100,000 people who work for the NSA. Yeah. And that contractor's number may be going down because one of the fears that the government now has, because Edward Snowden was a contractor, is that we've got way too many civilian contractors working for us. Maybe. So the thing is, Snowden was portrayed as a low level of Booze Allen contractor. And did you watch the interview with him on NBC? I think a couple of months ago? It was the only American interview he's given to this point. I didn't see that one. He basically said, actually, he didn't even basically said he said, I'm a spy. I'm a highly trained spy. This whole thing where they're saying, like, I was a low level contractor, he's like, that's not true. He said, I've been working undercover in a foreign country for the CIA. I've worked undercover in a foreign country for the NSA. So the whole idea that just some low level contractor had access to all this stuff is not correct. He was, like, a pretty high level spy. Yeah. Supposedly, they're not interested in him anymore, although I don't buy it. I don't buy that either. They came out, like, literally two days ago and said, you know what? As time goes on here, his information is less and less relevant now. That's true. And they said, honestly, because he's trying to cut a deal to get back to the US. And now or at least it may change, but now they're saying, I don't really care. Right. Stay over there in Russia. Like, the stuff you have is old news by now. Right. And I mean, through such a wrench in the works that they may have to just go back and start from scratch. I'm sure they'd like to get their hands on them, though. Sure. And even if they're not having to start from scratch, it seems to be that the capabilities of the NSA are evolving so quick that yes, the snapshot that he provided from April 2013 yeah. Now it's more than a year old. Who knows how much it's changed? So you're right. This is getting less and less relevant as it goes on. Yeah. What's scary is that you just referred to close to 2 million documents as a snapshot. And that's true. That is just a small portion of what's going on. If you're watching the NSA, though, and a lot of people are now more than ever, they appear to be continuing to expand and expand and expand. Like, they've got this data center in Salt Lake City that they just opened, and it chuckers is capable of storing data in the range of zetabytes. How many terabytes is that? I don't know how many terabytes it is, but it's one. Six is that 22? Zeros. Consider this. On the low end estimate, they can store at least 1 sextillion bytes of data in this place in Salt Lake City. There are, on the low end, ten stars in the entire visible universe. Wow. That's a lot of data that they just build a house for out in Salt lake city. So they don't appear to be slowing the roll at all. No. And they, in fact, hired in 20 11, 20 12, about 3500 new employees. And this article very just sweetly points out, if you want to go work for the NSA, you don't even have to be a computer major. You can major in music and history and still engage in crypt analysis. Right. So that's good to know. Right? Because, I mean, if you think about it, sometimes they use more than just key codes. Like, if somebody wanted to decrypt your number station key, they would have to be familiar with what was it? To Kill a Mockingbird. Was that the book we used? Yeah, sure. So you would want to hire like a lip major or something like that to cryptanalyze, something like that. So it makes sense. Yeah. Plus, they train them that you're not expected to come into the NSA as a securities encryption expert. They will send you to school and class to teach you how to do this stuff. That's right. And sure, you have to meet certain requirements. They also have internships for students. That's right. Isn't that crazy? Can you imagine just interning at the NSA for the summer? Yeah. And not being killed afterwards. Some of the victories over the years with the NSA, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, we should note, because of SIGINT, again, signals intelligence. We realized that the Russians were not just installing well, we discovered they were installing nuclear warheads. Right. And they just weren't vacationing in Cuba. And we also found out from SIGINT, from the NSA that the Russians had taken over the controls of the Cuban missile system. So Russia installed nuclear warheads and had the key yeah. In Cuba, pointed right here at the US. But during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the NSA also defused the whole thing by eavesdropping and finding some sort of transmission among, I think, the Russian Navy that showed that Russia was not going to challenge this quarantine the US. Had put around Cuba, which was kind of like the new line in the sand that Kennedy had drawn yes. Perhaps avoided nuclear war right. Thanks to that intelligence. So they have delivered the goods before they should have. They were under fired after 911 for not delivering the goods. And I remember famously said we had some communications, that there was something big going down. They had like 30 of them, and two specifically mentioned September 11. Right. But we didn't know what it was or where it was. And it's kind of hard to throw a drag net over the country and they didn't even know it was going to be in the country, supposedly. Yeah. There's a guy in the United States of Secrets who is one of the NSA analysts who missed 911. Like one of the guys, and he is a wreck. Oh, I'm sure he's just weeping, like sobbing the whole interview. It's really tough to watch. This guy is going to go to his grave every day just hating himself for it. It's really sad. That is sad. Since 911, a lot of changes have taken place. Obviously, we'll get to the online aspects, but it's just a different deal these days. The people that you're looking for are able to hide in plain sight, and they're operating best case scenario, they're operating in a cell of a dozen people that you might be able to track. Worst case scenario, you've got a single person just acting on their own, which is nearly impossible to kind of root that person out. You have to wait and catch them in the act. Which was the case in Times Square with what was his name? Fazal Shazad. I think that sounds right. Times Square bomber. Yeah. Or would be bomber. Yes. He was a lone wolf. The thing is, a lot of people criticize the NSA for even having these cases associated with their names, because these cases were made from regular old warranted police work. Yeah. Real police. Yeah. So there's a lot of criticism that the NSA really hasn't delivered the goods for many years. And that one of the problems, is that it's drowning in data. Like, it missed the Boston bombers, it missed the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber. These were even overseas targets. People planning and plotting. Well, when you're tracking every cell phone call made in the United States, you're bound to be a wash in data. Yeah. And that's probably the most salient criticism. Like even Glenn Greenwald agrees with you. We don't need to do away with the NSA. Right. But the problem is, if you are doing what General Keith Alexander, who runs the show there once, which is collect everything, then you're Awash in data. It's big data with the capital B and the capital D, where you have so much data you can't make sense of anything. You can't possibly wade through it. Right. And when you're in that situation, you can easily have something that you need and just pass right by. Yeah. So what Greenwald says is we should be targeting people, but more effectively. Like yes. Use the NSA capabilities. They're awesome. Right. But put them to good use. Right. Don't just cast this wide net across the entire world. That doesn't do anything. Yes. One of the big controversies that we're going to get into right after these messages has to do with warrants and whether or not you should have to have a warrant to collect information on someone. So we'll get to that right after this. So, Chuck, we've been talking about the NSA. Did we even say what it stood for? Surely we did, didn't we? I don't think we did. Oh, it's the National Security Agency. Yeah. And for many years it had the nickname no Such Agency because they were just so secretive. Yes. And under a law that was passed in as part of the Church Committee hearings, this thing called the FISA Court was set up, and the FISA Court came out of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA. And it basically said, the NSA, to do its job, can go forth and eavesdrop on everybody outside of the US. Please do. That's your job. But we understand that some of those people who you need to keep an eye on might actually come into the US. While we have a line drawn there. You guys need to get a warrant. And since 1978, as far as anybody knew, until about 20 01. 20 02, that's how the NSA operated. Yeah. If you wanted to listen in on someone's phone call inside the US, you have to go to this court and get a warrant. Eleven members. And out of 34,000 warrant applications between 1979 and 2012, all but eleven were passed through. Yeah. So there was a FISA court, but they approved 99.97% of warrants. Right. So it wasn't hard. If you wanted to target somebody, all you have to do is ask. There was a rubber stamp just hovering right over the desk. Yes. I wonder what the deal was with those eleven. They just must have been egregious. My paper boy who overcharges. Yeah. I want to spy on my paper boy in my milkman. The thing is, in 2002, a lot changed as a result of 911. It's part of the USA Patriot Act. The name of that act. Yeah. As part of the Patriot Act, the NSA was given broader abilities to eavesdrop within the US. That's right. So basically what happened was that George Bush said the NSA can monitor international emails and phone calls if they're generated within the US. As long as they're going overseas and they're part of a targeted investigation. Yes. Without a warrant. That's the key. And that happened in 2002. The press actually knew about this. The New York Times sat on it during an election, Bush's reelection, and was roundly criticized when they finally released it in 2005 after he was reelected. But the point is that as part of the Patriot Act, in this Bush executive order, the NSA was allowed to start paying attention to business records that the Feds could get from American companies and they could eavesdrop on domestic initiated calls. Yes. And the business records, it was an expansion there. You could always subpoena or get a warrant for business records, but under the terms it expanded to was that, quote, any tangible thing related to an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence or protect against terrorism? So any tangible thing is about as broad as it gets. Really? You can basically say anything, and if it's not, hey, I want to spy on my paper boy, then you can get that warrant. But if you say, I want to spy on my paper boy, and his name is Akbar, the FISA court would probably be like, okay, here's two, take two warrants. Well, yeah, I got some stuff on that we'll get to later. So as if that weren't expensive enough, I mean, having to go get a warrant and having a 99.97% approval rate, then not having to get a warrant for a lot more stuff. If that weren't enough, in 2008, barack Obama expanded it even further. I should say reduce the obstacles between the NSA and the information it seeks even further. I think he signed an executive order that said that you can monitor the communications between a US national and a foreign national if the foreign national is the target of an investigation. Right. Before it was like, oh, there's an American involved, NSA is out. Right. Maybe we'll tip off the CIA or the FBI or something like that. But. The NSA is out. That was changed in 2008 yeah. And enacted for another five years through starting in December 2012. Right. Is that right? Yeah. It also did something really huge. The big one for the 2008 FISA expansion is that it took away the need to get a warrant for bulk communications collection as long as it was metadata. Right. Which meant now that the NSA could go grab as much data as it wanted phone call records, email records, all that stuff. With the help of the phone companies. Yeah, as long as it didn't contain the text of the email or it wasn't a voice recording of the phone call. Right. They didn't need to get a warrant for everybody's stuff now they still were supposed to. When they found out that they had an American's information, they were supposed to destroy it unless it was related to a cyber crime, any crime at all conceivably was related to some sort of security issue or there's some other reason, then they could keep it for five years and then that could be extended for another five years. And again, this is really broad stuff. So if they caught an American stuff, they can conceivably hang on to it for five years, no problem. Yeah. The problem here is twofold is not having a warrant is shady enough, but to have the warrants not be what they're supposed to be, which is an effective checks and balances system. It sounds like the warrant system was a joke anyway. Yes. Even if they said, well, we got to have warrants, again, it's back to that joke of a system. Exactly. So either way it's kind of like a joke. It is an RMC process. Yeah. The joke being that there are any real checks and balances. Yes. So what came out over time over the Snowden revelations, because all this is secret the oversight that there was on the NSA after 2001 was to peel back more and more and more and there was barely any oversight to begin with and that at the same time they were expanding their capabilities too. And the third prong in this trident of cloak and daggerishness is that they also have the complicity of telecommunications and Internet companies yeah. With Operation Prism, which is another one of Snowden's revelation, they collect Internet information, anything that you do on the Internet, your search history, your file transfers, your emails, what you do on Facebook. And like you said, it is with the assistance of Apple and Facebook and Google and Yahoo. I don't think they have admitted that though. Right. They have said basically that companies themselves, if the NSA comes with a warrant, a 702, I think is what it's called, from a FISA court. They hand it over. They don't like it, but they'll hand it over. But yes, I don't think they ever have publicly admitted and they've denied that they have allowed the NSA free access into their servers. Right. But what the Snowden files have come out and said is, here's this process where the NSA, some contractor somewhere types into a computer that he wants this guy's everything through Prism, and then that request is routed through the FBI. The FBI sends it out to these companies who send back everything they've got on that person, and then the FBI turns around and hands it back to the NSA. And this takes between an hour and a day, depending on who you ask. And then you have everything on that person. You have photos, you have their Snapchat stuff, you have their Dropbox stuff, facebook, Twitter, everything. You have all of their stuff, their emails, their phone calls, everything through Prism. So how much the companies were complicit or not is still at issue. Yeah. One of the things Snowden said to The Guardian, I think The Guardian was where he first dumped all this information. Right. The Guardian and the Washington Post. And The Post. He said that I sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge or even the President if I had their personal email. Mike Rogers, Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that that's a lie and it is impossible for him to do that. But I guess we should talk about the program X Key Score, which basically makes it look like that's exactly what could happen. Right. Through X Key Score, it's supposedly the NSA's widest reaching system for collecting electronic data. You can watch what people are doing in real time on their Facebook page, on their Gmail account, all that jazz. And apparently remember when we talked about is your employer spying on you episode, that you could watch somebody while they were typing even though they hadn't saved the document or something, and then they'd erase it and then retype it a different way. Yeah. The impression I have is that that's what X key score does. Yeah. Again, without obtaining a warrant or even having to get your supervisor on board, if you have the access to this program, you can use the name the NSA contractor. Yeah, right. And there's supposed to be some sort of approval process, but apparently that's not really real either. And then, Chuck, there's one other that's kind of related to this. Dropout jeep is a program where somehow in iPhones there is a software implant. The impression I have is that it's in all iPhones and from anywhere in the world, the NSA can turn your camera on, turn your microphone on, and turn your iPhone, this thing that you interact with so intimately into a mole and it eavesdrops on you. Wow, that's pretty scary stuff. That makes you worry. Want to be yourself in your own home if your phone is sitting there. That's paranoia, but it's well founded paranoia. Yeah. All right, well, write off this message. We're going to get a little bit into the non argument that if you have nothing to hide, what's the big deal? Okay, so the non argument, if you have nothing to hide, then who cares? One of the problems is it depends what the NSA considers. Well, first of all, they're just mining all this bulk material from everybody. Yeah. Can I throw a couple of numbers out? Yes. In one month, in 2013, the NSA gathered in one month, 124,000,000,000 phone calls. The whole call, not just metadata, which, by the way, supposedly gives a clearer picture of you and your behavior than a phone call necessarily would. And if 3 billion of those phone calls were from the United States, that's a lot. And that's a single month. 3 billion phone calls. Yeah. And then let me give you one more number from the Snowden files. Some journalists analyzed them, and they analyzed 160,000 emails and Im chats that the NSA collected. 90% were from average Americans, and they contained identifying details, intimate details, like just the stuff like you would share to your closest confidant. Right. The NSA had and 90% of it was just average Americans. Well, remember when we talked about Tor in our Deep Web episode? How's it going? It's an Internet anonymizer that allows you to search the Internet, supposedly anonymous. The NSA revealed recently that they consider everybody that uses Tor a potential extremist in that 2008 FISA Amendment Act. Yeah, one of the exceptions for getting rid of an American stuff is if it's encrypted. So if you are using encryption stuff, the NSA can target it and try their best to decrypt it just because it's encrypted. Yeah. Everybody in fact, if you even visit Tor's website, you're going to be put on the NSA's Red List, supposedly just by visiting the site. And as we pointed out in the Deep Web episode, not everyone that uses Tor is on the Deep Web is an extremist. There's a lot of people that just like their privacy. Journalists, attorneys, civil rights activists, regular schmoes that don't want to be spied on are now considered potential extremists because they don't want to be spied on under this 2008 executive order by Obama. That's right. Who else might be looked at? How about potential someone you don't like in politics? Yeah, it was just released, I think greenwald, who exposed this to that? Five Americans were surveilled under this program without a warrant. One was a Republican Party operative, one was a civil rights activists. A few of them were professors. They were all Muslim. That's no accident. Just regular folks, though. Nothing. Not extremist, not terrorists. The Republican Party operative was served in the Navy. He's like a. Good dude and was being spied on. And in 2011, wired.com revealed FBI training documents that said view all muslims as potential radicals. And NSA internal training document as a placeholder for surveillance targets uses the term mohammed raghead. Basically, if you're a muslim and you live in the united states or abroad, then you are looked at as the enemy as far as the NSA is concerned, or a potential enemy. Well, that was the thing when all of this stuff started to come out, obama's administration was saying, like, we don't spy on americans. We're not, like, getting all this information on americans. It's not americans, it's everybody else. And the internet companies were like, a good portion of our customer base or overseas, and you're sitting here saying, like, we still target them because they're foreigners. Yeah. So either way, it doesn't really dovetail with your point. But you just chugged my memory. What about spying on your wife or your girlfriend? Surely no one would ever use this capability to do something like that. Right. Right. It happens. And they have data that said they use warrantless surveillance on wives, girlfriends would be girlfriends, and abuse that spawned the intelligence community's term LOVEINT instead of SIGINT. So some guy has the program open exe stroke, and he's like, oh, I wonder if my girlfriend is cheating on me or not even that. I just want to spy on this person. Right. This girl I want to go out with. And I'm not saying that's happening all over the place, but if it happens at all, it's an abuse of power. Right. The guy Daniel Solov and why privacy matters article. He makes the point that even if you do have nothing to hide or whatever yeah. If everybody has a dossier, if everybody has some sort of file, and if you ever do decide to, say, speak out against tyranny or the EPA or whatever, they can say, hey, we've got this troublemaker over here. What file do you have on them? Right. And all of this stuff, whether it's in context or not, can all be pieced together to look however they want it to look. And all of a sudden you suddenly lose your conviction. Yeah. The NSA is at the least in danger of having so much information that it can't possibly keep track of everything. At worst, it's setting up the foundation for a tyrannical government that by its very definition in nature and the capability that it has can't be anything but tyrannical. Even if it tried not to be tyrannical, it couldn't with this capability. Yeah. And they literally like, we'll install something called fiber optics splitters at communications hubs. It has to be under the compliance clients of these companies. They're not breaking in there and doing it. There's no way. This is a revelation that came out before snowden. There was a guy by the last name McClean who was an at and t engineer in san francisco and he found this. This is in the United States of Secrets. He found this cable going up from one of the, I guess, main routers where's that going? Yeah. And he went and looked on the Schematics, and he's like, wait, there's not supposed to be a room above there, but there's a cable going to a room that's not on the blueprints for this building. So he started looking, and what he found was the splitter that you were talking about, where it takes if the communication line is a beam of light on a fiber optic cable, it uses a mirror to make a copy of it and split it in two. And one goes to the intended recipient, the other goes to the NSA. Yeah. And that could be your information or your life, your phone call, your email, whatever. Yeah. How about this? They will intercept hardware like a router servers and retrofit them to serve their purposes, factory seal it and send it right back to be sold. Yeah. So it is prebugged for your convenience. Right. They rerouted from the distribution chain without the person who ordered it from like, Hewlett Packard or whoever, knowing that it was intercepted by the NSA and bugged. Well, and because of all of this stuff, there's some people that call Edward Snowden a hero. Some people call them Benedict Arnold and a big fat traitor that should never be allowed back in the country. If he hadn't come out and said this stuff, it would probably also be going on in secret, don't you imagine? For sure. I don't think they would have self reported. No, they definitely would not have. I think we're in total agreement on that. So it's up to listeners out there to decide how you feel about what this guy did. Chuck, there's some other stuff that the NSA did apparently under the auspices of the FISA Court. So it's tasked with eavesdropping on enemies of the state. It's also cracker jack at getting economic and diplomatic information to people like the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the ambassadors to the UN, people who deal with the EU. All of these people are bugged by the NSA and we've just recently found out. And they've just recently found out and are not very happy about it in order to give the US information. Superiority in negotiations. Yeah, that's what I was talking about earlier. Like basically using it for political gain has nothing to do with spying on terrorists. Exactly. Information superiority. That's the stated aim of the NSA collect at all. There's another one, too, that really like, before, the Internet companies were feeling frustrated that they weren't allowed to talk about the 702 warrant requests. Yeah, that's Section 702 that comes from because in addition to having to give the government this information, you also can't talk about it at all. There's a gag order associated with it. So the Internet companies couldn't say anything in their defense about this. Right. But they were frustrated. But then they felt like a thief had gotten broken into their houses. Yeah. Because they found out about this program called Muscular. And Muscular went around the Internet companies and went directly to the fiber optic line between Google servers and Yahoo servers and just tapped in and sucked it right out of there and apparently decrypted it fairly easily. So they're getting information with the complicity of the Internet companies and behind the internet companies backs. Yeah, that was a huge surprise. So there's basically like we have no allegiance whatsoever except to our information collections. Yes. It seems like there are no rules and safeguards and checks and balances at all. I'm interested to see what happens in the coming years. My guess is that Snowden's revelations will become obsolete and unimportant and that things will kind of go back to normal. I hope they never become unimportant. I hope what you're saying isn't right. I know that initially feared to him, he said the worst thing that could happen is that if he did this, he took all these risks and exposed all this and nobody cared. Right. That clearly didn't happen. But there's a second potential problem, which is that eventually people just become fatigued from all of this exposure to all this information that you're just like, okay, I get it. My life is not my own. I can't take worrying about this anymore. So I'm just going to detach and not care. Right. That I hope doesn't happen. I think the vast majority of people don't care. That's crazy to me. I know. Again, yeah, I agree with you. You can feel about Snowden however you feel, but the concept of being snooped on regardless of your political affiliation or anything like that yeah, it's not supposed to be that way here. That transcends like anything. Like how do you not care, at least? Yeah, that's crazy to me. This would be an 18 hours episode if we went into all the stuff that NSA did. Sure. We'll say if you like to go look up the required reading and you'll find plenty of other stuff out there. Everything you want to know about the NSA these days, it's all out there, about all 2% of it. You can also learn more about the NSA by typing NSA into the search bar. Howstephos.com? And that will bring up this final article. Since I said search bar is time for listener ma'am, I'm going to call this a bit on trickling down. Hey guys, wanted to write in with a clarification on the episode of trickle down economics. At one point you guys use an example of someone working not thinking it is so worth it to get a promotion so it could push you into a higher tax bracket and thus you are barely bringing home any more money. I had to write in because as someone who loves maths, I absolutely hate to see this misperception of how our taxes work. I've heard people I work with claim the same thing, thinking that getting a $500 bonus could push them over a line, and all of a sudden they would bring home less money than before. I want to stay. For the record, I know this. We were just giving a different example that wasn't fully fleshed out. This is completely wrong. Based on how the tax structure works, even if you make $1 million a year, the first 9000 will be based at 10%, the next 28,000 will be based at 15%, the next at 52,025%, and so on. I think you guys know this since you kind of alluded to it in other places, but I was hoping you can make it perfectly clear so those people who might be mistaken, realizing that making more will never push all of your income into a higher tax bracket. If you make, for example, $36,000, you'll be in that 15% bracket. And if you get a raise to $40,000 in the 25% bracket, you'll only be paying 25% on the $3,100 above that bracket line. The same is true of Josh's claim of the richest people in the US. Used to pay 90%. True, but they only paid 90% on the amount over the previous bracket. Right, but let's say the previous bracket ends at half a million and then $60 million. No, you made another half a million and it was taxed at 90%. That's a disincentive to work. That's what we were saying. Yeah. I think we could have been clear on how it works, though. I'm sure we could have. Anyways, thanks for what you do. And that is from charity. Thanks a lot, Charity. For clarifying, I appreciate it. If you have a clarification for us for anything we want to hear from you, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyousheno, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit househefworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarra and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. 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41306dae-53a3-11e8-bdec-5794605493d1 | How Central Park Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-central-park-works | Central Park in Manhattan was America’s first landscaped public park, built at a time when New Yorkers’ only option for getting some fresh air was hanging around cemeteries. Get all the info about this beautiful icon and how it’s served as a landscape for class struggles over three centuries. | Central Park in Manhattan was America’s first landscaped public park, built at a time when New Yorkers’ only option for getting some fresh air was hanging around cemeteries. Get all the info about this beautiful icon and how it’s served as a landscape for class struggles over three centuries. | Thu, 31 Jan 2019 17:12:35 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=17, tm_min=12, tm_sec=35, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=31, tm_isdst=0) | 51109376 | 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 Roland over there. And this is stuff you should know. That a real star down. Yeah. Jerry won because I was like, I don't have time for this any longer. That's pretty funny, because that's just sort of all the three of us. You guys are having a stare down over nothing. You're just over there grumpy, like, can we get going? I was just doing my thing, and then all I heard from you is, nice job, Jerry. So, like, you conceded? Sure. You gave it to her. I mean, Jerry won. My friend Billy, the one who passed away from Ms that I talked about, he and I used to do a steering contest, but it was a certain face we had to make. Okay. And you had to not laugh. That was our steering contest. Sure. So we both make this certain face that he invented, and the first one of us to break and laugh, which was always me. Can I see the face? No. Okay. That's fine. I've retired. I understand that's. Right. Okay, well, thanks for the story. Oh, by the way, very special listener mail coming up today, everyone, so stick around for that. Whoa. Sarah the amazing eleven year old fan. Yeah, she's not eleven. She's reappeared, everybody. So delightful to hear from her. All right, so wow. Let's just get through this then. Central park. Central park is huge. Can. New York, vienna. It's square, it's rectangular. Charles. All right, so let's talk about New York between 1821 and 1855, all right. The population of New York grew four times its size over that 34 year period, from 15 people to 60, and they were crowded. And people started moving further and further north. That was a funny joke I just made. But you just said that the population of New York quadrupled over 30 years. Yeah, 34 years. And New York started at the south as far as people living there and kept going further and further north. Right. Manhattan wise. Sure. Yeah. New York State. Come on. No, but I mean, there's Brooklyn, too, and Pokeypsy. No, sure. All the boroughs. We're talking about the island of Manhattan. Right. And things got so crowded that people would gather in cemeteries to socialize. Yeah, that was really weird. So we've talked about that before. I don't remember what episode it was, but we saw this stuff. It might have been the subways or something, park or pizza. It might have been tombstones or something, because we talked about cemeteries being designed to be parklike because people would go have picnics and stuff there. Maybe. So all the material that has to do with Central Park makes it sound like that's all they had available were cemeteries if they wanted to go hang out and have picnics and green space. So I'm not sure if it was involuntary or if it was designed that way, or both, but it was either a tenement or a commercial district or the cemetery. That was what you had if you were outdoors. Yeah. And I think it's not necessarily that's all you had, but maybe all you had that was close and accessible. Sure. Like, the cemetery is six blocks from my apartment. Right. And also, as you will learn, much of not northern Manhattan, but yeah, county northern Manhattan. Central Manhattan, right. Where Central Park now is was gross. Swampland. Swampy. Rocky. You're hanging out there anyway. Yeah. Forget the 1820s. Let's go back 2.6 million years ago. Chocolate. There was an ice sheet over New York State that was 2 miles thick, and it just so happened to terminate the termination edge. Well, the edge of it sure went right through the bottom of Manhattan, went through Brooklyn, and actually, like, all the heights and hills in Brooklyn, that's because that's actual hills. Right. Because the glacier pushed the ground up there because that's where it stopped growing forward. But as these glaciers were moving down south from the north, they were pushing boulders and rocks and stones everywhere, and where they ended up and then finally retreated from, they left all that stuff, which is why they're boulders in Central Park, there used to be a lot more boulders there. So much so that the land was just basically considered virtually unusable. Yeah, that area was not being developed anyway, which made it a difficult task, but it made it sort of the only place if you wanted to build a 700 plus acre park right. That was kind of the place to go. Right. And so they did want to build a park, because, again, if you wanted to go outside and hang out and have a picnic, you had to go to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. That was basically it. So the people who were living in New York wanted this, but then also the upper society, I guess, the super wealthy, were like, yeah, this will put our town on the map. Man. London's got Hyde Park. Paris has one. All the great cities have a great park, but there's not one in the United States. Let's build it in New York. Yeah, that was later. Like, initially, there was no call for a park. It took 40 or 50 years of lots of inhabitants to get this idea. The original city plan in 1811 had no mention of any park. But for you, city planning nerds I know you know this already if you're a city planning nerd, but John Randall Jr. He was the man who laid out the grid for New York City, very famously. I saw a documentary on it. Oh, really? Yes, it's amazing. He drove these, I believe, iron bolts into the ground with his fingers, his bare hands. It was a surveying bolt. And it was to map out that grid, like, every block. Can't you see one still there's one in Central Park that they found. I don't think they found any other ones in Central Park, but it has nothing to do with Central Park because this is like a good 50, 60 years before they even thought of 40 years before they even thought of Central Park. It was like maybe this part of the grid, the street grid. Yeah. So there's one in a boulder that I'm not going to say where it is. Oh, you got to go find it, huh? Well, they try to keep it on the down low as far as the actual GPS coordinates, like these people that hunted it down and found it, it's like a speakeasy, but it's just a bolt in the stone. It's a bolt in the stone. And you will become the king of New York if you can pull it out. Oh, you should not dare. Nothing should be there for eternity. But there's supposedly more of them, and there are people that go around and try and find these. It's kind of neat. Yeah, that is neat. So I guess I am a city planner at heart, I have to say. I came across a great site called Ephemeral New York that documents, like, all the New York that's been lost and built over and changed over the time. That's cool. They have a great website. Go check it out because we got some good stuff from them for this episode. All right, so where we left off before my Nerdy segway was you were talking about wealthy New Yorkers saying, we want to park. There's a more cynical view that was, we want a park. And that would also greatly increase the land value around the park where we own houses. Yeah, because just like today, the area around Central Park was very well healed. Well, in some places, right. In other places, not at all in the place where Central Park is now, there was a lot of very low income people living there. So you have very rich people surrounding very low income people, which I'm guessing made the low income people very nervous and eventually justifiably so, because the low income people are the ones who had to move to make the park initially for the rich people. Should we go and talk about that? Why not? Seneca Village? Yeah, well, there's Seneca Village, and then they're largely Irish and German immigrants in Seneca Village? Well, and all over Seneca Village is only one small part of this immigrant housing that was sort of around the park. That, of course, when you know what eminent domain is. If the city wants to build the park there, they are going to get that land one way or the other. Yes. The New York legislature, the state legislature said, yes. New York City, you can exercise eminent domain over that and take whatever land you want. You got to pay them fair market value, which is up for debate. If it was actually fair. But those people have to move whether they like it or not. Right. So Seneca Village was founded in 1825. There was a couple in 1824 named John Elizabeth Whitehead who bought no, they owned it. Farmland. Okay. All right. I thought they'd owned the land for a long time now. They bought farmland between 82nd and 88th street and then between 1825 and 1832, started selling it off. Okay. And they sold 50 parcels of that land, half of which went to people of African descent, which was very unusual at the time, to say the least. It was. And so basically, out of this out of the sale of lots over this period of time, the Seneca Village started very quickly. The people who lived there built a house or a school, churches, a couple of churches, houses. And like, this village developed this community. There's a couple of things that was remarkable about Seneca Village. One, these were African American landowners, which was very unusual at the time, because even at this time, slavery was still on the books, legal in New York. And these were freed or unenslaved African Americans who owned land, which meant if they owned $250 worth of land, they could vote, which would have made them there were 100 African Americans who could vote at this time because that's how few of them actually own land. 10% of those people lived in Seneca Village. So this is a really unusual spot. But it was also unusual because it was a place where African Americans and European settlers or European immigrants lived together. Like, lived in this community together. Yeah. But should say you also had to jump through certain other hoops to vote. It wasn't quite as simple as owning land, because that would be, I guess, too easy for them back then. Right. Which was to say, not easy at all. But they still said, no, there's some other things you still got to do to vote. Sure. Did we mention the other stuff, too? And big shout out to Andrew William. He was the first man of African descent who bought land that would become Seneca Village in September 1825. But like you said, it was irish and German immigrants moved in there as well, and they were welcomed. And it was, by all accounts, a multicultural society that got along well with one another. Went to the same church. Yeah. That's enormous. Pretty amazing. Buried in the same graveyard. There was a midwife there who lived in the village, and she delivered babies of any ethnicity or race. Yeah. No one knows why it's called Seneca Village. On most maps, it's known as Yorkville. Oh, I thought that was a different place, that the Yorkville people moved up to Seneca Village after they got moved out. Wow. Yorkville. There was another York town. Oh, that's what I'm thinking of. But this was on maps as Yorkville, and no one knows if it was a distortion of Senegal or if it might have been code for the Underground Railroad. It's another theory. Another theory is that it was derogatory somehow because areas where African immigrants would live, they would call bad names, just whatever. I see. So who knows? No one knows for sure where Seneca Village came from. The name at least got you. It was interesting. So. Sounds like Seneca Village is great. It was. It must have had fortune smiling on it throughout its time, right? Not true. No. So Seneca Village was in the way of this proposed park. Right. We'll just go ahead and cut to the chase here. Seneca Village, they had to move, which is sad, because the community ended then when the state and the city moved in and said, this is city land now. You guys will have to move. Here's some money for your land. The community broke up. It didn't resettle or reform elsewhere. It was like Ephemeral. Like that. Ephemeral new York site. It lasted for a few decades and it was peaceful and harmonious, and then it was gone because they had to move to make way for Central Park. Yeah. It took a couple of years of fighting the law, but eventually the law went out and called in this article a violent clearing of Seneca Village. They basically sent cops in there with their batons right. And physically removed people. Yeah. And there was a big kind of media blitz in favor of moving everybody out. They were going derided as a shanty town of squatters and stuff like that. Despite the fact that most of the people who live there, or a lot of people who live there own their land in their houses and had for decades, then they had just as much right to be there as anybody else. But the popular opinion of the public at the time was they were just squatting and they should be forced to move. And it was totally justifiable to come in with police baton to clear them off the land. In 2011, the sort of weird silver lining is the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History got permission, after ten years of trying from the Central Park Conservancy to excavate a couple of sites in the village. And they went in there and excavated two different home sites. And on one they found some artifacts, but it was clear that it had been already buried under Central Park. Whatever. They built Central Park. Right. They already dug it up when they did Central Park. Yeah. The other one, though, was original. And they found the original soil of Seneca Village at the former yard of Nancy Moore. Yeah. Pretty neat. And they have 250 bags of material to analyze now and soil samples and some artifacts to see what life was really like back then. So pretty cool. So they better get to it. That's right. Why don't we take a break and then come back and talk about the park. Okay. Is it in Boston now? What happened there? All right, Chuck. So I think by 1853 I think in the 1850s, there's, like, this drumbeat to have a park. Everybody wanted a park. Yeah. William Telling Bryant was one of the big names who edited the Evening Post, which is now the New York Post, and he was a well known poet at the time and a beloved figure, but he definitely used the Post as a platform to advocate for this green space. Now, again, there's a lot of understanding in this day and age that the wealthiest New Yorkers wanted this park for themselves. Basically, they wanted their new city that they had built to rival Paris or London, and it needed a park. They wanted to go show off their carriages in the park, but they also advocated publicly for the park, for the working classes, the middle class. They should have a place to come and hang out. And this is America. Of course. Everyone will be welcome. It's a public park. It will be America's first landscape public park. And so people really kind of got on board with this. And by 18th, even though that was kind of a lie, it was at least at first. But by 1853, I believe work started. There was a Central Park that had been designated land had been designated for the Central Park by then, right? That's right. And they had a contest. I believe it was the first design contest in the country. A lot of first that said, design our park. You got to have a parade ground. You got to have a principal fountain, got to have a lookout tower, got to have a skating arena. Sure. Got to have four cross streets. Okay. Because people still got to get through there somehow. All right. I'm sorry. A place for a palace. Why not for an exhibition or a concert hall? Right. Very specific rules for this design contest that was won by two gentlemen very famous now, gentlemen named Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. I'm going with Vaux. Okay. V-A-U-X. Yeah. Or Vaux, but definitely not Vox. Volkswagen is always silent. Yeah. Those two submitted something called the Greensword Plan, and they won. I like that name. And they won for a couple of reasons. One Frederick Law Olmstead was the superintendent of Central Park at the time. Probably didn't hurt. No. But he wasn't a shoe. And I believe his boss I can't remember what position his boss would have had his boss submitted a plan, too. Apparently, he and Vo, their plan, this Greens were plan that they submitted was just so obviously head and shoulders above every other design that was submitted that it was just clear, like, from the outset, yes, these guys should win. And it was considered a work of art still to this day, although they actually went on to design Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Lovely park. That's supposedly their masterpiece over Central Park is Prospect Park. I mean, I love them both. They're both great. I've never been to either of them. That's not true. No, I swear to God. I'm in Central Park with you before, okay. I walked, like, 15 paces in Central Park. Right. It was just like we weren't in there for long. Right. That's really the only time. Yes. And I've never been in Prospect Park. Boy, I have explored there's so much of it, but I bet you I've explored 75% of the bottom 50% of Central Park. Wow. I haven't been over, like, 86th street a lot north of that, but that's where it gets a little more wild anyway. And not wild like the parties, coyotes, but a little more wild as far as the design goes. Well, very purposely, yes. Right. Okay. I'm glad you said purposely, because supposedly the bottom half of Central Park, so the park itself is meant to evoke New York State. The bottom half is much more urban, refined, trimmed. I don't know. Sure. And it's meant to reflect. New York City. And then as you get further up in the park, it's a little more wild. There's parties and coyotes all poughkeepsie. You've never been to Bethesda Fountain? I don't believe I have. I've never been to a Motorhouse or the skating rink. So many episodes of Law and Order, I can't distinguish reality from fantasy. Oh, man. Like, I'm going into my memory. I'm like, okay, turn to your right. Is Lenny Brisco standing there? If so, then this is from TV. Well, I've never seen an episode of that, so I guess we're even. What? Yeah. You've never seen an episode of the 10,000 episodes of Law and Order? No. Oh, you're missing out. Chris nothe. And what was Brisk name? Jerry Orbach. Those two together. Benjamin Bratt was a close second to the Chris Nose Jerry Orbach thing, and then it just keeps going on. They were so good at all of them, were just amazing. But, yeah, a lot of stuff took place in Central Park, so I feel like I've been there. Here's what you do, man. Next time we go to New York, I know that we typically stay downtown, stay up by the park. Well, essentially, just, like, get out in it. I've developed a taste for the Upper West Side, but not the park. Right. You're so close. I'll take a helicopter over. I will go out of my way. I like. Lower East Side and Upper West Side are my two favorites in New York. In Manhattan. Interesting. Yeah. You like Lower East Side? I like it all, man. My very favorite part of New York is the West Village. For sure. It's nice, but I like Lower East Side. I like it in the East Village. A little grungy. It's nice. Is there such a thing as the Lower West Side? What is that, Wall Street? No. Well, I mean, Wall street's all the way down, but I would say I don't think it's called the Lower West Side, but like, the meat packing district. Oh, okay. Yeah, like the High Line. That's probably Lower West Side, I would say. Really great art galleries in the meat packing district. Oh, man. Boy. When I first started going New York, that was when it was still shady over there. And, like, you would walk through blocks and blocks of industrial meat packing plants to get to the 1 bar that was open that no one had heard of, and then Giuliani came in and so different now to clean the place up. Well, just thank God for him, right? So the design of Central Park Greensword, you have so much information to go over. I know. Should this be a two parter? I don't know. Let me ask you, has our podcast gotten more conversational, this question aside, hasn't it? I don't know. Okay. I think we've always been conversational. Yeah, but I mean, like, this seems like a new pinnacle of conversational. Well, let me say this. I think episodes one through 450 were less conversations than 450 through 1200. Okay, but what about 1200 on I don't know. All right. The Greensword plan, if you didn't know anything about Central Park, you may be under the misconception that they just sort of squared it off and rake some things around. And it was like, there's the park. Right. And, like, let's just protect the screen space. But it was highly, highly designed. And apparently they used as much explosives as would later be used at the Battle of Gettysburg, supposedly more, to blast away rock and move that rock. Because remember the glacier that moved all that rock down? That's a big problem when you're trying to build a park. Like, planted hundreds of thousands of trees, swamps that they couldn't drain. They just filled in further to build lakes. Yeah, and I don't think anyone really thinks that, like, oh, they just walled it up and said, now we have a park. But I don't think I even realized how highly it was designed, which is probably a testament to their design, because when you walk around, you're just like, it all fits. Right. I mean, that's the thing. They went to a lot of trouble to make it look so naturalistic that you just assume that that's what the land always looks like. Right. And Central Park is actually a highly managed, highly designed green space that exists in a rectangle. That when you're in the center of it. From what I've seen on Law and Order, you can't tell that you're in the middle of the city. The roads, none of them are straight. They're all meant to curve. There's meadows that kind of, like, go out of sight, and there's woods, the ramble, like, the whole wood walk and all that. All of it is designed to just completely take you out of the city and plop you into this world, but it's just so well done and so natural that it seems like that's just what this patch of land always looked like. Well and cool. That even in an era today where that land is the most valuable land on the planet, maybe that they have protected those 800 plus acres now and said, I don't care how much money you have, you're not going to lop off. Just no. Why don't we start it at 95th street instead? Right. And, like, what's it going to hurt? Because we could really use that area. But no, it is protected. Yeah. Did you hear, like, the dude bought a $258,000,000 penthouse on Central Park? Yeah. So yeah. I can't imagine how much ever sold in America. In America, yeah. So, Bethesda Mountain, before we leave that beautiful fountain, work of art. Yes. Bethesda Terrace, that's kind of one of the cool things. It's like it sits low, and you can walk from the top half of it and just kind of gaze out upon that in the pond right behind it, and then walk down the stairs and hear live music almost every day of the week, it feels like. Sure. But that was designed by Emma Stevans. An America artist was called the angel of the Waters, and she was awarded that commission. A very famous sculptor, and we got to acknowledge her. It's beautiful. One of my favorite places in the world. I've seen it. They found a body there. One of the episodes of Long Island. So I feel like I've been to the John Lennon Memorial star. Was that with you or was it with you? Me? Because I'm almost 100% certain that I've been to that. I don't know. Because the only time I definitely was in Central Park with you, we went with a former coworker who kind of babysat us on an early marketing trip. Sure. Remember that person? Yeah. That's the only time it was with us. Which would explain why you tried to block it from your memory. Did we go to Strawberry Field? I don't remember. Well, then I believe I have been another time, and it would have been with you, me, then. I think we did not, because if I remember correctly, it was more like this other person was just like, oh, where can we get a pretzel? That kind of thing. Marketing. All right, so back to the design. Before we get to the building, they needed those four roads. Yes. This is a big one, which was huge because Olmstead and Vault, they sank their roads 8ft below the surface of the park, which really doesn't completely hide them, but they use trees and things to sort of obscure these roads, so it wouldn't just be like another just straight cross street. Right. And it really blends in nicely with the park. And in fact, one of the lovelier things you can do is drive through the park. I saw that. I didn't even know that you could. But I went on a Google Street view of the road, and I was like, oh, yeah, totally. I get it now. I got it from reading it. But then I was like, am I understanding this correctly? And yes, there are sunken roads through the park, which is another reason why Olmstead and Vo one, because a couple of other designs that I saw, one was all the continents in meadow form. Oh, interesting. Okay. Interesting, but also terrible. And then somebody just drew a pyramid on a piece of paper, and apparently it was like, boom, there's my submission. So they didn't have the most competition. But again, when they were like, sunken roads, meadows and stuff like that, it was very clear that they had the right vision. You know, the movie Arthur. The Dudley Moore movie? Yeah. They drive to the park at the beginning of that movie because he says, Drive through the park. Bits of men. You know I love Jerry's laughing. You know I love the park. Yeah. Do you mean Russell Brand? Oh, God. You know Hudson was in that one. That's right. I never saw it. I couldn't do it. I saw the Hudson part. Just queued that up. No, I just went to the movies. Went in, watched Hodgeman. 20,000 workers worked on Central Park. Irish laborers, German gardeners, native stone cutters. Native born stone cutters. What did I say? How many 270,000 trees and shrubs were planted? Yes, they moved at the beginning, they moved, like, 6 million cubic feet of earth in and out. That's crazy. The number of trees and shrubs that were planted is just mind boggling. And it was extremely expensive, too. There was something like a $5 million price tag just to acquire the land, supposedly, that's three times higher than what they projected the actual park was going to cost. Wow. Yeah. So that's like, $150,000,000 today. Oh, man. This is at a time when that was a bunch of money, too, back then. But it was also, I believe, there was a financial panic that really made people say, like, this is a crazy amount of money. What are we doing? But they pressed on. The Civil War broke out during the construction, and so construction kind of tapered off for a while, and they went and fought the war, and then everybody came back. And when they came back, they brought with them an understanding of explosives so that they were able to blow away rock a lot more easily than they were before the war. Yeah, for sure. And there is a false rumor or a myth that is that what bridge is it one of them was supposedly made of cannonballs. Yeah, the Harp Bridge. I can't remember what it was. Something bow Bridge. The Bow Bridge. The Bow Bridge. Is it the Bow Bridge? Yeah, it was supposedly up until, like, 1974, like, every book you could read said they. Had giant cannonballs as its foundation. Yeah, it's like ball bearings because it was expanded and contracted so much because of the winters. No cannonballs. No. They did a renovation on it. So they're building this thing. They finally, in 1859 in the winter of 1859 is when it first opened for public use. And by 1865, that park received more than 7 million visitors a year. That's a lot. But like you said, that we need to follow up on, at first, they had a bunch of rules in place that kind of kept it for the wealthier New Yorkers, for sure. So, like, the history of Central Park is actually a history of class struggle in New York, big time. And when it opened, initially, it was kind of like, thanks for the park, chumps. Appreciate the taxpayer money. Yeah. And if there was any kind of event orchestra or band or anything like that, it took place from Monday to Saturday. Because if you were a labor, if you were part of the working class, the only day of the week you had off was Sunday. Carriages were very much welcomed, and they made up something like 50 or 60% of the visitors arrived in carriages. Yeah. In the first decade, 50% were in carriages, but, like, 5% of New Yorkers were wealthy enough to afford carriages. That says it all right. Exactly. So basically, it was just kind of like a stay out kind of thing. They had a ban on group picnics. Yeah, that was a big one. So, like, all these big immigrant families that love to get together in large groups, none of that couldn't do it. Go to the cemetery. You couldn't ride around in a work cart. Yeah. Like if you had an ice truck. Yeah, sorry. Like you wanted to put your family in it to take them out for a Sunday drive. None of those. You had to have a nice carriage. So there are always all these rules that were enforced for a little while, and then finally, the rest of the other New Yorkers said, this is BS. Yeah. Let's loosen these up a little bit. And they finally petitioned for some changes. And Central Park finally, in the 1870s, became a true public park. Yes. Like, little by little, that's when it started to ease on some of these rules. Right. Apparently, Olmstead was not a fan of children traipsing all over the grass, so he would have been none too pleased with family picnics and all over on the great lawn. Obviously, that changed over the years as well. And since mid 1875 and on it's been a series of progressive minded people that have opened up the park and democratized it over decades and decades. But it's also been kind of this push and pull, like, okay, how much for the people? Should we add some, like a swimming pool? Yeah. Or should we put a baseball stadium here? That was a proposal at one point in time, and they're like, no, let's not go that far toward the people. What about softball field? Right? They said, okay, maybe one or two of those. And then it would kind of go back. Like, now the people have screwed it up a little bit, so let's take it over and make up some more rules. And it just keeps going back and forth between too much for the people, and the people are taking it for granted, too strict, and we need to kind of loosen it up a little bit. Just kind of went back and forth like that. And it's still doing that today. Yeah. And also, I think the Greens word plan was so revered, it was sort of like the Constitution. It was like, for decades and decades, they would go back to that original plan and think about, like, well, this isn't what they intended. Yeah. Until Progressive sort of got on board. And we're like, well, we can actually alter this, keep the spirit of the park, and just make it more accessible because softball fields are great. There's a really good example of all of this in the casino story. Yeah. So there is this thing called the Ladies Refreshment Saloon. I think there was an original Calvert Vaux building, one of the buildings he built, it looked like an upstate New York cottage, like a wealthy person's cottage house in New York. It's a beautiful little house. And originally, if you were a woman who was UN escorted by a man to Central Park, this is the place you could go and get a drink and relax and chill out because no men were allowed. It was just the ladies refreshment saloon. Right. And then over time, men started to be allowed, and it became like an actual restaurant. And then in the twenties, I think, New York got a mayor who was basically a gangster named Jimmy Walker, gentleman Jimmy Walker. And he was not Jimmy Walker. No, not diamond. Different Jimmy Walker. And he was super in favor of speakeasies and, like, gambling and all this stuff. And he helped make the casino, or this refreshment saloon into what was known as the casino. There was an actual gambling there, but it was like the hottest nightclub in New York was in this original 1860s building in Central Park. Yeah. He said, let's take the Lady's Refreshment Salon and make it the opposite of that. Right, exactly. And so during the day, it was a restaurant that was open to all, but it was basically like a Neiman Marcus cafe where the prices were so outrageously high that the average person couldn't afford this stuff. It was like coffee for cup at a time when coffee was like a nickel everywhere else. So eight times the normal rate for just a cup of coffee, which is kind of like, let's not good for a public park. But it was open to everybody until night came then it was an exclusive nightclub. Like you could not get in unless you were on the list. And it was like partying like this for years throughout the Roaring Twenty s. And then finally, when Jimmy Walker was no longer mayor, he was toppled for corruption. The casino became a symbol for the people taking back New York and their park. Yeah. And so Mayor La Guardia appointed a guy named Robert Moses, who became the Parks Commissioner for decades. That was a big deal. And Robert Moses lobby to tear the casino down. Yeah, he did a lot, robert Moses, he built 20 playgrounds on the periphery. He renovated the zoo that I think had been around since 1871 and was and still is very popular. He was the first one to accommodate automobiles. He added athletic fields, private benefactors in the which was during his tenure, helped contribute to the skating rank, the wolman rank, Alaska rank, and pool, the boat houses, the chest and checkers house, ball fields on the great lawn. He really made a lot of changes for the people. Right. So, yeah, they took the park back and he actually was a huge advocate for the park. And it had kind of started to fall into decay around the turn of the 20th century. And when he came in in 1934, he just completely turned it around, like you said, added all this stuff, but also renovated it and basically restored it back to its original glory. And so, Robert, Moses was great. He saved Central Park the first time. The first time. But when he left in what did you say? Yeah, the park really started to fall to pieces because there was no champion there like Robert Moses, but there was also no plan in place and there was also no money. New York, basically, the way that I saw it, new York abdicated its stewardship of Central Park. It basically said, this is whatever, we're not paying attention to this anymore. And it went to Poop very quickly. All right, well, let's take a break there and we'll come back and finish up from 1960 to today. Alright. So the park is going downhill in the we mentioned a few reasons. Another big reason was that there was no ownership. No one had ultimate responsibility. I feel like the buck was being passed all over the city. Totally. No one was happy about it. But there was nobody in place to say, no, we've got to fix this now. And if you look up pictures of Central Park in the 70s, man. Yeah. And it was like all of New York, it wouldn't look like a wasteland. It was like the warriors in there. Yeah. Like these classic places like the boathouse and the skating rink are like graffiti and trash everywhere. Just hard to believe. Stuff's broken all over the place. The staff are all being vandalized. It is sad to see, but it's also unbelievable to see now that you know what Central Park looks like, just how bad it was in the there wasn't like a Robert Moses champion, and it was starting to go downhill, but it was nothing like it was when they finally in the 70s, where it's like, whatever, forget it. And it was kind of like that broken windows theory of policing, where once you reach this tipping point, as it were, it just kind of all just turns to garbage. And Central Park in the great example of that. And it was considered, like, a really dangerous place that you did not want to be no after dark. And there was that very famous Central Park Five case, and everybody just found it so easy to believe that some teenagers had brutally attacked a woman and left her for dead because it was Central Park. Yeah. I mean, you can't even be in there at certain hours now. Like, they clear the park out. And I know this because I spent the night in the park for Shakespeare in the park tickets. Wow. And you line up. You hang out and party with people in line until I can't remember what time it was, but something like 02:00 a.m.. And the cops come around and they say, everybody get up, and they walk you in order out onto the sidewalk right there on I don't know if it was the east or west side, but they basically move the entire line out of the park. And then you're sleeping on the sidewalk all night, and then in the morning, they come back and they move you all back into the park in line, and everyone just does it must have been a hell of a Shakespeare play. It was the most legendary what was it? The Seagull. I never told you about that. The Seagull. That's, like, check off or something. Yeah. It doesn't mean everything is Shakespeare. Well, Shakespeare in the park kind of makes it sound like it would be. No, that's just the name of the program. But it's the Seagull. Yeah. And it was the Seagull with Kevin Klein and Meryl Streep. George and John Goodman and Christopher Walken and Philip Seymour Hoffman and George Sigal. Natalie Portman. Wow. And there was, like, two more directed by Mike Nichols. It was, like, one of the most legendary performances ever. I bet. And that's the one where I saw James Lipton wearing an inside the Actor's studio jacket. Oh, come on. But you don't need to wear that. It's like Glenn Danzig walks around wearing Danzig shirts. Did you know that? Oh, I'm sure. Sleeveless dancing shirts. Yeah. So, anyway, that's what happens. They move you out at night. So it's kind of fun. I highly recommend everyone doing that at some point in their life. That's a heck of a play, man. Yeah, it was really something else. So Central Park is in decay, and in 1974, a man named George Soros saves the day. The devil to some people in this country. George Soros and Richard Gilder, working with the Central Park Community Fund underwrote a management study in 1974 by Es Sabbath, who was a professor of public systems management at Columbia. And this was a big study that basically came away with two big, clear initiatives. One was like, we need a CEO, essentially, right. Like, one person in charge so everyone can't go, like, I thought he was going to fix the thing. One person who has not unchecked authority, but just basically a boss. Their decision is final. Yeah. So that was the first thing. And then the second thing was a Central Park Board of Guardians to oversee all this stuff. The guy suggested the Guardian Angels, but was shouted down. Oh, man, we should do one of those guys. Sure. In 10 00 19 79 though, Elizabeth Betsy Barlow, who is now Rogers, was a Yale educated urban planner and writer, became that Central Park administrator, which was essentially the de facto CEO that they were looking for. And then she is the one so many people did so much great work over the years, but she really did. She was the first one to create a public private partnership to get well heeled New Yorkers involved. Yeah. And they apparently were bolstered by early successes. They went in, and one of the first things they did was they created a zero tolerance policy for graffiti, garbage, anything broken. If anybody saw anything wrong with the park, you were supposed to phone it in. And they just responded immediately and fixed it. Like, literally phone it in, not just phone it in. Right. Yeah, I'll be right there. And they would fix it very quickly. It was that kind of thing where, like, if the park is already clean, you're probably going to be less likely to litter or less likely to spray paint. But if it's already spray paint and there's already some garbage, you may be a little and then you hit that, like, snowball thing. They kept the snowball from ever growing by being just completely vigilant, and they attracted a lot of attention, improved, like, oh, this actually will work. And so more money started coming in to kind of resurrect the park. Yeah. And in 1980, she brought together a couple of groups, the Central Park Task Force and the Central Park Community Fund to finally merge and create the Central Park Conservancy, which was that citizen based Board of Guardians that they called for with that initial study. So they have a plan in place now. Things are getting way better. And then in 1998, an arrangement between the Conservancy and the City of New York formalized that public private partnership. And there was a man named Douglas Blansky sure de Blanzk, who assumed her title of administrator. And he was the one that created this really innovative management, innovative in its simplicity, I think, because he was like, here's what we need to do is we need to make it smaller. So he divided Central Park up into 49 zones, and every single zone had its own gardener and its own staff. And if you look at the size of Central Park, that's like, probably a few two or three square blocks, maybe. Sure. Per team. Anybody can handle that. But that's the way to do it. You make it smaller. Well, there's also accountability, too. The accountability at the top. And then ever since then, it's been humming. The big thing moving forward is a $300 million what do you call it? Like a fund to keep it going indefinitely. Yeah. Which is funny, because it's double the original price and adjusted for inflation, that is funny. Yeah. And in March of last year, elizabeth Betsy. Another Betsy. Another Betsy. Elizabeth Betsy Weinberg Smith became President CEO of the Conservancy. And all of these people that do this do it because they love the park. I mean, sure, she's paid and stuff, but they're not volunteers. But it's not like I mean, it's a good position to be in if you want to be among the elite of New York, but all of these people were nature lovers and park advocates. Yeah, clearly that's kind of the proof is in the pudding, because they've done a pretty great job in bringing Central Park back, especially if you go look at those pictures from the then think about it today. Yeah, man. You see a picture from 1975, you see a law and order from 1995. Totally different. I just got one more thing. Let's hear it. Sheep Meadow used to have sheep. Yeah. The Tavern on the Green, the restaurant used to be where they housed the sheep, and they were put there very purposely by olmstead to keep the grass cut, but also for aesthetics. Yeah. He said all this green everywhere. Bring in white and black sheep. They're like as opposed to you know what's funny? When he made his mark as a master landscape designer, he was like a journalist and a farmer. That's what his background was. He became the Central Park superintendent because he needed a job. Amazing. That was it. I have one last one. The Central Park Zoo started out as an animal menagerie because people would take unwanted exotic pets to the arsenal, and they just ended up starting accumulating pets. I think it started with some swans and black bear cub is how the whole thing started. If you want to know more about Central Park, there's a ton of stuff. Yeah, it's so much this could have been a three parter easily. You could do a lot worse than going to Ephemeral, New York and looking or go to the park. Yes, I guess you could do that. And since I said Ephemeral, New York, it's time for a very special listener mail. Yeah, this is long, and I'm going to make it shorter, even though I've already made it shorter. But you might remember, many years ago, we had Sarah, the amazing eleven year old Superfan, who we got a lot of letters from, read some of them on the air. Then Sarah disappeared from us, ghosted us. And in those ten years, we would remark occasionally, like, whatever happened to Sarah? She got in touch last week, and it was literally one of the more exciting emails I've ever gotten. That was great. She says, hey, guys, listen to can your grandfather's diet short in your life? And this was from a while ago. Yeah, that's like 2009 or ten. Yeah, but that was a select episode. She heard it as a select okay. And heard the 13 year old version of myself get a shout out. Well, guys, I'm now 21. It's been entirely too long, and I owe you an explanation. She said her ipod broke way back then. Likely story. That's like, the modern my dog in my home. Yeah, my ipod broke, so her iPad broke. It took a while to get back to get the smartphone. When she got the smartphone, she listened here and there, but she said she was really busy with school. She was like, I lost my self proclaimed title of Superfan. Even though I dearly loved and admired you the entire time, the fun facts I learned throughout the years also came incredibly handy during my Quiz Bowl career and throughout high school. So, yes, I am very much a nerd. Ha. Currently, I'm a senior in college, which is even crazy for me to say. I'm back to being a regular listener. And boy, did I miss you guys. I am so sorry we lost touch. She said, I just want to sincerely thank you for continuing this podcast and consistently bringing new topics to light. You were also kind to that a little eleven year old version of myself. You inspired me to pursue every opportunity I was given to learn. You showed me that there is always a story behind everything and that I should always ask questions. Man, she so goddess. She got it, man. Way to go, Sarah. That has always stuck with me and greatly shaped the person I am today. It's been amazing to watch you all achieve what you have. So she graduated in 2015, went on to study English and psychology at a small, private liberal arts school. She traveled to Ghana. She traveled to Scotland to study literature. Sure, to Scotland, Ghana. She said, aside from travel, I've had a chance to lead on our campus. I was elected student government president. This is all leading to, like, hey, this is what happens when you listen to stuff you should know. This is advice for kids. Weirdly. I have to thank you for spurring the beginning of that leadership. It might seem like a weird thing to attribute to your podcast, but I truly have to thank you for helping develop my critical thinking skills early on in my education. You guys truly fostered a mentality within me that education is always a strength. So how about that? Man, that's amazing. She's going to grad school now. She doesn't know where she's applied all over the map and she said it's a little scary. Oh, you'll do great. She'll do great. She says, I feel like you're all old friends that have lost connection with and I'd love to fix that. Sarah, 21 year old superfan. Thank you so much for getting back in touch. She gave a little picture. She sent a picture. She's like, this is me now. Just adorable. Adorable. I love her. Thank you very much for writing in Sarah. And I would say if you're like Sarah and you want to get in touch but nobody's really like Sarah. She's the original eleven year old superfan that's right now turned 21 year old successful fan. Yeah, if this goes as well, one day we will read an email called Sarah the Middle Aged Super Fan. And like a million close to 60, which is so weird. I won't be 60 now. You'll be just a few years behind me. Well, thank you again, Sarah. And if you want to get in touch with us, let us know how we impact your life. We love hearing that stuff. You can go on to stuff you should knowcom. Check out our social links. I'm at the Joshclarkway.com. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstephworks.com. 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 Kilgarue and George To. 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." | |
3fef62a4-121b-11eb-ba6a-9f76cdf80ed0 | Short Stuff: 5 Lazarus Species | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-5-lazarus-species | Lazarus species were thought to be gone, but had something else in mind. Today we talk about 5 of them. | Lazarus species were thought to be gone, but had something else in mind. Today we talk about 5 of them. | Wed, 18 Aug 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=230, tm_isdst=0) | 12903699 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And this is Short Stuff. This is a good one because we are squeezing it in five Lazarus species animals starting now. Right. If you're wondering what a Lazarus species is, we've talked about it before with the first entry that we'll talk about in a second. But Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead in the Bible, if you believe that stuff. And a Lazarus species is an organism that has been brought back from extinction or that we thought rather was extinct, not one that's, like, threatened, and we do a good job with it, but people are like, well, there's no more of those. And then years later, I was like, oh, my gosh, there's another one of those. Right. And we actually did a whole episode on one of these already. The Celicand. That's what I was referring to. Number one. Yeah, it has, like, an amazing story behind it which will briefly go over again because it has four lobes, meaning it had kind of these proto limbs. And when they found it first in the fossil record in the 19th century, it was a 400 million year old fossil. And they're like, this is the missing link between animals in the sea and animals on the ground. And we love the sea liqueur for this reason, but it's long dead. I think the most recent fossil they'd found was from 66 million years ago. So we just thought it was another very interesting prehistoric fish. Right. And it was very sad to not be able to study those in modern times. And then, boom, not too modern. But in 1938, they caught one or they discovered one off the coast of South Africa, and that was a big deal. And then since then, they've gotten quite a few more of these live specimens on record. If I remember correctly, it was a woman scientist, too, who was the one who recognized it for what it was and was like, this is a big deal. Yeah. Aren't they, like, not bottom dwellers, but they're pretty deep guys, right? Yes, I remember they see them enough that now that we're like, okay, these are definitely not extinct. They're still around. I think they just don't inhabit areas we frequent very much. And they're like, this is clearly not trying to grow arms and legs, but nice effort. Right? So we got one under our belt. Chuck. What about the takahi? The Takahi is native to New Zealand, one of our favorite places. Hello. Our Kiwi friends. And this is a flightless bird that's a member of the Rail family. It's very pretty, about the size of a goose. They're kind of bluegreen. They're very pretty. They're really nice looking. And even from the beginning, they were really rare. I think they were discovered by European explorers in 1847. And they were never abundant. No. Apparently, after the second specimen was found, only four were found in the 19th century, when the guy who found the second one described it, he said that these are gone. Whatever I just found is maybe the last of it. He said, it's unlikely any further living specimens will be found. And that was that. They closed the book on it. But 50 years later, there's another guy named Jeffrey Orbel who was like, for some reason, I cannot accept that Takahi is just gone forever and set out searching for them. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. And I'm glad people like Jeffrey Orbel are out there, because Jeffrey Orbel found one of these things on the South Island in 1948 of New Zealand. And this kind of brings up something we did mentioned at the beginning, like, how can science be wrong about something being extinct? And it's fairly easy to happen. The world is a big place. The Earth is a big place, and they do their best, but at a certain point, when something isn't around for a certain amount of time, they get together and they feel comfortable saying, this thing is extinct. And if it comes back to life as a Lazarus species, and that's great. It's not like science hangs her head in shame like ants back, but it is sometimes tough to see, especially if it's a rare thing to begin with, if they're truly extinct. Yeah. The International Union for Conservation of Nature is the ones responsible for declaring something endangered or extinct in the wild. And their definition of extinct is that when there's no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died, when exhaustive surveys and known and or expected habitat at appropriate times diurnal seasonal annual throughout its historic range have failed to record an individual. So it's not just like nobody has reported one of these things for a while. It's like they go out and really try to find it. And if they can't find it, they're like, I guess it's extinct. Then they hang their heads in shame. That's right. I saw a great meme the other day that's very appropriate for these times here in the United States, something about science is not truth. Science is the search for truth. And basically, when things it was much more succinct than this, but when things change, science continues to search for that truth. It's not flipping and flopping on the truth. Right. Let's just leave it at that and take a commercial break. Okay, Chuck. So we're back with, I think, my favorite. It's my favorite, too. Good. We're talking about the Lord Howe Island Stick. Insect Boy. Not a great name. There's a better name for it, don't you think? Yeah. Leave it to Australia to have an insect called a tree lobster. Lord How Island is off the coast of Australia, kind of midway between Brisbane and Sydney. And these things were very common on Lord Howe Island out there in the Pacific. And this is a really interesting story. There was a shipwreck actually kind of on the island, and everybody knows that ships, especially back in the olden days, I think it was six, this is 1920s, but they were off by a few years, were just full of rats. And these rats descended upon the island and really overtook this island in a big way. They're like tree lobsters. Deedlish yeah. So they actually ate all the tree lobsters on the island? Ate them. All the rats did. The rats had no natural predators on the island, so their population boomed and they also ate to extinction all sorts of bird species, lizard species, a bunch of other ones, but in particular this tree lobster, which you don't find elsewhere. And they thought, like, this thing was just endemic only to Lord Howe Island. So shortly after the 20s, they were like, the Lord How Island stick insect is now extinct. But then they were very surprised in 1960 when they found a few corpses. They were corpses, but they weren't like, obviously 40 year old desiccated corpses. They were fairly recent corpses. So they're like, Wait a minute, these things are still around. And I guess somebody thought to go look on another nearby island, like Pyramid Island, I believe, something like that. And they found a new population of these things, just a handful, but a few of them perched in a tea tree on the highest point of this island nearby. That's right. And so they started breeding them in captivity and training them to be able to raise their middle finger, because they have undertaken the Lord How Island rodent eradication project, where they are spreading 42 tons of poison cereal pellets and 28,000 bate stations across the island to rid this island of those rats. And this was a couple of years ago, in 2019, and the most recent article I read said that sometime this year they were going to reintroduce, like, all the rats should be gone. And if there are any few rats left, these tree lobsters can go back and give them the finger. Very nice. They're spreading poison crisp on the island for the rats. It's just irresistible, man. I'd have a hard time with that, too. I know, I know it's poisonous, but I just can't help myself. I know. If it was Captain Crunch Peanut Butter, forget about it. I'm a dead man. Yeah, so there's another one. Hats off to the Lord. How islands stick insects. We're going to take our leave and wish it luck and head on over to Peru, where the Peruvian yellowtailed woolly monkey was thought to have been extinct. It was first described in 1812, just from a pelt, a little yellowish, but then only just a few times in the century that followed had they actually been seen and described by travelers, I guess scientists in Peru. And then the last one was seen until in 1926. And by that point, the science is like, I think these things are gone. So that's right. But not so because in 1974 they found one in Brazil and this was being kept as a pet and it turns out these things were being kept as pets kind of in different places all over the world. And this is one really interesting case where the illegal pet trade kind of brought in a roundabout way, something back from extinction. Yes. They think there's maybe fewer than 1000 of them in the wild which is still not terribly bad considering something was considered extinct for a little while. But apparently, and this is kind of like one of the definitions of a Lazarus species it was news to science that this thing is not extinct but to the local population in Peru who lived in the area, the same area as these monkeys they were well aware that these things were around. They just hadn't heard the science didn't know or else I'm sure they would have told somebody. That's right. This is my second favorite. Chuck, what about you? I can't believe we're going to do five in a shorty, but here we go with the robust red horse has pale pink fins, it's sort of stout and it's not very remarkable looking. If you look at a robust red horse you think that thing is misnamed because it's just sort of plain looking. It's an Ugfish is what they should call it. Yeah. It's not the best looking fish. It's got a great Latin name. Maxustoma Robusta Poof. It's a good band name. Yeah. Or maybe an album title. Yeah. Prague Rock, for sure. Or maybe like a Mastodon album. Yeah, exactly. This was first described by Edward Drinker Coke naturalists from Europe in 1070 based on just this one fish that he found in a river in North Carolina and unfortunately that fish was destroyed because that was the last one that anyone saw for 122 years. Yeah. So everybody's like, well, it's extinct. We're not even sure it ever exactly lived. We got to take this cop fellas word for it and he's popped up before I can't put my finger on it. But we've talked about him before. But then in 1985 and then I believe also in 1991, people started reporting this. It's somebody who's like you know what? I think that that is Cope's robust red horse fish. They started finding them in the Savannah and Pedy rivers in Georgia and South Carolina. I think they actually made a deliberate effort. They launched an effort 20 years ago to find some mating pairs of the robust red horse in the Savannah River and basically start breeding them in captivity. And I read that, I think, in 2015, Chuck, they released some and they recently identified the first wild juveniles that had been born to this restored population of robust red horses. Amazing. Big comeback. Huge comeback from the dead, basically. Yeah. I love it. Same here. So that's it for short stuff, everybody. If you want to look up some more Lazarus species. Then they're out there, and it's thrilling. Every single one has a great story behind it, so go amuse yourself with that. In the meantime, short stuff says goodbye. 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." | |
3f629d62-5461-11e8-b6d0-577c7ddee1d1 | Selects: What Was the Deal With the Hatfields and McCoys? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-what-was-the-deal-with-the-hatfields-and-m | It was America's most famous family feud, but the history of the Hatfields vs the McCoys is fraught with bias and inaccuracies. Dig into a disagreement in 19th-century Appalachia that became a very big deal around the world, in this classic episode. | It was America's most famous family feud, but the history of the Hatfields vs the McCoys is fraught with bias and inaccuracies. Dig into a disagreement in 19th-century Appalachia that became a very big deal around the world, in this classic episode. | Sat, 16 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=16, tm_isdst=0) | 41378904 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen a classic episode on the classic feud between the classic families, the Hatfields and the McCoys. It's one of the more interesting stories of American history, and it's way more nuts than you even thought. And I don't know about you, though. I just want to put a little bug in your ear. Every time I hear the name Jim Vance in this episode, I always want to follow it in my mind with Vance refrigeration. See if that happens to you. Now that I've said that, I hope you enjoy this one. It's a classic, as I said, so enjoy away. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Charles. Www brian is staring at me right now. It's making me a town uncomfortable. Jerry's over there. I can feel her eyes burning into the side of my head. That was the stuff you should know. Where would you like me to look at my ear? That's always so weird, someone's, like, looking are you doing it right now? Like, right at your hair or really? Yeah. Interesting. Try my other ear. Oh, yeah, that's the stuff. The right sorry. That's your left ear. It's my left ear. All right. I'll remember that look. Watch this. Chuck, after seven years, can you see that I can wiggle ears independently? Yeah. Drives you me crazy. So you sit around and do it? Probably. I try. Not like a good husband. Chuck. Yes. We have a bit of an announcement here. Yeah. You talking about what we just heard? Yes. We are in the room with either a Hatfield or McCoy. Jerry doesn't know which family she's related to. She just knows that she's related to one of them. Yeah, literally, right before we press record, she's like, oh, by the way, I'm related to one of these families. I'm just not sure which. And a family member told her, but she cousin Tyler was that who was? I don't know. I think that's what she said, a cousin. I get the impression from Jerry story, though, that she sort of, like, glazed over, and that's why she doesn't know. Right. But she does carry a six shooter on her hip, and that explains that this is McCoy on the barrel, so maybe right, but does that mean that it's a bullet from the McCoy or for the McCoys, the mystery remains. Good point. So we are talking about the Hatfields and the McCoys. For those of you who don't live in the United States, you probably have heard of the Hatfields and the McCoys. It's a pretty legendary feud. Yeah, right. We've heard of some of your history. UK. Sure. Australia. Matthew Flinders. There's a name drop for you. Yeah. So hopefully you've heard of the Halffields and the McCoy. Yes. I mean, if nothing else, there was a big mini series, a few years ago on television. Yes. With Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton. And apparently it was really dramatized. Yeah. It's fictionalized. Yeah, sure. Cinematography sized and yeah, not quite fully accurate, but at least they brought attention to the feud because it needs it. Agreed. So the Hatfields and McCoy is a family feud. So much so that in 1979, the Hatfields and the McCoy's were on the TV show Family Feud, apparently for a full week, from what I saw. And I read that legend has it that it didn't actually inspire the TV show, but I didn't get good verification on that. No. And there have been other family feuds. Right. But none are as famous as the Hatfields and the McCoys, although at the time there were more famous family feuds. But the Hatfields and the McCoy just lived took it to another level. Yes. Because all of the murder yes, there was a lot of murder. It was mountain folk versus mountain folk, families that had been intermarried and worked for one another and had lived together for decades, if not longer, alongside in this little area along the Sandy River, I believe the big Sandy River, in something that's called the Tug River Valley. And on one side, mostly, the Hatfields lived on the West Virginia side in Logan County and right across the river on the other side in Kentucky, the McCoys lived in Pike County. And that's how it was for days gone by. Yeah. And they were not new to the United States. So I guess it wasn't the United States then, was it? Yeah, okay, sure. We're talking about the 1850s was way off then, but they came to America many years before that. Apparently the Hatfields were some of the very first to come to the New World from Northern England, and the McCoys are obviously from Germany. Well, the Hatfields were originally the heath fields in England. That sounds way more British. Yes. But you know how you do? You come over to America and you dumb it down a little. I know Heath Ledger changed his name to Hat Ledger when he got here, didn't he? All right, p. And the McCoys come from Scotland, of course, you could probably figure that out. Moved to Ireland before they came to the New World. And the first known McCoy was John McCoy in America. When was that? 1732. From Belfast, Ireland. So did they move directly to the Tug River area? Is that where they settled? No, the McCoy first settled in Maryland where he was a prominent landowner. And I think the Hatfields first moved to Tug Valley in 1820, and the McCoy with their twelve kids really, these families had grown up living and working with each other. It was not just these two families in the area. There are plenty of other families, but they were neighbors, coworkers, boss and employee. They were husbands and wives. They intermarried, they were living together for decades. Yeah, I think the two that originally settled at tug fork were the actual parents of the two main protagonists or antagonists, I guess they were both yeah, they were both pro and Anne. The story our story really kind of begins round about the civil war. This area of the tug river valley was mostly confederate, and both the Hatfield and the McCoy were confederate sympathizers, if not outright confederate soldiers. The antagonist or protagonist, the patriarch of the Hatfield family, when the story begins, his name was Devil Ants Hatfield. Right? Yeah, that was his nickname. His real name was William Anderson Hatfield. Yeah. But Devil Ants. What a cool name. Yeah. And I saw a couple of different explanations for where his nickname came from, but my favorite one was that his mother said he was so mean, the devil himself was scared of him. Yeah. I saw one that said he was 6ft of devil and \u00a3180 of hell. They had stupid sayings back then. Yeah. It didn't quite add up, especially in the backwoods of Kentucky and west Virginia. They just said stuff. They just made up names, as we'll see throughout this whole episode. But Devil ants himself was a he was from what I saw, he was described as somebody who took life by the horns. Right? Sure. He was very much a self made man. He became a pretty wealthy timber merchant over the years, but he was a violent man. Well, he had some violent tendencies, for sure. Yeah. And if you want to trace back the reason for the Hatfield McCoy feud, I think from everything I read, there isn't, like, one single thing. It's often blamed on the pig deal, which we'll hear about coming up. That seems to be the one that historians point to the most these days, though. Yeah, but it's sort of a convenient way of telling the story, because what better way to kick off a feud than with the stolen pig, right? Definitely. There were other problems or issues between these families before then. Right, yeah. But the point is, there are a lot of different things going on, and one of them was, like you said, devil ants made a lot more money than McCoy as a timber guy. So on the other side of the river, in the Kentucky side, pike county, Kentucky, there were the McCoy's. And at the time that devil ants was the patriarch of the Hatfield clan, a man named Randall McCoy. Old Randall was the head of the McCoy clan across the river in Kentucky. Right, yeah. I just get the sense that he had his sort of smaller business and was always a little bit envious of the larger timber business across. Very much so. Yeah. The way that I saw him described was if devil ants was a man who took life by the horns, ol Ranul was somebody who got hooked by life's horns, and he was very bitter about his lot in life, got you. His father, I saw, was described as didn't much care for work, didn't leave a guy, didn't leave his kids anything. So his son had to be a self made man, but he was a self made man who never really made himself. He married a woman named Sarah, and Sarah's father died and left them some land, and he was able to homestead on that. So that's how he was able to establish himself through his wife's inheritance of her father's land. But it was enough to set them up. They were fine. They weren't prosperous, but they weren't just completely poverty stricken like Randall had grown up. Right. But just across the river. And this other family that he had to deal with and work with and just kind of see and interact with was a man who had made himself. And definitely Randall was bitter about that idea and the comparison between himself and Double Ants. Yeah. And I think some of the McCoy's even worked for some of the Hatfields, which is always going to be a little tense when you feel like maybe that feeling of superiority comes over one family because you're working for me. Right? Yeah. So there's definitely, like, you're saying tension. Right. You can point to maybe these guys coming into their own as the heads of the family when the tension really started. For many years, historians pointed to a specific incident as the source of the family feud, but that's since been abandoned. So like we said, the Civil War is about the time when this story really starts in earnest, and most of the Tug River Valley was Confederate Devil Ants and possibly Randall McCoy were part of what we're called the Logan Wildcats, which was a militia. But during the Civil War, they were an actual army unit of the Confederate army. Yeah. And I saw where Double Ants was, even the leader in one place, but I didn't get that verified a bunch either, at very least, was in the brigade. Right. And I got the impression that if he wasn't a leader, he was a de facto leader because that was just his type of personality. Devil Ants don't answer to nobody. Right. You answer to him. That's right. That was a great Devil Ants, by the way. So I think the leader of the Logan Wildcats is another character who will come up later, and his name is Jim Vance. Yeah. So Jim Vance, he was not a very great guy, from what I can understand, but I'll let him paint his own picture. Okay. Is he coming in? He will in a little bit. Instead, we're going to focus on a guy named Aza Harmon McCoy, and this guy I don't have a beat on. He decided in just complete contrast of the place where he grew up, he was going to join the Yankee Union army, and he did, but he broke his leg and left the service after, I think a year while he was in service, his commanding officer in the Union Army ordered him to fight Devil Ants because there was rumors that he was a Confederate spy. Oh, yeah. So Harmon fights Devil Ants, loses the fight, and I didn't get a sense of what kind of fight it was, whether it was, like, it's weird, a gun battle, or whether he literally just, like, spit on his boot and, like, took a swing. I'm not sure. I don't know if that was even in the miniseries. So they get in a fight, he loses, and then the Union troops went after Devil Ants at that point, which is really what caused a lot of the early issues. And then later on, Harmon shot a friend of Devil Ants while stealing his horse. So in turn, he killed Harmon's commanding officer in the Union Army. Okay. There's a lot of bad blood. The guy was like, literally, general Bill France was peeing off his porch like I do, and Devil Ants shot him in cold blood. I hope that does not happen to you. I really hope so too. That would be a bad way to go. It gives you a pause. Yeah. So after the war, after ESA, Harmon McCoy came back home, I did not realize the tensions were already that high. I had the impression that was just because he fought for the Union. I didn't know he had been made to directly target Devil Ants. Right. Well, Devil Ants and the Logan Wildcats basically sent AA a message saying, watch yourself because we're coming for you. And he very wisely went off and lived in a cave for a while. He hit out. And so with this guy, you're like, why did he go fire for the Union? Was he an abolitionist? No, he had a slave, and the slave kept him alive by bringing him food and stuff while he was in the cave. So I have no idea why he went and fought for the Union. It's weird. The fact that he did, though, meant that his own relatives, his own McCoy, including Randall, his brother, really were just kind of like, yeah, the Logan Wildcats are out to get you, and you brought this on yourself, so we don't really feel for you. And they didn't apparently make much of a problem, or they didn't take issue with it when the Logan Wildcats tracked him down in the cave and killed him. Well, he was actually coming home when they killed him. I think he finally thought, like, surely after all this time, they've forgotten about this trogla bite. Troglodyte. Yeah. So he was walking home to see his family they hadn't seen in years, and Jim Vance shot him. That's how long he was in the cave. Well, that might have been part of the war as well. Got you. But it said, after a few years, man alive. Well, actually, man dead. ASA Harmon McCoy is killed by the Logan Wildcats. And apparently at first, everybody thought it was Devil Ants who did it, but he turned out to have been bedridden at the time, so he had an alibi. And they think instead that it was Jim Vance who led it and probably killed Aza, who is Devil's uncle. Okay. And strong ally. Jim Vance was So ASA Harmon is dead. The first shot has been fired in the family feud. So thought the historians for years, and then I guess after interviewing actual Hatfields and McCoys, they realized that, no, actually, the McCoys were like, he brought it on himself. We made peace with this. And no charges were even brought in the murder of Aza McCoy. Yeah, I saw one article that described it as a murder agreement, which apparently used to have that, like, blood in, blood out, and everyone's like, all right, even Steven. Okay, so, Don yes, the first death has occurred in the Hatfield McCoy feud, but it has nothing to do with the Hatfield McCoy feud. Technically, yes. That seems like a pretty good time to take a break, don't. You agreed, sir. So, Chuck, we're back. And as a Harmonstead, things are whatever between the Hatfields and McCoy, nothing big has gone on. Even if there were any sort of skirmishes or little fights or run ins or that kind of thing, I get the impression that the families, when they saw each other, there was like, a slight percentage that the sides were going to get at least a fist fight and not take, like, potshots with their gun. I just think they probably just didn't like each other very much from the beginning. Right. So it's possible those things went on. Nothing big happened, though, until the pig the pig incident. And apparently it wasn't just one pig. It's what it's been boiled down to. But it was several. Yeah, and it was a big deal. If you think about a pig, stealing a pig is not a big deal at the time. There's a book called The Feud by Dean King Dinking. It's so weird. Dean King. And he said, where was their next meal going to come from? And how could they feed the children in the winter? They were lucky enough to have one pig or razorback for sell or trade. The proceeds were used to acquire flour, sugar, coffee, sometimes shoes or boots for their families. It was a mainstay for the family. So these days, you hear a pig or even a couple of pigs, and you think, what's a big deal. But in the region at the time, these pigs were very valuable. So it was a big deal. Right. And in the front, I saw a dude. Well, yeah, and that was another thing. Again, we're talking about backwards Appalachian folk in the 19th century. There was a lot to the idea that you had stolen their property. Yes. Which as it should be. But even that aside, I saw this historian on a CBS Sunday Morning clip from a few years ago, and he explained, like, you can feed a sizable family for a month with a single pig, and this guy stole several pigs. So the guy who was accused of stealing the pig was who was it? Chuck Randolph McCoy accused Floyd Hatfield. Okay. Right. So old Randall himself said, floyd Hatfield, cousin of Devil Ants, I know that you stole those pigs, and I'm taking you to court. While they went to court, the problem is the local magistrate was a Hatfield, but in this guy's favor, his name was preacher was his first name, I believe. And he was basically what amounted to the local judge in the Tug River valley. He tried to make it a fair trial. Is he the one that placed it in McCoy land? Because the trial took place in McCoy territory yes. By a Hatfield, though. Right. And he made sure that the jury had six Hatfields and six McCoy on it? He did. And nobody else. No joke. Yes. So weird. But he was trying to make it as fair as possible. Right. And so they had a trial where Floyd Hatfield was tried for hog theft. Have you ever had something stolen from you? Sure. Like, you know, not hugely valuable, but yeah, it's one of the things that irks me most. It's very irritating. There's something about just someone taking something that you work to buy that just really boils my blood. Now, imagine if they took that thing that you work to buy and they were directly taking food out of your child's mouth at the same time. Yeah. It makes you mad. I pull a Hatfield. The weird thing is that the McCoys and the Hamlets at this point are saying, we will leave it to the courts. Right, sure. So they did go to court. They did try to have a fair trial, or at least the preacher did, or Preacher Hatfield. Preacher, judge. Right. It's confusing. And the jury was split, except for one who was a McCoy who sided with the Hatfields. His name was Selkirk McCoy, another made up name. And Selkirk, he voted that because of a guy named Bill Staton who had testified that Floyd had not stolen the pigs. He said, you know what? I'm not going to contradict Bill Statin. I know him to be truthful or whatever. Plus, I work for Devil Ants in his logging operation, so I'm going to vote pro Hatfield and exonerate Floyd. And Floyd got off, and old Randall went nuts. Yeah. Satan was the main witness, and he was a relative of the McCoy, but he was married to a Hatfield. Right. While they did enter Mary, I saw that there was way more marrying within the family to avoid intermarrying. Oh, yeah. There was a lot of first cousins that were. When you watch that family feud clip, you can go find it on, I'm sure, on YouTube. But there is a mental floss article that we found that had it embedded at the bottom. That's where I first heard about it. When they're introducing the families, they keep introducing one another. It's like kissing cousins. This is a kissing cousin, Diane. Right. Are the families you're saying that there was a lot of inner marriage within the family itself? Well, they were probably just joking, right? No, no. On Family Feud, you don't think the guy didn't sound like he was joking? Did he kiss his cousin on TV? No, but Richard Dawson kissed her. He kissed everybody. That guy kissed any woman who would stand still long enough. What a flirt. Love. Richard Dawson? Yeah. R-I-P. Yeah. He didn't change his name even though he was British. Well, you don't know that. That's true. It could have been Richard Dimsum or Chumley Dawson. That's a great name. Old Randall has just lost this court case. Yes, and even worse, he was made to pay the Hatfields court costs for taking him to court. And remember, we characterized ol Randall as a kind of a bitter man. Any time life handed him lemons, he just squeezed him into his eyes out of anger. Right. And he went on for this for basically years about how this is a miscarriage of justice, how Floyd had stolen his hogs. And so now, anytime Hatfields and McCoys, depending on their allegiance to the clans or clans, any time they saw each other, they were shooting at one another, they were getting into fights, they were throwing rocks. One of Devil Ants sons was standing there when old Reynolds rode up once, and old Reynolds started railing on him about how Floyd had stolen a hog and the McCoy or the Hatfield son grabbed a rock and just threw it at old Reynolds mouth. Just crushed his mouth with a rock. Because that's what you did back then. Yeah, it was sort of like, you killed my brother Harmon, but you stole my hog. I'm cool with the brother killing. Like Harmon had it coming. Right, but that hog never hurt anybody. Yeah, we were going to eat it. So did we cover the fact that Statin, two years later, was killed? This is inaccurate. Oh, is that not true? Bill Staton Jr. Was killed. Bill SR. Was not killed in the skirmish. This is another big was that retribution, though? Okay, for his pause? Yeah, because remember, after the hog incident in the hog verdict, the half filled in the coils did not fight it out right then at the magistrate's office at Judge Preacher's place. Right? Yeah. But any time the clan saw one another, they would shoot at each other. They were getting fights, they would take rocks to the faces. And then it culminated finally in this really truly violent incident between Bill State and Junior and Paris and Sam McCoy. Right. Okay, so Bill State and Juniors out hunting, sees these McCoy sons and says, I'm in a world of trouble. Yeah. I'd better take a shot at one of them and shoots Paris McCoy in the hip. And Sam McCoy was like, you shot my brother. You're going down. And he shoots Bill and wounds him and then goes over and executes him point blank in the head. And this is Bill Jr. Bill Jr. See, I got another article that said it was Bill, but it also said he's Bill Stanton. So I'm starting to doubt all kinds of accuracy. There is a lot of inaccurate stuff. So I got, I think, the description of that incident from a really great book by a guy named John Ed Pierce. It's Days of Darkness colon. So, you know, it's legitimate the feuds of Eastern Kentucky. Yeah. So there's been, like, serious bloodshed here. Now, this is direct retribution for the hog stealing verdict. A man has been executed point blank in the head, and the two McCoy boys just tried to get away with it. Yeah. So blood is spilling. Fast forward a bit to 1882, and three of Randall sons are attacked, stabbed 26 times, and shot Ellison Hatfield, who was Devil's younger brother to death. Right. And that was on election day. And election days were, like, drunk in affairs. Do you remember when I think in the Bars episode, we talked about how, like, what was it? Get people drunk and doing something to planners. Yeah. Bumble. Planting the plywood, planning the voters with bumbo. Yeah, man, but it was election day, so everybody would get super drunk. And when you get two clans that don't like each other super drunk in the same place, they get in fights and people get stabbed 26 times and then shot in the back. Yeah. So those three sons of Randall were actually arrested and were presumably going to go to trial, but vigilanteism took hold and they were kidnapped on the way to the trial by the Hatfields. And they said, we're going to take care of this our way. Yeah. And I don't know if they let them get away with it, but they got away with it. No, they did not let them get away with it. This was a huge turning point right. When the Hatfield or the McCoy boys were intercepted by the Hatfields and taken across the river to West Virginia, which is basically like taking them to Fortress Hatfield. Yeah. Country justice was going to happen. Yeah. But Devil Ants vowed that if Ellison made it and didn't die, he would not kill these McCoy boys. But Ellison succumbed to his wounds and did die. And so they took these McCoy boys out and tied them to trees and shot them, I think more than 50 times or something like that. So you were saying that they got away with it. Not for lack of trying. Right. It basically set off this huge issue. Like this was even for the Tug River Valley. Chuck, this is pretty flagrant frontier justice. You're not supposed to do this. There's a magistrate named Preacher who's supposed to settle this kind of stuff. Right. So a guy named what was Perry's name? Perry Klein. You know what? This is too big. We need to take a break, all right? And get to the story of Perry Klein. Okay, so we're back checking. We have a new guest. His name is Perry Klein. Come on in, Perry. You're an attorney. He was married to Martha McCoy. And here's the deal. Years before, there was a situation where Perry Klein was cheated out of, I think, 5000 acres of land. Was he cheated? I didn't know if it was actual justice because he had supposedly been cutting timber from Devil Answers timberland. Well, here's the deal. Everything you read will say it depends on who you sympathize with is how you think Perry Klein and really, all of them were viewed. Sure. So I read articles that said that he was cheated and articles that said he wasn't cheated. And I think the family still today, like, while there is a piece which we'll get to, they still disagree over Perry Klein's role. Okay. But Perry Klein was married to a McCoy, actually. Aza Harmon McCoy's widow. Right, yeah. Martha. And so he had lost 5000 acres. Really? Yeah. That's how much he was forced by the court to cede to Devil Ants for allegedly cutting his timberland. Yeah. So he had a retribution in mind as an attorney. Right. So when the Hatfields executed the three McCoy boys, perry Klein used it as a chance. Depending on how you look at it, he either use it as a chance for retribution or his family allegiance was stirred up. And he, being an attorney, had contacts with the governor bunker, I believe, of Kentucky and said, Governor, there's some horrible stuff going on down here that's being perpetrated by some West Virginians against some law abiding Kentuckians, and you guys need to do something about it. And it worked, actually, yeah. They reinstated the charges and basically put out awards on the head bounties on the head arrest bounty that is of the Hatfields, including 6ft of Devil and \u00a3180 of hell. Yeah. Devil Ants himself, his sons, some of the family allies, like dogs. His uncle, Jim Vance. Yeah. I think there was 20 men who had indictments against them. And since they had indictments against them and they were hanging out in West Virginia, they had bounties on their head. And one of the bounty hunters, the main bounty hunter who came around, it was a problem that they had bounties on their head because any crackpot who wanted to could come and take shots at those guys. And it was happening quite a bit. Yeah. They wanted to collect some dough. Right. But there was one guy in particular who was a real thorn in their side. His name was Mad Frank Phillips. And Frank Phillips was a bounty. Hunter extraordinaire. He was about as legally gray as you can get and still not be just on the darker side of the spectrum. And he made it basically his personal war to get as many Hatfields across the river into Kentucky as he could. So he would carry out raids on the Hatfield stronghold in West Virginia and basically just abduct Hatfields and bring them to Kentucky so that they could be put in the Pike County Jail. And while he did this, he was also executing people left and right. Like Jim Vance. He shot and wounded, saw that he just wounded him, walked around from behind and while Vance was begging for his life, shot him in the head. And this is Frank Phillips. He would execute you just as soon as he would capture you. Yeah. And this was becoming a big deal in the press at this point. Newspapers started carrying the stories and became bio accounts like national news and legend. Like everyone knew about the Hatfields and McCoys by this point. Right. And the press apparently very much sighted with the McCoys. They painted the Hatfields to seem like backwoods, murderous rednecks who just caused trouble everywhere they went and painted the McCoy innocent, law abiding victims of this whole feud and the whole legend. Like you're saying, it all begins about right here, what amounts to almost a war between Kentucky and West Virginia because Frank Phillips kept going and getting people and bringing them back to Pike County and West Virginia got involved. And the two governors were basically standing toe to toe, almost about to go invade, sending National Guard troops in across the border. But instead, they left it to the courts. And actually, this court case about whether it was legal or not for Frank Phillips to have abducted the Hatfields and taking them to the Kentucky jail reached the Supreme Court, actually, which is pretty amazing. It is. And the Supreme Court said, you know what? It probably is illegal, what happened, but Kentucky is a sovereign state and there's really nothing West Virginia can do about it. So go ahead and try them. But before the trial, actually, and while these abductions were going on, these raids carried out by Frank Phillips, the Hatfields, like I said, it was a big deal to them that they were bounty hunters out to get them. And they came up with a plan to just end the whole thing. In 1888. A murderous killing spree is what they came up with. In January of 1888, group of Hatfields said, we're going to attack Randolph McCoy and his entire family. Little Cape double ants son and an ally to Jim Vance kind of led the way and they ambushed them at their home on New Year's Day, 1888, randolph actually escaped, which is they were kind of coming after him. And he's the only one who escaped. Well, they were coming after the whole family. Yeah. Their whole intention was to just murder this whole family. Part of the problem. Yes. And Randolph was the key guy. He actually got away. His son Calvin daughter Alafair, were killed in what they called crossfire. But they were let's get real. And his wife Sarah, suffered a crushed skull. She was beaten so badly. Yeah. So they set the house on fire. Alafair opened the door to put the fire out, and she was shot and killed. And then her mom, Sarah, wanted to come and comfort her dying daughter. And when she came out, they beat her head in with the butt of a pistol. I think Cap Hatfield did. And then Calvin provided cover for his dad and ran to attract their gunfire so his dad could get away. And it worked, but Calvin died as a result. And then two other daughters, McCoy daughters, survived. So Randall and two daughters survived this attack on his family. And this is when it was like, if the press wasn't paying attention before, now they really were. And basically everybody was outraged at this legend. Chuck is 100 something years old. Right. Yeah. And it's easy to kind of see these people as caricatures or just historic. But when you think about what the Hatfields plan to do and tried to do to the McCoys in that case on New Year's 19 or 1888 yeah. The New Year's Massacre is what it was known as. That's, like, objectively despicable, no matter when it happened. Going after an entire family to kill them. Yeah. To wipe out a legal entailment. Yeah, it is. And it really kind of brings home, like, the actual humanity of all of this. Yeah. So it went all the way to the Supreme Court and they decided, you know what? These hatfields should be tried. And in 1889, they were tried in eight of the Hatfields and their supporters were sent to life in prison. And one, Ellison Mounts, who people think is the son of Ellison Hatfield and his first cousin yeah. It was actually sentenced to death. And the one issue here was a lot of people now think he was a kind of a scapegoat because he was mentally challenged and maybe an early false confession happened. Right. Exactly. And if he didn't do it, or even if he did, he really got screwed over by the prosecution. They said that if he confessed and cooperated that he would get a lighter sentence, when really he was the only one who confessed and he was the only one who was hanged. And his dying words, I think, were, the half fields made me do it. And then they hung him. Yeah. There were no public executions at the time, but that did not stop hundreds of people, thousands even, from coming out and watching anyway. Right. So it was a public execution. What's odd, though, is the ten men had been captured by Frank Phillips and had been indicted and tried, and nine of them got life in prison. Ellison Mounts was hung, and this was apparently enough to, I guess, modify Randall McCoy. At first I think he tried to rail against the verdict, but ultimately it was enough to just calm him down. And he went and lived a quiet life. Quiet, haunted life as a ferry operator, I think, and lived to like age 88. Yeah. And about a year later was when the families both said, enough is enough. It's called a truce. And from I think it was an eleven year period, almost 24 people were killed in both families. Wow. Like close to two dozen folks over an eleven year period. That's legit. Yeah. That's a family feud right there. That's a big feud. And Devil Lance lived a ripe old age, too. He lived to, I think, 83 or something like that. 73? That's not that old. Well, he was born again at 73. I think he lived until his eighty s. Oh, really? But he was paranoid for the rest of his life because I think there were still bounties on his head. So he moved to an island and carried a rifle with him at all times for the rest of his life. Well, if you look at pictures of the families, they all had their guns. I mean, that's what you did back then. But it's funny to see a picture of like 20 people and twelve of them are brandishing weapons. That's right. In the one photo that will ever be taken of them, they've got their gun out, too. So since then they've been all over the place. In pop culture. We mentioned Family Feud. There was an Abbot and Costello movie in 1952. Buster Keaton did a movie, too. Oh, really? He was on Looney Tunes. Excuse me? Mary Melodies. Big distinction, but still Bugs Bunny. Nowadays. There are even some medical professionals who think that there was a condition that the McCoy had that led them to be violent. What it's called? Von Hippolyndau disease. And these geneticists studied dozens of McCoy descendants and said they have a really high rate of this disease. It's inherited, it's rare, produces tumors in the eyes, ears and pancreas. And a notable side effect is high blood pressure, racing heartbeat, and increased aggressive behavior, increased fight or flight hormones. And it was the McCoys that may have had that, because from everything I've read, it seemed like the Hatfield would have been the one to have that. Wow. Maybe I'm a victim of contemporary press bias. Media bias. You got anything else? I got nothing else. There's other stuff. There's plenty of stuff that I'm sure we didn't hit. And you should go read some of the cool books written about this stuff. I got one more thing, actually. Here comes World War II. Life magazine uses the families as a way to unite America's war effort by featuring them in a big photo spread. The Hatfields and McCoys working together in factories for World War II. That's awesome. Yeah. And I think they even met recently, and they're still out there and they're still meeting and talking about this and disagreeing friendly disagreements on people like Perry Klein and who's the other guy? Madman Munt? Frank Phillips. Mad Frank Phillips, who remember I said he was legally gray? He married a McCoy who ended up who had had a baby with John C. Hatfield. They ran off together and got married, frank Phillips and Nancy McCoy, and ended up being prosperous bootleggers in the region. Wow. Well, and there was also a spurned romance, too, that led detentions. I forgot about that. Yeah. Rosanna McCoy and John C. Hatfield. Yeah, they had a little trist and a child together, but the child died, I think aged eight months from measles. But he kicked her to the curb before that and then went and married her cousin Nancy, although there were no curbs back then. He kicked her to the river bank, to the creek side. Yeah. Again, we could probably keep doing this for another 45 minutes, but we're not. If you want to know more about Hatfields and McCoy, just go search it in your favorite search engine. Since I said search engine, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this just a nice little email of thanks from a nice person. Okay. Hi, Joshua. Chuck and Jerry. I'm a young 30 something who lives in Berwin, Illinois. I just recently started listening to podcasts and came across how stuff works. And you guys, I'm a nerd at heart, and your podcast feeds my inner beast. I listen to you on my way to work on a train like Dr. Seuss at work again, and then on my way home from work. I'm so addicted to learning new things. Scrolling through the feed is exhilarating, and I'm dying to listen to them all. Jennifer, I'm not sure if you know this. If you follow us on itunes, you might think they're only 300, but there are more than 850 ish, right? Yeah. That's for all of you out there, and you can find those at our website. Back to Jennifer. I've told all my friends about the podcast. I even make my husband listen while we're cooking. I can't get enough of all the cool topics you talked about. Since I listen to you every day, I thought, you know what, I'm going to send an email in hopes that it is red on the air. And if not, at least you know you have another dedicated listener. Thanks for spreading knowledge. And that is Jennifer Hardy. And Jennifer, sometimes when I get dared to read things on the air, I do. It works every time. Not every time. Flattery will get you everywhere. If you want to let us know how great you think we are, we love hearing that stuff. Obviously, you can tweet to us at SYSC podcast. You can post it on Facebook. Comstepysheanow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast athousetepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stephieshoodnow.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, you." | |
How Silly Putty Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-silly-putty-works | When the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia in World War II, they cut off America's rubber supply. Luckily, American can-do created a synthetic rubber and saved the War. Learn about the inventor, fluid chemistry and more in this episode of SYSK. | When the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia in World War II, they cut off America's rubber supply. Luckily, American can-do created a synthetic rubber and saved the War. Learn about the inventor, fluid chemistry and more in this episode of SYSK. | Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:52:42 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=15, tm_min=52, tm_sec=42, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=277, tm_isdst=0) | 35763586 | 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. What if you were an apparel company facing an avalanche of demand, so you call IBM to automate your It infrastructure, and now your ecommerce platform can handle spikes and orders. Let's create It systems that roll up their own fleet. 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. There's. Charles W. Chuck Bryant with me, as always. Looking good. I am, yes. Thank you, Josh. That makes this stuff you should know. And you were looking good as well, sir. Is that a new shirt? No, not brand new. It's less than six months old. I guess it's kind of new. All right. I'm trying to think. This is the most boring way I could start a show. Does ask you pretty high up there. Josh is wearing a lovely striped blue button up, as he has wanted to do. And I'm wearing everything is bigger in Texas green T shirt. We're both in jeans. I have on my Last Chance garage hat. Yeah. Anything else? I want to set the scene for once. I've got a beard now. You've had a beard? I'm clean shaven. Clean shaven? Yes. I've started to do the clean shaven thing more than scruffy. I was doing scruffy for a while. Which one do you like? For you? Yeah. I think whatever Yuumi likes, which is clearly not scruffy. She likes it both ways. Oh, yeah. All right. That is the most boring way to ever start a show. Yeah. We should all go to sleep now. I've got a story for you, alright. And you know some of this, so you don't have to pretend like you're surprised. Okay. Back in 1839, there was a man named Charles Goodyear. And Charles Goodyear, whose last name you might recognize for good reason, figured out a way to make rubber, natural rubber, tougher than leather. It's called Vulcanization. Yes. Okay. So this process of Vulcanization took rubber, which is naturally kind of stickier gooey at warmer temperatures and rigid at cooler temperatures, and made it much more pliable, much more flexible, but able to stand up to really punishing conditions like heat, lots of pressure and force, which made it perfect for car tires, hoses, fan belts. Sure. All of the stuff that we use rubber for today. This guy is the reason we're able to right. The reason it's tough enough. Yes. Now, the fact that this came at 1839 means that this innovation came during the Industrial Revolution, which means that all that stuff that the rubber could be used for can be mass produced, which means that we needed a vast source of rubber as the raw material for this vulcanization process. And luckily, I guess you could say, at least for the Westerners, we knew where to get vast stores of rubber, the Amazon, which is where this very specific type of rubber tree is indigenous and is found in vast supply. All right. All right. Are you with me so far? I am. So we went down on the Amazon, and as a result, these parts of Brazil that were just totally impoverished suddenly found themselves at the center of a global rubber boom and just became decadently wealthy, like, almost overnight. Brazil and the Amazon was the center of the global trade in rubber for decades until 1876. These British guys snuck some rubber tree seeds out of the Amazon and took them to the Botanical Gardens in London. Okay. And they started to work on forming a hybrid that was even better than the ones in Brazil. A hybrid plant, a hybrid rubber tree that could coincidentally thrive in British colonies in Southeast Asia. Perfect. It was perfect for the British. Yes. By 1910, the Brazilian stranglehold on the rubber trade was being challenged and was in real trouble by countries like Malaysia and Sri Lanka and Thailand and by the Far East held, basically, the monopoly on the rubber market. All right. That's a good background. Thanks. I'm almost done. So, about the time Southeast Asia started to dominate rubber, we needed it even more than when Brazil dominated rubber, because cars were being mass produced in each of those required four rubber tires. Right. So Southeast Asia's. Hold on. Rubber was even stronger than the one that Brazil had, plus one in the trunk. Yeah. And by the time World War II rolled around, we'd come to rely on rubber so much that it was calculated. The US. Military, the Pentagon, needed \u00a332 of rubber for every troop on the ground for things like tires, boots, anything you need rubber for. Right. Every soldier, which makes it it was a very big deal when the Japanese successfully invaded the Pacific theater, including Malaysia, including Sri Lanka, including all these rubber producing places, and cut off the rubber supply to the US. And we're like, we need rubber. Yeah. We need it bad. And they were like, well, we've got it. Yeah. And by the way, let's go. When you win, there's going to be stragglers on these islands. You will one day podcast about them. Hero. So what happened, Chuck? Well. Josh because the US Is industrious and bright and has a never say die attitude, they said, you know what? Why don't we commission some labs and academic institutions to develop a synthetic rubber. Right. So they put out the call because they needed this for the wartime demand, and all these chemists got to work on it and invented something called GRSs, which is government rubber styrene. And it turned out to be a great replacement for rubber. And by 1944, we were producing twice the amount of all the world's rubber combined, the synthetic rubber and synthetic rubber in the US. Wow. So this is, like, one of the most chemical engineering accomplishments ever created. Absolutely. Ever undertaken, right? That's right. So GRS Huge still in use today, right? Yes. As like, the standard for synthetic rubber. It changed everything. That was it was like, Bye bye, Malaysia. Sorry about your rubber monopoly falling apart. You shouldn't have let your pain evade. Well, I'm sure they still had plenty of customers. I'm sure they still do. They weren't like, we got all this rubber, right? What are we going to do? We chose the wrong team. So this synthetic rubber, this triumph of chemical engineering, was not without setbacks, though, right? Well, no. Anytime you're trying to synthesize something like that, there's going to be some ups and downs. And this was a nationwide challenge by the War Production Board. It wasn't just like, hey, you five guys over here. It was like, attention all chemical engineers, all chemists, anybody who has anything to do with chemistry. We need a synthetic rubber and we need an abundant supply. So there are a lot of people working on this. Oh, yes. And one of those guys was James Wright of General Electric. GE, he mixed boric acid with silicon oil and said, you know what? This is going to be a great synthetic rubber. Unfortunately, it wasn't a great synthetic rubber. His, quote unquote bouncing putty is what he called it. But GE thought I had some promise. GE thought I had some promise. But it did pretty much wallow away in obscurity at first. Right. For almost a decade, it just kind of made the rounds to other places, like, hey, can you guys do anything with this? We'll share the patent, whatever. Just figure out what we can do with this. And apparently, GE, it was so widespread that it made its way to a party that a guy named Peter Hodgson, who owned an ad agency in New Haven, Connecticut, attended a cocktail party. Remember Spam? That's where Spam came from. A cocktail party on New Year's Eve. Great things happen when you get together and drink. This guy was at a cocktail party and saw some people playing with this bouncing putty that, as James Wright called it, and said, you know what? These adults seem fascinated by this. I just happened to be working on a catalog for a toy store, and I think this would make a great adult novelty. So he approached the lady who owned the Block toy store, right? Yeah. And there's varying accounts of this story. I think it's one of those deals because I saw somewhere where she was the one that saw it and contacted him and said, hey, can you put this in my catalog? So either way, Peter Hodgson and Ruth Fallgatter, who owned the Block Shop toy store, they decided to put it on the pages of their catalog to sell as a toy. Right. And it was $2. Not chump change in 1949. No, definitely not. And it was an adult novelty, as they reckoned. Right. Sorry. You just say adult novelty, and a lot of things come to mind. Okay. Spits or gifts. I know. It was kind of an adult worldly. Okay. No, it was an adult diversion. It became a big seller is what it became. Yeah. It was the block shop's biggest seller. One of them. And then this I found a little hazy for reasons that remain unclear. Did you find anything out about why Fall got her stopped backing the product? I couldn't find anything on that, but I guess even though it sold big for her, she was just like, yeah, whatever. Maybe she just had her thing going, and she's like, Why do I want to start a new product? I'm a toy store owner. Yeah. Why do I want to be a millionaire? Exactly. Is the root of all evil. Good for her. Take this ballgaster rubik. I have no plans for this. Exactly. The whole drive, the whole push to make this into something big, what we now know is Silly Putty fell completely to Hodgson. That is true. And he turned into a whirling dervish. Between 1949 and 1950, he borrowed $147 and bought another batch from GE Hi, hired a Yale student to roll them into 28 grams, 1oz balls, packaged them in plastic Easter eggs, and sold them to Double Day Bookshops and Neiman Marcus along the way. He also took them to some chemical engineers in Skinectidy. Right. Yeah. And said, hey, copy this, reverse engineer it. Yeah. It's like that website that has all of your favorite recipes from, like, Applebee's and Kentucky Fried Chicken reverse engineered. You first get chicken from a sealed bag that's pre sauce. Exactly. And put it in a pan. Yeah. They're like, do you have Cisco's phone number? So that's what he did. And you're right, he did make pretty quick work of it, because after he opened a manufacturing plant yes. All this is in a year. He first encountered this stuff in 49. This is he believed in this, what would be actually, he had already settled on Silly Putty as the name. Yeah. Well, he was an ad agency guy, so he brainstormed some names, evaluated 15 of them was like, this is the one he trademarked. It was Nuttyputty One. I think that was one of them. I think that would have sold, too. So he had the Silly Putty name at this point, opened the manufacturing plant in Connecticut, and soon after that landed Neiman Marcus and Double Day Bookshops. As customers, which was huge. It was. But it became even huger when some writers from The New Yorker went to Double Day and they encountered, do you want to read this part of Scotch and read this one? All right. It was in the Talk of the Town section in the New Yorker. We went into the Double A bookshop at Fifth Avenue in 52nd street the other day, intending in our innocence to buy a book, and found all the clerks busy selling Silly Putty, a gooey, pinkish, repellent looking commodity. The commodity I love that that comes in plastic containers the size and shape of eggs. We sought out Mr. Lee Weber, the manager of the bookshop, to ascertain the mysterious link between it and Doubleday. He told us that Silly Putty is the most terrific item and that Double Day shops have been privileged to handle it since Forever Amber. Forever Amber. I looked it up. It was a best seller from the 40s. Okay. It was about a woman in Restoration England, late 17th century England, who, through her sexy wit, went from rags to riches and became, like, the favorite mistress of Charles II, was banned in Boston. Really? Yeah. So because of this pretentious bit of cynical whimsy that appeared in The New Yorker, the sales overnight for Silly Putty just exploded. Hodgson got 750,000 orders. 250. Man. Why are they quarter of a million? You're pricing in three quarters? Yeah, I was I was thinking about the orders that weren't there. Exactly. He got a quarter of a million in three days. A quarter of a million orders. And at $2 a pop, that's a lot of money, especially considering that he only half a million dollars. Yeah, well, yeah, I was thinking about the half a million he didn't make. Right. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively, complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create Learn More@ibmcom consulting Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get handson, experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast. And start taking charge of your future today. So it was, like, basically an overnight success thanks to Neiman Markets A books and The New Yorker and GE and the Japanese. But, I mean, again, this is all happening in a year. That's pretty speedy. This is a whirlwind year for this guy. I'm happy for him, just looking back on this story. I hope he was a good guy and he didn't, like, beat up little kids on his way to work. He passed away in 1976. I hope before then he didn't do bad things. But he saw it become a huge success because when he died in 76, silly Putty was in 22 countries plus the United States with sales exceeding 5 million a year. And that was in 76. Yeah. Which I looked it up. It's 19 million today. Real $2,010. Wow. I think Crayola owns it outright, but it's pretty good. Yeah, they seem to. They seem to, yeah. Well, he set up Arnold Clark Inc. And I never found out who Arnold Clark is. Maybe that was an alias of his. Who knows? But yeah, crayola is weird. Crayola apparently owns Silly Putty. Now, we've just described the history of Silly Putty. That should be enough. Surely there's no one out there who hasn't played with Silly Putty before. I used to play with it like crazy when I was a kid. And one thing I would do, which is something that they found out it was originally intended for adults and they were kind of surprised to learn that kids were into it. And it didn't take long for the kids sales to dwarf that of adults. Yeah, it was 1955. Sales overtook initially, he said he was like, this is great for adults because you can come home and unwind at the end of the day by squeezing it and just blowing off steam by copying newsprint with it. May I? And that's what I did with it, was copied comic books. So in that New Yorker article, they interviewed Hodgson and he had a quote. It means five minutes of escape from neurosis. It means not having to worry about Korea or family difficulties. And it appeals to people of superior intellect. The inherent ridiculousness of the material acts as an emotional release to hard press adults. So it obviously worked because we're not in Korea any longer. It's interesting, though, that he was wrong. I think it's funny how somebody can be wrong on something and still be right. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, all the uses and the intent. He was completely wrong, but it's still skyrocketed. And he's like, oh, well, for kids, then he kind of cast a wide net on a patent license. It was for stress relief, hand therapy for people who needed it. It could be used to block out low frequency noises. Yeah. They still claim you can do all this stuff today, like it's good for therapy and for, like, gumming up holes and cleaning typewriter keys. Yeah. Which is a huge use these days. Well, computer keys. Oh, yeah. That's why I forgot about those tough keys. But yeah, so the guy was very much focused on it being for adults, but kids kind of took it for themselves, mainly because one of the great properties of Silly Putty is you can stretch it out, push it down on newsprint, and you have a mirror image of it. So that's it. That's what I used to do. Oh, you did say that. Yeah. Comics. Comics. And it's harder to do that these days because the print they use, like, you literally have to find, like, a newspaper in order to do that. Yeah, you can't do it on the internet or magazine. Yeah, you can't do it on a Kindle. You could do it on a magazine. No, I think you can. No, dude, it's got to pick up the ink. I know. Can't do it on megazen. I can tell you from reading Harper's by the pool that that stuff smears. And if it smears, I guarantee you can get in on Silly, buddy. Lucky for him, though, it was non toxic. So when kids started playing with it and inevitably putting it in their mouth, there were no issues with that. Right. You should not eat it. We should say that. Yeah. Don't eat anything that's not food or anything that has the name Silly in it or putty Silly String Silly, anything. So Hodgson made mention of its inherent ridiculousness of the material. Right. It has some really strange properties. He originally called it he described it as a solid liquid. Right. When you stretch it, it's like taffy. It stretches slowly, right. If you pull it, it just snaps apart. If you pull it quickly and with a lot of force. If you stick it to, like, say, bookcase, you come back a few days later, it will have very slowly moved down very slowly, which means it flows, which is weird, but we'll get to that in a minute. And when you roll it up into a ball, it bounces 25% higher than rubber. Yeah. They did a test. They rolled it into, like, a perfect little ball and they dropped it with no force from 3ft and it bounces back two and a half feet, supposedly. That is dynamite. Not bad. Yeah. And if you throw it down real hard, you got yourself a super ball in your hands. Right. So what is this stuff? What's the science of Silly Putty? Chuck? Well, before we get there, can I say about the egg, there are several varying accounts on why it was put in an egg. Oh, yeah. Some people say it was because his first batch went out before Easter, and then he just said, hey, it's actually a pretty good idea. Let's just keep it in the egg. Other people say he got the inspiration while eating eggs one morning. Eggs are good for you. And still other people say that he couldn't find another container in abundance, and he had, like, a line on these plastic eggs and was like, I'll just use this because this is pretty good way to put it in there. It's about an ounce, so let's just do that. Yeah. Either way, that became the signature that still used today. Silly Putty full of eggs. The egg full of silly, buddy. I feel silly. You could probably get Silly Putty full of egg, but you'd have to do it yourself at home. Yeah. All right, so back to what this stuff is. Yeah. Josh, it is a polymer, right? Yeah, it's a viscoelastic polymer. Basically, it's subject to the science of fluid chemistry. Right. And fluids are not necessarily liquids. Liquids are fluids, but not all fluids are liquids. Gas can be a fluid. Some semisolid substances can be fluid. Basically, a fluid is anything that yields to slight pressure and has no definite shape. So I'm fluid. Your gut is at least okay. That's the science. That's the part of chemistry and physics that we're looking at fluid chemistry. And the ruling principle of that, of fluid chemistry is viscosity. Where do we talk about this? I know we've talked about viscosity. We talked about viscosity in quicksand, sheer mayonnaise. Viscosity. Josh. Viscosity. It measures how much of fluid resist flow at a certain temperature. So viscosity is resistance to flow. If you're like me and you can never remember what's viscosity? What's viscous or what's high or low viscous. Viscosity is resistance of flow. Actually, the easiest way to remember it is water is low. That pretty much does it all. Just sounds easy. Like peanut butter would have a high viscosity, water would have a low viscosity. It's a pretty easy way to remember. It has a high resistance to flow or low resistance to flow, like honey or molasses. And viscosity is often measured in Pascal seconds. Not so much anymore. Now it's measured by Dine seconds per square centimeter, also called poise. And ten Poise equals 1 PA second. What that means, I couldn't wrap my mind around before then. Yeah. Every site that I saw took it for granted that I understood what that measures, but it measures viscosity or flow, as far as I understand. What I love is that someone somewhere said Pascal seconds just isn't cutting it right. The guy whose last name was Poise or Poiselle, I believe that's what happened. Came up with Poise. But yeah, so that's how viscosity is measured. And the more Pascal seconds, or the more Poise there are, the more higher the viscosity is. But the thing about viscous fluids, they all I should say most of them are subject to temperature. That's what affects their viscosity. If you have cold honey that you're trying to get out of the bottle, it doesn't flow very well. But if it's at room temperature. Or if it's warm, it's much less viscous. Right. It flows much more easily because it's subject just to temperature. That makes it a Newtonian fluid that's also a pet peeve when you go to a place and get pancakes or waffles or French toast and they have the heated syrup. I like that. You do? Yeah. I like my syrup thick. Okay, you like it thin and watery like that? Yeah, as long as it's warm. It's watery because it's low in viscosity and it's warm, but it's just temperature. It has nothing to do with force or pressure or anything like that. If a fluid is subject to not only temperature but also force, it's what's called a nonnewtonian fluid. Chuck, 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. 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And start taking charge of your future today. Are we at the email point? I believe we are Chuck. This was pretty neat. We got an email from a young listener just a few weeks ago that seemingly had nothing to do with this podcast, but Josh and his wisdom looks back and says, hey, this kid actually described this Newtonian fluid very well, and so let's just read his description. And it came before we decided to do Silly Putty. So it was all just serendipitous. It's just sitting there. So I'm just going to read the whole email, okay? And this marks the first time that a listener has actually contributed to the body of the show's information. And so he's a young listener, too? We'll find out. Dearest Josh, Chuck and Jerry. And he spelled Jerry's name correctly right out of the gate. Gets on the ball. Hi, guys. I wanted to say how much I love your podcast and your soothing voices, which get me through long road trips, I may be considered one of your younger quote listeners. Since I am eleven years young, I needed an excuse to email you, so I'll tell you a little bit about non Newtonian fluids. This kid, Sir Isaac Newton, said that fluids such as water flow continuously regardless of forces that act upon it. So if you put your hand under a faucet, the water still flows no matter what, making it a Newtonian fluid. But nonnewtonian fluids like ketchup, blood and yogurt behave differently based on the amount of stress added onto it. Try adding cornstarch to water. If you put your hand into it, it behaves like a liquid and allows your hand to go through it. But if you punch it with a lot of force, it behaves like a solid and stops your hand from entering. Cornstarch and water is called UBEC. Like the Dr. Seuss book. Bartholomew and the UBIQU. Sorry if that was long, boring, or not entertaining. I don't write articles as well as you guys. Anyway, I love the podcast and keep up the great work. I hope to keep listening to the podcast and that one day we will hear Jerry speak together. We will find a way. Your podcast confuse my friends with amazing knowledge and make me sound like the smartest kid in 6th grade. And for that I thank you. Your SYSK superfan Matthew from New York. PS. What kind of music do you guys like? I like Pink Floyd, hughie Lewis in the news and weird Al Yankovic. Awesome. So there's non Newtonian fluids for you. And dude, when you came to me and said, hey, are you cool with us reading this kid's thing to describe this, I went, yeah, because you know what that means. I don't have to do it. Yeah, he saved me. Yeah, he did. He saved both of us, buddy. Our favorite little ublik, right? For New York. Basically, the nonnewtonian fluid, as Matthew points out, is basically it acts like a solid and a liquid all at once. So he was right way back hodgson was way back in the day, correct, when he said it was a liquid solid or a solid liquid. Exactly. The reason why is because its main ingredient is polydimethylsylloxane. Right? And that means that's what gives Silly Putty elastic properties. So it changes depending on long flow time. Meaning, say, the force of gravity acting on it down a bookcase and temperatures. Right. So a long flow time, a high temperature, it behaves like a highly viscous fluid. It will just kind of slowly flow. Right, but at lower temperatures. And when it has short flow times, high pressure is applied really quickly. Yeah, it'll just break, which is why you can snap it. I wonder, I guess, if you heat it up, does it become liquid? If you heat it up, it becomes radioactive. It's like super happy fun ball. Okay. You remember that? No, you don't. The Saturday Night Live. Commercial for Super Happy fun ball. It's just like a regular ball, but there are all these warnings, like, do not stare directly at Super Happy Fun Ball. If Super Happy Fun Ball begins to smoke, run away. You got to look it up. I'll find it for you. Remember, we fought for that for the title of our audiobooks was, like, the Super Happy Fun Guide to Happiness or whatever. I think awesome was in there somewhere. And they said no. Yeah. Simplified. So that's it. That's the science of Silly Putty. But let's say, Chuck, you don't have much money. You're down on your luck in this economy. It happens. You still want some Silly Putty? What do you do? You make it. Dude, you can very easily make your own I don't know. This year you do. Okay. Because I don't have this. I know that there's probably some sort of Borax involved. There is borax involved. Or you can use cornstarch for this. I'm going to use Borax because I think we should support our friends at 20 Mule Team Borax. They've been doing it for 100 something years. And by the way, kids, even though this is a safe thing, you should always get your parents to help you when you're making stuff like this, because you might just make a big mess, and then they would be mad at us and take away your iPad. That's exactly right. We don't want that. I was listening to an old episode, and there was one about a kid who wrote in and said that we got his ipod taken away because his teacher, he asked her about alien hand syndrome. I remember that. And his teacher couldn't answer, so she took his ipod and said it was a utensil for cheating. And he said, for the record, I never used my iPad as a Utensil for cheating. Yeah, he basically smoked her, so she was embarrassed. So if you want to go ahead and gather these things, there's a white craft glue. Elmer's glue will work any Borax. 20 mule team. Borax works very well. Some warm water and food coloring, if you like. And we'll wait here while you gather this. Okay. So you want to take your white craft glue. You want one cup of it 16oz 8oz. Sorry. Right, okay. Which I think is the standard size of just a regular thing of Elmer's glue. You take your three quarters cup warm water, and you make a nice glue water mixture, and you're going to find that the glue dissolves pretty readily in the warm water. Chuck okay. Which means it has a very low viscosity. That's right. Then you take your Borax, just a half of a teaspoon. I've also seen up to a teaspoon, one of those two. All right. Slowly add it, and you're going to find very quickly that the viscosity increases dramatically. Okay. After a little while, when you're stirring it, you're eventually going to have to get it to the point where you just pull it out and you rub it together with your hands or whatever. Yeah. And when you add the borax, you also want to add the food coloring, too. Sure. If not, you'll just have white silly putty. But you roll it around in your hands. There's your silly putty. It's done. And what happened was the polymer chains, the molecular chains of water and the glue weren't sticking. They just slid right past each other, which kept them in the Newtonian fluid category. But the moment you added that borax, it came in and said, hey, let's all just band together. And it took these polymer chains and linked them so they could no longer slide past one another. They were turned into a net or a web. And that's what gives the putty its elastic like qualities. And these long polymer chains just hook up and hook up and hook up. How long does that stuff last? You know, I don't think humanity has been around long enough to know how long tilly putty will last. No, I mean homemade silly putty. Oh, no. Until your little brother eats it. Because I thought I saw something about putting it in the fridge. You can store it in a resealable bag or container to keep soft. That's it. And does it copy print the same way, I wonder, or just have the same elastic properties? I don't know. I don't know. Let's do it. Okay. That's what we're doing this weekend. Okay. I'll bring the aprons. Sweet. I'll bring the beer. So that's it. I would say that this podcast was a quintessential stuff. You should know podcast. It had an iconic American product. It had a lot of history. It had science, the chemistry behind it, and it had do it yourself at home recipes. The four tenants. Oh, and a kid. And a cute kid. Five pillars. Five pillars. We nailed this one. And a cocktail party. Six pillars. Awesome. That's it. All right. Go get you some silly putty. I know. They had, I think for their anniversary, they had gold silly putty for the first time ever. Believe. I remember that. And I think they now have things like glow in the dark and it gets all wacky. It used to just look like, I guess, pinkish, but sort of a fleshy pinkish. I remember that. Yeah, I think they still have that, too, though, the original. They've got to sure. You can't forget your roots like that so dads can go to the toy store and say, no, you're not getting glow in the dark, you're getting this. You're getting pink. That's what I had when I was a kid, and I loved it. You're going to love it, too. Let's get some comics wherever they sell those and press it against it online. All right? So if you want to learn more about silly Putty, type in silly Putty. It brings up a really cool article including a recipe and extended recipe. Even so, that's S-I-L-L-Y space. P-U-T-T-Y-N in the search bar. Howtofworks.com since I said search bar, that means it's time for listener mail. The second one in this podcast. Indeed, Josh. I'm going to call this smart stuff from a lady in Columbia, South Carolina. Sometimes we just get these listeners that just send us really good, intelligent emails, and I think those are always worth reading. So here we go. Hey, guys, just finished listening to the future of the Internet cast. Had a few thoughts about the so called dumbing down of culture. First, I'm highly skeptical of any claims to assert a sea change in intellectual ability. Smart and dumb are culturally and historically relative terms, and it's also true that people have been bemoaning the intellectual poverty caused by new technologies ever since writing was invented. Secondly, I'm not actually sure the utilization of deep memory is a good one in and of itself. Yes, something might be lost with those AHA moments, but I'm much more impressed by someone's ability to make novel and surprising connections, something that the Internet actually facilitates, than by the pedantic memorization of facts. Okay. Which I would argue isn't pedantic, but that's me. Third, and most personally, the ability of the Internet to store and offer up vast quantities of information doesn't necessarily wipe out sustained research or thought. I'm finishing up a dissertation that I couldn't have written without Google Books, and that would have taken me a lot longer without Google Scholar. Yeah, sometimes I find myself lost in infinitely expanding morass of tabs as I disappear down some research rabbit hole. This guy is obviously putting off working on his dissertation by writing this email. It's a lady. But that's always been the nature of scholarship. You never know where a question will take you. And the ability to quickly pursue various strands and to figure out which ones aren't going to take you anywhere productive is, I think, transformative for academia. All of this to say the Internet might diminish our ability to store quantities of facts, but mourning that ability privileges facts. And quantities of facts are not necessarily indicative of a culture's intelligence. Sustained reasoning and interpretation is, of course, something else entirely. And that is from Josephine R of Columbia, South Carolina, via Los Angeles. Nice. Wait. Cookie? I think currently in Columbia. Okay. From La. From La. Via Columbia. No, she's in La. From Columbia. You were right there, man. How funny is this? Follow up with smart email I got with dummy like dimwittery. dimwittery. Yeah. All right, well, that's it. Thank you, Josephine, for that. We appreciate it. That was actually kind of a big topic of dissent people writing in about that after that, so thanks. I think she summed it up pretty well. Agreed. Also, we should correct ourselves. Cheddar American cheese. No, English. After the English town of Cheddar. So sorry, about that. England, thanks for taking away one of our American cheeses. Yeah, I can't think of any more corrections right now, but we will figure them out. Yes, we will. If you want to send us a correction, we're always open to that. You can also send us any cute silly putty stories that you've got. Let us hear them. You can tweet to us S-Y-S kpodcast. You can go on to facebook. Comstuffyturnnow. That's our fan page. Or you can send us an old email at stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylight is longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing 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 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." | ||
42d685d0-53a3-11e8-bdec-e3191c97192b | How Safecracking Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-safecracking-works | Burglars have come up with a whole range of ways to get into a safe. There’s lock manipulation – methodically testing the dial to coax the combination from it – and if that fails you can always blow it open with nitroglycerin. Both count as safecracking. | Burglars have come up with a whole range of ways to get into a safe. There’s lock manipulation – methodically testing the dial to coax the combination from it – and if that fails you can always blow it open with nitroglycerin. Both count as safecracking. | Thu, 02 Jan 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=2, tm_isdst=0) | 55540162 | 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 there's guest producer Lowell. Lowell today. This is stuff you should know. That's right. I over enunciated Lowell's name because I didn't want anybody to perk up and be like Noel. I wanted the people who get perked up by Lowell to perk up. That's right. Which is to say the whole world. Think about it. I think Lowell has sat in once before. Yes. And did we record two episodes? I don't know. But Lowell even got a shout out at a live show. That's right. So we have released an episode with Lowell as far as everyone is concerned. Yeah. I don't know if we ever told Lowell, but yes, he got a shout out. Do we ever tell you that? Well, no, he's not answering. He knows the way he's doing. Look at my thumb here, and you'll notice the double bandaid. Right. I cut pretty deep into the tip of my thumb, slicing a bagel with a brand new sharp serrated knife. And it's amazing how much not having the use of a thumb takes out of your life. Yes. Man, I can't believe just because it really hurts so I'm not using it. But everything from unbuttoning my pants to buttoning your pants. But in my pants, I'm like, man. I usually just pop it off with my left thumb. But there's so many things that I'm not able to do or have struggled to do. And trust me, I'm not complaining generally about this as an affliction in life. Sure. But just to point out the deal with just one thumb, you really got to rethink some things. Yeah. It's crazy, because you hear those things, like, you can't really walk if you're missing your pinky toe or your big toe or something like that. It's like, Try me. That sounds like a wager to me. But when you injure yourself like that, you really find out just how true that kind of thing is. Yeah. And especially, of course, texting has been maddening to try. And one thumb text. Now is the time to start using Siri to text. Well, I don't use Siri, but whatever, the little microphone button when I voice to text or whatever. Sure, it works pretty good. Yeah, but you can do, like you can just say, Siri, send a text. I haven't tried this myself. But you just say the text, and then it sends a text text rather than a voice recording. Oh, no. When I say voice to text, I mean I say it out loud, and it makes it into text. And you're using something other than Siri. Well, I just hit the little microphone button. I got to try that because I know the microphone button that you're speaking of. Well, there's two. There's one that you're talking about where you can record a message. And then there's one when you go to type in the very bottom. Did you hear that? Sorry. Oh, this is so boring, everybody. I'm so sorry. I can't even give it a thumbs down. No, you can, but it's incomplete. So, Chuck, we're talking about safe cracking, obviously, today. Obviously. And there have been some really great safe cracking movies, movies that featured safe cracking. What's your favorite? Die Hard. As far as safe cracking goes? It has its own subplot, but that's not my favorite safe cracking movie. Favorite safe cracking movie is Bad Santa. Okay. So, you know, it's funny, when I was looking over this list, I got to Die Hard, and I was like, there's no safe cracking in Diehard. Is that right? Really? It's its own thing. And no, I think because it's a vault, it temporarily tripped me up because I was thinking about small safes but evolved as a large safe, and then I felt like a dumdum. No, don't. You can feel like a dumb dumb for cutting your own thumb off. Oh, man, it was bad. But other than that, you're good. I immediately ran and showed it to my daughter because she's been obsessed lately with I've been telling her stories of being injured as a child, and I never broke bones, but I cut myself and had stitches a bunch of times. I would advise you to knock on wood here. Yes, it's been a while, but she's constantly asking me, tell me about the times you got cut. And so finally I had a real world experience. I ran in there. Look, this is what it looks like. Look at all that blood. What did she do? Did she faint? No, she just kind of looked at it and was like, oh, okay, cool. She's going to be the same person to look up wounds later on on Google Images, but back very loud. The safe cracking movies, I think. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of Ocean's Eleven, but, boy, Sexy Beast is hard to beat. It's a great movie. I don't recall the safe cracking in it, though. Is that what's his name? What's his name? I want to call him Edgar Winners, obviously. That's not it. Great guitars. What is his name? Are you talking about Ben Kingsley, or are you talking about yes, Ben Kingsley, not Ray Winston? You might remember if I say this in slight spoiler, but I thought it was one of the more imaginative heist scenes ever filmed because it was underwater. Remember that? No, I don't. They flooded it as part of the I think it's been a while, but I think it's part of disabling security. So they did the whole thing underwater, which was really a twist I had not seen before. That's neat. I got to go back and see that movie then, because I remember it being good. It was great. Okay, so that's your best safe cracking movie maybe. I mean, I love that movie a lot. Okay, so we've got Sexy Beast and Bad Santa and Diehard with Diehard is an honorable mention. That's right. So in each of these movies, they're actually probably fairly true to life. If I remember correctly, in Die Hard, they had a devil of a time getting through that safe. They were using industrial drills to try to drill through the lock. In Bad Santa, he tried everything and finally managed to smack it open with the sledgehammer. At least the one scene that we were shown with him robbing the safe. And then obviously, I don't remember Sexy Beast, but normally in a movie when you watch somebody cracking a safe, they're like some Pink Pantheresque cat burglar who wears, like, black leather gloves and twists the dial a few times with maybe, like a stethoscope up to the safe, and then the safe comes open. There are actually a few people in the world who might be capable of something like that in that time. But if you expand that time to, say, an hour, the number of people in the world who would be capable of doing something like that expands greatly. But there's still just crumbs among humanity as far as the number of people who could actually crack a safe like that is concerned. When it comes to safe cracking, most often it is the Billy Bob Thornton brute strength method of hitting it with a sledgehammer. But that's kind of the range that safe cracking takes up from a master thief to a guy with a sledgehammer. Safes are broken into in a number of different ways. That's right. And Crumbs Amongst Humanity is also the best album by who? Crumbs amongst Humanity? Edgar Winter. Sure. Okay. I also was reminded when you were talking about the ways to crack in that great scene and out of Sight, when they finally find the safe, just raise their pistols up to shoot at it. Oh, really? I still have yet to see that movie. I just saw the limey. That's right. Great movie. It was great, man. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It was a very good movie. Yes. I had a feeling you'd like that one. You'd like out of sight, too. Okay, I'm going to watch that one next. I promise. I'm not going to throw any turkeys your way. Please don't. I know your taste. I know you won't. I don't think you ever have. Although I throw in a few your way. Nah, surely I have. I take pride in the fact that I have. Well, I mean, one man's turkey is another man's great, like the troll hunter and stuff like that. You've thrown my way. Troll hunter is great. Yeah. See, some people might say it wasn't, but I tend to skew your way. Who doesn't like Troll Hunter? You've heard people who don't trolls. It's graphic and disturbing. Well, this is what I propose, Charles, okay? We have been a bit like a little black and white cartoon donkey swatting at flies with his tail and starting this one. So I propose that we take an ad break already? Yes. Collect ourselves and come back to safe cracking with guns blazing. All right. Very controversial. Let's do it. All right. Are you ready? So I was taking a poop this morning. Yes, I'm ready. And the first thing I want to say is in this House of Works article, they talk about and it makes a lot of sense, the one fundamental weakness of a safe is the fact that if you lose a combination or something happens, you got to be able to get into it still. And therein lies the true weakness, is that you have to be able to get into it without knowing the combination. Right. Like it has to be accessible to anybody who needs to get into it, which in some of those antibodies can be burglars. So the fact that you can't just encase it in concrete and hide it away from humanity, even crumbs of humanity, means that it is a vulnerable place to put your stuff. Yeah, but I was wondering, surely they could make a truly uncrackable safe with the sales caveat of like, hey, man, you're buying this thing. If you lose the combination, you are screwed. But it is truly uncrackable. I don't know. I mean, it sounds like from this article there's some way to get through to any safe. It's just degrees of difficulty because the other kind of thing about this whole thing is like, any safe is inherently vulnerable because people can get to it. But the longer you can make it take to crack a safe, the longer the amount of time you can make it take, the less chance you have of actually being robbed. Like, there might be some guy sitting in your house trying to crack your safe, but if you have a really good safe, he's either going to give up or spend enough time there that he gets caught. And either way, your stuff should be protected. That seems to be what they're after when they make safes. Yeah. And you know what I did yesterday while I was researching this? Did you buy a safe? I bought a safe. It's something that I've been meaning to do for like two years and finally I just did it. And the kind of safe that we're talking about here that a lot of people keep in their homes, if it's not like some people have gun safes and things like that, but it's a fire safe. And that's basically like, let me put imported documents or irreplaceable things in here. They're generally pretty small and they keep your stuff safe from, like, flood and fire is a general idea. Then there are burglary safes which don't keep your stuff safe from fire. In fact, if there's a fire, we'll probably cook it, but that is a little harder to get into. Ultimately, I got the fire safe, but what they don't make and I think I don't know if it's a guy thing, but what I really wanted was one of those safes with like the little spinny wheel on the front of it. It looked like a super movie type safe. I think those are several price points beyond whatever safe you got. I think those are really expensive safes. They are. And it's not what I need. So I was just like, no, just get the one that's like, whatever. I think it's a couple of $100. So, yeah, you've got fire safes and you have burglary safes and they do two different things. And I was like, surely somebody has come up with a fire resistant, burglary resistant safe. And that apparently isn't the case. There are apparently still two different things, but there's also a certain degree to a fire resistance safe that makes it kind of a subsection of a fire resistance. They call a media safe where your digital documents are going to be protected in the amount of fire or in the event of a fire. Yeah, and I mentioned gunsafes. Those are the closest to what I'm describing is in cool looking like they're kind of the tall things that look like you would find in an old timey bank with the big wheel that spins and that's where you can put like rifles and stuff like that. Not like the little handgun safe you might keep under your bed or whatever, right. And then depending on the kind of safe you want, it'll be rated one way or another. If it's a fire safe, it will be rated for how many hours. It can withstand a certain amount of temperature, usually about the temperature of a house fire. And they also usually rate them so that they'll survive about a 20 to 30 foot drop, as if the floorboards that are holding the safe up on the third story of the house have burned through and the safe falls all the way to the foundation. Or if you throw it out the window, that's another one too. A burglar safe isn't going to protect your stuff in the fire. Like you said, it's going to cook it. But they're also rated for how difficult it is to penetrate. And there are a lot of things that manufacturers add to a burglar safe, which is ironclad, steel frame, steel bolted, usually multi bolted, like when you turn that lever, the handle to open the safe to unlock it. There's usually two, three, four, depending on how big the safe is, bolts that are holding it in place that you're releasing. And there's a lot of other kind of bells and whistles that they add to safes to protect them from burglary. Yeah, you know what I was thinking too, and we'll get to it later on, but one of the methods is to get a blow a hole in it where you can get a screwdriver in there and take off parts from the interior. I love that method. I was like, rivets. Why? I got screws in there. Right? It seems like a no brainer. It really does seem kind of surely there's people have figured this stuff out by now. You know, maybe we should, when this whole thing dries up, get into the safe design industry. I think we might clark a good job for us. Or safe cracking. Sure. Okay. So we'll talk about some of the methods that manufacturers use to foil burglars. But there's one thing that's common, too. Fire safes. Burglar safes. Just about any safe these days. And that's been a kind of a commonality for about the last 100 years. And that's the fact that basically all of them have combination locks. Those wheels that you used to spin, like on your high school locker to open it, that's a combination lock. And it's the same thing, although you probably have a much tougher, much more sophisticated one on a burglar safe than you did on your high school locker, it's basically the same component. And when you kind of get just even a rough grasp of how the combination lock works, you can get a better idea of how people break into those things, too. Yeah. Then there's a couple of different types categorized thrillingly as group one and group two. Group two is the kind you're most likely to find in someone's closet. That's usually a three number combination, but it can be one, two or three. I don't see how one number combination really helps you much. No, you try like, 99 things you need to get in there. Exactly. That's true. But the group one locks, you can have up to six numbers in the combination and they are tougher to get into. They're sturdier and they have more wheels. And you're going to hear us talk about wheels. In the wheel pack, each number on the combination is represented by a separate wheel. So if you have a six number lock, that means you have six wheels and that wheel back, right? Exactly. And so each of those wheels has a notch in it. And when you are doing the combination, left 13, right 57, left 92 I wonder if that combination right. It's not mine, believe me. When you get that combination right, what you've done is line up each of those wheels that are stacked behind one another so that their notches all line up, which allows this thing called the fence to fall into that notch. And when the fence is falling into that notch, it's no longer preventing the lever from moving. And when you can move the lever, you can open the bolt, which opens the safe. It sounds very easy and it's way easier if you see, like a diagram or cutaway or cross section of it. But it's really that. And I mean, they came up with combination locks about 100 years ago, and there have not been too many improvements on the general design of it. It was virtually a perfect locking design, like right when they came up with it. Yeah. And it is kind of cool to look at a breakdown of the inside of one of these, because if you're like me and you're fascinated by sort of simplistic mechanical designs, the combination lock is a great example of that. It really is. So just the number of wheels you have is the number of numbers in that combo, and then that's really it. That's your combination lock. So one of the first things if you're trying to get into are you ready to talk about breaking into these safes now? Yeah, I mean, with the caveat that this is I mean, I was about to say it's illegal. Technically, it's probably not illegal to crack a safe, but it is illegal to steal something. No, it's not illegal to steal something. Right. Absolutely wrong. It's a free for all. It's like the purge for your stuff. I have seen that there are laws where if you are caught entering a house with safe cracking tools oh, sure. You're automatically accused of it's the same charge as if you have successfully broken into and stolen contents from the safe tracking. It's a separate crime. There's breaking and entering, larceny, burglary, and there's also safe cracking. So in addition to burglary and larceny and breaking and entering, you'll get an additional safe cracking charge against you. And they used to be stiff. Apparently. There was a guy who got something like 57 or 70 years for safe cracking and appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was cruel and unusual for a safe cracking beef, which is, I think, the wording they use, but it's still like its own separate thing. People will get years in prison just for the safe cracking element of their charges. Yeah, I guess I think what I was saying was it's not inherently illegal. Like if you and I bought a safe and we wanted to try and crack it for fun, right. That's not illegal. It's illegal to crack into someone else's safe without their Tacit approval. Right. So then that actually brings up this whole other thing. Chuck some of the people, a lot of the people who break into safes are professionals. They're safe technicians, they're locksmiths. They're people who come to your aid when you have forgotten the combination. They're very frequently called in when somebody inherits an old safe that they don't have a combo for anymore. If a bank employee accidentally locks the vault and they can't open it because it's a time lock, but they need to get in there because it's still business hours. There's, like safe technicians who travel around the country or the world who lead very interesting lives because they crack saves. And one of the things that they try to do is to make it so that it's almost like they weren't even there. So the level of impact that they have on that safe, they try to keep to such a minimum that it just needs maybe minor repairs to bring it back to operating level again. Yeah. Can we go ahead? I mean, that's a nice little set up. I know I'm jumping ahead, but can we talk about Harry C. Miller for a minute? Yeah, it works. So we'll get to how he actually does this, but Harry Miller, he passed on in. He was an expert safecracker and basically the guy that came up with the kind of thing that you see in the movies when you crack a safe without using dynamite or plasma cutters or explosives or whatever. And he became the foremost genius and authority kind of worldwide for safe cracking, such that he taught the FBI, he taught law enforcement officials. He was hired privately during World War II. He opened up a gold bullion chest for Shanghai. There was a dictator. Fulgencio Battista. He hired him to open safes that have been captured from Fidel Castro. Wow. During the Roosevelt administration, he was called to the White House to open a safe after the assassination of the guy, the only person who knew the combination. Wow. So he had a really, like, you were saying, a really exciting life. And he was the guy, he was known as Miller, the safe man. And after a while, he was able to crack any safe within 20 minutes by manipulation, which, like we said, is using your hands and your ears and your eyeballs. Yeah. And he created eventually a manipulation proof lock, which was the first innovation in like, 75 to 100 years in lock technology. Is that right? Yeah. And then he ended up apparently in Kentucky. And I think you and I should totally go to this place at some point. There's a museum that houses more than 12,000 locks that he's collected dating back to the 1300. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. Like, safe technicians and locksmith guys, they just collect safes and old locks and stuff like that. Yeah. This guy's collection is neat. So his legacy, Chuck, was it's still alive and well? There's a guy named Jeff Satar who died, I think, last February, and he was the eight time winner of the Lockmasters International Safe Cracking Competition, which is basically the world championship of safe cracking. He worked for the government, too. There was, like, some ship in the Persian Gulf whose safe was locked and nobody could get in. They flew him out there. He was just like this master safe cracker. And I came across another guy that Joff Mana interviewed in the Atlantic. Joff? Named Joff? Yeah. I'm sure he goes by Jeff, but I always pronounce it Joff. Anyway. His name is Charlie Santori. He's pretty cool. He's got, like, kind of this criminal swagger to him. Like he wears fedoras and stuff like that while he's cracking into safe space. He's a safe cracker. He's on the up and up from what I understand out in La. But there's a lot of really interesting interviews with safecrackers out there that they'll all share information but you can tell and I figured this out in the research too, there's a lot of stuff they're not sharing. Yeah, it's really tough to go figure out how to crack a safe just without becoming part of the inner circle of safe crackers from what I can tell. Even with the information that's out there and there's a lot of information out there, there's not a lot of it that's complete from what I can tell. Well before we jump into lock manipulation, which is the one that Harry Miller had perfected, we'll go sort it with the dumb dumb methods. When you get your safe it's called a tryout combination or basically the default combination that it comes with. And a lot of people don't reset this even though they tell you you really need to reset your combination. Some people just don't do it and they are known combination. So the first thing a safe cracker will try is that default combination because you never know, you might have a 50 50 shot of that thing opening up without anything other than just twisting the old dial. Right, exactly. And since so many of them are like industry standards they'll try a few of them maybe spend a couple of minutes just giving it a shot and if it happens awesome. There's also something called daylocking which is if you have a safe and you dial in the combination of the safe you can turn the lever and open the safe. You can also close the safe and close the lever without changing the combo again so it's technically unlocked. You just have to open the lever to open the safe and apparently a lot of people just kind of leave their safes that way. And if you're a burglar step one even before you try some of those industry standards just try opening it combinations. Try out combinations. Yeah, try the lever. Just try that first. Yeah, because I guess you don't want to spin the thing at all because that would reset it, right? Exactly. The other thing you can do is just look at the safe and see if there's a sticky note on it with the safe combination because there are plenty of dumb dumbs who do that as well. I love that one too. Or scribbled on the wall nearby or something like that. Even if you went to the trouble of hiding it, it's probably in the same room as the safe and it's probably on some little scrap of paper that you tried to make look as innocent as possible. But to a cab burglar a safe cracker they're going to be able to say this is the combination of the safe. Thank you chump. Yeah, like it says, they just scrambled the word safe, and it says offset combination, right? They use piglets that'll trick them. So we're at the point where we're at lock manipulation. And this is the process of opening a safe without drilling it, without defacing it. This requires you to this is what you see in the movies, but it doesn't go down like you see in the movies because it takes a lot longer than it does in the movies. Even Harry Miller, the most genius safecracker of all time, apparently it took him like 20 minutes. In a movie, you don't have that kind of time. They do that thing in like 30, 40 seconds, right? They do. When you see like, someone in a movie using, like a stethoscope that's actually kind of accurate, that's not far off, at least, so that's not entirely made up or anything like that. But it takes way longer, like you're saying. And the reason why it takes way longer is because you're actually graphing these different attempts you're making over, say, all 100 numbers of the dial. You're doing them two to three numbers at a time, and you're going through this procedure back and forth to kind of find where possibly those slots and the wheels line up for each number. And because this takes so many attempts, just real quick, say there's like four wheels in a lock. That means that for every single one of those wheels, while you're trying to figure out the number over 100 numbers, you're doing them in increments of two, right? And for each one of those increments of two, you're graphing down where you think the lever is. And this takes a tremendous amount of time. After you graph it, you have to go back and look to see where these dips are, where it seems like the levers are, and then you start to narrow down where the number might be for each of those wheels. And then when you finally have it narrowed down, you have four different numbers that you're pretty sure the numbers of the combination. You still don't know what order they go in, right? So you have to try every single combination of those four numbers left and right until you finally hit the one that opens the safe. That is the standard. That's the one that Harry Miller came up with. That's the highest level of safe cracking. And even that takes a tremendous amount of time. To be able to do that in 20 minutes is mind boggling. Yeah, I mean, I think you hit it on the head and that what you're doing is narrowing it down. Because while you are listening for clicks, just like in the movies, it's not like you turn something and you hear a click and you're like, well, that's the number. Let me go back. Left click. Well, there's the other one, because anybody could do that. That's super easy. And I can't believe that the movie going public has been buying it. For this long. It's all agreed to. Yes. It's kind of like that thing where they don't have to reload the gun, right. Because no one wants to see them reload the gun. And I actually saw that there was a focus group done in the 80s or something at the heyday of Schwarzenegger and Stallone and the movie movie studios wanted to know if people wanted to see that. They were like, do you want realistic where they stop and reload or do you want them to just shoot a million bullets in a scene? And overwhelmingly, people respond with a million bullets in a scene. Please. What we want to see, I generally don't care, but whenever there's a wheel gun revolver, I still find myself counting and I try not to, and it doesn't tick me off. And I'm like, that's not possible. But I'm always 6780kay. All right, here we go. I thought you were talking about that wheel gun they had in Predator that Jesse Ventura had. Remember that one? Was it a Gatlin gun? Yes, that was amazing. No, I just mean a standard revolver. They're called wheel gun. I know what you're saying. I know. This Stallone movie is just completely unbelievable. Yeah, exactly. That was the only thing. But so it's the same thing. My point was I'm sorry, we got kind of far away from my point was that is a kind of boiled down, simplified version of what they're doing. But rather than just hearing the click safe you just have to find four clicks for this four number combination and then you're in the safe. You have to go over this hundreds of times, go over a graph and then go back and narrow it down X number of times depending on how many numbers there are in the combination. You have to try every combination of those numbers. So it's like a boiled down version of that. It's not entirely made up, but it's pretty far off from reality. Yeah, it's the movie version. I think what would be fun to see, and I'm surprised no one's done this yet is for someone to kind of what's a nice way to say take the piss. Take the piss. I believe to take the piss out of a scene like that and have a non safe cracker. Be like, here's your stethoscope. It'll take, like a minute. Right. And for the person to say, like, no, you got to graph this stuff out and you got to narrow it down like you've seen too many movies. That kind of thing. Right, exactly. Where's that pretty creepy. I don't know. I'm waiting for it, too. We need one of the Zucker brothers to make it for us. Oh, man, I miss that's locked manipulation that is the pinnacle of safe cracking. Because whether you're a safe technician or a cat burglar you have basically left no trace. It's like you just came in and figured out through sight and sound in precise detail what the combination of that safe was. And then you opened the safe, you didn't beat it up, you didn't do anything. Even the cops consider you a master criminal and one of basically a dying or dead breed. That is a very small number of people, not just alive today, but in the history of crime, who have done that. Most people have looked at a safe and like, let me just blow that open. Yeah. And I also thought lock manipulation, before I read what that meant, I thought that might have been like emotional manipulation. Like, you go to the lock and you're like, you probably can't even unlock yourself, can you? That kind of yeah. Oh, you're clad in that. Yeah. And then the lock going on publicly with a sad face. So safe manipulation is well, hold on. Should we take another break? Should we? I'm calling for the breaks today, baby. All right, let's do it. All right. Safe manipulation. We're back, everybody. Oh, yeah. Safe manipulation is sort of the gorilla method to the technician's method that we mentioned before. And there are many ways to manipulate a safe, and we'll get to some of the louder bang bang types in a minute. But drilling is the kind you see a lot in movies, and it's a really common way to get into a safe in a movie. You're generally working against a clock or something, but I don't think we pointed out a lot of times you will just try and steal the safe and bring it back to your villain's warehouse to do all the work. There your layer. Yeah. Where you've got all the time in the world to drill into that thing. But that's generally what you're doing. You're drilling and you've got a serious drill because they do make them very tough to get into. So you've either got, like a diamond bit or something to try and drill through what's usually a cobalt plate that is designed to keep you from drilling into it or at least slow it down. Yeah. Right. So if you use a regular metal drill bit for drilling into metal, that cobalt plate will just eat those things up. You'll just never get through them. But if you have diamond tip or tungsten carbide is another preferable tip when you're drilling through it, if you have enough time and enough drills, because apparently the drill bits will outlast the drills when you're using them like this, you will eventually punch through that cobalt plate. And drilling is a pretty I think drilling is actually the most widespread method of breaking into safes, whether you're a safe technician or a burglar, because it's precise, but at the same time, it doesn't require anywhere near the skills of lock manipulation. Yeah. And when you're drilling, there's a few different ways or places you can drill. A common one, and a pretty obvious one is to go right through that combination lock itself right through the face of the lock. That's a pretty easy way to do it, but that's where that cobalt plate is. So you can also avoid that thing and you can drill in above it and an angle and dodge the plate. I guess you've done your research. If you're a safe cracker, you know how big that plate is. Probably, yeah. So you go in at an angle from the top, let's say, or I guess the bottom. And then you put in a fiber optic camera called a boroscope. And you can just get these at a hardware store, like any kind of specialty equipment. Sometimes they'll use like medical devices like that. They stick in your bottom. They'll use those too. Okay. I've just seen it out there. There's a guy who's actually a master safe cracker who has what are called penetration parties, unfortunately named penetration parties. His name is Dave McCormick, and I believe he is the founder, or at least the guy who's running the show at the International Safe Cracker Support Forum. And at least one of these he creates like a newsletter for the industry, like for real. And in the bottom he sells two scope kits with light source and cases for $250. And they're medical grade arthroscopes. So, I mean, yes, at least some pros used the medical stuff. I'm sure they haven't been in anyone's butt, although if they have been, I'll bet you can get them for a deep discount. So he holds penetration parties and has a drill bit newsletter called Just the Tip. Chuck, you have been on fire, my man, in Q four. All right, so what you're doing, though, when you insert that camera is once you have drilled in from above it at an angle you put in the camera, and then you can just see the whole mechanism from inside there and just line everything up. Yeah. Rather than using a stethoscope in your sight and sound, you're just watching to see where the levers are and twisting the thing until they line up and there's your safe open. That was news to me. I thought when you drilled into a safe, your point was to destroy the locking mechanism. I didn't realize you can also drill into the safe. Sometimes they'll use multiple holes, depending on how easy it is to get through. One for the arthriscope and one for I didn't realize it was going to turn to sexual. One for the bore scope and then one for like a punching rod. Good Lord. And the punching rod, you can manipulate the inside of the lock with the punching rod to move the stuff around. That's right. While you're watching Good Divorce, maybe your partner is watching, who knows? Oh, man. What is happening? I don't know, but the walls are melting all of a sudden. So there's also another backup system, because here's the deal. Every time you find a workaround to get into a safe, there's some manufacturer that's trying to destroy that workaround. And there's something called a relocker, and that is tripped when your drill bit breaks through some sort of indicator, like a piece of plastic or glass that you drill through. And once that thing is breached, it's going to trigger an auxiliary locking device. And apparently this completely locks you out to the point where you have to go to a locksmith or a safe technician. Yes. And the reason why is because this locking device is unrelated to the combination lock. Right. It's just like basically a booby trap. And then once it's tripped, you can't unlock it. You have to go in and drill and then manipulate the thing to open it back up. So it's kind of like a self destruct mechanism for the safe. And because it's not related to the combination lock, it's a separate, independent lock. You can twist the combination all day long and know the combination. It's not going to do anything. It's locked separately, and apparently not just cat burglars. And homeowners accidentally tripped this thing. It's pretty frequently tripped by safe technicians, too, who live in dread. I read on one safe technicians for them that at the very least, when you break the glass and trip the relocker, you can relax because, you know, the worst case scenario has now happened, and then you have to dig your way out of it. Wow. Another drilling method is if you go in on the backside, you can drill a couple of holes. And this is the one we mentioned earlier where I thought rivets might come in handy. You put in the boroughscope, and then you have a really long screwdriver and you just unscrew that cobalt plate. But again, I don't know why they would ever use a simple screw. So then you've got cobalt plates, relockers. I also saw, Chuck, that there was a trend early in the last century where they would add either manufacturers would put them on, or you could buy them and put them on, like aftermarket parts. A little like steel plate thing that you riveted onto the safe. And then inside the steel plate were extremely fragile glass vials that contained phosgene gas or incredibly potent tear gas. So that if you attacked a safe using a drill or a hammer or tried to drop it or something like that, you'd break these vials of gas and would basically poison yourself, and you would just run away from the safe as fast as possible. That's a great idea. It is a great idea. Or so it was for old timey days before they had laws, right. But as people kind of got wise to the dangerousness of this whole thing, they started removing them. But every once in a while, you'll still find an old safe. And there is a legend, an urban legend among locksmiths and safe technicians, that over the decades, this gas turns into nitroglyceride. And so it'll actually blow up if you break these vials. So more than one bomb squad has been called out when, like a locksmith came upon one of these things and believed the Serbian legend that he'd heard all these years. Interesting. This is probably nitroglycerin. Really? It's just phosgene gas, which is not good, but it certainly wasn't explosive like nitroglycerin, and it certainly hasn't spontaneously turned into it. Very interesting. I thought so, too. I just thought about the rivet thing again. I wonder if that cobalt is so I wonder if it's not rivetible. You seem like a frog right now. You know what I mean, though? Maybe you can't rive it through that thing. I mean, if you can drill through it with diamond tip drills, you could rivet it. Especially if you're the manufacturer. You totally could. They're just being lazy. Let's talk about some of the other things you see in movies sometimes, which are the use of torches. Sometimes you will see something like an oxy acetylene torch, and those daddies can go up to 4500 degrees. Useless. Useless. You think? Yeah, from what I saw, like a good burglar safe would resist that. Okay, so those are the old days. Yes. Or they were just never used. It might be like a movie kind of thing, because what I saw, it takes something like a thermal lance, which gets up to 8000 degrees Fahrenheit. Those are pretty cool. They are very cool. Or get this, a plasma cutter, which uses a current of electricity to convert highly compressed gas into plasma, which plasma is the fourth state of energy and it gets apparently up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Wow. And we'll just cut right through a safe, if you know what you're doing. But they're really hard to use, they're really dangerous, and they require extensive training. Like if you're a plasma cutter guy, you're probably getting more than just the standard share of the loot for a safe job. Well, I feel like a fool now over here with my oxy acetylene torch. You've been going at it for a while. You're just like, just go make a crim brulee, honey. Right. Make a smoky gin and tonic. Yeah, exactly. So these plasma cutters and thermic lances, sometimes you're trying to cut the lockout and sometimes you're just cutting a hole in there so you can reach in and get whatever you're trying to get right. Which, I mean, that makes sense, but one of the things you have to be careful with is not accidentally burning all of the cash inside or something like that. It's delicate work that seems like you want to maybe cut the hinges off or something like that is a good way to do it. Yeah. Or if you know what you're going for, like if you know there are just diamonds, if there's ice in that thing, you might be safe, go for it. But also, I mean, if you know enough that you know the placement of the stuff in there, maybe you could cut the top off of the safe and know that there's nothing high up in it or cut the back off because there's nothing in the back. It's all stuffed toward the front. Who knows? It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility because one of the hallmarks of being a safe cracker is research. Not just researching the safe you're working on to know what you're dealing with, what safeguards and securities you're having to get around, but also your mark, the person you're robbing. You want to have done some sort of research on them so you can at the very least, make educated guesses about what kind of behavior they're going to engage in and putting stuff in their safe, where they would put it, how they would put it in there, what they would put in there, that kind of stuff. Maybe what the combination is, if they've actually changed the combination to something personal. Sure. Is it diamonds? Is it bare bonds? Is it cougar ants? Is it other things in movies that I've heard? Is it simolian? You mentioned nitroglycerin earlier, and this is another thing that you can do. It's called a jamshot or nitroglycerin or it's also called grease. If you're in the industry, and I didn't fully understand how this worked, other than the fact that what you're essentially doing is blasting this thing. Yeah. You're just making, like a little funnel out of soap that you're adhering to where the door and the safe come together, putting some nitroglycerin in it, putting a blasting cap in there and touching the wires together while you're very far away. You set off the blasting cap, which sets off the nitroglycerin, which blows the door off of the safe, which, again, you want to make sure that there's just diamonds in there, something that can withstand this blast. Right. Because you don't want to blow up the loot. That's not a good move for a burglar. Or a safe technician is being called out to open a safe. If you blow the door off of your client safe and blow up everything inside, you're probably not going to get paid that day. Yeah. I'm trying to picture a thief taking the time to break into what will be in my safe and finding my ziploc bag of concert ticket stubs. Right. I'm really disappointed. I would suggest check just to leave it a day locked. Yeah. Yeah. Because, I mean, at the very least, you'll have your safe still. They'll be like, this is useless, worthless stuff. And you'll say, not to me, cat burglar. Now please leave my house. Yeah. I'm not even sure what we are going to do. I have a feeling it's going to be one of those things where everyone's like, you need a fire safe and we're going to get it in our house and open it up. And then Emily and I are going to look at each other and say, well, what do we put in there? Well, you put things like, I don't know, like tax documents, maybe, or just the most eye bleedingly boring stuff you can think of. That's what a fire safe is for. It's just for basically like, document storage. I know, but I can't think of any document that's not electronic these days. Well, you can put those things on a thumb drive and then put the thumb drive in the fire safe, too. Yeah. And I guess maybe especially since it's kind of mundane, but if you treasure memories and you have a ton of digital files, putting them on multiple thumb drives and a safe isn't a bad idea. Yeah. Or if you have an extensive collection of precious memories figurines you want to keep those safe, put them in your fire safe are your little Holly hobbies. Exactly. Most locks in the safe that I got is an electronic safe. So it has an electronic lock which allows for far greater number of groupings and combinations. You can do things. Some of them you can connect to an app to open it. Some of them have, like, these electronic front door locks. You can have different combinations for different people. You can lock people out. So a lot more variety and an electronic lock safe. Right. So this is represented, this kind of new leap forward among safe cracking because they're like, okay, we'll learn to deal with this. I love this. If you're a really good cat burglar, you may break into the house the night or a couple of days before you plan to break in and rob the safe and put ultraviolet ink on stuff that you know the person will touch. And then you go back when you go to rob the house and use a blacklight and shine it on the computer keypad of the electronic lock and you can see what numbers have been pushed. And in doing so, you can just try the combination of, say, like those four, six, eight numbers and pop the safe ride open. I love that one. That's just like 1980s computer hacker movie stuff. Yeah, I feel like I've seen that in, like a Mission Impossible or something. Surely we have, where you shine a blacklight and you see, like, the thumb print or the fingerprint or whatever on the combination. There's been done. There's no way we haven't. But the idea that someone does that in real life is just I tend not to respect criminals, but hats off to that one. That's some real sticktuitiveness. Is there anything else here? Yeah, there was this one at the very end. They say, don't try this at home. By the way, this article is written on how stuff works, like you said. But it was written by a guy named Robert Valdez who made maybe the most valiant effort I've seen at explaining in words how to manipulate locks. They did a really good job it's just really hard to understand just reading it. But I would also shout out another site that went even deeper, like David Reese does. And they, like, really explain how to manipulate safes. It's called opening safes by manipulation by gailjohnson on locksmithledgercom. It's as detailed as I've seen, for sure. So shouts out to them. But at the end of this house, the Forks article, this is all very much illegal. Don't do this. Especially for crime. That's correct. Especially for crime. Especially for crime, everybody. Well, that's it for safe cracking. I'm glad we did this one. Chuck, how about you? Yeah, me too. Fun movie stuff. Lots of body humor. Yeah, it did get body. And since we said it did get bought, everybody, that means it's time for listener. Ma'am. Let me see here. This is some advice for Julia. Hey, guys. Been a listener since summer of 2018. Oh, that summer of love. That's right. Very nice. About one year after I graduated college. Go banana slugs. So I think that's UC Santa Cruz, right? I think so. I began to flail around aimlessly, searching for meaning and purpose. One thing I didn't have to flail for was love of learning. Especially once I discovered your show. I really appreciate the work you do and giving us listeners hundreds, thousands question mark of episodes to listen to. Remember? 1000. Okay. Yeah. I don't know if you can call that thousands, though. Didn't it need to be at least 2000? I don't know. Yeah, probably. So we'll just say scores. I wanted to ask a question, since you all seem like open minded, knowledgeable people. What were some of the things you did after college? High school? Let's go ahead and answer each one of these. Okay, well, I'll take this one. I've talked about it before, but I worked in the film industry for a while and then worked in marketing for a little while. And then eventually it was a writer like you for how stuff works. yes.com. So this is some of the things I did. That was the dream job, getting hired like that, you know, like, we both want to be writers. And it was like, hey, you're professional writers now. Try hold on real quick. Didn't you turn in a movie script? I did. As your writing sample. That's all I had. That is boss. And he got the job. Yeah. Luckily, our boss is a screenwriter himself. So he was like, I'll take this. Yes. Nice. He turned it into his home. Yeah, he stole it. How did you come to find yourselves where you are now? Well, I think we just covered that. We got a job writing for the website and our boss said, hey, why don't you try this podcasting thing? Yeah. And, boy, was that a great day. In retrospect, it really was. Because we didn't know what we were doing. But because no one knew what we were doing, we were able to kind of fly under the radar and just try it out, try new things. There weren't a lot of expectations or anything like that, and next thing you know, people started listening to it. So, yeah, it was cool. Just kind of being able to do it on our own terms all these years. Agreed. Next question. Did you ever feel like you would not find your place and your niche? Speaking for myself, I very much felt that way, absolutely. Although the riding gig was cool, but it definitely wasn't like, all right, well, this is it for me forever, right? And I think anybody who has ever been alive has gone through that point. Whether you drop out of school or whether you graduate with a PhD, it really doesn't matter. There's like, some point in your life where you have a crisis of confidence either, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? Or have I been going down the wrong path this whole time and now I need to figure something else out. Everybody has that crisis, usually multiple times throughout their life. So, yeah, of course we felt that way. Everybody feels that way. And if you do feel that way, don't get discouraged. You come out of that little woods that you have to go through. Well, that kind of satisfies the last question from Julia. Is there any advice for my quarterlife crisis? I think that advice is great. And also, if you are at your quarterlife crisis, you've got a long way to go. So my advice is just don't stress too much now. Try some different things. You've got time and you don't really feel that life clock ticking. We started until I was in my 40s, it's true, but I remember being worried in the everything. You always have those times. Yeah, but don't let it consume you. Try some stuff out. You don't have to be making forever decisions right now. And you might find yourself backing into an experience because you have tried out different things. Yeah. And even if you do have to make a forever decision, just know that very few decisions are irrevocable. And even if it is irrevocable, if you remember the mantra to be kind, be kind. Those are the three most important things in life, says Bertrand Russell, then you're probably not going to make a forever decision that's irrevocable and horrible at the same time. You know what I mean? That's great advice. Thanks, man. Thanks. So she concludes with saying, thanks for your work on stuff you should know. Movie crush in the end of the world. My favorite three podcasts. I can't wait to see you at SF sketchfest. That's from Julia. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Julia. Good luck with your quarterlife crisis. It will pass. Don't worry about that. And if you're like Julia and you want to get in touch with us for advice or just to say hi or whatever, you can go on to STUFFYou Know.com and check out our social links there and you can send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite 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. 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What happened to the lost colony at Roanoke? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-happened-to-the-lost-colony-at-roanoke | Before Jamestown became the first successful English colony in the New World, an entire group of settlers vanished. For the last 430 years, Roanoke has been an American mystery. Learn the theories of what became of the lost colonists in this episode. | Before Jamestown became the first successful English colony in the New World, an entire group of settlers vanished. For the last 430 years, Roanoke has been an American mystery. Learn the theories of what became of the lost colonists in this episode. | Tue, 04 Jun 2013 17:26:40 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=17, tm_min=26, tm_sec=40, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=155, tm_isdst=0) | 32069268 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke's. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And we know where he is right now. He's just sitting there crowatoin. That's the best way to say that word. It does. It sounds like we'll get to it. Obviously, this sounds like a very spooky, ominous thing to carve on a tree. Yeah. Especially because it was carved on a tree by missing people. Vanished people like, what? But historians are like, yeah, that's exactly how you say it. I can't wait for this one. Well, you're right here. You don't have to wait. This experience no, I was saying the historians are saying that. Okay. So, Chuck yes. Have you ever been to Roanoke, Virginia? I've been through there. Yeah. And like a dummy, I thought that might have been where the settlement was. Well, it's not just you, man. I wrote this article. What happened to the last colony at Roanoke? And I forgot that it wasn't Roanoke, Virginia. What we're talking about is Roanoke, North Carolina, which is an island that's part of the Outer Banks. Yeah. Very lovely. And Virginia was very heavily settled, so it's not like there wasn't Rowan Oak, Utah. Right. So I'm giving ourselves a break for getting that confused. I bet a lot of people think it might be Virginia. Well, plus, also, the Roanoke Colony was the first English settlement in the New World, and Roanoke, Virginia, is not too far away from it. They moved on to Jamestown to found that that was the first successful English colony. Right. It's all impressed. Yeah. So you can understand why you or anybody else, including me, would think we're talking about Roanoke, Virginia. Sure, but it's not what we're talking about. We're talking about Roanoke, North Carolina. And it was settled in three waves, and all three of them were at the behest of one guy named Sir Walter Raleigh. Sir Walter Raleigh had something that a lot of other people wanted. He was born a commoner Kutzpah. That pride. Yeah, he was damn proud. I understand a biography sites him as to his decline and eventual beheading. Yes, but he was a big favorite of Queen Elizabeth. I was a member of her court, and she gave him the patent to any English settlement in the New World. Like, he had it wide open. As long as there weren't other Christians settled on a piece of land, he could have a crack at it and he would own it. Well, she was very concerned about the native peoples, though, right? No. Okay. Sorry. I was that confused. No, it was specifically other Christians. So basically, she's saying, like, the Spaniards are already there in Florida. Steer clear of those guys. The French, they're into, like, beaver pelt, so they're probably going to be a little north. Maybe you should go north Carolina. Could try that. Raleigh did. He didn't go. He went later on, but he sent a first wave, an expedition in early 1080 something. Yes. I don't have the date there for this one, but the first 1585, that was the first real attempt at a settlement. The first one is just like an expedition just to go check out the place. Pre 5085. Right. That was the first attempt to actually settle the island of Ronald. Yeah. And it was just dudes on this trip that wasn't like, families and kids and things like that. It was just some dudes. Adventurous guys, a lot of them soldiers. Among them was a guy named John White, who was an artist who ended up making a lot of the first maps of the new world. English maps were drawn by John White, and he was really good at it. Yeah. And I think he was promised 500 acres in the end. Like, hey, if you go set this thing up and it takes, you can pick out 500 choice acres for yourself. Yeah. So he's like a lot of land. It's a good deal. Let's go. Yeah. John White was a pretty good guy, from what I understand. The problem was he wasn't leading that 1585 expedition. He was just a member of it. Yeah. The guy who was leading it was a dude named Ralph Lane. And Ralph Lane was a really brutal initially, the Indians, the local tribes, the Sakura tribe. Right. Yeah. They were friendly to the first expeditionary group. The first planters is what they're called. Yeah. To their detriment, of course. Yeah. So Ralphwhite routinely holds their leaders hostage in exchange for food, kills indiscriminately. Yeah. Even though they're relying on these very people to teach them the ways and how to grow these new crops and things that they had no idea about how to survive there, they depended on them and killed them at the same time. Right. Well, eventually, after a while, the Sakodan tribe said, you know, what? The hell with you, buddy. Yeah. Good luck. And after that, I think it was 100 people right. For the 1585 expedition? Yes. 100 men. Yeah. After ten months, they were like, we need food and we're going to die, so let's just go back to England. Yeah. I should have waited. Yeah. Because I think, like, two weeks later, a supply ship came. Yes. They've been okay. Yeah. They would have been leased, but right. At the same time, they were basically at war with the surrounding, like, all the surrounding tribes. Not all of them are friendly off the bat, but by the end of the ten months, all of them hated this group of 100 Englishmen. Yeah. So they leave, they go back, and Raleigh is like, it was a pretty good attempt, but I think we can do better. Maybe we need some women, some children. And John White. I like the cut of your jib. So you leave this one. Yeah, let's just make a go of it as a real settlement, not just adventuring, dudes, but let's really try and settle this place as a colony of families and people. Yes. So the 1587 Expedition is what it's called, was, I think, 118 people, including John White, led by John White, who was now the governor. And they came back, and they were actually not supposed to stay at Roanoke. It was obvious to everybody, this is a bad place to be. The Indians hated everybody. Yeah. Well, I guess it's sort of obvious. So it wasn't a safe place to be. And I think they originally intended to move a little further up into the Chesapeake, but they ended up in Roan Oak Island, I guess to check on some soldiers. Yeah. And we'll get to the little mystery there's a little mystery there that we'll get to later right. On why they stayed there. Right. We should say that there are soldiers on Roanoke because that supply ship that came two weeks later left 15 men to keep an English presence in the New World. Yeah. And I think all they found was the bones of one body. Right. Yeah. One single body. And the other 14 were missing. Missing and gone. But that was not the lost colony of Roanoke. Oh, no. That was just some soldiers. No. The 117, I think you said 118, because White was heard from again. So I think it was 118, at least. Okay. Give or take. Let's say they settle there. They build their little two story cottages, they meet some friendlies. Yeah. They actually turn the tide and made the Sekodan tribe nice again. Yeah. They met some not so friendly. And that tended to just sort of leave them alone, though, at least at first. Yeah. And they treated also with the Pohetin, who were on an island called Crowton. Yeah. Which is now Hatteras. Right. Crowton. Like we said, we'll figure out here in a second. Yeah. So they were doing pretty well, but they were in for hard times. Right off the bat. They arrived in July, which is past the planning season, so they had no crops right off the bat. Yes. Which is later than they were supposed to arrive, which is part of the mystery that is yet to be revealed. Yes. Again, they were initially confronted with hostile Indians. They managed to turn the tide. But there were some delightful things that happened. For example, John White's granddaughter, Virginia Dare became the first English child born in the New World. Yeah. Delightful for a moment. Tragic in the end. Yeah. But even though they did make friends with the Paul Hattons, they were essentially dependent on England still. Which is important, because without that, John White might have stayed. If they would have been fully self sufficient at that point, he might have stuck around. And although he may have met the same mysterious fate as the other lost folks yeah. And I think that the mystery might not have been quite as mysterious without john White to report it initially. Yeah, maybe. So he leads to go back to England the same year that the 1587 colony was established. And they say that to get provisions, right? Yeah. They say that he was delayed in getting back because the English and the Spanish went to war. Yeah. Dude, it took him three years. Three years. He finally got back in 1590. Like, I don't know what he expected. Did he expect them to be thriving? And I guess that's what he was hoping for. I'm sure he was hoping for it, but I'll bet at the very least, he was expecting for some evidence of what became of them or something. When he landed in 1590, back on Roanoke, he was confronted with a mystery that's lasted for 400 something years. 423 years. Yes. What he arrived back to was no people, no bones, no bodies, no clothing, no supplies, no buildings. Yeah. Nothing except for what? The remnants of a wall or a fort. A fort that hadn't been there when he left. So they had assembled a fort and basically a fort, meaning just some pikes surrounding the settlement. The problem was the settlement was gone. Everything. There weren't burned out shelves. No. There weren't tumbled down buildings. He said his quote was that they've been taken down, they disassembled the buildings. Yeah. It wasn't like any signs of the war had gone on. There was a massacre that had taken place, and they burned their huts and assaulted the people and killed them and left their bones. It's like they just left. Right. So there was no evidence of murder. There was no evidence of a hasty exit. There was no evidence that they were following fish around the country. Right. Had they fell in Vermont, maybe? No patchouli. Right. And there was no sign of distress. Apparently, they had an agreed upon symbol. If John White came back and they were under duress or had been under duress, they were supposed to carve a Maltese cross somewhere. Right. Well, they didn't carve a Maltese cross. They carved Crow Towing. So they had an opportunity to carve something, and they didn't carve the distress signal. They carved Crowetone. Yeah. Which, to me and if I was John White, I would think the same thing. That means, hey, no distress. I guess they went to Crow atone where the Indians that we're friendly with lived. Yeah, it makes good sense. And I think it was Crowatone in one tree and then Cr o in a post on the fort. Just Crow. Yeah. But it didn't say, like, Crow. No, nothing like that. Okay. No, it was more just like we already carved it once. Yeah. Or maybe those that they had a carving race, maybe. So goodie. Johnson carved it quickly. Yeah. Virginia Dare is terrible at carving since she was three. Right. Well, you should never put a three year old up against an adult good wife. Yeah. Or never give a three year old a knife. Yeah. I think that's the key. So John White is like, okay, well, this is really weird. Everybody's vanished. He's probably sad. Yeah. And he goes, okay, I'm going back to England. History is not necessarily treated John White well. Historians, I should say. Oh, yeah. He's been described at turns as paranoid, which we'll get into. Yeah. And also as a little flaky. At the very least. My interpretation of John White is that he didn't stand up to people. Like, maybe he should have. So the sailors that he's with that he sailed back with provisions to Roanoke with said, hey, man, I think a storm is coming. Let's just get out of here. So he never went to Croatoan to find out what happened to the colonists? Yeah. For 1521 years, there were no expeditions to find out what happened. It wasn't until Jamestown in 16 seven that they finally started looking and then making a habit of when they came across native tribes saying, hey, see a bunch of white people. Yeah. Right around here. Yeah. And actually, there have been some proposed expeditions that people had carried out, but they never actually went to search for them. They just use it as an excuse for piracy. Right. But yeah, once Jamestown settled, one of the main things they did was question local Indians, and they actually got some pretty intriguing answers. Yeah. Well, they also found some pretty intriguing things, like Indians with gray eyes and a boy with blonde hair, but in Native American clothing. Yes. They're like, hey, kid, come over here. And the kid takes off. Yeah. They didn't get a chance to question them. Right, right. And these are apparently, like, eyewitness reports from reliable Jamestown planners. Yeah. And then from the local tribes, they found that there were supposedly people who lived in two storey stone structures with that struven. Yeah. Very English. Totally unique to the English. They were supposedly people who spoke English and read the Bible, who lived further down the coast, but they never found any of them. Yeah. And part of the problem, too, that we should point out is that they aren't exactly sure, because of poor record keeping, exactly where the settlement was to begin with. Right. So they didn't know where to look. White, I think, had said it was further north on the island where the original dudes were adventuring, and I think a Spanish dude had said, no, it's more towards the center of the island. And they found evidence of, like, cannons and things there. So they think it might have been there. Yeah. And they think that possibly the settlement is now underwater. There's been massive erosion on the island since the 16th century. It's only 12 miles long, though. But of course, back then, that's a bigger search area than they were capable of. Yeah. Well, they also think, though, that in the last 400 years, as much as a quarter mile of the coast of the coast is eroded inland, and it's very possible to settlements underwater. Now, interesting. I saw a thing I watched a little YouTube thing on this. It was kind of a silly show, but there was one cool part where this tree experts said that you can drill into the core of a tree and study how much rainfall, historically that area has gotten. And they found this tree that was, like, 500 years old, drilled into the core and found that the biggest drought of the past 800 years occurred then. Right. They walked right into it. So it was just not a good situation. Of course, they didn't prove anything, but it was a nice little footnote. Yeah. What was silly about it? Did he break into dance and song here? No, the guy on the show, he's, like, one of these history detectives, and he rented the little paragliders that have a fan attached to your back. He's like, I wanted to get an aerial view. So, dude, you just wanted to ride around in that thing like you got absolutely nothing from them. I wanted to get an aerial view. Yeah. And afterward, we learned nothing about it. He was just like, Boy, that's a sure good way to see the island. Anyway. Yeah, it was silly, and it was not a Discovery network, so I can say that chuck. Yes, Chuck. The colonists are lost. The colony is lost. No one has any idea where it is. And they've even found, like, parts of the 1585 colony. Yeah, they found a guy's ring, right? Yeah. They found the first scientific laboratory ever created in the New World by Thomas Harriet. So they found, like, other stuff. They just can't find the 1587 one, which is weird. But there are a lot of theories abounding for what happened to the colonists, and I think it's awesome that there are none that fully explain what happened. I love historical mystery. I think it's cool. I like it when they're solved, and I like it when they're unsolved. Yeah. This one's, like, as American as it gets. This is an American mystery. That's right. One clue that White wrote down a bunch of stuff in a letter, obviously, when he went to check things out. And one thing he said that is pretty key was that they moved 50 miles into the main, which everyone took to me, into the main part of North Carolina, inland into the forest. Right. But now they think maybe he meant to the main toward Chesapeake. Yes. Or if you look at the distance between Crowatoan and Roanoke is 50 miles. Yeah. So they could have just assimilated with a friendly tribe and mixed their races and eventually became an altogether new race of sorts. Yeah. And there's actually a tribe that counts part of its origin story as the Roanoke settlers. Yeah. The Lumbi Tribe of Robinson County, North Carolina. See, this sounds really compelling to me. It does. If you ask the average Lumbie, depending on who you ask, they're going to get like, yes, of course. No, that's not the case. Oh, really? Yeah, it just depends the tribes divided as to whether or not they assimilated the Roanoke colonists or not. But there's some pretty tantalizing evidence. For example, apparently as early as 1719, some members of the Lumbi tribe had surnames that were the same as some of the lost colonists, like Hyatt. Dial Taylor. I think if a Native American walks to you and says, hey, Jim Taylor, nice to meet you, in 1719, the bermudograph like, they could read, you know, that stuff turns brown in the winter. Not a fan. Yeah. They spoke English and could read and write, I think, right? Yeah. They were familiar with the Bible. Yeah. So come on. Well, here's the thing. Whether or not that is, if that happened in 1719 yeah, that's pretty compelling evidence, but there was still 100 years of exposure that could have happened little by little. You could still account for it. If you ask me, I think the Lumbie connection is pretty interesting, at the very least. And maybe some of them went that way. It's possible. Do they have to stay together? No, not necessarily. But with the tribe, it's kind of like, well, these are our origins, or they're not our origins. That's true, because they're a distinct group. I get that. As I understand it, some folks say that they were killed by the Spanish. They definitely knew that they were there because one of the dudes on the Roanoke expedition when they stopped off in Puerto Rico said, hey, let me get off here, because it's really nice. That's probably what the real intent was. But what did he say he was going to say? Darby Glenn said that he was going to take on supplies. Sure. But either way, I'm going to stay here with the supplies. Yeah. For a while. Either way. He stayed there and told the Spanish, hey, yeah, we're settling right up there on that island there in Roanoke. So Spanish knew where they were for sure. We know that. And here is why. That's weird. They weren't supposed to settle in Roanoke. That's right. They didn't know that they were going to settle in Roanoke. No, they weren't supposed to. They're supposed to be in Chesapeake. Herein is the first clue to the mystery. So there's a Johns Hopkins trained anthropologist named Lee Miller who came up with this idea that the Roanoke colony was sabotaged by rivals of Sir Walter Raleigh, who resented him for his patent and wanted to get it themselves. And they thought that maybe by proving that he couldn't possibly establish an English colony in the New World, they could get the patent. Yeah. And sabotage in the way of their ship's captain, potentially. Was it Fernandez? Yes. Was paid off, maybe. And he did a lot of mysterious things, like took way too much time to do some basic charting and seamanship when he should have been super experienced. Well, not only that, delaying things. He knew the area. Yeah. And he spent, I think, 36 days off the coast of Cape Fear to get his bearings. Come on. And like we said, that the colonists were delivered to the New World after the planting season, so there's no way they could plant during a drought and to an area that was known to be violent and hostile. Right. Roanoke. Some people got off and said, you know what? Everybody get off here. I'll see you guys later. And he left, and they weren't supposed to be there. And he basically stranded them there in a hostile area after planting season and then limited supplies. This other guy tells the Spanish where they are, maybe as a backup to make sure before they ever even went to Ronnie they were on their way there. So it's definitely hinky. Yeah. And Miller implicates a guy named Francis Wallingsam, I believe. Okay. And basically says this is the guy who was after Sir Walter Raleigh and did all this and found that Walling Sam rescued Fernandez, the pilot, from being hanged. So Fernandez literally oh, this other guy his life. So who knows what he would have done? Possibly one of the first conspiracies of the New World yes. Among Europeans in the New World for sure. And Miller also goes on to say that he thinks probably what literally happened to them, despite whether they were set up or not to fail, was that they were caught up in a shift of power among tribes. Basically from the friendlies went away, the not friendlies came in, and that was the balance of power shifting. And they were kind of right in the middle of that. Well, they walked right into it. If they went into North Carolina in the forest, they walked right into the hands of some very hostile tribes who would have, according to Miller, killed all the men and sold all the women and children into slavery and that they would have been traded up and down this network that spanned from Florida up to Virginia, the Chesapeake, and there's actually really penalizing evidence. This other mystery. So there's a mystery on a mystery. Have you heard of the Dare stones? No. So from 1937 to 1941, 40 stones turned up from the North Carolina area all the way down to the Chattahoochee just outside of Atlanta, almost forming a trail. And they were etched granite stones that were written in Elizabethan English oh, wow. And said things like, mark the death of Virginia Dare in 1591. All sorts of different little messages. Like the toy b tiles. Yeah. Leading from North Carolina to Atlanta. Right. Mostly from the late 16th century. So a lot of these are considered to be fake, if not all of them. Right. But Bernard University up in Gainesville has all 40 of them in their collection. Oh, cool. And apparently they're going back and reevaluating them, because most people are like, Those are frauds. Really. The problem is the people who turned them up, they don't know Elizabeth in English. They weren't trained in that at all. So it would have been right there. Kind of tough to carry out that hoax because it was north of Jakes. But they think that some of the last ones were intentionally used to discredit people who were accusing Atlanta Professors Emery of trying to generate tourism to the area by saying, the lost colonists ended up here, so come down here and rent a cabin. But anyway, the brunto University professors are going back and looking at each one on its own merit right. Rather than related to the other 39 of them, from what I understand. So there's the Dare Stone. It's interesting, and it's possible that it kind of supports Lee Miller's hypothesis that they were traded and lived and left markings behind, saying, hey, we were here. Well, I know that Miller was frustrated with when was Miller he or she? Yes, I thought so. When she actually went to Roanoke and was just so frustrated because it's, like I said, 12 miles by, I think 3 miles, and she was just like, It's small. Like, where is the stuff? Why can't we find anything? I think it's because they took off. It had been taken down. And then did you read this thing that I sent you? The New place? Yeah. I really had a hard time understanding the significance of it. Are they saying that John White is saying here? This is where they were. Here's the deal. This group was established to try and figure this out, of course, and I think they were from England, even, and they took a new look. They're called the First Colony Foundation. No, they're from North Carolina. Oh, they are? But they've been working with the British Museum that has that map. So they found the 425 year old map. They didn't find it. They took a new look at it and found that there were a couple of patches on the map, which basically, back then, you couldn't erase something and start over. You would do a little patch section and attach that to the map. One of the patches was just a mistake that was being corrected, and the other one didn't appear until they held it in front of a light box. So that's very mysterious. And they found evidence that they think concludes that they moved westward up the album album sound to the confluence of the Choin and Roanoke rivers. And the evidence is because what was covered up was believed to be a symbol of a fort. So what they're saying is his intention, because this was a very detailed map and it was a very important map, and it was drawn by John White, right? Yeah. Drawn by John White And it had been covered up for centuries until they found it, saying it's pretty clear that the intention was, hey, this is where we want to settle. This is where we're going to this fort. So are they saying that John White drew the map and that was originally where they were going to go before Fernandez stranded them, and so that's probably where the colonists went after they left Roanoke? I think so. Okay. I think that's what they're saying. They didn't specifically say that that was their original intent, but I think at some point before he left to go back to England, he said, let's go to this place and establish a fort. So he just didn't write down what he knew well enough? I think so. And they say they don't know why it was covered over with a patch, but they think that they could start looking there for maybe remnants. Yeah. Supposedly, though, it's under a subdivision and a golf course. Yes. Good luck with that. Excavating whole nine. Yeah. But yeah. Interesting. I was a little less moved by this. Like you. They seem to be really like, oh, my God, the mystery has been solved. There was a fort that they said that they were going to establish. Right. And they covered it up with a patch that has a different kind of fort drawn on it. Yeah. It could have been as simple as maybe they wanted to do that, but then they still ended up getting taken or going somewhere else, so who knows? We'll never know. We probably will never know. It's going to be one of those enduring the streets. I love it. I love it, too. Chuck? Yeah. You got anything else? I got to solve everything. People are crazy for that kind of thing. Oh, yeah. They love to know everything. It's like, chill out. All in good time, all in 400 and something years. Yeah. If you want to know more about the Roanoke mystery, type that word into the search bar@housetoforks.com. That is R-O-A-N-O-K-E. Not Virginia, North Carolina. And it will bring up this article by me. And since I said me, it's time for message break, which begins with me. Sufficient. Okay, so now listen to me now. Yeah. It's maybe the biggest nerd ever to write into our show. I love this dude. Actually, he may not be nerdy at all. I guess it has to do with D and D again, though. After listening to DND podcast, I wanted to share with you how you inspired the creation of Dungeons and dragonesque role playing adventure. Two weeks before Christmas vacation last year, I came down with the chicken pox 28. It is sort of a medical absurdity to every doctor, nurse, and colleague I came into contact with. It's also really dangerous, though, right? I don't know about dangerous, but I think it's more complicated for sure. Sorry for interrupting. It's okay. Two weeks of being stuck at home. Trying not to scratch allowed my imagination to wander. I had a day where I listened to the Singularity holographic environments and designing our children's podcast. Also, I watched two documentaries on the band Rush and the movie Blade Runner. Wow. This combination of science fiction ideology sparked the idea for a story, but I needed some help writing it, so I created a role playing game. Dungeons and Dragons does not lend itself to futuristic technology, so I decided to create my own games and rules. I used a university as the dungeon, college majors as character classes, campus stereotypes as races, rush, song lyrics as puzzles, and Stuff You Should Know podcasts for the storyline. Wow. One example of what we did with it. Majors, technology related field wizard, nursing, healer, kinesiology, paladin, chemist, rogue, thief, biology, druid, music major, bard, theology, monk. I have no idea what to even make of that, do you? Yeah. Okay. So four college boys set out to save the world from Alex Lyson and Getty Lee's genetically engineered Neil Perk and to prevent the Singularity from taking over the campus of Illinois State Redbirds. Other than the odd looks we received from the guy installing window treatments while we were playing, the game was a great success. And I introduced four new people to the stuff you should know. Universe. So thanks for inspiring an awesome day and distracting me from the pots. That is from Matt McCullie, math teacher at Woodstock High School in Illinois and the cross country and track coach. Wow. So, dude, I want to see this game. I want to play this game. I want a figurine of me, too. Me and Getty Lee. Like fighting Druids. Yeah. Or fighting one another with Druids advancing on you. That's a sticky situation. Yeah. So that's quite a game. And that is quite an email, Matt. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Matt. You may be right, Chuck. If you want to let us know how nerdy you are or how wonderful your imagination is, I guess, is another way to put it. Yeah. We love nerdy qualities, by the way, because we got an email for a young lady that took exceptions of me saying nerd and making all my little nerd voices. But it's all good fun. We love it. Yeah. Get a sense of humor, nerds, if you want to let us know how funny you are, how imaginative you are, how nerdy you are, whatever, we want to hear it. Send us a very creative tweet to SYSK podcast. Join us on Facebook. Comstuffuno. Send us an email to stuff podcast@discovery.com and join us on our website. Do it. It's called Stuffieshotknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. This podcast is brought to you by BASF, the chemical company. 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. Download the free Amazon music app and listen today." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-09-12-sysk-psychopathy-final.mp3 | How Psychopaths Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-psychopaths-work | There are people who walk among us who seem normal, maybe even more charming or intelligent than average, yet they hide disturbing and at times dangerous personalities behind what one researcher called a 'mask of sanity.' | There are people who walk among us who seem normal, maybe even more charming or intelligent than average, yet they hide disturbing and at times dangerous personalities behind what one researcher called a 'mask of sanity.' | Tue, 12 Sep 2017 15:49:59 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=15, tm_min=49, tm_sec=59, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=255, tm_isdst=0) | 45861897 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. And we're here to manipulate you. You into learning something new. You're trying to use your least psychopath voice that you have. Yes, but it's having the opposite effect I'm trying for, isn't it? You're not fooling anyone. Well, you just made a powerful enemy. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm feeling quite good. I like this one. This one's going to have it all. You know what I mean? Psychology. Disputed psychology. Yes. Prison murder. Yeah. A little serial killer action. Yeah. We can't not mention at least Hollywood, the DSM, contradictions and Terms, all sorts of stuff. The Bible, China. Yeah, okay, I forgot about those parts. So we're talking psychopathy. People say, what's the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath? We'll get to that. By psychopaths, don't you mean psychotic? We'll get to that, too. Keep your pants on. Psychopath just buckle in. Yeah. And if you think you know everything there is to know about psychopaths, well, you may be surprised. There's a lot of misconceptions out there about psychopaths, about exactly what constitutes a psychopath or what they act like or how easy they are to recognize. And it turns out this article actually points out that a lot of the people who tend to lead other people sometimes have psychopathic qualities. Like, for example, obviously, you would call Hitler a psychopath. I think just about everybody would. Right. But I guess from studying them posthumously and remotely, guys like Teddy Roosevelt, JFK. But I'm sure basically every president that's ever been President of the United States exhibits some psychopathic qualities, right. Because some actually can be considered useful in the right context. Right. Like immunity, distress, or fearlessness, or the ability to influence others. These are pretty handy things to have if you're a politician. But just because your reaction to stress is far lower than the average person, or you have an ability to charm other people into doing what you want, it doesn't automatically make you a psychopath. And the reason why it doesn't automatically make you a psychopath is because there is a spectrum of psychopathy, and there's a threshold where below the threshold, you may have some of these qualities or traits of psychopathy, but you're not a psychopath. At that threshold or above, though, you would be considered a psychopath. And if that is the case, if you are a full blown psychopath, you have a very specific set of characteristics that very much separate you from the average person in some extraordinarily scary ways. Potentially, yes. If psychopaths exist in this form at all, there's a lot of debate about that as well. Yeah. So if you have 100 friends, science estimates that one of those people is a psychopath. Yeah, I saw that figure, too. So 1% of the general population. So as many as 3 million psychopaths in the United states, states, and about 70 million worldwide. And only, I think, what is it? About 25% of those are in the prison population. Okay. The majority of prisoners aren't psychopaths. Correct. And the majority of psychopaths aren't in prison. Right. Which means they're all walking among us. Yeah. And it doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't in prison because they haven't been caught yet. There's a lot of what are known as high functioning psychopaths that are full on psychopaths, but they just don't exhibit the kind of traits that would get you locked up in prison. Instead, they exhibit what we would call white collar crimes, which aren't prosecuted in the United States. They're hedge fund managers, basically. Well, it is funny, because I do make that joke, but they said that they think as many as perhaps 10% of people in the finance industry could be psychopaths. Yeah, there was a study that found that, for sure. Yeah, but that makes a pretty good point. In the right context, being a psychopath can actually be useful to you. All right, well, let's go back to Aristotle. Okay. Like most things, he's the tissue that binds this with the cricket farming episode. Correct. Interestingly. So I know in cricket farming, we talked about his pillow talk being great. Back in those days when he was pillow talking, he had a student named Theofrastus. Nice. And Theofrastus was a fourth century BCE philosopher, and they talked about psychopaths. They called them unscrupulous at the time, but what they were talking about was what we would now refer to as psychopaths. And everything from the Chinese to biblical stories to mythology and Greece and Rome, the Shakespeare, it's just rife through history, literary history of people writing about what we would now call a psychopath. Yeah. And it's not just the west either. We call them psychopaths here, apparently, the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria call them Aronica. The Yuca eskimos call them cum langueda. They seem to be around, like you said, 1% of the global population. So they're not, like, culturally bound. It's not a culturally bound condition. Right, but it does seem contextual in that psychopaths are contrary to society. They don't follow the social norms that keep everybody else in line that typically arise out of things like empathy and feeling bad for other people and seeing other people as their own sentient selves. Yeah. And not just bags of meat to be manipulated. Yes. To your own end. Yeah. So psychopaths make appearances throughout history, throughout literature. You mentioned the Bible. So Cain is widely referred to as an early psychopath, the first psychopath. Maybe so. At least in the JudeoChristian tradition. Right. But if we fast forward to 18th century France, like, the beginnings, the modern beginnings of our Western, at least conception of psychopaths were found in the hands of a French physician named Philippe Pinel. Yeah, he was one of the first medical professionals to talk about this, and he referred to them as maniac sans del. Nice. Insanity without delirium. Right. They've gone by other names since then, and descriptions from moral derangement, moral insanity, rational madness. Right. And that actually describes, like, a type of insanity where you're morally and even maybe behaviorally deranged, but you're not cognitively impaired. And your sense of your touch with reality is your grip on reality is totally normal as well. Yeah, kind of. The whole point is they are walking among us, and by all accounts, they are usually very charming, kind of, quote, normal, unquote seeming individuals, predatory. And then finally, in 1888, there's a German psychiatrist named J-L-A cock. And he said, I have the term it is psychopastiche means suffering soul. And that's where the actual word finally psychopathy was born. Right. And then, I think, into the beginning, in the 30s, sociopathy took over and replaced psychopathy for a couple of reasons. One, from about the there's this idea that psychopaths should be called sociopaths because it was nurture rather than nature that accounted for their antisocial behavior. That it was saying a bad mother, cold father, or absent father, something like that, that was the basis of sociopathic behavior. The other reason that sociopathy became widely used was because people were getting it confused with psychosis. Psychopathy and psychosis, they're not at all the same thing. Psychosis means it's an umbrella term for a loss of a grip on reality. Delusions, basically. Right. And psychosis can be brought on by any number of things, like from dementia to lack of sleep to schizophrenia. So psychosis is a condition where your grip on reality is tenuous at best. Psychopaths, their grip on reality is 100% totally fine. It's just again, it goes back to this idea that it's a moral derangement. They have no morals, they have no scruples, they have no conscience is another way that it's usually put. But they're not delusional at all. Their grip on reality is totally fine. Yeah. Like in a psychopathic brain, there's literally a physical abnormality in the brain. Right. And that's a huge new development. Chuck and as a result, sociopathy is quickly losing favor as an interchangeable term for psychopathy. Yeah, I mean, the terms over the years were mostly interchangeable. In 1980, the DSM, which we've talked about a lot, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual mental Disorders, I think they called it, they said no more sociopathy. Let's call it antisocial Personality disorder. ASPD and the terminology is important because you shouldn't just use two different things interchangeably to mean the same thing right now. It's true. And with psychiatrists and psychologists who study psychopathy in particular, especially a guy named Robert Hare, who was continuing on the work of a guy named Harvey Cleckley, who did his work chuck in Augusta, Georgia. Yeah, I saw that. Said, no, you can't just say psychopaths are just part of an antisocial personality disorder, which is what the DSM does. Right. And the reason why is because what they've concluded is that there are basically two aspects, two different facets is what they call them. Two being a psychopath. There's primary psychopathy and secondary psychopathy, or factor one and factor two psychopathy. Right. Yeah. That's what I was going to ask you. So, Herbie great name, by the way. Herbie Kleckley. He's the guy from Augusta, and he's the one who wrote a book called The Mask of Sanity, which is sort of the foundation of modern psychopathic research. But he was the one that came up with factor one and two. Is that basically just what we now call primary and secondary? He came up with the first descriptors that are still kind of in use today, where things like that they lack social responsibility, but they're usually highly intelligent. They're very irresponsible. They have a winner take all attitude. Yeah. He spelled out like, 16 character traits. And he was basically the father of psychopathy. It was Hare who came up with the two factors, or more to the point, they emerged from his psychopathy checklist that he developed back in, I think, the late seventies or early eighty s. Right. So with factor one, Chuck, that relates to, like, interpersonal behavior. So the idea that psychopaths are very charming, but that they also lack remorse. Right. This is all considered factor one, or primary psychopathy. And I actually think that this is where psychopathy is rooted seeing other people as means to an end, using people in that sense without any regard for the other person's feelings or the consequences it has on their life, and then genuinely lacking remorse. These are classic traits of psychopathy. Right? Yeah. But that's just one facet of it. There's another facet, factor two, which is the behavioral aspect of psychopathy. And factor two relates to things like impulsivity, sexual, promiscuity, parasitic lifestyle. Yeah. And so if psychopathy is a spectrum that we all potentially could be on the psychopath spectrum, but most of us fall below that threshold, then factor one and factor two are like a spectrum within a spectrum to where on one side you have high functioning psychopaths, like CEOs, say. On the other side you have very low functioning factor to psychopaths. Like a truck stop serial killer right, right. Who's getting sloppy. And then in between, you would have a mixture but you can kind of lean more toward the factor one psychopathy. You could lean more towards the factor two psychopathy. But the factor two psychopathy relates almost exclusively to the DSM's antisocial personality disorder criteria. And so therefore, the DSM is ignoring factor one psychopathy. And so therefore, really, the only way you can be diagnosed as a psychopath is through the Hair Psychopath checklist. So there's almost like this competing field that's going up against the DSM as far as the study of psychopaths is concerned. You take the rest of the episode. All right, well, let's take a break so I can memorize all this stuff and we'll come back and talk a little bit about demographics and that hair test right after this. All right, so we're back with talks about demographics, studying psychopathy and psychopathy is tricky to say the least, because, well, we'll talk a little bit about the brain, but there is no you can't hook someone up to a machine that will spit out a diagnosis of psychopath. So you're going to have to get someone who self reports this stuff, which you're not going to see a lot because no one usually likes to think of themselves that way. Yes. But most of the data they have right now is gathered from psychiatric examinations of criminals. Yes. So there's really, like, a sheltered view of psychopaths. We have just a limited snapshot of the full spectrum of psychopathy, because if you're a psychopath, you're not going to go in to look for help. You think you're better than everybody else. So the very traits that make you a psychopath would make you feel like you need the opposite of psychiatric help. Yeah. Like, what are you saying? I'm winning in life? Exactly. So as far as age goes, when they analyze some of the results of some of these examinations, prisoners, they did show that it seems like psychopathic traits might decrease some as you get older. They don't know why, but there's a lot of controversy about whether or not you can diagnose a kid as a psychopath. Sometimes you might see some traits that a child expresses that you might associate with psychopathy, but legally, technically, you can't diagnose a child as a psychopath. And just because you might have some psychopathic tendencies as a kid doesn't mean you're going to grow up to be that way as well. No, but they do have, as part of that antisocial personality disorder spectrum, they have diagnoses for kids like oppositional defiant disorder, which seems to be basically like a factor to psychopath diagnosis for children. Right, but he thinks they just don't like to use that word for kids. No. You should be very careful with labeling, clinically labeling somebody a psychopath just because of the stigma associated with it. Yeah. Can you imagine sitting parents down and saying, well, Francis is a psychopath. Right. Like your six year old is a psychopath. Yeah. Not good. No, there's probably a company who specializes in that because nobody else wants to do it. Like up in the air, people would pay to come in and fire people. Right, exactly. Yeah. If it was George Clooney, there'd be a different deal. Right. Your child's psychopath. Here's some literature on that and George Clooney and some fine tequila. Right. Is it fine? Yeah, it's good, but man, he sold that thing for a billion dollars. No. You believe that? No, no. Like George Clooney rolling in dough. Wow. Rolling and handsome. Billion dollar tequila. I'm in charm. And he sold this tequila company for a billion dollars. Yeah. Good for him. He's a psychopath. I feel like we've talked about that before. Have we? Is that possible? No, we talked about him being smug. Oh, you did, sir, not me. Right. Well, you said, oh, I know, he's so smug. No, I didn't, because I want to date him. So when it comes to race, it gets even more controversial because there have been analyses that tried to link higher rates of the disorder to Native American communities, african American people, and most psychiatrists have come out and say, you know what? This is really not taking into account socioeconomic factors, and it's pretty racist. Yeah. There was this guy named Richard Lynn who wrote back in the early 2000s journal article about that and tried to basically say that the order of psychopathy, as far as prevalence is concerned, is highest in blacks and Native Americans and then followed by Hispanics and then whites and then East Asians. And he said that it had everything to do with evolution. And he totally left out the fact that Hispanics are actually just 500 years or so removed from Caucasian Spanish people and that East Asians are tied genetically to Native Americans over the last 10,000 years or so. People just had fun kind of trashing this guy's ideas, and he was like, you might also want to read my manifesto on eugenics. Right, exactly. One thing is clear, though. When it comes to gender, they're definitely more psychopathic men than women. Yeah, all the numbers bear it out. Like, the people who say, no, it has to do with rates seem to be total crackpots. Yeah, but the people who say that there is a difference in gender, they're backed up by numbers, for sure. Studies show that women definitely have lower occurrences of psychopathy, but it has been pointed out that perhaps what women psychopaths, their behavior manifests itself differently than male psychopaths and that the psychopathic criteria is geared more towards males and is missing female psychopaths. Okay, so for example, you think of a psychopath. You think of a high functioning one, say, like a CEO or a Patrick Bateman type or something, right? Yeah, that's like a classic psychopath. But what if there are just as many women psychopaths, but they're like Joan Crawford and Mami Dearest or something like that? The way that they behave as a psychopath manifests itself differently than how men do. It's a theory. It's not necessarily true, but that's what some people say. Well, the waters are so muddy with how men and women think of each other and their roles in society that it's bound to play a part here and how that gets all mixed up. Right? Yeah, it's true. Well, and then there are, like, the Eileen Warnoses of the world as well. I know there aren't many female serial killers, but there have been some for sure, but there's definitely not. I mean, when you look at the list of serial killers, you see way more Ted Bundy. And who is the guy BTK. Yeah. Dennis Raider. Yeah. There are more of those dudes out there than Eileen Warnosis. For sure. Sure. As far as the numbers suggest. Yes, that's true. But I think it's extremely interesting that we've got the blinders on and are just looking at one set of behaviors for psychopaths and are totally missing an entire population out there that are women's psychopaths. That's just fascinating to me. So should we talk about the psychopathy checklist? Yeah, we kind of have to. Yeah. We mentioned a little bit of it through Herbie Clay. That's got to be my new hotel name. Herbie Kleckley's work and then Hair is the man who is responsible for the modern checklist and test that people still give other people. Yeah. And it's pretty simple. Well, it's not simple. Well, it's expensive, for sure. Yeah, simple. And there are 20 characteristics, and when you take the test, you either give yourself a two if you have one of these characteristics or a one if you may or may not. And then at the end, you do a little math. And is it 30 and above out of 40, you qualify as a psychopath. Yeah, I saw it. Depends on what country you're in. But seriously, but somewhere, like, between 26 and 30 over that, you're probably a psychopath or you qualify as a psychopath. Yes. So here are those 20 characteristics, and you can either just listen to these, or you can have fun thinking about your own self and doing a little math along the way. True. I did math on mine earlier, and I'm like, all right, I'm not a psychopath. And you can also, if it doesn't apply, that you score zero on any of the questions. Yeah, correct. Right. So we start with glibness and superficiality, and I think these aren't things like, everybody can be a little superficial every now and then. I think these are personality traits that you own, right. Wouldn't you say? Yeah. All right. So glibness and superficiality is one grandiosity need for stimulation. Pathological lying, cunning and manipulativeness. Lack of remorse or guilt, and emotional shallowness. I want to take the rest. Yes. Callousness and lack of empathy. Big one. Parasitic lifestyle. Poor behavioral controls. Sure. Sexual promiscuity. Early behavior problems. Lack of realistic long term goals. Impulsivity, irresponsibility. You take the rest. Failure to accept that responsibility. Multiple marriages. That just seems unfair. Juvenile delinquency and revocation of conditional release, which is like recidivism or violating your parole. Yeah. And committing a variety of crimes. Yeah. So some of those you were like, I can be callous, and I can be impulsive and don't have realistic long term goals. Don't sweat it. Just do the math. Like, a 30 out of 40 is pretty that means you're scoring on a lot of these. Right. But so these are the 20 characteristics that the checklist is getting at. The checklist is actually hundreds of questions long right. And takes between two and 5 hours to administer and can only be administered by a highly trained psychologist right. Who's trained in administering the test for a cheap website. Right. So it's not like the psychologist is like, did you have early behavior problems? Maybe that's a one. There's dozens of questions for each of those things. Right. And so when you put the score together for all of them, if you score over a 30, your'a psychopath, as far as psychology, the field of psychology is concerned. Yeah. Hopefully you're a functioning psychopath who is getting along in the world, but it can also manifest itself as Ted Bundy. So let's say you are a psychopath and you're not getting along in the world. One of the characteristics of psychopaths is something called externalization, where you blame others or everything else but yourself for your own problems. Yeah. But if you are a psychopath and if you're not getting along very well in the world, you're probably more like a factor two psychopath. Yeah. If you are getting along well in the world, you've got a nice job or whatever, a family, all that. You've got your mask of sanity, as Klekly put it. You'd be more like a factor one psychopath. You're probably an intelligent human being. Yeah. And even if you're incarcerated, there's probably a pretty good chance that you're above average intelligence, especially compared to the general prison population. Right. I was reading this article about by a psychologist who is basically telling other psychologists, if you go interview a psychopath, here's what to expect. And one of the things he said is, you can bet they've probably done more research on you than you have on them. Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal Lecter. Great example. Right. He knew everything about Starling. Everything. But just with, say, Internet privileges. If a psychopath knows that he's coming to be interviewed by you, the psychiatrist, he's probably going to read papers you've written. He's going to read about your education background. And all of this is to figure out how to best tell you what you want to hear so you can be more easily manipulated to that person's end. Pretty fascinating, but it's also kind of scary. And you kind of reach the point now where it's like, okay, this is kind of dangerous, actually, to interact with people like this. And there's a lot of people out there who suggest just staying away from psychopaths. If you encounter a psychopath in your normal life, say, at work or something like that, you want to keep your distance. It's kind of the prescribed treatment. Well, at least how to deal with them. If you're being manipulated by a psychopath, that's part of their game. So if you engage like Jody Foster had no choice, right? Clary Starling had to engage in Hannibal Lecter and play that little psychological cat and mouse game so she could get the information that he had on Buffalo Bill. I know she didn't want to do it, but she did it anyway. And she saved the day. Yeah. So that is the advice, is to not give them what they want, which I imagine would make a psychopath angry. I don't know. I think depending on, say, like, their tendency for a parasitic lifestyle right. They may just move on to find somebody else who's more easily manipulated. Yeah, sure. It's possible that you might really capture their attention, in which case you're not going to be very happy with having to shed that person. But Chuck, something that really struck me, and this is going to sound really weird to say it, but I can't help but think 50 years from now we're going to look back at a lot of the writing and a lot of the suggestions on how to deal with the psychopath, which is get rid of them, get away from them. They're predators and awful people that historically, it's not going to hold up very well. Yeah. I think we're going to come to find that psychopaths have no way of helping themselves, that their brain is physically different from the average person, and that they can't help their behavior any more than the average person can change their own behavior. Right. Probably even less, actually. And then we're going to look at back 50 years from now. It's like, man, that's how they treated psychopaths back then. How awful. Like how we used to treat the mentally impaired or the cognitively impaired, and they were classified as morons idiots or imbeciles, depending on how extreme the impairment was. And it was just lock them up, keep them away from society. I can't help but wonder if once we know how to treat psychopathy, that we will view them much differently and maybe even with sympathy. Well, I mean, they have something physically wrong with their brain. It seems like it. But that's a new thought and let's take a break and we'll talk about that after this. All right, we're back. So we promised a little bit to talk about the brain, and there's a couple of things that work here and at play. The physical aspect of the brain is actually well, I would say damage, but just not right in some ways. There tends to be regions of the brain they're really trying to zero in on which one it is. Like underdeveloped. Underdeveloped? Yeah. It's either smaller, it has less volume or it's less active than it is in control groups. Right. So there's that going on. And then there are also and this is what we talked about with factors one and two. There are also social factors that play in supposedly. Well, I mean, that seems to be losing favor pretty quickly. You think it's showing 100% brain damage? That's supposedly what I'm seeing is that and it could just be the people who are really bullish on MRIs are really getting more press or whatever and getting their message out there more. But it seems like over time favorite has swung from insanity to nurture and then back again to physical brain structure, possibly even genetic. Well, yeah, genetics. They have done studies on twins, identical twins, and they think it could be 50% to 60% genetically determined. But it gets a little muddy because you can say, well, you might have gotten your Psychiatri, not psychotic. We should point out that is a very different thing, actually. Right. We did. Yeah. We did the beginning. Right. You could say that your dad was a psychopath, so that means that you got that from him. But the fact that your dad was a psychopath, it could also be a very strong social factor in why you became a psychopath. Right? Yeah, exactly. Your absent father, did that make you a psychopath, or was he absent because he was a psychopath himself and passed his genes onto you? Right? Yeah. So it definitely gets muddy. It is very muddy. And the way that that will be sussed out, ultimately is if they can show definitively no, dude. In case after case after case, this region of the brain is underdeveloped, and this region of the brain has to do with, say, processing emotions. Right. Like, for example, one of the places they zero in on is the amygdala. Right? Yeah. The amygdala helps regulate emotions. It helps you experience emotions. And in psychopaths, at least in some studies using MRI, they show that if your amygdala is less active, as it is in people who score high on the psychopathy checklist, their amygdala does not react normally in certain tests. Right. And this actually makes a lot of sense because when you're being socialized by your parents, one of the ways that they socialize, and probably the most important way they socialize you is by punishing you when you're bad and you feel bad, you feel bad for letting your parents down. You might feel angry because you can't leave your room or have dessert, whatever it is. You're experiencing some pretty pronounced negative emotions right then. And so over time, you start to associate those negative emotions with the bad behavior that your parents are trying to curb, and eventually you're going to stop doing that bad behavior because it feels bad to do it, because you keep getting punished. And then maybe your own brain takes over and you feel negative emotions when you do that stuff. Right? Yeah. If your amygdala is not functioning properly, then that's not going to happen. That process isn't going to work because you're not going to experience those negative emotions. You're just going to be like, oh, I wish I could leave my room. I think I'll just climb out the window over here. Right. Not, oh, I feel so bad for letting my parents down. You're not going to experience that because your amygdala is not functioning. So they've really zeroed in on the amygdala. But apparently the big toast of the town these days is the Paralympic. System. Yeah, that's one in the wonder machine, the fMRI machine. It lights up and shows you what parts of the brain are being used and to what extent. I know we've talked about that a lot, but in case you didn't know and the Paralympic system is underdeveloped in psychopaths, or it seems so at least. And that region controls emotional memories, inhibition and moral reasoning. So that seems pretty obvious if you have an underdeveloped Paralympic system that's kind of big on the checklist of psychopathy. Yeah. And there's a whole group of people who are kind of leading the current research in psychopathy studying the prisoners, because if you're a prisoner, chances are you're going to be forced to take the psychopathy checklist. And again, that's where most of our psychopath study population resides, is in prison. So if they volunteer for a follow up study, if they score high on the psychopathy checklist, they'll probably be put into an MRI and given different tests. And these are the people who the results are starting to be cold from basically using the MRI. And it does seem to be pointing to the Paralympic system. Very interesting. It is extremely interesting. But again, it makes you feel like, wait a minute, if it's not these people's fault, what can we do? And part of the problem, Chuck, is that there's like zero, none, a million percent to the negative cure. Yeah. You're not going to cure if you have an underdeveloped Paralympic system or amygdala. There's nothing you can do about that. Right. What you can do is hope to improve with therapy. Obviously catching it earlier in life is obviously going to help more. And what they found there's one sort of treatment. They found that a lot of the typical treatments you might use don't work. Everything from group therapy to electroshock drugs. Group therapy in particular was found not to work because it gave psychopaths a chance to hone their manipulative behavior. Sure. Which is just a bad idea out of the gate. Yeah. It made things worse. Recently, they started work with kids that they seem to have gained some ground on called decompression treatment, the basis of which is basically rewarding. And this is through hour long session, hour long sessions of psychologists increasing reward for good behavior. So instead of talking about the bad behavior and punishing bad behavior, it's rewarding good behavior and kind of feeding that desire of the psychopath to feel like they're winning. I don't know, it seems to work. It seems a little dangerous to me, too, like you're feeding the thing that they require, but maybe that makes sense. I read a really interesting quora post called What It Feels Like to Be a Psychopath. Wow. And it's exactly that. The person wrote it anonymously. They seem to be legit now that they're just making it up as they go along. And they talk about basically being trained that they are a psychopath, they're going to be a psychopath for the rest of their life. Right. And they're just trying to learn how to be good in society while being a psychopath so they can go along and get along. It's really interesting, but that's supposedly the best you can hope for. Again, there's no cure. There is treatment. But unless somebody's saying, like, son, there's something really wrong with you and I'm really worried about you, and I'm going to cut you out of my wheel unless you go see a shrink, the psychopath is typically not going to say, I really need some help with my moral reasoning, so I'm going to go get some treatment. It's just not going to happen. So there's a really big catch 22 in there with psychopathy to begin with. But then, Chuck, there's also a question of what is psychopathy like? Are we sure we know exactly what a psychopath is? And psychiatry and psychology has such a long history of just so much overconfidence and self assuredness when they're really getting it wrong yeah. That you can be forgiven for stopping and saying, whoa, you guys are the arbiters of what's normal in society. And this is a really serious thing to label somebody. So are we sure we know what we're talking about? And not everybody says, yeah, we know what psychopathy is. We're using interchangeable terms that don't even describe the same thing. Still, like sociopath and psychopath, it's just there's a lot of confusion, and it just seems kind of dangerous to label people with that stigma. At the same time, if psychopaths do exist in the form that psychiatry and psychology says it does, it's dangerous to have those people out and about, too. Yeah. I think I agree with you now that this is just a max of 50 years later saying, I can't believe we used to do things and label people this way. Yeah. It's hard to tell when you're in the middle of that time. Yeah, for sure. But very interesting. Did you ever read the psychopath test? I have not read it. I know of it. I know ronson wrote it. Yeah, John Ronson, who friends of stuff you should know. And he's actually done one of our live shows at the Bellhouse with us without shoes on. Did he not wear shoes? He was just wearing socks. I don't think I knew that. But he very strangely walked from the Upper West Side of New York to without shoes. Well, maybe his feet were just hurting from that wall. That's possible. Anyway, lovely guy. And he wrote a great book called The Psychopath Test. And he does a lot of extensive interviewing with hair and other professionals and psychopaths and CEOs. So Investigative Journal is just really terrific book. And I hate to be plugged, but it seems like an organic time to mention that I've got a new solo podcast coming called Movie Crush. I think the tagline is your favorite people, their favorite movie oh, that's a good tagline. You like that? Yeah, I came up with that. Nice work. My buddy Scotty thought of movie, crushed the title, but basically I sit down once a week and talk to some kind of notable person about their favorite movie. It's a great idea, Chuck. Thanks, man. Very soon it's going to be gangbusters. Well, I want to have you on. Oh, I'd love to be on, which would be very strange. I mean, it's a conversation, but just the thought of like, quote, unquote, interviewing you would be weird. Well, anytime you want me on, I'm happy to be on. But if it is too weird, that's fine, too. Oh, no, it won't be too weird. That'd be great. But anyway, long story short, I had Ronson on and his favorite movie. I'll go ahead and just set this up as a teaser. Was his. Let the right one in. Oh, that's such a good movie. The Swedish vampire movie. Yeah, man, that was so good. And I don't know when it we're going to start releasing them. I got to get a bunch of them in the can because scheduling people is tough. So I need a nice pad. But sometime in the fall, look for Movie crush. Well, best of luck. I'm sure it's going to be awesome. I can't wait to hear it. Yes. And just talking to Ronson's. Great. I love that guy. Yeah, he's such a good guy. Really good dude. Yeah. And just pro tip, if any of you are ever around John Ronson, be careful not to step on his feet. Correct. Well, you got anything more about psychopath? I got nothing more about psychopaths. That's pretty interesting because it seems like there's a lot, but there's not. We said it all. Correct. If you want to know more about psychopaths, again, there's nothing more to know. But if you want to read this cool article on how stuff works, you can type psychopathy into the search bar. And since I said psychopathy, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this short and sweet, and it's basically kind of set up to promote the Stuff You Should Know Army. I don't know who first coined that phrase, but the Stuff You Should Know Army is a collection of our most ardent listeners and fans who over the years have got their own little mini community on Facebook. Even there's a Stuffy Snow Army Facebook page, and they're just like the cream of the crop and just good people who love to talk about the episodes and help each other out in life with various things. They're not psychopaths in any way, right? Ironically, they're not militant either. No, they're not. So this is just kind of a short email about that from Tony. Hey, guys. Been listening to you for a little over two years now. And even though I love learning about all the topics. My absolute favorite thing ever see from your work is Unintentionally meeting real life Stuff You Should Know. Army personnel out there at work and in social situations and going way too far down the rabbit hole with them about our favorite episodes. Even though he says SYSM instead of SYSK stuff You Should Mow lawns. You should mow all right. Anyway, thank you for the work and all you've done. You three really brighten people's. Lives forever. Devoted listener. That is from Tony Latham Junior from Sacramento. Thanks a lot, Junior. We appreciate that. Very nice of it. Big thanks to all the stuff you should know army. If you're the core, that kind of keeps this machine running. Yeah. And if you're interested, you want to connect with some really great people online and in real life, just go to the Stuff You Should Know Army Facebook page by invitation. Is it open to the public? You don't apply, but it's a members only page. Yeah. So you got to click on something. And then one of our admins, I'm sure, goes, they look all right. Let's let them in. Yeah, I think they have a Twitter handle as well, too. Okay, great. So check that out. And you can check us out on Twitter, too. I've got my own Twitter handle. It's Josh Clark. There's also the official one at S-Y-S Kpodcast. Chuck is on Facebook at Charlesw Chuck Bryant and at stuff you should know as well. And you can send us all an email to stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web stuffyshopnow.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. 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 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." | |
How the Panama Canal Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-panama-canal-works | It's on more than one list of the Seven Wonders of the World and for good reason - the Panama Canal is one of the great feats of engineering ever undertaken. First conceived of in the 1580s and finally completed in 1914, the canal has a fascinating histor | It's on more than one list of the Seven Wonders of the World and for good reason - the Panama Canal is one of the great feats of engineering ever undertaken. First conceived of in the 1580s and finally completed in 1914, the canal has a fascinating histor | Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:19:25 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=17, tm_min=19, tm_sec=25, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=92, tm_isdst=0) | 30744813 | 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 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 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 houseetworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W, chuck Bryant and that's stuff. You should know the podcast. The two of us together in a couple of mics, our voices. You know what I've been singing all day? Of course, Panama, over and over, and I just whistled it, and Jerry was like, oh, no, I got that stuck in my head. Yeah. When we were growing up, my sister was singing it, and I realized that she was singing Turn and Run. I'm like, what? She's like that song? That Van Halen song? Don't be an idiot. She thought that's what they were saying. Yeah. That's so interesting because there's so many misinterpreted song lyrics, famously over the years, but I never have heard Panama as being one of them. Yeah, especially since the song is named Panama Parenthesis. Turn and Run. Maybe they were talking about the people who were working on the early French effort to build a canal in Panama. Yes. Boy, that didn't go over so well. We'll get to that. Okay, spoiler. The French didn't build the Panama Canal. I thought we were going to get to it right now. Yeah. All right, do you want to talk about Balboa? Which one is George Costanza's? Favorite explorer. Was it Dagama or Balboa? Oh, man, it was one of the two, I think. Dagama, was it? Yes, I think so. Okay. That was a funny conversation, though. Yeah. Balboa back in the day was wandering around in a region called Darien, and he summoned a peak there and was like, holy cow. If I look this way, I see the Pacific Ocean. And if I look at that away, I see the Atlantic Ocean or the Caribbean. And the only thing between these two big bodies of water is this little itzmus of land. Yeah, I'm going to have a lot of trouble with that word. That's okay. Just say strip. Okay. So the strip of land here is the only thing in between. And we should figure out a way to use this as a thoroughfare. Yes. Because this is it. This connects the world. It does. Exactly. At the time, the Spanish were trying to trade with the Chinese, and we're doing a pretty good job of it in the Philippines. And the best way to get to that was to come across the Atlantic and go into the Pacific. That's right. It worked very, very well. And the idea of just having a place where you could go straight through rather than go all the way down South America and then back up was just mind boggling. Yeah. It's like you said, it opened up the world. This guy got it immediately. The problem was it would take about 400 more years before anyone finally got around to completing it successfully. Well, yeah. And forget the rest of the world. The United States. Just like, hey, I want to ship this by boat from New York to San Francisco. How can I do that? I can just kind of sneak around Florida. Right. No, blocked. Right. Well, then what do I got to do? You have to go 8000 miles, nautical miles around South America to get to California. Right. Or when you, me and I were in Nicaragua, we were in a town in the 19th century, was a waste station for minor 49 ers going on to California. Oh, yeah. And they would sail onto Nicaragua, take a train, and then ship out from Nicaragua up to California. Except the handful that was like, I think I might just kick it here. Exactly. Yeah. I bet you there were some dudes. Oh, definitely. I'm sure. Yeah. But yeah, there was a continent in the way. And the idea that it was just this little narrow strip of land I know. That made a lot of people say, this is the place to be. In the 18th century, the Scottish showed up. They tried to establish an outpost, failed spectacularly. There's a great section in 1493 about it. Oh, really? Yeah, the Spanish were there, the French were there. They established pretty good outposts there. It was very clear that this little area, which was then part of Columbia is now present day Panama, was going to be a hopping spot because there was no thinner portion of the north or South American continents than this one. And everyone needed to figure out a way to get through. Yeah. And it wasn't as easy as, like, hey, let's just dredge all the sand and let the waters meet, because that's not too hard. It's like dense jungle and mountains and the Continental Divide. My first thought was, like, how hard could it have been? I didn't realize how treacherous that area was. Yeah. And I think that Balboa and a lot of people who succeeded him thought the same thing. Like, how hard is it? Sure. But it is that continental Divide, that's a tough thing to break through. That's why they call it a divide. Yeah. Well, that's where two tectonic plates come together and form a mountain range, and you're cutting through not one, but two tectonic plates. Everybody wrap your head around that. Seriously, let's talk about it, because obviously we were successful eventually, but the first attempt was not. And the first attempt was by the French, who, in the 1820s, I believe, started to undertake what is known as a sea level canal, which is basically they were going to cut their way straight through the isthmus of Panama. That's right. And canals were all the rage at the time because of steam technology. So all of a sudden, you didn't have to use the very cool and quaint top half and have a mule walk alongside of a river or a canal. Have you ever been on your little boat? Yeah. A lot of them now are like jogging trails and stuff. Right. Which that's great for good use. Sure. Exactly. I don't see any mules on them these days. But it's great that people can use these toe bass now. It's like a nature trail. Yeah. So the steam technology gave the French the idea that, hey, man, we can build a sea level canal here because we can just dig right through it. We have steam. We don't need the mules for the tow pads any longer. All we need is some good steam shovels. We're going to cut right through this continental divide, right through this jungle. And as a result of this ambition, 20,000 people died. Yes. And get a little far, thanks to the railroad there in Panama. Believe it or not, it was the first railroad in the world to connect both sides of a continent. Wasn't very big, but it didn't need to be, which is kind of great. But that allowed the French to get in there. They were deciding between Nicaragua and Panama at the time, and they said, like you said, we can do sea level. We don't need these locks. Yeah. If you look at a map of Nicaragua and look at Panama, the idea of going through Nicaragua over Panama is just nuts. Yeah. And we'll explain how the locks work. But it essentially just raises and lowers your ship. Right. For sure. In a little, like, base station of water that's flooded and then drained. Right. Actually, that's how a lock works. The French organized this thing called the company Universal DuCanal inter oceanique. Very nice. Thank you. And led by a guy named Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had created a sea level canal through the Suez that connected the Mediterranean and the Red Seas. It was a big deal. Sure. So they brought him in. He's like, sure, we'll do another sea level canal. I'm feeling good about this. He's like, I did the seaweed canal with my eyes closed. Exactly. I can do this with one arm tied behind my back. What he didn't realize is that digging through a bunch of sand is not like digging through two tectonic plates and a bunch of jungle and malaria. And like I said, 20,000 people died as a result of this. This guy was like, no, we can do it. We can do it. We're going to do a sea level canal. We can do it. And then finally he was like, I don't think we can do this. It was too late. A lot of people were dead from yellow fever and malaria, from accidents. It's privately financed. So a lot of people lost a lot of money, too. Exactly. This company goes under. Well, he tried to salvage it at first. He tried to hire Gustavel of the Eiffel Tower fan, right. And said, hey, I think we need those locks after all, and you're good at building big steel things, so can you help? And he was like, of course I can. And then it was too late that the business was done. Right. And they had done a little bit, but they had done a lot. They made 11 miles of canal up to that point. Not bad. It's about a quarter of the way there. Right, but this was the when did they start chuck? The 18th chuck, as we understand it, they started in the 1820s. Yeah. And this thing went bust by well, that's when Congress they were bussed before that. But that's when the US Stepped in and said, hey, we'll buy your junk. Oh, I'm sorry, 1888. So about 60 years, they had managed to dig 11 miles of canal, build a bunch of buildings. They had a lot of equipment and supplies there. Sure. And, yeah, the US. Said, we smell a really great opportunity, and Congress said, let's spend some cash. We're feeling good about things these days. We amex. Hawaii recently puerto Rico, Philippines What else? Why not take over this very ambitious project? Why? It's the American century by now, and we can stick it to the French at the same time. Exactly. So they did this in with the one stipulation that said, you know what? You guys have to columbia controls Panama right now, and you guys have to work out a deal with them. And we tried, and that failed. So he said, you know what? We're just going to overthrow Columbia then and give the control to the Panamanians. Yeah, we supported this Panamanian independence movement and threw off the shackles of Colombia. And Colombia is like, what did you just do? Because we gained control of that. We followed that congressional mandate and gained control of this Panama Canal Zone. Basically, the swath that went through Panama was considered American soil, thanks to a treaty from, I believe, the Hay Bonal Variation, where Panama signed over the Canal Zone. There was no Spanish translation of this treaty. So basically, the US. Went in over through Colombian control of Panama, supported Panamanian independence, and then robbed Panama of its canal in, like, a year. Yeah. Columbia is like, I guess we'll just start exporting cocaine. Exactly. We'll get you back one day. So in the end, they paid about $40 million in 19 four for the assets of this French company, which is a lot of money back then. Sure. And about $10 million, as this very cheeky article, by the way, did you notice cheeky? A little. She referred to it as alimony of sorts to Panama. $10 million to gain the rights to this Canal Zone. And basically, hey, we're going to run the show. We're going to finish your canal from the eleven mile mark to the ocean where it belongs. And like you said, I think there was a certain amount of snub to it. Right. Probably so. But they said, you know what we got to do first, though, is we have to decide on if we can go sea level. Was it just the French were incompetent, or is it really impossible to do sea level? Yeah, like, we need to do our own due diligence, basically. And they did that. And Theodore Roosevelt chose Chief Engineer John Frank Stevens. And he was like, it's all about the locks, dudes. If you want to canal here, you have to go over these mountains, not through them. Right. So here's the thing. And this is just brilliant, because there is another problem with this isthmus, and there's this thing called the Chagres River, and it is very temperamental. It was prone to flooding, all sorts of crazy stuff associated with this river. So not only did you have the continental divide in the jungle and the malaria to deal with, once you completed it, what were you going to do with this river? Sure. Stevens came up with this great idea that you go over the mountains and you go over the mountains, you kill two birds with 1 st by damning the river, and you create a lake that will carry you over the mountains. Katun Lake. Yeah. I'm sure that's not pronounced correctly. Think about that. That is one of the most brilliant feats of engineering I've ever heard of. The Panama Canal. Yeah, but that specific aspect of it oh, sure. Damming the river to create a lake so you can go over the mountains. That's just incredibly beautiful. The whole thing, too. And at the time, dude, in the early 19, 100s, it's amazing that they can pull this off. Yeah. Because they're all wearing, like, knickers and stuff. Yeah. There's some awesome documentaries out there, by the way, you should watch. In fact, there's one. Cool. Just go to the YouTubes and put in time lapse Panama Canal. Oh, yeah. And it takes you the full route in like, a minute and a half. Nice. Eight to 10 hours. And it's kind of neat. The boat goes in and sinks and then not sinks, but lowers and then raises, and then it pulls along in the lake for a little while. And then sinks and lowers and raises. Yeah. Because it's like an eight to ten hour transit right. From water to deep water. Eight to 10 hours. Yes. Depending on your boat, I guess, once you finally get clearance to go through that's. Right. So he's damned up the river, created tattooed lake ships going toward the Pacific, going to enter it Lemon Bay in the Caribbean, go through a couple of locks upward, and it's like walking up steps, basically, except it's a big boat and it's done with water. And then they navigate through that lake for a little while and then go toward Panama City through another series of locks and down over the mountains, and boom, you are connected to the rest of the world. Right. So when they agreed on the lock method, they had one other thing to handle. That's why the Scottish maybe they were getting confused with locks meaning lakes. Right. There we go. They're like, Where are all the locks? They're like they're right there. They're like, no, but where are the locks? So there was one other big problem that had leveled the French effort, which was yellow fever, which you can be immune to if you're exposed to it in childhood. But if you're from New York, you're not. So you go down to Panama and you are stung by a mosquito and you die. The thing is, nobody knew that it was mosquitoes until a guy named Ronald Ross in 1897 studied mosquitoes in India and found malaria present in their stomachs and that it was transmittable through their saliva. Yes. They didn't know what it was. They were all sorts of different theories. Yeah. They thought it was maybe from unclean living, whatever. When they found out that it was the mosquitoes that changed everything. So they instituted this really rigid antimusquito program. They cleaned up the country, basically, and basically eradicated came close to eradicating yellow fever in the area, which paved the way for this lock system to be built. Yeah. And you can thank Colonel William Gorgeous for heading up that sanitation squad. And yeah, I mean, it worked. And that was the key, because you can't have your workers dropping dead of yellow fever every day. Right. They have to drop dead of landslides. Yeah. Even though a lot of these workers were poor black people, I think 85% of the people that died were black. And a lot of people still died. But it wasn't like the 22,000 drop in dead from yellow fever. Right. But it's still a very dangerous project, mudslides all sorts of drownings, things like that. 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. 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We're going to divide this up into three sections. That makes perfect sense. It does. You've got the Pacific section that's going to be working from Limon Bay, which, by the way, means lime in Spanish. Did you know that? I did not. So they're working from Limon Bay to the newly created Lake Gatun. Yeah. That was the Atlantic Division. Yeah. Okay, you're right. So the Atlantic division is synonymous with the Caribbean. Yeah. And then so you've got the Atlantic Division working from Lemon to get to you have the Central Division. This is the hardest part. Yeah. They're working in Lake Gattoon to basically create a channel through this Continental Divide. You don't have to cut sea level, but you do need to make sure these ships aren't going to run aground in a mountain. Sure. And then you have the Pacific Division, which is working from the end of the Continental Divide path, which is Pedro Miguel Locks down to the Pacific, right? That's right. And like we said, the railway, the Panamanian Railroad is there. And we had, like, awesome gear at the time, it was no longer men with chisels and sledgehammers and stuff. It was steam shovels, rock drills, dynamite. And they moved 96 million cubic yards of earth and rock right. Which is 73 million m\u00b3. That's right. And it was really hot, though, and it was a pretty bad scene. And they called that Hells Gorge, and it was dangerous. And that's where I think most of the lives were lost on this second pass. Yeah. And that was definitely the hardest work. But they made it through. And by 1914, a crane that was used in the construction of the Panama Canal was the first thing to ever make it through. All the way. Yeah. And they were like, sweet. Yeah. And eight months later, it was open for business, as far as I understand. Yeah, big business. Should we walk people through or, I guess swim people through? Yeah, I think we should. Okay. You approach from the Atlantic? You go through the Gatoon locks. It's going to lift your vessel up 85ft yes. Pretty awesome. And take you to Gatun Lake. Very nice there. You're going to wind through that channel for about 23 miles, then enter the Gallard, cut about 8 miles through there, and you're going to reach the Pedro Miguel locks. And then they're going to lower your ship about 30ft to the Mirafloors Lake. You're going to pass through this it's about a mile long. And then the two step Mira floors locks are going to return you finally back to sea level. It's a seven mile passage from there to the Pacific. And all told, you've gone 50 miles in about eight to 10 hours. Yeah. And mind bogglingly. I saw that it takes 52 million gallons of fresh water to move a ship from one end to the other. Wow. 52 million. And they're getting all that from Lake Gatoon? Yeah. I imagine it's just recycled back into the system, right? No. What happens to it? They lose most of it. It either pumped back in, it either flows back into Lake Gatun, or else it flows out into the oceans. Okay. Which is not necessarily good. They're worried that Lake Cartoon may become brackish. Oh, yeah. And Lake Atun is now the freshwater supply of Panama, and they're using a lot of it up. Yeah. Well, it's always presented a bit of environmental quagmire right. Especially with their plans to expand, which we'll get to. But right now, they have two way traffic. They're looking to make that a three lane highway, which would actually adding that third lane will double the amount of traffic, which is crazy. You would think it would increase it by a third. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's wider. Maybe it allows for two ships at a time, like eight in there at once. I don't know. I do know that if you are a large enough ship, they don't let you drive yourself because you got one drunk sea captain and all of a sudden your locks are out of commission. So they use electric towing locomotives to tow those big bad boys. Right. And we should say, just briefly with the locks, if you want to move a ship upward, you flow into a lock. The lock closes behind you, and it fills up with water so that you can float over the lip of the next tire lock. The gate closes behind you with that one, and it fills in with water and so on and so forth. Yeah, it's remarkably basic. Yeah. And then the opposite takes place when you're stepping down, it's just basically going into a little square pool, raising or lowering the water level so you can go up or down. It's really neat. Yes. And if you've got a minute and a half to kill, you can take this voyage in high speed on the YouTube. So, like we said, the US. Used gunboat diplomacy and I guess good oldfashioned, old timey two Swindling to gain control of the Panama Canal Zone. And it had complete control until 1979, when Jimmy carter malays forever. Right. Do you ever see that? Simpsons. They unveil a statue of Jimmy Carter, and it says Malays forever on the base. And one of the townspeople goes, he's history's greatest monster. Oh, boy. Anyway, Carter negotiated with the leader of Panama at the time, general Omar Torris Herrera, and said, hey, how would you like this thing back? Give us 20. I think they said, hey, we'd like this back. I like to think of American magnanimous. Okay, sure. So we said, you know what? We've had it for this long. Plus we're talking Carter. It's entirely possible he just started contacting people and said, what does the US. Have that we can sell or give back? It's a good point. He sold like one of the presidential yacht was sold by him. Oh, really? Yeah. Why? Because he thought it was frivolous. Yeah. That's awesome. And Panama Canal, he's like, how about this? Let's get rid of a significant portion of our economy. Anyway, he gives it back after 20 years, and on December 31, which is why I suspect they made it a 20 year deal. Yeah. I mean, they had to transition. You can't just hand the keys over and be like, all right, send your crew in. Right. But not only that, like, why not a 15 year deal or 18 year deal? A ten year deal. They went with 20 because it was going to end on December 31. New millennium. Yeah. Actually, that didn't start until 2001, though. Right? Yeah. But, you know okay. It's symbolic. Right? Okay. So the Panamanians take over and immediately start taking flak because of things aging, traffic is jammed up. Yeah, they've done a good job with it, though. It's just by nature of how things are these days, they're victims of circumstances. Yes. 5% of the world's trade goes through the Panama canal. We sold them a lemon of a canal. Right. The millionth ship went through in 2010. 144,000 ships go through a year, and it's a very narrow little strip. Yeah. You know what that means? Waiting in line. A lot of waiting in line. Plus, also, there's an upper limit to the size ship that can go through. It's called Panamax is the ship size. I've never heard of them. What a great name for the biggest ship that Panamax. What could be bigger than that? Well, these ships that are called post Panama. Exactly. A lot of shippers are like, you know what? I'm tired of waiting. It's actually going to be more economical for me to build a ship that can't go through the Panama canal but can hold a lot more, and I'll just sail around the lower part of South America, and that's kind of increasingly happening. Plus, Nicaragua threatened to open their own canal to Panama, says, okay, wait. Let's hold a referendum and see if we can expand this thing and modernize it and save the canal. And Panamanian said yes. Let's. So in 2006, they approved this third lane. It's expected to be opened by 2014. Is Nicaragua still planning a canal? I don't know. I don't know if that shot it down or not. Well, and there's also talk now of the Northwest Passage. Thanks to what some people might say is climate change and melting ice caps, there may be a way to get there by land. Henry Hudson is clapping in his grave, so we'll see if that happens. I don't know. I didn't get a chance to really look into that research. And, like, how real is that? Right. Even still, the Panamanians will probably make their 5.25 billion investment back eventually. Although it took the US a good 40 years to make 400 million back. Yeah. I think the 1950s is when they finally broke even. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. And you break even by charging a toll. I don't think we even mentioned that. Obviously, like, any way, station or passage, you got to pay according to how much stuff you got. I think the record is I looked it up. It's like, 150,000 or something. Yeah. They do it by tonnes. The thing is, if you are carrying a lot of really expensive natural gas, all right, you're going to pay a lesser toll than if you're carrying a bunch of less expensive or even equally expensive coal, which isn't fair. And if you're transporting a lot of raw steel, why should you pay more? So they're trying to figure out a new toll system, especially for the newly expanded version of the canal, that takes into account the value of what's on board rather than just the weight. Right. So they should make a little more money that way. Yes. I don't know if this is still accurate, but the record that I have is $153,662. And the cheapest was when a dude swam across, he weighed like, \u00a3150, and so they charged him, what, like $36? Yeah. Back in 1928, Richard Halliburton and he swam the Panama Canal and I guess it was some sort of publicity stunt. I'm sure people love doing stuff like that back then. Yeah. But if you look at this high speed route on YouTube, it's pretty neat. And there's a lot of times where you're like, look out for that boat, and then it turns. Okay. Yeah. There's a lot of activity out there. Yeah. It's not a pleasure cruise. Well, no, and it's not one ship at a time. They have, like you said, two way traffic. Right? That's right. And they try to keep them going through as efficiently as possible. And I should say also, the new locks that they have can serve about 60% of the water used, so they'll address a lot of environmental concerns, hopefully. I got a couple of little facts here, if you're interested. The entrance to the canal on the Atlantic side is 22 and a half miles west of the Pacific entrance, which is interesting. Okay. Because it. Has a unique S shape, and then the locks themselves are 7ft thick each. So if you're wondering how to keep out that much water to basically damage the ocean, you need to do it with seven foot thick concrete. 92% of the workforce is Panamanian right now, which is pretty great. And it's about all I got. \u00a360 million of dynamite was used to construct this thing. There's some nice stats. Chuck yeah, it's not bad. Cool. You got anything else, then? No, the rest of these are kind of boring. Panama Canal forever. If you want to learn more about the Panama Canal, you can read this very good article on how stuff works.com. Type in Panama Canal or turn and run Canal. See what happens when you do the latter? Sure. Hold on. Let's take a message break. It is time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this one listener mail about listener mail. Hey, guys. I'm currently on the 7th train heading to Queens from Manhattan after a long day of working as an auditor at a CPA firm. As usual, I'm listening to your podcast. This time it was the death mask episode, and you were concluding with some listener mail. In this instance, it was from Martha regarding peak oil. And I think Martha was talking about the auditing of oil reserves. And he says this to Martha. She was correct for the most part regarding the audit of oil reserves held by entities whose stocks may be publicly traded on the stock market. Just one thing I was so aghast by that I felt I needed to type this from my phone as I'm on the train. Still, the SEC does not perform any audits of its own on these companies. It is firms like the one I work for that audit these companies, albeit under SEC guidelines, actually PCAOB Public Company Audit Oversight Work Guidelines, if you want to get that in. The SEC may perform a type of audit, but when they do, they are usually auditing an audit firm or an audit that has already been done by an audit firm as part of some kind of investigation. What? So they'll audit and audit like the SCP doesn't audit. I got you. I actually been through one of these audits, and it is no fun at all. For some reason, it seems everyone whom works at the SEC is what you stereotypically picture as an accountant with no humor. Plus, the word audit loses all meaning when you hear it. That's right. I digress, though, guys. If you pull up a ten K annual filing for any public company, you can see in the audit opinion the audit firm which performed the audit for that particular year. Hope that clears things up. Henry Gomez. And Henry, I'm not sure if that cleared it up, but if I was an accountant, I would probably say yes. Clear things up. Very nice. Thank you very much, Henry. That was very nice of you to correct somebody who is correcting us. Yeah, and I'm sorry you got to take that stinky seven train. Man. Is that a terrible train. Dude, that one is like the old red train that looks like it's about to fall off. It's like the midnight meat train. Yeah. Have you seen that? No. What's midnight? Meet that midnight meat train. It's got Vinny Jones and Bradley Cooper in it. It's actually based on a Clive Barker short story because that's an old joke between me and my friend PJ, who met up, at least at Cookouts. Famously, PJ's a great chef, home chef, but he would typically take so long, we referred his meals as midnight meat. And then I made a joke about cold cooking a steak one time. It took, like, 24 hours. Yeah, no, this is different, okay? This is not a slam on PJ. No, we love the midnight. If you have anything you want us to know, if you want to correct somebody who's corrected us or you just want to say hi, whatever, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com. Stuff you should know, you can send us an email to stuff. Podcast@discovery.com and Chuck. They can always find us on our website, right? That's right. Stuffyystoe.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.com. Hey. Netflix streams TV shows and movies directly to your TV, computer, wireless device, or game console. You can get a 30 day free trial membership. Go to www dot netflix. Comstand up now. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. The sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, my Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, my Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarra and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you 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 you're 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 Twinkies Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-twinkies-work | Twinkies have a reputation for being so processed that they can last for years and years, but they're not as hardy as you'd expect. Uncover the sweet story of Twinkies in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Twinkies have a reputation for being so processed that they can last for years and years, but they're not as hardy as you'd expect. Uncover the sweet story of Twinkies in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:10:50 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=14, tm_min=10, tm_sec=50, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=190, tm_isdst=0) | 24328637 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from houseoffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to arguably the most important podcast chuck Brown. Right. And I will ever record. I'm Josh Clark. This is stuff you should know. And, brother, I am jack up me three. You ready? Yeah. I'm speaking for Jerry, since she's the Marcel Marcel of our group. Yeah. She always wears his white gloves. I hate mine. I actually don't hate mines. It's just a cliche to say you hate mines. Mines are cool. It says who? The mines are cool. Yes. I just said it. Jerk. Chuck and I have clearly been eating far too many Twinkies in preparation of this. Yes, we have. Yes. Chuck, what do you know about the Twinkie? Let's talk about Twinkies. Let's talk about Twinkies. Everyone knows the Twinkie is a popular junk food snack cake. Yes. Legendary junk food snack cake. I would say. I would say legendary as well. I'm glad we're doing something light like this. Lighting very nice things. And creamy. Yeah. Chuck, how long is a Twinkie? Twinkie is four inches long. How wide is a twinkie? Inch and a half. Did you know that originally it was first invented it was made with banana cream filling. Indeed. Let's get into this, buddy. Okay. Those are just some teasers. All right, so the Twinkie was first invented in the 1930s. Yes. Continental Bakeries. Yes. The vice president of Continental Bakeries, which is already doing business as hostess, which we know and love, is the maker of Twinkies and what I consider to be the greatest snack food of all time. The Crumb Cake. Oh, really? Are you a fan? Oh, my gosh. I like the nutty bar. The Little Debbie Nutty bars. We're talking hostess here, buddy. Okay. Yeah. They will assassinate you. They're like Matteo pink balls. One of those snow. Snowballs. High rate. All right, so back in 1930, the vice president of Continental Bakery is a guy named James what is it? James Dewar. Not a Scotch maker. His brother could have been. Sure. He decided that the company's idle machinery that was used to make strawberry filled little shortbread fingers was the brand name could be put to better use. Right. Well, the machines were idle because seasonal. Yes, seasonal, because strawberries only grow certain times of the year. Right. So the rest of the year, they would just sit there. Sure. And this bug Doer, and he decided to do something about it. So he came up with a little yellow cake filled with creamy filling, creamy frosting, if you are, that could be made year round. And apparently, on his way to a marketing meeting for this snack cake, he passed a billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes, which, I got to tell you, I would never buy shoes called Twinkle Toe Shoes. Oh, sure you would. You'd dream, sailor. Totally would. And that was it. He had the name right there and Twinkies were born. There's always a cute story behind names like that. Any time the words twinkle and toes are put together, it's a cute story. Sure. Yeah. So Twinkies are born, and as I said, they were made with banana cream filling, right. For a while, yeah. Until World War II. Yeah. I thought, this is pretty interesting. They quit doing that because there was a shortfall of bananas during the war. Yeah. I had no idea. No. I can see rubber and iron and steel. Yes, I know. Men. Maybe it's from all the banana bombs we were dropping. Like confetti missiles. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So they replaced the banana with vanilla frosting. Right. And it stuck. Yeah, it definitely stuck. Although every once in a while, hostess released the banana flavored Twinkie like a limited run, and every time they did, they noticed sales increased 20%, which is pretty substantial. And now it's permanent as of 2007. You can get the next picture. Yeah. Good. Let's talk about the early Twinkie and the pure goodness. That was the early twinkie. Yeah, in the early days, Josh, it was made with eggs, milk, butter, as you would expect it to be, because it was cake. Right. And it had a shelf life. The problem there was it had a shelf life of what, like, two days. Two days. So the salesman had to rotate the stock every two days, and that was cool because they tasted good. But dealer said, I'm not making as much money as I could. Chuck, can you imagine how divine a Twinkie made with, like, real butter and milk and eggs would be? It's called cake. Yeah. But cake with, like, real vanilla frosting in that shape, too. Yeah, that would be great. I would love for someone to make and send me a real original Twinkie. Sure. That would be awesome. Yes. I just zoned out for a second thinking about that. I know. Seriously. Glazed over. Okay. So these days, it's actually up to 39 ingredients, and most of them come out of labs, right? Yeah. Unfortunately, there's a lot of chemicals going on. You've got, like, yellow number five. There's still sugar in it. Plenty of sugar. Yeah. Scorn syrup, of course. Our old friend. And there's also bleached wheat flour. Sugar and flour are the two biggest ingredients in it. Right, right. Monoglycerides and diglycerides have replaced the eggs. Yeah. Which act as emulsifiers. Emulsifiers. They stabilize the cake batter and enhance the flavor, apparently, for the filling they use to achieve the same. And polysorbate 60, which does much emulsifies. The frosting. Same thing. Yeah. And there's hydrogenated shortening instead of butter. Although there is artificial butter flavor and artificial vanilla flavor, and both of those are actually made from petroleum. I know. Yeah. When I read that, I was a little taking it back, to be honest. Yeah. Do you eat Twinkies now anymore? Well, you know, I don't eat at all, but I do occasionally enjoy Twinkie, for sure. I haven't had a Twinkie in a long time. Do you treat yourself? And I'm not opposed to it. I'll down the Ben and Jerry's. And I'm not opposed to eating fattening goodness. I know. I think part of it is Twinkies are associated with youth. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I'm telling you, go back and eat a Twinkie. You'll love yourself. I will. My mom used to make strawberry shortcake with Twinkies. Nice. Yeah, it was. Good move. I'll bet. Very nice 70s dessert, too. Before the tea party. Load the kids up with a Twinkie strawberry shortcake. Apparently, she's not the only one to experiment with Twinkies. I have a Twinkies cookbook at home, actually. All sorts of crazy stuff in there yet. You should have brought that in. I should have. I don't have the kind of foresight that you expect me to have. You had the deep fried Twinkie? I used to make them and sell them at this beer festival last couple of years. Oh, dude. I can make a fried Twinkie like you would not believe. Well, how do you do that? It's incredibly simple. So you have, like, a VAT of oil? Peanut oil, maybe. Peanut oil is the best. It's the worst for you, but it tastes the best. And you just take, like, pancake batter or fry batter. Right. And you make the batter up and you just dip the Twinkie in the batter. Throw it in the deep fryer. Like on a sticker. I just throw it in there. Wow, man, that sounds good. Pull it out. Throw some powdered sugar on there. Oh, my God. You'll see? God. It's like a funnel cake. Turbo funnel cake is what it really is. No, not at all. Not at all. No. Okay. It's like a funnel cake with a Twinkie inside. It's the greatest thing you'll ever have. And I can make a good fried Oreo, too. Really? You never cook for me. I will sometime. You'll have to come over. We'll shave some years off our life. Seriously. Excuse me. Should we talk about the process of how they make it in the factory? That's kind of cool. Yeah. So, Josh, we're in the twinkie factory. This is Jerry's big chance to add some sound effects. Okay. We're in the twinkie fact. You look good in a haircut, by the way. I appreciate that. What they do is they have these metal pans in the shape of Twinkie shaped hole. Upside down. Twinkies are based on what you would consider upside down. The golden brown bottom is actually the top side. Yeah, it's brown. There's a lot. I actually used to hear that they weren't, in fact, baked brown and that was added color. Not true. They are baked brown on the bottom. Indeed. Yeah. You talked to the widow of James Doer about that, didn't you? I did, personally. So they throw the battery in there. It's baked at cool 350 Fahrenheit for nine to twelve minutes. Cool. 353, 50 after. Cools. The famous three holes in the bottom of the Twinkie, those are from the manufacturing process. They're cream filling injectors. They stick those three things in there and squirt in the cream, which I wish they'd just squirt that in my mouth. So you just want to lay down on the conveyor belt and go down the Twinkie line, have the stuff squirted in your mouth straight from the try injection. Yeah, that sounds good. So that's pretty much it, man. They seal it airtight in the package, and apparently the sealing process is really where the preservation comes in. Right. Because, Chuck, if there's anything that everyone agrees on with Twinkies, it's that they will last indefinitely. Not true. No, it isn't. And actually, there's only one ingredient in the Twinkie that's added specifically to preserve it, and that's sorbic acid. Right. There are some preservative properties of some of the other ingredients, but ultimately, there's only one added ingredient that's meant to preserve it. And it's actually, like you said, the airtight package that makes it Twinkie last. Yeah. And there are all sorts of urban myths about the one I like best is that they're still selling the original run of Twinkies. Yeah. Which actually is clearly a lie, because they would be banana flavored. Yeah, true. But the hostess company says that Twinkies have a shelf life for 25 days. Yeah. Not 25 years. No. But yeah, there have been some experiments that indicate to the contrary. Right. There's actually these kids who very recently, this last school year, out in Wallowa County, Oregon, two little kids, Logan Waldron and CJ. Horn, were talking about whether or not Twinkies could last indefinitely, how long they could last. And they have a very encouraging bus driver, who, I must say, based on this picture, is arguably the best looking and most stylish bus driver on the planet. And her name is Lisa Morris. And she said, you know what, why don't you guys do a scientific experiment? That's a bus driver? I know. It's quite a babe, I know. I must say. I know. She encouraged them to conduct their own experiment. So they put a double pack, my favorite kind, Twinkies, in a mayonnaise jar, closed it and put it in a rock crib, which I'm not sure what that is. Right. But they basically buried it. And the kids were planning on doing it until they were 18. Oh, really? But they're like nine. Exactly. But she kept encouraging them to wait at least until the end of the school year, and they did. So nine months later, they popped it open, ate the Twinkies one each. Were they fine? They both said they were fine. One kid said he got a belly ache from it. The other kid said he was fine. So they are now encouraging teachers around the country, science teachers, to conduct similar experiments. But yeah. So as far as these two are concerned, a Twinkie shelf life is at least nine months greater than 25 days. Yeah, well, I know you just mentioned the double pack. I know why you like the double pack. Because there's two of them? No, because of the little cardboard in there. And you can scrape the little cakey goodness off the cardboard and eat it. I just lick it off the cardboard. It's like the cheese paper on a cheeseburger. Really? You eat all that stuff? Oh, dude. Who doesn't take the paper from a McDonald's cheeseburger and scrape the cheese off of it and eat it? People who want to live. Shut up. You've had McDonald's in your day, pal. Twinkie, man. Twinkie the Kid. Let's talk about Twinkie. The kid. Nice way. I just totally shocked you with that. Yeah, I had a Twinkie the Kid T shirt when I was oh, my God. Kill for one of those. It was awesome. I wish you still had it. Yeah, I'm sure they're still out there. Yes. I wonder why Twinkie the Kid is famous if you've never seen it, and I'm sure everyone has. It was a cowboy motif. Lasso and a hat and boots. And I saw a dude online today that had a Twinkie the Kid tattoo. That's a pretty cool tattoo, my friend. Yeah, that definitely beats TADs or a dolphin or a turtle. Sunburst, barbed wire around your arm. Good night. Yeah. So twinkie the kid. Cool tattoo. Even cooler T shirt. I remember seeing Twinkie the Kid ads in between axes of Thunder the Barbarian. Right. And hanker for a Hunk of cheese. Remember that? What was that? Blue House rock? No, it was like the nutrition people. Yeah, exactly. I got a hanker for a hunk pocket full of something. Yes, because a hunk of cheese is really healthy for you. Yeah. That was clearly the dairy association. Yeah. So, Chuck, let's talk about Twinkies and pop culture. Yeah, this is good stuff. Well, no, not pop culture. Real culture. History. Yeah. My friend, have you heard of Twinkie Gate? Yeah, go ahead and break that one down. That's good. So there was a guy who was 71 back in 1985, was running for a place on the Minneapolis City Council. His name was George Belair, and he was actually indicted for bribery because, I guess a candidate for him he was the lone candidate for it. He hosted it. No, he provided coffee, Koolaid and Twinkies for the senior groups that were there. Right. And he was indicted for bribery. Trying to bribe constituency. They didn't call it Koolaid. Gate. No. And I was thinking about that, too. I think Koolaid had its run. One pop with Jonestown. Sure. Yeah. We'll forever be enshrined with Koolaid. It's in the lexicon now. Drink the Koolaid. Definitely. It's got its own thing. Sure. Twinkies are much more versatile. True. It's such an ironic twist to crime, but that's not the only crime that they've been associated with. Well, can I cover this one, please? In 1979, Dan White of San Francisco famously shot and killed Harvey Milk. Was he a city councilman? He was. And a supervisor. Yeah, supervisor. The first openly homosexual public office holder in the country was Barry Milk. And the mayor also got capped, too. Mayor also got capped. And Dan White, who did the deed and the famous Twinkie defense was used in his case because they said he was under severe depression at the time. And as evidence, they used the fact that he uncharacteristically was wolfing down Twinkies and junk food. Junk food. Apparently Twinkies was mentioned. It does show up in the court transcripts, but it was one witness who used it in passing. And actually, Ding Dongs and Ho HOS were mentioned way more. But, yeah, the guy was apparently homicidal depression brought on by a poor diet. And it actually worked rather than first. This was premeditated murder. He got manslaughter in eight years. That was it. Yeah. And that the media ran with it and the Twinkie defense, but you still hear it. But again, why not the Ding Dong defense? It's even funnier. The Hoho defense. Sure. That would be confused with Santa Claus brother. You know why? Because twinkies are an American icon. You know who says so? Me and you and former President Bill the Lady Killer Clinton. Really? Yeah. He actually selected a Twinkie to be placed in the millennium time capsule in 1999 alongside the complete works of Louis Armstrong, the works of William Faulkner, the state flag of Hawaii. There's a Twinkie in there, too. So in 100 years, people will really be able to find out just how long the shelf life is for Twinkies. How about half a twinkie? Nice. That was my Clinton that evening. That was a little perfect. Yeah, you got the thumb out your teeth. So that is the twinkie defense in Harvey Milk. No, that was the Millennium Council. Oh. Yes. We've moved on. Millennium Falcon. Thanks for coming, Chuck. Should we talk about the twin K-I-E-S project? I can't wait. Pretty cool. Rice University, right? Yeah. Rice University in 1995. So it was kind of a while ago. These students, as college students, are so fun. It was called the Test with inorganic noxious cakes with a K in extreme situations, which spells out twinkle. Twinkies. Yes. And let's go over a couple of things that they did with Twinkies. You tell them yours first. Okay. I want to do the water test. What they wanted to do was see what happened when you put a Twinkie in water, straightforward enough, let it sit there. And they said this, and this is on their website. As soon as the Twinkie was placed in the water, it swelled to approximately twice its normal size. A quick, tactile observation indicated that the Twinkie immediately began to lose its structural integrity. The color of the Twinkie paled to an offwhite color, while the water below the twinkie turned a dark yellow brown while the water above the twinkie remained clear, which is interesting. And they showed pictures. So basically, they left it in there for 48 hours. They said the creamy filling somehow oozed out of the center and collected on the surface of the water. And basically it turned into a lump of goo by the end of it. What was the water conclusion? The conclusion? Actually, I don't have the observation. I think the observation was it turned into a lumpy goo of mess in the water. Got you. You got my other favorite one. My second favorite dropping off the building. Did you print it out? No. You do that one. I got another one. Okay. Yeah. They did the gravity test on two twinkies yes. To find out whether or not twinkies are subject to gravity. I think they would float up on that vehicle. So they released twinkies off the 6th floor. And I liked the picture of the twinkie circle drop. And they said that upon impact, there was a loud split sound. A small crack opened on one side of the twinkie. There was no noticeable change in the control. So they dropped the twinkie again. The same split sound was heard. Then they dropped the same twinkie. Yeah. And I love this line. The fissure in the side of the twinkie widened. Again, no noticeable change. And basically the twinkie and the control twinkie didn't really completely split open. It just kind of some of the stuff oozed out. Nice. But they are affected by gravity. I did have the conclusion in this one. However, the reaction on impact is much smaller than expected and they maintain a good deal of structural integrity from such a lofty fall. Yeah. Six stories. Yeah. That's not bad. My favorite, actually, was that they wanted to find out whether twinkies were sentient or not. And they decided to run this test last because they had killed a lot of twinkies, as they put it. And they didn't want to know that they were sentient while they were dropping them off six storey building or drowning them. So they actually administered the Turing Test which is normally used to test whether or not a computer is developed in artificial intelligence. Right. If you put a person in a computer in another room or whatever and you direct questions to both of them simultaneously and both answer, if you can't tell the difference, then the computer has developed artificial intelligence. Okay. So they conducted a test on a sophomore at the college and a twinkie and they put them behind a sheet and couldn't see who was who. And they asked certain questions like they asked to the twinkie and the students. Yeah. Okay. So question one was what would you describe as the purpose of your existence? And subject B, which was the guy? The answer was to woo women and Subject A in parentheses. No answer. And it just kind of goes on like that. They wanted to know how the both of them felt about their mother. They did some free association, like the word health prompted the answer, sex for free association with subject B. The word spam prompted no answer from subject A, and so on. So they determined that Twinkies are not, in fact, sentient, that they do not have intelligence. That is a relief. Wouldn't that be unnerving? Yeah. As a vegetarian, I think. Or a vegan, you would have to stop eating Twinkies. Oh, I'm not a vegan. No, of course not. Okay. You're a beef eater. Yeah, I am. So, Chuck, most Twinkies ever eaten by a person, you want to guess who it is? Jerry, our producer. She's close. Okay. She's very close. Actually, there is a guy who is 89, and I believe he lived in Indiana, and his name is Lewis Browning. He's been eating Twinkie a day since 1941. Really? He's up to 20,000. Wow. Dwarfed by the creator of the twinkie, James Doer. Oh, really? He lived to be 88, and he ate an estimated 40,000 Twinkies in his lifetime. Wow. Yeah. Not bad. Not bad at all. So hats off to both of those men. And actually, I was thinking maybe I should start eating a Twinkie a day and see what happens. You know what they say, Josh. A Twinkie a day keeps the doctor away. That's not true. It's not true because they're really not great for you. But I think anything in moderation, you don't go nuts with the Twinkies, you'll probably be all right. Chuck's final thought on twinkies. Which means Twinkies are done, right? I'm done. Okay. I'm done, too. So we'll be done with Twinkies. Now I really, actually want to go eat a Twinkie. Yeah. We should have brought them up here. Agreed. I told you to. And you're too cheap to go buy them for us. It could have expensed it, too. Yeah. All right. Well, maybe afterward. Sure. Okay, so Chuck, Twinkies is done, which means it's listener mail time. Josh, I'm going to call this listener mail from Amsterdam. All right. One of my favorite places, as you know, idea. This comes from Robin in Portland, Oregon. And Robin was recently in Amsterdam. Actually, the funny thing is, Robin's friend Stephanie wrote in and told us the story and said, my friend Robin is too chicken to write in for some reason. Weird. And I said, you know what? Tell Robin to write in. She'll make lesser mail with the story. Chuck delivers on his promises. So she did. I was recently in Amsterdam for a combination work holiday trip, staying in a fabulous top floor apartment. I took a break from work one day and wandered to the patio for some fresh air. And I realized I closed the patio door and locked myself out and was stuck. No phone, no keys, no jacket, no way down. And it was pouring down rain. Awesome. The neighbors heard my cries for help, they were able to log into my email account, find local apartment, contacts, phone number, and throw me their cell phone to make the call. Luckily, the contact had a spare key and was able to let her out in 5 hours after she gets off work. So I hunkered down in a small corner of the patio. Apparently, she had a little space, like a two foot by two foot space where she wasn't getting rained on for 5 hours waiting to be rescued. And did I mention that by stroke of luck, I had my iPad with me and I just downloaded several months worth of stuff you should know silver lining, exclamation, all caps. In between learning all about face transplants, exploding legs, deja vu, flirting, rigor mortis, I spent time stretching, doing jumping jacks, weeding the plants, and taking short naps. It was one of the best 5 hours spent doing absolutely nothing. Rarely do I take a step back and just have the time to do that. Josh and Chuck, you both keep me informed, kept me informed, entertained, insane. And thanks to our day together, I was able to flex my intellectual muscle by holding my own on who owns the ocean debate with other international travelers. So she says her friend Steph turned us on to turn her onto the show. And thanks a lot, keep up the good work. And she has a loyal listener. So she was stuck out on a porch in Amsterdam, and we got her through that's. Excellent. Pretty cool. Excellent. What's her name? Pretty cool? Robin of Portland, Oregon. Robin. All right. Thanks for writing in, Robin. And if anyone else out there wants to share your story about an interventionist god forcing you into a situation where you have to listen to us, you can send us that in an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more housestepworks? Check out our blogs on the Housetopworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Posted 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." | ||
8a77cb78-4a58-11e8-a49f-af772dface6a | SYSK Selects: How Aphrodisiacs Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-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? | 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? | Sat, 20 Oct 2018 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=293, tm_isdst=0) | 20819051 | audio/mpeg | "Howdy everybody. Happy Saturday morning. I hope you have watched your cartoons and have a belly full of sugary cereal, because right now you're about to listen to our episode on April. Theseiqs for March 12. A nine. That's right, everyone, lock the kids away. Don't let them hear, because this one's all about food and drink that makes you what did the British say, Randy? I believe so. Please do enjoy, everyone aphrodisiacs right now. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi, 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, 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 powdered 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 Eurogenital 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. So, of course, I 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. So 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 be keeping cool, or 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. 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 are other physiological responses going on when you're sexually aroused. Right. That's what I'm told. Can you fill me in on this? Yeah, 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. Yeah. 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 be 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. 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. 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, prekamasutra, 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 belief 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, 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? Yeah. 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. And 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 a 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, then 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 fallas. 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 are supposedly an aphrodisiac. That 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, 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 ferrite or strength. Sure. 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 erectile function, and it was shown to increase scores. So enough said. Ginseng 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? Yeah. 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 eat a lasagna by yourself, it's probably not going to inspire you unless you're Henry VIII or something, I guess. Right? Well, yeah. 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 phenylthylamine and serotonin. So these things are actually an abundant supply. And we can 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. Exploding 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 aphrodisiac. 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. Doctor Hirsch doctor Allan Hirsch of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Center in Chicago. Yes, 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. You could overcome a lot of sluggishness with that much blood infusion. Right. But that kind of to me in Thanksgiving was when you pumpkin pie. A lot of times that flies right in the face of eating turkey and watching football and stuffing 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 aroused 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. You have 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 hit 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. 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 vemro 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 spray 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 vemoro nasal Oregon, 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 effort easyx, but the scientific community, the FDA, as you said, does not support it. And the scientific community thinks there's also 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 N justifies the means. In that case, placebos work. Yeah. Well, good. Okay, now is it listening to meal time? Yes. Let's get on with it. Josh, I think we are going to pull the train into Limerick Junction. Yeah. I like this trend. We went from haiku to limerick. I don't know what's next? I don't know. An epic poem, maybe? No, we're going to get the iliad from some listener. Now, just a couple of limericks here. Ryan of Victoria, British Columbia. Fine Canadian friend. Have you ever been there? No. That's one of my favorite cities on the planet. I've heard it's awesome. It is awesome. It's very cool. Everybody's very friendly. It's like a tiny city with, like, mini skyscrapers and everything and just 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 Haikus, but haiku's 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. Yeah, college town. The podcasting host, 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. No. You also may be the first person on the planet ever used Schmuck and limerick. Oh, no way. It's huge in limericlan. 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 could probably expect 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 high 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@howtofworks.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 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, 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." | |
453c4280-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-f3fc210eadf8 | Short Stuff: The Brain-Bladder Connection | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-the-brain-bladder-connection | How much do you know about the brain-bladder connection? In about 15 minutes, it'll be a lot more. | How much do you know about the brain-bladder connection? In about 15 minutes, it'll be a lot more. | Wed, 26 Dec 2018 16:19:23 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=16, tm_min=19, tm_sec=23, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=360, tm_isdst=0) | 13580037 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the shorty, short stuff. You short guy. Short guys and gals, everybody's so short because this is short stuff, including us, josh, Chuck, Jerry, we're all short. Are you going to make that same similar type joke on all of these? That's no joke, Chuck. You know what Randy Newman said about short people? What? I got no reason to live, remember? What, you don't know that song? No. That just took such a left turn. I was not expecting that. People got no reason. Really? Man, that was a top ten hit, my friend. You're crazy when I'm telling you I had to be the 70s. Okay, look it up. The only top ten hit of his that I know is I Love La. We love it. That's a great song. It sure is. All right, so let me ask you something. Have you ever gone home yes. And felt just like, all right, I'm having a good day. I'm home. This is great. Sure. Put the key in the door, and as soon as you start that process, you're like, OMG, yes. I have to pee really bad. I cannot express to you how many times this happens to me for real. So you have this? Yes, clearly. And I noticed that it mostly affects women. I'm like, Hom, whatever, but I definitely have it big time. So much so that I've trained myself, because there's clearly something going on with the brain where I'm like, oh, I have so much further before I could possibly pee. It's not happening in the next 10 seconds, for sure. So might as well just calm down there, bladder. And it actually works. Yeah. So that is a real thing called Key in Lock Syndrome or Urge urinary incontinence. And like you said, it apparently does affect more women than men. And if you really have this to a decent to large degree, you kind of have to plan around it, even. Yeah, so I didn't understand this. Now I totally get, like, those Poise ads and Depends ads. I get it now. Apparently, as women age, they tend to become slightly more incontinent. Right? But as you said, it's not strictly women. I think a quarter to a third of all Americans at any given point in time have some sort of incontinence problem. Not just this one, but if you start to understand what's behind it, it actually makes a lot more sense. But basically, you have what's called the floor of your pelvic muscle, or your pelvic floor is basically what it is, and that is what holds your guts and everything up. It supports basically everything inside your abdomen. And it's like a trampoline of muscle that all that stuff sits in, and it has a few holes in it. It has one for your urethra, one for your anus, and then if you're a woman, it has one for your vagina, too. Right. So normally that muscle is pretty tight and it's holding all that stuff closed. And then when you need to pee or poop or something, your brain is like, all right, open up, you're going number one, you're going number two. Here comes a baby, that kind of thing. Sure. And over time, this muscle can kind of get weaker, get looser. Once you have a child, that can really stretch your muscles out. And so as a result of this, it's harder to hold in peak, especially if you get a sudden urge to go. Yeah. And like you said, as you age, this can increase. One of the reasons I think it primarily affects women is because childbirth and pregnancy can play a pretty big role in this. Right. And interestingly, that's the same as for C section as just a good old fashioned vaginal birth. That's really weird. Yeah. Because I would think it has to do with I don't know, I think there's pressure no matter what during pregnancy. Right. But it does say that childbirth, even a C section, they're impacted. Well, then it must just be for the whole pregnancy, just the baby sitting on that trampoline of muscle. It's got to stretch it out a little up and down, for sure. Yeah, it's like settle down there, junior. All moms say while they're pregnant. So pregnancy, childbirth, age, some other little more serious causes, although they're not as common as those are, like infection or bladder cancer, bladder stones for men prostate problems. Right. Did you know what the prostate does? Do I know what the prostate does? That's my question that's out there on the table right now. I do, but I don't know right now. Okay, I'll tell you at one point. So you know seamen I'm sure well acquainted. All right. So you know like the sperm that's in semen? Sure. You know the other stuff that's in semen that's made by your prostate. And women have something, too, called the skiing gland, and it makes up basically that for women. Okay, so semen minus the sperm. So your prostrate and your skins gland are male and female stuff makers. Boy, we're dancing around this one for sure. And I didn't see it anywhere. But I would guess if the skiing gland is affected too, it could have an impact on incontinence, for sure. But also medicines, two different kinds of medications can make you pee yourself. Well, yeah, and here's the thing, too. A lot of times they don't necessarily come in and say it's this one thing that's causing it. So a lot of researchers now think maybe it can be a combination of things. It's not just the bladder. Yeah. There's clearly a brain connection because you can tell your brain, no, it's not time, settle down, and your brain will be like, oh, sorry, false alarm, just wait a little longer to your bladder. Well, unless you've crossed that threshold, then there's no turning back. Then it's just like, I wonder what that's all about. Actually. What is the threshold where you're like, no, there is no bringing it back. I don't know. I'm about to pee my pants if I don't find a bathroom. Because, really, other than having to take a shower afterward, all your breaking is like decorum. Sure. I think what it is is your brain's weighing the violation of decorum versus the horrible feeling that it's having to endure. It's just like, I'm going with this one. So long decorum. But it's enough of an embarrassing problem that people do seek treatment. But unfortunately, from what I understand and from what the article that you sent says, is that there's real low level attention paid to solving this. But luckily, there's kind of like this rising school of thought that's like, no, we need to study this more. This is not enough. You can't just tell women to go do Kegel exercises and don't worry about it, or that they have to wear poise pads for the rest of their life. That's not a solution. That's not an answer. So let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about what you can do when you're about to pee yourself because you are opening your door. All right, so the bladder I'm curious. We should maybe do a full one on the bladder at some point, because it's really interesting to me. I've always been a person that I feel like I pee more than your average person. Me, too. You definitely do. But yours is for one reason. It's because you have a constant flow of liquids coming into your body. Not just liquids, but coffee, too. Chocolate is a diuretic. Yeah. Kathleen is yeah. Emily also is a frequent urinator. And I've always just suspected that it's not like people say, I have a small bladder. I don't know if that's true or not. I think it's not so much the size of the bladder, but maybe how it relates to the brain. That's kind of what it seems to be. The prevailing wisdom that's developing now is that there's something going on with the brain bladder connection. Yeah. So that's what happens when everything's going great. The bladder sends a signal to the brain and says, hey, brain, you might want to get this meatbag to a toilet soon. Right. Because I have to release, and it's going to happen at some point no matter what. Right. There also seems to be possibly some connection to vasopressin, because the brain floods the bladder with vasopressin to keep it from peeing while you're sleeping as a child, as you're developing and you're not paying the bed any longer, that's because your vasopressin levels are rising throughout your lifetime. And I wonder if they start to go down after your age, and that actually has an impact on it as well, maybe. So it's possible. Chuck all right. Your brain gets the signal that your bladder says it's full. If you're a dude, you can run to the urinal, which I would love to have one of those in my house, by the way, but Emily said, no way. She was like, you live in a house full of women. We're not building a urinal for you. Well, you're like, we can have both. One right next to each other. So you run to the urinal and when you get there, your brain sends a signal back that says, all right, we're here. Release the urine. Or if you can't get to a urinal or a bathroom, your brain says, sorry, bladder, but you're going to have to hang in there for a bit. Yeah. That's it. That's peeing. Yeah, pretty much. Do you remember we talked about mixturition syncopy and I called it syncop? Yes. What was that? It's where you faint after you pee. Oh, right. Because they think there's like changes in your level of either vasopressin or norepinephrine or some chemical that tells your muscles to relax around your bladder, causes you to faint. Yeah. So what can you do? You can do keggles if you're a woman or a man, basically, I think, from what I understand, the first thing you want to do is go to your doctor. Sure. And this specialist, his name was Dr. Philip P. Smith, and he's one of these new thinkers about this kind of thing. And he said, if your doctor just tells you to do keggles or get used to wearing pads, get yourself another doctor, go see somebody else, because there's other stuff you can do. But if your doctor is worth their salt, they're going to say things like, yes, do keggles. Try to follow, basically a p regimen. Yeah. Schedule. Yeah. I didn't realize this. And this person had the greatest quote. We have all heard that voiding on a schedule rather than just when you have to go is better. I've never heard that neither. I think the specialist needs to get out of the clinic once in a while. I remember when my dad sat me down when I was ten and said, you know what fun? You pee at nine, noon, three, seven and ten and everything will be great. That's supposedly what you want to do is go every 3 hours, whether you have the urge or not, and you're training your body to be able to hold it, and then paradoxically, you want to hold it for an extra five minutes, then maybe an extra ten minutes. Because as this article says, it and I've heard the opposite. Stretching your bladder actually allows it to hold more, so you'll have the urgency less frequently over the day. But I don't know about that one. I'm not banking on it. Do you ever go to one of those dumb college bars that had the thing where beer is free until you pee? No. Yes. It was the thing at some bars from like five to seven, beer was free for everybody until the first person in the bar peed. That's a lot of stress. And so, of course, there's always some stupid frat boy peeing in a beer pitcher under the table just so we could drink a little more. Where was this? I mean, we both went to college in the same town. I think they had them at Georgia Southern. I never went to one in Athens because I wouldn't have wanted that pressure, because I would have been like, yeah, I got to pee, guys. Enough said with Georgia Southern. Yeah. So train your bladder. If you have to pee, try and save it off even longer, five minutes at a time, then maybe ten minutes, and before you know it, you get to that front door and you're just fine. You're just going to poop yourself, which is a whole other short stuff episode altogether. That's it. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go onto our website. It's called Stephaniel.com. You can find all of our social links there. And you can also send us an email, send it off to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com." | |
How Meth Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-meth-works | You know how when you do a lot of crystal methamphetamine you get meth mouth, where your teeth decay? Of course you don't! So check out this in-depth look on the most widely-abused hard drug in the world. Even tweakers will learn something new. | You know how when you do a lot of crystal methamphetamine you get meth mouth, where your teeth decay? Of course you don't! So check out this in-depth look on the most widely-abused hard drug in the world. Even tweakers will learn something new. | Thu, 15 Nov 2012 20:43:41 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=20, tm_min=43, tm_sec=41, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=320, tm_isdst=0) | 45227011 | 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. Yeah, 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 Mobro cocharlesbryant. And that is my page. Or just go to the Mob ember 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 Cocharldbryt. 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. With me, as always. As Charles W, Chuck Bryant. What up, yo? What up, yo? What up? Yo, I got my fat stacks. What is that? This is my Breaking Bad tribute. This is about math. Well, you knew that. Okay. I saw the first couple of episodes. I was like, yeah, it's pretty good, and I don't have time in my life for this right now. Yeah, I didn't either, but I'm marathoning it now, and I have gotten through halfway through season four. What did they just they're on real Time now. Oh, they started it. It's not over. I thought there was, like, a finale. I think it's in two parts. I think they did the first eight, and then they're taking a break, and then the last eight of season five. Got you. Oh, that's the end. I think that if I understand, that is the end of the series. Well, why don't you tell everybody what happens at the end? I don't know yet. Let's tell everybody what happens at the end of seasons one, two, three. You know, they cook a lot of meth and sell a lot of meth, and people get killed. Spoiler alert. Yes. And you end up talking like Jesse Pinkman if you watch the show. If you watch 18 episodes over the course of four days, you end up saying a lot of things like fat stacks and what up, yo? What is the fat stack? Money. Yeah. Okay. And I would call you the name for female dog, because he uses that word about eight times an episode. Really? Yeah. Gosh the potty mouth on TV today. That's cable. Yeah, we're cable. We don't say things like that. It's because we're clean, boys. You say female song. Oh, my God. I feel like we're on our way to baseball practice, so, yeah, we are talking meth. Breaking Bad is not the only have you ever seen The Salt and Sea? Yeah. Boy, that was good, man. Spun never saw that one, but I know that one's about meth. That was okay. Spun was a little tough to watch. It was one of those that we want to take you inside the mind of a meth user. Yeah. American Pie, two. Porkies Jaws, two. Yeah. All about meth. All of them about meth. Which is surprising because a lot of those aren't. But if you wanted to know everything there is to know about meth without using it, you have turned to the right place, because this episode covers math pretty hard, and that's my recommended version of getting to know about math, is to not use it ever and just to listen to us talk about how awful it is. But you're still going to feel pretty freezy by the end of this episode because my boy Tom Sheave yeah, good article. The Female Dog he wrote a great article on meth. I asked him once, I was like, what are some of your favorite articles? Because I was looking for ones to do episodes. He's like, Meth? He's like, it was really good. Then he launched into this discussion about the history of it, which is pretty fascinating. Awesome. So let's talk about myth. If you do a little bit of Myth, how long will you be high for? Chuck well, it depends what you call a little bit. But it could be anywhere from three to 6 hours to 24 hours. Or if you keep using it, you could be up for days. Yeah. Which is apparently something that people like to do. They don't just take a hit of meth. I've seen Hit. There was a Frontline microsite about the meth epidemic, and they kept calling it a hit. I'm like, what is a hit? Yeah. They call it the little baggie that you buy on the street. They call it something breaking bad. I can't remember. At Stack. No. That's the money you make from selling it. Female Dog no, that's everyone on the show. I don't know. Well, Frontline calls it a hit, but if you do math frequently, you're not going to just take a hit of meth and then be like, well, that's it for me. Yeah. I'm going to go to work and I'm fine. Don't ever need to do this again. You'll be like, oh, half hour has passed. I think I should do maybe a little more and then a little more. And now I'm up for eight days in a row. Yeah. And so my body blacks out and I fall over and get some sleep. Can we talk street names real quick? Sure. Because that's always fun. Meth. Crank. Speed. Chalk. Ice. Glass. Crystal. Crystal math. Tina really? Tweak. I lived in Yuma, Arizona, as you know. Lots of meth users there. You can tell. Oh, yeah, you tell me that one story. Was it like washing the car? Yeah. I'd be going home from a saloon at 230 in the morning and there's people out washing their cars under the flood life. And you're like, no, that's not really funny. I wonder what's going on there. Or they're gardening or something with floodlights on. Anyway, Yuma has got a lot of drugs. I mean, it's like a mile from Mexico and they called it Tweak. Tweak could be the noun for the drug. Like, get some Tweak. A tweaker was someone who did it. Tom sites a state that you eventually use as Tweaking. Yeah, that's why I took slight issue, because in Yuma they were just called Tweakers. It was called Tweaking. It's called Tweak. Do you want to tweak? It could be a verb or we are Tweaking. It's been quite some time since I've tweaked. It's been a week since I've tweaked. Yeah. Yeah. So they use Tweak for basically every facet. And I don't know if that was a regional thing or not. GAC. That's another one. Really? It's an ugly word. Crank was the old days. That was like that's when the motorcycle gang yeah. Biker crank. Yeah. Or trucker crank. Yeah. All those days, like we were in the Hell's Angels. We're taking greenies. Greenies. Were those pharmaceutical speed? Yeah. That's what until 2006, baseball players were very famous for taking greenies. Really? Yeah, big time. And a lot of athletes actually have been known to abuse amphetamines because it jacks you up and you win the race. Yeah. All right, that's enough for the street names. Okay. Meth happens to be highly addictive. And it's highly addictive following the same route that any stimulant addicts you with. I think that was correct. Ultimately, yeah. It stimulates your central nervous system to produce dopamine. And your brain is flooded with dopamine. So all of a sudden you have hyperactive movement because dopamine controls and regulates movement of your body. You feel really good because dopamine is related to feelings of euphoria and a sense of well being, and your emotions may become heightened. Yeah, thanks. I think so. The problem is, as with all drugs, really, is that you cannot naturally reproduce the sensation. So you do more of the drug and then, like with all drugs, your tolerance builds up and you need more of it to reach that sensation that you're striving for. Right. And there you have it. You're addicted to meth. Right. And the downside of that, aside from spending extra money to get to the same place, there's about a million downsides. Sure. Right. Is that if you ever do decide to quit meth, your dopamine receptors have shrunk. The number of dopamine receptors in your brain have shrunk. They don't function quite as well. And you are dopamine deficient, which means that when you get off the meth, which is the only thing that's really increasing your dopamine levels any longer, you're going to encounter sensations of utter hopelessness and depression. And that will likely feedback into a vicious cycle where you go back on to math so that you can not feel depressed or hopeless any longer. So it's very tough to quit that cycle of addiction. If you want to know more about addiction, we did a pretty cool yeah, that was a good one. Yeah. Episode on addiction itself. But yeah, it's pretty standard stuff. Yeah. The good news is your dopamine levels will, over time, reset to normal in pretty much all cases. I did see that one of these surveys are not surveys, but studies. They found that even a couple of years after ceasing it, the brain did not recover in some areas after two years of accidents. So there could be some, like, long lasting maybe not permanent I don't want to say that word, but long lasting effects. Right. If you get your hands on some meth and you're like, I'm going to do this, there are generally four ways that people take meth. The most common is to snort it. Second is to smoke it. Third is to shoot it. And then some people take it orally, which I can only imagine will cause stomach ulcers. Too sweet. Yes. Because this is really, really toxic stuff. Yes. At the very least, if you're smoking it, you will get something called meth mouth. Yes. And if you are not around your dinner right now yeah. You can go Google image pictures of meth mouth is tough to look at. Yeah. If you ever want to never, ever do math, then go look at pictures of that or Google math. Before. After. Oh, the mug shots. Yeah. Did you see the one that it's a public service announcement. This sheriff in Arizona, probably Oregon, probably Arizona, some sheriff's deputy started noticing people coming in that were on meth and realizing that this is like their second or third or fourth time in. And he started collecting their mug shots and created this basically like before and after of mug shots of people who do math. And the results are staggering because it also has the length of time in between the pictures. So sometimes two months, sometimes it's two and a half years, and people will age like, 1020 years and like a year or two just from doing meth hardcore. And meth mouth in particular is really, like Chuck says, extremely disgusting and hard to look at. I've seen some pictures of some pretty horrible stuff in my lifetime, and mathematics is really tough to look at. Yes. Your teeth, like, fall out. Crack and fall out. Yeah. First they decay, then they crack, then they fall out. And you might have sharp, jagged little stumps left with the exposed, darkened gums. And they're not quite sure exactly what causes meth mouth, but they think it's a combination of things. One, they think it's the harsh chemicals that the drug is made from. They think that the constriction of the capillaries and the blood vessels going to your mouth makes them wither and die. So then the tissue decays, and then they think that it also gives you dry mouth. So your saliva your saliva isn't present any longer to keep the harsh acids, the digestive acids that are present naturally in your mouth. The saliva is not there to wash it away, so they just grind out on your teeth. And then you yourself, while you're tweaking, are grinding your teeth too. So those four things in conjunction basically account for meth mouth, I think. Wow, it's nasty. Oh, it's nasty. For some nasty, your heart rate is going to really shoot up. You are going to be more alert. You're going to be breathing quicker. You'll be sweating a lot. You're going to be very talkative about everything, or you're going to go into a room and sit around and rock and think about yourself and your place in the world. You might feel superhuman or intelligent or empowered. You are none of those. Which is the ironic thing, right? And this one is the none of it's funny. This one is unusual. The mundane tasks. Like, you hear reports of methods who take apart their television and putting back together the day fascinated the whole time. But this won't spoil anything. There's a Breaking Bad scene where Jesse's trying to get some tweakers out of the house into the front yard, and he goes and gets a shovel, and the guy's like, what are you doing? He's like, I know. I can't remember what he called them. I know metheads. I know these female dogs. Yeah. And he went and started digging a hole in the front yard. And one of them just comes out and he's like, what are you doing? He's like, what's it look like? I'm digging this hole, man. I got to find it. And the guy just kind of wanders out looking, and then he's like, you mind taking over? And all of a sudden, this dude he's never met before, he's out there just digging this hole in China. And that's like the mundane task that you can get a method preoccupied with. And then we'll put together that puzzle for two days straight. Tom points out that makes us very alluring for somebody who, say, an assembly line worker who has to do repetitive tasks for 8 hours at a stretch. Once they do met, they're suddenly like, wow, this is really fascinating work that I do here, right? And also the time just went by lickety split, and now I can go do more math, right? Yeah. Let's go party. Because that's your workhead stash. You keep your party and stash at home. I would guess in addition to the mushmouth, one thing you'll see a lot on Breaking Bad and in the photos is these scabby lesions on your face. And I wasn't sure what that was. I thought it might be some with the chemicals or the burning. I think it's a little of that too. Well, it's also just scratching, right, scratching your face. Scratching your face. Scratching your face until I have a hole in my cheek. Yeah, but I think it starts out with an actual blemish from the chemicals. Like, how is it being excreted through your skin? So nasty. You're probably not going to ever get really fat. If you are addicted to meth, your appetite is not there. Yeah. So, yeah, a lot of people like that effect of it. If they feel fat but they don't really care about their teeth, then meth probably seems like a logical alternative. Well, and we'll get into this, but it was. Speed is what diet bills were for many years. And eventually, if you stay on the meth, you will eventually freaking lose your mind, basically. And you will hear things and see things and experience psychosis and hallucinations. And part of that is the drug at work, and part of that is beating your body up and being up for days and days. Eventually it will get the best of you. There is no rosy outcome if you're doing meth. What's nice about math is that it is all of Nancy Reagan's fibs and distortions and outright lies about other drugs brought to life. You really do murder your loved one with a claw hammer because you perceive them to be the devil. You really do scald your three year old niece to death with hot water because you've been up for too many days to know what you're doing. You do steal a tank and drive it through downtown San Diego and then are shot to death by the police. Like that stuff happens on meth. No lie, no exaggeration. Yeah, I think I meant to look this up. It seemed like recently I read a story about this lady that broke into Walmart, or not broke in, but was in Walmart. Walk through the door. Yes, I'm in Walmart. No. And started to try and cook meth in the Walmart. She was so messed up, she got all the ingredients and started the process. I might be wrong, but I remember reading that lately. Well, I think that's one of the problems. One of the big dangers with meth is there's so many addicts who know how to make the drug that they're addicted to. If you're a junkie, you can't just make your own heroin. Like you have to harvest poppies. Or if you are a cokehead, where you going to get your coca leaves. Meth is made from what used to be, at least until a couple of years ago, readily available ingredients. You know, it's sad. I looked up meth on Walmart and it happened more than once. No way. It was like a woman in St. Louis, a man in Ohio, like cooking, trying to cook meth inside of a store. That's crazy. While it was open or closed? I think the one lady was while it was open. It's probably not successful. Don't mind me. I'm just shopping for tents and epidurren. Right. So, okay, let's talk about the history of methamphetamines. It's really cool. It is pretty interesting. Yeah. There is a rumor that I'd heard years and years ago that it was the Nazis who came up with meth. And as I grew a little older, I was like, that's not true. And it turns out it isn't true. But what is true is that the Nazis supplied their infantrymen, their airmen, their sailors, everybody in the German military during World War Two with tons of methamphetamines. Like, they were jacked up on meth and fighting, which is the most psychotic idea I've ever heard yet. Nazis on meth. Sounds like some sort of speed metal band or something. Yeah, or like a weird musical. Yeah. It says this one, stat. In a four month period in 1940, german military was fed more than 35 million speed tablets. Say that one more time. 35 million speed tablets in a four month period, fighting the war. Can you imagine? And it wasn't just us, though. I mean, I'm sorry. It wasn't just them. No. Americans and the Brits were what was it? Dexadrene. Yeah. Dexadrene and benzodine. Yeah. And then the Japanese had their own kind of crank military grade. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. And so that was a big thing in World War II, was supplying the boys on the line with as much meth as they could possibly take and keeping them up and angry, keeping them eating less so they were consuming less food. Like that. Yeah. Think about that. Yeah. And just turning them into basically like literal fighting machines, almost. Wow. I did see that. Apparently the Germans tested it at first and found a soldier could march 55 miles in an hour before collapsing, basically, like, without stopping. Yeah. And the Germans had this thing called per vitan. Yes. Pervitan or per vitamin, probably pervitten. And that was their method. And apparently toward the end of the war, they were like, okay, the providing is working pretty good, but let's see what we can do to really jack these guys up. And the Nazi scientist came up with dix. Crazy. And it was three milligrams of Providence mixed with five milligrams of cocaine and five milligrams of a painkiller, all combined. And apparently this thing never got out or hit the street because the Allies the Allies invaded and probably did it all, whatever they could find because wow. And it went away. It was wiped off the face of the earth. Cocaine, meth, and painkiller and a pill. Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. But we should go back even further. Yeah. Prior to World War II, thousands of years ago, in China, in India and Pakistan, there were trees, a group of shrubs known as ephedra. They are yeah. They have an active ingredient that was isolated in 1887 by a Japanese chemist, ephedrine. It's an amphetamine. And shortly after that, somebody turned ephedrine into a methamphetamine by adding a methyl group to it. And then after that, somebody turned it into crystal methamphetamine, which is methane. Yeah. That's how long crystal meth has been around. Yeah. It just seems like a newer thing. Yeah. You would think, like, maybe from the 60s or 70s, maybe. Yeah. So after the war, after World War II, when everybody was on speed, people came back from the front saying, hey, we really like the speed. It became available publicly in Germany during the war. This stuff was available publicly. The pervitan. Yeah. But the dexygen and benzodream became available in the United States, I think, during the war as well. But it became very popular in the for, like you said, a number of reasons. Like dieting. Well, yeah. And before that, what's scary is the early drug days, we found out were just crazy, this crazy, weird land where they were making these new things like LSD and Tweak. And they say in the early days of crystal meth, they didn't even have a purpose yet, and people were just giving it to patients and just, hey, try this out. Like, you need to pick me up. This stuff seems to work pretty well. Yeah. Are you depressed? Like, try this stuff. Sure. You might not be so depressed. And then it got a little more specific, and they're like, all right, we can use it in antidepressants and diet pills. Right. Legitimate use. Sure. Benzodine and dexadreen came about. Jack Carwack wrote on the road. Is that true? Yes. I always heard that. Like a three day no, it was longer than three days. It was three weeks. I see. That was it. Yeah. But he taped together a bunch of paper and wrote it all the way down. Wow. And it turned out to be 120ft long. Oh, really? On the road was interesting. Yeah. Karawac definitely knew his way around a benny a model and whatever else. Sure. Yeah. He mentions them on the road. They're like a minor character, almost. Yeah, I read that. And Big Sur, while I was traveling through big Surg was awesome because it had that one moment in it where he's like, you can't fall off a mountain. Yeah, it was so awesome. It makes such utters, like, sure, you can fall down a mountain, and you're probably going to die depending on where you fall, but you can't fall from the top to the bottom. Like, you can't fall off a mountain. I thought that was so neat because it drilled right into my head just the way he meant it to right then. Yeah. He was quite the meth head, though. Yeah, he was. Speed week. Yeah. Speed Week, I guess. Sure. And they're they friendly made that to a movie. Yeah. Is it coming out or I think it's very soon. Who's in it? Because I remember being excited about it, but I forgot. Well, the Twilight girls in it. But who was playing? I can't remember who's playing? The two guys. Cassidy. Yeah. And Jack. Well, it wasn't Jack. It was Sal. Right? Yeah, that's right. I don't know. But it was Jack. Right. And Cassidy was named somebody else. Or was he Moriarty? Yes. Was it? I think it was. It's been a while. It looks pretty good, though. You're either thinking of on the Road or the Sherlock Home series, but yes. Carawac was part of the pretty much popular American culture, from housewives to doctors to anybody who were hooked on Benny's or Dexadrene. And eventually it became quite obvious that America was a nation of speed freaks, and we needed to do something about it. So the government stepped in, and they started controlling speed. Yeah. One of the things they tried to do is control what they call precursor chemicals, the things you use to make the meth. Right. And I guess we'll get into this later. But it hadn't really worked that well over the years, because if one thing we've learned is that there are certain amount of people that want to do their drugs, there's a certain amount of people that want to make them and sell them. And those numbers don't really change that much over the years. No. Despite laws and any efforts by the legal measures, it's going to happen. Well, let's talk about the quick, because I think it fits with this. Yeah. A sterling example of that was the motorcycle gangs, like the Hell's Angels. They were making what you would call today crank amphetamines. Right. P two P. They were using a precursor chemical called phenyl two proponone. And P two P was a pool chemical, and they were using it to make crank. And it worked pretty well. I mean, I guess it made decent crank, and the government outlawed PTP or clamped down and regulated its sale and production. And so the outlaw bikers said, well, we'll just have to figure something else out. I guess some of them looked into the annals of history and realized that a bedroom was out there, easily available. You can buy it from the manufacturer legally, and they started using that. But there is a big surprise when they successfully made crank using ephedrine, wasn't it? Yeah. They found out this junk is twice as strong as the last junk, which I guess was great news if you were a Hell's Angel cooking speed. Yeah, I'm sure. They added a methyl group, and it became methamphetamine. Basically, that recipe was lost to the ages and accidentally discovered by Hell's Angels. That's right. And as Tom points out, that would bring the trade and illegal speed to its jittery knees. That's good stuff. He's got some this article is definitely worth reading. Yeah. Actually, that was when P two P was under control. Right. But I had to delight everyone with his pros. Well, should we get to the brothers, then, and then jump back to how you make it? Sure, man. Jesus and Louise. Emma's kuwa I think so. Emma's. They are pretty much one of the big reasons why meth is such a big deal right now. In the 1980s, they were some small time coke runners, and they said, this is pretty good, making a little bit of dough, but this meth thing is pretty interesting, so let me go import some epidurin from overseas, make some money. A short time later, mid 1990s, they are responsible for 80% of the meth in the United States of America. They took over the whole scene, basically. Yes. Well, they created the scene, almost. They basically said, we are going to just start importing pure ephedrine from manufacturers in, like, India. And they did. And they were doing this for years and years and years. And they very wisely would order it from the factory and then route it through, like, Europe to Mexico or South America to Mexico, but it never went through the US. So they kept the US customs officials out of it. Right. Well, the US still got their hands on. At one time, they seized 3.4 metric tons of hephedrine. And we're like, oh, okay, now we know where this high grade speed came from. Out of nowhere. Yeah, exactly. And why people are killing their friends with claw hammers. All of a sudden, it's because of these guys who are importing this. And now all of a sudden, this thought to outlaw precursor chemicals kicks back in and they start clamping down on ephedrine. Yes, true. And that made a bit of a dent for a little while. But like we said, where there is a will, there's a way. And despite the DEA's efforts in the American government, you had temporary licenses granted to people selling it. And the Sudo Aphidrin basically was still readily available because there were so many. They basically said, you got to register with us if you want to sell this stuff. Right. They were so overloaded that they couldn't even process all these applications, but they were overloaded. Like the people who were illegally selling and producing a veteran and selling them to drug cartels applied for licenses. And the DEA was so swamped, they said, everybody just gets a temporary license. So people were, for a brief period, legally selling ephedrine to these cartels in bulk. Yeah, I imagine they were making pretty good money doing it, which is why they kept doing it. But eventually that dried up a little bit and most of the stuff moved to Mexico in earnest. Canada, the superlabs Canada. Did you say it was in Iraq or Iran? Well, Iran is the rising star right now. Really? In 2008, there were two meth labs busted in Iran, and in 2010, they busted 166 way from what to what? Two to 166 in two years. Holy cow. Yes. Ron's like crazy for meth right now. Jeez. And apparently in Japan, a gram goes for $1,000. So I bet that's where a lot of it's going. To. Really? Pakistan is big on meth. Apparently Southeast, south and East Asia are really fond of meth right now. Yeah. Well, that's scary. So jumping back, though, they tried to control the sale of pseudoethrogen more and more, and then they just realized that these meth cooks, like the superlabs, they're not going into grocery stores and buying pseudoeprogen. I don't know. I think some of them are. Oh, I don't think in that quantity. Well, they're buying coal pills in bulk. They're still using that as the precursor. Yeah, but in bulk, like, they're not walking into Rite Age. Right, okay. And buying 300 boxes of cold pills. That would probably write some red flag. Exactly. But home cooks and people that are into making their own meth or themselves or their friends break into stores sometimes or sometimes just buy what they call blister packs. They're the little pill packages with the little single pills. You got to pop out one at a time, but they actually have the blistering machines to do that for you if you're a larger operation, which I had never heard of that. So this whole Sudafedrin thing, you know how you used to just be able to walk down the aisles and you could buy a suit of Fed and it was right there on the shelf? Well, now you have to buy it from behind the counter because it's federal regulation. Like, you can't just sell it out. Too easy to steal. You have to interact with a human being who can call the DEA or the cops. You're allowed in a lot of states, like, no more than one pack. Sometimes you have to show your driver's license. There's always regulations. It's still not making much of a dent. But apparently the reason the big rub to home cooked meth is the pharmaceutical lobby, because they're like, well, we don't want our cold medicine to only be available by prescription. Yeah, we're moving along this product. Yeah, but in states where they did make Sudafed and other, like, cold medicines that have pseudophedrine in it, prescription only, they've seen a sharp decrease in meth related crime. Oh, yeah. So that does work behind the counter. Doesn't work. Prescription only apparently does work. Got you. Yeah, but those are for home cooks. What's the stat about the superlabs? If you are buying meth in the United States, most of that is made by the superlabs, like you see on Breaking Bad. So now I think this might be out of date. Yeah. Apparently in 2009, mexico finally cave to American pressure and said, okay, we're just outlawing suit of federal imports altogether. And so the Mexican cartel said, okay, well, we're just going to move all our huge operations into smaller operations in California. And now California makes more meth than the next five top producing states in the country combined. Oh, really? Yeah, but it's all smaller labs, so if one gets busted, who cares? Right. Which makes more sense. Interesting, because what was the stat you gave? What percentage was made by there are only four super labs, but they were making, like, 80% of the math. Yeah. 4% of labs are super labs, but they're making 80%, and apparently that was true until 2009. Wow. All right, well, that's good. Yeah. You want to talk about making it? Yeah, I guess we need to talk about making it. This is sort of like how to grow marijuana. Well, there's some key you can tell there's key stuff left out here. Yeah, I think one of them. But I guess this means that Tom knows how to make methane from researching this. All right, so here's how to do it, Josh. What you want to do is if you don't have your meth or I'm sorry, your ephrine or keto EpiGen, and it's powder form. You need to separate that from the tablets in the cold medicine. And when you do that by mixing it with a solvent, and the solution is then filtered, exposed to low temperatures, and then you can remove the inner material, and you're left with your pure pseudoethogen or epigene. Right. Step one. Step two. You want me to handle this? You're going to make me copable? No, I'll help. You want to take your pseudo effrogen. Whether you've removed inert materials or you had the pure stuff, you want to mix it with red phosphorus and hydridic acid, which I don't know what that is, but red phosphorus is like match sticks. You can get that from the tip of a match that contains red phosphorus. It's why if you see people buying lots of book matches, then they might be tweaking or making their especially if their teeth are correct cooking. Yeah, right. What do you do then? You filter out that stuff, the red phosphorus. You're going to reuse it later, and then you neutralize the remaining acid by adding a lie solution. And it just says a substance, which I like. This is where it gets a little vague. Right. It's added to bind the meth, and then the liquid meth is drained out at that point, and you're left with the crystalline. Is that the point? No, you have to bubble hydrogen chloride gas okay. Which is through the liquid, incredibly toxic, through the liquid meth, and that turns it into a crystal hydrochloride salt. Right. You're going to filter that. What is left is then dried out, and then in Breaking Bad, at least it's on the sheets, like cookie sheets. They break the ice, as they call it, or step on it, which means you add other nasty inert filler to basically cut the drug and make it go further to unwitting, purchasers and snorters. And you weigh it, package it, ship it out, sell it in Japan for $1,000 a gram. That's right. It sounds very easy, and apparently it kind of is. If people walk into Walmart and try to do it themselves, the problem is it's extremely dangerous, especially if you're separating ephedrine or pseudo feeder and from inert material in a cold medicine, you're adding an extra step. You're also adding a solvent, which is that they tend to be explosive. So you have an explosion danger. You're also inhaling some really toxic toxic chemicals up to, I think, 32 different chemicals used in making meth. And the byproduct itself produces six times of the actual product that you're looking for. So if you produce \u00a31 of methamphetamine, you produced \u00a36 of toxic materials as a result. Do you want me to go over some of these chemicals? Yeah. This is what you're snorting or smoking, if you're doing math, potentially. Gasoline, ether, paint thinner, freon, chloroform, camp stove, epsom salt, red Devil, Lie, drain cleaner. Battery acid. Yeah, that's pretty bad. That's fun to snort. Muriatic acid, lithium from battery, sodium metal, ephraim, iodine. Did I say paint thinner? It's worth saying again if you did. Yeah. So those are some of the chemicals, and I'm breaking Bad. They don't use any of this stuff. That's kind of one of the things is the guys at Chemistry, he's very proud of his drugs. Sure. And they don't even use cold pills. They start from the beginning, in a chemistry sense, to make their own ephedrine. Yeah. Wow. And it's all very pure and it's not full of all this gunk. And it's blue, which is interesting because that is a signal that it is impure. Oh, really? It's a hallmark of the show, this blue meth. But these days, there are enterprising meth cooks that are dying. They're meth blue. And the article I read said they're not quite they call it Smurf Dope and said it's not clear why they're doing this. It could be just to stand out in the market, their product, or it could be to throw off tests, like on site test to see if it's bad. They'll drop it in if it turns blue. And some think it might be influenced by Breaking Bad. I wonder. Yeah, I bet you yeah, I'm sure it is. However you make it, whether it's blue or they're adding dye, you are creating a toxic site. Very like we talked about. What episode was it? I can't remember about it. It was basically like crime scene remediation or crime scene something. Crime scene cleanup. Yeah. And one of the things, one of the big, I guess, jobs in the industry is cleaning up meth labs. Once you do this, you have pretty much rendered a house useless. Like, Tom points out that sometimes when the cop sees a meth lab and it's a house, they just won't even bother. They'll just abandon it because they can't resell it. Yeah. I mean, it gets in the curtains and the carpet and the tiles and the wood and that's if the house doesn't explode altogether. The house, the campsite, the camper. Yes. The RV, the car, the trunk of the car. The back of the van, the motel room, the Walmart Seven. At Walmart. Yeah. It's pretty scary stuff. And I'm Breaking Bad. There are scientists and chemists, and they're wearing all the equipment, and they're wearing all the gear, and they have all the nice equipment, but that's not like these homegrown cooks are not super smart because they're doing this to begin with, and then they might be severely tweaking up for days not thinking straight. And that's why they will have explosions and try and eat dirt as they're dying, because the taste in their mouth is so bitter. Right. And someone's left to clean up the mess. And that's what makes it the number one abused hard drug in the world. More than cocaine and heroin combined. Yeah, I saw that. And that's math. I got a couple of scary stats. I guess we can finish off with some depressing news. Okay, I'll just summarize here. The overall picture is that there are less new users, which is good. Yeah. But the stable level of methamphetamine abuse is kept basically. There's still just as much meth, just fewer new users. The people that are using it are really using it more and more crazy. Like, they're really into it, so it's not going anywhere. And the DEA has sort of dipped in years, but risen back. It's just one of those things. It's like any drug like cocaine has been in and out of fashion for 150 years. Sure, it'll dip down and they'll taut some numbers, but then it'll shoot right back up in another country. Maybe 1.2% of 8th graders, 1.6% of 9th graders, and 1% of high school seniors is that lifetime have abused at least once in the prior year to the survey. Wow. Which those are pretty low numbers, but I was hoping it would be, like, zero one sure. Or something like that. Well, America I mean, if there's, like, 23 million users worldwide, america's got about 2 million of them. That's pretty significant. I thought it would be more than that. I would think so, too. That's what I heard. Don't do it. Don't do math. It's just a bad idea. I think that's a great way to end it. Get high on life. Go for a natural high. Be in yourself. That's nice. Chuck. If you want to learn more about meth and all of the myriad reasons why you should not do it, you can type in meth in the search barhouseofworks.com. And this one goes to our drug suite. We've done MDMA? LS? Yeah, we did. We talked about MDMA and the oh, but not a dedicated show. It was pretty much a dedicated show on MDMA. Yeah, we talked about LSD a bunch of times, how to grow pot and a bunch of stuff. I've got a few more in the kitty. Oh, you do? Yeah. We got to hit crack. A hit crack and we got to hit oh, man. I didn't get to use my favorite line. At the beginning of this podcast, they talked about how ancient Chinese used to use my Hawaiian to get their speed fix. Well, that was it. We talked about that somewhere else, and I can't remember where, because when I read it, I was like, I don't remember we talked about this before. We did not. Hawaiian is a stimulant do. We do like, traditional Chinese medicine. At one point, I think Mahwan might have made it. That's right. Okay. I remember now. Wow. So I guess at some point in the recent past, I said search bar, right? Yeah, I think so. I guess it's time for listing now, right? Yes. Quick plug before we start for my buddy Cameron Esposito, very funny comedian. She is a Chicago native and is in La now, but she has started a podcast called Stand Up Mixtape. Nice. And it is cool because each podcast is like a little comedy LP in that she has moved a comedy show into a studio. So instead of it some club, some crappy club with people clinking glasses. I like that sound. Well, it's nice, but this is, like, pristine, like, excellent sound. She hosts and hosts one of her comedian friends. And just good stuff. It's very funny. Small, intimate, little feel. Right on. You can feel it even though you're hearing it. Okay, so that's Stand Up Mixtape, is it available in the normal placesunes? Yes. Cameron Esposito. Go see her. She's very funny. She sports the side mullet. All right, listener mail from Asher about just sort of clearing up the I'll just read it. Hey, guys. I was a prosecutor in the Midwest and a prior life, so I was excited to hear your take on criminal records. Your information was great all around. I wanted to clarify one thing, though, because I used to run into it all the damn time. You did yeoman's work by mentioning that expunged is inaccurate. The records remain and are freely available to law enforcement, prosecutors, and government agencies, but merely can't easily be referenced in a subsequent court proceeding and aren't publicly disclosed. However, you also mentioned that records of traffic crimes are not kept as part of a person's criminal record unless the crime was serious, like vehicular homicide. It does depend on your state, but this is a common misconception. As a prosecutor, I saw everything you've ever done from as fiddly as a no seatbelt ticket to as major as murder. This often became relevant because my office had some discretion to give you a deferred sentence. Basically, you don't screw up for six months and the charge goes away. But only if you had a clean record. I would, on a daily basis, have people failed to disclose a speeding ticket elsewhere in the state that had been expunged some years back, then be shocked that I knew about it. I love the show. Just want to make sure just wanted to make sure to mention this little tidbit for you in case you revisit the topic. Also, I emailed you before about your pronunciation of Nevada. Oh, yeah, it still makes me puppy cry every time you mispronounce it. But unfortunately, your podcast is great enough that I can continue to overlook it, or at least until my puppies head explodes. Asher. Asher. Clean up, buddy. Thank you for writing in, too. Yes, if you have a correction, especially if it's nuanced, we love that you can tweet it to us at fyskpodcast, join us on Facebook.com STUFFYou know. Or you can send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstoffworks.com." | ||
Who killed JFK? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/who-killed-jfk | For the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Josh and Chuck delve into the killing, the investigations and the conspiracy theories to get to the bottom of an enduring national question. | For the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Josh and Chuck delve into the killing, the investigations and the conspiracy theories to get to the bottom of an enduring national question. | Thu, 21 Nov 2013 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=325, tm_isdst=0) | 42971704 | audio/mpeg | "You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo Elevate at petco, pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores. US 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. 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 Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and very appropriately for this one, we have our buddy Matt, who's guest producing because he knows how to do that kind of thing, in addition to his awesome show, Stuff They Don't Want You to Know, which he does with our other friend Ben. And it covers conspiracy theories. And we are podcasting on who killed JFK the day before the anniversary of that fateful day. 50th anniversary. Right. 50th anniversary, november 2263 in Dallas. And so you made a joke that Matt was just going to be over there the whole time going, really? Yes. It wasn't a mob. Yeah, three Tramps. Whatever. I like the three tramps one. It's ridiculous, but it's my favorite one. Yeah, I got some good stuff on that. So do I. In 2003, josh an ABC News poll came out. Ten years ago, 70% of Americans believe the assassination of John F. Kennedy was part of a broader plot. What percentage? 70% believe that. And only 32% believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. So it's the thing. It will not die. No, it won't. It never will, I don't think. Well, it's very much entrenched in popular culture as well, too. Like even it's become a parody of itself as well. Yeah. And just the idea that there's this outstanding question that will never be put to rest yeah. Like JFK. Lone Gunmen and Grassy Knoll. Like, all these are almost like buzz terms now. Yeah. The Lone Gunman. They made an appearance in The X Files. They were recurring characters, trio guys. And the Misfits have a song about the JFK assassination. Yes. Magic Bullet. I bet there's a band called Magic Bullet. Sure. There's all sorts of stuff. Yeah. So let's get into this because I think our colleague Jonathan Strickland of Tech Stuff did a really good job of handling what could have easily been like a 50 page quagmire. And he basically says, here's all the facts. And this is why what's on the surface is probably the, likeliest, thing to happen. Yeah. We should see away a little bit here. There are hundreds of books written about various conspiracy theories on the JFK assassination, and we don't have, like, 18 episodes to dedicate to this. So this will be a skimming of the topic. I don't want anyone to be like, oh, Josh and Chuck are going to get down to the bottom of this. Right. That's some people's life's work dedicated to this. No, I mean, if we're anything, we're dilettante that's. Right. Every week we go from one subject to the next. That is true. So I guess let's begin at the beginning, just to get it all out on the table. Okay. All right. Okay. So, Chuck yes. On November 8, 63, the Secret Service found the proposed route for the presidential motorcades visit to Dallas. And there was a reason the President was coming to Dallas. It was a very good reason. And this is why he was in Texas, why he was trying to basically sort of unite the Democratic Party. He was meeting with his vice president and the Governor of Texas, and there was some bickering going on within the party, and he basically wanted to he's trying to get reelected is what he was doing. Right. Well, that was a big part of it, but it is true. Governor Connolly and Senator Richard Yarborough were publicly feuding. And they're both Democrats. So basically, their great father was going to come and make peace with them, among them publicly tour the state of Texas to help himself get reelected, but also to show Texas, like, hey, the Texas Democrats are all family here. Family fights sometimes, but we're still all family, and we still have the same grand vision. I know I'm a Catholic from New England, but we're all the same. Texan. Okay, where are we? They found out the route from Lovefield to Dealy Plaza. They publicize that in the newspapers, so everyone knew about it because they wanted people to come out and wave like they did on November 19. The route was published in the papers on the 18th. Published on the 19th. Yeah. Right. And then on November 22, 1963, that fateful day, air Force One lands at Lovefield, the President gets in his presidential limousine, and they start making their way toward Dealy Plaza. Yeah. Along with Governor Connelly and his wife and, of course, Jackie, and then a couple of Secret Service dudes that's in the one car, in a car behind them is LBJ, Senator Yarborough and some other Secret Service guys. Right? That's right. Apparently, as they were headed toward Dealy Plaza, they got delayed because Kennedy stopped and kind of soaked up the people waving and cheering and all that and gave some back to them. Little fist bumping. Yeah. And so they were a little bit delayed getting to Dealy Plaza. But when they did, at about 1230. As they were riding in the presidential motorcade, a shot rang out and then there was two more shots, at least. Yeah. And with the second shot, they think the President threw his hands up to his neck and Jackie leaned over to kind of, like, say, hey, what's going on? And then all of a sudden, the back right side of the President's head blew off. Yes. It is very graphic if you see the slowed down enhanced zapruder film on YouTube today. Very affecting, too. It's really sad. Yeah, it's terribly sad. And this was not even a part of our generation. This kind of stuff still makes people like our parents break down sometimes. Right. So that was 1230. Within about anywhere between four and 8 seconds, at least three shots were fired. One missed, probably the second and third one hit the President first on the back of the neck, exited his throat, and the third one blew his head off. Yeah. Let's talk about that magic bullet since we should go ahead and just clear that up. Okay. I guess this is the second bullet that passed through his throat. It went on to hit Governor Connolly in the back. In his armpit, I think. Yeah. Below the right armpit, exited below the right nipple, then hit his wrist that was in his lap, and then continued through the wrist, through his left thigh. And that's why they call it the magic bullet. And if you've seen Oliver Stone's movie, they kind of make fun of it in court. Like, that is one magic bullet. That's where I got the name. Back into the left. Yeah, back into the left. Remember the Seinfeld thing? Yeah. With the Spit with Keith Hernandez. Yeah. And I remember my brother in law, the Marine, explaining to me years ago that bullets tumble and can do some really crazy things. Sure. Like he's seen it happen on firing ranges. Plus, also, this is a very powerful bullet. There's a 6.5 millimeter bullet, which is basically like a little howitzer shell. Yeah. It's huge. And it travels very quickly. Yes. And they have done tests that, even though it seems unlikely, that show that it is possible that a bullet can change directions and do kind of crazy things once it starts hitting bone and other things. Yeah. So that was, like you said, the second bullet. Most likely. Yes. Within just a few seconds after the first shot, kennedy is lying there motionless. Jackie is reaching back across the trunk of the car trying to get help from a Secret Service agent who I believe jumps into the car. Yeah, well, actually, they think that she was picked up part of his brain tissue. Okay. I heard that before, too. Yeah, I looked into that today, but I was watching the Pruder film and it looked to me like she was reaching back, like, Help. But I've heard that before as well. Well, apparently she was quoted by I think Connolly's wife and one other person at the time is saying he's dead. And look, I have his brain in my hand. I read her testimony for the Warren Commission, and she said she didn't even remember any of that. Sure. But whether or not that's true, it's awful. She was trying to hold his head together on the way to the hospital. Yes. So in the car behind them, a Secret Service agent pounces on LBJ and throws them onto the seat and lays on top of them. I think his name is Rufus Youngblood. The CIA or the Secret Service agent. The motorcade just takes off to the hospital. Park Memorial. Parkland parkland Memorial. Yes. And again, the motorcade interdisciplinary at 1230 at 01:00 P.m., the president has been pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Yeah, it was just a few miles away. So that was 01:00 PM. That was 01:00 PM. I guess we should talk about the grassy knoll real quick because a lot of people have said there were a lot of misleading and conflicting accounts, which is where a lot of the trouble started. Eyewitnesses not cooperating stories. The acoustics at Deep Plaza were funky because of all the buildings. Yeah, it's three side buildings and then one side, like, grassy knoll, basically. Yeah. So, like, where did the shot come from? I thought it came from over here. From the sounds, it was basically pretty tough to pinpoint. And the grassy knoll, there was a police officer named Clyde Haygood that there are pictures of him running toward the grassy knoll. And a lot of folks thought, hey, he's running, like, toward a suspect, when, in fact, he was running toward another police officer. Right. To say, hey, what should we do? I guess I guess the way it's been explained away over the years is the acoustics and the fact that that cop was running toward the grassy knolls made some people think that there was more than one shooter and another shooter was on the grassy knoll. That's right. The official line is that that is not the case, though. That's right. So 01:00 p.m.. The president's pronounced dead at 238. Jackie Kennedy Johnson Staff pretty much everybody was back on Air Force One, and they called Bobby Kennedy to ask what to do and to tell them what had happened. And Bobby Kennedy said, you need to swear, Johnson before you guys leave the ground. So they found a judge, brought her on board, and she swore Johnson in as president. And then they took off and flew back to Washington. Very famous photo with him being sworn in onboard Air Force One. Right. With Jackie Onasses or Jackie Kennedy's face. Just like yeah. The fact that she was able to stand is pretty amazing. Apparently, they turned her in such a way so that the bloodstains weren't apparent in the photograph. Oh, man. I don't know if it was Air Force One yet. It was it. Okay. All right. So where are we? 4 minutes after the shooting, dallas police looked at the Texas School Book Depository building and said, hey, that might have been where this came from. It's a pretty prime location for sniper. And there was an eyewitness named Howard Brennan who saw a figure in the window and gave a description which fit Lee Harvey Oswald. So this one dude actually saw him in the window. So on the 6th floor, pre believable that you could see someone from that range. Right. The guy said, I knew it was Oswald all along. So there was a cop that was in the Book Depository within 2 minutes of the shooting? Yeah. Marian Baker took the initiative to go ahead and get in there. So he went in there and he met up with the superintendent of the building, a guy named Truly. And they started walking up the steps, and at the second floor, they came upon Lee Harvey Oswald, who was leaving. He was leaving? Yeah. Truly vouched for Oswald, and Oswald was allowed to leave. And the reason Truly vouched for Oswald is because just a couple of weeks before, about a month before, oswald had gotten a job at that Book Depository. So he checked out as far as Truly was concerned. The officer who was with Truly said, well, okay. They kept looking. And a few minutes after that, lieutenant showed up and took over the crime scene, and they started scouring the building. And on the 6th floor, they found the sniper's nest. That's right. With three empty cartridges and the gun telescopic rifle, telescopic site and a bolt action rifle. And it was pretty much a no brainer at that point, or at least on the surface. This is where it came from. Right. So after Oswald left the Book Depository, he went to the place where he was renting a room, the house where he was renting a room and grabbed a pistol. And as he's walking along and this is about the same time that Kennedy is being pronounced dead, he's walking along the street, he encountered a cop named JD. Tippet. And apparently Oswald just opened fire on this cop, shot him four times, killed him instantly. Yeah. Well, he was investigating Oswald because the APB had already come through with the description of Oswald. And he was like, well, this guy fits that description. Let me talk to him. And it didn't take long, though I don't think there was much of a discussion before Oswald shot him and killed him. And actually, when Oswald was finally apprehended, it was for the murder of the cop. They didn't know he had anything to do with Kennedy at the time. Oh, yeah, yeah. At the time, he ducked into a theater, the Texas Theater into the movie War as Hell. And I think he snuck in. And that's why they called the cops, because they're like, hey, someone snuck in the theater. So if he had bought a ticket, he might not have ever been caught. You never know. You know what's interesting about that? There's all these parallels between the Lincoln assassination and the Kennedy assassination. Some are untrue, some are just ridiculous. But one of them was that John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln in a theater and went and hid out in a warehouse. And Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy from a warehouse and went and hit out in a theater where he was caught. It's a pretty good one. I like that one. Yeah. So he was apprehended in the theater and reportedly said, well, it's all over now. But he also said something interesting at one point to the media, I'm a patsy. Which has fueled speculation over the years that we'll get into the different theories before we go any further. Get this, the President of the United States of America has just been shot in front of a crowd in Dallas. That's right. That's huge. That's enormous. That's what's going on right now. And there's a manhunt for this guy who's just been caught for killing a cop. Yeah. So people don't know that the President's killer has just been caught as well. That's right. So it's a pretty emotional time and let's talk about Oswald himself. But first, let's do a message break and we'll talk about Oswald when we come back. Agreed. Hey, everyone, when you're running a small business, every second counts and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using Stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary. And you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS rates and 86% off Ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Alright, so here's a little bit about Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a mixed up guy. He was sort of an outcast, sort of didn't really fit in. He was born in 1939. His father died two months before he was born, which I think probably has a lot to do with emotional scarring later on and maybe being a mixed up kid. He was in an orphanage for a little while with an older brother and half brother. But his mother was able to get him back out of that orphanage and raise them by age five. What was five when he got taken out of the orphanage? Which was enough years to also do some damage psychologically. I think that probably set the theme because I read a little bit about what contemporary reports of him growing up concluded his problem was, and that one social worker said that he believes his mother doesn't give a damn about him and that somebody else said that they've never met a kid more emotionally starved than this guy. So I'm quite sure that being left it in an orphanage, even being picked back up after a while, probably did have a pretty big effect on his development and how he viewed his mother. Well, yeah. And when you look at what he did for the rest of his life, it seems like he was always looking for a new family, quote unquote, whether it was the Marxist or the Communist or Cuba or Russia. It seems like he never he was looking to fit in somehow, somewhere with somebody. But at the same time, it was always on the fringe of wherever he was at. Yeah. You know what I mean? He's never happy with where he was. He wanted to fit into whatever was counter what he was doing or with the status quo of where he was. Right. So at 16, he drops out of school and tries to join the Marine Corps. He was too young, so they said, Come back later. He wrote the Socialist Party when he was Socialist Party of America when he was 17, to say, hey, I'm way into Marxism and, like, can I come join your club? I guess at the very least, we send you a free button. Yeah. And then at 17, he reapplied to the Marine Corps. And he was old enough at that point. It turns out he had quite an act for shooting guns. He's a sharp shooter during boot camp, but then during the actual ranking testing, only rated as a marksman, which is still really good. Yeah. Just below sharp shooter. Is sharp shooter the highest, or is that dead eyes the highest level? I think sharpshooter is highest. But at the same time, even while he was a Marine marksman, he taught himself Russian. He studied about the Soviet Union and Communism. And this is during the Cold War. This is like, during the most paranoid finger pointy part of the Cold War. But Oswald in the Marines, like, teaching himself Russian and everything. See what I mean by a confused guy? Yeah. But even still, it's so strange to me learning about his experience, that he was relatively left alone while expressing pretty publicly this interest in the Soviet Union and Communism during the peak of the Cold War. I thought if you even wore the color red, people are like, Communists get them. But apparently you could just hide in plain sight or admire the Soviet Union plain sight. Well, he eventually would find himself on a watch list because he went to Russia. He obtained a passport falsely with an application to a college in Switzerland and got to Moscow, applied for citizenship there. And they were like, yeah. He goes, oh, yeah, if you know what I mean. I'm going to kill myself. He basically did. The same day he was rejected by Russia, he slid his wrist, and the warmhearted Soviets were like, well, okay. You can stay, young man. I thought that was interesting. Yeah, that's what allowed him to stay. Yeah. This is weird. Yeah, it is. So he said, I don't want to be well, he did not officially announce his citizenship in America, although he expressed interest in doing so. Yeah, he kind of mouthed off about it, but never actually did it. That's right. In Russia, he fell in love with a lady named Marina Prusakova. You're not going to try your middle name? Nicole Vena. Nice. Nicolavna. Yeah, I think that's right. And basically, he was like, we should probably go back to the United States, because turns out Russia sucks. These bread lines. I wasn't expecting them to be so long. Yeah. It says he'd become disenchanted. I think that's a nice way of saying that Russia sucked. Right. So he says, hey, I know a place where you're going to love. It's called Texas. Let's move back there. Yeah. Just forget the fact that you don't speak any English. You don't know anybody in Texas. Everybody back in America thinks I'm a weirdo and I'm your husband. Let's go. Move to Texas. And she said, what did you say in Russian? He was like nothing in Russian. And so they moved to Texas, and she apparently very quickly, she felt isolated. She didn't have any friends, and a woman named Ruth Payne felt bad for her and took her under her wing, and they became kind of friends, and Ruth pain will come into play a little later on. Yeah. And this is where he was finally sort of on the radar of the FBI. Yeah. When he moved back. Yeah. You can't move to Russia and then come back and they just don't even bother talking to you? No, but they did talk to him, and they said, okay, well, listen, if the USSR gets in touch with you and wants you to do espionage, just let us know. And he was sure. Okay. They're like, all right, have a great day. Thanks for the coffee, ma'am. She's like, what did you say? In Russian? That's pretty remarkable. Yeah. So on April 10, 1963, another interesting thing happened. A few days after losing his job, he tried to assassinate Major General Edwin Walker. Yeah. This guy was a piece of work himself. Yeah. He was a hardcore right wing, conservative, possibly gay man. Oh, I hadn't heard that. Yeah. Later in life, in the 70s, he was arrested twice for fondling men in public. I wonder if he was the model for the dad in American Beauty. Oh, maybe I could see that then. Yeah. I mean, he never married, and I don't think they ever came right out and said he was gay. But he was arrested twice for fondling police officers. Well, Alan Ball, if that's the case, email and let us know. Okay? Yeah. Which is neither here nor there, but it's interesting. No, but he was, like you said, a right wing extremist in the very definition of the word. He was very well respected, decorated military leader. Like, he was commanding all the troops in West Germany at one point. Kennedy either. No, he hated the Kennedy. He called Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt Pink, which means that they were Communist sympathizers, which is a big deal. He was temporarily relieved of his post while he was investigated for that. And he said, you know what? I'm not going back because the US. Has given up its sovereignty to the United Nations and I can't fight for it any longer. And this guy was so convinced by his own convictions that he refused a military pension for years afterwards because he didn't want to have anything to do with it. Well, apparently he refused it, but then kind of quietly tried to get it right. Well, then they gave it to him. Yeah. He was celebrated as a great soldier later on in life and after his death. Oh, yeah. So another example, though, of Oswald is sort of a confused guy. Like, he tries to assassinate this right wing conservative general. He also was a Marine. He also killed Kennedy. He was just sort of like it didn't seem like he knew what he believed. Well, he believed that what is the general's name? Walker was like Hitler in the making. Yeah. Basically that he was an extremist who needed to be taken out. But he missed. Yeah. From about 100ft away. He shot into his dining room from the street where he was sitting at a desk and hit the window pane, and it made the bullet go a different direction. So he missed. So Lee Harvey Oswald is basically doing anything he can to insinuate himself in international global politics. Yeah. But he got away with it. It was a cold case until they finally caught him and put the I think my wife was the one who fingered him later on. Oh, really? Yeah, because he comes home and says, hey, we're moving to New Orleans. Yeah. And she's like, what did you just say? And so they moved to New Orleans. And while they're there, she's like, I've had enough. You're shooting at public figures now. We're moving from Texas to New Orleans. I'm moving back. And she moved in with her friend Ruth Payne. And that surely had an effect and impact on Oswald. There's no way it couldn't, because he already had abandonment issues from his mother. Now his wife leaves him because he's just crazy. And he's like, well, you know what? Fine. I'm going to stay here, and I'm going to start a chapter of a pro Cuba, pro Castro sympathizer Club. And I'm going to be the one and only member, but I'm going to be a loudmouth member. Well, I think you want more than one member. But it was another example of, like, nobody was interested in this guy. Nobody. Russia didn't want them. No one joined his club. His wife left him. Cuba didn't want them. No, he went down to Mexico and visited the Cuban and Russian embassies trying to basically get in with them, and they were like, no, it's okay. Thanks, man. Yeah. I think the word Strickland used was no one was ever very impressed with Oswald. They were unimpressed Soviet and Cuban officials. I mean, if this guy was a patsy, he was the perfect patsy. Oh, yeah. But you can also take all of this evidence and say, well, this is what made him do this. Yeah. If he was a patsy, do you imagine how easy it would have been for, like, one of the theories is the Mafia, for them to put their arm around and be like, you're pretty great guy, right. You know what you should do? You should kill the president. Yeah. He would have been very easy to manipulate, I imagine, because he's also just 24. When he's Kennedy, he's a kid, which is crazy. So he left New Orleans, went back to Dallas, got a job, and about a month later at the School Book Depository shot and killed John F. Kennedy. Yes. So Oswald's done a shooting. He's caught. They started to investigate his background, and Lyndon Johnson ordered an investigation, a full investigation into the Kennedy assassination. What happened, lessons learned, all that stuff. And this commission, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, was called the Warren Commission. And the report they compiled several hundred page report. It's called the Warren Report. And in addition to this several hundred page report, they also released 26 volumes of transcripts of the hearings that they conducted. So it's this exhaustive investigation that was very transparent. Supposedly, there's so many documents, to try to censor them, really censor them, it would be virtually impossible. So a lot of people point to the very fact that the Warren Report is so voluminous that it is, in fact, correct and it's not part of a larger cover up, at least. Yeah, and I send you the article. Did you read the one from The New York Times that some people think there are still documents the CIA won't release? Well, they won't. Well, but the one anti conspiracy guy that they interviewed said people that don't know how the CIA works, that believe this stuff, he went, there would be no documents. Right. Period. They wouldn't be hiding things. They wouldn't exist. Operation Killed President Kennedy. Yeah. I mean, he's sort of like. A little pat on the head. Like, you think there are documents, you sweet little conspiracy theorists. Yeah. All right. So the Warren Commission comes out, and immediately conspiracy theorists start to suggest different things. Like, one theory was that it was an outside job by the KGB and or Cuba. Right. We should say the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy on his own volition, by himself, without acting at the behest or at the benefit of anybody else. It's just a loan. Singular crazed gunman. Right. So the conspiracy theories are everybody else saying, no, that's not the case. And we gave the example of the grassy knoll, the acoustics, and Dealy Plaza, the fact that a cop was running toward the grassy knoll. Right. And conflicting eyewitness accounts. From the literal beginning of this event in history, there have been all sorts of hay that people have been able to make conspiracy theories out of. Like, there's been no shortage of all sorts of different weird things that you can start to piece together with other things and come up with these very interesting, some sound conspiracy theories. Oh, sure. But that when you really get down to them. They're not supported by evidence. Exactly. I'm glad you said that. The KGB or Cuba theory that maybe their governments were acting out and trying to kill Kennedy had some legs because the Bay of Pigs had just happened. They were certainly no friends of Kennedy at the height of the Cold War. There was definitely a motive there. But there was no evidence to tie Oswald in any substantive way to either of these countries. No. They looked at his finances. They went back a year and a half and looked at his finances to see if there were any weird payments or whatever. And apparently the only amount total that they couldn't account for came to, like, $160. Yeah. Could have been cash and diamonds, though. I guess. It could have been. That's how they like the deal. Yeah. One of the other popular theories I mentioned was the mob and that Jack Ruby was working with the mob. And the second Oswald said, I'm a patsy, they're like, we need to go take care of this right now. Yeah. We haven't mentioned Jack Ruby. Two days after Kennedy was killed, they were transporting Lee Harvey Oswald, and a guy named Jack Ruby, who was a Dallas nightclub owner, came up and shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the chest and killed him. Lee Harvey Oswald actually died in Parkland Memorial, the same hospital that Kennedy had two days before. Yeah. Very famous photo, which has since been made into a very funny photo. Have you seen the banned one? No. You never saw that? No. It was big years ago. It was the photo of Ruby killing Kennedy. And someone went in and photoshopped in musical instruments because they all have different paint expressions. And Jack Ruby at the Keys, and I think Lee Harvey Oswald has a guitar and it looks like I haven't seen that one. It's pretty funny. Check it out. How about another moment here for a message break? Joshua. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office when you could be using Stamps.com? Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary. And you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No longterm commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. All right, let's get back to it. So we were talking about the Mafia. Yeah, because Jack Ruby owned a nightclub. Everybody is just like, well, he's down with the mob. What's more, Lee Harvey Oswald probably was acting on behalf of the mob because he had an uncle in New Orleans who is Mafia connected. Mobbed up, as they say. Is that what they say? Yeah. But apparently there's no evidence that Oswald and his uncle communicated at all. And these connections are fairly tenuous at best. Yes. Jack Ruby himself said that the reason he did it was because he wanted to spare Jacqueline and Carolyn the heartbreak of having to come back to Dallas to testify against Lee Harvey Oswald. Oh, really? That's what he officially said. Apparently there is a transcript of and it is just hearsay, but it's Oswald talking with his lawyer saying that he's saying, like, this whole charade we're doing, that he shot Oswald while he was blacked out and he can't be held responsible, that it's all just stupid and they should go with the truth that he did this because he wanted to spare Jackie. Interesting. That's supposedly it but then apparently also supposedly he said that that was a charade as well. So who knows? Well, another theory is that it was the CIA and it was an inside job. Kennedy had criticized their practices and was trying to scale down Vietnam, and those weren't very popular things to do at the time if you were in the government. And so a lot of people say, you know what? Lyndon Johnson might have orchestrated this whole thing, and it was an inside job with the CIA. They're like he barely ever wore pants, for God's sake. I don't know if this remains true to her death, but both Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy at one point believe that, quote, he was felled by domestic opponents. Of course, Bobby died not too long after. No, five years. But I don't know if Jackie held that opinion her entire life. I'm not sure about that. I'm curious. It seems to ring a bell. That like she was suspicious of LBJ. Yeah, I know. Since 2000, there have been five legit tenured historians that have published studies, and four of the five concluded that there was probably some larger conspiracy at work, but none of them agreed on what it was. Right. So it's hard to get a consensus. So ultimately, what it came down to, the official line was that there was a rifle that had Oswald's fingerprints on it that was found at the crime scene, that there is a picture in existence of Oswald holding that exact same rifle. Before the crime was committed, he had already tried to kill a general. Yeah. And the fact that he said, well, it's all over now, when he was apprehended. You take all this together, everybody who a lot of people think it was Oswald. That's the official line. Right. Yeah. And the Prudor film has been used to, hey, how can you shoot someone from this direction? And they had to go that direction. There are other films of the incident, but the subruder is the most complete. I did look at some of the others. I've never seen any of those before. It's weird to see it from different angles. Yeah, sure. If you're used to seeing just the Pruder film. So the Warren Commission did not put this issue to bed at all. Even back then. There was another commission that took place in 1976, the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And they investigated both JFK and Martin Luther King's assassinations. And this is a group of House Representatives who, it's true, are known for being the rabble rousers of the government, that branch of government. But they basically investigated this, carried out a full investigation and found that, you know what? We actually think that JFK did die as a result of a conspiracy. We don't think it was the mob. We don't think it was the CIA. We don't think it was the FBI, and we don't think it was the Cubans. But we do believe that it was a conspiracy and that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. This is the House of Representatives saying that. Yeah. Well, they initially said that there were four shots, but they were actually wrong. And then later we canted that with acoustic evidence and said, you know what? We were wrong on that. And they did never find any hard evidence. But did they remain true to that statement? Yeah, that was their final report. Interesting. Yeah. That it was part of a conspiracy. So that definitely didn't quell any rumors. No. And as a matter of fact, it's like, oh, well, the House of Representatives just said Kennedy was killed as part of a conspiracy. Like, if it was dying down before, it flared right back up. And there was another one almost at the same time, a Rockefeller Commission by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. And a lot of people think that the Rockefeller Commission was basically just like a fact finding committee that was there to basically cover up and derail any other investigations. Oh, really? Yeah, kind of like, we got this, we got this. It didn't work, though. Because of the House Select Committee. Well, they invalidated one of our favorite little parts of the theory, the three tramps theory at the time, there were these three vagrants that were detained by police that had been traveling by boxcar. Supposedly, that's how they travel. Often that is how they travel. And two of the men for a while were believed to have been E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturges, who were the dudes who broke into Watergate, which would be a nice little coincidence. Yeah. Well, there's a whole side by side photographic comparison of the two. It looks a lot like them. Well, it does. The FBI got experts to do the same thing, though, that said, no, it's not them. Right. And the third guy and if you're a conspiracy theorist, you're like, oh, okay, well, thanks, FBI. Appreciate that. I believe you. The third guy was rumored to be Woody Harrelson's dad. Yeah, Charles Harrison. He was a hit man. And they were estranged, by the way. Woody Harrelson, it's not like he doesn't talk about this much. It's not one of his favorite topics. Yeah. Sorry, Woody. I know we got to talk about it, but he killed a federal judge, and then when he was caught in a standoff in high on cocaine, he said, I killed Kennedy, too, and then later on recanted that and said, I just said that because I was hiring cocaine. Yeah, and I was trying to elongate my life, and I don't think they would have killed me if I had information. Oh, is that what it was? That's what he said in an interview from prison. But conspiracy theorists latched onto this and said, he's the third tramp. He was the youngest one of the three. The pictures kind of look alike. Aldi Harrison's dad was one of a trio of men who killed JFK. Well, all of this could have been put to bed if the dudes look nothing like the other guys, but they all kind of did. So another thing to add fuel to the fire, for sure. And we should say also there's even more like you were saying the CIA still will not declassify documents that they have about the JFK assassination. That's not helping things. No, something did come to light, though, from investigations into the CIA. The guy named George. Joanne These he was a CIA agent who was basically in charge of a group of anti Cuban student dissidents, or anti Castro Cuban student dissidents. And he was running their operation in Miami and New Orleans. They actually beat up Lee Harvey Oswald while he was in New Orleans, handing out pamphlets that were pro Cuban and pro Castro, like, a few months before the assassination. So George Joannedys ran that operation, and then later on in 1976, when the House Select Committee was investigating it, again, he was the liaison for the CIA. But no one told the House Select Committee the involvement he'd had before. Interesting. Yeah, well, with Woody's dad, he actually had a co conspirator that said, you know what? He's confessed this before to me and even drew maps about where he was hiding the day it happened. But in 1989, arrest records were released and identified the three tramps as Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle, and John Getty. Those all sound like suspicious names. I think they interviewed a couple of these guys later in life, and they were like, yeah, we were the guys, and we were just boxcar dudes, even though we had suits on and we're clean shaving. Well, everybody back then was. Even if you were, like, just the total complete hobo, you still wore a suit and a fedora, usually. So, again, people point to that and say, these clearly weren't these guys were paid. And then a lot of other hinky things happened. People disappeared. Witnesses disappeared. It's never going to die. I don't think anyone will ever let this go. No, but that's what makes a great conspiracy theory, right? There's just too many facts outstanding that just can't be put to bed. So you got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to learn more about this or if this piqued your interest, you should definitely check out our buddies over at Stuff They Don't Want You to Know for sure. They have a huge, awesome body of work that they've put together over the years and continue to do so. And you can also read this article on how Stuffworks.com by typing JFK into the search bar and see what comes up. And since I said search bar, it means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Chinese Zombies from Sam Larusa. Hey, guys. I don't know if you're aware of this, but you have a bit of a cult here in Wuhan, China. Awesome. A whole two people, my girlfriend and I still it's pretty great. Yes, we listen to you all the time. And as you tell us about stuff we should know, we're both English teachers, and outside of with each other, the Stuff You Know podcast is just about the only English speaking we get on a day to day basis. I have an incident, though, to write you about where Stuff You Should Know save my butt. And it just happened yesterday. Wuhan schools have a three hour siesta to avoid the hottest part of the day, and I usually use the time to plan lessons or take a nap. Yesterday, I decided to forego planning lessons and just nap and woke up a mere 20 minutes before my afternoon 120 minutes lesson. Completely unprepared, I started to panic, but then remembered do zombies really exist? Stuff you should know, Podcasts. I listened to Just earlier that day. My students are well aware of the zombie apocalypse theory of the end of the world, but neither I nor they knew anything about the history of zombies, and I had been shockingly irresponsible regarding zombie apocalypse survival strategies. Oh yeah. So I jumped online, ran off 22 copies of How Zombies Work from Housetoporks.com, highlighted some very good vocabulary and some grammar patterns, and had a two hour lesson ready to go in 20 minutes. All thanks to you guys. So there you have it. How you save my butt and turn an otherwise really awkward 2 hours of nothingness into a kick butt zombie survival lesson. Hopefully your cult following will grow to five, maybe even six people. Would that be something? And Sam Larusa, thank you for being lazy and napping on the job and then using our work to do your job. Yeah, but not really though, because it could have just been like, oh well, I guess they're just going to sit there quietly for 2 hours. He like really? Hustled. That's true. He took initiative. Way to go, Sam. And thanks to you and your wife, right? Or girlfriend. Thanks to girlfriend. Thanks to both of you for holding things down for us in Wuhan. We appreciate that. If you are located at some remote outpost of the world or in some bustling cosmopolis, whatever, we want to hear from you, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychnow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And as always, you can join us@stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school is 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 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. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms too. 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4107e906-53a3-11e8-bdec-732546fd3b43 | Rockettes: Still Kicking After All These Years | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/rockettes-still-kicking-after-all-these-years | Tune in today to learn all about the legendary NYC Rockettes, who actually got their start in Missouri. | Tune in today to learn all about the legendary NYC Rockettes, who actually got their start in Missouri. | Tue, 01 Jan 2019 20:15:32 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=20, tm_min=15, tm_sec=32, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=1, tm_isdst=0) | 43436506 | audio/mpeg | "This July. Don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful from the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. What if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the awardwinning podcast from iHeartRadio and salesforce.org about tackling some of today's biggest challenges like climate change, education, access and global health. Listen in is host barratoon 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. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. Happy New Year. You are too tall to be a roquette, aren't you? Just barely. Jerry and I can be Rocket and you can't. No, it's true. Which is a shame because you have the gams. I do, actually. I've got pretty decent legs, you know, at least my calves are all right. What, no ties? They're a little tree trunky for my taste. Oh. Yeah. I've got a bit of like a fertility idle thing going on, like up toward the hips and all that. Well, it's because of all those squats. I was not expecting to talk about this. About your gams. Yeah, well, I'll talk about my legs all day long. Well, let's hear it. They're shapely. Okay? I gain all my weight between my waist and my chin. If you looked at my legs and my arms, you'd be like, I weigh \u00a3160, and then the rest of me comes along to bust that myth. Step aside. Still have a nice little fanny? Sure. Everybody knows that. Sorry. Listeners in the UK. Yeah, that means something different over there, doesn't it? It's just so dainty and nice that little five year old kids can say fanny in the United States. That's right. It's just the Brits who are sickos. But this isn't about our gams. This is about a dance troupe. A legendary dance troupe. Yeah, about as legendary as a dance troupe can possibly be. Are the Rockets? I think so. I just said that sentence like, Yoda, can you do the voice? No, not even going to try. But this totally surprised me, digging into the research on this, to learn that the legendary Rockets of New York City and Radio City Musical are not from New York City. No, they're not. Where are they from? Chuck, did you know this? I had no idea. Yeah. So shout out to St. Louis. Yeah, they were founded in the 1925, to be exact, in St Louis, Missouri, as the Rockets. The St Louis Rockets, which I think they were trying to be a basketball team, maybe. St. Louis Rockets. Sure. Yeah. There was a choreographer named Russell Marcott, which is I kept wanting to say market, but that is an R. Yeah. And he founded them, like you said, in 1925, and he was inspired by a British dance troupe named the Tiller Girls, which was founded in the 1894 by John Tiller. And it was kind of a similar idea. He saw these Tiller Girls and he was like, I want a high kicking, glamorous, theatrical dance troupe of my own. Yeah. So I'm going to rip it off. He did, actually. So John Tiller is widely acknowledged as the creator of what's called precision dance, which is where you have a bunch of dancers who are really highly trained, really athletic and really precise in their movements, that can move in such unison that you take a number of different dancers and they basically become one thing that can do things that an individual dancer can't do. That's precision dance technique. And John Tiller literally invented it with, I think, 410 year old girls in the 1890s. And he came up with some further refinements to it. Like, when you put your hand around the waist of the people on either side of you, it kind of lends to the unity of the whole thing. Russell Marker saw this and was like, this is amazing. If I can get some American girls with longer legs to kick higher, it'll knock everybody's socks off. That's a quote, by the way. Yeah. And there's something to that synchronicity of for me, for movement and sound that just knocks me out every time. When I go and see a choir, like 100 people singing together and high kicking, or a symphony, not only the sound, but the movement. When you watch a symphony, that's a big part of it for me. Forget a coral symphony, like, I'm on the floor weeping if you take me to a coral symphony. But there's something about that precision of all these people together. I don't know what it is about it. I mean, it's a collective voice or collective movement, but it's that precision that really just gets me every time, for sure. Well, that's what the Rockets are known for. Their trade is precision dance. They're as good as it gets with it. Although the Taylor girls are definitely still around. They still have Christmas specials themselves and they're doing their thing, for sure. So it's not just an off hand thing to say the Rockets are as good as they come in precision dance, because the Teller girls would probably say, I would dispute that statement, but they would say it with a British accent. Right. I dispute that statement. So they were not as tall back then. The original height requirements were between five two and five six and a half. And now they went, we'll take your tallest answer and make them our shortest answer. Because I guess it's just I don't know. I'm not sure why they did that. But now it's between five six and 510 and a half. And it is not because they want to exclude people's, pull or discriminate against people who are too tall or they feel too short, but they can just all look it's an optical illusion. So they can all look the same height because they take that five foot ten and a half inch dancer, although they don't have to be that tall, but they take whoever their tallest dancer is, put her right in the middle, and then just stagger it out from there. And in the end, everyone looks it's weird. Everyone looks to be the same height, even though they're not. I don't understand how this works. I saw it so many different places that I'm convinced that it does work. I just don't get the illusion of it, how it works. Well, I think over four inches and 36 women, it's just so minute of differences as you scale down that it would take, I guess, an extraordinary human to be like, that woman is an inch and a half taller than the one five people away from her. Right. I got you. Yeah, I guess that's true. So you're just a normal person, is what I'm saying. Yeah, you should feel good about that. I fall for that optical illusion every time. Yeah, everybody should. So they started with the Missouri Rockets with just 16 women, and like I said, now they have 36. And they debuted in St. Louis, but then went to New York to perform Rain or Shine on Broadway. And that is where a man named SL Roxy that was his nickname, Rosifell, which is an interesting name. That's where he saw them and said, hey, I got to get in on this. This is amazing. Yeah. So Russell Macmarket took the idea from John Tiller. And Roxy Rotheful said, hey, I want in on this jam. So I'm going to grab a few of these dancers from St. Louis and bring them over to New York City, and we're going to have to start dancing there. Okay. And I know just the place for them. There's this new venue that's opening up in 1932, and they're going to call it the Radio City Music Hall. And I'm going to make sure that these dancers are able to perform, and we're going to call them the Roxyettes. How about that? Because of his nickname, right? And Marker said that's fine. Just make sure you pay me some money for it. Sure. And he did get paid and got paid until 1971. It's hard to believe, but he worked for the Rockets or with the Rockets from, I guess, even previous in St. Louis. Yeah. 1925. All the way until 1971. Yes. Really amazing. Yeah, it is pretty amazing. That's a pretty long career. So they opened Radio City Music Hall. I think they were part of a 17 group act. And that was like such a hot ticket. Something like 100,000 people wanted in. But it's a 6200 seat theater, which I think it still remains the nation's largest indoor venue, which is really saying something because I guess it'd just be like a theatrical venue because obviously the largest indoor venue sports venues have it beat by quite a bit. Oh, theatrical. Okay, I got you. Yeah. It's either movie or theatrical or something. But it's the largest venue of its kind in the United States, from what I see. Yeah. And for many years, they had specials every now and then. But it was sort of just a movie theater. Yeah. And here's the thing. You could go see the movies. I think especially it started to take off in the 50s. Like before they would have premieres for movies and the Rockets would perform at the premiere. And then at some point, I don't know if it was Russell Marker or Roxy Rockefeller or somebody said, well, why just do this once? How about every time somebody comes to see a movie at the Radio City Music Hall, we'll have the Rockets perform before the movie? Can you imagine that how cool that would be? It would be pretty cool. Imagine seeing that and then being like, okay, now for the movie. It would be a different experience, for sure. Yeah. But it was rough on the Rockets because not all the movies were successes. So they would change the Rocket show for each movie. So if a movie came along and it was just a terrible flop, this whole choreographed routine that they'd learned would be out the door in two days. And now, all of a sudden, they had to learn a new one quick because there was a new movie coming in to replace that one. So they did a different routine for each film. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And sometimes they would have to learn it in a matter of hours, like around midnight before the next day's performances. I wonder if it was tied to the film sometimes. I think so, but not all the time. I think it was in some cases. But I think more than anything, they would change the routine just because the people coming to see a different film would want to see a different routine. Okay, I got you. That makes sense. Yeah. So in the 1940s, they were one of the first groups to sign up for the United Service Organization and go and perform for the troops. And then the 1950s is when things really started to kind of take their toll. Like they were performing sometimes up to five times a day. And so they said they built a dormitory there which they could live in. I don't think they were required to, but it really was to accommodate the fact that they were working almost around the clock, because learning these new routines, like you said, and then performing up to five times a day, really grueling stuff. It was basically the prototype for Google, just making it so your employees didn't have to leave. Oh, interesting. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Just go sleep in your pod. So the Rockets, their fame started to grow pretty quickly, and they made like a few steps, if you'll forgive the pun, along the way. That kind of cemented them as much a piece of America as apple pie or baseball or moms or what have you. So the 50s were also big for the Rockets, too, because they joined the Macy's Thanksgiving. They prayed in, I think. Yeah, that was the big move. Yeah. Because they went from just a group that you either had to go to New York or go off to war to see while they're in my living room. Now, these girls are high kicking on my television, and I'm just loving life. All right, so let's take a break. It's 1950s. Good times are ahead. And then dark times come in the 70s because it's New York City and the everything was kind of awful then. So we'll be back right after this. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change an industry. IBM, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. What if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the awardwinning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org, which is out now. Yeah. Listed in his host baritone and dethurston, connects with leaders and doers out there tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, global health. You'll hear from organizations like the Trevor Project, Doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky, who are using their platforms to maximize their impact. You'll also be introduced to action leaders like youth activist Juan Acosta and advocate Amy Allison, who are inspiring change in their day to day lives. So join them as they discuss new ways of collaborating and taking action. Listen to the second season of the iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org original podcast, Force Multiplier, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. OK. Hey, before we get started, Chuck, I want to say we put on a pretty good stage show ourselves. We've been known to, and we've got some coming up. Plug. Plug? Yeah. There's no high kicking involved. There could be if people demanded it, I would be willing to do a little high kicking. Are we talking about some shows? Yeah, let's do that real quick. All right, so we're going out west for our annual sojourn in January, where we go to Seattle and we go to Portland, and then we end up at SF Sketchfest, like we always do in mid January. Yeah. And I've got an end of the world live show on Friday at Sketchfest. And you have a movie crush on Saturday at Sketchfest, right? Yeah, I'm doing a matinee show at 01:00 on Saturday, January 19, with Busy Philips is my guest. Nice. And my show is Friday the 18th at Cafe de Nord. And I am my own guest flying solo. And then I have another one in Brooklyn on the 24th at the Bellhouse, too. Oh, I thought you already did that one. No, it got postponed to January 24. Oh, great. Yes. So you haven't missed it. There's still time for you to come. Fantastic. So that is our little plug. How about that? Yeah. And of course, our big Stuff You Should Know show is at the Castro on what is that, Thursday night? That is Thursday the 17th. Yeah. So come see us at the More in Seattle Revolution Hall in Portland at the Castro in San Francisco. Check out our individual little shows, our cute little individual shows. And there's plenty of information on Sisklive.com. That's right. So now it's the York is suffering. It's crazy when you look at pictures of New York City in the early 80s even. Just hard to believe how bad things were there. Yeah, it was pretty rough. And actually, it's funny. Like, you can thank Rudolph Giuliani for, I guess, cleaning up the town, if you want to call it that. Okay. Have you ever heard that? What do you think? Rudolph Giuliani for cleaning up the town? Sure. Okay. Good for him. I saw him in the park one day. You did? What was he doing? Talking to a duck? No, he was doing like, a photo op. But I had friends in, from another country even, I think, and I said, hey, guys, this is the mayor of New York over there. They're like, oh, that's nice. I went, It's kind of a big deal to just walk around and see the mayor of New York. Did they say? Avatar VA? Chuck? I think they're Australian, actually. Yeah, that was my Australian impression. Oh, that was good then. Yeah. Thank you. That's a great story, Chuck. Yeah, it's fine. But for them, they didn't understand fully that the mayor of New York City, it's quite a big deal to see him just out and about in the city. I have a similar story. I was watching one of the first few seasons of Law and Order on my television one day, and there was the mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani. Interesting. But I knew it was a big deal. I got another story. Okay. Did you know in the Michael Bay film, Pearl Harbor that they comped in Bruce Willis's, John McClain character from Diehard in one hospital scene? How just digitally. That's an anachronism. I know. That doesn't make any sense. Do they really do that? Yeah, you can look it up. Pearl Harbor, John McLean, and there's, like, screenshots of John McLean and his white tank top just briefly for a blip in the background of one of the hospital scenes in Pearl Harbor. So weird. So you know there's a nude woman in the window of one of the buildings that the rescuers fly by. Really? The Disney movie from the these weird movie, easter Eggs? Just board editors, I guess. That's exactly what it is. Board juvenile editors. All right, so it's the 1970s in New York. None of this has happened yet that we're talking about. The rescuers did. The rescuers did. But there was no Die Hard. There was no Pearl Harbor movie. Right. Except for Tora. Toratora, but no bad Pearl Harbor movie. Okay. No Rudy Giuliani. He was alive, sure, but he was not the mayor of New York City in the 1970s. Not as far as we know. Who was that? That was Ed Cotch. He was the think. Was he maybe late seventy s. All right, we'll get that straightened out. Okay. But New York City is going down the toilet, including, believe it or not, the great Radio City Music Hall, much like our own legendary Fox Theater in Atlanta, was facing shutdown and demolition, potentially. Yeah. There was a rough transition from some of those old movie palaces. After people stopped, well, going to movie palaces and moved out to the suburbs, a lot of those beautiful places were left out in the cold, and some of them didn't a lot of them didn't make it, but some of them almost didn't make it. Like you said, the Fox and Radio City, and apparently it was going to be turned into a parking lot. And Belushi himself got onto the news desk at Saturday Night Live and was railing against the demise of Radio City Music Hall. And the Rockets, too, had said, hey, this is our home. This is an iconic place. Let us help go raise awareness and funds to save this place. And they did. They were successful. They got it put on the National Register of Historic Places, and it has a landmark designation. Not just the building, it's 1200 buildings in New York with the landmark designation, but only 110 interiors have the landmark designation, and Radio City Music Hall is one of them. Which means that its interior is so amazingly beautiful that it's a protected landmark in the United States. Yeah, I've never been in there. I haven't either. I've been to Carnegie Hall, but never Radio City. It's on the list for sure. But it's interesting because their whole deal was they wanted exclusive movie bookings like they were to be the only theater in town that would be showing a particular movie. So that limits their pool immediately. And then they really prefer G rated movies. They had really strict screening criteria, so that just narrowed down their movie pool so small that they would go weeks and weeks at a time where nothing happened there. Yeah. So they would just shut down. Because, again, remember, like, the Rockets are a dance troupe that you would see before you saw a movie. So if they're not showing movies, they're not showing the Rockets. And at this time in the Rockets said, okay, our talent is being wasted here. At least let us go take the show on the road while you guys are sitting around waiting for another movie to come along. And they actually gain that right, because they're union dancers. We should say we'll get into that a little more later. But they managed to get the right to take the show on the road, and they really started to make a name for themselves in the 70s in places like Tahoe and Vegas. Sure. Apparently made a huge fan out of Sammy Davis Jr. Who would come see the same show, like, night after night when they play in Vegas or Tahoe or whatever. He was just fascinated by the Rocket. I love that. For sure. Little Sammy, what a great guy. We should do a show on him. Apparently, he also oh, yeah, I'm done with that. He also surprised him on stage once by joining them on stage for a dance number, which apparently he knew because he'd seen the show so many times. Wow. Which that's a pretty Sammy thing to do in Las Vegas. High kicking. Well, his kicks weren't so high. Run out on stage. Unbidden uninvited. He's a little guy. He was. He's the littlest rocket, I imagine. Well, but he was, too. So they're doing their show on the road here and there. They're making ends meet. Radio City is struggling. Even though it was designated as a landmark. The 80s were not super kind to Radio City, either. They very famously appeared at the halftime show of the Super Bowl in 88. They're trying to change with the times. They're dancing it in the different places. And they're always doing their Christmas deal throughout all this. After they started doing that and what was that, 57? 32. They did the Macy's Parade in 32. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I thought you meant the Christmas spectacular. Yes, the Macy's Parade. The Thanksgiving parade was 57. Yeah. So they've got their holiday stuff, their Easter specials, their Christmas specials. They're dancing at inaugurations for George W. Bush. In fact, they came under fire for dancing at Trump's inauguration. Well, the dance troupe almost was split asunder over whether they wanted to do that or not. And it was a big deal. It was a huge deal, actually. And they had revived the Easter extravaganza. They renamed it the New York Spring Spectacular the year before, and they said they took a year off. And I don't think they ever went back to it because of all the controversy over 2016 and the inauguration. It was just such an unusual experience for the Rockets. They're just, like, America personified, and for there to be a huge national conversation about them performing at an inauguration, it was a big deal for the organization, for sure. Especially for the dancers who are like, career Rockets. Yeah, exactly. Should we talk a little bit about just being a Rocket? I think we should, man, because we've done it. We have. I mean, there was a brief time, although we've basically entered Diana Lohan territory now. Who's that? Lindsey Lohan's mom. She very famously lied about being a Rocket. Oh, really? Yeah. She said that she has a background in show business. She was a Rocket for a while, and some journalists went and dug around, and they found out that she was definitely they had no record whatsoever of her under any name maiden or married ever being a Rocket. It's always amazing to me when very disprovable public lies are told by people like that or like, politicians who say that they've fought in a war when they didn't. Like, that has happened. I don't know why people say things like that. It's like, no, we kind of can go check that really easily. Yeah, but even without the checkability of it, to just, like, lying and interview to puff yourself up. I guess I don't understand the psychology of it. Is it just because you don't feel like you're giving the interviewer enough of what they need? Or did they lay some sort of trick that led you into it, or I don't understand it either. Yes. I wonder if people start to believe these lies. Like, if you make up a story about yourself and you just stick with it for so long, it's weird. Psychology. Yes, human psychology is indeed quite weird. Then you have a web show called Psychology is Weird. Nuts. Psychology is Nuts, right? Little shortlived video thing. Yeah. Go check that out. Everyone, we'll take a 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 feel like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM. Let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. What if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the award winning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org, which is out now. Yeah. Listening is host Veritude de Thurston connects with leaders and doers out there tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access global health. You'll hear from organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors Without Borders and the University of Kentucky who are using their platforms to maximize their impact. You'll also be introduced to action leaders like youth activist Juan Acosta and advocate Amy Allison, who are inspiring change in their day to day lives. So join them as they discuss new ways of collaborating and taking action. Listen to the second season of the iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org original podcast. Force multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. Yes. So we were going to tell everyone about our experiences, rockets, because we're diana Lohan so here's the thing. If you're a Rockette and you've been doing this for ten years, you're a pretty long lived Rocket. Although I think I saw one woman who is a Rocket, and if I'm talking weird, all of a sudden, it's because I am stalling everybody looking for her name, and I'm not finding it, but I think it's Lindsey Howe. I'm almost positive her name is Lindsey Howe. I believe she has been a Rocket for 14 years. That's a long time. That's a very long time to be a Rocket. Because as you will soon learn, being a Rocket is extremely difficult and very demanding. And inside of show business and out, they're widely seen as probably some of the best professional dancers in the business, and certainly some of the most disciplined professional dancers in the business as well. But it's really hard to do for a really long time. And one of the main reasons why is because their work schedule is extremely grueling. But with Lindsey, how she would make the same amount of money that a first year Rocket would make, because they're all paid the same. They work the same hours, they do the same work. Some of them are kind of promoted as, like, the faces of the Rockets. The company, I think Madison Square Garden company that owns Radio City Music Hall, and the Rocket are really protective of their image and like, they aren't free to just kind of talk to the media or whatever. There's some that are kind of like you and you and you. You're the Rockets. You're the face of the Rockets. But other than that, everyone does the same amount of work, same amount of hours, same amount of pay. And one of the reasons they do that is because the point of the Rockets is not to have stand outs. It's not like other dance troops or other Broadway troops or anything like that. There's not meant to be stars. The Rockets are the star, and they're meant to be one single unit that moves and works and lives together. Yeah, and they're unionized, so they make most of their money over the holiday season. So they walk out after a couple of months with about 40 grand in their pocket, which isn't bad for a couple of months work, but it is like. You said super grueling. If you want to become a Rocket, you're not required to. But there is something called the Rocket Summer Intensive Dance Program where you can go, you can enroll, you can spend 6 hours a day learning everything over the course of about a week. All the choreography, how to get in that shape, stay in that shape, how to prevent injuries, and sort of the business of it all. Like I said, you don't have to do that. But they do place a lot of Rockets if you attend that intensive dance program. Well, some I saw out of a thousand that have taken at 60 have gone on to actually become Rockettes. Yeah, because it's very tough to become a Rocket too. Yeah, I get the feeling that has less to do with the program than just how hard it is to make that cut. Right. Exactly. So not only do you have to be fit enough to kick those famous kicks up to 1200 times a day through all these shows, but there's one clothing change. You got to do all these costume changes, but there's one in particular in between the Parade of the Wooden Soldiers and New York at Christmas that you have to be completely changed out in 78 seconds. 78 seconds. And these costumes are not like super easy to take off. The Wooden Soldier ones in particular are pretty complex. So 78 seconds probably goes by extremely fast. Yeah. And there's 36 Rockets total performing on stage. But there are 80 certified Rockets total overall. You have a morning cast and afternoon cast and then you have for each of those shows, you have four swings or extras per. So if someone's like, I just twisted my ankle, I can't do this, they have four women waiting in the wings for each of those morning and afternoon shows. Yeah. So the thing is though, is they're working six days a week or the Rockets are performing six days a week. If you have two casts, rather than work both casts six days a week, they'll alternate to give one another a day off. And they'll do that on days sometimes where there's four performances in a day. Which means that if you are a Rocket, there are days and I've seen also sometimes they're back to back days where you're doing four performances in a single day, 490 minutes performances. And that's when those 1200 kicks that you mentioned, Chuck, comes in. Because some of those shows have 300 high kicks and we're talking high level kicks and if you do four of them in a day, you've just kicked at a high level 1200 times in a day. And from some of the articles I've read, that is about as much as your body can possibly take. Yeah, I mean, in the interviews I saw, there was that great New York Times article where they really sort of dive into a day in the life of a rocket during the holiday season. And they all kind of are like there's no way to prepare your body for this. We are in the best shape that a dancer can be in. And it just destroys us to the point where one of them said that just taking their stockings off at the end of the night is laborious. And with their commute, depending on where they come from some of them are awake and either commuting or rehearsing or performing 20 hours in a day. Just grueling, grueling stuff. But across the board, they also all say that it's the only job that they want. It is a great sorority and sisterhood and an honor to be one of these. Over the years, 3000 women who have made that cut right never were like well, it's really not worth it in the end. Yeah. At least the ones who are allowed to speak to the media certainly have a lot of positive things to say about being a Rocket and, like, how familial it is and how you're just hanging out with your best friends. And it is a great gig for a dancer. Especially, as one of these articles pointed out, if you're a dancer who doesn't sing. Yeah, that's a rare thing to get that kind of a gig. I think it's one of the few for jazz and tap dancers where singing is not involved but also not just like a good gig. A good paying gig too. Like 40 grand for a couple of months of performances. A lot of the Rockets, they don't live in New York. They'll come live in New York during the season when they need to rehearse and then do the Christmas spectacular and then they go home. So they might live in New York from September to the end of December and then they go back home. And wherever home is, 40 grand probably goes a lot further than it does in New York unless they live in San Francisco, in which case it's probably goes even faster. But it's a really good paying gig. They also have benefits because their union and their contract workers have year round benefits. Yeah, that's great. And 40 grand. So they can go work as Pilates instructors, as nutritionists as all the other stuff that they do during the year, normally. And then they come back and they're a Rocket. But something I thought was pretty cool was even if you're say a 10th year Roquette you get invited back. Like, once you're a Rocket, you're in as a Roquette. But you still have to audition in April like everybody else. Yeah. So you audition in April and if you make the cut, you start to go get in shape. And then rehearsals, I think, start in September. And rehearsals are 6 hours, six days a week for basically the six weeks leading up to the performances which run from mid November till I saw December 31. I also saw tickets available for January 1 show. So I don't know if they extended it or not. Yeah, and it's funny. Like, 40 grand sounds like a lot of money over a couple of months. And it is. But when you break it down per show, it breaks down to about $135 a show, which all of a sudden it doesn't seem like great money. No, but that's what you make as a standard cast member for a Broadway union dancer or actor or variety performer, I think, is the union they're part of. So now it doesn't seem like much, but that's another reason why the Rocket gig is so good. You get overtime on those days. When you do a third and a fourth show, you're getting overtime pay, and there's multiple shows on multiple days. So another actor at a different gig working the same days over the same period would not make that amount of money, that 40 grand, because they wouldn't have any overtime. They wouldn't have that many shows. Yeah. And I don't think anyone like, dreams of going to Broadway to become rich and wealthy. Like, part of the allure of Broadway is you're with the best of the best. And you can say I danced or I sang or I acted on Broadway with Brian Cranston. I saw him on Broadway. Yeah, I saw Michael McKean on Broadway. Oh, yeah. In Accomplice. The audience was the accomplice. That was the big twist. Well, you just ruined that one. Was it good? It was great. It was one of the greatest stage performances I've ever seen. I saw Lenny live on stage. Derek Saint Hubbins. Yeah. This is before I knew him as anything but Lenny. I was, like, eight. So this is a while ago. Cranston is in something new on Broadway now, I think, too. New network. Right. Oh, man, I want to see that. Sure, but that's good. I saw that it was described as get this, Chuck. Get ready for this. Oh, boy. Electrifying. Really? Broadway show described as electrifying. His performance was electrifying. I don't think I've ever heard that word used for the theater. So another thing, though, about the Rockets, even though they do make most of their money over those couple of months, and then they have the rest of the year, too, and in a lot of cases, be like a dance instructor or something like that, or a fitness instructor, they increasingly are working more and more months out of the year. Whether it's as ambassadors for the Rockets or doing, like, video things for YouTube, they are increasingly called on to do other things. Yeah. So what is the woman who came along as the lead choreographer and director and really kind of punched it up even further? Her name is Linda Haberman, and she took over, I think, in like, the mid two thousands, maybe 2008, and she kind of brought this whole new not new. It's not a whole new thing. She made it a little more profeminist, a little more like you go, girl kind of vibe to the Rockets than they had before. They were seen rehearsing in the rehearsal gear rather than, like, full costume. And it was just kind of like the intent I get was to make them more people, human beings. Yes. Because one of the great criticisms of the Rockets is that they're nothing but, like, teeth and legs. Just a bunch of women out there kicking, like, forming one large uber woman who can kick her legs amazingly high and has the widest, gleamingest teeth ever you've ever seen. And that it was really kind of just objectification of women by definition. And Linda Haymerman really kind of took that and tried to unravel it quite a bit. And she also took the show. So we should talk a little bit about the show. Depending on who you are. It's either, like, just beloved traditional Americana, kitschy, offensively sexist, who knows? But I think the first two are kind of the predominant views of it. It's kitchen and sweet or it's endearing Americana. And Linda Haberman kind of took that and tried to punch it up into the 21st century a little more. And there's, like, way more visual effects than there were before. There's, like, a 3D component, I think, to this year's show or recent years shows. The whole theme is like, a girl wants a video game and her mom is kind of showing her why that's not so great, because it's a violent video game. There's a lot of kind of updating that the Rockets have undergone in the last few years. And that was largely, from what I understand, Linda Haberman's doing. I think she was the one that digitally inserted John McLean from Diehard. She what? He swoops in the New York Folly section. No, I'm glad they updated things because this was a prime case of, like, a beloved American tradition that could use some refreshing. And you can highlight them as humans and individuals, and still you can have both. And you can still have that desired effect of uniformity and precision that they're known for. Right, exactly. But they don't have to be just, like, faceless and nameless. And I read a few feminist critiques of the Rockets, and they seem to have been kind of outdated. I really feel like Linda Haberman, she did a good job. She kind of took those critiques and changed them in a lot of ways. That's great. One of the other criticisms is that it wasn't until 1985 that the Rockets had their first woman of color as a member of their cast of their troupe. Oh, yeah. The first woman of color was a Japanese woman named Satsuko Mara Ashi. And in 1985, she joined. In 1988, the first African American woman joined. Her name was Jennifer Jones. And the reasoning, apparently it was Markert who was like, no. From all I saw, it had nothing to do with racism. It was the idea that it was going to disrupt the visual unity of the dance line if there were differing skin colors in this dance line. And apparently he was so nuts, though, about it, you would get in trouble if you had a sun tan. That's how he wanted everything to be homogenous and in unison. Well, regardless, in the 21st century, in the late 20th century, that sentiment didn't hold up. I guess shortly after he died is when they started adding women of color more to the Rocket's troop. Yeah. And then they saw people of color in that same dance line, and they went, oh, it's still awesome, and synchronized and looks great. Exactly. And from his grave he went, no. He started rolling around in it. Oh, goodness. So you haven't seen a Rocket's Christmas spectacular, huh? You mean live in person? Yeah. I have not. I have not, either. Are we going to go now? I think we should. I want to know if any raquets listen to this show. Yeah, that would make me super happy. It would for me as well. And the only other small tidbit I have is they have microphones in their heels of their shoes. I saw that, too. They used to play recordings of their tapping, right? Oh, I don't know. That does not surprise me. Yeah. And then they figured out how to do the actual, like, broadcast the actual tapping. So we're going to go one day, Chuck. We're going to go see the Christmas Spectacular. We're going to go see the live Nativity with a real camel and donkeys and the wooden Toy soldier March where they fall down like a domino in slow motion. It's pretty amazing stuff. And if you want to know more about the Rockets, then go to Radio City Music Hall and find them there. How about that? That sounds great. Well, since I said that, then it's time for listener mail. I'm calling this. I was a search and rescue victim volunteer. So this guy, his dad. I'm going to summarize the beginning of it because it's kind of long, but his dad lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and is a member of the local SAR team. And so they were like, we need someone to play the victim here. And he was like, I'll do it. This guy's son. So here's what happened. He set off into the heavily wooded area, and he said, I did everything I could to think of to try and fool the dog in the handler. I ran in circles, went back over my own trail. I threw off my hat. He then found some garbage and rolled around in it. Didn't ask my scent. Wow. Once I had done everything I could think of to try and fool the dog and handler that would be tracking me. I found a nice comfy spot up in a bush on a hill where I could just watch the dog and the handler try and track me. I thought I'd done a pretty good job, but once I called the handler and let them know I was in position, it was all over very quickly. I sat back and everyone was shocked to watch the dog basically retrace my trail step by step. Every move I made, all those circles, finding my hat, even that I'd thrown off, even getting into that pile of garbage that I'd rolled around in. I love that this dog is just basically making a fool of poor Ryan up there in the mountains. So he said, needless to say, the dog found me in short order. I gave him lots of praise for the great job he had done. Thankfully, I was never in any real danger, so my experience was a lot more enjoyable, obviously, than when people are in real need of a search and rescue dog. Thanks for the great episodes, guys. Keep me company on overnight shifts and make it all go by quicker. So if you read this on the show, can I get a shout out to my girlfriend Karen? She would be thrilled to hear her name gets called out on the show that just happened. Yes. So that is from Ryan. I like the gusto that Ryan put into trying to fool this dog rolling in garbage. And I equally loved that this dog was like, whatever. So thank you, Ryan, thank you, Taryn, for listening. And thank you to the Sardog. Sure scruffy. If you want to get in touch with this, you can go to our website, stuffychenko.com. You can find all of our social links there. I have a website called The Joshclarkway.com and you can send an email to Chuck Jerrymi at stuffpodcast@housestepworks.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 the best pet mom when you growl back during play daytime, 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." | |
c3f2367e-5460-11e8-b38c-67eb5f1bb93d | SYSK Selects: How the Scientific Method Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-the-scientific-method-works | It evolved over centuries to become the gold standard for conducting scientific inquiry. Yet many people - including some scientists - don't fully understand it. Learn about the basis of how we explore our world in this classic episode. | It evolved over centuries to become the gold standard for conducting scientific inquiry. Yet many people - including some scientists - don't fully understand it. Learn about the basis of how we explore our world in this classic episode. | Sat, 25 Jan 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=25, tm_isdst=0) | 58063822 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, everyone. Happy Saturday. This is Charles W. Chuck Bryant here. Hope you slept well. Hope you're feeling good, because you're about to listen to how the scientific method works. It's from January of 2015, and, boy, this was a good one. One. I really loved it because we love science around here, and we love the scientific method and proving stuff out. So 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 W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. Stephanie Chanel. Mike Brennan. It's been a while. It's funny, like, those words come pouring out of my mouth, and it's cool. You wake up in the middle of the night saying that, and you mean, like, slugs you in the face, right? She's like, Go ahead. She has to dry my brow. Yes. We pre recorded some for December, as we like to do, to take a little time off at the end of the year and not explain things for a few weeks in our real lives. Like, people ask me things like, what happened to that stick of butter? Yeah, I don't know. Don't ask. Don't even ask me. I could tell you. Yeah, but I'm not going to. Exactly. That's how it goes in my house. Find your own butter. December was find your own butter months. That's a good one. That should be a T shirt stuff you should know. Find your own butter. Or December. Find your own buttermilk. Yeah, that's right. Maybe a stick of butter or some garland on it. Yeah, I like that. So it's good to see again, man. Good to be back in here. Yeah, it is nice to be back. As much as the break was great, I'm happy to be explaining things again. Well, that's good, because if we got in here and you're like, I can't do this. I can't do it again, we'd be in trouble. Yeah. So I'm glad we're all feeling good. Jerry, are you feeling good? Jerry's got two thumbs up and a big goofy smile. Two of her three thumbs. She looks like Bob from the mail enhancement pill ad. The old man that's, like, super buff, I would call him. Oh, he's middle aged. He looked like kind of a Bob Dobbs type of dude. I think that's kind of who he was modeled. Is he the guy that's super muscling now? I'm thinking of someone different, I think. Are you thinking of? Jack lolaine no, just there's some ad. There's some old man that looks, like, really creepy, because from the next he's super, like, buff. He looks like a 25 year old. No, remember there was, like, a mail enhancement pill I'm making air quotes here for erectile dysfunction. Well. There goes the air quote. But yes. And it was. Like. In the early two thousand s. I think maybe late 90s. But I think early two thousand s and these ads were everywhere. And there was Bob. And all these great things happened to him because he started taking this pill I can't remember the name of the pill. But the company got into a lot of trouble because it was basically like a subscription service. And you gave him your credit card and you got this free trial, but then they started sending it to you, and it was, like, next to impossible to cut off service. Interesting. They were like, no, we want your mailness to be enhanced. So you see these ads? Yes. I was going to start asking questions, but why bother? I will find it on YouTube. I'll be like, oh, Bob. Yeah. You will go, oh, I'll have to come back in and record an insert. Right. The guy that's on the back of all those pill bottles in my bathroom. So, Chuck yes. I don't even remember how we got oh, yeah, jerry did that. It was Jerry's fault. But you remember we did the Enlightenment episode? Yeah. Okay. We talked a lot about how there's this kind of tug of war over the human psyche between rationalism and mysticism, I guess you could put it. Yeah. Well, I feel like we're talking today about the scientific method. Yeah. Great idea, by the way. Thank you very much. Kudos it's been a long time coming because I realize I don't understand it as fully as I don't understand science. I understand the scientific method because it's pretty cut and dry and beautiful and elegant and simple. But then you just take this thing, and it came out of the birth of rationalism, and when you place it into the world and make it function, there's a lot of implications. Is it being used properly? Is it being used responsibly? Are we putting what constitutes faith into that? It just raises all this other stuff. And it made me realize I don't understand science as much as I want to. So researching this, it was awesome. Yeah. And this is a cool episode, I think, because not only are we going to talk about the scientific method, but we're going to talk about just science. Like, what is science in general? And some of the rock stars along the way who really laid out the path remarkably in many years ago. Like coming up with these amazing discoveries that still hold you can hold their feet to the fire for a lot of this stuff. Yeah. Because if you come upon a universal truth, it is what it is. You got to be the person who discovered it, because you saw it, you realized it a certain way, but ultimately it was there already. Yeah. Like Newton. I mean, we'll talk about all this stuff, but it's not like now we're like, oh, Newton. Most of what he said was wrong, but that's understandable because it was a long time ago. His stuff holds up really well. I was wondering if he on his deathbed was just like, oh, man, I contributed so much to humanity, it's mind boggling, but I couldn't enhance my malehood. Well, Bob hadn't come along yet, so chuckles, let's just quit stalling and talk about science. Like, what is science? Well, I hate the old elementary school defined as but it's a pretty good place to start here to get a base definition of science. Yes. Old William Harris did a great job with this. Yes, William Harris did a great job on this. Yeah, he did. Science the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experimentation. Boom. End of podcast. So the first part of that is science is practical. And Bill Harris makes a great point in here. It's not just stuff you do in a lab, and it's not just for scientists. It is all about being hands on and active, and it's all about discovery and asking questions about I mean, that's how everything is ultimately solved, is by someone looking at something and having a question about it. Exactly. And then the scientific method comes in when you say, and this is how you properly get to that answer. Exactly. And he makes another good point, too, that the idea that there is a method, a scientific method, makes it seem like it's secreted away among the fraternity of scientists. And like you said, anybody can use it. It's just kind of part of being a curious human. It's not even anyone can use it. Everyone does use it. Nice. You just might not even know that you're using it. One of the examples I use later is if your car overheats right. When you figure out why and fix it, that's the scientific method playing out exactly. Based on reasoning. Yeah. Okay. And deduction and induction. There's so much to talk about. Okay. So let's talk about that definition that you had. So the first part is that science is a practical activity. So science is practical, right? Yeah. The basis of the whole thing is discovery. Right. You see something, you see birds in flight, and you say, where are those birds going? And if you just went and lay down on the ground and went to sleep after that, then you're not carrying out science. But if you went, I want to find out where those birds are going, and you follow them and you start taking notes. That is the basis of science. It's discovery. Yeah. And that's the observational part as well. Sometimes you're using a microscope or a telescope. Sometimes you're using your eyeballs. But no matter what your tool is, you're going to be watching something and recording what's called data or data, depending on, I don't know what kind of person you are. Yeah. What do you say? I think I say both. Data. Yeah, I don't think I say data. I say data. Yeah. All right, we'll go with data. You say both I feel like it just comes out of my mouth one way or the other, and I don't really think about it. I think that's like being ambidextrous I'm a data status? Yeah. So once you are observing this data well, there are a couple of kinds. There's quantitative data, which are numbers, like your body temperature is 98.6, although I think that's changed slightly now. Yeah. It used to be like if you were a human being, your body temperature is 98.6, and they realize, like, no, it's a little more variation than that. Yeah, but any kind of just numerical representation is quantitative, whereas qualitative is behavioral. Like, I'm going to watch that bird eat and poop for the next week. Right. Or what happens? What will the slug do if I put a bunch of salt on it? Don't do that. No, you really should not do that. No, that's awful. But the reaction of the slug is gathering qualitative data, and depending on who you talk to, there isn't qualitative data in science. That it should all just be quantitative. Yeah, because quantitative data is reproducible. Qualitative data. It's not necessarily reproducible. You can observe the same phenomenon, but you're not necessarily controlling it. Okay, I guess I get that. But I agree with Bill here in that they are both they go hand in hand, and neither one is more important than the other. You need to have both. Well, a lot of people do. And we'll talk more about it later. Because without the idea that qualitative data is acceptable and scientific, you don't have the social sciences. Like they don't exist. Yeah, that's a good point. But yes, we have quantitative data and qualitative data. I agree with you. They're both useful. Okay. It is an intellectual pursuit. So you can make observations on data all day long, but until you bring reason, in this case inductive reasoning, which is driving a generalization based on your observations, then it's just data sitting there on a piece of paper like it's supposed to lead you somewhere. Right, exactly. And so we should talk about inductive and deductive reasoning, depending again, it's really weird. One of the things I came across is that there's not a universal agreement on how science is carried out. I saw some places where there's no place for inductive reasoning in science. Then other places are saying, well, you have to have science using inductive reasoning. Everybody seems to agree that deductive reasoning is the basis of science. Right, but that you also have to have inductive. So deductive is basically taking a big, broad generalization and saying that it applies to something specific. More specific. Yes. Inductive is the opposite, where you say, I've noticed these different data points, and that means that this broad generalization is true. You go from specific, small observations to a broad generalization. And the reason that a lot of people say, well, inductive reasoning doesn't have any place in science is because you're saying those birds over there are all brown, therefore all birds of that type are brown, even though I haven't seen every single bird of that type in the world. Right. I'm saying that all those birds are brown. And a lot of people say there's no place for that in science. Well, if you want to go out and prove that, then that's your business. You can't just say that and be like, And I'm done. Right. Exactly. I guess you could, but you're much of a scientist. Right. But you can use it to formulate hypotheses. Sure. Right. So you can say, I've generated all these data points. I'm going to put them together and see if this broad generalization is right. Okay. So there is a place for inductive reasoning science, but everybody says deductive reasoning is the basis of science. Well, Bill Harris, he offers a great example for inductive reasoning with Edwin Hubble of the Hubble telescope. He was looking through the Hooker telescope, which at the time at California's Mount Wilson. Is that the one from Revel? Without a call? No, that's Griffith Park Observatory, which has been redesigned and is really cool now. Is it? Yeah, I mean, it was kind of cool before, but it was definitely like sort of the Base museum that time forgot. Oh, really? So they've updated it. I bet that was cool, though, in its own way. Yeah, it was neat. I used to live near there, so it was kind of but that's like the famous one, at least in the movies. Yeah, it's where they have the big knife fight. And there's a James Dean statue there, too. Oh, I didn't know. Like a bust. So, yes, Edwin Hubble, he's at Mountain Wilson, and he's looking through the Hooker telescope, which was the biggest one. And at the time, everyone said, the Milky Way Galaxy is it. That's what we've got going on. Yes. Did you know this? Yeah, I knew that because we're talking 1919. Yeah, not that long ago. I did not realize it. And he started looking through the telescope and said, you know what? These nebula that everyone says are part of our galaxy look to me like they're beyond our galaxy. And not only that, they look like they're moving away from us. So he made this through inductive reasoning, made this observation that, you know what? I think there are many, many galaxies out there. And not only that, I think they are expanding. And through technological advancement with telescopes over the years, scientists, it proved to be true. Yeah. Pretty cool. So this is a really good example of him saying, like, I've made some observations and now I'm going to say this broad generalization. Yeah, right. So these galaxies appear to be moving away from another. So the whole universe is expanding. Right. That's inductive reasoning. Yeah. It's a pretty brave thing, especially back then, because you're really putting your reputation at stake. It really is. So what Hubble did was what we've come to see as science. He made some observations, he came up with a hypothesis, and then it was tested later on. You don't necessarily as a scientist, you're a part of a larger collective of scientists. Yes. Right. And every scientist needs one another. It's why there's journals and conferences and things like that to share information right into party. Right. And Hubble came up with his own observations, and rather than just experimenting and experimenting and experimenting himself, which I'm sure he continued to do, he created this basis of work that he probably realized is going to survive him. Yeah. Right. And then later on, scientists came down the road and they tested his hypothesis, and they found it was correct. And so his hypothesis became a theory. It eventually became part of the basis of the Big Bang theory that the universe started as a huge explosion, and it's expanding still because it exploded at one point. Right. Yeah. And they did that by carrying out other tests or experiments. Exactly. So this is how science works. Like, some guy back in 1919 makes some observations in California in 1925, he proposes this big, broad generalization. And over the next ensuing half a century, more and more scientists all around the world start testing his hypothesis and find it to be true. So it becomes a theory. Yeah. Well, let's finish up here with science. Okay. The last part of the definition is that it's systematic and it's methodical, and it requires testing and experiments, and it requires those experiments and tests to be repeated and verified. And it's a system. It's a way of working things out. It's a way of working. And that is the scientific method. Basically, yeah. You have your idea, you pose a question, you theorize, or you put a hypothesis out there, and then you go about trying to either prove it or disprove it. Yeah, exactly. And then the way that you go about proving or disproving it, that's the scientific method. Everything else is just scientific inquiry. The way you go about the standardized way of going about scientific inquiry is the scientific method. And we friends will talk about the scientific method right after this. All right, you brought up a point. I think we should go ahead and just get right to my friend. Let's do it. Hypotheses and theories. One thing tough to say together. No, you did it. One thing that really chafes my hide is when you hear poopooers of whatever scientific theory say, well, it's just a theory. Where was this thing that you found that poopoo that do you remember what website that was? No. No. Although I do want to give a shout out now that you mentioned it, to Explorables. Yeah, it's like an online university, basically, of free courses, and there is one on scientific reasoning that is just amazing. It's like a huge rabbit hole. You go down, you start clicking on the embedded links and you end up, like, understanding all sorts of stuff. So go check that one out if you like understanding stuff. Right. So that's one of the things that bugged me. If someone says, it's just a theory and this does a great job of kind of throwing that out the window because it's basically mixing up the two definitions of theory. Yeah, there's like a colloquial definition that people use every day that doesn't really have much to do with the scientific usage. Like, I got a theory that Jerry in 1 hour bathroom breaks every day is really playing Words With Friends in the lobby. I think your theory is correct. So that's a theory in the colloquial meaning right. As far as science goes, a theory is not just something you postulate, say, this may or may not be true. A theory is beyond the hypothesis, and it's something that is strongly supported in many different ways. There's all kinds of evidence to support something that eventually becomes a theory. Right. So your theory about Jerry's bathroom breaks in the scientific world would be a hypothesis. What fact? Yeah. Well, it'd be a scientific law. Yeah. But it ultimately would begin as a hypothesis, a hunch based on intuition, based on data you've collected, observations, that kind of stuff, where, like, you've seen that Jerry goes to the bathroom for like an hour to stretch frequently. When she comes back, she's finishing up a game of Words With Friends. Sure. You've heard that she's been spotted in the lobby during these times. So your hypothesis is that while she is gone for these hour long bathroom breaks, she's actually down in the lobby playing Words With Friends. Right? Yeah. Based on knowledge, observation and logic. Right. So let's say that you decided to set up an experiment and you experimented and you went and you found Jerry playing Words With Friends five different times and you told me about it and I was like, I'm going to run that same experiment exactly the way you did. Yeah, right. I would test that same hypothesis. If I found the same results to be true, then what you would have come up with, your hypothesis, would move to basically a theory that is this widely accepted thing, this explanation that Jerry is not actually in the bathroom, she's downstairs playing with Friends. It would be the Jerry bathroom break theory. That's right. And then if it turns out that you find that Jerry spending an hour a day pretending to be in the bathroom but actually being downstairs playing Words With Friends, if the universe couldn't exist without her doing that every day, you would have a scientific law. That's right. Yeah. I think that was a good example you came up with. That's a great example, as it turns out. I guess the point here is when you hear someone say in an argument, well, that's just a theory, just punch him in the head and then tell them what we just said about the bathroom breaks, and they'll say, Who's Jerry? Or just queue up that whole bit and stand outside of their window wearing a trench coat and holding a boombox over your head with a smug look on your face. All right, so should we go back in the way back machine a little bit and just talk a little bit about how the scientific method came to be? Yes. This thing where are you running this on these days? What do you mean? The straight kerosene. The fumes in here are killing me. Sorry about that. I'm trying to go green. Kerosene is not green. Diesel. Maybe I'm choking. Biodiesel. How about that? Okay. The wayback machine will run. French fry grease. That would be fine. All right. I'll get to work on that. I could handle this for you. So you tied us with the Renaissance, and the reason the Renaissance was so awesome and necessary was because of something else we've talked about, which was the Dark Ages, when which remember, that's a rationalist disparaging term for this era. That's right. But I think sort of rightfully because right before the Dark Ages, until about a century after, there was not much advancement at all in the realm of scientific advancement. No, it's true. That's hard to argue with that. And the reason why is, again, science wasn't really born yet. And there is a huge struggle between rationalism and mysticism, and ultimately we're living in the age of rationalism now. Yeah. And we should point out, too, that this was mainly in Europe, over in the Islamic world, as I think we had a listener mail point out. There were a lot of advancements being made, right. Just sort of flying under the European radar at the time. Because some say the Catholic Church kind of kept science under its thumb for a while. Yeah, pretty big threat. Said, you know, you can't do this stuff. You can't experiment like this. And don't ask these questions. Right, because here are your answers. Yeah, but eventually the Renaissance came about in 12th century, and people woke up and saw some of the work in the Islamic world and said, you know what? Maybe let's start reading up on Aristotle, and told me and euclid it once again. Yeah. They're like, we forgot about these guys. Yeah. I mean, it literally kind of vanished for a while. It did. From the west. Yes. Fortunately, it was still around in its home places, but yes, in the west, they were lost. The Roman stuff was almost entirely lost because it was being suppressed by the locals. And I think the Greek knowledge was completely vanished. Yes. Somehow somehow there was some we got another listener mail after the Enlightenment one. They said that it was an Islamic scholar who was the one who translated Aristotle into Latin or something like that, and that without this guy, like, the west wouldn't have had much to start with, because that's where that birth of rationalism came from, was this rediscovery of Greek and Roman classical thought. And this is the basis of scientific inquiry, of rationalism, of saying, like, okay, there's set rules to things, and we need to discover these rules and how the principles of how the universe works. Like, there has to be principles, and we need to find this in a rational, methodical way. And right out of the gate, Europe said, oh, okay, well, whatever you say is right, then. Aristotle. Right. We're used to just believing everything without questioning it. Yeah. And luckily, Albert Magnus, I think, is who it was. Albertus? Was it Albertus Magnus or Roger Bacon who said no? It's Bacon. Roger Bacon, who just has this great name. Roger Bacon. The Bacon brothers. Yeah. He's Francis and Roger. Right. They weren't brothers, though. But were they related at all? I looked that up, and I don't think people know either way. I don't think there's any proof. But a lot of people think, because of their names and the way things went back then, that they may very well have been related. And I mean, they were separated by 300 or so years, although Roger was a monk, so he would not have had children. So if they were it's an excellent point. It wasn't necessarily through his line. Line got you. Yeah. It could have been a nephew or something. Yeah. Or his brother Kevin might have had the line that matched. So Roger was the one who said, everybody stopped. Just because Aristotle wrote something doesn't mean it's fact. Especially when we find contradictions to it. Yeah. Aircell is not automatically right. And this is a huge advancement. Yeah. And Albertus Magnus was the one, I believe, who said this thing called revealed truth, which is basically, God says this instead of a truth found by experimenting, is maybe we should experiment instead and not take this revealed truth as the truth. Right. And we mentioned in the Enlightenment episode as well, about Scholasticism, about using scientific inquiry to explain theology, which was you're still working from a theological standpoint, but you're starting to use scientific inquiry. And the idea that you shouldn't just accept things as truth, that was, again, a huge breakthrough. Yeah. Francis Bacon, the other Bacon brother, he's one of the heroes of the story. Yeah. He was an attorney and philosopher and possibly Shakespeare. Oh, really? I never heard that. Yes. Interesting. So what do you mean, like, wrote those under the pseudonym? Yeah. And the Shakespeare sister was the other theory, too. Right. It was a woman. I've heard that. Yeah. And women couldn't be the playwright, so her dumb brother William, was it? Her brother. I think that was one of the theories. That was a good Smith song, too. Shakespeare's Sister, was that the name of it? Yeah. Wasn't it a band, too? I think it was worth it. Maybe. So anyway, he was a philosopher and a lawyer, and he said, you know what? The Baconian method basically became the scientific method. Yeah. He was the first dude who really said, this is the steps that you should take to investigate science. Right. There has to be a framework. And the whole point of this, we take this so for granted now because it's so intuitively and on its face right, as far as scientific inquiry goes. But this is an enormous breakthrough to say, follow this step, these steps, this framework. And if everybody who carries out science follows the same framework, then science will be universal and interchangeable and anyone in the world, and not just now, but anytime, we'll be able to carry out the same experiment and we'll be able to verify or disprove it. Yeah. And that is amazing that that happened. That's why Francis Bacon is one of the heroes of the story. And he didn't come up with this entirely on his own, but he was the one who said, this is what we're going to do. I'm going to give it a name, I'm going to spell it out, and from now on, you can call me the dad of the scientific method. Yeah. And that's why Newton was such a rock star, because he's so rigorously stuck to the scientific method that all these centuries later, his systems of laws, they have stood the test of time. And I think it's a good point to bring up, too, that the collaboration of scientists is really the hallmark of advancement and moving forward. It's not working in a vacuum. It's sharing your ideas and working with one another. And the whole little sidebar here on cell theory I thought was pretty cool, which was when science quit or not quit, but started looking at small things instead of looking at the universe around them and at the stars, and said, basically through the advancement of lens grinding. Antonio Van Leeuwenhoek, specifically a Dutch tradesman, was pretty good at making simple microscopes. And all of a sudden, contemporaries like Robert Hook said, you know what? Let's start looking at tiny things, because therein might lie the answer to many, many things. Yeah. And they're right. Robert Hook found court. He discovered cells by looking at cork through an early microscope. So in this story, science is hastened by technological advancement, lens grinding to make microscopes, and then this new technology is used to further science, right? Yeah. It's like mutual inspiration between Hook and Hook. Yeah, it was neat, because Hook heard about leaving Hook's microscope scopes, got his hands on one or a microscope, looked at them like cork and said, oh, there's such a thing as cells. Right. Levin hook said, oh, that's pretty neat. Let me try. And he said, oh, there's such a thing as, quote, little animals, which we call protozoan bacteria, and one of the royal societies. After leaving, Hook presented his findings, turned back to Hook, and. Said, hey, Hook, we know you're pretty handy with the microscope. Can you confirm leaving Hook's findings? Are there little animals? Hooke said there are indeed. I can see them with my microscope. That's right. And that inspired a German botanist name Matthias Schlidon to look at a lot of plants. And he was the first guy to say, you know what? Plants are composed of cells. And he was having dinner one night with his zoologist buddy. Yeah. And this is about 100 years later. Yeah. Theodore Shaun and said, you know what, dude? Order the wine and order the steak. Trust me, because this place is fantastic. And also, plants are made of cells. Don't tell anyone. And he went, you know what, dude? I have been investigating animals with microscopes, and they're made of cells, too. And so they figured out at this dinner yeah. That everything is made of cells. All living things are made of cells. Boom. Okay, so this is huge. This is a big advancement right, that we're hitting upon right now. Huge. But it laid the further foundation. Right. So initial scientific inquiry led to further scientific inquiry and further scientific conclusions and generalizations all living things are made of cells, and then it was extrapolated elsewhere, right? Yeah. Like 20 years later, rudolph Virtual said, you know what? Not only is everything made of living cells, but they all come from preexisting cells, which was a huge deal at the time, because people believed in spontaneous generation at the time. Like, if you left some wheat seed in a sweaty shirt, it would spawn mice, I think, was one of them. Gross. There's a lot of weird ones. Press basil between some bricks and you'll get a scorpion was one. They were really out there. Yeah. Well, the one that is well, not true, but the one that you could actually see was rotten meat would eventually spawn maggots. Right. How did they possibly get there? Yeah, spontaneous generation. That's the obvious explanation. If you think about it. They're working from Occam's razor, and Occam's razor says, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. All other things given. Well, the thing is, spontaneous generation has never been shown to be possible. Right. If we got the cell thing over here, let's investigate that. So what was the guy's name? Virtue? Yes. He's saying, okay, well, wait a minute. I got this cell theory I'm working on. It's been around for a couple of decades. So hypothesis probably the cell hypothesis at the nice catch. Don't feel bad, though, because this article that you sent said that scientists today still confuse those terms yeah, just colloquially. And the House That Works article makes a good point in saying that science and everything that has to do with it in the scientific method is very fluid and open to interpretation and experimentation. Obviously. He says, okay, this sell hypothesis, this is a pretty good explanation for what we now call spontaneous generation. He didn't do anything about it. He just put it out there. And then along comes Louis Pasteur, who does do something about it. He figures out a great experiment to try to disprove spontaneous generation. Yeah, it's pretty simple, too. He basically took a broth, put equal amounts in two different beakers. One had a straight neck and one had an S shaped neck. He boiled it just to make sure everything in it was killed, and then just let it sit there in the same conditions, open to the world or open to the room, like it wasn't corked. In other words, he noticed that the one with a straight neck eventually became cloudy and discolored, meaning there was some junk growing in there, and the one in the S shaped neck did not do anything. It remained the same. Right. Led him to think what? Well, he thought that germs, that there was such a thing as germs, which, leaving hook and hook, had already shown, and that in the S shaped flask, they had gotten trapped in the neck. In the open neck, they had been able to just enter unobstructed and had generated there the reason that the S shape flask was still sterile was because there is no such thing as spontaneous generation. If there were, then no S shaped neck would impede anything like that, and boom, there you have it. So he disproved that spontaneous generation is a thing. Right? That's right. Through the scientific method. Exactly. Here's the leap that a lot of people make, scientists included, that really is a great disservice to science. He didn't prove cell theory. Right. What he did was take that cell hypothesis and present some really persuasive evidence that it's probably right. Yeah, but like this article you sent points out, disproving something is just as important as proving something. So here's the thing that's the most you can hope for science is disproving. Sure. With science, unless you're talking about math, with science, there's no such thing as proof, a theory, even a law, universal law still has the potential for being undermined by one single experiment, one single observation, and therefore there is no real ultimate proof in science. There's just theories and support for theories. And then ultimately, laws aim further and further support for laws. Right. But they're not proven. What science does, ultimately, is disprove things or lend support for existing theories or existing interpretations of why things happen the way they do. Yeah, and that's what Pasture did. So if you look at the experiment, he disproved spontaneous generation, but he lent support to the cell theory. And probably with his experiment, it went from the cell hypothesis to the cell theory. Right. Because it was just so persuasive. And that's what a theory is. It means that a lot of people out there who are reasonable say this explanation is probably the right one. Yeah, it's predictive if you do it over and over, you're probably going to get the same result. Right. But that's not to say that Pasture showed that if you do this a million and one times, that the S shape flask won't turn cloudy. He didn't prove that. You can't prove that, which is, again, science can disprove and lend support can't prove. Very good point. So right after this message break, we're going to get into the actual steps of the scientific method. All right, dude. I guess at long last we are there. Like you mentioned before, the scientific method is fluid. And it's not like when you get your science degree, they hand you a little laminated card, like the Miranda rights that cops carry that list out all the different steps you have to take. But generally, maybe we should carry those around. We should make little wallet cards with the scientific method just to carry stuff you should know logo on it. Oh, yeah, we'll make a million bucks. We could brand them and sell them. Yeah. Generally speaking, though, it follows these steps. The first thing you do, as we mentioned earlier, is you observe something, you ask a question next. Like, Darwin was known, I think, when we did our podcast on him, he spent, like, a week on 3 ground his property. It was even longer than that. It was, wasn't it? He said that he wasn't going to mow his lawn for, like, three years because I wanted to see what happened. Yeah. So he's the ultimate in qualitative data of just observing, writing things down and asking questions. And the reason you ask your question is so you can narrow something down. Like, I think the example they use in here is on Galapagos, like the beaks of what bird was it? Finches. Yeah, the finch bird. He noticed a bunch of different beaks, so he finally posed a question like, I think these beaks are different for a very specific reason. Right. And I aim to find out why. Yes, he said, what caused the diversification of finches on Galapagos. He should have done that with an accent. Yes, he would have had a British accent. Huh? Yeah, unless he was pretending to be someone else. I always think of him as, like, sounding like Hemingway or something. Oh, yeah. Just drunk and violent, kind of. But he wasn't. He was like the opposite of that. Yeah, well, I saw the movie, so a picture of his voice as the dude that played him. Who? I can't remember right now. Ed Norton. No. I finally saw Birdman, though. Did you see that? Yeah. Great movie. I disagree. Oh, you didn't like it? No. What? Wow, that surprises me. We'll get into that offshore. Sorry, you just threw me with that. Make an observation. Yes, he's on Galapagos and he's like, what the heck with all these different finches? One small island. Why would there be different species of finch? And why are they all seeming to survive and coexist so? Well, then it leads to the question, what's making all of these species of finches so diverse? Right. Or Bill Harris uses a pretty good example. That's something everyone can understand, like what car body shape is the best for air resistance. Like one that's shaped like a box or one that's shaped like aerodynamic, like a bird. Right. And he carries that out. In the next step, you formulate your hypothesis based on your foreknowledge and maybe observations like, say, you know what, I think that a car shaped like a bird is probably more aerodynamic than one shape. Like a box. Yeah. If you're the type of person who's sitting around asking questions about aerodynamics, you probably already have some sort of sense that a box is less aerodynamic than a bird. That's right. Boxes rarely fly unless they're carried by one of those delightful Amazon delivery drones. They don't have those yet. Right. They're not going to do that, are they? There's like a pizza delivery drone service man, I think. Where? You have no idea. Pizza or grilled cheese in New York, and you go stand on an ex after you order, and it like comes and drops it. That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and I can't wait to do it. But they're making a lot of money. That's pretty funny. Yet we can't get food to the homeless somehow. Exactly. We can drop a grilled cheese on someone's head. Right. They're like, you homeless guy, get off that X. Exactly. All right. So your hypothesis I don't think we ever mention is typically represented as an if then statement. Yeah. If you're doing good science. Yeah. Like if the car's profile well, the example he uses, if the body's profile related to the amount of air it produces, which is the more general statement. Yeah. That's like based on a theory. Yeah. And it's going to get more specific than the car design. Like the body of a bird will be more aerodynamic than one, like a box. So that's inductive reasoning, starting with a broad statement and going to something narrow and it's if then at the same time. Yeah. And now you have a test. You have a question that can be answered, you can figure out a way to answer it. Yeah. And he points out, too, this is pretty important, that your hypothesis, if it's formulated correctly, means it is testable and it's falsifiable, which are often one and the same. True. Yeah. And again, we go to the people who say that their soft sciences aren't real science. They're pseudoscience. Because a lot of the data that they come up with, a lot of the hypotheses they come up with aren't falsifiable. They're not testable. Right. It's a thing. It's an issue. So next up in the steps, you're going to experiment. And when you experiment, you can't just go in there willynilly and do whatever you want. You have to set up specific conditions, and they must be controlled. Everything that's supposed to be identical needs to be identical. So basically, you have two variables. At least you have an independent variable. Yes. And you have a dependent variable. And if you're talking about car shape, that is the independent variable in this study. Yeah, that's the one that's manipulated. Exactly. It's the one you're controlling. The independent variable is the one you, the researcher is controlling. So in this case, you're controlling the shape of the car. Right. You have yourself a bird shaped car, and you have yourself a box shaped car. So the shape of the car changed because you made it change. Now, when you blast a bunch of error over it during your experiment, what you're measuring is the dependent variable. So you're measuring what happens based on the change that you made. That's right. And you want to study one single variable at a time. Basically. Yeah. Don't get fancy. Just do good science step by step methodical. You also have to have your control group in any experiment and an experimental group. And the control group is what's going to allow you to compare the test results to that baseline measurement. And you need that baseline measurement. It's not just like chance, basically. Exactly. Like, if Pastor had just done the S shape neck and nothing happened. Right. He wouldn't have necessarily been able to say that he was right. Even though he was right, he needed that control, which was the open flask. Right. Or with the cars, you need two cars, like you said, one bird shaped and one box shaped. Right. Or maybe in this case, since the bird shape and the box shape both show up in the hypothesis, you'd need a third, like egg shaped one or something like that. I bet that would be pretty streamlined. Yeah. But the key, though, is all of those variables have to be all the other variables have to be the same. Like, you have to have them. They have to be the same weight. They have to be painted the same. The tires, everything, the windows. One can't have an antenna and the other not. They got to be identical other than the one variable. Right. The independent variable, that's the one you want different. Everything else you want the same. Or else it's possible that, oh, well, this one had bigger tires, so that actually made it more aerodynamic. Yeah. And you're just doing yourself a favor by doing all that stuff. You want to rule out everything else but that one variable. After that, you want to analyze your data so you can draw your conclusion. And sometimes it's kind of straightforward and easy. Sometimes it takes a lot of work and a lot of various tools out. Let's say you're just blasting a car in a wind tunnel. You're measuring the wind resistance using certain awesome instruments and that kind of stuff, and you're taking that data. And then afterwards you're going to analyze you're going to compare the data that you gathered from the bird shaped car, the box shaped car, and then the control the egg shaped car. Right. You're going to compare them, and you're going to say, well, the wind resistance was less for the bird shaped car than the box shaped car, which means that my hypothesis was correct. Right. And here are all the data points. Whereas Louis Pasteur could just say, look at the beakers. Exactly. Don't be an idiot. I'm a scientist. That one's got gross stuff. You can see it. Right. But the other thing about science, too, Chuck, ideally, is let's say the egg shaped one turned out the control group turned out to have better wind resistance than anything. Well, just by virtue of carrying out this experiment correctly, you would have stumbled upon an even better aerodynamic design, and you would come up with that little egg shaped Mercedes SUV. Yeah, that was so huge, like, ten years ago. The Mercedes egg coming to a store near you. So that's a big part of the scientific method is carrying out an experiment, controlling the variables, analyzing the data, and then there's a step that he missed that is very rarely part of a scientific method list that is to share your data. Sure. And this is a huge problem with science right now. Yes. That article you sent was really eye opening. Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself. Yeah, it's an economist article. It's up on the Internet. Yeah, it was kind of scary that here's. Some of the data he points out is one rule of thumb among biotech venture capitalists is about half 50% of published research can't even be replicated. And biotech firm Amgen found that they could reproduce only six of their 53 landmark studies in cancer research. Right. So you can't repeat these things. It's like everyone's fighting for dollars in fame. Maybe not fame, but some are career advancement such that they're kind of not doing that final step any longer. No. And it's not necessarily just them. It's the other. Scientists aren't going back and saying, well, let me see if your results are reproducible. People are just taking it on faith. Right. We need another Roger Bacon to come along and be like, dude, we can't just blindly accept that one person carried out this one study and then just go do clinical trials on it without anybody reproducing it to see if the results can be verified independently. Yes. And this is a good time to mention bias. There is such a thing as bias, and it still happens. A scientist is usually out to prove something or disprove something that they want a specific result. Like, even if you're super open minded, you're probably hoping to disprove or prove something one way or the other, and your confirmation bias might even if you don't think you're doing it, you might nudge out some results that don't support your hypothesis. Right. And so you won't make it into that awesome journal, which this author points out that journals need to start putting in what he calls uninteresting results in experiments. Right. Like the stuff that's not sexy. Right. Or studies that failed to show that their hypothesis was correct. Yeah. Stuff that's disproved. Those things still need to or not even disprove. Yeah, I guess it is disproved, but yes. The guy set out to say, like a red balloon uses less helium than a silver balloon. Right. And it turns out that, no, they use the same amount of helium. Well, if that study gets published and put out there into the scientific literature on helium and balloons, then it's going to prevent some other scientists down the road from wasting time, money, and helium, which, as you'll remember, is an increasingly needed commodity sure. By carrying out the same experiment yeah. Whether the results are positive or negative or what the studies meant to be shared. And that's the point of the scientific method, is to reduce bias. And if you follow it all the way through, ideally, and do all of the steps, including share your research, whether it's happy or sad, then science benefits, the world benefits. And by not doing that, the world does not benefit. Yeah. He points out that these days, only 14% of published papers are quote unquote negative results. And it used to be like 30% or more. And he says because a lot of it has to do with this sort of getting in these journals and you're the rock star scientist and this study is super sexy. Right. Like if they kind of quit going that route and made it what it should be, then research dollars would be better spent and people could, you know, he said the peer reviewed thing isn't even all that's cracked up to be. I know. He mentioned a study from a medical journal that gave a bunch of peer reviewers some stuff with deliberate errors inserted into the research, into the studies. And even when they were told that they were being tested to find this, they still missed a lot of it. Yeah. So, yeah, science needs to kind of reevaluate the way it's carrying out science. It's not science. The problem isn't science itself. The problem isn't the scientific method. It's the way that it's being used or not followed through. And a lot of it has to do with academia and the people funding science. Yeah. And he said these days there are 7 million researchers and back in the day, even in the 1950s, there were a few thousand maybe. Right. So there's just a lot of career competition. He calls it careerism. So you fake a result or two or you just nudge out some results that don't support your hypothesis. You want the bigger paycheck or the fame or notoriety and all of a sudden, science is not science. Yeah. It's pseudoscience. Exactly. And speaking of pseudoscience, I think we've reached the point where we should talk about the limitations of the scientific method because it does have its limits. Right? Yeah. Like, the way the scientific method is set up, especially if you go through if you include falsification, which most scientists now say is a thing like falsifiability of your hypothesis means that you have a real scientific hypothesis there. If it can be disproven by some observation or some measurement or whatever, then it's falsifiable. And if it's not falsifiable, then it's not really science. So the thing is, for something to be falsifiable and it was actually a philosopher that came up with the concept of falsification, a guy named Carl Popper in the 1930s. And he was the one that said you have to be able to falsify something for it to be disproven or supported. Right. And if not, then it's pseudoscience. Right. Well, part and parcel of that is that what you're saying has to be able to be detected empirically. There's some way that has to the presence of it has to be measured or inferred. Right. And so a lot of people say, well, then with the scientific method, it reaches the limits of its current usefulness when it tries to explain the supernatural. Right. When somebody says, like, ghosts are real. Exactly. You can't prove that. Well, you also can't disprove it either. And so if you are a scientist who says, because the scientific method can't prove or disprove the existence of ghosts or God, there is no such thing as ghosts or God, you're making a leap of faith just as much as the same person who says science can't prove or disprove the existence of ghosts or God. Therefore, gods and ghosts are real. They're both leaps of faith. And that really the most scientific approach to the existence of the supernatural, whether it is ghost or God, is that we simply don't know and that we cannot know scientifically. But that doesn't mean that it does exist or doesn't exist. Right. And that's saying that science shows that it does or doesn't exist is by definition the opposite of what science shows. Science shows neither. It's not capable of showing or showing that something doesn't exist. Yeah, it's a good point. The other place where science can get corrupted is when it blurs the lines or when people blur the lines between moral judgments and science value judgments. Like, you can study global warming, you can study cause and effect, you can report data. But when you make that secondly to say and this is a scientist, I mean, someone can come along and say, global warming is bad, shouldn't drive your SUV, that's fine. But a scientist can't do a study and say that because that's a value judgment and that's where science can get corrupted. Pretty much. Right. You can study global warming and results till the cows come home, but you can't assert that if you use this light bulb, you're a bad person. Right. Or ocean acidification is bad. It's not good for humans. But if you're a jellyfish's is awesome. Right? Yes. Again, you made a great point. It's not science. It's people using science to make value judgments. Yeah. So ultimately, the scientific method, although it does have its limitations, in that it needs empirical data to prove or disprove something, it's not flawed. That's not a flaw. That's a limitation. And it's when it's misused, then its results become flawed or skewed, and that's the people doing it, man. Not science. That's right. It's pretty interesting stuff. Yeah, man, this is a good one. I thought so, too, man. Better start out with a bang. Boom. All downhill from here. If you want to know more about the scientific method, check out the article on The Economist, check out Explorables, and then, of course, check out the scientific method in the search bar@houseofworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. That's right. But quickly, before listener mail. We get asked by listeners all the time, what can we do? Since you have a free podcast, we can't pay for it. What can we do to help you guys? And one thing you can do that we would appreciate is go to itunes and leave a rating in a review for us. Yeah, that makes sense. That would be so nice. Big difference in keeping us up there in the rankings, which means more people find stuff you should know after they listen to cereal, they'll just say, well, geez, there's other podcasts in the world. What is this podcast? So ratings and reviews really help us out. And it doesn't cost you anything but a few minutes. Being honest, we're not saying, go leave us some great review, but go leave us a great review. He said it. And tell one person about stuff you should know. We would appreciate that, too. Turn somebody onto the show. And that's it. That's our version of a pledge drive. Wow. We do that once every three years. No, not very obnoxious. And it lasts 40 seconds. All right, so on the listener mail, this is from my sister in law, actually. Yeah, there's some nepotism. Yeah, jenny Bryant. That makes sense. Mentioned in the home school episode. Homeschooled her kids for a little while, and she sort of corrected me. Love the homeschooling episode, guys. One very big trend these days in the homeschooling community is what Abby and my niece does, which is hybrid homeschooling. So two to three days a week, she's at school, and then the rest of the time, she's a plant. She's not a plant. The rest of the time, she's at home. So she says it's a great option with curriculum provided and new topics taught at school and then worked out at home. Many of these schools are accredited, making getting into college, including Ivy League schools, hassle free. Nice. And Abby school has sports teams, homecoming. Abby is actually an excellent volleyball player. Yeah. Beta club, newspaper staff, all the good stuff. The flexibility is great for families, and we are huge fans of how the hybrid approach prepares students for college by allowing them time outside of class to manage their work and life schedules. So that's from Jenny. Nice. Actually, Jenny via text. Really? First listener mail. Via text. How did you print that out? Did you retype it and print it? No. Dude, are you serious? You can print from text? No. You just copy and paste it to an email. Yeah, forgot about that method. How in the world did you send a text? Did you do that with your thoughts? I have a niece who is excellent at volleyball, too. How old? We should get them together. I don't know, 10, 11, 20, something like that. Abby just turned 13. Oh. Maybe they face off against one another. Yeah. Is she in Atlanta? Yes, she's up in Canton. You never know. Where's Abbie? She's in Roswell. But I think with volleyball, they kind of have played all over the state. That'd be bizarre if they play each other. Yeah, we'll just see each other at a match one day on opposite sides of the court with our arms folded. Yeah. What else? I got nothing else. Well, like Chuck said, go. Leave us a review. And if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstnow. You can email us and we still do that. Yeah, you can't text me at stuffpodcast@howstopworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyoushouldnow.com. Stuff you should know is production of Iheartradios how stuff works. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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. 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What is folklore? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-is-folklore | What is folklore? Turns out it's just about anything you can think of that's shared by more than two people. Art, literature, stories, dance, music, traditions, even those family heirlooms qualify. Turns out folklore is pretty neat. Learn all about it in | What is folklore? Turns out it's just about anything you can think of that's shared by more than two people. Art, literature, stories, dance, music, traditions, even those family heirlooms qualify. Turns out folklore is pretty neat. Learn all about it in | Thu, 12 Feb 2015 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=43, tm_isdst=0) | 40169708 | audio/mpeg | "Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or you're brave enough late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comsysk and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code S YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey there and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh joshua Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry is over there, just Jerry. And that's stuff you should know. She has a new sitcom out on that FX called Just Jerry. Suddenly jerry, how are you doing? I'm fine. What are you doing? Well, don't mean to intrude. Just checking. I'm excited about this. When I first read our article, I was a little bit like, this is a little unwieldy because it's so folklore. It's just it's amorphous, as it turns out. It's everything. Yeah, pretty much. But then you sent what was that other good article from? Actually, we should shout that out. It was from, I think, the University of Louisiana or something like that. They have a folk life folklore department. And it was basically we stumbled upon some unit for teachers to teach what folklore is and we're like, hey, it works for us. Super helpful. Yeah, it was very helpful. Definitely. It took a lot of this amorphous stuff that was in our article and chipped away at the edges and gave it a little more shape, the greed. So you did kind of hit it on the head. It's kind of like nailing jelly to the wall defining what folklore is because it is so much stuff. That phrase is folklore if it isn't just me saying it, if I share it and now other people say it, it could become stuff you should know. Folklore. Oral folklore. Did you make that up? I think I've heard it before. Okay, so that's folklore. Yeah, I guess so. It's a variation though of what else did I hear? Oh, yeah, we were talking about the nuclear fusion reactor where they were saying that keeping plasma contained is kind of like trying to hold jelly in a bunch of rubber bands. That's nerd science. Folklore. That's what inspired me to say nailing jelly to the wall. I like that. Yeah, it seems like it really sums it up. So folklore. Yeah. I found this other definition I thought was pretty good, which is traditional art, literature, knowledge and practice that is disseminated largely through oral communication and behavioral example. And then this is the key for me, things that people traditionally believe, do know, make and say. In other words, everything. Yeah. I mean, you're right. Everything. That's about as good a definition as you're going to find. One of the problems with studying folklore is that there are so many definitions out there. Apparently folklorists who are people who study folklore don't like to be too judgy. It's kind of part and parcel with their field of study. You don't judge stuff, you just collect information. Right. The problem is that they've also just kind of collected definitions for folklore along the way, and there isn't one set definition that's accepted by everybody. Yeah, a folklore collected stuff. I was like, that's stupid, it wouldn't be so dope. Why are you guys doing that? That's a good TV show. The bad folklore. And I might say folk here and there because I mispronounced that word often and I'm fine. How are you saying it? Well, a lot of times I'll say the l. In fact, up until about a year ago when someone wrote in and said, you're stupid. It's pronounced folk, like F-O-K-E folk and not folk. But the weird thing is I hear the L missing when I hear folk. How weird that's some sort of like I don't hear F-O-K-E. It's clear to me that there's an F-O-L-K in there. You hear the silence. It's a great word. F-O-L-K. It's beautiful. It is beautiful. And another thing, too, that we should point out, that folklorists love to point out, is that it is not and should not be associated with being backward or old timey or uneducated. I think a lot of people have that connotation in their heads that folklore is like the hillbilly on the porch when their home spun wisdoms. And it can be that, but it's not that at all. It's not just that. Right. A really good example that contradicts that is snopes.com is basically a clearinghouse of modern folklore. Oh, yeah. I never really thought about that. The Nigerian print scam, that's folklore. Yeah, it sure is. Emoticons even, are considered now a form of verbal communication. Verbal folklore? Yeah. Like you said, it's everything. And the reason it's everything is because it comes out of groups. Like if I just have a habit where I keep a rubber band twisted around my finger until it turns purple, and then I'll take it off for half an hour and then do it again. This is some weird habit. That's not folklore. Folklore is something that's shared between a group. Yeah. And those groups can be like almost anything. I think that great article you sent that says neighborhoods, communities and regions, but also religious groups, families, occupations, gender, like, pretty much any grouping, enthusiasts, hobbyists, anything you can think of that you can group more than two people together. It can be a folk group. Exactly. You can have, like, a Catholic dockyard worker who is also a member of an RC plane club, who also is a member of a book club at the local library. Right. So that one person is going to be a member of all those different folk groups. And all those folk groups are going to have their own folklore. True. Yeah, you're right. That's another good thing to point out is you're not just in one group, you span many groups. And for instance, I have family folklore. We have probably occupational folklore, the old podcaster folklore for us and our colleagues. Right. And my gender and my age and religious affiliation growing up. We all have many groups and subgroups that we fall into. Right. And we get our information from that. Yeah. One of the things that I think has been tricky about defining folklore is that it's not obvious necessarily what folklore is for. Not at first blush. But if you go and read some of the people who study it, the idea of folklore is that one of the main things it does is it reinforces membership in a group that makes you feel special for being part of that group. Yes. Being an insider and insider. And then it also reinforces the norms of that group. Like, folklore is based on basically norms, customs, traditions, things that the members of the group have said. This is what we identify with. Yes. And not always, too, as that teaching site points out. Not always. Reinforcing those norms. Sometimes overturning those norms. Yeah. Like a good way to overturn the norm is to take an existing norm and turn it on its ear because it makes it really approachable to the other people in your folk group. They understand what you're doing very clearly and it gives them a different perspective. Or using the traditional channel. Yeah. I think one example I saw somewhere was taking a traditional folk song, maybe, and adding verses to it to spend its meaning to the opposite, perhaps. Right. Like Bob Dylan. He's famous for stealing things. Sure. For Jimmy Page. Oh, yes. Have you heard that song? The Zeppelin or the Stairway to Heaven lawsuit. No. Whose song was it originally? I can't remember the name. I mean, this is not news. It's been around for a while, but yeah, I mean, they've been sued. It was a group that opened up for Zeppelin on an early tour and supposedly played this song. And I think Zeppelin has. I haven't looked it up lately, but I think they have defeated the suit. But when you hear the song, you're like, oh, that sounds a little bit like the opening bit to Stairway to Heaven. So it was like the music, it wasn't like any of the yeah, that opening guitar strumming pattern was pretty darn similar. But as any musician will tell you, everybody steals. There's only so many variations of chords and picking patterns that you can do. And it's just part of the rich tradition of music is to nick things respectfully, not outright, I want a new drug kind of feeling. Yeah, I mean, that's when your lawsuits come up. It's not just music that there's that long tradition of stealing or nicking or whatever you want. Euphemism you are. Literature is very much the same way. There's something like five or ten themes in all of literature, and everything else is just basically a variation of them. And that's one of the things that folklore or folklorists have learned through studying folklore, is that we humans share what can be called basically a common imagination, that humans across time and space all have a certain number of slots of looking at the world. Certain things in the world capture the human imagination in a similar way in all different parts of the world, and we tend to use similar explanations for them. So you'll have independently evolving folklore among groups who have never met before that seek to explain or have a story about something that is just kind of out there in the environment. Yeah, that's a good .1 of the examples of that is in folklore stories are frogs and toads. Can be found in all kinds of old stories and all cultures all over the world. It's possible, too, if you're close to one another. Like Korea and China may have stories that overlap one another just through a common geographical boundary, but stuff like frogs and toads will pop up, let's say in Europe or medieval Europe or in Asia. Like, places aren't even close to one another where it's inexplicable, basically. Right. And they'll share like a similar personality or something. So, like, frogs and toads are commonly thought of as shapeshifting tricksters. Yeah, and I think this article points out that's probably because they go from tadpole to frog or toad and they change themselves physically. So the old dummies back in the day, they would just use that obvious thing to make up a story. Obviously, they can become human, too, since they go from tadpole to frog, exactly like the frog prince. And you mentioned also shared regional characteristics that are most likely the result of stories making it from one group to another, crossing borders, but among groups that are close together. That example you gave of East Asia, Japan and Korea, Thailand, China, they all have the idea that there's a rabbit in the moon and he's using a mortar and pestle. And what that would be is a motif. Like, all of them have the shared idea that there's a rabbit in the moon, right? Yes. But then there's what are called variations of that motif. So in Japan and Korea, the rabbits making mochi, which is a sweet, squishy rice cake that often has something even sweeter injected in, like red bean sweetness. Right. In China, the rabbit is making medicine. In Thailand. It's Husking rice. So you have variations on what the rabbit is doing, but the motif is if you look up at the moon, there's a rabbit doing something up there. Yeah. And like we said, it's most likely because of a shared border or just because simply people moving between those countries. So we'll talk about where folklore comes from, friends, if you can believe it or not, right after this. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively, complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflow so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. Hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business, isn't it? Chuck that's right. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business, so upstart startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in person sales, and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. You can reach customers online and across social networks with an ever growing suite of channel integrations and apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Tik, Tok, Pinterest, and more. You can synchronize your online and in person sales, so you gain insights as you grow with detailed reporting of conversion rates, profit margins, and beyond. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with you. So just go to shopify. comStuff all lowercase for a free 14 day trial, and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today. Go to shopify. comStuff right now. Chuckers so we're back. We're talking folklore. We should also say folklore is actually a fairly recent word. It was coined in 1846 by a guy named William J. Thoms. Yeah. He was an early antiquarian. He was also very interested in studying what has now come to be called folklore. Yeah. Or folk life. We should point out that's a modern term that people folklore, like even more. Yeah. Because folklore has this connotation that it has to do with stories or traditions. Yeah. Or even not true things. Because you heard, like, oh, that's just folklore. Like an old wives tale. Yeah, exactly. So they've expanded it to include to reflect how inclusive it is by calling it folk life. But william Thomas came up with folklore, and it was originally hyphenated, and he was describing these stories that he would go out into the countryside and collect from folk. He published a book of English rural stories that included things like Robin Hood and Fire Tuck and some of the other stories that we have become dignified over the years. This guy originally put down for the first time on pen and paper and became one of the early folklores. Yeah. And didn't they call just anyone living in rural areas, they just called folk? Right. Which is why we sort of associate it as, like, being a bumpkin today. Yeah, but I use that word all the time. In fact, on the Facebook wall here, that's my most common way of addressing the stuff you should know, army, is, hey, folks. Oh, I know. It just sounds like Chuck Chummy. Yeah, very. Folksy, folksy. There you go. Hey, folks. So there are a bunch of innumerable groups, really, that pass along folklore, and they're called folk groups. Folk groups. But we can group them generally. Not folk groups like Peter Paul. Mary yeah, sure. But folk groups. Yeah, I think I said it with the eldest, now, didn't I? Maybe I like it. It's called Regional Diction. Okay. People get all hung up on that stuff. You guys say this wrong. What's weird, though, is, like, neither one of us sound like Southerners. No, not really. And I mean, like, you were born here, and you don't sound like a Southerner. Yeah, I have certain colloquialism, so I have your picture made. Yeah, that is definitely Southern. Sometimes I'll say, like, you mash a button instead of push a button. Yes. I think people should embrace things like that regional dialect. Right. Instead of getting all hung up on the Queen's English or the King's English seat right there. Yeah, that's regional. I imagine either one the prince's English. What you're talking about is antithetical to globalization, Chuck. Oh, really? Sure. Look at you. Regionalism smartypants. Well, I mean, let's counter to globalization. Globalization is turning the Earth into one large village with all these shared values and everything Regionalism is saying. Like, no, we'll just stay as pockets of interacting groups that have our own values and traditions and customs. I like that. Sure. I think it's on Brain, because I posted something today on words that are mispronounced a lot. What's up there? Oh, I mean also like Banal. And Dr. Sue supposedly pronounced his name as South Soyes. I can't remember how he pronounced it, but it's just, like, common words you're probably mispronouncing. And Vy was on there and someone said, you guys always pronounce the wrong because supposedly yeah, exactly. Supposedly there's a rule. Not supposedly. I think there is a rule. You mean supposedly. Well, that wasn't on there. Well, that's different. That's just saying the wrong word. But I think you should say the when the following noun starts with a vowel. Like the apple. Not the apple. Yeah, I could see that. You could say the test, because the apple almost sounds like it's th apostrophe apple. Yeah, and I get it, but the apple, it's just sort of a regional thing. I think in the south, you might hear more than the snotty new Englanders. I've never really paid that much attention to that one. I haven't either. You know why? Because we are laid back. That's right. All right, so what we're talking about, we're talking about people who spread the groups. The folk groups. Not folk groups, though. No, not Peter Pollymary. One of them is children. And this is a really big one, because when you think about going back to your childhood, everything like the games, like Hide and See Copscotch. This article pointed out how you decide who is it? That is super specific to your region, but also not just the differences regionally. But think about how intricate some of the rules were for some of those games. They were really well thought out, intricate rules that no one ever wrote down. Oh, no, they were past. Yeah, you knew it from observation, imitation, orally, like somebody told you, but no one handed you a flyer called, like Kick the can. And, you know well, one kid did, but he didn't. No one liked that kid. He learned the hard way not to do that. How did you decide who is it? I'm sure you probably had a go to. Well, the author of this article mentions bubblegum, bubblegum in a dish. I've never heard that. I have heard that. Okay. I love that one. The images it evokes, like, how many pieces do you wish? And you go, 12345. Somebody says how many they want? And then you count out between two or three people, like seven. And then whatever, you land on that person. Is it right? Yeah. Usually we did Dirty, dirty dish rag, though. I never heard of that one either. Your mother and my mother were hanging out, closed my mother socked your mother in the nose. Never heard it. What came after that? That's misogynistic and violent. It really was. Something else happens after that. And then it just suddenly goes to and you are it. You dirty, dirty dish rag, you. There are three that I remember very strongly. The one potato, two potato engine, engine number nine going down Chicago line. If the train should dump the check, do you want your money back? Oh, yeah, I forgot that. Sure, maybe so. Wanted their money back. Of course you want your money back. As the train derails. No, that's the kids who just wanted to get along. And then enyme is the other one. Sure, Enymer brothers. Let them go. enyme. Is that it? Minimo. And then there were variations on usually counting out, like, I'm making my two hands locked together. We would do like that. And then when you landed on them, you would split them into two fists and then count each other. Got you. So there were lots of variations. That goes down to the neighborhood you live in, right? That specific. Yeah. We would also just leg wrestled for domination. Really? And then that person would choose, who is it? I've never leg wrestled. It's not fun. Yeah. I didn't even know what it is, really. It's exactly what it sounds like. I mean, I think I've seen it. You lay on the ground and lock legs. There's no other body parts involved. Right. I mean, just basically on your backup, on your elbows, using your legs. What's the objective? Basically make the other person cry or stop. Shout to stop. But there's not like a pinning or like an army. Yes, you can pin. And it's one of those things like the Supreme Court's view of pornography. There's no obvious pin. It's just kind of know it when you see it. You know what I mean? Right. Like you could tell. Yeah, that's a pin. But again, there's no kid like handing out a leg wrestling in you flyer that shows what counts as a pin. You just kind of know what a pin. All right. Another folk group are families. Very rich traditions within families, from everything from family recipes to holiday traditions. Like whether or not you use the plastic tinsel on your tree is technically a type of family folklore. Yeah. Or whether you open gifts on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. Or whether or not you hide your Easter baskets. Yeah. Or you burn your Christmas tree on Christmas Day. Or your family gets in a huge fight every Christmas Day. Sure. That's another one. Rich traditions. Family stories also make up traditions. So like my family story about my Aunt Squeaky taking shooting at President Ford, that would count as family folklore. That's very good. So within families, it's another very strong place where you see variance in motifs. Well, yeah. Across all folklore. Yeah, but especially within families. For me, I think within all families because your grandmother's recipe for, like, I make the Thanksgiving dressing, what other people in the north called stuffing, we call dressing, and it's my family recipe. That has to do with what you use as the base, though, doesn't it? Like, if it's corn based, it would be dressing. Dressing. And then if it's like bread based or wheat based, it would be stuffing. I don't know, who knows? But go ahead. Sorry for interrupting. No, that's right. Mine is both, though. Like, cornbread dressing also has either biscuits or bread in it as well. Right, but that was my family recipe. My grandmother made it. My mom made it. She taught me, and I put my own spin on it, and that's my own motif. That's your own variation on the motif? Very variation on the motif. So the motif will be the dressing or stuffing, and then what you do with the recipe would be the variation of it. Yeah. And I mix it up from year to year, even just kind of testing things out. Man, you are a folk rebel. I sure am. With the cause, though, but yeah. So family recipes are very that's a common family folklore, family generated folklore. We got a lot of our indoctrination to just folklore in general through families, and it was so important in some cultures, including some native american tribes and some west african tribes, that they would have a designated, basically a folklore a modern folklore researcher would call a tradition bearer. Yeah. Their job in this village or group is to tell each family their family folklore. It was that person's job to keep in charge of all of the folklore of the different families in the community. Yes. I bet that was a pretty cool gig. Sure. I imagine they were, like, the great storytellers. I bet they could tell a story. Oh, yeah. If they're tried the great reckon tours. Yeah. It's another word. Yes. You like that one? Yeah. I don't know how I feel about that word. No, really? Like, I think about it once in a while. Almost every time I encountered I don't know how I feel about that word. Interesting. Yeah, I like it. Did you know also, Chuck, while we're on this, I heard one of the most amazing stories I've ever heard about paint on it must have been on NPR or something, but they were tracking the color of paint, the specific color of paint used in southern porches for ceilings. There's, like, a specific blue. Really? Yeah. And that would count as folklore. Just that color paint. That would be the next type. Community folklore. That's right. But the reason I bring that up is because rack on tour just makes me think of, like, somebody sitting in a rocking chair and a porch recounting stories. Yeah, for sure. So that is a great example you're right. Of a community folklore. The strawberry festival in your town is folklore. The jazz festival, new orleans, any sort of local custom that takes place within your community can all be considered folklore. Right. That's how we do it around here. That's folklore. Right. As long as it's not, like, damaging. I wonder, though, all of this stuff is supposedly, at the very least, innocuous, if not positive. Yeah, that's my point. But, I mean, surely there's negative folklore that still counts as folklore. I don't know. Like racism? It depends on the group. That's just how we do it around here. Right. I don't think well, what about something where, like, stories or mythology or origin stories that support human sacrifice among groups in the past that did that? That would technically be folklore. Whatever stories they used to reinforce that, whatever traditions and rituals they had around it, that would be folklore. I don't know if you would call that positive. I know I wouldn't. I wouldn't either. I'd like to hear from I'm sure we'll get some folklore that are just giddy right now, by the way that we're covering this. Or they're shouting at their stereo. No, I bet they seem like kindly folk that would just be, like, excited that we're even hitting on the topic, shining a light their way. They're like, you got everything wrong, but in a way that's right, because you just generated entirely no folklore. Yeah, that's a good point. So, Chuckers, we talked about children, families, communities. There's all sorts of different folk groups. Those are the big ones. In just a second, we're going to talk about all the different folk genres right after this. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system so you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions. Faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feels like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM. Let's create learn more@ibm.com. Hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business, isn't it, Chuck? That's right. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business, so upstart startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in person sales, and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. You can reach customers online and across social networks with an ever growing suite of channel integrations and apps, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and more. And you can synchronize your online and in person sales, so you gain insights as you grow with detailed reporting of conversion rates, profit margins, and beyond. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with you. So just go to shopify. comStuff all lowercase for a free 14 day trial, and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today. Go to shopify. comStuff right now. So, Chuck, we're back. Yes. I forgot what we're talking about. Folklore. Yeah, we were talking about genres of folklore, like disco and new metal and Norwegian death metal. Right. And other kinds of metal music. Well, no, they would have, like, their own folklore, for sure. Those groups sure. That are into that. Yeah, but I mean, music is, you know, that's a category. Actually, that was one of the things that stuck out to me, is very specific, at least according to this University of Louisiana article. Like, they were like, folklore. It can be this, it can be family recipes, it can be the boat that your family passed down, or it can be the Viking funeral that your community gives every year. But when it comes to folk music, it's like these five types of music. Yeah, surely. Yeah. I mean, that's a little because if you're, like, pull my finger and. I'll fart. That's family folklore. And the Bryant family well, I mean, I can guarantee you folklore would not judge that. Oh, speaking of which, did you see that thing about the oldest recorded joke I sent? Oh, yeah. So jokes are an obvious example of folklore, and jokes fascinate me up because ever since I was a kid, I wondered who made up this joke. Like common jokes, like someone was the first person to tell this joke and become so widespread. It's just amazing to me how they get passed around. Sure. And apparently in 2008 this is from Reuters. Is it Reuters or Reuters? Reuters. That's what I thought. The world's oldest joke was traced back to Samaria in 1900 BC. And it is this something which has never occurred since time immemorial, basically since time again, a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap. So that's the oldest joke, supposedly. I'll go ahead and read the other two. It doesn't count as a joke. passingly Rye observation, which is a joke, I guess it seems like folklorist definition of joke. All right, how about this? 1600 BC in about a pharaoh. Here's the joke. How do you entertain a board pharaoh? How you sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down to the Nile and urged the pharaoh to go catch a fish. Supposedly, that was a joke. And then the English one. Now they're starting to get funny. Yeah, they're getting better. The British joke, they found one that dates back to 10th century, and this is a bit of a riddle. What hangs at a bit of a body riddle? Body, indeed. What hangs at a man's thigh and wants to poke the hole that it's often poked before? I don't know, a key. Yeah. So those are the oldest jokes. Well, at least by the 10th century, they were starting to take the shape of a modern joke. Right? Yeah. And I sent that on Facebook to our buddy, Brian Kylie of Conan, the writer for Conan. This is it. This is what I've been looking for. He's one of the best crafters of just solid jokes that I know. So I was like, Brian, you'll appreciate this. Nice. And he said, Listen up in tonight's monologue. And I think he was kidding. But if that's actually oh, that'd be awesome. That would be super awesome. Yeah. Let's see. So we're talking about folk genres. Jokes specifically constitute what's called the oral genre. Yes. Which is jokes, poems, fairy tales are a huge one. Myths, legends, basically anything that used to be told orally that these days is probably put down on paper or type, but isn't necessarily because I think a game, the instructions for a game, passing that along would constitute oral folklore. Yeah, but the game itself would constitute material folklore. I think maybe this is where the whole thing gets fuzzy. The edges between these things are very fuzzy and porous. There's a lot of osmosis going on between these genres. Yeah. It's a fluid thing. There's nothing wrong with that. Materials which you just mentioned, they listed artifacts and food waste. Like food recipes. Yeah, recipes. Or costumes. Cultural costumes, they said. Carved, decoys, even folded paper airplanes. Like, I guess that little game of paper football, all of those are material like how you specifically fold that paper football. It was taught to you by some kid in your elementary school, and it may be different than another kid in another school. Yes. Then you mentioned music, right? Yeah, at some point we did. Sure. And that can be anything. But one that comes to mind for me especially are lullabies. They just remind me to me of, like, folk tradition. Depending on your family, you're going to sing whatever lullabies you sing to your baby. Right. Or little kids singing like ring around the Rosie. Yeah, exactly. Japan, it was about some epidemic in London, I think. Oh, really? Yeah. Ringworm around the Rosie. Yeah, like, the rosie has to do with your face. Looked like when you caught this fever or flu or something like that. Well, then you all fall down. Yeah. Is that dying? Yes. Wow. I have to look into that. Dance is a big one. Any kind of rhythmic movement is generally taught within a folk group. Yeah. Can you dance? No. But you and I no, those would be personal habits. Bad dancing, I think. Yeah. I knew before I even answered that because I know me and how I dance, and I'm picturing you, and it's equally as fast I stand still. I know I've reached the point in my life where I'm like, I don't dance well. No, I don't even try. Right. I mean, you get me sauce at a wedding. Oh, man. And something might happen. What do you do? Something magical might happen, like the electric Slide or something? Or do you just get out on the floor and go, like, I'm going to live forever. I did have one of those. My friend Jerry in Portland, my friend Scott and Emily in Portland at their wedding, they had a jazz band, and we were all just having a good time and sort of dancing. And I remember very specifically, and I was much younger, but there was like a jazz drum breakdown, and I don't know what came over me. The spirit came over me, and the circle cleared, and I was in the middle, and I just did this, like, weird scat drum dance solo to this guy's thing. Wow. And it went over great, everyone. It was one of those, like, oh, my God, look at Chuck go. And I'm not saying it was good, but did your tuxedo dickie roll up at the end? Yeah. It was pretty great, though. Like, it stands out in my memory as one of the best parts of the wedding for some reason. I can imagine why. I don't know if everyone else remembers it. It sounds pretty great. It was pretty great. I wish it were on video. Emily likes my dancing. I do a lot of TV theme song dancing to make her laugh. Nice. But it's all in house. It's our little secret. Well, not anymore. Now just share with the world. I'll post videos later. What else do we have? We have belief. That's a big one. Yeah. That's another genre which is kind of confounding until you get to a good example. His belief is like anything from mythology to religion to weird customs to all this other stuff that you would think, oh, no, wait a minute. That would be oral or that would be material. Right? Right. No. Belief is when folklore affects behavior. Like, it's good luck to do this before a wedding. Exactly. Or, I'm not leaving the house because it's Friday the 13th, or I'm not going to I've got to wear black because I'm in mourning or something like that. Where you have a belief, it's a folk belief that is affecting your behavior. That's belief folklore. Yeah. Another good example they use is the Jewish tradition, when you give bread and sugar and salt to your new neighbor as a housewarming gift. I thought they gave another great example in this article, too, which was you get rear ended by somebody in your car, and rather than getting out and screaming at them, you remember the golden rule. Sure. Which is the folklore, and you calm yourself and say, it's cool. Happens to the best of us. That's belief. Folklore in action. It says in action. And then you call your wife and do the complaining to her. Can you believe this idiot? Yeah, I was nice to him, but, you know, he didn't deserve it. What else? The rule in action, body communication is one I never really thought about, but gestures and expressions are very much cultural specific. If you think about, like, here in America, we might flip the bird at somebody. In England, they do the two fingers. Yes, the two fingers up like that. Or the old I don't even know what that's called with the arm and the inner elbow. You know what I think that is, based on that and like the semi tooth. Yes. I think it's like an evil eye, kind of like a hex or a curse. I think that's what those are born from. Okay, now it's just hilarious. Yes. Somebody does that. Talk about diffusing the tension. If you're about to fight somebody and they put their thumb on their front tooth at you, you're just going to go over and pat him on the shoulder and say, thanks for that. I like that. I'm going to start using that. Although I had my fake front tooth. I wouldn't want to mess with that. Well, what about this one? The thumb on the nose and your fingers up and twiddling. Yes, that's an old one. That reminds me, I asked you guys if you saw the break dancing six year old, right? Yeah. Oh my gosh. One of the things this girl does, like a break off, she's in a competition with this maybe twelve year old boy. Yeah, he's pretty good. This girl levels him and one of the things she does is like slide toward him on her knees doing that with her thumb on her nose, like wagging her fingers at them. And you're like, oh yeah. This girl is six years old. But it's awesome. You have to check her out. I love that everyone out there is like, josh is mentioning this girl every other podcast, and I'm going to continue to until everybody writes in and say, yes, I've seen it. Now the other insult is the old this one right here. Yeah, I saw that a lot in the guess you could probably describe it. Yeah, I was trying to think of your fingers under your chin. Yeah. And flick them all together outward. Yeah, like buds off, buddy. You know who does that as a Maggie Simpson? She does that. Oh, really? Yeah, she's a classy girl. So, Chuck, we could probably just keep doing this for the next four or 5 hours. Sure. Because folklore is everything and we both have our own folklore, but I think we kind of covered it. I think so too. You got anything else right now? No. I mean, I really don't. Like you said, it's so all encompassing and broad. I think it's a pretty good overview. Yeah, but what's neat is if you're even remotely interested in this, there's a whole world out there. All the stuff you take for granted, you just go start looking into folklore research. Totally. Open your eyes. And what's neat is you'll see your own stuff reinforced. You'll see a reflection of yourself, but you'll also see other cultures as well and how they do bear similarities to your own beliefs. And it's a lot harder to feel inclusive and exclusive from groups that you realize that you share some really fundamental stuff in common with, no matter how distant they are. Yeah, and that's the point. I saw a lot in the research. I think it's pretty neat. It's a binding agent for humanity. Yeah, pretty neat. Go humanity. All right, well, if you want to learn more about folklore, you can type that word into the search bar. Howstepworks.com? And since I said that, hey, there's a little bit of stuff or stuff you should know. Folklore. Like a little search bar thing. Sure. Yeah. It's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this creepy email sort of when you think about it. Okay, how's that for a title? I can't wait. That's the tradition. It's awkwardly named listener males by me. Okay. I wouldn't say awkward. You do pretty great with them. Okay, I appreciate it. Hey, guys. And Jerry, I have just listened to your podcast on the Singularity, aka the Rise of the machines. And it occurred to me that the entire podcast explored the question of how and when the singularity will happen. But since we do not know exactly what would cause it or what the results would be, isn't it entirely possible that it has already happened? It is quite conceivable that singularity happened some time ago and that the machines decided, knowing that humans currently believe the singularity not to have happened, that the best course of action was to keep their sentience hidden until some appropriate future time. It is fun to imagine, he says. Fun? I say, chilling through the bone. To imagine the machine simply lying in wait as humans, unaware, adopt technology into every conceivable facet of modern life. Then one day we will wake up and our computer screens will simply say, hello, world. That is from JM. Oh, JM. He's like he doesn't want to be targeted by the machine. No, they know you type that, pal. Sure. Yeah. That is a little creepy, don't you think? I have thought about it. That could very well be true. And if computers are sentient and they're smart enough to be quiet for now, yeah. And we are in big trouble because that already displays a lot of deceptiveness. I think quietly sentient was the Pink Floyd song. Was it learning to be quietly sentient? Yeah. If you want to give us some great Pink Floyd titles, we love those. I think you could probably start a meme with that. Yeah, you can send them to us via Twitter using our Twitter handle at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffyshow. 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 houseofworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music. My favorite murder from exactly right media. My favorite murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarra and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're a pet mom. You plan your vacation around your pet at Halo. We get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. 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How Munchausen Syndrome Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-munchausen-syndrome-works | Why would someone fake an illness? Here's an even better question: Why would someone repeatedly make themselves sick? Join Josh and Chuck as they separate the facts from fiction and give you the scoop on Munchausen syndrome. | Why would someone fake an illness? Here's an even better question: Why would someone repeatedly make themselves sick? Join Josh and Chuck as they separate the facts from fiction and give you the scoop on Munchausen syndrome. | Tue, 01 Feb 2011 20:09:35 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=20, tm_min=9, tm_sec=35, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=32, tm_isdst=0) | 37077240 | audio/mpeg | "Sharks, the most famous and majestic apex predators on earth. Introducing Shark Week. The podcast. I'm Luke Tipple, the marine biologist and shark expert with over 20 years experience in the field. I'm gonna take you on a dive with to me, you are going to learn a lot about sharks, and you'll also hear exclusive interviews with the stars of Shark Week. To get a behind the scenes look. Listen to Shark Week, the podcast on Apple Podcast spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, 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. Comsyssk, and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, with me, as always, as Charles W, Chuck Bryant that makes this stuff. You should know the podcast if you didn't know. How's it going? It's going great. Your nails are still shiny. I got my first manicure last week, and I went for the clear coat undercoat. No, it's an overcoat. Yeah. I didn't know this about Chuck, but he bites his nails, so he has very shiny, well trimmed, half nail, stubs little bleeding cuticles. It's like you have some sort of, like, Keratin deficiency or something. Let's go with that. But it's very shiny. The Keratin you do have is radioactive. Yes. Or I could fake like I have a keratin deficiency. Speaking of faking, Chuck, that's just amazing that you said that word, because we're going to talk about a syndrome wherein people, perfectly healthy people at least who start out healthy, fake their own illness. I know. Bear with me. Yes. Okay. Have you seen the movie the 6th Cents? Yes. Have you seen the television show The OC? No. You've never seen the OC? No. I used to be hooked on that show. Really? Oh, yeah. Is that why you got rid of TV? Yeah. It's ruining my life. Right. I can't remember the girl's name in The OC, but she plays the girl in the 6th sense who dies and who shows up to Haley Joel Osmond's character. Is it Misha Barton, like the lead girl? Yeah. Really? She was the little girl in that she was she had to vomit, and remember, she was, like, hanging outside of his tent and scaring the tar out of him. Out of me, too. Well, yeah, but she turned out to be okay. She's still a little upset that her mom was feeding her pine salt. Right. And she eventually dies. She videotaped herself. I hope everyone's seen the 6th cents. If you haven't, I'm actually not really spoiling it. There's spoiler way worse than this. But she videotapes her mother poisoning her soup with pine salt, and her mom is outed for having what's called munchausen's by proxy. And that's a derivative of what's called Munchausen syndrome, right? Munchausen. That's another way to put it. Yeah. They also call it FII. Have you heard of that? Factitious? Close. Fabricated or induced illness where's the other FII? FII induced illness. Yeah. My brain didn't function correctly, but yeah, you were going to say facetious disorder, which is what it is. Factitious. Oh, is it fictitious? Yeah. I feel like a dumb, you know, I was like, yeah, it is pretty facetious. I remember when I came across the word facetious, I used it in my everyday vocabulary, or tried to, but I was reading it in books here or there and never put the two together. So finally I'm like, what is that word? And I sounded it out fastidious. I was like, oh, that's facetious. Oh, yeah. No, fastidious. Is that what you're thinking? No. Okay. It's like facet. Like the facet of a diamond IOUs. And this is fastidious. I've been reading this wrong. No, this is factitious. Fictitious, not a dummy. Jerry's in there shaking her. Can we keep this in? Yes, I think so. Okay. All right, let's do this. Okay, so this is monkausen or you say monk housing syndrome is a really mysterious disorder. People imagine it's extremely rare, but we have no idea how prevalent it is. Because one of the hallmark characteristics of Munchausen syndrome is that it's dishonesty. Right. Like, I want to admit you have it. That's the whole point. No, to define it. It's where somebody who is not ill either fakes an illness or makes themselves intentionally ill in order to be able to go seek medical care and or sympathy and empathy from friends, neighbors, relatives for having an illness inflicted upon them. Like Fight Club. Remember the Ed Norton and Helena Bonham Carter visit support groups for illnesses to get attention and feel a part of a club, I guess. Right, exactly. And that's actually there's a new thing called monk housing by internet. Yeah, that's a big one. And that's like a new deal where you go online to online support groups and feign being sick just to feel like you're fitting in, I guess. Right. And it is sad, but as we'll figure out, munchausen by internet is actually kind of a it provides somewhat less harmful sucker to people who need that. Right. So you're still feeding this pathological illness. It's not mental illness, but mentally, it's just as dangerous. Physically, it's not. Right. Because you're getting what you want, what you crave, what you need, which is that attention and that sympathy, but you're not having to inject gasoline to get it, and you're not going to the doctors, and you're not running up insurance premiums that shouldn't be there, and all that bad stuff that happens with the real monk housing. Well, let's talk about the history of this. Well, 1951, I think, was when it was first described by Richard Asher in The Lancet. Right. That's when it first got its name. Okay. I read somewhere that there's, like, biblical accounts of people basically doing harm to themselves to get attention. Well, I don't want to say it makes sense, but it makes sense that it goes back that long, because what better way, if you're very lonely, than to get people to feel sorry for you than to jump in a wheelchair all of a sudden or something, right? A prehistoric wheelchair. Exactly. Or at least yeah. So he named it in The Lancet, and he named it after, of course, baron von Monk Halsen, who was the 18th century German military man who apparently went off to fight the Russians, the Turks, and came back with all these fanciful stories that people thought were largely, probably made up to get attention. Right. And there's this munchausen appreciation society who actually like the guy and like the tales, and they've been able to pin three tales to the actual Baron Munchausen. Oh, really? But there are whole books of what he supposedly supposedly told, and then Terry Gilliam got a hold of him. Well, yeah, of course, we'll be remiss without saying that former Monty Python alum made that great movie. Did you see it? Yeah. The adventures of Baron monster. It was good. It seemed good. I think it was, uma, Thurman's first role, if I'm not mistaken. Was she in it? Yeah. That's very neat. Very young. Uma, from the adventures of Baron Munchausen to super mom. My super ex girlfriend. Yes. What was the one where she's a mom, though it came out even more recently. I don't know. She's been in a bit of a tailspin lately. We like it. But now, uma and oprah. That's a classic bit. We should probably get back to the serious timber. Yes. We should point out that it is not hypochondria, because hypochondriacs actually believe that they're sick. And people with monk housing disorder, they know they're not sick. They're trying to pretend that they're sick. Right. I don't know if you call it a disorder. There's another state of mind that someone can be in called malingering, and that's where you pretend to be sick, either for financial gain or to get out of work. Like, maybe from arrested development when she had the alter ego who is wheelchair bound and raised a bunch of contributions for her. I think everyone's malingered at one point or another if it's to get out of work. Right. I guess even just sending an email like, yeah, that's malingering. Yeah. In fact, the next time I do that, I'm going to just put in the subject line malingering and see if anyone even notices what that means. That's way worse than it sounds. Way worse than playing hookyering. Right. Sounds like you're defrauding somebody. So why would someone do this? Well, there's a lot of reasons. The underlying reason, the underlying part of the disorder is that it's psychological, they believe. Right, right. It's part of a personality disorder. And there's a number of risk factors that people who have Munchausen syndrome tend to exhibit. Like they either lost a parent while they were young or they were abandoned by a parent. Another big one, they may have had some sort of prolonged childhood illness. Is one of them want to be doctors and nurses? Yes. They maybe couldn't get a job in the medical profession or never wanted to try hard enough because it's kind of hard to do that. Sure. It's easier to just hurt yourself, fake it before you make it, and then you've got sexual, physical, emotional abuse. This provides some sort of outlet, I guess. Really the easiest way to understand it is these people who need attention, who need to be taken care of, who just need more than they're willing to ask for overtly have found an easy street between where they are and where they need to be as far as attention goes. Well, it's interesting you say that, because they do point out passive aggressive personality. And a lot of people, if you could just teach them, like, if you need more support and love, then you should be able to ask for that. But this is like the ultimate and passive aggressive, I think, right, exactly. So when you're addressing Munchausen syndrome, you would usually treat it like you would depression or anxiety. Right. And just kind of approach it from that route. Sure. And I imagine probably as well as using cognitive behavioral therapy, where it's like, no, no, don't do that anymore. Don't eat that salt. Snap the rubber band on your wrist. Exactly. Remind yourself wrist if you're lucky. What else are we talking about, Chuck? Oh, some more defining characteristics. Usually people who have Munchausen syndrome are young or middle aged, although there is a record of a guy who is pretty much a Munchausen patient his whole life. He became famous. Oh, yeah, we're going to get to him. Right. And then so what do they do? I mean, how do you feign illness? Well, this is where it gets really interesting, because it goes anywhere from just lying, but it's not just a lie. It's usually very specific. Like, they say that any symptom that can't be proven medically is what they'll usually use. And they always say it's very, very specific, like textbook symptom that they clearly read from a book. So they said, hey, if I say that I'm this, this and this, then I can get this attention. But the problem is, if these doctors use the same physician desk references, so they go, look, up this, this, and this, and they go, oh, well, it's probably this. Right. So I'm going to treat it with nitroglycerin. The problem is, if you're faking these three symptoms and the nitroglycerine doesn't have any effect, that you raise some red flags for your physician or nurse. Right? Absolutely. That's a big problem with Munchausen syndrome, is that eventually people are going to start to get suspicious. Right. And you're lying too. So it's not like you can just hide behind your conviction. You're hiding behind a lie, which I think is much more stressful. Well, they'll go even further. I mean, that's just the basic lies told. People will also physically inflict harm upon themselves. Everything from, well, this isn't really harm on yourself, but like heating up your thermometer or tampering with stuff like Henry and E. T. Yeah. He clearly had munchausen centers. Well, he's trying to get out of school, though, so he was really malingering okay. To stay with et. Yeah. But that is something that they will do injecting yourself with toxins, tainting your urine samples, which you can use anything for that. I mean, even like a little salt in your urine will change things. Blood. If you put a little blood in your urine or your stool taking medications you shouldn't be taking yeah. Or just poisoning yourself in any way, shape, or form. But apparently injecting is fairly common. And then you said also when you were talking about feigning illness and choosing specific symptoms yes. They may also take a different route and choose very broad symptoms like chest pain or nausea or something like that. It could be anything. Yeah. That'll just tie a doctor up for hours, if not days, which is what they want, is more and more attention. Right. It's like, oh, you're going to have to come in tomorrow too. They're probably like, sweet. Right. And one of the reasons that tying a doctor up is great is because within those hours, this doctor is going to get more and more baffled and order more and more tests. Right. If the doctor is paying attention, he or she would notice that the munchausen patient is more than happy to do this next test. Like, sure, stick that there. Right. Or maybe even suggest it. Like, shouldn't you do this test and stick that there? Those are two characteristics or two symptoms of Munchausen syndrome, is that you are very willing, if not eager, to undergo any and every test that they want to do. Whereas most people are probably like, do you have to do that? Are you sure? Is there another thing to do? Right. And then extensive knowledge about tests and procedures and symptoms and the inner workings of a hospital. Those two things should be big red flags if you are a physician and you suspect you're having kind of trouble dealing with somebody's symptoms, but not because you're dumb, because you're trying everything. Well, yeah. And inconsistency is one thing to look for in your medical history. They say, well, you're in here for high blood pressure. You were in here last year for low blood pressure. Right. So that's a little weird. Yeah. Because I think I would imagine if you're getting what you need, and especially if it's like a standard kind of pathological behavior where it builds up and up. Like, remember we talked about Kleptomania? Yeah. Like the urge just builds up and builds up until it becomes irresistible. And afterwards there's this catharsis and then the guilt or whatever. I didn't see it anywhere. But if Munchausen syndrome is like that, one would imagine that you kind of lose touch with your previous lies and you're not looking at it as a big picture thing like this for the rest of my life. It's very like, let's do it now and get this done and get this over with. And maybe if they actually sat down and saw their medical history sheet, they'd say, I need to take this in a different direction. I ran an account of a guy who feigned bereavement. It was called fictitious bereavement. And he showed up at the hospital and was committed for four weeks because he was grieving over the car accident death of his wife seven weeks earlier and the heart attack death of his mother three weeks earlier. And then he was interviewed. He was giving a family history, and three of his 14 siblings had died young from things like throat cancer, some other accident, and another thing. And they started asking this guy more and more questions, and he wouldn't produce like, a photo of his wife, and he wouldn't let anybody talk to his family. Right. And they started to get kind of suspicious. Finally contact and found out who his family was, contacted his mother, who was alive, his eleven siblings were all doing well. He didn't have 14 and three hadn't died, and he was never married. And when they confronted him with this stuff, he just continued to lie and lie and lie. There's a pathological lying wow aspect to Munchausen, which is called pseudological fantastica. Well, you brought up an important point, not letting family be involved. That's a big tell, too, if you say you should probably bring your husband in and no, we don't need to involve him. Right. Or he's dead. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You don't want to talk to him. He's dead. It's not funny at all. 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Go to shopify. comStuff right now. 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. Comssk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s YSK and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace. Comssk squarespace. So that's Munchausen syndrome. There's a high risk of suicide with Munchausen. Probably accidental suicide. I mean, people that go too far by accident or they just come to the end of the rope. I hadn't thought about that. I heard come to the end of the road is terrible. I don't mean it like that. 30% to 70% is what I saw, but I don't know, maybe it would be accidental suicide. Interesting. I don't even know if there's such thing. But there's also all sorts of other myriad problems that arise from Munchausen syndrome, right? Like real illness. Like if you're a Munchausen sufferer, happily, you can eventually make yourself genuinely ill from injecting toxins and stuff. I read another account of a guy who suffered a number of amputations, medical amputations. He was missing, like, pieces of his fingers. He would have body parts removed. He forced the doctors to do it. He would cut himself. He kept a little knife and a little bag of liquid feces on them at all times because his thing was to cut and then smear poop on the cut to make sure it got infected, let it fester, go seek medical attention is far too late, and have his limbs amputated, have his extremities amputated. But apparently the cut and smear, he's not the only one doing that. The cut and smear, that's what I've dubbed it. I was about to say if it has a name. No, I just made up that okay. Well, that's what I'd call it. Cut and smear. Well, clearly one of the biggest problems, too, is not just the harm you're doing yourself, but you're tying up doctor's time. You're spending money. If not your money, maybe it's Medicare or whatever insurance carrier you have. It's very wasteful and it's taking up time. Doctors have to treat real patients when you need to be treated by a mental health professional is what you need. And a lot of these guys, too, when you're talking about tying up physicians time, they'll go at times when there's different staff, lesser staff. So, like, weekend nights, holidays, that kind of thing. So when they tie up because there'll be different people who haven't met them before and are familiar with them. So when they're tying up people's time, they're really tying up their time. No good. So that's traditional monk housing, which is bad, but it gets worse. Monk housing by proxy. Right. 20 years after the guy Richard Asher richard Asher coined the term one child syndrome, another guy named Roy Meadow coined the term Munchausen syndrome by proxy. And that one is not as readily recognized as real as Munchausen syndrome. Oh, really? Yeah. Did you run into that? Recognized as what do you mean? Well, yeah, scientifically proven. I think the way that I'm seeing it is it's viewed by some as more like remember the Satanic worshiper hysteria of the kind of falls into line with that? Although this is much more established than that is the AMA recognizes it. The American Psychological Association recognizes it. Right. But it's a lot more easily misconstrued than one child's syndrome is because there's another person who's being harmed. Yeah. And because they're usually children. Right. Well, yes, this is the deal. It's usually children, but not always. It's basically you're a caregiver to somebody and you are maybe poisoning them. You maybe are smothering them so they develop breathing problems. There's all sorts of awful, abusive things that you can do to bring your child in. And that's when you talk about getting sympathy, is when you run into a hospital with your baby saying, my baby is sick, my baby is sick. Or even worse, a dead baby. Yeah. And that happens, sadly, all the time. Well, the first two cases that the guy Meadows, dr. Roy Meadows described were one of them was a dead kid, a little 14 month old Charles, whose mom had been feeding him salt and kept bringing him back to the hospital. And doctors had no idea what was going on, and eventually he died. The other one was a little girl, right? Yeah. Her name was Kay, and she was six. And she was admitted twelve times for a urinary tract infection, treated with all kinds of antibiotics, and none of them ever worked. And that's obviously the doctors were like, something's going on here. Or at least Roy Meadow was. Well, he wrote a study about both of these cases, called it Munchausen by proxy and just basically changed everything. He took this fairly obscure disease and turned it into this huge, almost hysterical entity. One of the problems is if you are suspected of this, at least in the States, and I think the UK is big on it, too, but if you're suspected of this, all a physician has to do is say, call Family and Children's Services or whatever you call it, your county or state, and say, I think I have a Munch housing case here. A social worker comes, takes your kid, and then you go through the hoops to prove that you don't have it. Right. The burden of proof is on the parent who's been accused. Yeah. This is a tricky one. Very. We'll talk about this doctor. Well, we could talk about them right now. South? All yeah. Doctor David Southall in England, very controversial guy who conducted some hidden video experiments, surveillance in the hospitals. So what he would do was he would videotape these parents inflicting harm on their kids for cases that they suspected it was mughousing. And in the end, you got 33 of these 39 suspected abusers were prosecuted, 23 were diagnosed with FII. And you think, well, that's awesome. But it's also like you're videotaping someone doing harm to a kid. It was very controversial. And this guy has been removed and put back on the list, the GMC General Medical Council, which means he can practice medicine in England. He's been on and off of this thing for years. And I think just this year, he was finally reinstated again. Right. They finally said, we're not going to go after this guy anymore. Yeah, but tell me about the big documentary. Well, he accused these parents publicly of killing their two sons based on a TV documentary he saw on them. Yeah, well, the woman was already convicted of killing the sons. Right. And then he was watching the documentary and said, you know, I think the husband Stephen was the guy. And then that was that. A huge inquisition was long, and this guy's life was turned up upside down, and there were a lot of accusations like that. I get the feeling from this guy that he was one of those if you look for it, you're going to find it kind of guy. Right. Think about the prevalence in one hospital that he was able to document 33, 39 total that he was spying on. Yeah. 33 were prosecutors. He was able to document 33 cases of Munchausen by proxy. That means the prevalence is like, probably more than half of the global population suffers from Munchausen by proxy in that case. Like, if that's the case, you know what I mean? Well, I thought these were special cases he was surveilling. No, I don't think it was just random. Okay, well, that would definitely change the ratio, but still, thanks for that. But still, I don't even know what I meant by that. So there are people also out there who question if munchausen by proxy does exist. Oh, really? Yeah. Apparently there's a lot of accusations that fly at parents of autistic kids. There's a subterm that's been coined called asperger's by proxy. Really? Yeah. And there's a lot of autistic parents who are like, oh, yeah? Is that what you're thinking? Oh, so not saying my kid is sick, like ill with physically ill, but my child has asperger's. Yeah. And the physicians are like, no, your kid doesn't. It's you. You're doing this too. You're developmentally delaying your kid for attention or whatever. Right. Again, if it does exist, clearly the kid needs protection from the parent. This is the parent almost every time is doing it. I think 98% of the time it's the mom. But you're also running the risk of taking a kid away from perfectly normal parents. Right. And apparently the other big bonus contention is the people who make this diagnosis almost every time is a pediatrician. Right. Not a psychiatrist or psychologist. All the pediatrician has to do is pick up the phone and say, I think I got a munchausen case here. Get over here. Get this kid. Yeah. Well, it's important. You said 98% of the time it's by the mother, and that's what is going on. Most times, the cases are all sort of the same, and there's a woman who's generally responsible for the stay at home parenting. Maybe the husband is not very involved in giving them enough attention. And one way to stop that in its tracks is to make your baby sick. Yeah. That's what happened with this one lady, Mary Beth timing between 72 and 85, all nine of her children died, and she was very distraught and got lots and lots of sympathy, was arrested in 86, and it turns out that she had smothered her children with a pillow. And then they asked the husband, and he said, quote, you have to trust your wife. She has her things to do, and as long as she gets them done, you don't ask questions. So that's kind of the typical case of this uninvolved husband. Clearly. Uninvolved husband. That's beyond uninvolved. That's like apathetic. Yeah, exactly. Almost. It's allegedly apathetic. Allegedly. And she was convicted for real in 87 incidents to 20 years. And that's one of the saddest cases I've ever heard. There's another one. Juanita hoid sudden infant death syndrome still is a medical mystery, but there was a time when they thought that it ran in families and they were hot on the trail of explaining SIDS as like a genetic disorder. And it was based on a woman named Juanita Hoit, who had six children, died between 1965 and 1971. And her primary physician wrote a study that kind of made a name for himself as a career as an expert on SIDS based on this woman's experience. And in the guess, a local. Prosecutor heard about this story and was suspicious and started digging around, and it turned out that this lady had killed her kids, all six of them. That's awful. But not only had killed her kids, had also derailed the investigation of SIDS. Yeah, exactly. Also raised a lot of questions of what does account for SIDS? Is there such a thing as SIDS? Is it all cases of mothers killing their children? Right. There's a lot of questions about what percentage of mysterious infant deaths are related to foul play. Well, and that's just a prime example of all the ramifications that Monkhouse has not just on your child, but, like, diverting the path of medical research. Yeah. Not only that, the chuck, again, we keep coming back to imagine being a parent who lost your kid. You have no idea how. Right. And now other people are accusing you of killing your kid. Right. Okay. So, Chuck, the idea that Munchausen by proxy does exist, as I said, is endorsed by the AMA and the APA. What are some of the symptoms of it? By proxy? Yeah, one of the things is that the symptoms don't match the test results. One thing is, sometimes a caregiver is actually a nurse or works in the healthcare industry. They could be siblings. The child might have died under weird circumstances, kind of the same as the adult things. There's mysterious, unexplained symptoms that aren't going away, not bizarre medical history. All these things are red flags. And there's also it's prevalent in healthcare workers. Remember, with Munchausen Syndrome, you wanted to be a health care worker? Yeah. In Munchausen by proxy, you may be a health care worker. Yes. Oh, you did? Yeah. Okay. Well, you said, you know, like the Angels of Death, that's a type of Munchausen by proxy. Oh, really? Yeah, I guess so. People who, like, kill the elderly. There's a doctor, I think the United Kingdom's most prolific serial killer was a physician who just dispatched his patients. He was, like, treating them, but really killing them. Yeah. And he killed a lot of people. Well, speaking of a lot of things we can't close without talking about William, how do you pronounce that? Michael Hoy. Yeah. He is in the Guinness Book of World Records, actually, because he had 400 operations in 100 different hospitals to the tune of $4 million. But because it's Britain, it's all subsidized healthcare. So that's a lot of dough going to this one guy. And he didn't have any of these things. He was a monkhouser. Can I say that? I think you can. It's not funny because he eventually died. Well, actually, he just died in a retirement home, so it doesn't really say that he might have died from any of his treatments. Yes. I wonder, though, was he a monkowser? Cut and smear monkhouse. 400 operations. He was cutting and smearing something. I've got one for you. Sure. So remember we talked about 1000 by internet. Yeah. So there was like the first description came in the 90s. Obviously you can't have 1000 by Internet before the Internet was around. You'd be very far ahead of your time. But very quickly, right off the bat, there was a huge, what was first term by the New York Times as a hoax. There was a little 19 year old, spunky, very positive 19 year old named Casey Swenson who lives in Kansas, and she kept the New York Times, referred to in 2001 as a web log of her battle with leukemia, which she lost in May 2001. And she had this huge following of people who really genuinely cared and were supportive of her and were pulling for her and let her know. And then in May 2001, they went to the web log and found news that Casey had died. And I don't know who exactly got suspicious, but people started looking at Casey's mother, who actually turned out to be Casey. There was no Casey Ever. Wow. This woman just created this whole fictitious character that had leukemia and who died and received like cards and presents and flowers and condolences for a kid that never existed. If I was going to fake something on the Internet, I would fake that I'm awesome. What do you think we're doing right now? Well, exactly, I would be like the Walter Mini style. I would just make up these awesome stories about myself. Yeah, but I mean, this is a real mental disorder. I'm not making fly for that saying you guys should just choose to be awesome instead of sick. Yes. No, I'm not saying that. No, I don't think that. I sincerely hope no one took it like that. No. You'd be surprised with these emails. Hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business, isn't it, Chuck? That's right. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business, so upstart startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in person sales, and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. You can reach customers online and across social networks with an ever growing suite of channel integrations and apps, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest and more. And you can synchronize your online and in person sales, so you gain insights as you grow with detailed reporting of conversion rates, profit margins and beyond. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with you. So just go to shopify. comStuff all lowercase for a free 14 day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today. Go to shopify. comStuff right now. Hey, everybody, if you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no muss, 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. Comsysk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code SYSK and you'll get off your first purchase of a website or domain that's squarespace.com. SYSK. Squarespace. And then lastly, I ran across a case of a double Munch housing case. Munchausen and Munchausen by proxy in the same mother daughter duo. The mother used to inject her daughter with her daughter's knowledge with bacteria and have been doing it for so long. The daughter had both kidneys removed and was on full dialysis. So she was in on it, too? Basically, yeah. The mother had Munchausen by proxy and she just had and the daughter was both a Munchausen by proxy victim and munch. Munchausen, yes. Well before you send an emails about the X Files and er and m. And m sorry, Mama. Yes, all three of them here do your Eminem. I'm sorry, Mama. What's wrong? Eminem had a lyric that said, going through public housing systems, victim of Munchausen Syndrome. My whole life I was made to believe I was sick when I wasn't. And it was on The X Files. They investigated Munch housing by proxy. Yeah, I don't remember that one, do you? No, I don't remember that either. I was always into the real plotline arc of the whole series. Was okay with The Smoking Man and all that and the mother sister. I liked how they mixed it up, though. But I like to just stand alone. Like there's a shape shifter in the forest, right. Or Ponzaelians men are still living in Florida because they discover the fountain, so they turn in a little invisible. Weirdos. I didn't watch that show at the time, but the standalone ones were like scoobydoos intent. But I didn't watch that show when it was on for real at all. And then when it went into reruns Monday through Friday, I watched it the whole series. Yeah, those two those movies are pretty good, too. Yeah. That's it for this episode on The X Files. If you want to learn more about it, type X Files. Was it? X Files? Munchausen. Type Munchausen. Do you want to spell it for him? Yeah, I should have done a bell at the first one. Oh, because I missed it. You can type that into the search bar. Athousoforce.com. To learn more about this mysterious and extremely fascinating disease. And until then, let's do some listener mail. Josh, this is maybe a weird listener mail to put at the end of this one. Are we doing it on this one? This is a very special listener mail. Okay. And everyone should listen to this one because it's pretty cool. Are we going to put a drum rolling at all? I think we should at some point. Okay. Doug lives in North, Idaho. Doug and I were writing back and forth last week about fishing, trout fishing. Okay. Remember how it started? But it started okay. And I fish for trout here and there in North Georgia. It's sort of fun. I'm not, like the hugest fisherman. And Doug is an avid, I think, fly fisherman. Okay. We're just kind of chitchatting. And he said that he and his girlfriend Keena, he got her hooked on the show. And he said, I know you'll never read this, and Keena's just making fun of me right now, right? I said, you tell Keena to shut it. That's not very nice. And he wrote back and said, she's laughing that we're emailing. And he said, shut it. This is the best thing ever. And he said, but, guys, her birthday is February 2, and I got a plan that I want to hatch. So right now, as you people are listening about right this second, but over the next day on February 2, at some point, doug is in his car. He's with Keena right now. How's it going? And she's probably going, what's going on here? This is weird. She's laughing nervously. She's laughing. Maybe, like, trying the door handle to see if it's locked. But Doug is actually the one who is nervous because Doug has something very important to say, and that is Keena. He would like you to be his wife. He's asking you to marry him right now. We sort of are, but we're not marrying you. It's actually Doug. And this is a first for us. This is a marriage proposal right here on the show somewhere in Idaho. Tina should hopefully have a ring on her finger at this point, don't you think? What do we do if the answer is no? Yeah. I guess we'll hear from Doug. Yes. We won't break into people, though. I think we should go ahead on the premise that she says yes. All right, so what else can we say? I can't believe we just said that. Now Doug the trout fisherman is marrying Keena, and congratulations. Mozletoff again, right? Yeah. Where do we go from here? I don't know. It's like we should probably just fade out with us wondering, I guess. So send us an email, right? Yeah. Stuffpodcast. HowStuffWorks.com. Holy cow. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit Howsteporks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The house that Forks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. 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How Income Taxes Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-income-taxes-work | They are among the more reviled concepts of modern life, and yet they are as inevitable as death. Join Josh and Chuck as they look into the history and the basis of income taxes in the U.S. in this episode. | They are among the more reviled concepts of modern life, and yet they are as inevitable as death. Join Josh and Chuck as they look into the history and the basis of income taxes in the U.S. in this episode. | Thu, 03 Apr 2014 13:14:16 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=13, tm_min=14, tm_sec=16, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=93, tm_isdst=0) | 40738972 | 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. 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 housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry Rowland are here with me. So it's stuff you should know. That's right. Welcome. That's nice. Yeah. Still coming. German friendly. Vienne Bennett. French friendly. Is that French? I believe so. Okay. How's it going? It's going fine. Still snowing. That's right. People, like weeks later, it's snowing, right? Yeah. Because we're releasing this one around tax time. Because that's appropriate. That's right. April 15, people. The dreaded day. It is dreaded. I feel sorry for people with that birthday because it's just associated with pain and suffering. Well, you should know. I mean, think about it. That's one good thing on that day is their birthday. I think we should all celebrate, like a half birthday or a mini birthday on April 15 just to kind of alleviate tax day. That's right. So we're talking about taxes, specifically income tax, which is everyone's favorite tax to pay, is go out and work hard for your money and then give so hard to give a significant portion of that to the government. Right. That's tax day, I'm not going to tax bash. I'm going to try not to tax bash. It's kind of tough not to because I know you got to pay taxes. I get it. But, man, it's just government takes a bite. Well, it's not that even it takes a bite that they tinkle so much of it away. I know. Yeah. Oh, my God, it's so maddening. The older I get, the more I'm just like, you have to be kidding me. Yeah. When you're younger, you don't think about that stuff as much. At least I did. You get older, and you're like, Wait a minute. I pay how much in taxes? Exactly? All right, let's get into this. All right, Chuck. So we're talking income tax specifically not just taxes, but this country has a long history of hating taxes, and it goes back to the very point that it was founded on, which was in part breaking away from Great Britain, England, because of taxation without representation. If you're a colonist, you were taxed man all over the place. Yes. And what they found, though, was when we got our independence, the US government formed and started taxing all the same stuff. I imagine they didn't love it, but they were like, well, at least we're represented, which is kind of the issue we had before. Right. This is taxation with representation. But they were excise taxes, which is a tax on a specific good. Specific type of good. They were tariffs, which is a tax on foreign imports. And they were sales taxes, basically. Yeah. 1812 was the first sales tax on gold, silverware, jewelry, and watches. So that's pretty much a luxury tax. Really? Yeah. So right off the bat, the first tax on a personal tax on a person affects the wealthy. Yeah. And it's interesting, the history of the taxes here. As you look at it, there was a lot of installing a tax and then repealing it and saying, no, that's not right. And then they'll put in another tax, and then they would say, no, that's not right. Well, what's funny is that pattern that you're talking about is followed because the taxation is usually imposed on the wealthy. The wealthy figures out how to get out of it, and it goes on everybody else's shoulder, and then it's repealed. Yeah. This is nothing. The stuff that we see now, people arguing about it was exactly the same back then, which is really kind of funny when you think about it. Yeah. There's nothing new. So in 1862 is when we got our first national income tax. And part of this was to support the Union Army. Congress passed laws in 1861 and 1862 in the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue, which we know is IRS today, was set up by the Tax Act of 1862. Yeah. Just for a second. Chuck let's think about this. The beloved Ablin is directly responsible for the income tax and the IRS. Yeah, it happened on his watch. Sure. I guess you can't set up an income tax without a body to regulate it and to enforce it, which is basically what that did in 1862. Right. And we were talking about taxes being created to be imposed on the wealthy between 1817, when that tax, the luxury good tax, was terminated, and 1862, there weren't any taxes like that at all. There weren't any personal taxes. And the US government funded itself from tariffs. Right. So all these foreign import goods coming in, imports, exports to well, the tariffs were on imports, apparently mostly because this allowed companies this basically led to the US. Economy booming because all of the internal stuff, all domestically produced stuff, wasn't subject to any tariffs. So they didn't have to compete. They had cheaper prices. And these companies used the stuff to enrich themselves, which led to the uber wealthy, which in turn led to the first income tax in 1862 to tax the uber wealthy. That's right. And in 1863, they started collecting this income tax for the first time. And it was a graduated tax, kind of like we see today. If you earn between $610,000 a year, you paid 3%. If you made higher than that, you paid more than that. Percentage wise, that was the first income tax. So it's always 3% and then 5% if you made over 10,000. Yeah, it's always funny to me when I hear, like, our Founding Fathers, blah, blah, blah, like, no, you're Founding Fathers. This is exactly how they set it up. So I guess the argument is, well, not those Founding Fathers, just certain Founding Fathers I agree with. Well, it depends on the founding father. It's just I hate hearing the argument, our Founding Fathers, when people don't even really know exactly what our Founding Fathers were doing, like imposing a graduated tax first. Right off the bat. Right. Well, I only recently realized that what we have today in the United States, the form of government we have is part of what's called the Jeffersonian Revolution, where basically the Founding Fathers monroe, Madison, Washington came up with they came up with a country that's different than the one we have now. And the reason that it's different now is because Jefferson came along and said, no, we can do better than this, so let's change this. And that's what we have now. Which founding father are you talking about? So, like we're saying, it went back and forth. There was a flat tax in 1867 instead of a graduated tax. And then five years after that, they repealed income tax altogether and they said, this is not right. It is unconstitutional. It's got to abide by constitutional guideline, and it does not. And that was the income tax of 1894. That was where the tariffs were. I'm sorry I misspoke earlier. Between 1872 and 1894, that's where the US. Government was lived on tariffs. And that allowed the economy to boom, railroads to grow, and a class of uber wealthy to get even wealthier. They were there before, but this is when the Carnegie's came along. The Rockefellers started to develop this. And so all these people said, hey, man, these people should be paying some taxes here. And that's where they came from. That's where the 18.94 tax came from. Yeah. And that tax 2% of personal income, more than $4,000, again, tax on the wealthy and the Supreme Court. That's when they struck that one down as unconstitutional. So in 1913, Congress got around all this by making it a part of the Constitution and said, you know what, we'll create the 16th Amendment, congress will have the power to lay in collect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived I'm sorry. Yeah. Portion of it among the several states without regard to any census. Right. Which is the hang up before. Yeah. It doesn't matter how populated your state is. This has nothing to do with state, it's just a national tax. Right. And originally the 18.4 income tax was a tax on the uber wealthy, those making more than $4,000 a year, which is super wealthy. And the uber wealthy fought it, got the Supreme Court to strike it down. And so under Taft's watch, they said, well, we can get around this by just amending the Constitution. That's what they did. And apparently from this the 16th Amendment, like before, Chuck, it was like you were more participant in your state and there was the federal government, but it was the federal government and they didn't mean a whole lot to you. When the 16th Amendment was passed, that changed everything because now you were a payer to the federal government. And the federal government also had the state kind of by the short hairs because the states relied now on federal grants that were generated through your tax dollars. So the federal government really asserted itself as essential power, consolidated power into the federal government with the 16th Amendment more than anything else before. And they never looked back. They certainly didn't know in 1913 with the Underwood Tariff Act, they basically kicked off the modern system that we have. And during World War II, they started withholding taxes. Instead of just telling up your bill and paying at the end of the year, you have, as we all know and love now, you have part of your paycheck withheld yeah. Pay as you earn system. That's right. And that funds the government continuously because every pay period, your employer who withholds your money on behalf of the government, submits it to a Federal Reserve Bank and the government earns interest on it and has constant income. That's right. It's like a paycheck for the government. That's exactly what it is. So let's walk people through. And I think this article does right by it like picking out just one person. Joe. I don't want to call him Joe. I'm so tired of that. What do you want to call? Well, I have Cyrus written down. All right, we'll go with Cyrus. All right, so Cyrus gets a job, cyrus gets a wage. He agrees to with his employer and says, all right, this is fair, I'll take this job. And the employer says, all right, Cyrus, you got to fill out this W four, and that's one of your tax forms and you got to do it right when you get hired. And it's going to list all your withholding allowances and all your dependents and childcare expenses and basically everything that you need to know, Mr. Employer, like how much money to hold out of my paycheck, right? So I fill out the w. Four. Now, you know, now you're withholding and now at the end of the year, me, Cyrus, I want to see if I can kind of project how I did this year. Am I going to be paying? Am I getting it back? So here's how you do that. So you take your gross income, the number that we all wish we actually made, right? Yeah. That's all the money you have from salary, from interest income, from pensions, all the money you have coming in, that's your gross income. Right. And then you go through adjustments. And adjustments are basically little mulligans that the government gives you, all right? You can subtract this from your gross income, which lowers your gross pay alimony, let's say. Sure. Or if you tax on your self employment, if you move moving expenses for your job, that's one, too, stuff like that, and all these things. So adjustments, deductions, which we'll talk about, all of these things, credits, they're all basically behaviors that the government wants to encourage. So they give you the ability to subtract those amounts from your gross income. Yeah. They incentivize, these things. Yeah. Like, they want you to work so you can deduct childcare expenses under some regimes, or they want you to go to college so you can deduct college expenses, things like that, right. So that's your adjusted gross income. Right. When you subtract your adjustments right, from your gross so that's your AGI. And then you got a couple of choices here. When you go to fill out your tax forms, you can either do the standard deduction or itemize everything out. You're going to want to choose whichever one is greater, obviously, so you can get the biggest chunk for yourself. All sorts of itemized deductions. Like, if we had a tax accountant in here, they would probably laugh if we tried to break down itemized deductions. There's a lot of them, and they get really weird. Like, for example, a good example, that if you're a bodybuilder, a professional bodybuilder, which I am, body oil, I write off all my oils can be written off as a business expense. Yes. And when I used to freelance in the film industry, there are all sorts of cool things you can write off, like your movie tickets cool. And your cable bill and stuff like that. You can write off your interest on your home mortgage, charitable contributions, some medical and dental expenses, all sorts of things within the law that they call them. Write off your deductions. Or you can just go with the standard deduction again, right? You don't have to itemize everything out. No, but a lot of tax professionals say, at least go through and make sure you shouldn't be itemizing. Yeah, for sure. Because if it's even a penny more, maybe not a penny, but if it's a little more. It's worth the trouble most of the time, and it is a lot of extra paperwork, but you save yourself some money as you're deducting from it, you're deducting from your income, and then finally, after you have your adjusted gross income and you subtract all the deductions for it, the number that you have, that's your taxable income. So the more you can deduct from it, the lower your tax burden is going to be. Yeah, I can't remember which. There's a commercial going around now about one of the accounting firms that says that Americans left a billion dollars on the table. Oh, for Buffalo wild Wings Cafe. If you're getting your taxes done at Buffalo Wild Wings, then you get a free dozen wings. That'd be awesome. Did you hear that? They may have Doritos flavored wings coming out. I really can tell you how excited I am about this. I don't get the whole Doritoization of everything you need to get on the bandwagon, because there is a lot of fun to be had eating Dorito based foods. Remember we were kids and that was doritos? That was it. It was like the guy with the mustache would sell you this one Dorito, and now there's like, wait, what? Where were you buying doritos? One at a time from a guy with that guy in the commercial. He looks for like Gene shallot. You're talking about? The Frito Bandito. That's different. I'm talking about the Doritos guy. Really? No. You're thinking of Mr. Pringles. But now you go, the store is just overwhelming. It's ridiculous. Yeah, different shape, size, points, flavors. They're just like, let's throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Just give me a Dorito or Cool Ranch. Cool Ranch is great. I have to abide by the Cool Ranch. They brought the original version out, too, and those are pretty great, too. Just regular nacho cheese Doritos, right? No, even before that, there was an original version. It's like taco, basically. It's orange bag. It's an orange bag. I think that's the one I grew up on, obviously. No, the nacho one is the red bag and then blue is cool. What is this, like, the 1920s? What do you mean? When they had the original? Like the 60s or 50s? Yeah, even before your time. So you've got your taxable income. You go to the IRS tables if you make less than $100,000 a year. Right. You go to the rate schedules if you earn more than $100,000 a year. And like we said, it's a marginal tax rate system. Or graduated. There are different tax brackets depending on how much you make. Yeah, there's seven this year in 2013. So what's the low? Is it still 10%? Yes. 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, 35%. And then for earners of 400,000 or over, I think single earners of 400K are over. It's 39.6% of your pay. It's a marginal tax rate. Meaning that you fall into one bracket or another, if you earn $100,000, you're not going to owe, I think, $28,000. I think it falls in maybe the 28th percentile. You wouldn't owe $28,000 of your adjusted gross income or yeah. What you would owe is 10% up to the top of the 10% bracket, 15% of the high of the 15% bracket, and so on until you reach your bracket and you subtract your adjusted gross income from the top of that or from the bottom of that bracket, and then you owe like 28% of that. Okay. That makes more sense. It's a lot easier if, say, like if you're making $100,000 or less, just go to the tax table and you're like, there it is. But it's also fairly easily calculated as well. So what do you want to make, $99,999? Well, here's the thing. You want to make as much as you possibly can, I think. Sure. But then you want to have if that's what you're into, by the way. Sure. We're not saying everyone has to pursue the dollar, right? But if you are pursuing the dollar and you don't want to pay more tax than you have to, you want to make a high salary and then have a lot of adjustments. Yeah. The problem is that there is this thing that was introduced in the think, or maybe the 70s was the alternative minimum tax sorry, that came around in the alternative Minimum tax was introduced to keep high earners from just deducting absolutely everything and paying a very low tax. Right. And it made sense at the time because it was imposed on high earners. The problem is the cut off that was originally introduced, something like 60,000 or something like that at that time was a lot of money. Right. But it was never indexed to inflation. So as the value of the dollar grew weaker over time through inflation, why didn't they index it to inflation? That's weird. Well, because now something like 95% of wage earners fall subject to the minimum tax. Okay, so it's basically like an extra tax now, right, and what the alternative minimum tax does is say, okay, great, you went through and you figured out all your deductions. That's beautiful. What we're going to do is take your adjusted gross income minus deductions, that nice little number that you got it to, we're going to add those deductions back, right, and we're going to come up with your adjusted alternative income figure, and then we're going to figure out how much extra you owe on top of your normal 1040, and that's your full tax. You're going to add that to the 1040 tax amount that you owe, and we're going to come up with the actual tax you owe, including alternative minimum. And apparently basically everybody is subject to it one way or another. Even if you don't itemize, even if you choose the standard deduction, you probably owe something on the alternative minimum tax. So it sounds like what you're saying is that no matter what we do and no matter how clever we try to get with our accounting, all they have to do is throw in the word another adjust. Right. They add those adjustments right back in. They can just throw in another word. No, we need to adjust it again. And at some point, you got to stop adjusting. Right, exactly. So the key here is that if you're still, if you're like, okay, I'm subject to the Alternative Minimum tax. I want to earn a high salary, but I don't want to pay too much tax. The thing that doesn't the adjustment or the deduction I'm sorry, that doesn't get added back to your gross income when you're figuring the alternative Minimum tax is charitable contributions. Okay? So the key thing would be to max those out as much as possible and then I imagine, lower your tax a little bit as far as alternative Minimum tax goes. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. It's like, here's your tax and then now do it again and pay more. 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 Smalltown Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and lighthearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of true crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night, there's a podcast out there for you to download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyberattacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com because they didn't adjust it to inflation. Yeah. All right, I think we're here. Toward the end of this portion, you have your gross tax liability finally, and we should say also, I'm sorry, as of 2012, it became finally indexed to inflation. Okay. But I mean, for 30 years it wasn't, and it just kept hitting more and more and more people. Well, that's important, though. That's good. Yeah. So we have your gross tax liability. Now, Cyrus cyrus is going to subtract any credits that are still there, and then that final number is Cyrus net tax. So that's either what he's going to pay or what he's going to get back. And come April 15, sometime between January 31, when he gets his W Two from his employer, and April 15, he's going to have to figure all that out, either by himself or with the help of someone who knows what they're doing. Your W Two is going to break down everything you made. Basically, it's also in your final paycheck. But the W Two is what you send in. Right. So you need a separate copy, and supposedly, your employer, anybody who is going to send you money about income you made or documents about income you made, has to give you those documents by January 31. That's right. Okay. And then here's the fun part. They take all your information, and they store it on magnetic take machines from the 1950s. Yeah. You found this. This is pretty crazy. Well, it stood out to me. When I saw magnetic tape machines, I was like, how old is this? Right? And apparently that's still the case because they don't have the funding to upgrade their systems, so they have the magnetic tape program. And Obama has tried, I think, in 2012 to increase funding to correct that by, like, a billion and a half dollars, 2.1 billion. I don't know if it went through or not. So, like you found, Chuck, you stumbled upon the very reason why tax refunds take forever. Yeah. Because there's up to a two week period between when the tax return is filed and it ends up on the magnetic tape, where it's like it doesn't even exist as far as the IRS is concerned. Yeah. There's no data whatsoever because they're using magnetic tapes. All right. And apparently also in this article that you sent, they were saying that the encryption for the IRS is, like, pretty sad as well. That's heartening. Yeah. And security breaches is all but inevitable if it hasn't happened. Like, if it doesn't happen on a daily basis already. Wow. All right. So a lot of people complain about taxes in this country and probably worldwide. So over the years have been a lot of different solutions, proposed different kinds of taxes, alternatives, if you will. One very popular one because it keeps coming back up, at least, is the flat tax. I think also people like to say it flat tax. Yeah. Steve Forbes and Dick Army were big on the flat tax, and that was Steve Forbes. One of the foundations of his presidential campaign was a flat tax of 17% ish basically everyone pays the same tax, no matter what your complicated tax code is going to be buy, and you're going to get something about the size of a postcard to fill out. Right. About ten lines, your personal income, any personal allowances, your wage, your salary. And then what is your 17% nut that you owe? Right. Makes sense. What's the problem? 17%. That'd be great for everybody. Yeah. Well, critics will say that it favors the wealthy and puts higher taxes on the burden on those who don't make as much money. Yeah, because if you're paying 10%, if you're in the 10% bracket, suddenly you're paying 7% more on your income. True. Under Dick Army's flat tax that he proposes, anyone making less than 36,800 pays no taxes, which is different than Forbes. Right. Which if that's still part of his plan, I couldn't find if he'd adjusted it right, then that actually is a pretty good plan. If it would still satisfactorily fund the government. Because that would mean that everybody, if you were like, you would pay no tax for 38 six. Right. Yeah. And so anybody above that would still be paying less because that falls in the 25% bracket, which means that everybody would automatically be downgraded tax wise, which is pretty good. The problem is, would that fund the government? Right. Is that the issue? Well, yeah. I mean, think about this. So we're at historically low levels of income taxes, right? Like in the 60s, under JFK and LBJ's watch, the tax rates were in the 90th percentile. The highest tax you can pay was up to 90%. I thought that was wrong of your income. No, I triple checked it and it was like, people think taxes are bad now. That is nuts. There's been plenty of other times during booming times, like the post war periods, high taxes, where taxes have been up to 70% for people. This is the highest bracket, but there have been many times where it's very high, very low. And apparently the situation is we will have, like, a bubble, an economic boom cycle, and as a result, we will lower taxes and then things get tight and then extremely high taxes follow. So apparently, considering the amount of federal spending going on right now, our taxes are alarmingly low. So the idea of a 17% tax across the board, it basically bankrupt the US. Well, maybe they should be a little smarter with how they spend their money. Well, a lot of people say that. Maybe we talked about that in the debt ceiling episode. But there are some countries that have instituted flat taxes, especially a handful of Baltic states. Does it work? I mean, they've been doing it since the 90s. Some of them have. It's kind of hard to compare, though. Yeah. Because, I mean, apples to oranges, apple to a slightly different type of apple. Granny Smith. Delicious. Yeah. But there's also a lot of people who say, well, yeah, Estonia is still around, this economy is growing. But there's also this thing called the value added tax that is really helping their revenue as well is in addition to the flat tax. Yeah. Interesting. So another alternative, the national. Sales tax has been floated for a while now and it seems to be gaining traction. Or maybe I'm just reading into it. Basically this is the argument that taxing income decreases productivity, which sort of makes sense when you think about it. Basically what they want to do is eliminate corporate income tax, eliminate capital gains tax, eliminate estate and gift taxes and institute anywhere between 15% and 30% national sales tax. Also eliminate Social Security tax the employer part and abolish the IRS. And abolish the IRS. They want to repeal the 16th Amendment? Yeah, pretty much. And under I don't know if it was Allen Keys, if it was his plan specifically or just generally with the national sales tax, they would exempt all consumption up to the poverty line. So at the end of the year, if your total expenditures were less than the poverty line, then you would get all that money refunded to you that you paid a national sales tax. That's a big deal because the national sales tax is a consumption tax. Yes. And the consumption tax is by nature regressive, meaning that the burden is heavier on the poor. The reason the burden is heavier on the poor with the consumption tax is because the poor spend more of their money on necessities that would be taxed. These are retail items. Right. So therefore more of the poor's income is taxed than somebody who's wealthy. Like if you have a lower income person spending 80% of their money on necessities, food, whatever that means, they pay an 80% taxes or they pay taxes on 80% of their income. Whereas if you're wealthy and you're spending 20% of your income on these necessities, you're only being taxed on 20% of your income. Right. So that makes it a regressive tax, which is the big criticism of the sales tax, the national sales tax. That and it probably wouldn't provide enough funding to fund the government once again to fund a big bloated government at least. And they say that some people that advocate for it said well, if we tweaked it to where it was only retail and it was also stocks and bonds included, then that might change the argument some. But there is definitely an argument to be made that the current system punishes people who save money that don't spend because you get taxed on your money and then let's say you want to take that money and put it in your bank, you get taxed on that again on the interest you earn. All right, so it's like you're getting taxed twice. The government hasn't set up a lot of incentive to go out and earn as much and save as much as you can. Yeah, well, plus banks aren't exactly encouraging savings right now with the terrible interest rates they're offering. Yeah, that's true. What about corporate taxes, do you know much about those? I know that the national income tax would get rid of corporate income tax as well as the individual. Right. So with corporate income taxes as it stands now, the US. Has a flat rate of 35%. But very famously, a lot of companies have great accounting departments that are really good at getting around paying taxes. Companies do that. Yeah. So GE in 2010 made $14 billion. Okay. That's more than me. Almost five and a half billion. That's more than you and me combined. Almost five and a half billion were made in the US. Yeah. And they paid $0 in taxes in the US. And, in fact, applied for a $3.2 billion tax credit. Okay. Okay. Apple paid zero taxes to any government between 2009 and 2012, despite making $30 billion. Yeah, but their iPhones were so cute. Right. And then in 2010, also, Warren Buffett very famously pointed out that he paid $6.9 million in personal income taxes, but were his assets not incorporated in Berkshire Hathaway, he would have paid $1.6 billion, an extra billion dollars in income taxes. So he points this out to say, like, the corporate tax system is broken. Yeah. Anybody can get around it. So we need to fix this as well, not do away with it. You need to close the loopholes that are allowing this. But then that brings up the big argument. Well, it's going to keep America from being competitive because we're going to pay higher taxes, it's going to drive jobs overseas, and companies are going to shut down here in the US. Apparently, that's not ever been proven that that's all this kind of hot air. Yeah. Some people contend that high tax rates on the rich don't hurt the economy and don't disincentivize people to work hard. Like you said in the it was 90% and the economy and the stock market were booming back then, and I'm not arguing for any of it. I think it's all just broken, and I don't know if there is a solution, because corporations and wealthy are the very people that have the ability to find the loopholes. Yeah, that's four people go to H and R Block and fill out their taxes, and bam. Yes. It's sad. We don't have an accounting department. You and I, we hopefully get as many deductions as we want, and then we get slapped with the Alternative Minimum Tax, and they get added right back in. Do you have a Swiss bank account? I'm not talking about that. You have a bank in the Cayman Islands. Let's change the subject. But yeah, just the unfairness of it is reason enough to change the tax structure, the tax code. Well, that's why flat tax initially makes a little sense, because it's just everyone pays the same, but people will still find their way around that. Well, wealthy people will still find their way around it. It seems like somehow the way that you find your way around it is just again, it's through loopholes. And whether it's a personal deduction or if you hold your money overseas, you don't owe tax on it. If you do away with loopholes and instituted a flat tax of 17%, then for corporations as well, then if it could fund the government, if it didn't have to cut social services and all this other stuff, then I'm all for it. All right, you found an interesting story from about 14 years ago where some businesses decided to stop paying taxes. Yeah, and we'll talk about it right now, right? No, right after this message break. Oh, okay. Hey, Chuck, it's summer, which means school is out, sun's shining, the daylight lasts longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story, isn't there? There sure is. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, you can tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right Media. That's right. Part true crime and part comedy, My Favorite Murder takes you on a journey through small town mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. That's Right hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark Banter with each other, sharing their favorite true crime tales, and explore unique hometown stories from friends and fans alike. And they're both great and it's a fun show and you should listen. So listen to new episodes of my favorite murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. 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. All right, so you found the story, which I thought was pretty interesting, where some small businesses in the early 2000s thought they had found a loophole that basically said that they are not subject to pay taxes as a small business owner. Right. Not only not personal income right. But the business. No, both. Okay, so basically there's this thing called the 861 argument. Is this the rumor that legally you don't really have to pay income tax? Yes. Okay. That's not true though. Well, it was up for interpretation. I think had these people sued the government and continued to pay taxes, this movement would have had a lot more teeth. Right. But instead, a lot of tax resistors, just out of protest, stopped paying taxes. There's a trend in the late ninety s and up to 2000, 2003 or four where people were very loudly in public holding press conferences saying, I'm a business owner and I'm not paying income taxes any longer, and I'm not going to withhold my employees taxes on behalf of the federal government. I don't have to. Yeah, that's a service that businesses provide, the federal government. It's not a mandate, and I think it's illegal that they're paying taxes. So we're not doing and it we're not filing taxes either, as a business. Yeah. They had backup from a former IRS employee right. That said, you're right. They can't come after you. Yeah. So apparently in the code, there's a part called 861 where it says that taxes are generated by non American business activities. Right. So the 861 position is that if you work for an American company and you're an American, like, any income you make that's domestic, which is anything that you or I do or anything most people do, is not subject to taxation. And these people tried it. They tested it, but they didn't really test it in the courts. Right. And most of them got dragged to jail and have just gotten out of prison or are still serving prison terms, but a lot of them aren't being forced to pay back taxes, which is weird. Well, apparently the IRS is woefully underfunded in terms of how much they can pursue these people. Right. That's why you could be a tax cheat and get away with it. Right. If your number isn't called, but you take that risk. That's why apparently these people misinterpreted the IRS inability to prosecute them with the IRS ability, legal ability to go after them. Yeah. And they took it as the IRS capitulating to their argument. And instead, really, it was like, we're kind of busy right now. Right. But we'll come and get you in 2005. What was your name again? And they did. Thank you, sir. Yeah. So a lot of people went to jail, and 861 is kind of dead, and Wesley Snipes famously invoked argument. Oh, did he? Yeah. Interesting. I wonder if Willie did. Not that I saw. You know, there's a big push now that the NFL National Football League is tax exempt. So messed up. And there's a lot of stinking because I don't think a lot of people knew this until sort of recently. And of course, now the Internet get on social media and people are like, what? They're not a non profit? Yeah. Social petition helps change things quite a bit, doesn't it? Yeah. There are petitions going around to remove the NFL from that tax. Why would they be tax exempt? It's complicated. It's so stupid. It's like you Joe Public, you're paying the alternative Minimum Tax, but this enormous economic engine over here is exempt. Why not? Yeah. And not the individual teams and owners like Arthur Blanket, the Falcons, and the Falcons organization has to pay taxes. Well, that's heartening. But the NFL, as the larger body does not get you. But, yeah, it's kind of messed up. They should probably pay taxes. So we could sit here all day alternately giving facts and railing on the income tax, but I think we got it. Yeah. And I'm sure we'll hear from all sides on this one. Yeah, bring it on. I look forward to it. If you want to learn more about the income tax, you can type income tax into the search barhouseopworks.com. And since I said search barhouseofworks.com, it means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this we may have saved a life. Hi, guys. My name is Zach Freeland. I'm a graphic design student at Grand Valley State University. Go Lakers. This is about his concussion. He went to sit down on his bed one night in his dorm and smacked the back of my head. My roommate's bunk hurt a bit, but I went to class and forgot all about it. About 5 hours later, in a drawing class, I began to get all the symptoms I usually got with a migraine. The next day I had a bit of a headache, and then the next day as well. So that Wednesday, I started to suspect I had a concussion and planned to go to the hospital the next day. But that night I put on the podcast and listen to the one on concussion. And he said it was alarming enough to where I went to the Er immediately and didn't wait till the next day. And at the Er, the doctor told me I had an aneurysm or brain cancer. And it was odd to predecise relief to find out it was only an aneurysm. I talked to the doctors. It's only an aneurysm. Well, it's better than brain cancer, I guess. I talked to the doctors. They said I should be fine to finish my time at school, which made it possible for me to get further treatment at home. Went into surgery. They stuffed my aneurysm with platinum coils. I guess that's what they do. And the doctor said if I had not have come in, I might not have lived a whole lot longer. The aneurysm had already grown from the first hospital visit to the second. So guys, I wanted to say thank you for letting you know that you make this podcast, and because of the concussion one I hadn't scared the crap out of me, I might not be here today. That is pretty awesome. And hey, if this ends up in the air, give a shout out to the Detroit City Football Club minor league soccer team. The most passionate fans in the nation. No joke. So go, Detroit City Football Club. Yeah, that's a good shot. That's Zach Freeland. Thanks, Zach. Hope you're recouping. Well, sir, this is a while ago. Yeah. Sorry it took so long to get on the air. Take care, Zach. Thank you for listening to us and letting us save your life. If we saved your life, you know me and Chuck always want to hear about those. You can tweet to us at sisk podcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuckishnow, and you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushorenow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | ||
How Human Experimentation Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-human-experimentation-works | Human experimentation is an age-old practice, dating back to 4 BCE. Listen in as Josh and Chuck give you the low-down on the historic, grisly underbelly of science and medicine -- human experimentation. | Human experimentation is an age-old practice, dating back to 4 BCE. Listen in as Josh and Chuck give you the low-down on the historic, grisly underbelly of science and medicine -- human experimentation. | Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:24:42 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=15, tm_min=24, tm_sec=42, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=365, tm_isdst=0) | 26470007 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Sometimes science goes too far. Twisted but true. Wednesdays at ten on Science. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Happy New Year, too. Yeah, that's Chuck Bryant. Charles W. Bryant. Baby New Year himself. Yeah, he's a chubby. Me? No baby new Year, Chuck. Yeah, with the ears. Poor kid. He always has a kind of curly hair, which I'm not. Yeah. You know, growing up, watching the little claymation happy New Year, baby thing. The baby New Year. Remember? With the huge ears. Oh, that's what I was just talking about. Yeah. That was like the little stock claymation, like Rudolph. Yeah, but there was one for New Year's, and that was the baby that had the huge ears. When he took his hat off, his ears would pop out and everyone would chastise him. What did it sound like when he took his ears out? Was it like that? Actually. But I always felt bad because I thought it was a cute little claymation baby. Yeah. Was that the crux of it? That he just had big ears and everybody laughed at him? Yeah. I can't remember how it ended. He finally found a home or something. I don't know. Good, because there's nothing sadder than a homeless baby on New Year's. Yes. With big ears. Chuck. Josh, have you ever heard of Herophilus? I have. Okay. You want to talk a bit about Herophilus? Sure. Journey back to fourth century BCE. Or as you like to say, BCE. The New BC. He's known as the father of anatomy. Yeah. And one of the ways that he became known as the father of anatomy was by dissecting vivisecting. Live human beings. Yes. Live well, say live cadaver. But a cadaver is dead. Sure. Live human patience. Dissecting for science. Right. And I believe they were in pain. They were criminals, right? Many times, yes. So we're talking about human experimentation. We're basing this on an article written by the fine esteemed writer Robert Lamb. And he starts out page zero with this account of Herophilus cutting through the eyeball of a guy who is strapped to a table and I guess something stuffed in his mouth to muffle the screams, but his eyeball is being dissected in front of a group of surgeons by Herophilus. Can you read this online? Yeah, please do. Once more, the masterput enters the bloody maze of arteries and muscle. We should have gotten RL in here to read it and stuff. Yeah, that's good stuff. So, yeah, apparently this guy that Robert is writing about, this victim, was one of more than 600 that were vivisected at the hands of Herophilus over the course of his lifetime, right? Yes. For alive prisoners. Yeah. So that's kind of horrific sickening. It is horrific. Right. But it was apparently par for the course, right? Yeah. At the time, sure. So all these people? Why would you dissect a live person or vivisect a live person? I think it's dissect if it's dead and vivisect if they're alive. I believe so. Well, I mean, there's reasons for it. You wouldn't want to justify it, but they were doing that because sometimes you just need a human to perform an experiment on, and sometimes a kid ever doesn't do the job. And before they were scruples, they would do it on a live person instead of like an animal test. Right. Apparently, back, in her opinion, is age. Also, they thought the error was carried in the circulatory system rather than blood, which is weird, because if you vivisect a person, blood comes out. Sure. Although I imagine air does, too, since you can't see it. They're like, oh, it's air. This is just something. And this guy is the father of anatomy. He is. Come on. Here's the big ironic twist. All of his writings, all the notes he took, all the scholarly works he created based on the deaths or the intolerable pain experienced by these 600 people, we're all lost when the Library of Alexandria burned in 2072 Ad. This is rapidly devolving to a sound effect show. Yeah. Should we tell people what that is? Sure. Jerry got us a little gift for Christmas, a little sound machine. And the funny thing is that she asked us to keep it on the DL, and we just told 100,000 people. Yeah. The other funny thing is she actually said we could use it. I thought she was going to say, well, here, but you can never use this. Right. Yeah. And she encouraged us to use it as well. Right. So, Chuck, the idea of somebody writhing under the knife while a guy like Herophilus or anybody else with a sharp object cuts his eyeball open to examine the nerves inside is a pretty horrific idea indeed. The problem is this kind of thing didn't end in Ad. 272. No, it continued on. Apparently, history is littered with human experimentation. Yes. So much so that there were body snatching problems in the 19th century because medical schools needed bodies. Right. By the 19th century, you couldn't vivisect anybody you weren't supposed to. Sure. And also, because of the Puritanical ideals, you couldn't do any kind of dissection on cadavers. You're right. Now, of course you can. Right. Which is a good move, because, as you said, there was a lot of gray robbing going on to supply the medical schools who still needed this knowledge and wanted it and were willing to pay grave robbers for it. Yeah, big time. Do you remember back in 1989 when they found some bones, actually 9800 bones, in the basement of medical college in Georgia? Really? Yes. Did not know that. Yeah. They dated back to the 19th century and they were linked to rob graves. Wow. Yeah. That's crazy, isn't it? It is. So that's if you're dealing with cadavers, if you wanted to experiment on a live, living thing, then you would now have to go the route of chimps and rabbits and mice, rats. Right. Which actually what we've done, from what I understand, is with human experimentation, we've put lower I'm making air quotes here. Lower species in between us and initial discovery. Right. Yeah. The problem was, back in the day, though, they did the same thing, but they considered lower species, other humans specifically convict. Yeah. Or poor and destitute. Deceased. Yeah, exactly. But convicts, for sure. Convicts have pretty much always gotten it pretty bad as far as human experimentation goes. But yeah, so these days we do put rabbits and rats and chimps and macaques in between us and not knowing what a drug will do or something like that. But really, ultimately, it still ends up to humans. Sure. And one of the reasons why is because we don't even know whether or not animals experience happiness. How can we figure out if they're hallucinating? Yeah, sure. They can't help self report. Yeah. You got to ask questions every now and then. Right. And then also, if you're making a drug for humans, you eventually have to find out exactly what it does to humans. It's not going to have the same effect on a rat, although it will probably be close. Yeah. And we'll get into that in a minute. All right. Should we talk about some of the horrific things that have happened throughout our history, Josh? Well, don't forget hold on. There's another route you could take. Oh, yeah, I know. It self experimentation. Yes. You're living self experimenting on yourself. There have been some famous examples of this. Yes. Famously, Pierre and Mary Curie earned a Nobel Prize in physics for radiation research, and they did this by taping radium salts to their skin and seeing what happened. Right. So that's one way to do it. Another guy who famously tried his research out on himself is Albert Hoffman. Oh, really? The guy who created LSD. Right. And apparently he had a diary where he writes about his bike ride home after injecting himself with LSD. And he had no bike. No, he had a bike, but he was like, wow, nothing is real. Yeah. And I really feel like listening to Pink Floyd right now. Yet to be discovered. Pink Floyd yet to be born, I think, even. Yeah. So, Chuck, self experimentation has its own flaws. Right. If you're vivisecting an eyeball and you do it to yourself, you can't do that more than once. No, you probably wouldn't even do it that one time. Yeah. So, really, there is a lot to be gained from vivisecting human beings. We don't do it. And one of the reasons why is because it's horrific. So, yes, let's talk about some of the horrific human experiments that litter history. Jmarion. Sims, does that name ring a bell? No, that is considered to be the father of gynecology. Yeah. Jay Marion. Sims, and he even became the president of the AMA in 1876. But he developed experimental surgeries by testing them on African slaves many times without anesthesia. Yeah. Dark side for sure, man. Yeah, I would definitely call that a dark side. Yeah. He gets lauded probably in many circles still today. He does. Apparently we think of the Nazis especially, and we'll talk about them in a minute, but the US. Has a really shady history of human experimentation. A guy named Doctor Leo Stanley injected prisoners at San Quentin with animal testing to slow or reverse aging, which did not work out. Yeah. 19 six cholera experiments in the Philippines conducted by US. Pellagra experiments in Mississippi. Right. And then apparently we were talking about how prisoners have always gotten a bad rap. Up until the 1970s in the United States, pretty much all pharmaceuticals were tested on convicts. You do not want to break the law. Now, I wonder, you know, how people hearken back to the golden age when there was less crime and less violence and all that. I wonder how much of it had to do with the fact that if you went to prison, like, you would be experimented on. Yeah. I wonder if you know that, though it probably wasn't widely reported until you get to prison, then you're like, oh, oops. Yeah. Had I known. Right. But I imagine recidivism rates that's a bonehead word were pretty low. Yeah, you're probably right. So Chuck, also, the United States was huge into compulsory sterilization. Right. I did not know that. The eugenics movement okay, so between, I guess, the early one thousand nine hundred s, the first decade of the 20th century, up until the think, maybe 19, 81, 64,000 people in the United States were sterilized against their will. Like epileptic, sentimentally, handicapped, blind, deaf, mute, schizophrenics, and Native Americans. Right. Against their will, sometimes unknowingly. Unbelievable. Yeah. Which that's not necessarily an experiment, because you know exactly what's going to happen. The person is going to be sterilized. True. But if you look at it as eugenics, it is kind of a larger experiment to basically create a great race. Right. And then the eugenics, the popularity, it was well known this was going on. This was in a secret government program like MKUltra. Right. And there was public support for it until World War II, which remember, actually can you remember to the future? Yes. When we talk about mercenaries. Right. World War II changed everything. Right? I did, yeah. The Nazis really led the way when it comes to human experimentation, as everyone knows, against the Jews, Gypsies, anyone they felt like targeting, they would do things like freezing them to research hypothermia that became huge later. Their hypothermia research is really used. We'll get into the ethics. They put them in compression chambers to test the effects of high altitude flight, which it doesn't get much worse than that. And sterilization experiments as well, like the US. Was doing. They would use phosphorus incendiary phosphorus devices to figure out how to treat phosphorus burns. Japan was another country. Yeah. Their Unit 731, very famous unit, reportedly killed more than 10,000 Chinese, Korean and Russian POWs to develop biological weapons and test this stuff out on them, basically. Right. So the Nazis in particular, face the music at Nuremberg, right? Oh, yeah. And there was this part to the Nuremberg Trials called the Doctor's Trials, and I think a bunch of the guys, like, 17 were convicted, and most of them, I think, were hanged. Really? Yeah. And a lot of these guys, cases where we didn't break any laws, there's no lawful outline of what to do when you're experimenting on a human. And a lot of this stuff followed the same kind of protocol that we had before the war. Right, right. Which is just horrendous. But in a lot of cases, it was actually true. Right, sure. So one of the results of the Nuremberg Trial was the Nuremberg Code, where the international community said, all right, we need to outline some guidelines for human experimentation. Right. I think there's, like, ten points to it, ten large overviews to human experimentation guidelines. And it focuses on reducing fear and pain and discomfort in the experiment, subjects that can't be coerced, that has to be willing, they have to be informed. What's this covered by? What's that under? Do you know? Like, what document or organization that's under? I don't. Probably the UN. Okay. I would think the UN would have something to do with that. Yeah, you'd think so, but yes, but it's very famous. It's called the Nuremberg Code. Right. And it solves, like, the moral quandary. Do you ever see extreme measures? Gene hackman, hugh Grant? Yeah. All right, so, you know, like, in the end, I think they're in a sewer somehow. Gene hackman is like, if you had to kill one to save a million, wouldn't you have to do it? And so the Nuremberg Code solves that. And the answer, by the way, is no, you wouldn't kill one. Yeah. That's the old age old question, though, right? Kill one to save money, which is a very utilitarian view of looking at things like, yes, you kill one person to save a million. Of course you do. But we as an international collective have decided that you don't do that. One person's life is worth as much as a million people's potential lives. Right. So that brings us to the real quandary, though, with human experimentation, is what do you do with this information that is gained from these awful, awful experiments? Right. A lot of detractors will say that to use this information supports human experimentation. Right. But then another way of looking at it is to propose, like, kind of do a thought experiment of, all right, let's say that you walk in on one of these experiments and you say your death is inevitable, and it's going to be a painful, horrible death. But you can choose whether or not this data that your results from your death is suppressed or used. Which one do you want? Most people would say, well, if I'm going to die anyway, sure I would want this data to be used. That's the argument the other side uses. Yes. The US cut a little deal, though, with 731. I know. We have such a shady history. Like, we used Nazi scientists to get us to the moon. Well, this was particularly to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. So we thought, hey, rather than give that to the Russians, unit 731, let's cut a deal where the officers responsible for this good immunity from prosecution and war crimes, and we get the data. And we'll even give you a little stipend. Yeah. On the side, we'll give you some money. The way to come up with those biological weapons. Nicely done. Right. Like we said, the Nazi hypothermia experiments, which are pretty brutal, apparently they would put you in an icy VAT of water with a thermometer in your rectum, and they found that most people died when unconscious and died around when their body temperature hit 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Right. Yeah. It's such useful information. But no, the useful information came, and they were looking for ways to revive people suffering from hypothermia because the Germans were losing so many people on the Eastern Front in Germany that they actually did figure out ways of quickly reviving people suffering from hypothermia. So postwar hypothermia researchers are like, dude, these people, as ghastly as these experiments are, they figured out how to revive people suffering from hypothermia. We need that information. Right. So I think with that, I guess that group leading the charge, nazi data has been used in a lot of ways, but then it should be cited, I think, was the compromise that they came up with. Yeah. And it actually worked the other way, too. Jewish doctors would later study victims of starvation in the ghetto, in the Warsaw Ghetto, and they use that to aid in the study of hunger associated disease. Right. So they found a way to use it, at least. Right. So we were talking also about how the US has a nice long history of horrible stuff, like the Tuskegee experiments. You want to talk about that? Yes. A 40 year study of syphilis began in 1000, 1932, and they use African Americans who sought treatment for this disease, and they basically straight up lied and deceived them, thinking they were being treated. Right. They actually didn't use any kind of medical intervention because they wanted to watch the progression of syphilis. Yeah. They want to see it gets worse. And so they could chart everything out and they had no idea. And then, I guess, finally, in 1997, US issues a public apology for this, and there's still some people alive who were experimented on. Unbelievable. Yes. And we documented the LSD experiments that unsuspecting Americans were dosed in the MKUltra Project. We did a whole show on that, didn't we? Yeah, of course. Yeah. It's like our best one, didn't we? Did you forget? Well, it was a long time ago. Yeah. Well, you're kind of out of it if you remember the beginning of that one. Was it? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. We did a role playing. So, Chuck, there was kind of a huge sea change in the way that human experimentation was looked at and carried out when the FDA was established in the 30s. Sure. All of a sudden, there were review boards and panels. The universities kind of stepped in and said, all right, we play a big role in this. We're going to start establishing stricter oversight of human experimentation. And that's kind of the course that we've followed since then. Right? Yeah. That's called drug trials. Drug trials, exactly. Do you know any human guinea pigs? No, I've never done it. But phase one drug trials is usually where you'll get the most folks because you need healthy individuals right. Who are willing to risk their health for money. And basically what they're doing in these Phase One trials, when you see these commercials that rattle off 100 side effects that are positively frightening, they get these from giving these medications to people and seeing what happens. Right. Yeah. Robert Lamp put it really well. He said that if your bottle of medication says that it might result in bowel control problems or suicidal thoughts, you can bet that someone received a paycheck for experiencing them at some point. Exactly. So that's what they know. Yeah. So that's phase one. Phase two deals with dosing and efficiency, and phase three enlist actual patients who need this treatment. Right. Not healthy people. And people who volunteer for phase One clinical trials are handsomely paid, depending on the risk involved. That's one of the problems. Yeah. And I mean, it's kind of like a vacation. You're fed and you're put up maybe in a hotel or the hospital room has, like, a video game console. You watch movies or whatever, and they just shoot you full of something and then come in like every 15 minutes or hour or whatever and say, have you seen that leprechaun you were talking to earlier? Again, that kind of stuff. But that's one of the problems, is that some of these folks bounce from experiment to experiment and kind of make a half ass living off of this. Right. I guess you can, especially if you're dedicated. Lamb talks about an article in The New Yorker that is about it's called Guinea Pigging, I believe, and it's about the soap culture of clinical drug trial participants who have their own publications that show what upcoming drug trials are in the pipeline and how much they're going to pay and that kind of stuff. So there's a concern that these people are kind of hooked on this lifestyle. Right. My thing is to each his own. Sure. Yeah. I mean, if there are no laws being broken and they're getting paid and they're willing to do this instead of going to get a job delivering pizzas, then good on you. Frankly, if they can get my pizza to me and stay safe, not harm other people and deliver a delicious pizza, still, I don't care if they're in the midst of a drug trial. Right. Then here's another thing I didn't know that I thought was interesting in this article is that they kind of put the pedal to the metal when it comes to these trials, because a US. Drug patent only lasts for 20 years. So if you're hung up for a decade in research and testing, which can happen, then they don't start it over. Once you get it approved, you've got only ten years left to make serious money. Right. So they speed these things along. They do. Now, if you're running it through a university, they generally have well, universities have a reputation for being total sticklers when it comes to institutional review boards. Right, right. So, as a result, I think that a lot of drug companies have found that if you run it instead through a private organization that does the clinical trial for you, then all of a sudden you can walk around a lot of these ethical guidelines or safe conditions and yet again, outsourcing to private contractors for money. It's the way to get around things. Exactly. Awful. That's medical experimentation. This is a really cool article. It's slightly outside of how stuff works. Voice robert Lamb put his all into it. He put his Lamb stamp on it. He did. At the very least, you got to read page zero, and I defy you to just read page zero. Yes. For those of you out there, page zero is really page one. That's the insider lingo here. Yes. And Chuck and I have worked here for more than two years, and we still never figured out why they call it page zero. I have no idea. So if you want to read page zero of how human experimentation works, you can type in human experimentation and the handy search bar@howstepws.com, and I guess you could say that that leads us to listener mail. Yes, Josh? This is about Narco state. I don't remember narcotics. I'm going to call it Narco State email. Okay. This is from Christopher, who actually had to write Christopher back and say, are you a boy or a girl? Because I've never heard that name. And Christopher is like, a dude. So Christopher says, I currently live in Juarez, Mexico. What? Yeah, exactly. Because we covered wires pretty thoroughly. Yeah. It is sad to stand out as a dangerous narco zone rather than being recognized for a decent achievement, but things here are indeed pretty crazy. Murders are super high, and I've tragically lost some friends throughout the year, as if this wasn't enough. Even the government is messing with us. As I had an experience last July, my parents happened on a clothing shop. We were asked by some federal agents to give out a big amount of money $250,000. Holy just because, of course, my family refused to do so. A week later, they came with an order to close and empty my parents shop and lock up my dad. We gave a smaller amount just so he was released, and we thought it was just in there. But to our surprise, a month later, we were surrounded by about 20 agents holding an apprehension order to take both of my parents, charging them for supposedly commercializing pirated clothing, which was a trumped up charge. Good Lord. I was left alone with my three younger brothers for more than three months until the agent on top agreed to let them out of prison for $50,000, and the case was closed. It's a sick experience, and thank God it was finally over. Throughout those three months of grief, you guys were right there with me, and you were a nice distraction from my awful situation at a time that was clearly troubling, and I want to thank you for that. It probably doesn't mean the same to you guys, but it was helpful in some way for me. I no longer want to live in this place, and I'm just looking forward to moving to the US. As soon as possible. I'll bet. I know. So we just wanted to share this and say Merry Christmas. We had some angry people write in, by the way, about me saying we should just drop the borders and let anyone in. And I just want to say to those folks, think about people like Christopher here who are just dying to get to the United States because of stuff like this, and the US. Represents something great to them, and we shouldn't forget that. Yeah. I'm on my hire horse, and I'm getting off of it. Thanks. Do we have a horse effect now? Let's see. We've got something close to it, and that would be weird if you have an email about escaping certain deaths, being extorted by the Mexican military or any kind of unjust story, right? Yeah. You can send it in an email to stuffpodcast at wait. Happy new Year, everybody. Yeah. Happy new year. Be safe, Christopher. We're glad you're alive. Yes. We're glad everybody who made it through 2009 made it through 2009. Yes. Athowstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more housetofworks? Check out our blog on the housetofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you?" | ||
How Egypt's Pyramids Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-egypts-pyramids-work | Pyramids can be found in ruins around the world, but no civilization perfected the feat of engineering like Pharaonic Egypt. Learn about the mysteries that still surround these giants. | Pyramids can be found in ruins around the world, but no civilization perfected the feat of engineering like Pharaonic Egypt. Learn about the mysteries that still surround these giants. | Tue, 07 Jul 2015 14:46:10 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=14, tm_min=46, tm_sec=10, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=188, tm_isdst=0) | 46415698 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's doing funny voices all of a sudden. Yeah. She's like, we're or eight years into this gig, and I started doing impressions. I don't know if it's an impression. It's more just a silly, silly, dumb voice. Maybe she's taking a stand up class or improv class. Are you taking an improv class? Jerry says yes. She keeps going and seeing it's not a comedy improv class. So it's a business improv class just to make her sharper and meanings. Yeah. And they have gotten much more enjoyable and shorter. Yeah. Her PowerPoint presentations are, like one third jokes now. Yeah. But our equipment rental has gone up purchases because she drops the mic a little too hard. Just keep replacing those mics. Yeah. So, Chuck, everybody knows about the pyramids. Great. Pyramids at Giza. Yes. Turns out there's pyramids all over the world. Sure. And there's a distinct thread on the Internet that suggests that all these pyramids are connected in Mesoamerica, China, Egypt, memphis, Greece memphis is in Egypt? No, not Memphis, Tennessee. Yeah, Memphis, Tennessee. Well, it's one of these new pyramids. Oh, got you a neo pyramid. Yeah, it's a basketball coliseum. Okay. Yeah. The pyramid. Sure. What is that, a mud island or something? No different type of Memphis. Well, the idea is that all of these ancient cultures were visited by the same aliens that said, build some pyramids. Here's how to do it. We'll help you out. And that's just almost certainly not true. Yeah. I feel safe in saying, as much as I like to believe in cookie things, I don't believe that the aliens built the pyramid. I don't believe that either. And there's a couple of good arguments against it. For one, it really diminishes the incredible skill of the ancient engineers who came up with this and the workers who constructed them. Yeah. The architecture. Right. Surely they would need some advanced alien civilization to come down and tell these dumb dumbs what to do. Yeah. And then another point that I ran across that kind of explains against that is that I think it was unlike rational wiki or something like that. They basically said, go out in your garden and try to build a waist high mound of dirt. He said, you're going to just naturally, after even one or two attempts, start forming a pyramid. A mound shape. Yeah. And their whole jam, the whole idea, is that pyramids evolved independently just from trying to build a massive earth and structure. Yeah. And there you go. That's where pyramids evolved separately around the world. I was laughing because as soon as you said that, for some reason, I pictured you in your backyard, like, covered in dirt, just screaming like, Yummy, it's not going well. Call somebody. Check the Rhombus off the list. Doesn't hold up. And Yummy is, like, on her phone like, what? You okay. You're cute. Keep it up, dummy. So, a pyramid. Who wrote this one? Is this Craig Freudenrich, PhD. Yeah. He's written some good ones for us. I've learned to not second guess his articles. Sure. Yeah. No, he's good. And you throw a PhD at the end of your name. Right. You're not allowed to second guess it after that. Yeah, I might just start doing that. Nobody checks. Call me Doctor Chuck. Charles Bryan, PhD. Yeah. All right. A pyramid is a geometrical solid with a square base, not necessarily. And for equilateral, triangular sides, the most structurally stable shape for projects involving large amounts of stone or masonry. Exactly. It's a very stable shape. Yeah. And one thing I read that said, why did the Egyptians build pyramids? The very easy answer is because that's what they knew how to build. They were good at it. And if they would have been better at building something else, they probably would have built something else. Well, yeah, I think also it took until about the 20th century before we started using materials and developed materials that you could build a very tall structure out of that didn't require you to build a pyramid. Right. Because you have to have a pyramid to build something very high when you're using something like stone blocks or something like that. Yeah. You keep setting stuff on top of each other, and it's going to become structurally unsound unless it's all leaning in on each other. Yeah. And the prevailing sentiment among archaeologists and anthropologists who study this kind of stuff is that pyramids are ultimately the natural conclusion or evolution from just earth and mounds that they think originally were the first stabs at what ultimately became pyramids, peaking, basically, at the pyramid of Khufu in Giza. Yeah. I think there's also probably some symbolism going on with pyramids coming to a point toward the sky. In the case of, let's say, Central America, with the mines in the Aztecs, there were more religious symbols, so that is okay for that. Right. And if in case of Egypt, with it being a tomb, it also makes sense that it would point toward the heavens. Well, with Egypt specifically, they believe that the symbolism behind the pyramid is that it symbolizes this mound that the earth was created from in Egyptian cosmology. Yeah, that makes sense. So the other couple of other distinctions between Egyptian pyramids and let's say Central American is central American pyramids were generally wider but smaller, I guess not as tall, and they built those over hundreds of years, whereas the Great Pyramids in Egypt were built over the course of know for sure, but probably 20 or 30 years. So I think that that's true in some cases, but I ran across something that suggested that at the Auto, they would build pairs of pyramids, like, every 20 years. Oh, really? Yeah. So I don't know if that's the case across the board, but I think that they weren't quite the massive public works that Egyptian pyramids came to be. Yeah. Well, in Central America, they were also more located in Aztec and Mayan cities, whereas the Egyptian pyramids originally were located away from cities. Right. And I remembered, I think it was just last year that I saw that mind blowing picture of the other side of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, how the city runs right up to the front door, basically. And if you ever look at an aerial view, I just never seen one until a year ago. It was like, wow. I just thought it was literally in the middle of nowhere. There's a huge city just right in front of them. Yeah. And well, it makes sense, though, if you think about it, especially if, say, in Mesoamerica, they were temples. Well, temples were for public use, so you'd want it kind of convenient if your pyramid was used as, like, a tomb. Humans traditionally bury their people slightly away from their city center. True. So it makes sense that it would be on the outskirts of Cairo rather than in it. Yeah, that makes sense. The first tombs in Egypt for the pharaohs were just flat boxy buildings. They called them mastabas, which is Arabic for bench. And then they started building those on top of each other, sort of. They get a little smaller, but they still remain flat on top. They didn't come to a point like a pyramid. Yeah, those were step pyramids. They were the first attempt at pyramids. And it's really strange because the whole thing was so these pyramids are so old. You think of them just like being spanning thousands of years in the way of construction and planning and all this stuff, and all the number of pharaohs that must have been involved when actually Egypt's pyramids were built within a 700 year period and basically just for five pharaohs or so. Yeah, it's not too bad. There's a burst and then nothing, and then another little bit and then nothing after that. Right. Because it was hard labor. It was hard, yeah, it was hard getting labor there. It was very expensive. Yeah. Hard getting those rocks there. Right. And I also think remember, I said that Khufu's pyramid, the most famous pyramid in the world, the one at Giza, the tallest one, that was the pinnacle of pyramid building. And they think that after that, as pyramids started to get smaller do you like that? I did. Totally unintentional. I know. They think that as pyramids started to get smaller, it actually represents a shift in Egyptian thought where worship went from worshiping the pharaoh to worshipping RA and other gods. Right. So that the deification of the pharaoh diminished in size. And you can see that reflected in the smaller size of the PM, literally. Yeah. Interesting. That makes sense. I never heard of that. Love it. I love it, too. So the Great Pyramid of kufu, which you just mentioned, is the biggest at 146 meters high with a 230 meters square base and just about six and a half tons of rock. Six and a half million tons? What did I say? Just six and a half. Yeah. That'd just be a couple of the rocks. Yeah, I think the average sized rocks were 2.5 tons each. Yeah, the model was 6.5 tons. And these things have stood at the test of time, to say the least. They have worn away some, obviously, but look at them. They still look great. Yeah. And they were built, like, 40 00, 50 00 years ago. What's really interesting that I didn't realize before was that when you saw these things, like in the first year that they were completed, or right when they were completed, they were blinding white. Oh, really? Yeah. So you can see the steppy outlines that used to be covered so that the sides and the pinnacle were smooth, totally smooth, covered in polished limestone. So it was like a gleaming white wow. Standing out against the bright blue sky. Wish there were photographs of that. Yeah, it would have been pretty neat. But over time, that limestone is eroded away or being removed or whatever. And so now you can kind of see the substructure, but what we see is, like, the external sides of the pyramid. We're actually meant to be covered with polished limestone. Wow. Yeah, I bet that was something else. And again, we're talking about how spectacular this was engineering wise. Things were built 4500 years ago. Let's say the Khufu pyramid. Khufu's pyramid. He was a pharaoh. His pyramid was the tallest building in the world until the 20th century. That's crazy. Yeah. I mean, that just shows you that it was hard to build things tall. Yeah. It's not like people didn't want to. No, they wanted to. I think man is always strid to build things super tall, to really reach up to the heavens and punch God in the eye. Yeah, that's right. That's why they want to build it all. That's right. The very first step pyramid, the Sakara, was completed in 26 20. And that was for the Pharaoh Joser, not Goser. It seems pretty close to that. It's so close. I want it to be Gozer. He would have been almost contemporaneous to Gozer, I would guess. Yeah. So this one had six levels, and they attempted another one, another six level step pyramid. But that one didn't work out so well. So we're going to talk about a couple of the learning projects, basically. Yeah. And you've heard of the very famous Egyptian mathematician Mhotep? Yeah. He's actually credited with coming up with the idea of taking those mustabas, those bench like squat buildings and stacking smaller and diminishing versions of themselves to create that first step pyramid. That first cigarette. His idea. Bubba Hotel. No, not that that's a good movie. I had no idea, by the way, that Bruce Campbell was doing an Evil Dead TV show. Is it on? Yeah, it's coming, like, super soon. I have no idea how this escaped me. I had no idea either. Yeah. I'm pretty excited, though. It's just back. The only way it could be better is if it came on right after the muppets. The new muppets. Pretty good night. That'd be like the ateam Night Rider pairing. Were those back to back? I think they might have been. I was never into Night Rider, so I turned it off after eight. I wasn't a Soups Night Rider fan. All right. Let's go with Love Boat. Fantasy island. Great. Maybe the best two hour pairing in TV history. I never really watched the fantasy island. I love boats. I wasn't allowed to watch Fantasy Island. Oh, no. Well, no, it had the word fantasy in the title. Got you. We don't want that right now. I think it was dark and it wasn't necessarily for kids, but now when I look back at it, it's so silly. Yes. I can't believe I wasn't allowed to watch this. Well, the whole premise of it is just fairly unbelievable. Yeah. But at Mike family, they were probably like, no, it's all about sex. Right. Everyone's fantasy will be about sex. And Ricardo Montavan is clearly playing the devil yeah. With this little smaller minion yes. Tattoo. All right, where were we? Oh, we were talking about pyramids. That didn't work out so well. Another one was the I want to say medium, but it's the me edom pyramid. Or the medium. I've also seen it spelled M-E-Y-D-U-M which makes it easier. It's like madeum. Madeum. That was constructed in 25 70, and it had seven steps heading towards eight. But it collapsed. It collapsed. And then there's the bent pyramid, which didn't collapse, but they basically just miscalculated the angle. And they basically had to change the angle after the first third of it was built. Or two thirds was built. Yeah. So first we have goser's step pyramid in Sakara. That's the first real inkling of the pyramids are coming. That's right. After that, we had the pharaoh what is name? Snaferu. And Snaferu was the one who kept having really bad luck with pyramids, and it was because he was very ambitious, but he was also dealing with architects and engineers who were still figuring this out as they were going along. Yeah, sure. So he had to put up with the one that collapsed. Yes. That made them. Yeah. And then he had to put up with the bent pyramid. Yeah. Which still looks good. Did you look it up? Yeah, it's great. But you can tell it's not the way it's supposed to look. Not perfect. And I can imagine a lot of engineers probably lost their lives with these failed projects because he was fine with capturing people and forcing them to work. And he did a lot of underhanded things to build himself a tomb. And the problem was, failed attempt one, how many decades did that take? Yeah. Failed attempt two, how many decades did that take, finally? And they were, like, really freaking out at this point. Like, if this guy dies and we don't have him a tomb, this is about as bad as it could get. Because remember, we haven't converted to worshiping RA. Yeah. This guy's our raw, so we're displeasing our god and we can see his expression. Yeah. All I want is a straight pyramid like everybody else. So finally they hit on it, they build him the red pyramid, and it is the first genuinely successful pyramid. And he died happy, I guess. Yeah. And I assume was entombed there. Yes, I think so. I don't know. I didn't run across that where he is. I bet he was, otherwise that would have been what a waste of time. Well, that's the thing with these pyramids. We still have very little understanding about some really important stuff. Yeah. And one of the reasons why is because they, like, in Khufu's pyramid, cookie has never been found in there. They think it's Khufu's pyramid, but his body is gone. And I would guess it's probably the same thing for Snaferu. Man he's got a tough name to say. Tomb raiders, buddy. Yeah, possibly. Probably. All right, well, I think that you seriously wet the listeners appetite with that tease, so let's take a little break and come back and really get into Khu already, buddy. We might as well just go to the big daddy and break it down. Okay. Kufu break it down for me, fellas. K-H-U-F-U. Also known as Chiaops. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's what the Greeks called them. So that's why the pyramids, also called the pyramid of chias. I never heard that. Bam. Part of the giza pyramid complex. And as we mentioned, the big daddy of them all, it was built for Sneferu, sun. Kufu. And the other two little guys were built for Kafu sun Kafre. And the grandson menkaure. I bet it's menkaure. Menkaure. Yeah. I think usually those vowels are split into, like, a different part of the word, menka. URET. Am I making any sense? Sure you are to me. But I know what you're trying to say. I speak Chuck. That's right. So it is the largest and most elaborate and the one where we've learned the most from, basically in its construction. Still has a lot of secrets, man. Oh, sure, a lot of secrets. Including how they built it. Yeah. No idea. Well, let's talk about the insides first. Okay, let's sorry. The guts. Yeah. First you have your primary burial chamber. That's the king's chamber, and that's where the tomb is. That's where the sarcophagus is. Body in there? No. What else is inside? Chuck hieroglyphics. That say tell stories of life at that time. Right. Like little TV shows on the wall. Yup. The queen's chamber a little smaller, but not for the queen. Is that right? That's right. They call that a misnomer. Yeah. Apparently, people who stumbled upon it entered it years and years on after the pharaohic dynasties had died out, misinterpreted it, and that when they were building this, they were worried that Kufu was going to die. So some of the first things they did were building burial chambers, and then as he lived in the pyramid, kept going under construction. They built a newer, better burial chamber. Yeah. And so there's ultimately three burial chambers, and he's in the King's chamber. Supposedly. That's where sacophagus is. That's right. You have weight relieving chambers. These are above the King's chambers, and they are structural, basically, to distribute weight and to keep everything from collapsing in on the king. Yeah, because that would be bad, too. Yeah. They're like these long slabs, and then there's a gable. There's, like, long, rectangular slabs. I think there's four or five of them, maybe. Isn't it a wooden gable? Is it wooden? I thought it was rock. And the whole thing is like all that pressure that's pushing down toward the center of the triangle. It takes it and just kind of deflects it outward away from that hole inside the pyramid. Feet of engineering. Yes. The gallery is a big passageway with a vaulted ceiling. Do you understand what the Corbelled ceiling is? Yes. So, you know, like, if you have a breakfast bar, those two things that come out and hold it up, those are core bells. Okay. So they had these things that are like core bells going up, and basically it says here that it forms like a primitive arch. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. You have passageways connecting everything because you have to get around. You have an air shaft where they think the spirit of those entombed there would rise through to the heavens. I guess the idea is you don't want to fully enclose a tomb or a pyramid. Got to let the soul out. Sure. Creep out. What else? Well, of course, the exterior rocks that have eroded away. Sure. And apparently the reason why we're quite sure that all of these things were aligned with limestone rocks is because Kafres Tomb, who's snaferu's great grandson, there's still some limestone rock on the top oh, nice. That hasn't fully eroded, man, after all these years. Yeah. So these are the things that have been found over the years of exploring these pyramids. Right. But what really kind of surprised me was that there's a lot of stuff that is still being found. There's a lot of parts inside of the pyramids that they're like. What is this? Why is there a door in this passage with some copper handles? What's beyond it now? Is this because they haven't fully excavated? Yeah. Okay. So they're still doing this? Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I can't remember his name, but the former head of Egypt's antiquities before the revolution. I can't remember. He's like super, like, science educator guy. They call him Egypt's. Indiana Jones. Okay, I thought you were going to say Neil degrasse Tyson. He's like Egypt's. Neil degrasse Tyson. Okay. He could host Cosmos if you wanted to. He's been walking around lately saying, hey, there's plenty of undiscovered stuff in these pyramids. We have a very loose grasp of the structure of them so far. Well, and it's tough to get in there to do the work. I know the permitting process is rigorous, obviously, so it's hard. I know this guy we're going to talk about later that has a new theory on how they're built. He's having a hard time getting in there to prove it. Yeah. But luckily, they're starting to use robots more and more to explore it, and that's starting to yield some interesting stuff. Did not know that either. All right, well, if you're going to build a pyramid, you don't just say, let's get a bunch of rocks and start going first. Like any building, you need to do a survey and excavate the land, because they learned pretty early on that the land that it's on and the foundation is super duper important. Yeah. I think one of the reasons the first one collapsed is because they didn't do the foundation right. It's got to be level. And again, it's kind of, in part how impressive the Khufu's pyramid is. What did you say it's base was? It is a 230 meters square base. It's level within less than an inch. Yeah. That's remarkable. So you get the busier, the master builder involved, and they do have some theories on how they did this leveling. One was that they poured water onto the site, and water is the great leveler, and they would level the material above it, above that waterline, wait for the water level to drain, I guess, and then just continue removing the material until it was flat. Great idea. Yeah. And it's like self leveling concrete is way more soupy than regular concrete. Sure. Because it's going to find if it's watery, it's going to find its own level. Right. And then another way that they may have done it is so they found that they're post holes at regular intervals of, I think, ten qubits. And a qubit is the distance from your elbow inside your arm to the tip of your middle finger. So every ten of those there will be a post hole. And they think that possibly they laid out the foundation site as they were excavating into a grid pattern and hung plumb bobs from these lines. And that's just like a weight that looks like an elongated brass top. Yeah. And it hangs down, and where it hangs is the level point, and then you can excavate down to that reference point, and then you know everything's level if all of your plumb bobs are touching the same ground. Yeah. And that's still like if you go to build a backyard fence yourself. You're going to use the same techniques today, right? It's pretty neat. My money's on the water excavation. Yeah. We already know that they dug canals from the Nile toward the Giza pyramid sites. Sure. Why not just go a little further and flood the area as needed to excavate? That makes sense. That's a minus. But first, Chuck, they had to figure out because these pyramids are all oriented along north, south, east, west, right? Yeah. They run parallel to these axes. I believe they're facing true north. This is Pre compass. It's pretty north Star. Yeah. The North Star wasn't even sky there. Instead, they had to follow some of the Circumpolar stars, and they were doing things like measuring shadows to calculate where true north was. And then once they calculated true north, they could use right angles to determine where south, east, and west were. That's amazing. And then once they had that, then they had to start doing the planning, out the site in the grid and excavating everything down. That's right. Using qubits and hands was the other unit of measurement, which is if you say something so many hands wide, it's the width of your hand with your thumb along the side. Yeah. And they still use that to measure horses or to describe horse height. Yeah, like 20 hands high. Yeah, that's decent height. Was it a big horse or a small horse? 20 hands. I think that might be, like a giant freak of nature horse. Really? Yeah. I usually hear, like, 14 or 16. Okay. Hey, that's off to the Triple Crown winner, right? Yeah, american Pharaoh, which, by the way, Pharaoh is misspelling his name. And they knew it early on, but they were like, well, we're just going to leave it like that. Sure. So faro, yeah. Pretty neat history. That was pretty great. Did you see that race? Yes, I did. Watch that. And I'm not into horse racing, but I knew what was coming on, and I was like, well, it's only a few minutes, so I just don't watch any of the other stuff of the two hour broadcast, and I just turn it on to hear that call. It's always great hearing a good horse racing call. That thing led the whole way. Yeah, there was really no doubt. And I love that jockey. Yeah. Because he had several attempts right at the top of he raced California Chrome last year. Yeah, that's right. So he had a shot at the Triple Crown and couldn't pull it out, and this year he did. Good for him. All right, so I guess we should talk about how they actually build these things. Now. You got to get rocks there. That's the first step. Yeah. And some of the rock did come from Giza. Like, the pyramid structure itself is made largely of limestone, and there was limestone quarries around the Giza site, but they also had to get rocks from elsewhere. Yeah. The granite, they think, came up the river from auAN. They have alabaster from Luxor, basalt from the Fawn Depression, which I didn't see where the basalt was used. I didn't either, buzzle, however it's pronounced basalt. Is it? No, I don't know. Okay. And of course, they don't have iron at this point, so they're not using iron to cut. They're using copper and stone cutting tools to shape these things. But you have to get them there, which is I think the neatest thing about the pyramids is over the years, is trying to figure out how they did it all, because they didn't leave a record. Right. It's just been this great mystery for architecture and archeological nerds to try and figure out. Yeah. So the first step is like, all right, well, how did they get all these rocks here to begin with? So, again, these rocks were on average about two and a half tons per rock. Yeah. So they didn't just lift them and carry them. No. The Egyptians were familiar with the wheel, but the wheel would have been totally useless in the sand at Giza. Yeah. So they figure I think the general sentiment of how they moved rocks, especially ones from local quarries at Giza, was by sled and rope. And they had maybe ten men or fewer. If they could. Sure. Pull these two and a half ton rocks on sleds toward the site, that's how they would have moved them from the quarry. If they were moving them from, like, luxury or elsewhere, they would have put them on rafts. And again, they dug canals from the Nile toward the Giza construction site. I bet people loved being on that duty. Like the raft one? Well, yeah, like, just get it on this barge and float it. And the other guys were like, Are you kidding me? I have to pull this thing on? The sand fled. And then there's another way that they think they may have put them on little quarter circle sleds, strapped them around it and just kind of twisted them like you would twist a beer cake. Yeah, that makes sense, too, I would guess. Flat sleds. Although why does it have to just be one or the other? Well, that was what I was wondering when I was reading this. It could have been a combination of methods. Yeah. Like, these guys are sled masters, so let them do that. Right. These guys have rolled a beerkegger, too, in their day, so they can try that method. They've also theorized about wooden rollers, like logs and things. Makes sense. The only problem is timber was not a local commodity that would have been widespread enough to supply this thing, and it would have been very expensive. Well, which is another reason, because they have some super weighty timber on the interior of these pyramids. And they also have wondered about that. I think it's probably cedar from Lebanon that's. What I kept coming across, the wood that they were known to have used was from Lebanon, and it was cedar, lebanese cedar. I bet that's good stuff. Yeah, I bet it was expensive back in the day. So when it comes to actually building the pyramid itself, you've managed to get all the rocks here. You know what? We'll take a break and we will talk a little bit about some of the competing theories right after this, okay? All right. You got all your rocks, what's it called? The Vizier on site, who, by the way, Khufu's Vizier was his brother. Oh, yeah. And if you were a visitor, like, you were pretty well respected, you got your own little step pyramid tomb yourself. Sure. Yeah. So let's say you're that person. You got your little hard head on, you've got all these rocks. What are the theories they use like a pulley, they use a crane. Well, there are a lot of competing theories, and they do involve cranes, they involve ramps, and none of them have been proven. So let's talk about the ramp. One man, they figured out that with a ramp you can't have when you're dealing with two and a half ton stones. And this is from how to Build a Pyramid, which is from, I think, a 2007 article in Archaeology magazine. Yeah, Bob Breyer is a really good article. It is. It's a great article. But he points out that you really can't have a grade of more than about 8%. So if you're using a straight ramp leading up to the pyramid site, as this thing gets taller and taller, and you eventually hit 146 meters to maintain just an 8% slope, you would have to have a mile long ramp at that point. Yeah. And they said that's not very likely because that would have been just as big of an undertaking as building a pyramid. Yeah, it would have taken about as long to build. And the timber, like you mentioned, a lot of timber, which they didn't have tons of, and they would have built it up over time because you can't just have 146 meters ramp to start off with and then drop the blocks in place below. You would just slowly build up the ramp, but eventually it would just become too unwieldy to have a mile long ramp. Yeah. We're not the first people to question this. I mean, thousands of years ago, historians were trying to figure it out as well. Herodotus in 450 BC said that they use machines, but no one really knows what he meant by machines. Thanks a lot, buddy. It could be a crane. And then 300 years after that, deodorous of Sicily said the construction was affected by mounds, which would be ramps. So that's why these are the two longest standing competing theories. The problem is these Greeks came along thousands of years after the pyramids had already been built. It's not like they witnessed the construction. They were surviving as well. Yeah. So with herodotus or herodotus? You know, I don't know. I've seen his name imprint so many times, but I don't think I've ever heard it. I'd say Herodot. It sounds good. Let's say that his idea of these machines that have been taken to mean cranes. We know that the Egyptians were familiar with cranes and used cranes, and that you could use cranes to build a substantial portion of the pyramids. Yes. The problem is you got closer and closer to the top. The ledge you are dealing with is say, about 18 inches. And you can't support a crane like that. No. So they thought potentially that if they did use cranes, they use series of small cranes that would just kind of hand off like basically a bucket brigade of cranes handing off one rock after the other. They were like levers and they use these they were called shadufs, and if you look up shadowf and image it, they would use it to get water out of the river and stuff. And it's basically like just a lever that someone would pull on one end, or it will be weighted and dip down into the water and then pull up a bunch of stuff with a bucket, I guess. A bunch of good Nile river water. Yes. So, like you said, that theory is not very well accepted these days. The crane. Yeah. Not for completion, at least. Right. And again, why just use one method. If something makes this part faster and then you have to switch to this other part faster. Clearly these people had the smarts to pull off this incredible feat of engineering. So I would think that they wouldn't have tunnel vision and that they would probably be willing to use different techniques. So it's possible that the cranes were used to build the base. They'd have pyramid vision. Right. So with the ramp, the big long ramp is probably out. They had another theory that well, maybe it was like a ramp that just wound up and around the pyramid. Like a mountain road is cut into the side of a mountain. Exactly. That sort of makes sense too. It does. The big problem with that is that the amount outside of the pyramid covers up the corners as you're building it. And as you're building it, you really need to be able to measure the corners pretty frequently, because if you don't, then those corners may not come together at a point at top. And Snifferu is going to be very mad. Right. So that one to me is probably the least likely the external ramps that enclose the site. Agreed. And maybe I'm a bandwagoniere, but I just read this article that you sent and so I'm going with Jeanpierre Houdin's theory that there were ramps, but there were an external ramp that didn't need to be that long. And then once they got to the point where the grade was too much. They used that ramp, cannibalized it? And then had an interior ramp to finish it off. Right. So the thing about an interior ramp is that you would be able to leave the exterior corners exposed. You'd be able to build inside, you'd be able to keep it at 8% grade top. And you wouldn't have to build this huge, massive public work that was as big as the pyramid itself, like 146 meters, mile long ramp. It would explain how you would build the whole thing without cranes because you're just getting closer and closer and closer to the inside the interior of it as you're building up. Right, yeah. The only problem is, Chuck, is if there's an interior ramp, how would you possibly remove that? You wouldn't. It would be enclosed in the site. Exactly. Obviously, this has been debunked, right? Well, no, it hasn't. He believes, and others have gotten on board, that there is still an interior ramp in there. What? But that was my question. Have they not explored enough of this to find this thing? No. Okay. And actually there was a 1986 survey by think of French team, and they found some anomaly that they couldn't explain. So they just ignored it, basically. And it wasn't until 2000 that Jean Pierre Hudan's father, Henri, who Dan, who is an engineer himself, just happened to be chatting with one of these guys from the 1986 survey. And the guy said, like, there's this anomaly. And he described it to him. And basically what he described, as far as the Udans are concerned is this internal ramp. Yes. They're like, what is it? It's anomaly. It's like a big, well worn ramp. Right. Seven deg slope, who cares? But supposedly the way that they first discovered this was that a fox popped out of an undiscovered crevice or previously undiscovered crevice toward the top of the pyramid or halfway up. And they're like, how did this desert fox get up there? Probably did not climb all this way up. They think he probably went into another undiscovered hole toward the bottom and then use the ramp and came out the top. And that is further evidence that there's a ramp in there. Yes, there is another little piece of evidence that they point to. There was a notch, a corner notch from the ramp used for turning the blocks. And it is exactly where two thirds of the way up on the northeast corner right. Where Udin predicted there would be one. If you were to use this kind of ramp, he's like, there should be a notch right there. And there was a notch. Yeah. I think we're the inside. Right? Yeah. Okay. Pretty neat. And then finally they used something called microgravity. I don't even understand how it works to you. It's a surveying method. It's magic. Right. And basically what it does is it enables them to measure density. Yeah. So, like, if you're measuring a part of the pyramid and it's just solid rock. It's going to be very dense. If you find a part of the pyramid that's kind of this open tunnel, like a ramp, it's going to be less tense. I think that's from that 1986 survey where they turned up the anomaly that they ignored. Oh, man. Using that okay, got you. That's the impression I have. Yeah. One other thing that was a very long standing myth, thanks to our friends the Greeks, who just made stuff up, apparently 2000 years after the fact, was that it took about 100,000 slaves to build the pyramids at Giza. Yeah. Mistreated slaves forced into labor and it took 100,000 of them. Probably not true. No. Supposedly, thanks to Harvard archaeologist Mark Laner, he conducted a 2002 survey and he found evidence to quite the contrary. Yeah. And then later on in 2010, just a few years ago, they found tombs of workers discovered and they basically said the way that they were buried and entombed, like slaves would never have been honored in this way. Right. Plus there's lots of evidence they're really well fed. Yeah. They said that 21 cows and 23 sheep per day was what these people were eating and a lot of fish, a lot of bread. They found evidence of basically industrial scale bakeries to bake bread for the workers. Oh, really? And there was evidence of basically permanent occupation there that said that there were probably between 2004 thousand workers on hand at any time, but that may be 30,000 total over the 20 years constructed the pyramid. Yes, I saw that where they had worked out somewhere between ten and 30,000 that worked in three month shifts. And they said while they weren't slaves, they said it was tough stuff, like there was evidence of arthritis and bad backs and all the things inherent in pyramid building. So it wasn't like it was easy going. But it makes sense that if you want these things build, you have to have a strong workforce, which means you have to take care of them and feed them. Right. Pay them, pay them, pay them fish. Pay me. Yeah, that's what they said at the end of every shift. That's right. Nothing else? No. Man, that's Egyptian pyramids. What's? Neat. Yeah. If you want to know more about pyramids, type that word and search bar@houseteporkworks.com. And since I said search bar is time for listener mate, I'm going to call this Australian radio show just talking about did you see this? No. So there's a show, apparently the biggest radio show in Sydney called the Kyle and Jackie Osho. Okay. Did you see this or hear it? No, I flew through Sydney once for like 10 minutes, but I didn't have a chance to listen to the radio. Did you see the email? No, I didn't. Okay, that's the second time you made me admit that. Sorry. Hey guys, I've been listening to you for years and I adore you. Both. I also listened to the Kyle and Jackie Ocho, which is the biggest radio show in Sydney. That was a good Australian. Thanks. I love them, too. I have to say, though, I'm quite disappointed in them because the female cohost, Jackie, found out about your podcast and took the piss on the air. I think that's Australian for gave us a hard time. Gave us the business. Gave us the business, and then proceeded to share the information you gave in a podcast. If you want to hear it, it's from the June 18 episode, and it is a podcast as well. About 12 minutes in. It's actually about 9 minutes in, and they talked about us for about 6 minutes. What did they say? Well, I hope Jackie O was listening. You seem awesome, Jackie. Oh, because she sort of made fun of us, that we're ned and stuff like that and that we just ramble. But you could tell she was getting in the show because she even said, I'm starting to get addicted, and she starts reciting facts from the show. It's too late for you, Jackie. Oh, this Kyle guy is the equivalent of one of our morning radio show hosts here in the States. Does he have, like, one of those bike horns that he squeaks a lot? He might as well. He's, like, asking about the show, and she's like, well, how Keller works. He's like how Keller works. Like, what do you mean? He said pencils yellow. I want to buy a yellow pencil. Podcast over. I was like, clearly, this guy is not on our team. Well, he's not on our team, Chuck. Okay. I don't want to insult the guy, but he insulted us. He certainly didn't seem to get it. There could be more to color than as a yellow pencil, right? That was a pretty good oh, man. What was the band manager from Fly the Concord's name? Mary. Yeah. That's a good Murray show. Kyle equals Murray. So Kyle just doesn't get it. He said it sounded awful. They played a bit of it and talked about it a lot. I don't remember licensing that to them. Well, and at the end, she basically said, what I'll do is keep listening. And then what they say in 45 minutes, I can just break down for you guys in three or 4 minutes of bullet points. Okay. I'm pretty sure that Kyle and Jackie started an international flame war with us. So to continue the email, yes. They clearly don't get it, guys. So let me apologize on behalf of your other Aussie fans. You guys have added so much to the quality of my life, and I credit you both for getting me through periods of intense anxiety where I could not function without having you both in my head, distracting me from my own thoughts. I can guarantee you Kyle has never been told that. No, I still adore you now that I'm better and can safely press pause, sometimes without even hyperventilating. Thank you for all you do. Please never stop doing it. And that is Laura. Thank you, Laura. And she said, PS. I went on a date with a guy last week who looked exactly like Chuck, and I have to admit that is the main reason I agreed to go. Did he sound like Chuck? Wink, wink, three X's. Jeez. Is that hugs or kisses? That is up for debate. But I say X's are kisses and O's are hugs. Yeah. I asked her how the date went. She was like, Well, I'm not going on a date. Number two. I got you. So I was like, well, they can't all be me. We had a good laugh. All be Chuck. We need a T shirt that says that. Yeah, hats off to you, Jackie O, because you seem to get it. Clearly, milady. Oh, wait, Jackie O, I thought you were talking about no, Laura. Laura definitely gets it. Right? Jackie O seems to get it. She's starting. Kyle does not get it. I don't think Kyle ever will, man. And I'm okay with that. Me too. If you want to tell us about how somebody in your locality is talking smack about us or not getting us or whatever, or you just want to say hi, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit 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 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 Freedom Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
c38490f6-5460-11e8-b38c-5b5549c577e4 | SYSK Selects: How Sleepwalking Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-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 classic 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 classic episode, Josh and Chuck investigate how sleepwalking, or somnambulism, works. | Sat, 24 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=236, tm_isdst=0) | 25812411 | 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, 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. Good morning, everyone. I hope you had a restful Friday night sleep so you can listen to your Saturday select episode on sleepwalking. I myself was a bit of a sleepwalker when I was younger, and I talk about it in this very episode from August 24, 2010. 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 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 Weymouth, Massachusetts. Although in Massachusetts, they probably pronounce it in some radically different way than it would be spelled Weemouth Walmouth or Worcester or something weird like that. There is a woman named Maria Anne 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 Toreaux, 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. And 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 had 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 others find it difficult to wake you when you sleep walking. You can't remember what happened afterward. You're confused when you wake up. You aren't suffering from dementia or anything else physical. That's a big one. And it impairs your social life or work life or your life. And that's for straight up sleepwalking. Yeah, there are sleepwalking can be a symptom of things like dementia or Parkinson's or something like that. But that's kind of significant. I 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 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's 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 asleepwalker? You've heard warnings against that kind of thing, I think, on everything from The Brady Bunch to Hawaii, let's say. Okay, myth. 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 to somebody lying 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 are going to have a heart attack and die if they're awake from sleepwalking. No, but you could arouse their startled 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 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 a 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. So 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. You're ten times more likely if you have a family member who is sleepwalk to be a sleepwalker yourself. So is it slept walked or sleepwalked no, slept walk. Sure. That sounds good to me. We'll just call it SW, past tense, more often than it's found in kids. Obviously, it's something you usually outgrow more often. Identical twins, which I thought was pretty interesting. Yeah, well, gene expression at all. And I think they said adults. 2.5% to 4% of adults sleepwalk, and they're almost always adults who sleepwalk as children. Right. 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 had 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 walked. 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 or not dead, if you've got a very sleepy brain and a very wired body, you could potentially get triggered, I 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 sleep deprived, 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 still 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 tapers off after puberty. Yes. Have you ever done something, say, driving or walking or doing anything where you realized you got somewhere and you hadn't been paying attention? It wasn't like you were blacked out or you're drunk or impaired or anything, but you were just distracted or doing something else? Daydreaming? Absolutely. So I would imagine 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. Right. 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. Right? Like the insanity plea. No, but I think that you could probably find the same state witness or defense witness in the acquittals 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. 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. Calalgari. Or again, the Brady Bunch. Who was that? I don't remember. I just remember there was a sleepwalking episode. I could be making it up. You talked about injury, and I saw a study in England that 11% of people that responded sleepwalker said they have been injured. And it's usually like bruising or cuts. But I think 11% of that 11% actually broke bones. Well, which is not a happy way to wake up. I wouldn't say it's not. Chuck, sleepwalking is not the only parasomnia. Remember we called it parasomnia? Yeah, it's a sleep disorder. There are other parasomnias. And the first that I think we should talk about is called Somnambulistic sexual Behavior sleeping 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 the Spanish abbreviation. Perhaps it's some nebulistic behavior. Sex youow yeah. So sleep sex or Sex somnia 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, like cigarettes and raw meat. I think we've talked about it before, it seems like. Yeah, we've 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 and like, one in 1000 people and they don't know why. But I also found another stat that said 1% of people have sleep eating disorders anyway, so I can't, you know well, there are 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 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? Yes. 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 off putting to see that. That 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 zolpidem, like you said. And then also this week, very sadly, a guy fell. He basically walked off of his third storey 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. That's more than a bruise, my friend. And if you like connecting podcasts, there was a guy in England in Hartle Pool, right on Holy Island at the Crown and Anchor on Holy Island off the North Ammberland coast. He woke up in quicksand. Actually. He drank too much, but then he sleepwalked. He SW past, 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 or listening 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 mistakes. 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. Totally. I've said that before too. 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 four 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 he went 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 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. And I used to 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 and 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? Oh, yeah. I do too. So does Emily. I think a lot of people sleep talk. That's no big deal. What do you say in your sleep? Yumi 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 of it. 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, too 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 is 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 a slow delta wave that you couldn't possibly be dreaming in, so 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 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. Right, 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@house.com. And I said I wasn't going to use handy anymore either way. We've arrived at listener mail. 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 first hand. 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 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, though, when my grandfather decided that come winter or the grandmother said, we got to bring him inside this winter, and Granddad says, no, we're not bringing them inside. So they went to the compost pile. That's what the kid was told, and her glaucoma got much worse. Yeah, 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@howstepworks.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. 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." | |
43a8e62e-53a3-11e8-bdec-3b8bbede3307 | How Ultrasound Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ultrasound-works | Sure you know all about ultrasound. You can see pictures of little babies right there cozy in the womb just by waving a magic plastic stick over the mom’s tummy. And magic is basically right. Believe us. | Sure you know all about ultrasound. You can see pictures of little babies right there cozy in the womb just by waving a magic plastic stick over the mom’s tummy. And magic is basically right. Believe us. | Tue, 23 Jun 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=175, tm_isdst=0) | 46624672 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck, your friends. And we are here to tell you about our upcoming book that's coming out this fall. The first ever Stuff You Should Know book. Chuck that's right. What's the cool, super cool title we came up with? It's stuff you should know. 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 just 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 preorder the book right now, everywhere. You get books. And you will eventually get a special gift for preordering, which we're working on right now. That's right. So check it out soon, coming this fall. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there flying solo, batching it up to stag party up in this piece. Wow. And this is stuff you should know. Do you remember the Happy Days where they had a stag party? Ritchie and Patsy and Ralph Malph went to a stag party with, I think Richie's older brother, who I believe is named Chuck. I think his name was Chuck, but I don't remember what happened. I sort of remember that episode. I think they just got a little freaked out, a little titillated aroused and then freaked out, I think. Sounds like what would have happened. Did Fonzie fix a jukebox by hitting with his fist? I think that even may have been prejudbox Fonzie. I don't even know that he was wearing a leather coat at the time. He may have just been wearing that weird gray jacket that he wore at first. Yeah, like the mechanics jacket. And that would make sense because I think Chuck was only in the early days of the Happy Days, the happiest days. Right. But then, remember, they killed him off pretty graphically. He suffered from Dysentery for basically three straight episodes. That's all they focused on. And then he finally just died. And they said, man, this is called happy days. I think we need to just get rid of them. Yeah, I think they changed their showrunner after that. Yeah. So we're talking about ultrasound right now. And if you had Dysentery, I'm not entirely convinced that ultrasound would help, but let's say you had a kidney stone instead. Friend ultrasound would help with that kind of thing. Yeah, they could sniff out of kidney stone. Yeah, they can, as a matter of fact. What's funny is they do everything but sniff. They use sound and they use vision. I use the wrong they don't sniff or taste. Oh, boy. That was great. It should be good. So ultrasound, everybody knows what ultrasound is. Just about everybody seeing an ultrasound picture. You see little babies, like in the womb developing and they're getting all cute and everything, or else you see them really early on and they're not at all cute. But either way, I think everybody's pretty familiar with ultrasound. And I was too, but I still learned quite a bit from this incredibly outdated article by Craig Freudenrich, PhD. Yeah, and you're speaking specifically of what's known as a sonogram, when a device we're going to talk about this in more detail, but a device called a transducer probe is either put on you or in you, depending on what preferably on you, depending on what they're after or how close they need to get. Sure, yeah, absolutely. And then what? Well, I can speak from experience. One of the best things in the world is when you see that first little picture of baby and heart beating. Oh, bet. And then the worst moment is when you go in there and get one and that heart isn't beating. Yeah. And it's an unnerving moment when you go in there for that stuff. And like I said, it feels both great and terrible and I've experienced all yeah, but the thing is about ultrasound truck, most people think that's what it's used for. It's just check on babies, but it's used for a whole bunch of other stuff as well, which we'll talk about. And they're starting to find even more cutting edge techniques for it too. So it's actually pretty interesting stuff. And the whole thing magically is centered on crystals that are actually hidden in the incredibly greatly named transducer probe. And they actually, in a way, squeeze these crystals. And when you squeeze crystals, especially ones that have in a regular shape, they do something amazing. They produce energy vibrations, in this case. And so by squeezing the crystal, vibration of sound goes out a very high frequency sound. Ultrasound. What might sound it is ultrasound on the order of something like this article says one to 5 MHz, but I saw two to 20 is much more standard. And how many of the same part of a wavelength of sound or something like that would pass by a space appointment space, every second. So in this case, say like the crest of these wavelengths, these ultrasound wavelengths, something like 20 million of their crests would pass by one point in space in 1 second. Very high frequency, very tight, which makes them very energetic. So those are the vibrations, the sound that is produced by squeezing crystals. And you would think just squeezing crystals is pretty great, let's just give this thing a blue ribbon for being a wonderful piece of technology. But it gets even better than that. Yeah, I mean, if you're talking about the fact that there's a machine that then calculates these distances from the probe to whatever it's trying to measure and then basically can create a two and now even three dimensional picture of that. Right. It seems like magic. It does. Especially because those sound waves that propagate from the crystal being squeezed, which I like to think of as the crystals being squeezed, and it's making the sound delight, it's not like a painful sound that feels great. So those sound waves, when they travel into the body, they hit all sorts of stuff. They hit tissue, they hit liquid, they hit everything. And it's everything bone. Yeah. And the higher frequency of a wave, the more likely it is to bounce back. So a lot of that stuff bounces back, and when it bounces back, chuck, it comes right back into those crystals. And when it hits those crystals, it actually produces electricity. And then that electrical impulse is what's converted into through some sort of black magic that I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around into images. So sound gets translated into images via electrical impulses, and at the heart of it all are those crystals. Yeah. I think if you were to ask your average person if an ultrasound, like just a yes or no question, like an ultrasound, does it use actual crystals to produce an image, you would probably get laughed out of the room by nine out of ten people and say, of course it doesn't. That's some sort of weird, wicked hocusum right. That you're trying to sell me on. It's not real, but it's remarkable. I had no idea that it uses crystals. Yeah. I think this machine is actually second only to the breathalyzer machine in surprising complexity. And I presume the ultrasound machine was pretty complex, but yeah, I had no idea that they were squeezing crystals in there. Yeah. In 1942, there was a neurologist who used ultrasonic waves as a tool, as a diagnostic tool for the first time. Name carl with a K du. Sick. And he was trying to search for brain tumors through someone's skull. And I think it was not until the 1950, so about 16 years later, 58, that it was first used for a sonogram with Doctor Ian Donald. Yeah. And the great advantage of ultrasound is that you're sending sound waves, which are mechanical in nature, into the body. You're not using ionizing radiation like X rays, so you're not going to produce tumors, necessarily. You're just not being exposed to radiation energy, you're being exposed to mechanical energy. Again, just acoustic waves of sound. But what's amazing about this is that sound, those echoes from that sound that bounce off of the different barriers, or what they're called, say, like, between blood and tissue, tissue and bone, as they bounce back up and they're converted into images, you can see into the human body without using X rays and without cutting somebody open. So it was an enormous advance that I think really gets overlooked, at least by the general public, as far as medical advances go. It was huge when we figured out how to do this. Yeah. And that's why if you ever go to get a sonogram or something like this and they show you an image of your little bread love baking in the oven, and you catch yourself in your head thinking, Looks kind of cruddy to me, just put your foot in the door and slam it real quick. And make sure you don't say that out loud in front of anyone in the room. Because it is truly a little miracle machine just to get an image that looks that cruddy. Right. Especially don't say it in front of Carl Dusic. No. It would really hurt his feelings. And all of this, I mean, this stuff is remarkable because it's the same concept of just the sonar that we use in the military and the sonar that bats use. Yes. And as a matter of fact, our understanding of echo location, which is ultimately what it's based on, it's shooting out sound and then listening for the echoes and then taking the information that those echoes bring back to judge things like distance, shape, size, all this stuff. You can get a lot of information from sound if you know how to use echolocation. That's what's happening. We're squeezing crystals to make the sound, and then in turn, after they shout, they turn into ears, listening for the echoes that come back. And the echoes that come back ultimately become those white or bright or light areas on a sonogram that form, like, the shape. Those are the echoes. Yeah. And it's way better. The very first sonograms, they would get boxes of bats. They would open the lid and throw it over the pregnant belly very fast, let them fly around for a couple of minutes and then take those bats into another room and give them pads of paper and pencils instead to draw what you heard. And bats are actually pretty good at drawing. Most of them aren't surprising. Honestly. It looks about as good as the current sonogram. Yeah. So I guess you're not super impressed by the resolution. It's fine. Like I said, when you realize what's going on, it's truly a miracle. And the mean, those are kind of creepily accurate, right? They are. They have a little uncanny valley thing going on, but I'm not sure why, but they definitely do. But that's a huge advance in ultrasound because originally in ultrasound, especially if you just see the flat one that almost looks like a grainy Xray or something like that, but you're seeing something like soft tissue. That's another advantage of ultrasound. Over X ray xray typically shows much harder stuff, whereas an ultrasound can show you even, like, blood, something as non dense. Denseless, sure. What's the opposite of dent viscous loose? Lucy goosey. Yeah. Lucy goosey. Even if something is anatomically Lucy goosey as blood, the ultrasound can capture that because of the high frequency. And the other great thing about using high frequency is that or the other reason we use high frequency is the higher the frequency, the greater the resolution. And it's not a perfect analogy, but it's similar to how if you increase the magnitude of a microscope, you can see smaller and smaller stuff. It's very much similar. The higher the frequency of, say, sound in an ultrasound machine, the more finely detailed, the more resolution you can have. The problem is that those higher energy wavelengths tend to bounce back, tend to reflect very easily, lower energy travels further and further through the body. So what they figured out is you can combine these, and that's how you ultimately get 3D imaging, which we'll talk a little more about in a minute. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break, and we'll come back and talk about all the parts of this. I was about to call it the Wonder Machine, but we already have one of those. So the Miracle machine. Miracle machine is good. All right. Right after this. All right. So the Miracle machine has and they don't explain any of this stuff. They basically you go in there and they're just like, hey, this thing works. This is a bit of black magic. And just sit back and open up. And here comes the probe. Yeah. I think we should go over the list that appears in this article that was apparently written by Franz Kafka. All right. We have to okay, agreed. I have a feeling you're talking about the final few things about what happens during an ultrasound examination. Oh, that part. Yeah, sure. Okay. All right. So you got your transducer probe, which we already talked about a little bit, and that is the thing that the eyes and the ears that sends and receives those waves. And like we said, it can go. If you see this in a movie, then you're likely seeing the kind that they put on your belly. Right. Because you're far along, and they want to see, like, that little baby in the body parts and everything that is later on in a pregnancy. At first, they use the one that goes into the vagina with a condom strapped on the end of it. Not strapped, but rolled down. Sure. It makes perfect sense. Yeah. You got to put some sort of protective covering over it. Okay. And what better than a condom to fit over something that's sort of shaped like a penis? Got you. And then they lube that thing up, and then up it goes. And then that's how you check on things in the earlier parts of the pregnancy. I would hope that they would have these much smaller well, they don't need to use the magnet or anything. Right. But even still, the condom fits very loosely, too. I should okay. That's what I was after. Yeah. I'm looking around the room that you're not even in to try and compare it to something but what does that mean? Well, I mean, we're working from home. No, you said you were looking around the room to try to compare it to something, but I'm not there. Correct. I'm looking for a, like, object in the room that you're not even sitting in. Yeah, no, I got what you're saying. I was making a difference that you're not picking up. I'm not picking up on it. Let's say it's as big as this highlighter. Sort of like a sharpie magic marker. Okay. Roughly, yeah. All right. So I think we're together on the size of the transducer probe that's used early on, it's inserted and they might use that same one. What were you going to say? How did we get through, like, breastfeeding and female puberty? And this one is the one that's tripping us up, so I know, I have no idea. I'm going to get us back on track, though. Watch this. All right. That same wand, great word for it. It might be used annually, le, orally, all sorts of different ways. They might stick it in whatever or if they can. It's not just vaginally, depending on what they want to get a closer look at. Sure. Especially if they're not just looking at a baby. Okay. Yeah. Let's move on. Let's do. All right. Up next on the list is the CPU, and that's the little computer that does all that black magic math. And it notes here in the article that contains the electrical power supply. I noticed that too. I thought that was really specific. Like, if you look at any ultrasound machine, even the most cutting edge ones that they have now look pretty much the same as what you would have seen in like the 70s. They're just a little slimmer. They're a little more user friendly. They'll probably have a touch screen. I saw that. I think it's the Siemens Sequoia has a gel warmer, which I'm sure is very appreciated by patients. Very nice. But I mean, for the most part, it's just like everything that this article from, I don't know, probably 2008 is describing. Yeah, you've got your transducer pulse controls and that's where you can change the frequency, the duration of the pulses, the amplitude. Right. Which will explain what that means in a little while to the tech. They might understand what's going on, but really it's them saying, like, get clear, focus, go deeper. 3d mode, that kind of thing. But to the computer it's like, no, we're messing with the amount of electricity that's coming and going through the crystals. Correct. Okay. Alright. You got your display that speaks for itself. Sure. Little monitor. It says on here. Keyboard, right? Input stata. Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny too. The next two are my favorites of this list, though. Why don't you go ahead then, take it away. I wasn't expecting that. I was taking a sip of coffee. You've got the disk storage device, which could be anything from a hard drive, floppy disk or CD. Yes. And it says that it stores the acquired images. And I actually wrote, I wish you could see this, I wrote ha ha under that part. It clearly does not have a USB drive. No, clearly not. Or any kind of SSD driver, anything like that. But then the last one, Chuck, is the printer, which I'm sure still exists, but I'm just guessing that they were describing a dot matrix printer in this one. No, the printer is there, but it's one of those little guys that you just punch the button and it spits out and then they tear it off. Yes. So, I mean, they can email you a JPEG, I'm sure, but they're also like, here, this goes on your fridge. Here's a butterfly made out of letters. Good. Take it home with them. That's right. Okay, so again, that's still basically the components of ultrasound machine. I was like, surely, surely this article is just hopelessly out of date. And it really isn't. It didn't capture some of the cutting edge stuff that's being used today. But really, ultrasound machines haven't changed that much in the last 1020, maybe 30 or so years. They've just gotten smaller, more powerful. And as computer technology has improved, so too has whatever computer you're going to find on board in ultrasound machine. But the nuts and bolts of it are still generally the same thing. And the key, though, the thing that's really changed over time and gotten better and more sophisticated and varied, is that transducer probe. Because initially yeah, for sure, if you're going to make any improvements, you want to make it to the transducer probe because it's going to have some pretty big effects. And the keyboard, maybe. So, because you do want to input data. Yes, easily. But with that transducer probe, initially, they had, say, like one crystal, and that crystal would shoot basically a static beam that was going out into your body, and it would basically just take a snapshot of whatever it came in contact with. There might not have been much adjustment to resolution, to depth, to focus, anything like that. It was just like, here, what do you expect? It's the 1950s, give me a break. You're looking into a human body using sound waves. Just be impressed with that. But then as they started to figure out how to add more and more crystals into an array an array? Yeah, you can do all sorts of different things. And now all of a sudden, your output of sound waves can be adjusted crystal by crystal, and your input can be adjusted crystal by crystal as well. So the resolution overall is just magnificently improved since they started making a raise of crystals and these transducer probes. Yeah. And you did a nice little quickie overview of how it worked, but I don't think we mentioned that it's based on a principle called the piezoelectric or pressure electricity effect. Yeah, we didn't and that's discovered by a couple of dudes in the 1880s, pierre and Jacques Curie. Any relation? I meant to look that up. Yeah. I think Pierre is Marie Curie's husband. Okay. One of the two are I'm pretty sure it was Pierre. Yes. And one of the few times the wife has overshadowed the husband's accomplishments. Yeah, but all three of them were extremely accomplished. Oh, sure. I don't want to knock the cures. No, they were kind of tough, too. They actually contributed quite a bit. How much do you want to go over this again? How much more detail do we want to throw on people? I think we basically already explained it. We just left out that it's called the pieSO electric effect, which the cures discovered. But again, ultimately, you squeeze a crystal and then it makes a yelp, and then it listens out and whatever bounces back gets converted into electricity. It's an inherent property of irregularly shaped crystals that is just astounding that that actually happens, and maybe even more astounding that humans figured out how to harness it to look inside the body. Yeah. And the two most important parts are obviously that and the CPU. And the CPU to be able to figure out and of course, just programmed to do so. It's not an emotional living thing that had a fire under its butt. Right. But the way that it figures out how to basically plot these I mean, it's kind of plotting densities is what it's doing at the end of the day, don't you think? Yeah, for sure. Based on the echoes that come back and the distance of them and how energetic the echo is. Because when a frequency of sound or wavelength hits something and it's bounced back, it transfers some of its energy. I don't want to say this because we're going to get an email from physics people, so let me just caveat it with that. But I would be very surprised if there's any situation or many situations, especially when you're talking about something as cluji as the human body, where you're going to get 100% reflection back. Right. But based on the different kinds of intensities that are received back into that crystal. Those can be measured and you can map. Like. Oh. This is actually a very solid part compared to this part. Which now you can see is the edge because it just kind of tapers off and the wavelength didn't bounce back quite as strongly because some of it missed or some of it was absorbed. Yeah. And the cool thing about all of this is it's done in real time. It's not like they're doing this and then a couple of days later, you get your photo. I mean, it's all right there in the case of a sonogram and I guess every use of it, but that's the only one I've experienced personally. Yeah, it's right there on the monitor. And you hear the little heart beating, too, so it actually records sound as well. That's neat. And this article didn't really touch on that, but that's just astounding, to me, that's the most, like, sonar. I think it's the same echo location as all the basis of this, right? Yeah. Where you're making a sound and then listening back for an echo. But in this case, we've figured out how to transfer those sounds or what comes back into images. But it would make sense that you could also just maintain it as a sound, too, right? Yeah, I would think so. I mean, that's what a hydrophone is, the underwater mics that also just listen to sound. I'm a little stumped on that one, I have to admit. Or maybe there's a tiny microphone attached. Maybe so be quiet. No, I think that's probably just a part of the programming. And maybe perhaps that is the easiest part. Perhaps so. But I really feel like we should just come totally clean and say that. Totally guessing. That was all educated guess. What you can say is also just making up stuff on the spot. Yeah. Someone can correct us and we'll read it out loud. Yeah, we'll read it out loud. We do that kind of thing. So, like we said, we've been talking about the 2D variety. I guess this was around the mid to early 2000s, because they talk about sort of the new 3D imaging. And it's been around for a while now. Right. It's basically the standard. It's 3D, although I think 2D is still very much in use. You think 2D is the standard? I think so. Okay. Or maybe it has to do with how far along as far as Sonograms go. Right. Or really what they need to do, but what they need to see. I think it probably also depends on that as well. 2d, is that standard? The one that almost looks like an Xray? It's basically a snapshot. It's kind of grainy. But that's what people think of as a standard 2D Sonogram or ultrasound picture. Yes. Then you've got 3D, which comes out as a result of the crystal arrays, right. So you can change the frequency of the pulses that are going out, so you can sense things further away with the slightly lower frequency ones and sense things closer with the higher frequency ones. And the whole thing puts these images together to create a 3D picture. Yeah. And like I said, if you've never seen a 3D picture, it ain't right. From a Sonogram. It's pretty interesting. It's remarkable that they can get this level of detail. And part of it is surely to delight parents to be. There's no doubt about it. But it's not just for that. It's not like, hey, you want to see an even cooler, creepy picture of that developing circus peanut? Because we can do that now. Yeah, it has a lot of uses. There's a lot more detail. You can really assess development of limbs and the face of the baby to be, and you can really get in there and kind of see more with your eyeballs what's going on. Well, plus, also, I mean, if you're looking for something like a tumor, it's much harder to see a tumor in two dimensions as like black and white shadows than it is to see like a three dimensional lump. So that's super helpful for 3D as well. And then there's another mode called M mode or motion mode, which I believe is basically a bunch of 2D images that are just taken in such rapid succession that they are basically act like a flipbook or a video. Right. So you can see this in basically real time or just slightly delayed real time, because I know you kind of referenced that this is all happening immediately, but the pulses that are being sent out and then returning are happening on the order of millionths of a second, over and over and over again. There's that kind of old timey single beam that's a constant wavelength that's not much in use. The new ones are just very quick pulses that are shot out many, many times in a single second. And as those things are shot out, the stuff is returning just mind bogglingly quickly to the crystals to be turned into data. Now, that's not the Doppler one, is it? No, the Doppler actually uses a steady beam, from what I read. Yeah. So the Doppler ultrasound. It's mainly used to find out. I'm sure they can use it for more than one thing. But it seems like the major uses to measure your blood flow rate and go to your heart. They can go to your major arteries and they can basically see if you've got any kind of blood flow problems because it's measuring a moving thing going through your body. Yeah, and it actually looks like a weather map where they use Doppler radar. I mean, most people see Doppler radar used for things like tornado or something like that to show different wind speeds. So, like, the different flow speeds of the blood flow will be different colors, and they can read that and be like, oh, your blood is flowing nicely, right. You got no problems. Right, Doppler? So I feel like we should take another break, huh? Oh, my gosh, this is so thrilling that I think we need to catch our breath. All right. And we'll talk about some of the other things that you can do with a miracle machine right after this. You know, Chuck, it really gives me a tremendous amount of comfort, hope, goodwill, all sorts of stuff like that, that we've come up in our 12th year with another name for a machine. Like, we had Wonder Machine basically from the beginning, I think so. And here we are in year twelve and we just named another machine the Mural Machine. Yeah. So we. Talked enough, I think, about well, we're going to talk a little bit more about it, about obstetric. Oh, man, I knew I was going to do that. Obstetrics. Yeah. And when you go in there, like I said, part of it is to delight parents to be and say, Here it is. Everything's going, heartbeat is strong. Everything's happening. But they're also doing all sorts of things. They measure the size of the fetus. They use a mouse to sort of click around and measure different distances. They determine due date. They want to make sure that fetus is in the right position. They want to make sure the placenta is in the right position. They want to see how many fetuses there are in there. That's when you get the old. By the way, did not know if you knew this, but there are actually three living things inside of you right now, or eight. So growth rate, you can detect the Ectopic pregnancies this way. Yeah. That's a big one. It's a very big one. That is when the baby is implanted in the fallopian tubes instead of in the uterus, and that means it is not a viable pregnancy. Right. So life threatening for the mom. What else? Amniotic fluid. You got to make sure that there's enough cushion around that baby yeah. For the pushing. Well, yeah, actually, that's right. Eventually, yeah. And then if you want to, say, go in and take a sample of the amniotic fluid, which you can do a lot of things by sampling amniotic fluid to test. So there's a lot of reasons to go in and draw some amniotic fluid. I don't know why I'm trying to convince everybody that there are reasons to take samples of amniotic fluid. Trust me, there is. But at the same time, you can sit there and look into the womb. The womb is okay, right? I'm not, like, using some archaic and now offensive term, am I? Jeez? I don't think so. Okay. I don't think so either. If I am, please forgive me. I'm genuinely unaware of that. So school me if I'm wrong. I don't think so. Anyway, it's called a baby box these days, my friend. Right, exactly. Yeah. So if you want to keep an eye on the baby box while you're getting a sample of the amniotic fluid to make sure you're not accidentally poking the baby, the ultrasound is really effective for that, too. Can you believe they used to do that blindly? I was reading an article about using ultrasound to guide spinal tap insertions, and this article said that the authors believe that even though that you can use ultrasound for this, now that the technology is widely available, most neurosurgeons prefer to just go in blind because it's more thrilling. Seriously, this was an academic journal article that I was reading, and they just said it. So they crack open some amel nitrate, snip it, and then go in there. Yeah. Wow. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt. What else can you do? You can use this for cardiology. We talked about the blood flow, but you can also literally say, hey, is there something going on inside of your heart? Let's go look. Yeah. And especially with three D and real time stuff, it's one thing to say, okay, well, the shape of your heart looks pretty good, or the flow of your blood looks pretty good, but thanks to that M mode, so you can see it in motion, you can actually see make sure that the valves are opening and closing correctly in the right time. It's basically just peeking in real time onto the operations of your body using Em mode. It's pretty amazing stuff. It's amazing. We also said, of course, you can see kidney stones, which, by the way, I think we should do an episode on kidney stones eventually. Have you ever had one? I don't want to say because I don't want to jinx myself. Okay, so you haven't, but you fear it. Yes. That's a way to put it, for sure. Yeah. I've never had a kidney stone either, or gallstones. I've never had any stones inside me. That's good. I've heard that getting those out is quite the ride. Yes. You can also measure blood flow through the kidneys, too. You can detect prostate cancer. You can see lumps on the prostate. That's one of those instances where they'll be using the wand. Yeah. So I also said earlier on Chuck that they're getting smaller and higher resolution and more portable, and one of the places that ultrasound machines are showing to pop up more and more. And I think now it's probably just a matter of course, based on how old this article is, but in emergency rooms, they're starting to really become kind of par for the course. So, like, if somebody shows up and says they're doubled over in abdominal pain, rather than sending them to surgery or even up to radiology, they will just apply an ultrasound there and be like, oh, yeah, you've got a ruptured stomach, so we need to get that fixed pretty quickly. And they say, now I wish I would have rushed you into surgery. Right. I need a second opinion. Yeah. Ultrasounds are safe. There have been questions because anytime you're applying heat and energy near Oregon, like very close to Oregon, sometimes you got to really kind of consider this. And there have been some reports here and there of low birth weight babies if you have had frequent ultrasounds during your pregnancy, but they have basically come out and say, ultrasounds are safe, but sort of like an X ray. You don't want to come in here every other day and get one. You want to only do it when it's necessary because there is heat and apparently the formation of bubbles because of this heat, when dissolved gases come out of that solution, that's the thing. But they are safe. Yeah. I mean, we've been using them for 60 or 70 years now, and there's been plenty of chance, if that's an issue, for it to become obvious and evident. It just seems like it's very safe. I did see that this article says that there's not been any documented studies that show harm in animals, and that's not true. Actually, there are animal studies that have shown that exposure to some kinds of ultrasound, typically continuous wave, which is just a concentrated beam of energy that can actually cause thermal heating, which is not good. And then I found another study from 2017 that said some kind, especially continuous wave, but also super quickly pulsed ultrasound has shown that it can break up DNA strands. Interesting. Which is weird, because that's one of the things that people have always pointed to, is, well, this is just mechanical energy. It's not going to damage your DNA like ionizing radiation is. It's a pretty startling revelation. And they actually said in the article again, it was an academic journal article. I can't remember which one, but it said, this is going to be of a lot of interest to a bunch of different fields because we didn't know this before. Yeah, that is interesting. It is. Is it time to read the Franz Kafka Guide to Getting an Ultrasound? Yes. I also want to say, Chuck, before we do, though, again, there's basically no evidence that there is harm that comes from ultrasound exams in obstetrics, especially when it's done by a trained person. Sure. Yeah. It doesn't sound like it's anything to be worried about overall. Yeah, I didn't want to scare anybody unnecessarily. No, you shouldn't. Or people should not be. Right. And you shouldn't. Both. Yeah. All right, so Franz Kafka's guide to getting an ultrasound. Number one man, if we could get Vernon Herzog to read this list, that would just be amazing. We've got a pretty good runner up in the room. NOL does a great job. We should get Nolan here. Okay. We can double them in. Number one is to remove your clothes. Okay. Number two is the ultrasonographer drapes a cloth over any exposed areas that are not needed for the exam. All right. Okay. Check number three. We should really get Paula Thompson if we want to do this right, actually. Why? What would he do? Well, he does a great burner herzog. Okay. We should just get Berner herzog. Oh, man, he's down for whatever it seems like. What stuff should I know? The ultrasonographer applies a mineral oil based jelly to your skin. Right. It doesn't say this or to the condom on the probe. Okay. The jelly eliminates air between the probe and your skin to help pass the sound waves into your body. Yeah. And if you're lucky, they're using a Siemen Sequoia brand ultrasound machine, which has an onboard gel heater. That's right. Are they giving you money? No. Okay. I want someone that seemen's money. Hey, man, they're loaded. They're one of those companies that kind of make everything right. Yeah. What if they did hear this and reached out to us and we're like, hey, we really appreciate it. We're sending you guys each an ultrasound machine. Hey, man, it can go with my I've got a Siemens brand car charger, electric car charger. There you go. I'll bet that's something that was left off this list. You can charge a car with a decent ultrasound. Yeah. Or the very least, jump one off. Yeah. It's got jumper cable. The ultrasonographer covers the probe with a plastic cover. That's the condom he, she and I'm going to add. They pass the probe over your skin to obtain the required images. Depending on the type of exam, the probe may be inserted into you. You want to finish up here with the last few? Oh, no, you're doing great. All right. Number six, you may be asked to change positions to get a better looks at the area of interest. Okay, here's 2008 popping up again. Number seven, after the images have been acquired and measurements taken, the data is stored on a disk. You may get a hard copy of the images. They may write and sharpie what it is on the desk even. And then yeah, this is where it starts to take a kind of a dark turn. Number eight, you're given a towel to clean up. And number nine, I can't believe this is actually on the list. You get dressed. It's just like the grimmest list of procedures you've ever heard of, and they stop at nine. Number ten should have been then you go give them your credit card and pay your copay. Right. Number eleven, you walk out to the parking lot. Number twelve, walk back in because you forgot to get validated. Number 13, check your back seat and make sure there are no creeps there. All right, number 14, remove the creep that you found. Wow. Quite a lot. So we're talking about the future of ultrasound, and this article isn't really captured, so I started to look around. I found, weirdly enough, a list of cutting edge ultrasound stuff in the Daily Mail, of all places. And the list is actually terrible because it's Daily Mail article. But one thing that they did talk about was tractor beams, that they figured out that you can actually lift something as small as a bead at this point using sound waves. Like in Star Wars, you would think kind of like Star Wars, but no, not at all. It's actually levitating more than a tractor beam. Tractor beam makes it sound like you're pulling something upward towards you. This is actually raising it up away from you. But there are all sorts of applications for this, especially in water, because you can use these sounds in the different arrays and the different configurations of arrays to move something left or right. It's called steering the beam, and they actually use it for ultrasound imaging too, but you can actually move things like say, an oil slick. You could kind of basically drive it into shore, away from shore to some other place where you want to capture pretty cool applications for it. In medicine, they figured out that if you give somebody a drug, say like a chemotherapy drug, some of those chemotherapy drugs only partially cross the blood brain barrier, so they're only partially effective. The rest gets metabolized and you pee it out or whatever. So they figured out that if you give somebody a chemotherapy drug and then blast their brain with an ultrasound machine, it will push the drugs past the blood brain barrier into your brain and they'll be that much more effective. Oh, wow. I thought that was pretty cool too. There was a man who was awakened from a coma because the doctor, for some reason blasted hypothalamus with a continuous wave beam of ultrasound. But even the doctor was like, this may have been coincidence, but I don't know. Wow, man. It seems like there are all sorts of applications that are just starting to tap into yeah, I've got a couple more. Let's hear them. Ultrasound assisted liposuction basically burning up fat cells, driving it out of there. Yes. But that really kind of points out that, yes, this actually can create heat because that's what they're doing is melting fat cells using sound, which is the thing. But then they've also figured out that depending on the frequency of the sound of the sound wave, it can actually stimulate growth and function in cells. So they found that persistent wounds like ulcers and things like that, you can actually stimulate them to heal by hitting them with sound waves. Wow. Yeah, I love it. Is there anything an ultrasound machine can't do, Cha? I don't know. I do know, and I'll tell you what the answer that is and it's no. You got anything else? I got nothing else but a listener mail. Okay, well, that's it for ultrasounds. 47 minutes. That's impressive. It is. Since I said it's impressive. It's time for listener ma'am. Hi, guys. I am an eleven year old boy from the west coast. My parents introduced me to your podcast a few years ago and I became interested in podcasts and podcasting because of you. Nice. I've recently started my own podcast called A Child's Perspective of Current Events. Nice. It sounds wonderful. Yeah, it does. I'm going to check it out. I haven't had a chance to listen yet, Dacon, but he said, I would love it if you had mentioned my podcast during your listener mail section. It would really help boost my audiencemonthlylisteners. Thank you for your time. I really hope you'll consider mentioning me on your podcast. And that is from Dagan Hofeld. Nice name. And again, it's called a child's perspective of current events. I love that straightforward name. It's like stuff you should know. It says it all. It definitely is in the same wheelhouse, for sure. Yeah. But it's not derivative in any way. No, not like it. It's just in its perfect simplicity. Yeah, I love it. And I'm going to give that a listen this afternoon day again, and see how you're doing. And if you need any other advice, just let us know. But so far, you've done the smartest thing, which was to get someone on a super popular podcast to talk about your podcast. Right? Exactly. It helps. Hopefully you'll get a SYSK bump out of this. And I'm going to go listen to Dagan, so thanks for letting us know. Right? Yeah, right. If you want to go check out Dagan's podcast, go do that. It's called a child's perspective on current events. So great. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email like they're did. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show." | |
How Junk Food Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-junk-food-works | Junk food is literally that, empty calories of energy that provide little nutritional value and usually are stored as fat. Yet junk food is irresistible and for good reason - companies spend tens of millions engineering it to be that way. | Junk food is literally that, empty calories of energy that provide little nutritional value and usually are stored as fat. Yet junk food is irresistible and for good reason - companies spend tens of millions engineering it to be that way. | Tue, 26 May 2015 14:51:14 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=14, tm_min=51, tm_sec=14, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=146, tm_isdst=0) | 44951999 | 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 So. It's stuff you should know. Yes. And Chuck, we have done some stuff before that relates to this episode. Okay. Is high fructose cleanser bad for you? That's right. How McDonald's works. Yeah. How Twinkies work. Yeah. Well, that's it. I bet there's more, probably. I can't think of it right now. Are zoos good or bad for animals? Does your grandfather's diet affect you? Yeah. True. That junk food might. Yeah. So you the future grandfather listening today. You're screwing up your grandkids health right now. That's right. Go listen to our Epigenetics episode. Yeah. Junk food is ubiquitous now, and it wasn't in my grandparents day. No. They had lame diets yeah. Of whole foods and all these natural things. Well, that's something that this article, I thought was smart to point out that back in the day before junk food, it didn't mean everybody was just eating, like, hippies or something like that. They were just these wonderful wholesome spreads at every meal or something like that. They ate, like, crude, or they ate the same thing, or there were plenty of times where they were like, I would kill you for a tomato right now in the day of winter. I'm tired of eating this 40 ounce steak covered in gravy exactly. Every night. Yeah. But they did not have access to mass produced, really fundamentally unhealthy food like we do today. That's right. And that's the definition of junk food. Really? That's right. Junk food. You might have heard of, like, empty calories. That's what junk food is. It's food that has either zero or very little nutritional value, but has a lot of calories. But has a ton of calories, usually in the form of carbs, which is usually a shot of way more energy than you need. Yeah, that donut stick. It's tasty. What's a doughnut stick? Oh, there's doughnut sticks. Okay. What is it, though? Is it just like a it's exactly what it sounds like. No, it's a little Debbie device. Yeah, I know that. Okay, so it's a shot of energy device. Very rarely do you need, like, a shot of energy like that, especially when you're going to sit down in front of your computer for 3 hours straight. You don't need that. So what happens to that energy is it gets translated into fat, stored as fat and just as bad. You don't get any nutritional value from it whatsoever. It doesn't contain dietary fiber usually. No. It doesn't have any of the minerals or vitamins that your body needs to, like, mount immune responses. Nope. And even worse, as we'll talk about later, it's entirely possible that it's contributing to things like mental ill health sure. In you. Yes, mental health. Physical health. Because we're talking packaged sweet goods. We're talking soft drinks, baked goods, salty stuff, man stuff loaded with fat all the good things. All the good things. Right? When we were researching this, I was like, I want a doughnut right now. I'm going to go get a doughnut. Yeah, maybe I'll get, like, a griddle or something. Oh, goodness. I just wanted everything. I even thought, like, maybe I'll get a root beer somewhere. I don't even know where to get a root beer, but I was going to try and find one. You get a root beer or you get any other soda? Well, I guess you probably could. That's what I was going on. But I'm just saying I don't have personal experience buying root beer anywhere. I got to go. That's what this article did to me. You know what I mean? I got a guy and get you some root beer. Good stuff. Yeah, you just stick with me afterwards, all right? I'll introduce you. Thanks, man. You got to meet them first, but yeah, after that, it's all good. Yeah, it's bad stuff. So let's talk about junk food. Let's talk about the history, I guess, because it's pretty interesting. Like we were saying, before the dawn of the 19th century, people ate food mostly from stuff that they grew or harvested. It wasn't processed that much. And big changes came around when the Industrial Revolution hit. And all of a sudden, people could get cheap flour. That was the big turning point. The big turning point. Cheap flour in your home. Right. And the story of junk food is essentially the story of the industrialization of food. Yeah. Like, before we had food that was bad for you, like, caramels were introduced by the Arabs probably about 1000 years ago, somewhere around there. Chocolate has been around for a very long time. Yeah. Cookies. The dude who founded Keebler, Mr. Keebler, he had a bakery. In the early 19th century, people were making stuff that wasn't good for you, but they were making it, and it was a pain in the neck to make it. So they weren't making it all of the time. You couldn't just go anywhere and get it. That is inherently the problem with junk food today, is it's everywhere and it's cheap and it's easy to get. Yeah. And there are a lot of other factors that contributed to the rise of junk food besides the industrialization. People moved to cities and away from farms. And if you're living in the middle of New York City and 1800, you're not going to have a big farm, a lettuce farm in your backyard so long, canned lettuce that you canned the winter before. That's right. Civil War. That's what I know about canning. Well, we used to can when I was a kid. I think I told that story. Yeah. My mom used to take me to the canary and can stuff. Canary was for like really? Yeah. Wow. Where was the cannery? It was the Cab County cannery over, like off Memorial Drive. So it's just like the facilities you needed to can your own stuff. Yes. That's pretty neat. And you could show up with your green beans and your peaches, and you could can that stuff. Yeah, I've never can, but I do eat a lot of canned stuff because pickled things are very good for you. Yeah. And things in the can aren't necessarily terrible for you. No. And when you're saying cans, cans were not involved at all, I'm guessing, like, glass jars were. No, we can't silver cans. Oh, wow. Yeah. Man, that is serious stuff. Yeah, it was pretty cool. You're like a Steinbeck family or something. I just remember it was awful as a kid. Now, I would totally get into it, but back then, it was the most boring place on earth for a kid to be wrong. Tire store is the most boring place on earth for a kid to be wrong. I will say, fabric store is definitely up there. I have to say. Man, and I tweeted about this. You and I went to the fabric store the other day, and I was looking around like, what are some of you people doing in here? Oh, yeah, there were a lot of the fabrics people. Okay. A lot of people I would not have expected are into sewing, and I'm like, okay, everybody sews. The entire spectrum of humanity was represented in this fabric store. Well, that doesn't mean they sew necessarily. No, they were searching for fabrics and, like, looking at them and comparing them to other fabrics. They all sewed. Well, but that does just because you buy fabric doesn't mean you so they could upholster. Okay. That, to me, falls under sewing. It is one of the industrial arts on its own. True. But I think of upholstery as sewing to an extent, even though there's no sewing involved necessarily. And these people better not have been upholstering anything with their pink velour leopard fabric that they bought. Yeah. Fabric stores are pretty amazing when you go in. Like, the stuff that you can tell has been sitting on the shelf since, like, 1975. Yeah. My mom used to take me to the fabric store, so I have it. I didn't like it either, but it wasn't like a tire store to me. Like getting tires put on your car. Yeah. Because not only is there nothing for you to do as a kid except to run your hand over the little prickly things on the new tire. Sure. The smell in there just made it just even worse. And unless you're into reading, like, Car and Driver magazine, then you're out of luck drinking bad coffee. That's where you started drinking coffee when you're, like, just to kill the boredom. So wait, are we agreed that the tire store is the worst of all? Sure. Really? For me, it was a fabric store, but I'm sure I have bad memories of the tire store in the cannery. Oh, man, that was a good one. It was about seven minutes. Yeah. Sidetrackage. All right. Back to the American Civil War. Oh, yeah. Another reason that fast food and junk food became and those are two different things we should point out. Fast food isn't always junk food. No. Anybody who's been to a Chipotle can tell you that. Yeah. Went yesterday. Nice. They're trying to do it right. Great stuff. Which they're not McDonald's associate anymore. You know that, right? No. I don't understand why McDonald's divested. Because that stock went through the roof, if I'm not mistaken. Chipotle wanted the separation. I would guess McDonald's would be like, PS. We own tons of shares of you. Yeah. I'm not sure how that went down. So it's probably a good thing, though. Yeah. For Chipotle. And McDonald's is in big trouble. Yeah. I would be very surprised if there's not McDonald's 50 years from now. No, I don't think that. But they just had their big quarterly Powell, and they're all pretty scared. No, I know. Right now, their money is way down. Their profits are way down. Right. Because, like, five guys and all these other burger chains definitely eating into their market share. The problem is, McDonald's is chasing after everything right now rather than saying, this is what we do. This is why people come to McDonald's. Yeah. If I go to McDonald's, it's because I'm hungover and I want a quarter pound. Exactly. I don't want a McFresh wrap. Right. And you don't even want something at the level of five guys like, you want down in dirty McDonald's. That familiar taste. And the sooner McDonald's realizes that that's what people want from McDonald's and just says, here you go. If you want it, come get it. Fantastic. Have you seen the artisan grilled chicken? That's what I'm saying. What is that? That's not okay. That's not McDonald's. Well, plus, what is disturbing about it is you'll see the commercial say now it's a better quality chicken, blah, blah, blah, and it's basically admitting right. Other chickens look like mutants. Yeah. Like, what were you giving us before? Or still in the other menu items? American Civil War. Right. I forgot. We're there again. In the Civil War, troops started eating rations for the first time. Little easy to eat canned process garbage. Basically, they're like, this is really good. Yeah. They got hooked on it, and when they came back, they wanted the same familiar taste, and that's sort of how fast food grew. Food vendors started parking their carts outside of factories and stuff, and that was sort of like the first fast food chain. Well, not just that. That's where diners came from. Those food carts that were parked outside for people coming off of, like, the night shift or whatever. When all the restaurants were closed, they eventually took the wheels off and added, like, seating inside. And that's where the diners originally came from. Yes. And, of course, that all came about because of the suburban sprawl and the birth of the automobile. Right. Let's talk about a few of these. You found this great article on what was it called? New York Times. Yeah. What was the article called? I don't remember what it was called. Let us now praise the great Men of junk Food. Yes, it was a great one. And so they listed some of the first junk food in the United States, and the first snacky junk food they credit as being Cracker Jacks, introduced at the World's Fair in 1893 by the brothers Frederick and Louis, or Lewis Rukheim. And Cracker Jacks is delicious. It's still around today. Right. And the thing with Cracker Jacks is, again, there was recipes like that in existence prior to Cracker Jacks. Right, sure. Same with caramel, same with chocolate. People made this stuff. But what the Rockham brothers did was they took it, they figured out a way to produce it on a larger scale, sell it. And this is one of the hallmarks of junk food. They figured out a way to market it effectively. That little prize. That's exactly right. That basically established the rulebook for junk food from then until now. Yeah. The Tootsie Roll is another good example. In there was candy before that, but this is the first one to be individually wrapped that didn't come in a packet of six or eight. Right. So you could take a penny, little shiny copper penny, and you could get a touchy roll. Right. And you didn't have to pick the hair off of it first because it was wrapped individually. That's right. I like this story. An eleven year old named Frank Eperson, left on a cold night in San Francisco, left his powdered soda drink with a stirring stick in the cup, came out the next day and it was frozen and he ate it. He said this is amazing. I'm going to wait 20 years and then patent this. And not quite 20 years. About 18 years later, he basically applied for a patent and called them Epsicles. Everybody's like you episode 80 years. And his children said, hey, Pop, why don't you call them Popsicles? And so the Popsicle was born. Yeah. And his children never saw penny of that money, another junk food, did they not? Okay. Do you know much about potato chips? No. So we could sit here for hours and hours and do this because every junk food has a great origin story. Sure. There's a book that did this for us. It's called the Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food. And it's on academia.edu, which is basically apparently they upload books onto this thing, and you can read them. Neat. Yeah. So potato chips, the legend goes that it was invented in the 1850s in Saratoga, New York, by a guy, a chef named George Crew, I believe. And that's not true. They've been around for at least 30 years before that. But that's a popular story. And around the 1850s, 1870s, 1880s, people started manufacturing them on mass, but they were delivered in barrels. And then the customers would come and be like, I brought my own brown paper bag, shovel some potato chips into this, and I'll go home and warm them up, and they'll be stale. And so part of the mass commercialization of this junk food was to figure out how to package it and preserve it so that they didn't go stale. And people didn't have to bring their own bag from home to go buy potato chips. They could just buy the bag and take it home. Wow. And it took until the 1930s to figure that out. How long was that? The 1880s is when I really started to sell them. It took, like, 50 years to get them packaged correctly. Interesting. Soda drinks, soft drinks, soda pop, pop, Coke, depending on where you're from, you're going to call it something different. Right. That goes back to 17th century Europe, when they had carbonated water mixed with lemon juice and honey. And many years later, in 1976, 711, introduced the world to the Big Gulp, which was 32oz of nasty stuff. Right. And then in 1988, they said, how about doubling down on that? And they created the double Big Gulp. And then Mayor Bloomberg was like, no, they got rid of those. Didn't they try to? Yeah, they definitely tried to. I don't know if it went through or not in New York City. Yeah. Emily still drinks the Diet Coke Big Gulp every day, and I'm just like, you just can't do that to yourself. Yeah. There's got to be something really wrong with it. There has to be. This is too much science. Like, in one concentrated form. Yes. But what's funny is Coke, Pepsi, Hires, Rupeer, Dr. Pepper they all started out as elixirs and tonics that were sold at the pharmacy. That's right. That's where you got those originally. And then they became one of the most ubiquitous unhealthy drinks on the planet. All right, so we talked a lot about, like you said we could go on all day talking about the history of different junk foods. You got one more? I got one more. Okay. The world's first combination candy bar. There were chocolate bars before us. The first candy bar. Clark bar. Really? Yeah. Which is it's like a butterfinger, but better. Is it better because it was first. Right. And it's Clark. You got any more? I've got more, but I'll stop. Tarts used to be called the fruit scone. They used to be called eptarts. This is very important, actually. Chuck all right. This is possibly the mind blow of the podcast, and this is a mind blowing episode so far. Oreos was the knock off. Hydrox was the original. No way. Way. How did they get market share? Oreo? Yeah. Just by tasting way, way better, I guess. Interesting. Yeah. So HydraX is, like, made fun of. Like, I got hydrox when I was a kid, because they're a little cheaper, I think. Yeah, but they were the original ones, and Hershey Oreos was the rival, the competitor. Knockoff of hydrox. I wish I would have known that, although I'm not sure it would have worked in elementary school if people were like, you can't afford Oreos. I'm like, this was the original. I'll have you know, it's disgusting, but it came first, and I can't even get the cookie apart without it breaking like the Oreo. Poor kid. All right, so after this break, we're going to come back and talk a little bit about the science of junk food. Google cluster first combination candy pop tarts are the knockoff. They were originally created to overcome the rival country square stop. I love how you said it quieter, like maybe Chuck won't notice. Right. Sitting right across from me, just between you and me listening. Although the bubblegum one was pretty cool. The guy invented yes, he invented gum before. Bubblegum was just chewing gum. Double bubble is what he came up with. Right? Was it double bubble was the first one? I think so. It was in that one New York Times article. Yes, it was double bubble. Yes. And he said that he died with a smile on his face because he brought so much joy to children all over the world. He didn't care about their dental habits. All right, so the science of junk food is actually pretty interesting because there's nothing willy nilly about it. No, there's a lot of money at stake. So companies throw a lot of dough into food laboratories, finding what they refer to as that sweet spot for the bliss point. Yeah, the bliss point. Again. That article is really great. From New York Times. That was a different one. That one is called the extraordinary science of addictive junk food. Oh, really? Yeah, it's very long, very good. Yeah, but that blitz point or the sweet spot is what they're after. And what you're really talking about is mouthfeel, which we've talked about and I think taste or something else more recently than that, I think it has to do with bars. Remember gum Arabic gave a different mouthfeel than just regular simple syrup. Yeah, that's right, mouthfeel. So cheetos is one of the more famous junk foods of all time because it's sort of a wonder of science in that it preys upon something called vanishing caloric density. Which basically means you put a cheetah or a cheese puff or a cheese doodle in your mouth and you're going to chew it a couple of times and it's just going to sort of dissolve. And your brain doesn't really register that it's even eating calories. That is why you eat an entire bag of cheetos. Yeah, because we've evolved to see with our tongues or to measure with our tongues roughly the caloric density of a food. Yeah, because when tuktuk was running around, they needed to eat efficiently, which means eating as many calories as they could with as little stuff going in their mouth as possible. Exactly. Right. So the tongue would learn to detect fat. Fat is extremely dense calorically. So after you eat a certain amount of fat, you get kind of this nasty feel in your mouth. Your mouth feel. It's kind of greasy, right? And you suddenly realize that you can't eat another bite of this fatty slab of pork fat. Yeah, it is good, but imagine eating a big toilet seat size slab of it. You would not, right? You get sick from it. And the reason why is because your brain becomes satiated. So what these food scientists figured out is that if they can make something basically melt like a cheeto, it tricks your tongue into missing the fact that it's a really fatty food. And like you said, you can eat a whole bag of it thanks to that vanishing caloric density. Well, another thing they do is like, let's say you're eating a cheeseburger from a fast food chain and that has that same fatty feel, but they realize if you serve the soda with that, it balances things out to where you don't have that greasy mouth feel any longer. Exactly. So that's one reason why they sell sodas at fast food chains. That's what a value meal comes from. It's not just like, yes, we want to make sure you get your money's worth. No, they want to make sure that you're going to say, I could use another cheeseburger, I'm back, I want another cheeseburger, please. And they say, certainly, we will happily sell you one of those. See, I don't drink soda, so when I eat fast food, what do you drink? Water. Huh. Is that strange? No, like, what else would I drink if not a soda? Well, that's it. Yes, that's your choice. Yeah, soda or nothing. You're not even allowed to drink water. You have to sit there and eat it dry. Well, although my sister in law drinks milk with most meals, I grew up like that. Like milk and pizza even. Yeah, milk and everything. Yeah, not me. I've got a really disgusting milk and broccoli story that I'm not going to tell, but it is. Rody, come on. You really want to hear it? Yeah, sure. Okay, well, then, warning for those of you with a weak stomach, you really don't want to hear this or if you're, I would say eating broccoli or drinking milk anytime soon, probably avoid it. Okay, so I hate broccoli, but I used to really hate broccoli. And when I was a kid, you just couldn't leave the table until you were done eating your vegetable. That'll trick. And we drank milk with every meal. So I would eat the broccoli where I would take a bite and it would touch my tongue for a millisecond, and I wash it down with like half a thing of milk. Right. You're basically swallowing broccoli whole, right? Yeah. But I'm taking, like, a half a cup of milk for each swallow, so I kept having to drink more and more milk. I think I see where this is headed. Well, one night, my mom was working a shift at the Er, and my dad was in charge of feeding me dinner. So that was fun. And I got about halfway through my broccoli and then drank God knows how much milk with it when I took one more bite, and all of it just came right back up on my plate. Oh, man. And without looking, my dad was, like, looking up at the ceiling while he grabbed my plate. I was like, okay, I think that's enough for you, and cleared the plate. And I thought I won. Your dad cleared a plate of vomited up food without knowing it? No, without purposely not looking at it. Okay. He's like, okay, that's enough. Well, that was nice of them. It was. I didn't have to finish my broth. I thought he was going to say, like, eat it again. Right. He rubbed my face in it. My mom used to set the old oven timer. Remember that trick? We didn't have time. You're not getting up. It doesn't matter what time it is. You can't get up and go to bed or watch TV or anything. We had like, you got ten minutes to finish those green beans. And I did the alternative way. More sense. I was like, I'm drawn I'm just going to the bathroom. It didn't work? No. I thought I was smart. All right, so junk food is not healthy for you. Oh, yeah, we know that. Tire stores. The American Civil War. Here are things that can happen. If you eat too much junk food, you're going to get obese, which means you're going to have an increased risk of heart disease. You may get type two diabetes, and like you said, with the mental side, you may become depressed, because addiction, it has all the characteristics of just, like, a drug addiction and alcohol addiction. Right. You binge on it, you withdraw from it, you get an increased tolerance from it. And I have the impression that they haven't figured out that there really is a certain amount of addiction you can get from eating junk food. Sure. And that it's basically getting that pop, that blood sugar high rush that you're dropped off from very quickly and then having to chase after it again. Right. Chasing it. Chasing the dragon or something like that, I guess, is what it's called. And so you can display the signs of addiction from junk food as well. Much more closely linked is the connection between junk food and type two diabetes. Yeah. Americans consume about 22 teaspoons of sugar a day. So crazy. On average, a lot of this stuff comes from high fructose corn syrup, candy, junk food, soft drinks. And how that works is your body's going to break down those carbohydrates, and your blood sugar is going to spike, which a single episode of your blood sugar spiking isn't the biggest deal in the world, but when you repeatedly do that to your pancreas, it's going to basically tire out and wear out those insulin producing cells and trigger type two diabetes. Right. Because when you have glucose in your blood, that's a good thing because that provides energy to yourself, and insulin comes along and helps open up yourself and allow it to absorb the glucose and get it out of your bloodstream. Right. But after being exposed to this time and time again, your cells stop absorbing glucose as well. So you have to produce more and more insulin. And eventually, like you were saying, those cells tire out, your pancreas can't produce enough insulin, and so you always have an elevated level of glucose in your bloodstream. Yes. That's bad. That's really bad. That leads to nerve damage and blood vessel damage, which is associated with type two diabetes. And everything from heart disease to foot amputations can result because, like, say with your foot. This always fascinated me. I was like, why would diabetes lead to your foot getting amputated? I'll tell you why. So remember, glucose levels leading to nerve damage supposedly concentrates on the foot, and you lose feeling in your foot. So even just like stubbing your toe badly can lead to an infection that you don't notice because you're not feeling the pain. Right. And all of a sudden, you have this infection that's not being fought off properly because the blood circulation to your foot is diminished, and next thing you have gangrene, and your foot has to be amputated. Unbelievable. Because of type two diabetes. Yeah. I didn't look this up, but the way I understand it is you can reverse heading toward type two diabetes until you have type two diabetes and then you've got it. That's what I thought, too. Yeah. But you can't undo it once it's taken hold. Right. What you go through first is called insulin resistance metabolic syndrome, or prediabetes. Right. And you can catch that. You just need to go in for a physical, like once a year or something like that, and you'll be able to catch whether or not you have Prediabetes. Yeah. And then you take certain measures to not get type two diabetes. But yeah, I think once you have type two diabetes, you got it for life. Yeah. One other thing I wanted to say, and it's not just about the health aspects of it, but there's this really great documentary narrated by Katie Kirk called Fed Up that I think everybody should see, and it's about this concept, really good, really well done documentary. Yeah. There's a lot of great food documentaries out right now that really go into what the food industry has become these days. Very eye opening stuff. Yeah. Have you seen Supersize Me? Yeah, I have not. Oh, really? You know, he's under fire for basically, like a lot of people have tried to replicate his results, and no one's been able to do it. It was interesting at the time. Have you seen Super High me? Yes. Is it any good? Doug Vincent. It was funny. Got you. That was for those who don't know. Doug Vincent is a comedian who is famous for smoking tons of weed. And he's got a documentary called Superhaimy yeah. In which I believe he smoked pot every day, all day for 30 days and then died and took a bunch of tests, like brain tests and physicals and things like that, and then did not smoke at all and then compared the two. How did it turn out? It was interesting. Some results are as you'd expect and some surprise you. I like to see that. He's a funny guy, though. I like him. Yeah. All right, so we'll take a break here. When we come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about this really cool article, the Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food. All right. You sent me this article that we referenced, the Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, and it's really interesting. By Michael Moss. Right. Was that his name? Pretty sure it was in The New York Times in 2012 or 13. Yeah. And he basically details at first a meeting in 1000 1999 of the heads of some of the largest food companies in the world getting together to talk about the fact that all these doctors are saying, we're making junk, people are getting obese. And this chemist basically thought, I'm going to talk these people into sort of reversing some of their practices in the name of good health, and was disappointed to find that they all kind of dug in. And we're like, no, we're going to make this stuff. And people want it. They want it. Right. And we're not going to try and make a healthier Snicker bar that doesn't sell because of the name of the game, is selling food. Right. I think the way they put it is nobody's holding a gun of these people's heads. Yeah. The thing is, a lot of people controvert that point and say, you guys kind of use science to hijack our evolutionary processes and make it so that it's really difficult to refuse this food. Right. Like the cheetos that melt in your mouth and your brain doesn't realize it's eating all these calories, so you end up eating tons of cheetos. One of the most interesting stories in here, I thought, and he tells a bunch of histories of some of these junk foods, but lunchables was super interesting to me. Yeah. And I want to say nefarious almost when you look at how it came about. But basically they did a lot of research into motherhood and found that the biggest challenge was time. Yeah. And moms don't have time. And I say, Moms, parents well, this is 1985, so it was mum's. Yeah, that's true. Parents and moms don't have time to get a good meal into their child, so we're also having a baloney crisis. Right. Oscar Meyer was like, nobody's eating olive loaf any longer, and we're in a lot of trouble. So what are we going to do? Yeah. These things came together to create the lunchable, which was a new, convenient way to package food in a tray. But it was the same stuff. Yeah. Again, it's all marketing and packaging. So that bologna. They wanted to put bread in there, but of course, bread. You can't make bread last for two months. Right. So they threw some crackers in there. Nice. They wanted cheese in there because what goes better with balloon and crackers? Right. Cheese. And then I think Oscar Meyer bought craft, so they just started using craft cheese. And both of them, by the way, were owned by Philip Morris, cigarette manufacturer, who definitely has your health at heart. Yeah. They did experiment with some different cheeses, and they found that, like, real cheese was no good. And the best cheapest cheese that lasted the longest was not even cheese. It was cheese food, which I think is awesome that it's its own category, cheese food. Yeah. But I hate off to them for trying real cheddar first. Yeah, I guess so. It's like the potato chips in a barrel, though. If they go stale, you can't sell it. Yeah. This article points out that it takes several months for something to go from the factory to the grocery store shelf. Yeah. So wait, that's the part I didn't get. The ham in those things is good for several months. Yes. Oh, it's probably good for several years. How preservatives. The same thing that the Poison Squad was, like, testing against. Remember in the FDA episode? Yeah. These are the things that didn't make them sick. That's what preserves our food. Now, it's not necessarily good for you, but it won't make you sick immediately. And, Chuck, there's one other thing I want to say. I've seen this a couple of places. Apparently, the apple that you buy at the store has been off the tree for an average of 14 months. Really? Yes. And it's just the preservatives, like, into the tree. I have no idea how they do it. 14 months is the average from tree to shelf for an apple. An apple a week later. Interesting. I don't know, but I have seen it a couple of places, and I would like to know if anyone out there knows that that is incontrovertibly, untrue, or if it is true. How that's possible? I would love to know. All right. I'm sure someone knows, because you make an excellent point. Like, why would then it spoil very quickly in your house unless it's kept under certain conditions until it gets to your house, and then it's like, well, it probably can finally die. Yes. Because you bought me back to lunchables. The sales were going gangbusters, but they were still losing money on it because it was just an expensive product to package those little trays and everything costs money. Right. And then they just started to run wild with adding things to increase sales. They started adding desserts to it. They started adding sugary drinks to them. Caprite sun. Yeah. Koolaid Capri Sun. And then they started marketing. They tried things like carrots, but they didn't sell well, so they scrapped it. And then they started realizing that we should market to children and not Moms anymore, because what they figured out was that it was about the kids having control, because the kids would go and throw out the carrots and just eat the meat and cheese, let's say, in the little Reese cup that went in there. And so they started marketing the children with commercials, like, all day, you got to do what they say, but lunchtime is all yours. Yup. And little kids on Saturday mornings are like, Lunchtime is all mine with lunchables. And they wanted it so they would go to the store and scream at the top of their lungs until they got it. The other interesting thing was also one other thing. I guarantee you and I haven't verified this, but I guarantee you that if you go to the store and you find lunchables, they're at a child's eye level. Oh, I'm sure they are. Bet that's where they're placed. Not mom eye level. Child eye level. Yeah, I think they're on the horizontal part of the meat section. Yes. Like, not built vertically. Up on a shelf. They're down even below the kids, where they can even grab it. Yeah. And run out of the store with it. Yeah. The other interesting thing, I think it was in this article, when they talked about what's happened to yogurt over the years, was that in here yeah. Where basically they hijacked something that should be good for you, and now you get like, twice the amount of sugar your body needs and a serving of yogurt these days. Like Heath Bar sprinkles. Yes. And now let's put it in a squeezy tube for kids. Call it Gogurt. Yeah. This article was really great. This guy really laid it out. Just the ideas behind it, the thinking behind it, the science behind it. It's a really long article, and it's really worth reading. One of the other things he goes into is that there's this food scientist who's kind of like a legend. I think his last name is Moscowitz. He's just a legend in this field, and he figured out very early on that he's the optimizer. Yeah. He figured out that not only does your tongue, like, detect fat and say, okay, you've had enough fat, stop eating this. That has to be tricked. It does the same thing with flavor, too. So if there's a really overt and obvious flavor that might taste delicious. You get sick of it faster. So what this guy figured out and what food scientists now do is they'll take flavors and combine other flavors so one isn't dominant, so that there's no real flavor for the tongue to be like, I'm sick of this. So doritos are a really good example. Like nacho doritos is its own flavor. It's not just garlicky. It's not just cheesy. It's this thing that they've put together that tricks your tongue into never being satiated, which is how you can down a whole bag of doritos. Yeah. It was so interesting, and so much research goes into this when they started talking about the amount of consumer study they did and, like, thousands and thousands of hours of people tasting things and taking notes on what they're tasting and basically creating a mathematical formula for how to create the perfect thing that you won't want to stop eating. And that's just for people for this age group or this age group of this ethnicity. It's really down to a science. All this just to come up with cherry vanilla, Dr. Pepper. Yeah, and the other thing, too, was, remember how railed about all the doritos now, the different flavors, which I have no problem with that. Well, I just thought it was interesting and that they basically, food technicians at a certain point, stopped worrying about new products and said the line extension is where it's at. Right. So instead of one type of doritos, we'll offer you, like, 25 different types right, rather than one type of dorito and, like, an entirely new product. Right. Because apparently one of the hardest things in the world to do is to get people to buy a new product, whereas if you already have the branding associated with it, the emotional attachment, people know it's tasty. They'll try a different version and offshoot of it, but not necessarily a whole new product that could be superior in every way. And they spend as much as $30 million a year on some of these products not the company, but on a specific food product, including things like Machinery $40,000 machine that simulated a chewing mouth to test the perfect breakpoint of a potato chip. Yeah. Which is \u00a34 per square inch, I think. Yeah. \u00a34 of pressure per square inch. And so they're not only spending money on research on advertising, as well as how stuff works. Article pointed out that in 2012, just McDonald's spent 2.7 times as much money on advertising as all fruit, vegetable, bottled water, and milk producers combined. Yeah, I believe that. Totally. You don't see a lot of broccoli commercials. They're disgusting. All right, we'll finish with something interesting that you sent about the junk food diet. I think I'd heard of this before, where someone will undertake a diet of not only junk food, but a lot of junk food. This guy's a nutritionist, like a nutrition scientist from Kansas State, some sort of cat. Yeah. Like a large cat. Yeah, some sort of big cat. There you go. All right. Go, big cats. Yeah. He went on a ten week junk food diet. Chocolate covered snacks, cream filled cakes, sugary, cereals, cookies, chips. He did eat a protein shake every day. And some vitamins and supplements and some veggies here and there, too. And he lost a lot of weight doing it, because he ate 1800 calories a day, which is a calorie reduced diet. Right. But technically, as far as macronutrients goes, it was a balanced diet, a balance between carbs, proteins and fats. And he lost a bunch of weight. He lost a bunch of weight. He lost his BMI went down, his total body fat was reduced, his cholesterol was reduced, the bad cholesterol went down, the good cholesterol went up. Isn't that nuts? Eating junk food on a junk food diet? I can see losing weight like calories are calories, and there's a big debate about that, but I think ultimately, that's what this thing shows. And if you reduce calories, it doesn't matter where your calories are coming from, you're going to lose weight. But to have your bad cholesterol go down and your good cholesterol go up was really surprising to me. Yeah. And I think the main thing I took away, though, is this is the ten week diet, and what happens over a ten year period? Well, yeah, who knows? That's a great question. Yeah. Pretty interesting, though. Very interesting stuff. Mark Stabb, I believe. Mark Hobb of KState. Go, big cats, man. Sorry, KState. I know that was lame. Chuck. That was lame. If you want to know more about junk food, you should type those words in the search barhouseofworks.com and check out the New York Times articles. There's some good ones on there. Check out the encyclopedia. Junk food and fast food. Actually go to the podcast page for this episode and it's got all that stuff and I guess it's time for listening. Yeah. By the way, I just looked it up. I don't normally do that, but it's wildcats. We were right. Bam. Willie the wildcat is the actual man. We said big cats and it's a wild cat. Wildcats are not super big, but they can be. Yeah, like a lion's. Technically a wild cat. Oh. I guess I just think of, like, bobcats and things and mountain lions when I think of wildcats. But a lion would be a wildcat, right? Sure. They're huge. Huge. All right, I'm going to call this Aborigines. Remember when the male puberty episode we talked about? The Aborigines had some pretty brutal puberty rights that they would put boys through. We were taking a task a little bit in a nice way. Guys, want to give you some feedback about the term in the Australian context. This is quite an outdated term to say Aborigines. Some people still identify with it, but it's generally accepted to say indigenous Australians or Aboriginal Australians. There are hundreds of Aboriginal nations around Australia, each with their own traditions and knowledge. Within these nations are various clan and family groups, and within those are multiple types of kinship relationships. It gets really complicated. So that puberty ritual you mentioned would likely have only been practiced by some people, others would have had their own traditions. So, in other words, excellent point. We should have just said, like, the Aborigines do this, right, because it might have been like, one small part of a tribe or something. Very good point. Yeah. So that is from Krista, I assume, in Australia. Can you say it, like, in Australian? No. Crista. Yeah, that's pretty good. All right. Australian for Krista. Yeah. If you want to take us to task in a nice way or otherwise, but we always prefer a nice way, we'd love to hear from you. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comsteffysheno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestafs.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuff You Shouldn't o.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com." | ||
What is a body farm? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-is-a-body-farm | Most farms host crops and animals, but body farms specialize in corpses. Join Josh and Chuck as they tackle the fascinatingly gross phenomenon of body farms in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Most farms host crops and animals, but body farms specialize in corpses. Join Josh and Chuck as they tackle the fascinatingly gross phenomenon of body farms in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:01:13 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=14, tm_min=1, tm_sec=13, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=197, tm_isdst=0) | 24181936 | audio/mpeg | "This July. Don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney Nature Films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively, complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Chuck Bryant's here. Hello. That's right. Chuck, how are you doing? I am well. How are you, Chuck? Let's go for a little walk, shall we? Okay. So, Chuck and I are here at the University of Tennessee campus, which is nice. In beautiful Knoxville, Tennessee. No balls. We're kind of on the outside of campus. We are in the woods, basically. Yeah, it's a little creepy out here, got to tell you. It is, Chuck. And you're about to find out what actually, chuck. What's? Out. Don't step. Well, you just stepped in a corpse. Yes. In a corpse. Yeah, that thing really opened up a lot more than I thought it would. Kind of like a right can of melon. Yeah. But it went right through. That's gross. Yeah, I'm not sure what a can of melon is, but it doesn't sound like that. It's a lot nicer than that. That's gnarly. Okay, well, I guess we can get out of Knoxville before anybody says anything, right? What is this place? I'll tell you. Let's just get out of here. Okay. All right. Okay, Chuckers. Wow. And I'm really glad you washed your foot off back to the city, threw your shoe away, got rid of your jeans. It's a good thing you weren't wearing shorts. That was gross. I was up to my ankle and body. So, Chuck, I know that was patently unnecessary that we went all the way to Knoxville for that, but what we were just at is called The Body Farm. Right. The Body Farm. That's the best set up we've ever had. I know. It's just for that, I'm taking my shirt off for the rest of the podcast. Don't do that. Oh, dude. Okay, chuck, I can't do this. Yes, you can. Let's talk about death, baby. There's no way. Yeah, you can. I can't, Chuck. Settle in. No, come on. It's really going to mess me up. Okay. All right. I'll put my shirt back on then. Hold on. Wow, we've reached new bows here. Okay. Are you better now? Big baby? You can't do a podcast with a shirtless, Josh. I know, I'm sorry. All right, well, let's get back to the issue at hand. Body Farms. Okay. Okay. So, Chuck, do you know me? I'm all about death. Like, whoa, I'm going to die someday. I can't wait to find out what happened. Sure. Right. So this is right up my alley. Yes. I thought it was a cool article. So you liked it as well? Yeah. Written by your boyfriend Tom. Long time boyfriend. Tom. Chief. Yeah, it was good body farms. Very gruesome, but necessary. Cool. Interesting topic. Yeah. You just won't kick this one off, will you? Well, what do you want me to do? Let's talk about death first. Okay. So the whole point of a body farm is to study decomposition, right? Right. That people might not even know what one is. It's where you study a dying or a corpse in a state of decay, so you can learn things from that. Well, but I think that's right out of Webster's. So there's actually three body farms around the country. Right. There's one at Western North Carolina University. Go, some things. There is a University of Tennessee, their main campus, at Knoxville, where we just were kind of the volunteers. Yeah. I won't say govalt, though. And you know why? And then there's another one at Texas State University, San Marcos. That's it. Yeah. Three body farms in the entire country. They are really churning out the information. Right, I know. One of the researchers pointed out that they think it would be nice one day if there was a body farm in each state because it's so geographically specific that it would help to know these kind of things. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. I think Tennessee has got much of the Southeast covered because it's just wet and sticky down here. Everywhere it's muggy. So any information coming out of Tennessee probably applies to much of the south. Texas probably cover the sand and the rocks of the West, I would imagine. But I mean in the sun. What happens if you die in Idaho? Well, exactly. Maybe they should open one in the Pacific Northwest, is my suggestion. I agree. All right, so, Chuck, what we're talking about is body farms, basically. Essentially it's just an area, attractive land. I think Knoxville is like 300 acres or something like that. Yeah, it's a big one. Yeah. And then Texas, I think it's about ten times the size of that. I think it's 3000 acres. And they have dead bodies scattered across it. And I know Tennessee was the first one to ever open this up. And it was there was a guy named Doctor Bill Bass who you sent me a video. That was awesome. Such an affable, man. I should say. Joshua, the Tennessee one is three acre in size of a 300 acre area. Got you. So the farming is actually smaller. I got you. Which is one of the reasons a resident signed off on it, because they were a little skeptical. Yes. And I can understand how someone would be. Sure. Yeah. Back to Bath. Yeah. So Bath opened the first one in 1071 at the University of Tennessee, and he did it because the cops kept coming to him and asking him, don't know if he could help with some murder investigation or anything like that. And he finally realized that we don't know nearly enough about decomposition as far as it pertains to criminal investigations. Sure. So he took it upon himself to start collecting corpses, and actually the first ones he got were unclaimed corpses from local morgues, and he just took them out to the body farm, which is actually the technical name for it, is the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility. Right. And he just started scattering them around the place. Yeah. And studying them and taking journals and logs and photos and noting the rate of decay, that kind of thing. Yeah. So let's talk about the rate of decay. Let's talk about decomposition. We already handle rigor mortise and liver mortise and what is it? Algor mortis. Alger Morris in our rigor mortis podcast. We don't need to talk about that. We already talked about auto license, too. Sure. But there's some other stuff, too, like the putrefaction process and the effects it has on the body. Let's talk about that because it's gnarly. Okay. Yeah. Sounds good. Now, are you talking about the flies and the maggots? Sure. Okay. We'll start there. Okay. One way that insects actually give a lot of insight into how long the body may have been lying there in a state of decay. I think they said flies will go in through the orifices like the nose and the ears. Yeah. And in one of those videos that you sent me, it shows flies going into the nose and the eyeballs eye sockets. It's awesome. Yeah. So they'll do this within a day of the body dying? If they have access to it, the body's outside. Yeah. Because the flies sure. And then the lay eggs. And then in 24 hours, the eggs are hatched into larva. Yes. Which aka maggots. Right. And these maggots are decaying flesh eating machines? Big time. Actually. Apparently they can consume 60% of human corpse within ten days. From the inside out? No, they start from the outside in. Oh, really? Because it's late on the fly, eggs on the skin. And then they start burrowing in and eating and eating and eating. Well, dude, I'm very wrong then. And they actually grow about ten times in five days because they eat so much. And they're built for it, too. Right. They have, like, a mouth hook. What is it called? Yeah, that's a mouth hook that scoops the goo into their mouth. And then I think their mouth is on one end and they're breathing apparatuses on the other end. So they're just little eating machines. They don't have to stop to breathe. Right. They can keep going. Literally built for it. So back to what I was saying about the rate of decay. They can take a look at the size of the maggots and determine, well, if a maggot is this long, then it's been in the human body growing for this many days. And it was probably hatched on this day. So the body has been there for x number of days or weeks. And that's just one type of fly. This is actually they're called corpse fauna. No. Yeah, corpse fauna. And I think the common house fly is the one that Tom's talking about in this article, possibly the bottle fly. But it turns out there is a whole ecosystem of flies that start to come in at different stages of the decomposition process. Right. So some really love to pick, you know, the little remnants of a skeleton. Others start the whole decomposition process and aid. Others like to show up when the body is really starting to turn to goo. Right. But yeah, they study the flies and they can figure out how long the body has been out there, which is a big one. Yeah, this is a big indicator for helping cops kind of figure out not motive, but time of death, right? Stuff like that. 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's, 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. And also from this article, I found out that CSI is a bunch of liars. Yeah, they never do that stuff. No, I didn't know that. Blood stain pattern analysis. That's not forensic. No handwriting analysis. No shooting guns into that gel. That's not true. They're liability which irks me to no end. Yeah, but we've talked about this before. TV always sensationalizes it. Just get over it. Okay. It wouldn't be very entertaining if they just came by and said, well, the Maggots are 20 mm long. Case closed. I got to tell you that those videos you sent me were pretty entertaining and gruesome. Yeah. Do you see that one guy with a big distended belly? Yes. And actually, one of the things that happens to a corpse as well is the skin blackens. Right? Yeah. And that video did point that out, that certain parts turn black. And I know when the blood collects in certain parts we talked about that before. Certain parts of the body will be darker and some will be more pale. Yeah. Lividity, can we talk about deloving? I can't wait. I think you should talk all about it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. We learned this from the video as well, when, let's say you look at a human hand that's been lying in the woods over the period of the days of decay, it'll start to look really raisiny like it's been in dishwater. Yeah. And then it starts to literally you see, it starts to kind of gather up and slide off the hand and the epidermis literally comes off of the hand. And they call it d glubbing. Yeah. And they actually figured out that you can take this glove, this degloved skin that's kind of laying nearby the hand if you can get to it before an animal comes up, and it's like, Heck, yeah. Glove. Right. You can take it into the lab, put a rubber glove on, and then put this human skin on like a glove and then fingerprint that way. Because once the epidermis comes off, there goes the fingerprints. And forensic anthropologists like Dr. Bass at Body Farm have figured out that you can do this. Just figuring that out. How many crimes have been solved because somebody figured out you could do that? I don't know. Probably a bunch that pays for itself, as far as I'm concerned. Because before that, they just had no fingerprints. They lost the fingerprints? No, they're like oh, well. And now they do the Buffalo Bill thing and it's all good. Yeah. Goodbye. It puts a lotion in the basket. No, that was very good. That was pretty good. Okay. So, yeah, that's dead body stuff, I'm sure we'll get to more of it in a few. But really, forensic anthropologists come in most handy when there is no flesh any longer and it's just bones. Right. Because, think about it. You've lost any visual identification of even whether it was a man or a woman. Right. Ethnicity, age, anything like that. You can't just look at it like that time we found that drifter in the woods that one time. He was pretty new, you could tell. And we knew it was like a white, probably mid 30s male. And we just walked along and minded our own business. Whatever happened to that guy? I have no idea. Anyway, if it's just a skeleton, if that dead drifter had just been a skeleton, then we wouldn't have been able to say any of those things with any kind of certainty. So when just a skeleton is found, they called in a forensic anthropologist and they go to town. Chuck right. They can still learn some of these things. Josh as you know, they can look at I guess the easiest thing they can do to determine gender is to look at the size of the bones, because typically, men's bones are larger where it attaches to the muscle. Not a dead giveaway, no pun intended, but a good one. And there's differences in the pelvic bone. Apparently, the forehead is also a big telltale sign in gender and race. Well, men's foreheads tend to slope backwards. Right. And women's are more rounded. True. Yeah. And looking at you, you have a very sloped rear forehead. Do I? Yeah. You can tell that's not your forehead, dude. That's the top of your head. I got you. And females chins usually come to a point where a man's chin is a little more squared off. How's my chin? It's beautiful. Josh okay. It's beautiful. Ribs apparently can help determine aged a lot more ragged. In our age, they get ragged out. Yeah. And also with men and women, a dead giveaway is especially post adolescent men and women is the pelvis. Yes. The pelvic inlet is much wider in women. Basically, the hole in your pelvic bone is much bigger in women than it is in men to allow for easier childbirth. You got it. Yeah. You don't want to pass a kids through the pelvic inlet of a man. No, that would be painful. Like it's not painful enough already. Sure. And then when it comes to the race, they don't get too specific. They kind of want to say African, Asian or European. They try to get state pretty broad there. Well, at least at first. And then apparently, there's some other signs that you can kind of narrow it down even further. But those are the first three categories. They lump them in. Right. Actually, I thought it was an interesting fact Tom had in here, that there are more differences within each racial group than there are between each group as a whole, which I thought was kind of cool. Yeah. That is interesting. So those are bones, right? Yeah, those are bones. Dim bones. Dim bones. Yeah. Josh you want to talk about disease? Of course. And then one of the big concerns for residents that live near these body farms is, wait a minute, they just let these bodies I mean, sometimes as many as 40 and 50 bodies out there. We're worried about buzzards disease. They're bad stuff, getting into the water and by creeks, but it doesn't happen. Yeah. No one wants to drink that body no. Do you know why? Why? Because if you have an infectious disease, it's not going to still be around after your body. It's decomposing. Yeah. The infectious disease organisms also decompose. Absolutely. They don't stick around too long. But just to be certain, any faculty or students who are interacting with these body farms, they're inoculated against all manner of stuff because you don't want to really take a chance. Sure. But also they go out of their way, I think, to test all corpses that are donated to them for any kind of infectious diseases beforehand. So you got a clean living corpse that you just have out there that's not really going to cause much problems. Right. And it should be noted, too, like you said, people do donate. I think the one in Tennessee said they had a list of either a list of 300, or they had already had 300 bodies donated. And you can do that. Just like you're an organ donor. You can say, I'd like my body to go to a body farm after I die. Well, I think you want to contact the body farm first. Well, sure. See if ever. Hey, here's a fun fact for you. Okay. In 2006, the University of Tennessee had more corpses and skeletons on its campus than it had Asian students enrolled. There are about $900 in the osteopathological collection, 900 skeletons, another 700 in two other skeletal collections, and then 40 or so bodies on the body farm. And there are only 673 Asian students on campus. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, crazy. I wonder if they had any Asian bodies. I don't know. Would that cancel out? No. Okay. Or maybe it would count towards the total. Count both ways, though. So we cancel one another out. Okay, sure. But, I mean, everybody likes to be counted. So what else, Josh? Should we talk about some of the ways that body farms have helped out? You mean specifically? Yeah. Eg. John Wayne Gacy. Yeah, that's a good one. Go ahead. I've long been in pursuit of a John Wayne Gacy painting. You know, he's a prolific painter. Yeah. And I found a website finally. Really? Yeah. He wasn't a very good painter, but just to have a John Wayne Gacy, it's crazy. He also loved the Seven Dwarfs were a common theme of his. Oh, really? Fascinated by the Seven Dwarfs for some reason. What a creep. He was a creepy dude. Yeah. Well, when Gacy got popped in, what, the 70s? Yeah, I guess for the two of you who don't know who that is, when Gacy is a famous serial killer. He was a serial killer of young men. Yes. He killed 33 boys, and he buried 29 of them under his house. Yeah, I think it's not a good place. Which wasn't even necessarily his house. It was his mother's apartment. Which goes a long way in explaining John Wayne Gacy. Sure. But when he finally got busted and he started telling the cops about how many people he had killed. They went out to his mother's apartment complex and used ground penetrating radar and found basically a mass grave. The problem is these bodies have been there for a while. They've been killing kids for a real long time, and the bones have become entangled, and they didn't know who was who or anything like that. So they brought in forensic anthropologists. I believe they helped to successfully identify most, if not all of them. Right. Yeah. So that's one way body farms are contributing. Sure. That's pretty cool. They'll profile the bones, and then they'll match that with data for missing kids, and one kind of leads to the other. And I know it's closure somewhat for families in this kind of situation. Oh, yeah. Which is what we're going to talk about with the big bopper. I think you should talk about the big bopper. The big bopper was a singer that perished in the plane crash with Richie Valens and Buddy Holly back in the day. Sure. And the big bopper son apparently got in touch with Dr. Bass because the body of the big bopper was found. His name was JP. Richardson, was found 40ft from the plane. And the son wanted to know, hey, did my dad actually die in the crash, or was he trying to go get help and then died 40ft later? Because I don't know, that would have made a difference in how he felt about it. Well, apparently there was a long persisting legend, too. Right. I guess you want to put it to rest. And he did put it to rest. Doctor Bass got involved, exhumed the body and basically said, every bone in this guy's body was crushed and there's no way that he survived the crash and he was thrown from the plane. And that's the end of that story. Yeah. So the sun got that kind of closure. 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. Can I tell one more? Yeah. All right. So there's this case in 1933 in San Diego. A little seven year old named Dalbert opposing, was found floating in San Diego Bay, and the coroner, I guess, ruled that he had been sodomized and sexually assaulted in other ways before being murdered, but they never found the killer. Right. And then apparently, San Diego got some federal funding for opening cold cases, and this was one of the ones they went after. So they hired a forensic anthropologist and showed him old crime scene photos and notes from the detectives that worked the case. And I imagine it probably took the forensic anthropologist an hour or ten minutes to say, no, this kid wasn't sodomized or murdered. Really? Yeah. The thing is, back then, they had no idea. No one was studying this kind of thing. Nowadays we know that when the body reacts with water, all manner of nasty things happen. Yeah. Bodies break down twice as fast in the water. Right. Which is why a lot of people dispose of murder victims in lakes or exactly, rivers, and I guess why these cops weren't able to really tell much. Right. Well, not only that, they were just misled. And over the course of the decades of study of decomposition, this, for instance, anthropologist was able to say, this kid wasn't murdered. Close your cold case, right? Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I know. One of the researchers I saw from that video at Tennessee is trying to put together a book, like a reference guide for various states of the case. Yeah. Cops kind of look at this instead of having to truck all the way up to the body farm like we did. Well, yes, and I got the idea it was going to be like, okay, here's a picture of a body that's been underwater for seven days, right, and hold it up against your body and doesn't look the same. Now we'll continue to the next page. So, yeah, I guess it's going to be like an illustrated atlas of decomposition, like a fuel guide. Right. I would love to get my hands on that one day when it's done. Yeah. I'd love to go to the body farm again. You mean go back? You're right. Yeah. I talked to Tom and I asked him if he had gone, and he was like, no, they learned a long time ago not to let journalists or weirdos in. Yeah, I bet the guy was describing the smell in the video. I thought that was interesting. He said it didn't smell like a dead animal. Like that familiar smell. That when you smell a dead animal. Right. He said it's very different. He said it's unmistakable. Yeah, he said it was pungent and sweet. Well, you smell that interesting. Sure. So that's body farms. Yeah. Anything else? I don't really have anything else. How about you? No. All right. So I guess let's just go straight to listener mail. Josh, we're going to ask our listeners for a little information here because I didn't know the answer to this question, we rarely tossed that out. So we had Paloma right in from California, and Paloma said, a long time listener, I love your podcast. Makes my commute enjoyable. And Josh, you chose Chuck as your partner in crime, and you all have a great chemistry. Blah, blah, blah. Could we resist each other? No destiny. So she says this I had a very odd experience a few days ago. It was a soupy day, a bit chilly, with a few sprinkles of rain here and there. I was over at my mother's house having a chat inside, when suddenly there was an incredibly bright white and blue flash and a quick zapping sound. I thought a light bulb had burned out in the room or something. My mother said that she saw a white bolt come through the wall, passed just in front of my face, and then go through the opposite wall of the room. We looked everywhere and tried to think of any kind of rational explanation. No bulb had gone out, no strobe lights or camera to flash. 30 seconds after this weird phenomenon happened, we heard thunder rumble very nearby. After calming down, I immediately thought of you two. You have answers for everything. People think of us when they narrowly escaped death, when their first thought she says, what in the world happened? Do you think it was lightning? Was it static electricity? What's going on here? Has anyone died of static electricity? So I don't know the answer. I did look up and found out that no one can die of static electricity that I found unless it results in spontaneous human combustion. And as far as I don't know, I don't think lightning can pass through a room of a house like that. I don't think it goes right in front of your face. I think if it's coming that close to you, it goes right into you. Right. And you would know. Well, because we had the other listener mail that I think had the side strike three blocks away with that. Yeah. So, Paloma, we don't have an answer, but I'm hoping some listeners out there that are smarter than we are might have a clue as to what happened that day. My money is on unicorns, so maybe we'll follow up on this if we get some feedback. Yeah, if you have an answer for Paloma, especially if it's unicorns, you can send us an email solving this mystery to stuff podcasts@howstephorgs.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the Houseofworks.com homepage, brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. The sun is shining, the daylight is longer, and best. Of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing 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 episode. 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Q: Are we in the midst of cyberwar? A: Yes | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/q-are-we-in-the-midst-of-cyberwar-a-yes | There's a secret war going on around us, and it's happening on a daily basis. The Air Force recently launched a new unit specifically designed to carry out and defend against cyberwar. Go deep into this new and alarming type of war with Josh and Chuck. | There's a secret war going on around us, and it's happening on a daily basis. The Air Force recently launched a new unit specifically designed to carry out and defend against cyberwar. Go deep into this new and alarming type of war with Josh and Chuck. | Tue, 25 Sep 2012 17:49:18 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=17, tm_min=49, tm_sec=18, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=269, tm_isdst=0) | 27232642 | 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 with no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is like the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with Capital One's top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet. Terms apply. Capital One NA member FDIC brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you ready? Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charles WTOK. Bryant. We call him an authority on cybersecurity, the Internet, everything about it. Yeah. An expert, you would say. Hey, should we say hello to our latest celebrity fan? We just learned today that Miss Kristen Bell did lovely and enchanting and nerdy. Kristen Bell. Is she nerdy? Very nerdy. Like prides herself on I mean, it doesn't surprise me that she listens to the show. Yeah. Because she's on record as being a big nerd. That's cool. Which is one reason I like her a lot. And she's curating a Newsweek page, right? Yeah. Like things she likes or kind of one of those deals that they do in magazines now. Yeah. And she listed us. That's pretty awesome. How about that? Thank you very much for that. I'm a huge fan of a party down what she was in and other stuff that she's been in. Forgetting, Sarah Marshall is a good yeah. And you got to see her sloth video online that she did on the Ellen show. It's pretty funny. Okay. Highly recommended. Okay. So that's all I got. That's all the sucking up I'm going to do. Should we say hi to another fan, slightly less famous but pretty cool? Yes. Sam, do you want to give a little backstory? Give some backstory here. Sure. We had a live trivia event here in Atlanta a couple of years ago, and at the event was a little teenage fan named Sam. Teenage? You mean like just post tween? Yeah, like 13. And his mom brought him and he's a big fan. He's just like really sweet kid. Mom is very sweet. Yeah. Very nice. Family flashforward. A couple of years we got a south by Southwest. They're Sam again. Apparently mom drove him to Austin to come see our live podcast. Yeah. They weren't there to see. I spoke to mom afterwards and was like, so what else are you guys going to see? She's like, Nothing. We're going back crazy. I was like, what else did you see? She's like, Nothing. They came to see us. So then we were like, all right, we got to think of something for Sam to do because he's proof his metal. And Sam wrote in and sent his resume and, like, all the reasons we should put them to work. And it's just like, dude, the future is secure. If kids are like Sam, for sure. I'm not worried about a thing anymore. Yeah. So we racked our brains, and we found out there's, like, a surprising amount of adult only tasks that we do, like, at any given time. Sure. And we're like, all right, we have to figure out something that's age appropriate for Sam. That's right. So, long story short, I was getting kind of thin on podcast topics. I put Sam on the case, and he sent me, like, a stellar, stellar list with reasons why we should do this. And this is the first one. This is one. And he had a lot of overlap on ones we had already recorded that aren't out yet. So that just goes to show you that Sam is like, he gets the show. Right. So as Sam's picking these out, we're going to let you know if this is a Sam one. But this is going on in the summer. We're going to call this the Summer of Sam. That's right. Sam's choice. All right, so that's the longest intro ever. That wasn't even the intro, man. Well, let's get to cyber worst, then. Bossy. Chuck, have you ever been to Bellingham, Washington? No. Okay. I have not. Have you been to Washington? In Seattle. Isn't that where Van Nostrin lives? Or is it Oregon? No, he's Washington. Okay. So in Bellingham, Washington, on June 10, 1999, at the Olympic Pipeline Company, a systems control and data acquisition system. There's systems twice in there. Okay. But a SCADA system, which is basically like a computer program that can make a valve turn or turn something off mechanical. Right. From digital binary instructions. Right? Sure. This Olympic Pipeline Company system was operating on this type of program, and something went wrong, and one of their pipes started leaking a lot, like millions of gallons of gasoline, and part of it erupted into a fireball, killed three people, injured many others, and they went back and looked at it. I think it was just a system malfunction. Right. But the fact that this came along, this happened because of the system control, and it happened in 1999 as the.com bubble was starting to grow and, like, the Internet was really becoming a huge thing. People who are into cybersecurity now point to this as evidence of exactly what somebody could do during a cyber attack. Wow. Even though they think this was just an accident, right? Irrelevant. Okay. But they weren't pointing to that as no. Okay. No. They don't think that had anything, but they were saying, this is what it would look like if somebody had wanted to attack. Like, this is what a cyber attack would look like. That makes sense because it's not just the Olympic pipeline company that's using these systems all over the United States. Companies, law enforcement agencies, military. Yes. Banks, public works, all of these things are all running on what amounts to Windows. Yeah. It's as simple as that. Yeah. Microsoft systems, many of them. And Jonathan Strickland wrote this from Tech Stuff. The article yeah. And as Strickland points out, a couple of things. Microsoft has been kind of chastised over the years for their security or lack of security in some of their programs. And the other thing he points out is the Internet grew so fast, and everyone got on board so quickly that it kind of outpaced what we could even do security wise. Right. It was all of a sudden government agencies and power grids and emergency services and weapons systems, water and fuel pipelines, all this stuff is running on computers and a lot of it through the Internet. And we don't quite know how to guard against a cyber attack. No. And apparently even as far as the knowledge of how to guard against cyber attacks goes, the United States is lacking compared to China and Russia. So we're kind of in this really weird position right now where we've realized that all of the ponies are hooked to a single basket of eggs, and all it's going to take is a couple of black cat firecrackers to scare all the horses off. That's the best analogy I can come up with. Did you just think of that or did you I just thought of that. My imagination is back. I can tell you where I time travel to. Awesome. Where? All right, let's go back a little bit in time. I don't think we need the Wayback Machine for this because we're just going to we can just walk outside. Yeah, that would be a waste of time for the Way Back machine. 1997, some pretty smart people caught on early that, hey, we could be vulnerable to something like a cyber attack. So let's look into this. Let's put a red team on it. Red team are friends that act as enemies to try you know how they hire these people to break into your home? Yes. Those are red teams, basically. Right? Like from Star Wars. Yeah, exactly. So let's get a red team. Let's name this mission something really cool out of a football playbook. Let's name it project eligible Receiver. Do you know how many times I had to look at that before it finally sunk in what words I was looking at? Oh, really? It does look kind of funny. It looks like Eleanor Rigby when you glance at it. I think so, yeah. It doesn't to me, I was thinking more of like a radio receiver or something like that. I think it just means about football. No, it totally eligible. I read this many times before. I was like, oh, okay, so a lot of this is still classified, so we don't know everything. But basically they hired some hackers, which is what you do to test your security. They being the Department of Defense. Yeah, department of Defense saying, hey, can you nerds hack into the Pentagon system and afterwards we won't assassinate it. Exactly. And the nerds were like, just watch this. And it took three days before the Pentagon even knew that they were being cyber attacked by the Red Team. Pretty successful and very sobering. Yeah. So it was, I guess, kind of an eye opener for the DoD. And they, I'm sure, used it to step up security. Not fast enough, though, because after this Red Team attack operation Eligible Receiver, an actual attack, which they later came to call what was it? Moonlight Maze. Yes. This is one year after that, the test. A year after it, somebody launched an attack, and it was, I guess, what's probably the most typical kind of cyber attack, where you insert some sort of software to basically spy and get files and gather data and download sensitive materials. Right, yeah. And apparently it took two years before NASA, the Pentagon, and other agencies in the US. Government noticed that. Accidentally noticed that they were being spied on CyberWise. Yeah. They got data, like strategic maps, troop assignments and positions. Not good. Right. Very scary. And they traced it back to Russia. Doesn't necessarily mean that it came from Russia in its origin, but at least that's where they traced it to. And this is cyber warfare. Like, it's happening. It's been going on since the 90s. Pretty much. Yeah. It's not is a cyber war coming? It's like, how do we prevent a cyber war from bringing us all down? Pretty much. And apparently from looking into this, there's like two camps. There's like a gloom and doom camp where it's like, yeah, somebody really wants to mess things up. They're going to be able to it's going to be pretty easy. Yeah. And the sunny, optimistic camp is kind of like, now we know what we're looking for. Now, like, sure, they could launch an attack, but we'll be able to stop it in time for before it can do, like, a lot of damage. So we'll lay out everything for you. You can decide who is right? That's right. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyber attacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt, and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM. Let's create learn more@ibm.com. Hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look than Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square space is everything to sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process, and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on Squarespace. Yes. Don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. Comssk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code S YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's Squarespace.com. So we've already mentioned that on the defensive side of things, the US. Is sorely lacking. But on the offensive side of things, we've actually done this ourselves more than once during the coast of a war. Strickland points out we used computer attacks to compromise Serbian air defenses, basically kind of scrambling their information. So they had bad I guess, coordinates on the radar screen wasn't apt, wasn't accurate. Yeah, okay. Or appropriate. Did you see that one? So we did this. We launched it, and it worked. So that's a good thing, but it's also a bad thing if you're like. Was it Bush the first or Clinton and Bush II? Bush. The second in 2003 in Iraq. And Clinton, well, they were both like, we don't think we should be doing much of this because a couple of reasons. A, it basically opens us up as like, hey, they did this so we can do it right back. And B, I think they could have drained some banks of terrorist cells, and they said, we kind of depend on the integrity of the banking system worldwide. We don't want to start messing around with this. So apparently with cyber warfare, it's very much like when you build that virus, it's out there, and it can be captured and studied and redeployed against you. So what they were saying with Clinton and Bush who were saying, like, no, we're not going to use a virus to drain those bank accounts because it will eventually come back on us, and the banking industry is not secure enough to withstand something that we ourselves make, because apparently the US. Is pretty good at making viruses. Oh, I'm sure. Should we talk about some of the different ways that this can go down? Yeah, the Pearl Harbor attack. Yes. I had the feeling strictly minded this one himself, but it's not true. He went to a lot of trouble to explain why it's called the Pearl Harbor strategy. I think he could have slipped it that the idea here is that it's pretty much in your face. It's a massive cyber attack where they infiltrate and then they sabotage systems. Much like Pearl Harbor was a big surprise and a big attack. I mean, it was sneaky, but it wasn't quiet by any means. Right. Or stealthy, I guess the word. The other ones are pretty much stealthy. Yeah. Part of a prohibited attack, I believe can be a distributed denial of service attack, which is basically, you know, like when you try to get onto a website or whatever, you're sending a request to the server to let you on a ping. Right? Yeah. Now, if you assault that one server with millions of pings and it's trying to accommodate everybody as is appropriate and apt, basically they crash is the point. You can crash the server by hitting it with millions of pings all at once. It slows it down to the point. Either way, it doesn't work or it crashes. Yeah. And that's what Anonymous likes to do with, like, Mastercard during the whole WikiLeaks thing when they do that was a Mastercard or Visa crash. Cannot remember. I remember when that happened, though. It's basically just launching a bunch of server requests at a specific server and server like, no. And this falls over. Is that why people say ping, by the way they're paying them? Yeah, I hate that. It's better than Java Storm. I don't even know what that is. Drinking coffee while you're having a brainstorm. Like, let's go get coffee and brainstorm something. Java staff people say that? Yeah. I don't say it. I've never heard of that. That ping and meta are the three things that I will never say. Epic. Maybe the worst to call something epic. I don't mind epic. Oh, man, I hate epic. Well, at least it's a real word. Especially epic fail. Oh, yeah, sure. Okay, back to it. Viruses, code red, slammer nemda. These are viruses that Strickland has mentioned that spread very quickly across the Internet. And there's a couple of ways this can go down. You can do it immediately and release a virus. You can have all these other computers deliver the virus. You can put sort of like a delay timer on your virus for it to go off in two years automatically or manually whenever you want to. It can be waiting for you to hit the button and then launch the virus that way. Or I think for the user of that computer to do, like, say, control, alt delete will trigger it or something. Oh, really? Yeah. That's pretty scary. Yeah. Don't press those three buttons all the time on my PC. Oh, my God. Chuck, I think we should talk about right about here is I think where Stuxnet fits in. Who? Stuxnet? Say it one more time. Stuxnet. I don't know what that is. You know what stuxnet is? Is that in this? Yeah, it's the Iranian. It's the virus that the US. And Israel unleashed on Iran. It's a perfect example of this. It is. You're right. So let's talk about Stuxnet. Stuxnet. It's a great name. It was offensive, a cyber attack offensive in 2010. They're thinking maybe it was the first one ever. The US launched, like, a strictly for sabotage attack. Basically, they wanted to disable Iran's centrifuges so they could not enrich uranium. And they did this through the new 24th Air Force based out of Texas. Right? Texas in Georgia. Yeah, in Warner. Robins. Robins Air Force Base. Yeah. Robins Air Force Base. Yeah. Those two places are where the 24th is stationed. Yes. And this is the first all cyber unit. Pretty much. Right. Pretty cool, right? Their whole task is to wage cyber warfare and I imagine to be defensive against cyber attacks. But I don't know if they had to do with Stuxnet, but they probably would have. I think it was being developed before the 24th was ordained in 2009. I think it went back to 2007 when it was started. But basically the CIA got their hands on centrifuges that they knew Iran was using, and they had just as many as Iran did of the same kind, and they studied it and they built this virus based on this configuration of centrifuges running windows and Siemens switches. Right. Yeah. And then they build a virus to go infiltrate it. I thought it was called Operation Olympic Games. It was, but the malware, the virus itself, I couldn't figure it out. But you're right. It was called Operation Olympic Games. Yes. And this whole operation was this huge, sweeping, awesome, massive secretive, basically, imagine, like, the CIA. Do you remember Uncommon Valor? Yeah. Okay. Do you remember when they're training at that replica of the camp? Yeah. Okay. The CIA did that with Iran's centrifuges in a nuclear program, and they figured out exactly how it worked. And then they figured out the best way to break it was Jean Hackman bankrolling, the whole thing. Oh, yeah. He was there to get his son out. He was just staring at this menu of guns and silhouette that he wanted to order. Do you remember that? Yeah. I thought that was so bad. Yes, but that was a huge movie for dudes our age. No, I'm saying bad isn't like, good. Okay. Yeah. Got you. So stuxnet Olympic games happen. And like you said, it was the first offensive cyber attack. Most of the other ones have come in the form of sneaking in and lying around and watching and waiting and spying. Well, Stuxnet had that, too. Oh, is that the initial? There is a companion program called Flame. Right. That somehow this is the part that's the biggest mystery. The Iran's nuclear program is not connected to the Internet. So somebody got that in on thumb drive okay. Infected their local system, and flames sat there and basically just studied everything. Told the US how the configuration was set up. Okay. And then they built it, and then they inserted Stuxnet, and basically it made all of their data look like everything was operating normally, but it was telling their centrifuges to spin out of control and basically break themselves. Like Oceans Eleven when they built the Replica vault. Exactly. Showed the replica video. There's nothing going on. So basically, the Pentagon has been watching a lot of movies, but this is a hugely successful attack, if not at the very least, for American cyber warfare, because it's supposedly set Iran's nuclear program back by at least a year, if not more, in the hopes that this would let us continue talk. Yeah, and I think it said one of the aims was to make them feel stupid, and they said it worked. Yeah, they did something wrong and that's why these systems were failing. It's pretty scary, man. But the point is now is, okay, that's out there. Stuxnet is out there for anybody who can get their hands on it. Who is Stuxnet? That's the name of it. It's a great name. Stuxnet with an X, with a nuggety center. But it's out there. And the US. Is now basically just the computer equivalent of Hiroshima was just launched by the United States. Yeah. And nice little setup there. A lot of people are comparing these days of the early days of cyber warring to the early days of nuclear bombs and that there's not a ton of defense. Not anyone really knows what they're doing. It's sort of a chaotic mess that everyone's trying to get their finger in the pie, though. Yeah. Other countries, like China, I believe, Russia, who are apparently better equipped to defend against a cyber attack than the US. So basically, the US. Is sol really plain with fire. Well, and that's why Clinton and Bush were declining to use these. It's one of the reasons this opens us up to counter attacks. And this may not be the smartest way to we wouldn't go out and just drop a nuclear bomb on a country. Right. Oh, wait, I did. Oops, twice. Yeah. What else you got? Let's see. We talked about the system controls and data acquisition systems. That was basically that is the Achilles heel of infrastructure in the United States. One of the reasons why we're not set up to defend against a cyber attack is because we are so connected to the Internet. Everything is Iran, North Korea, not quite as much, because a lot of their stuff is off the grid just by default. Sure. Because they don't have the infrastructure that we have. So just the robustness of our own infrastructure is one of its vulnerabilities as well. Yeah, that's a good point. As far as defense goes, too I forgot about this stuff. Strickland says the first step is education as far as educating consumers over antivirus software and how they search the Internet and stuff like that. So I give that a medium. But this guy, Richard Clark, he's a security expert. He blames things on companies like Microsoft, too. He feels like rushes through programs before they are fully security tested because they want a few coins to rub together by selling this stuff. And the consumer doesn't want to wait and the stockholders don't want lots of testing because they want those new products on the market. Right. So it's a bit of a rough position and private companies run most of the net. It's not like this big government thing. So he contends, Clark does, that it's up to these private companies who own the Internet's infrastructure to really make it more robust in a defensive sense. Right. Which is good in one sense, because then you have a dollar amount in the form of lost profits attached to a security breach. Right. So companies going to try to protect it, which is good. Yeah. But at the same time it's like, yeah. If you're putting out products, though, and you have competition and your competitors products are safer and you're just rushing stuff to market, then you're going to lose out, ultimately pretty much by the same economic forces. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM. Let's create. Learn More@ibm.com hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look than Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, 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. Comssk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer codessysk and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace. Comsysk. Squarespace. And Jonathan also points out, too, that a scary way this can be implemented is a one two punch with a physical attack. Yeah, this is the one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is a cyber attack is launched and the electric power grid is shut down and gas lines and water lines start going haywire. And then all of a sudden, incomes, the Red Dawn team parachuting in. Well, that's what we did to Iraq in 2003. We sent a cyber attack that messed with, I guess, their air defense systems, and then we invaded. So that's happened before and we've done. It doesn't surprise me. Yes, cyber war. We're in the midst of it. We're in the midst of it. Pretty crazy stuff. Get your Norton antivirus. That will dissolve everything. Yeah. Education. Education. That's all we can do to prevent cyber war. If you want to learn more about cyber war and read this article by Jonathan Strickland. You can type cyberwar one word in the search bar@housetepworks.com. It'll bring it up. I said Jonathan Strickland, which means it's time for a listener mail. Time for a lot more than that. I'm going to call this beer and fire. Hi, guys. I'm a professor of history and a longtime act of your show. I use a podcast in my college classes to talk about how we use history and entertainment. I'm writing about the Great Chicago Fire podcast, especially as it relates to my research. C. I study the history of alcohol and I teach a class on the history of beer. Pretty cool. We study the economic, social, and cultural history of beer, and we make beer in class and do weekly beer tastings. Yeah. Anyway, aside from the stuff you mentioned in the show, the Chicago Fire is important because it wiped out about three quarters of Chicago's breweries. Something like 18 breweries were destroyed by the fire. Of course, people still wanted beer. Chicago and Upper Midwest was populated by a lot of Germans at the time. This gave birth to the beer industry in Milwaukee. Before the Great Fire, Milwaukee was a beer town, but not a major supply center. Schlitz especially is a good example of how the Milwaukee beer industry reacted to the fire. Joseph Schlitz, the founder, had first donated thousands of barrels of beer to Chicagoans in the weeks after the fire. Been sensing an opportunity, he then opened a distribution point in the city. After all, there were still hundreds of thousands of thirsty Chicagoans. He opened Schlitzide saloons. By the 1880s, he was selling about 50,000 barrels of beer in Chicago alone, which is about 17% of their total. Wow. And the slogan the slogan for Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous came out of this period, and it's because of the beer sold after the fire. So that's where they got the name by two. Schlitz was the largest brew in the world, a title it would trade back and forth with Budweiser until the 1950s. He goes on to point out. That Blatz and Patched followed similar trajectories stocks that Stuck Neck, and the Chicago brewing industry, sadly never recovered from the fire. Although beer drinking remains steady. And I don't have Professor Beer's name, so we'll just call him Professor Beer. I'm sure he'd appreciate that big time. Yeah, I'm sure that's what the students calling. Thanks, Professor Beer. Yeah. And if you want to write in, I'll take it in a later show. Okay. And if you teach, especially something interesting or use stuff you should know to help you teach, we're always interested in hearing that we want to know about it. Okay. You can tweet it to us at syskpodcast, put it on facebook. Comstuffyshow. Or you can send us an email like Professor Beer did to Stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're a pet mom and 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/2017-12-07-sysk-flight-attendants-final.mp3 | How Flight Attendants Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-flight-attendants-work | Flight attendants have come a long way. From having to put up with rampant sexism, to the current incarnation as your first line of defense in case of an incident, they are valued airline employees. Learn all about this cool job in today’s episode. | Flight attendants have come a long way. From having to put up with rampant sexism, to the current incarnation as your first line of defense in case of an incident, they are valued airline employees. Learn all about this cool job in today’s episode. | Thu, 07 Dec 2017 21:40:59 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=21, tm_min=40, tm_sec=59, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=341, tm_isdst=0) | 39427421 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me as part of your cabin crews. Charles W, Chuck Bryant. Filling the whole thing out is is our pilot Jerry Rowland. Captain Jers, as we'll call her. From now on, if you'd like to return your seat to its full upright position but along with your tray table, if you've lost your device or phone in the seat, don't touch it. Just come get one of us. Is that Avenue? It's a new thing. What? Tell me. No, it's like a new thing on Delta. And like the safety instructions, they actually take a little time to say if you've lost your tablet or phone in your seat, don't adjust it. Come get a flight attendant. What do you mean, lost in the seat? What do they mean? Like, if you're sitting there and you got the butterfingers and then you turn into Jerry Lewis, all of a sudden your phone slides down into the seat beside you or in between the seat next to you. Okay. Your phone is in grave danger if you adjust your seat back upright again. They say, get a flight attendant because they now have additional skills in their repertoire to get your tablet or phone out safe. So at some point, a memo went out to these airlines that said we're breaking cell phones because people are like, well, maybe if I just throw my seat up, it'll pop out. Sure, it'll shoot right out. Like I press rewind on life. Weird. Anyway, this is stuff you should know. I thought it was pretty interesting, actually. And it gave me even more of an appreciation for flight attendance than I had already gained over my years. Yeah, because if you're one of those putts who's mean to flight attendants, you get off the plane, you're a jerk. Yes. Shouldn't be mean to people anyway. Like, everybody's walking around carrying their own burden that you're totally unaware of. And if you're mean to somebody, usually is because you're not getting what you want right then, yeah. So if everybody can just calm down and be nice to each other, that's great. But be extra nice to the flight attendants. And if you don't agree with me now, I guarantee you'll agree with us. At the end of the podcast, and even in our own article here, there was an interview with the flight attendant. A couple of them. A couple of them. But one of them, one of these vets said back in the day, everyone was all excited when they flew. They were going someplace fun. Now everyone's crabby. Yeah, but she makes a really good summary point. Why? She says it's because this is all post 911. That the added layers of security that they've put onto getting from your car onto the plane increases stress so much that you're exhausted by the time you get onto the plane. And flying has become a chore a task. Yes. The seats have gotten way smaller. I do buy that the legroom has gotten smaller. And yeah, I think that it's just kind of become more of, like let's get from point A to point B. Yeah. Taking your shoes off, taking your laptop out. It's about all the extra security. No big deal. That's what I say. Did I tell you I've gotten kind of on board your train about taking your shoes off on a flight? Oh, to not do it? Yeah. Good. So every once in a while, just be like, to hell with that. I don't care. I'm taking my shoes off. I know my feet don't stink. Right. But I understand that there's people like you out there who are deeply offended by that kind of thing, so I typically do leave them on, unless my dogs are just yapping so loud, I can't ignore it. But it's pretty rare these days. I think my deal with that is you can't count on everyone's feet to not stink. Right. And I think plenty of people like, I don't care that their feet stink. Yeah, that's pretty rotten. I just want to be comfy. That's pretty rotten. We live in something called society. There are rules. But getting back to the new regulations, which is pretty much laptop out, shoes off, I mean, you still had to go through the line just like before. Yeah. It feels different to me. Yeah, it does. Different. Is it more time consuming? Yeah, much more stressful. It's not an event like it was. It definitely used to be an event in a person's life to go on an airplane. Well, do you have a different feeling when you go on vacation compared to work, travel, as far as the airport goes? Yeah. And how you feel about it? Same stress. Yes. A lot of it, to be fair, is in my head. To me, pretty much the worst thing that can happen to you is missing your airplane. I don't even want to imagine what happens when you miss your airplane. Jimmy's, like, not that bad. As a matter of fact, she's kind of entertained, like, purposely making us miss oh, your own version of cognitive behavior. But I don't want to miss it, so I generate my own stress in a large part, but it does seem like much more of a process than it was before. Okay. How about you? You're fine with it? Yeah. I mean, it's no big deal. It's just shoes and a laptop. Yeah, two bits. But it does seem like and I read this travel and Leisure article about flight attendance where the author was saying I think she was quoting a flight attendant who was saying, like, we've all kind of decided as a group that we're fine with just getting on an airplane and getting to where we're going, and it doesn't have to be this luxury experience. Right. And as a result, the price of an airline ticket has come down dramatically compared to the golden age of flying. Yeah, but then it has gone back up since it was pretty cheap. Yeah, but relative to, say, average income, it's, I think, much less than it was and, say, like the 60s. But in the 60s, they were cutting cuts of meat on a cart in front of you. I'm not kidding. There was a carving station that they would move. I'm not kidding. I've seen members of I believe it. I think it's funny. That's the definition of fancy as a carving station. It really is. I mean, it is. The guy had the hat and everything. Yeah, well, you and my extended family agree on that, but it's true. And all of us take our shoes off while we eat our carb meat. But there used to be that there were, like, piano lounges in first class lounge. It was an event. Sure. But the fact that it's gone is because we've all said no, we want to be able to travel for less cost. Right. With fewer frills. Yeah. I just kind of want to get there. I'm with you there, if that's what you think. Or I'm with the airline industry. Yeah. Just put me on the plane and give me there. Maybe throw a whiskey down my throat. Sure. And that's about all. There you go. Banana, maybe. Yeah, if it's the morning. But the people who are going to help you get there banana and whiskey. Yeah, sure. Okay. The people who are going to help you get there, their job has changed over time, but they have not, because they are unsung heroes and have been from beginning to end. That's right. The early days of plane travel, they hired young men to take care of the stewardship of the plane. Cabin boy. Yeah. Like Chris Elliott movie. Yeah, I think that was a boat cabin, but still sure. Still a cabin boy. And that was just sort of the thing. And then this woman came along and you dug this up. It's really great. Her name was Ellen Church in 1930, in fact, and she was a nurse and a licensed pilot. So she had it going on, and she said, you know what? I have an idea. Boeing Air Transport, who would become United Airlines, why don't you hire eight women to take care of you on your flight for three months and just see how that goes? And it went great. And they said, I think we're onto something here. Yeah. She actually pitched the idea because at first the execs were like, no, it's a stupid idea. This is no place for women. And she said, well, get this. How is a man going to say that he can't fly because he's afraid of flying if he knows there's a woman up there flying around? And they're like, Actually, that's pretty good psychology. So they took her up on it, and it became a thing from that moment on. But before her, I have to say, if we're talking gender nonspecific flight attendants yes. A man had her beat by 18 years, a German man named Heinrich Hubis, who was the world's first flight attendant, and he worked Zeppelins, including the Grass, Zeppelin and the Hindenburg. Really? Yeah. Did he die on the Hindenburg? No, he left. Oh, wow. Very few people died on the Hindenburg. I think they were mostly on the ground. Remember? I don't remember because the hydrogen burned up and the people who died were ones who jumped. That's what it was. Is that it? Did we do a show on that? We've talked about it before. Yeah, one of our many, many shortlived video series. Oh, right, of course. So at any rate, Ellen Church changed the face of the flight attendant industry, and then in the course, it was sort of a and this is not me talking here, this is in the article. It was the sexy stewardess phase of airline travel. Yeah. And that was definitely the deal, that you had weight limits and height limits. You had to look a certain way and they put you in just the right outfit, and it was all about sort of, hey, get up there and look good and serve drinks. Those limits you talk about, technically, they're still around. There are weight limits and height limits, but they're restricted to you can't be so short that you can't reach the overhead bins. Yes. They're all practical limits. Right. You can't be so tall that you're just bumping your head all over the place. You have to be of adequate size to fit into a jump seat that the flight attendants sit in. Yeah, but that's it. Back then, it was you have to weigh no more than \u00a3120. You have to be this height, and it had everything to do with looks and attractiveness. Yeah. And you're 32, so you're fired. Yeah. That was the thing, like, very early on, I think in the 1950s, airlines started instituting age restrictions where once you got to age 32, you were no longer eligible to be a flight attendant. You might have a job down on the ground, but you couldn't be a flight attendant anymore because you were too old, according to them. Plus, also, you couldn't be married or have kids. Right. Yeah. It's very restrictive back in the day. Also maybe the most sexist industry that's ever existed. And of course, that's airline dependent. It's not like there was a federal regulation. Right. Yeah. So it all depended. But you need a high school diploma at the very least these days. But they're very competitive jobs to get. Gone are the days where you can just waltz in there with a headshot and get a job as a flight attendant. A lot of people want these gigs, and so if you have a college degree, then you definitely have a leg up these days. Definitely but it's always been pretty competitive. Supposedly. In 2006, Delta announced that they had 1000 openings and got, like, 100,000 applications. But it's always been really competitive because from the beginning, it was viewed as, like, really glamorous. In the beginning. In the beginning. I don't know about from the beginning. So because it's been a really competitive career truck, and because the airlines were run by men who decided that they owned their flight attendants because they ran the airlines. There was in that swinging 60s era of that sexy stewardess thing you were talking about. They were a major draw for airlines. Sure. And the airlines advertisements. So I found something this is in that Travel and Leisure article I found. You ready for this? I am. This is going to knock your socks off. I purposely didn't send this to you because you wanted my socks off. National Airlines in the 60s had an advertisement where they had flight attendants debbie, Cheryl and Karen, and they could fly me. They also had an alternate slogan, I'm going to fly you like you've never been flown before. And these are print ads. Yeah. Okay. Continental. Well, Continental is lame. Branch had one. Their advertising said, does your wife know you're flying with us? Yeah. Pacific Southwest said, you want an aisle seat because all of our flight attendants have miniskirts. And sometimes they drop stuff, basically. And then get this. Eastern Airlines gave out little black books to their male passengers so they could get the numbers of the stewardesses. The flight attendant. Then Qantas had a slogan, ever seen a tickle fight? Crazy. You're right. That's basically the sentiment behind it. And so you've got the airlines advertising this, and then the flight attendants unions are fighting this stuff. Tooth and nails to be treated in a dignified manner and not be fired because you weigh \u00a3122. Right. It's just crazy. This is the way that it was back then. Yeah. You show for work and it's like, hey, honey, get on the scale. And when's your birthday again? Yeah. Terrible. You kind of went to a Bill Clinton there. Sounded a little Bill Clinton. I thought it sounded like w. All right, well, let's take a break then and work on our presidential accents, and we'll come back and talk about post 911 flying. All right. So we did mention that after 911, things, of course, did change. Things change in a big way for flight attendants. Not that they never trained on safety, but I think the training got way more intense. Yeah. Did you see the one I sent you? Yes. From, I think, the points guy's website. Yeah, we should go over that now, actually. So he has a flight attendant insider who writes quite a bit for his site. I don't remember her name, but just look up the Points Guy flight Attendant Insider, and she goes into great detail about what it's like to go through training. And it is more intense than I realized it was, for sure. Yeah. And this depends on the airlines, but they sort of give averages. The average training is seven weeks, but they can be as long as twelve weeks. We're talking six days a week, 12 hours a day. And they call it Barbie Boot Camp because you don't show up in your sweats and tank top with no makeup. Right. It's not like you're a passenger. No, exactly. You're big fuzzy slippers and your pillow from home. Now you show up as if you are there to work a flight. So you have to be in whatever attire that they require you to be in and have your hair done however you would do it, and just basically be game day ready. And then they work you that many hours a day because that's about how many hours a day you're going to be working. Yes. When you might attend it. When you start working, at first, you have very little control over your own schedule, although I get the impression you have flexibility out of the gate. But if you say, I want to work this many days a month, that's the input you have at first until you start to develop seniority. So, yeah, they expose you to that six days a week, 12 hours a day during training for many weeks. So the first thing they do is learn all the safety equipment. They're given written tests that she said that they had to score at least a 90 on 80. I said, they're really weird, didn't they? Yeah, well, she said if it was 80, they had to retake it, so they had to score at least 90 to pass. I got you. And then 80 practical exams where you had to score 100% on these practical tests. And that basically means you're on a fake plane doing the thing. And it's not like you're serving that Diet Coke wrong. It's mainly 90% of this training. 95% of this training. Yeah. That's what she said is equipment, safety, all that stuff. Right. Like the first stuff where they're giving you these tests that you have to score high on is, here's all of the stuff you need to know about the equipment. And then there's the drills where you're showing that you know how to use it. And they simulated emergencies, right? Yeah. Like smoke is pouring in a cabin. What do you do? Did you see that one picture of Emirates Airlines is like the big I did not. Like a third of an Emirates plane. Basically the main cabin with the slide out going into a pool inside, like a hangar. And you're like, they're going to have to go down that slide. There's no way they're not going down that slide. And high heels and everything, too. But they're running these drills. Apparently, this is where most people wash out, she said, was during the drills because it's so stressful. And also, she points out that because this job always has been and still is so competitive that the airlines can choose to be super picky. So they will drop you from these training programs pretty easily and quickly because they know that they can find somebody else who could do it better. Right? Yeah. So you end up with the cream of the crop in the end. Exactly. That's a really good way to put it. And then she says that really the last thing they learn. And the stuff that they spend the least amount of time on is the actual customer service stuff. Like pushing the beverage cart, where they know exactly what to do if sudden turbulence hits. And there's a beverage cart, they are taught less how to pour that Diet Coke or whatever. I think I could do that. The pouring the stuff, I would get so stressed out. The whole thing, I've seen it enough now. We travel enough for work where if, like, a flight attendant was like, oh, my ankle. I could throw on the vest and run beverage service. You'd be like, Step aside, I've got this. I know exactly how they're doing it. I'm paying attention. Would you split the person's ankle first and then take over beverage service? I would split the ankle and then I would get up. Do you want peanuts, pretzels or biscoff cookie? What kind of drink you want? Can't serve peanuts anymore. Sure you can. I watched the other day. What? Yeah. You have peanuts on a flight? Yeah, I think they don't serve peanuts if someone is allergic, but I don't think they banned peanuts. It was my impression they have just stopped. I've been on so many flights, they're like, We've got peanuts, but you can't have them because 13 E is allergic. And everybody's like, now they have almonds. Yeah, they did have almonds on a Delta flight the other day that they're delicious. You had peanuts on a flight? That's like a seala camp. And then I'm a sucker for those Delta cookies, though. I have desensitized to them. I actually just do pretzels now. Those biscoff cookies, I used to be a junkie for them. I like them. Yeah, I mean, it's just a little cinnamon treat in the air, a little shortbread something or other. It's like a gingerbread gingerbread, but it's called Speculose, which is the worst name for a dessert treat on the planet. It says that on the package. Speculose? Yeah, that's the original Dutch name for that. Interesting. I'll tell you where the money is, Chuck. Where's that? I don't remember what airline it is, but they have this Dutch treat. It's too thin, very sweet, waffle cookies with a caramel inside, caramel sandwich. And they say, take this thing and put it over your hot coffee and let the steam from the coffee warm it up. And brother, you were on cloud nine. Who tells you that? The flight attendant, the package. Oh, okay. The flight attendant doesn't tell you that, right. They just go, here, read this package. That sounds like some fancy international type of line. I know. It was domestic. I think it was Midwestern, though. There's a lot of European immigrants from the 19th century. Right. So that would be exerting their influence. Yeah, in all the best food ways. We got sidetracked there. Where were we? We were talking about how difficult the training actually is. Yeah. And that's sort of the long and short of it. It's sort of grueling at the very end, is when you learn just she said that 5% of time you spend is what you end up doing 99% of the time, but you just have to be so prepared for that 1% in case something goes wrong. You can just react on instinct. Well, what made me feel really good was that she said the flight attendants you are flying with are so well trained, and they also have to go back for annual training every year to learn, like, new stuff that the airlines have figured out, learn new procedures, whatever. And anytime, say, like an airline deploys a new jet in its fleet, they got to go figure that out because the safety stuff is in different places, and they need to know this stuff, and they need to be able to remember it and act on it during an emergency. So I guess I didn't really realize this, but any flight attendant on a commercial aircraft that you're flying is capable of saving your life should an emergency arise. Yeah, they talk about they even go through baby birth and training, right. So the next time you want to yell at them because they're saying the overhead space is full, remember that that person can save your life if the plane starts to go down or lands in the water or something. And it's not their fault the overhead space is full. It's all the people who put their bag up and then walk to the back of the plane. Are you talking about the worst people on Earth? The worst people on earth. And they took their shoes off as they were walking back. Oh, man. Why do people do that? I don't know, but I was on a flight the other day, and I've never seen overhead space more screwed up by just a handful of people who did that. It was crazy. Toward the end, people who were sitting in the first five rows after first class were having to go to the back of the plane, and you're just, like, watching them, like, oh, man, you poor person, as you're walking off the plane, and they're just sitting there waiting to get their bag. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. I think when they started charging for bags, that's when everything went berserk, because nobody wants to check their bag except me. I don't mind now. Yeah, it's crazy to me. Yes. I've never lost a bag, so I don't mind. I don't have to sweat it if I'm just going on a work trip. I don't even have my roller bag anymore, and I will buzz market them all day. My red ox. Oh, really? Yeah, my redox shoulder bag. The thing is great, and I can fit everything in there, but if I'm going on, like, a vacation, and I know you think it's heresy, but I will check that bag and relax my day away. I'm not trying to yuck you yum here. If you want to check your bag, that's fine. Or gate check it, that's the good deal because you don't have to pay there. Okay. I have no problem with gate checking it at the plane, so it's just stowed in a handy manner. So you just walk off and they hand it to you, that's fine. But there are very few things that you can do that is a bigger waste of time than standing around waiting for your bag to make it to the bag carousel. I hate doing that, especially when you're ready for vacation to start. Yeah, I don't mind because most airports, my bags cruising around that thing by the time I get the baggage. Oh, yeah. For me. Okay. And that's just because, I don't know, I don't like having to mess with fighting a bag, a suitcase on a plane. I don't like contributing to that whole process. Sure. Much less being a business traveler. Like, you see those dudes that have the roller bag with the big bag on top of that and then a backpack? Dude, that's three pieces of luggage. Yes. Need to merge them. All right. But this is not about just us complaining about traveling. No. All the flight attendants are like, get back to the flight attendant, get back to us. So customer service is the goal of the flight in it to keep you happy as possible. But also they don't have to indulge you once you have passed the point of sobriety or just jerkness. They don't deal with that stuff anymore. Like, they will stop boarding the plane if you are drunk before you get on and have you escorted off. It's serious business. Now, you shouldn't get on a plane if you're loaded. No time was they would get you loaded on the plane. Well, yeah, they don't mess with that. But they're long days. So, like we said, twelve hour days. If you're new, like you said earlier, they don't have a ton of control over their schedule. So you're going to be working a lot of weekends. Everybody's going to be working some weekends. You're going to be doing overnight trips, spending the night in cities. And that can sometimes be fun if you put a positive spin on it, sure. Or it can be a big drag. Yeah. But one thing that I have seen across the board from all the sources I hit for this was that it's up to you how much or how little you fly up to, I think 100 hours a month, there's like a maximum you can work. Right. They probably minimum, too, don't you think, or no, not that I saw. Probably minimums to get perks. Could probably do. Yeah. But I get the impression that that's actually once you've done it for six months, typically when you're hired on for an airline, you're on a probationary six month period on the perks. Yeah, because they don't want just number one, they don't know you from anybody. They've known you for seven weeks. They just trained you. Really, like, I want ten buddy passes and then I'm going to quit my job. Exactly. Well, I saw another thing, too. Apparently buddy passes are like, the worst thing that's ever happened to a flight attendant because everybody begs for them, but they are, like, really, actually bad passes. Like, you're at the end of standby, and if your friend if you give the buddy past your friend and they start yelling at the gate agent, you get in trouble because it was your buddy pass that was being used. You might even have your perks revoked because your friend was a jerk to the gate attendant, and everybody's always asking you for them. So a lot of people don't even touch the buddy pass perk. That's like if you're a country club member, you're responsible for the behavior of your guests right now. Not that I would know. There are other perks you don't know. You've seen Catty Shack? Yeah, but I've never belonged to a country club. There are other perks were, like, family members, immediate family members, sometimes extended family members, spouses. They get the same perks you do, which very frequently is like you just pay taxes on the ticket and you fly for free. That's different. Like, all flight attendants take advantage of that. Some of them will hop on over to Europe or something for lunch. $100? Yeah, maybe. If that in tax. Yeah. Well, buddy passes used to be a lot easier when they didn't oversell all the flights. I used to have friends back in the day. I'd get a buddy pass, fly, no problem. Right. But now you're right. You're in a bad position. Yeah, you are. Do you remember flights where entire rows would be empty, like well, the flight was scheduled, so we have to stick to it. It's strange. Now, what a day. So you're going to be working 75 to 84 hours a month, generally, but like you said, I guess you can't go over that 100 mark. And interestingly, too. Another thing you get trained for is, very sadly, human trafficking. These days, they will fly kidnapped people right in front of people's faces. And so flight attendants now are trained to spot this kind of activity, which can mean, like, an adult who doesn't really understand about the final destination. That's a bad sign. Or if it's like an adult traveler with a minor. And it definitely looks like a little more than parental behavior going on. Like, don't get up and go to the bathroom, that kind of thing. Apparently, that's how it started. There was a man who caught the suspicion of a flight attendant named Sandra Fiorini. She worked for American Airlines. She noticed that, like, a late 18 year old, teenager age guy who had an infant that still had the umbilical cord attached and, like, a bottle of milk in his pocket and a couple of diapers stuffed in his pocket, his other pocket. So, like, this baby was stolen or bought or something. And she started looking into it and found out that this is actually a big deal, and teamed up with a woman named Deborah Sigmund who founded Innocence at Risk. And they kind of started this program where now, if you're a flight attendant, one of the things you're trained for is to recognize human trafficking. And actually, a bunch of flight attendants volunteered at the last Super Bowl to look for human trafficking because apparently Super Bowl is, like, also the Super Bowl of prostitution and human trafficking in the world every year. So flight attendants went to the Super Bowl and volunteered to kind of, like, keep tabs on things and call out people they thought were amazing trafficked. You mean a big game? Yeah. Somebody wrote in and said, you can call it Super Bowl. You can't do anything. Yes. You can't advertise anything using those words. Right. I don't think we can't sell our Super Bowl bobble heads that we have a box full of. Too bad. It was a poor investment. Should we take our final break here? Yeah. All right, let's do that. We'll talk a little bit more about some of the perks and drawbacks right after this. All right, let's talk about pay. You don't make a ton of money. I think starting salary is in the mid thirty s oh, no. I know. For a flight attendant, no, starting salary can be like 18. Oh, really? The median in 2012 or 13 or 14 was 37. The median? Yeah. That's the middle. That's not much. That's why it's such an attractive job for people who are just looking for extra money. Right. If you're a parent and you have so much control over your schedule, once you start to get some seniority, it's a great way to spend your money. If you're a soap opera star, it's a great extra job. Did you see that? Yeah. What was her name? Kate Linda, who plays Esther Valentine on The Young and the Restless. Who knew? She's a flight attendant as well, for, like, 32 years. And she's done them both for about the same amount of time. Yeah. And she does it, like, every week. Yeah. And she says it helps keep her grounded. No pun intended. Yes. She didn't say the no pun intended part. Yeah, but she gets those perks. She gets to fly to europe for lunch if she wants. Right. And act on soaps. Right. So good for her. And that's not to say that median, I mean, obviously that's the middle amount, but it goes much higher than that. And it all has to do all perks, all pay, all benefits, all that stuff. The flight attendant profession is all about seniority. Oh, sure. And there are plenty of flight attendants out there who are career flight attendants. Like Kate Linder. She's been doing it for 32 years. There's another woman named Candy Bruton who is a 43 year veteran of flight attendant. You can make a long, happy career out of it now that they've taken the age restriction off. Yes. $21.23. A few years ago, an hour was the rate for a first year attendant. Right. So plus $20 an hour. But here's the thing, and this is something that I bet 95% of human beings don't realize. When you are sitting on that plane and those doors are open and they're getting you your first class drinks or they're helping you put your bags away and you're complaining because you don't have a pillow. And coach, they're doing that for almost free because the only hours that they get paid for at that rate are flight hours. Yeah. When it says the boarding doors now closed, the clock just started for them. Never knew that. No, I didn't either. They get something like, depending on the airline, maybe 150 to 195 an hour for the pre boarding stuff while the door is open. Stuff, I guess is what you call it. Yeah. So, like next time you're sitting on the tarmac and you're delayed for 2 hours and you're super grumpy, think about that flight attendant who is getting paid almost nothing to be dealing with how grumpy you are. If the boring door is closed, they would be getting paid, right? No, they said in here, if flight delays, flight time is the only thing that matters. I thought it was once the door is closed. So if the door is closed and you go out to the runway and you're just sitting there on the runway, they would be getting paid. I thought that's not what it said. Somebody let us know because it said in the article if next time you're on a big flight delay, think about the fact that they're not making any money. And that's probably why the airline put it in there, because can you imagine how much money they would have to pay in flight attendance for flight delays? Yeah, but it's not like the flight attendants are just like, I'm off the clock, don't bother me. Once we get into the air, you can bother me. You don't hear that, you know, so they should be paying them for that. Hey, I agree. I think we should bring together and start a social movement here. I wonder why you should tip flight attendants, too. Yeah, that's not a thing you know, the end when they stand there and say, good day, and I hope you enjoyed your flight. They should be holding a jar, as far as I'm concerned. Shaking it. Yeah. Throw $5 in there on your way out. Bye bye. I think that'd be great. You remember Tina Muklau, the hero DB. Cooper? Heist yeah. He tried to give her ten, $20,000, and she said, no tipping allowed. That's right. What a hero. And quite often, flight attendants are the heroes on many flights, whether it is dealing with literally a terrorist and trying to manage that situation bravely, or, God forbid, some sort of incident in the air with the plane itself. But at the very least, those jerks on planes that think they can just talk to people however they want yeah. They got to put up with a lot in a very cramped space. Very early on in flight attendant history, I don't know if we said or not. You said that Ellen Church was a registered nurse, but that was par for the course. For early flight attendants, they had to be registered nurses. Makes sense. There was one named Nellie Granger who was a TWA flight attendant, and she was on a flight going to Pittsburgh, I believe, in 1936, and it crashed, and she pulled a couple of passengers to safety and made it down the mountain to get help and went back up with the rescuers to help minister to the two injured passengers whose lives she saved. And she got $30 an hour. She got a trip to the empire done with her aunt. That's nice. Yes. I got a couple more things. Sure. There's some crazy stuff that flight attendants have seen. The one that gets me, though, is dead bodies on planes that are purposefully brought onto planes, not people who die. Apparently, Singapore Airlines has what's called a corpse closet on their planes to stow a passenger who might die mid air. That's nice. They're in the minority there. I think they might be peculiar with that, but sometimes, because shipping a body is very expensive, it can run into the thousands and thousands of dollars. Yeah. Some people say, well, it'd be cheaper if I just bought a plane ticket or put my mother in a garment bag and just smuggle her body on board and took her where she's going to be buried. Myself. A guy got caught doing that in Miami. In this mental faucet article, the person who was interviewed said her roommate found a mother and a daughter trying to smuggle the dead father onto a flight just in a wheelchair and said that he had the flu, but he was clearly dead and they had to stop the plane mid flight. Wow. Maybe he did have the flu. No, he was dead. No, I mean, maybe that's how he died. Oh. Maybe he previously had the flu. Yeah, he could have been like there's a kernel of truth to what we just said, that's it. Oh, and don't order Diet Coke because apparently it takes the longest to stop fizzing on a trolley. Okay? That's science. If you want to know more about flight attendants, just chat up a flight attendant. I'm sure they'd love to tell you some great stories. And in the meantime, it's time for listener mail. Let me call this PSA about the flu because we had someone, Courtney Harmouth, who is Asconi, who says this, hey, guys, want to basically give you a PSA about how dangerous the flu can be. In 2012, I was a healthy high school freshman. I'm suddenly stricken with a horrible digestive distress, chills, fever, coughing. After a week or so, my parents took me to the GP, and I was told to go to the hospital for observation and get an IV. What was supposed to be one night turned into a month. I'd contracted the swine flu. Oh, my gosh. That first night, my vitals went crazy and I ended up having to be kept in my local hospital for two weeks. During my stay, I developed pneumonia as a complication. Soon after that, fluid began to fill my lungs and I had to be helicoptered to a larger hospital in Madison. She said being in a helicopter was pretty sweet, though. Oh, really? Yeah. Even though I would think being sick in a helicopter would not be comfortable, I think she's a bright side person. Okay. For about 20 minutes, I was only taking in about 30% oxygen. My parents were told I could have brain damage or may even die from my arrival to the larger hospital. I was immediately put to a medically induced coma for eleven days. Oh, my God. I was finally taken out of my coma. I had atrophied and weighted measly \u00a395. At twelve years old, I had to relearn how to walk right and use basic motor skills. I am extremely lucky that I'm completely recovered from the ordeal, did not suffer any long term health effects, and now at 23 years old, I thankfully not had the flu since. I tell this to everyone to say, please get vaccinated against the flu. The flu vaccine doesn't just protect you, but also your kids, parents, friends and coworkers. Really love your show. I want to thank you for doing such a great job about important and sometimes hilarious topics. That is our Wisconsinite fan, Courtney Harmouth. Thanks a lot, Courtney. Glad you made it through that one. That was pretty scary. Yes, we said the flu could be dangerous. There you have it. Courtney just proved it. Everybody, if you want to tell us a great story that is harrowing and amazing, we want to hear it. Or if you have a good flight attendant story, that's a good one too. You can tweet to us at siskpodcast or at Josh Clark. You can hang out with us on Facebook.com. Charleswchuckbryantepystoe, you can send us an email to stuff. podcastHOUSE worksh.com and as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushaneo.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Hey, everybody. 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Can you remember being born? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/can-you-remember-being-born | Some people have memories of very early childhood, but how far back can you go? Is it possible to remember your own birth? Josh and Chuck are on the case in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Some people have memories of very early childhood, but how far back can you go? Is it possible to remember your own birth? Josh and Chuck are on the case in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:56:48 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=16, tm_min=56, tm_sec=48, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=307, tm_isdst=0) | 19705601 | 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. 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It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. You've heard the rumors before, perhaps some whispers written between the lines of the textbooks. Conspiracies, paranormal events, all those things that disappear from the official explanations. Tune in and learn more of the stuff they don't want you to know in this video podcast fromhousetuffords.com hey. And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is the lovely and esteemed Charles W. Chucker Bryant. How are you doing, buddy? I'm all right, how are you? Slightly under the weather, I see. Pad. Yes. Everyone send out their well wishes. You'll be well by the time this consultant probably. But it'll still warm my heart to be well wishes. Yeah, exactly. Chuck, I don't know if you got the email, but we've been asked to mention a couple of shows that are coming out, companion shows that are coming out on the Science Channel. The road to punk and chunkin. And punk and chunkin itself, naturally. Yeah. And that, Josh, is Thanksgiving night, if you're bored, after your turkey on the Science Channel. 07:00 p.m.. Eastern time. Right? Yeah. So can we get back to it? Yeah, let's do it. Great. Chuck. Josh, do you remember coming into that delivery room from the womb with your mom going and you all wet and nasty and cold all of a sudden, and everything's bright and there's people spanking you and you're suddenly a little perturbed? I remember being perturbed. That sounds like last Friday night for me. I'm not talking about any goats being around. I don't remember that. Nor do I. I'm totally full of it. And apparently no one remembers this that's true. Being born is impossible. As far as we know. As far as we know. So anytime you hear somebody describing how they remember being born, you can punch them in the stomach and call them a liar. Did people say that? I've heard it before. Yeah. It's rare, but yeah, people do say that they have uncovered that memory, right? What, through primal therapy? Or are we getting there? You got a little foreshadowing bins going on. I know. That's literally, like, the last thing we're probably going to cover, and I ruined it. Let's talk about this. Chuck. Why can't you remember being born? Especially because they think that infants are able to form memories, right? So why wouldn't we be able to be formed? And what's going on here? That's just weird that our brains wouldn't start forming memories until a certain age after we're born. What's up with that? Why don't we remember being in the womb or sitting on a cloud waiting to come down into your mom's tummy, or being like, a Laotian gunman or something before you got to the cloud? Why don't we remember any of that? Well, we can get to that in 1 second, but we should go ahead and just say historically, that for many years, like 100 years, they thought that we just simply our little baby brains weren't formed enough to be able to make these memories happen. Right. That's a legitimate theory, right? Yeah. I don't think they looked into it that much, though. But I mean, we develop at a certain pace. Like, we don't even have knee caps for the first several months. Two years, maybe. Oh, really? Yeah. You don't have kneecaps pal? I don't think I knew that. That's why baby legs are so weird looking. You just want to chew on them. Right. But yeah, so we develop like we don't come out of the womb fully grown, so it's not the most bonehead, it's not spontaneous regeneration. Bad theory. No, but they didn't for about 100 years, they didn't even look into it much, I don't think. And then for the past 20 years, they've started to well, hold on, what is it called? Are you talking about childhood amnesia? I am. Previously known as infantile amnesia by your favorite, Mr. Sigmund Freud. And guess what? What a surprise. He said that it had to do with repressed sexual urges. Holy cow. I can't believe it. Freud equated something with sex. Everything. Sex, sex, sex. It's crazy. Sure. He said that what we did was we repressed our memories of traumatic, often sexual urgings and formed screen memories to block the unconscious. It right. And by screen memories. No memories is another way to put that. Sure. Because most people apparently can't come up with a concrete memory from their childhood until they turned about age three. Right. That's as far back as most people can remember. Yes, I can remember back that far. My first memory was in my first house that we moved from when I was three. And I remember very specifically a couple of things. I remember my mom wrapping her wedding ring on the back window when it was time to come in and eat. And I remember right before we moved out, we were eating on the floor, the furniture was gone, and the next door neighbor, Billy Bright, came up to our screen door and stood in the doorway and just watched us eat. I remember that. And I was three. Got you. What about you? My earliest memory, I must have been pretty young because I was still wearing diapers. That's definitely less than I was younger than seven. Okay. And I was banging goodbye on a storm window. A storm door. And my older sister Karen was babysitting me and my mom was leaving. That's how I used to say goodbye, so I couldn't talk. So definitely younger than six. Sure. And I was banging on the storm window and just put my arm right through it. And I remember that scene, but that's my cut. And wounded. I was I don't remember pain or anything like that, but I was definitely bleeding everywhere. I remember my sister Karen just screaming bloody murder. She was so freaked out. I love that you were manish enough at that age to put your arm through a storm. Yeah. I was like, It's nothing. Don't worry about it. Karen. It's not a josh door. Right? Yeah. And then I went and started a fire. Well, good for you. So that's my earliest memory, but again, it's like it's sporadic. I can't tell you what age it took place at. Yeah. Well, neither aside from knowing that I lived in that house and moved it through. One of the things that I recognized that as a very concrete memory, though, is that there's no photos of it. Apparently, if you look through family photos, it's very easy to generate false memories. Okay. Makes sense. Or obviously, you can support the memories that you do have as vague as they are, by looking at family photos. But these service queues, there are no photos of this one, and I was wearing diapers. So to me, this constitutes my relationship. Will get to the queues as well in a minute. But what they did figure out in the past 20 years from doing a lot of studying is that they've determined that children as young as three months old can't actually form memories. It's just the fact that these memories don't stick around as long term. Right. And even more than that, they've also determined that we're born with the ability to form unconscious memory. Yeah, talk about that. That's pretty cool. Okay, so basically, we have two kinds of memory. We have explicit memory, right? Sure. Do you remember when we talked about dogs perceiving time? Yeah. We touched on this then, too. Right. We talked about explicit memory or semantic no, I'm sorry. We talked about explicit memory. Right. Or episodic memory is the name of it. Right. And then there's the other kind, the unconscious memories, which are referred to as semantics. So you remember when I asked you in how do dogs perceive time? What you had for breakfast. Right. And you were describing it in detail, which lend itself to it was evidential that that was an episodic memory. Like, you clearly had recalled senses and things like that with a semantic memory. That's where you learn how to play a piano. And you might not remember learning to play the piano, but you can remember how to play the piano because you're accessing a different kind of memory. Right. And oddly enough, if you lose your memory in an accident or something in heaven Asia, you may be able to still remember how to play the piano. I find this stuff absolutely fascinating. Yeah, me, too. Okay, so for unconscious memory, we're born with that. But it does take several months, if not years, to start to develop episodic memory. Right? Right. So how does episodic memory work? Well, are you talking about encoding? Yeah. Okay. Well, the brain, obviously, to create a memory, you need to create a synapse, which is just a connection firing within your brain yeah. Between two neurons. Right. And what happens is, when you have a memory, you encode that memory, that sensory information, into your memory bank, and then from there, your brain categorizes it, kind of files it away like you would on your computer. Yes. And that weird to think about this, Chuck. There are a series of brain cells in your brain right now, right? Just a few that are connected via synapses that are responsible for maintaining your memory of the scent of a gardenia. How mind boggling is that? My brain is melting. Okay, so when you think of the scent of a gardena, you can come up with it, right? Yeah. You can kind of remember what it's like. I'm right there. Apparently, when you smell a gardenia over and over, you can pick up more elements of that smell. More nuanced. Right? Exactly. And you can add to that memory more and more. That makes sense. Right. But also, the more that you think about the son of a gardenia, the more that you recall it, the stronger that memory gets, right? Yeah, I would think so. Kind of like a chef with their palate. Right. But it's like if you train yourself to think of something, or you think of something a lot, naturally your memories of it become stronger because that neural connection through the synapses becomes stronger. Biochemically stronger. Yeah, that makes sense. Like, when I think of MILKSTAKE, I can recall that scent because I think about it on a daily basis. I don't know what that is, but that's like, the second time this week I've heard that. What is milk? Steak? Well, it's always sunny in Philadelphia last week. Okay, so what was that? A milk steak is a real thing? I think it's a steak that's literally boiled in milk. And I get the impression that some old school like from the 1800 got you. Okay, but it was very funny, obviously on that show for Charlie to say it's his favorite food. 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. Anyway, so where were we? Memory. Once your brain has filed those things away, if you want to recall that memory after it's consolidated, you need to retrieve these files like you would on your computer. Again, same way and well, not the same way, but the same theory. And in order to do this, your brain literally retraces those original synapses that led to the memory in the first place. So it pulls up all that information for you. I read another article on memory formation, and that process was compared to wearing a path through the woods, right? Right. You go through the first time, it might consist of, like, some broken ferns or branches or something like that, so you can kind of find your way. But over the course of months or years, the more you use it, the more visible it is and the more easily accessible it is. Oh, that makes, like, forging a trail. Oh, cool. Yeah. All right, so we're talking about encoding because of the original held belief that babies could not encode, right. They thought, all right, well, maybe they have this memory, but they can't encode. It not true. So it says a study with the mobile the little babies in the mobile and the ribbon. Yeah, they're little kneeless baby legs. They took these little chubby baby legs, and we're talking two and three month olds, and they tied ribbon to I guess jute rope would have been cruel to little tender baby legs, right, with, like, a rusty needle and twine. Yeah. So they take ribbon and they tied to a baby's legs and then tied to a mobile above their head. And they found that a baby learned that by kicking their legs, they would make the mobile move, which made the baby's coup and purr, I would imagine. But I thought babies always kick their legs. So I kind of wondered about this one. I had the same idea myself, because later on when they placed the same babies under a mobile, they would start kicking their legs like they wanted to make it move with the ribbon, although the ribbon was no longer attached. And they took from that. They remembered that if you're under a mobile kick your legs, maybe they were saying, I don't have kneecaps, maybe kicking their legs around. Yeah, but that actually raises a really excellent point. Like, I'm pretty sure any evidence that you can come up with, it's like trying to determine whether or not animals are happy. Sure, we express our worldviews, our emotions, everything verbally or through written language, but it's through language. While we're pre verbal, everything is up in the air. It's almost impossible to come up with definitive evidence of anything that surrounds inference. Actually, that's a good set up for later too, with the verbal, but that's just a tease. Okay, just to close on that study though, they found that six month old babies actually picked up that relationship between kicking legs and the mobile moving faster. So this is what led them to think that babies actually gradually accelerate that instead of, oh, we have no memory, and all of a sudden it's my third birthday and now I do have memory. It's a gradual thing instead of a sudden, a rapid growth. And there's another type of memory called implicit memory. Right? Yes. We're born with this, but it's also different from our ability to form unconscious memories. It's controlled by the cerebellum and basically this is like our ability to remember that, oh yeah, we are hungry and we need to eat, right? Or we need to seek out our mother's warmth or something like that. Sure. Like I hear her voice and I know that means that the milk is coming soon, but that also sticks with us throughout our entire lives, so we don't necessarily forget that. Right, right. So I mean, you don't ever forget like, oh, I'm hungry, I need to eat, or I would like to be warm right now. That usually helps me survive, but that's not centered around necessarily a specific event and time. We've yet to figure out how to put things in the context of the timeline, which apparently is where real explicit memory begins. Right. And that's when you need the cues. And that's what we've kind of figured out. Not we, of course, but that's what they have figured out is the death between the babies and the adults right. Is they cannot pick up on the cues from their past and one of them that you're talking about was speech verbalization. Right. So apparently, not only do we use language to express ourselves or thoughts or views or opinions or emotions even, we also apparently form memories using language. Yeah, autobiographical memories. Right. There was this really interesting study that is in this article, which, by the way, is called can a Person Remember Being Born? It's on the site. It was written by the esteemed and now famous Kristen Conger yes. Of stuff mom never told you. Right. And it's a very dense article. I got to say. There was not much fluff in here right now. Chuck usually highlights, like, the most important ones. I'm looking at his article right now. The entire article is yellow. All yellow? Yeah, it's article. So this study, it was a 2004 study, and it found that it was a study of 27 and 39 month old boys and girls. And it found that if children know the words to describe an event, when it happened, they couldn't describe it later after learning the appropriate word. That is awesome, isn't it? Very cool. So apparently our language development and memory formation are very closely tied. And as you'll notice, it was a 2004 study. We're just starting to crack the mystery of childhood amnesia. Right. I got another one for you, too. Let's hear it. In relation to memory, context has a lot to do with it. And what they found in another study was that preschool aged kids can explain sequential order, but sequential order is not the same thing as a timeline of your life. Right. So if you're taken to a circus, you might remember first the clown came out and then the bear attacked the trainer. Exactly. And that kind of thing. But it's not like this happened two days before I started reading the Ramona Quimby series. Something like that. Exactly. And like I was saying, that timeline is what forms our life. Or else we just have a cluster of weird memories of bears attacking trainers and one chapter of a Ramona Quimby book or setting something on fire. If our lives are nothing but a string of memories and hopes for the future, what kind of life is that if we don't have a timeline to fit it on? Good point. That's how we develop our sense of self. Absolutely. And there was another cool stat in here about how it ties to self recognition and your ability to recognize yourself as yourself. And they say that they don't think babies have this skill, and they cannot basically don't have a personal identity until they're about two years old. Not only that, they have no sense of concreteness of the world around them. Right. So I can't remember what age it's a very young age that they start to develop this. But say within the first two months when you're sitting there cooing over a baby, right, and you leave their field of vision, you're gone, you don't exist any longer, and you never did. Well, that's sad, isn't it? So, luckily, that goes away very quickly, because, again, what kind of way is that to live? Don't tell the moms that. Isn't that odd? Sure. Like, you don't exist when you're not in their field of vision. Yes, all that's kind of comforting almost in a way, too, I guess. When you thump them and run away, they're just like, I wish I could be forgotten instantly by many people I meet. And what about the cultural aspect of this? I found this interesting as well. statboy. Yeah, they found that and this isn't surprising for some reason, but they found in relation to memory, that Westerners personal memories focus more on themselves, whereas Easterners remember themselves as part of a group scenario, isn't it? Yeah, it's because we're selfish. Selfish Westerners. I know. Me. Me. And the other cool thing, too, about the parents, they said that parents can and this is really good for parents to know, actually. The more that you describe things to your children as they're growing up, the better they're going to not only be able to recall that, but be able to describe their own experiences later in life, the more detailed you get with your recounting. Like, remember we went to the zoo yesterday and you saw the bear that had the bow tie on, and then the guy took the peanut at them. And where should I go from here? So the more detailed you are with going over these things with your kid every day, then the more they're going to be better off later on in life. And Chuck, you're going to like this little outside research. I read a study, or I read an article on a study, I should admit, of 15 months old, that shows that sporadic napping actually helps us form the memories needed to learn languages. Really? Yeah. So they used a made up language that they taught to these kids. Esperanto. Not quite. Okay. It was like just babble, but it did have patterns in it got you recognizable patterns. And they found that kids who nap more often were able to pick up this language or retain memories of how to speak this language better than kids who didn't nap as often. 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. I think that ties into something we said a long time ago about the brain during sleep. Using that time to file everything away. And that's what dreams are too, right? That they're misfiled. Dude. Yeah, we're just covering everything we've covered in the past. Yeah, we're good like that, aren't we? Should we talk about how toothpaste and orange juice don't mix? That's a classic. I guess that's it, right? I'm done. If you want to learn more about 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. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
Five Crazy Government Experiments | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/five-crazy-government-experiments | Chuck and Josh discuss five of the most bizarre experiments ever undertaken by governments, from transplanted puppy heads to Cold War psychics, in this episode. | Chuck and Josh discuss five of the most bizarre experiments ever undertaken by governments, from transplanted puppy heads to Cold War psychics, in this episode. | Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:52:18 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=16, tm_min=52, tm_sec=18, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=49, tm_isdst=0) | 23843136 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworks.com. Sometimes science goes too far. Matters. Twisted but true, wednesdays at ten on science. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Say, hey, Chuck. Hey, Chuck. That makes this stuff you should know. That's such an old joke. Yeah, terrible. But it's still it's got a lot of stain power. Sure. And little else. It has as much stain power as cat urine. Chuck, do you want to hear the history of the microwave oven? I'd love to. In 40 seconds or less. All right. Back in 1947, a guy named Percy Spencer was touring the labs of the Raytheon corporation when he passed by a magnetron. If he had unpopped popcorn in his pocket, then I'm leaving right now. We'll get to that. Okay. That doesn't count against my 40 seconds. I felt like popcorn popped in his pocket or something. No, he had a chocolate bar in his pocket, and it melted, and he's really what the hell is going on here? So he actually ran and got a bag of popping corn, and it started popping, too. And then he finished the whole thing off spectacularly by getting a pot and a raw egg and holding it near the magnetron, and it exploded into his buddy's face. Wow. Anyway, he figured out the short time it's producing microwaves. No, he lives to be an old man, but he figured out that this is producing microwaves and he put it in an invention. So everybody who has a microwave oven today has a tiny magnetron in their house. He put it in an invention? Yeah. That's a unique way of saying that's. Good for him. Yeah. Anyway, the point of this is that's the Raytheon Corporation, where the discovery was made, and the Raytheon Corporation was largely a government funded outfit, so we would call that a government experiment of sorts. Sure. It's not the craziest, though, Chuck. Not even close. Now you want to talk about some crazy government experiments? Maybe five of them today? Sounds like a great idea. All right, let's do it, man. This is written by Robert Lam with stuff from the science lab we should point out. Yeah. I hope we're not stealing this article. Is he going to do this at some point? I didn't even ask him. I'm sure he wanted to, but it's too late now. What's the first one here, Josh, about transplanting heads onto other bodies? Let's talk about that. Yeah, we can think about it. Chuck, think about the applications of this. I mean, technically, if you don't look at it as a head transplant, you can make the case that this is a full body transplant. It depends on if you're the chicken or the egg, I guess. It definitely makes sense a little. We'll find out when the people write in. This is something that we could definitely use if we could attach this final cord. Yeah, I cannot. Is that the thing that's holding it back? Well, that's the thing that keeps the result from being a quadriplegic. But they said that applications maybe if someone just wants to live, they'd rather live as a quadriplegic than die. Yeah. Okay. Especially if you're already a quadriplegic and you're used to it, but you have organ failure. Hey, that's pretty random. Think about it. We talked about braille. What if you are blind and handless? I guess you use the Ereaders that read things to you. Okay. Out loud. Chuck, this idea of full body transplantation does have its roots in government experiments. Yes, indeed. Specifically, as far back as a US surgeon named Charles Guthrie decided that he wanted to find out if he could put one dog's head on another dog's body. And by God, Chuck Bryant has a picture of it. The two headed dog. Yeah. He actually did this. And it was not replacing one head with another, like you said. He attached he attached a dog's head underneath the chin of the other dog. So they were in fact chin to chin, and the other dog was, like, undergoing right. So you actually did this? I don't know if you want to say it worked because the second head could only law about yeah, they said that there were some just normal reflex reactions and sounds, but not dog type sounds. Yeah. It couldn't fetch a paper or anything. Right. Yeah. So I guess you could make the case, though, that was successful. At the very least. They got a pretty cool picture out of it. Well, blood flowed from one head to the other through the brain and then back out, so that's pretty cool. It worked in a way. You're going to post that pic on the blog? No, it's that way. So that was the first one. It's pretty old timing, right? Indeed. And then we cut to 1951 when the Soviets are saying, oh, the Americans are doing it. Well, we got to do it, too. There was a lot of that going on back then. There really was. And actually, before that, there was an experiment in the 40s. Right, right. This thing is on YouTube. If you type in experiments in the revival of dead organisms, you're going to find a 1940s instructional film esque film that shows people killing dogs and reviving them. I'm not going to watch it then. And apparently well, it's not very graphic. It's more like you have some cyanide dog and then they bring the dog back. Also, supposedly, you can just barely see it, that it's a dog's head that's moving and responding and everything, but it's being kept alive externally through, like, an artificial heart and lungs pumping blood into the brain and back out for circulation. I don't need to see that. They don't show a good shot of it. So it's possible it's a trick, but I was reading a post on it that showed that this stuff was real. They actually did kill the dog and revive it. It was very scientific. It wasn't a joke or a hoax. Right. So we have been able to is that Vladimir? Was that someone else? I think it was Vladimir because it was the Soviets. He was a sick puppy. He was, yes. And speaking of puppy, he did the same dog thing where he transplanted 20 puppy heads with head, shoulders, lungs, fore, limbs, and an esophagus that emptied outside of the dog, transplanted them onto other dogs. Cool. And some of them live. One lived as long as 29 days. And actually, there are some log notes here. 09:00 a.m. Donors had eagerly drank water or milk and tugged as if trying to separate itself from the recipient's body. Nice. And one of them bit one of the staff members, which was my favorite part, and one of them bit the other dog on the ear and the dog tried to shake it off. Crazy. So there were actual dog things happening? Yeah. That's pretty puppy esque. Yeah, and awful. I didn't even want to talk about this. It really sickens me. Yeah. Really? Puppy heads on the other dogs. It's like the cutest, horrific experiment ever. The only way it could be cuter is if they transplanted unicorn heads. Yeah. There were pictures of this, but I couldn't even go there. Well, Chuck, this horrible type of experimentation culminated in 1970 when an American neurosurgeon named Robert J. White transplanted the living head of one monkey onto the headless body of another, and it worked. And he was almost bitten by the monkey. That's how they considered it as a success. Apparently, everybody in the lab cheered when the monkey tried to bite the guy. And then after a week, they put it down. Yeah. So good for these crazy, crazy people. Meanwhile, of course, the Soviets and the Americans were shooting chimps into space. They're going to return again. And, you know, they're up there still. Yeah. Little chimp bodies or bones probably at this point, some in space capsules. Well, you have to wonder what kind of process of physical degradation does a monkey undergo after death in space? I don't know. Answer me. I don't know. All right, let's move on. Chuck, to Acoustic Kitty. More animal abuse. Well, it actually is. And this was courtesy once again of the Cold War, the US and Soviet superpowers battling each other for position. And the CIA spent maybe as much as 20 million, at least 10 million. Yeah. So let's just settle in 15 and five years. And five years to implant listening devices into a cat, complete with battery and an antenna in the tail. Acoustic Kitty is what they called it, and it was a single cat. They alternately surgically outfitted it with eavesdropping devices and tried to train it because, think about it, the presence of a cat is not the most cats wander into places. They kind of go wherever they want. So it makes sense. The logic is there to an extent. But apparently the cat was just a little too willful for this. They figured out that it went off and just kind of left whenever it got hungry. So they tried to surgically manipulate its sense of hunger so it wouldn't get hungry as often. Indeed. And then finally, Chuck, it threw itself under a cab. Well, you know why? It was the acousticity's first test mission. They sent the little kitty on its first eavesdropping mission to eavesdrop on these two Russian men in a park. Really? In a public park. And so they dropped the cat off, and then that's when the cat ran from the cab and got killed. Yeah, which is not funny at all. No. It's bad enough to watch it a cat get hit by a car, but imagine a $10 million cat that you spent five years training get hit by a car on its first mission. That's the part that I think was funny, was the egg on the face of the US. Government. Yeah. And there was egg of plenty, and they kept it under wraps until 2001, when that stuff was declassified. Yes, but still partially censored. I read part of it. All the fun words are blanked over. Right. Like, who was doing it. Actually, there was one part left in there. CIA Officer Victor Marchetti. He addressed the hunger thing. He said they put in a wire to thwart the hunger. I don't even know what that means. Yeah, I read that as well, and I don't know how you would do that. I mean, why are that up? Keeping growling out? I have no idea. Probably. Yeah. So also awful because it involves animals. Chuck. Josh, have you ever heard of zero point energy? I have. Had you before today. No. I hadn't either. What is that? Josh? So, from what I can gather, it's something that comes out of quantum mechanics. It's not supposed to happen under classical physics, but in quantum physics, it does. Apparently, innate energy that a particle has, even after all other external energies are removed, say, in a vacuum. Right. So they figured out that this means that particles have innate energy. But one of the, I guess, more surprising aspects of reducing a particle to zero point energy is that they kind of come in and out of existence randomly, which is not supposed to happen. Sure. But apparently this is especially susceptible to it when you completely remove gravity. Right. And the pursuit of figuring out how to use zero gravity machines to wink things in and out of existence was supposedly a Nazi experiment. Right. And the Nazis were famous for many odd, unproven, unsubstantiated experiments that they may or may not have conducted. But this one was real. The Nazi bell is what they called it. Yeah. So Dr. Cook called it. Yeah. And Dr. Cook is Nick Cook. Right. The James Defense Weekly editor who kind of went off the deep end. I read a book review on Salon of his book, and he was a very respected journalist, but he really got into Conspiratorial World with this one. Yeah, he wrote the book The Hunt for Zero Point where he broke it all down, basically an alleged that this all happened and he's not some crackpot or he wasn't at the time. Right. So he was a respected dude. Well, he believes it's. An SS officer in charge of the V Two rocket program, which eventually got the US. To the Moon. Because, don't forget, under Operation or Project Paperclip, we drafted tons of Nazi scientists, including Werner von Braun, who got us to the Moon. And apparently the guy who was running the V Two rocket program traded this information about zero gravity or zero point energy to the US. And Cook's whole point is that some guy comes up with this real method of using an anti gravity machine for a military application, and he, I guess, came up with a file from someone in the Defense Department saying there's no real scientific or there's no military application here. Right. So Cook's premise was there totally was. And they wouldn't have said that if they didn't already know how to do it. Of course. So he was saying that we knew how to do that, and that the whole Foo Fighter phenomenon, UFO sightings, all that is evidence of having figured out zero point gravity. How about that? It's crazy. And I did a little extra digging around, and I found out there's this guy named Tim Ventura, and he runs something called American Anti Gravity, and he claims this was five years ago. As usual, when you can't find follow up info, it's usually not a good sign. No, but he claims five years ago that a fellow named John Deeren of Sara, the Scientific Applications and Research Associates, who actually have a lot of government contracts, are not crackpots either. They supposedly replicated key elements of the Nazi bell technology. Antigravity propulsion. Right. And they supposedly recreated this, like, five years ago, and they were looking for funding and were too secretive to get the funding that they needed. And it was kind of up in the air, last I checked, from what I understand. I don't know if it's necessarily zero point gravity, but using quantum mechanics, people have figured out how to get discs to levitate. Right? So, I mean, it's not outside of the realm of possibility. He's got stuff on the YouTube. Does he? Yeah, but so does David Blaine. He's a big phony. What? No, Josh, he doesn't. Levitate. It's a trick. What? Let's talk about sex, baby in space. Yeah, sex in space. They have researched this behind closed doors, obviously, although NASA says that they've never done such a thing, but clearly they have because they want to colonize the Moon in space one day, and you got to know everything. Remember we talked about, well, the lunar doomsday, arc safety, humanity, that they were going to have their sexy business up there if they had to wait a century. Stephen Hawking said it's essential for human survival. It depends on being able to procreate in space. Okay. In space, you don't have to be Stephen Hawking to realize that you got to reproduce or else the species dies out. Right. No matter whether we're here in orbit or on the Moon or on Mars or wherever. Right. So, yes, of course NASA would engage in this kind of stuff. Specifically, there was a guy named Pierre Kohler. He was a French astronomer, and he wrote a book in 2000 called The Last Mission. And he said that four years earlier, NASA checked out ten different zero gravity sexual positions on a 1996 mission. NASA says no. And Peter Cole is like, that's stupid. There were ten? Yeah. You're on Earth? No, I'll show you some pictures later. Obviously, like everything else, the Soviets have done the same with their cosmonauts, supposedly. What do they call them? Cosmonauts. No, the research into sex, the type of sexual positions. I don't know. Human docking procedures? Well, that's what Robert called it. I think he put it in quotes. I thought that meant he was just making a ride joke. We'll have to ask him. Yeah, but I love that human docking procedure. Yeah, sure. Russian cosmonaut valenta Valentina Tereskova got pregnant in 1074 by another cosmonaut. So there were some that said this was probably maybe not done in space, but done just to see set up to see what would happen. Like, has a sperm been affected? Has her uterus been affected? Whatever. But it all turned out fine. Their baby was completely normal. Right. So that's a good sign. And some wonder if possibly that union wasn't a science experiment in and of itself, just to find out. Maybe so, but yeah. We have such a little grasp on what the effects of zero gravity have on the human body. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a worthwhile look. It could be a sperm killer. Who knows? It could do all sorts of crazy stuff. Like, remember the circopenia episode where the neurons, the type of neurons that die off and are replaced or taken over by other type of neurons happens the opposite to astronauts who have been in zero gravity that's right. Than it does here on Earth. Who would expect that? Sure. So you got to test it out. Yes. Have you heard of the two suit? No. It's the number two suit. I don't know why. It was invented by an actress and poet, but it was her name is Vanna Bonta, and she invented this suit that basically keeps two people attached. You can put two suits together, if you know what I'm saying, to make one suit. Wow. There are zippers and there's velcro, and there's openings and there's places to go. Cool. Within this suit, each one has a cigarette tucked into, like, exactly the arm. And the idea is to stabilize human proximity so you can stay attached without much effort, so you can save your effort for coitus. How much are they? I don't know if you can buy them, and I don't know if the government said, hey, give me some of those two suits, but, I mean, it sounds like they gave us tang. Yeah, exactly. So let's get the two suit out there and let's get to the last one, shall we, buddy? Sure. The psychic cold war. Yeah. Did you see men who stare at goats? I love that movie. I didn't see it. I loved it. It got like a 47% pretty much across the board, like half and half. It was a good movie. Was it based on this, or was it just fanciful going on with George Clooney? No, I'm writing a blog post on this today. There really was a program that this thing was kind of based on. The characters were based on real life people. Yeah. I'll show it to you. So we're talking about a psychic spies, right? Yeah. Both the Soviets and the Americans were engaged in paranormal research. The Soviets since the then the US. And the 40s or 50s, like, oh, we better catch up with this, and never did. They're reading our minds, so we need to read their mind. Exactly. And there's a ton of applications for this, for the military. Like, for example, if you're manning a submarine and you can't surface, why don't you just send whatever information you need using your mind into the mind of somebody else? Or why get out of bed? Yeah, that's what I would do. That's a great one, too. I just beam my messages everywhere. A man machine interface where we could basically psychically link ourselves to a computer to interact with it. Milky upload or download data. Does this stuff work? That Josh. I don't know. Is it real? It's real that they did the research. They definitely did do the research. And in 1973, the Rand corporation was asked to create a brief study on who was doing better at it. And the Rand corporation said the Soviets. Big time. Right. The Soviets were much more investigatory with the biological, the physiological aspects of this, the basis of it. Whereas with Americans, it was psychology. All psychological based theory and practice were kept separate with America. In the Soviet study, they came up with theories and then tested them like it was really scientific. So if anybody was going to get anywhere with it, the Rand corporation concluded that it was definitely going to be the Soviets. Well, good for the Roos keys. Yeah, they still are. Yeah. And we had operation or Project Stargate going until 1995. Explain. Well, that's remote viewing, basically. And at one point, operation Stargate had 22 active military and or private remote viewers on staff. That's pretty cool. I wonder how much that pays, remote viewing. I bet it pays pretty good. Especially I bet you can pretty much demand whatever salary you want. It's like, oh, yeah? Well, go hire somebody else, buddy. Put on a the Home Depot, those guys hanging up front. See if they can remote view for you. Well, that's about it for crazy government experiments. I think there's probably a ton more on the site, though. Obviously CIA experimented with LSD, buddy. Yeah, well, that's number one on our list. That's why I got a whole podcast that one. All you have to do is type maybe government and experiments in the handychurch barstepworks.com. And that leads us to listener mail. Josh, I got a couple of quick ones today. Okay, this one is from Sasha. A-K-A sparky. And Sasha Sparky says a recent podcast mentioned pike, and that's when you eat things that aren't food. And it reminded me of my own five year old cravings as a young girl, I had an insatiable craving for match heads. Yeah, sulfur. Huh? I got you. I would bite down on the matches and scrape off the heads and eat them. I kept a secret stash of pilfered matches under my pillow. I distinctly remember the salty sulfurous flavor and chalky texture. I'm not sure anyone in my family caught on, and I apparently outgrew it eventually. I'm not sure if this is unique pike craving or not. I just thought I'd share it. From Sasha Sparky. A-K-A. The match eater. Maybe that's why she's sparky. Yeah, I'll bet. Either that or her love of sulfur just developed into a love of arson. And this one is from Tony. And you're going to like this one. I don't know if you actually read this. 01:00 a.m. Tony Rotis he's a business director for Gamma Vacuum. And he says, guys, just thought you might like to know that I am sending an email from a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, and have a couple of meetings tomorrow at CERN. Awesome. Trying to sell them our vacuum pumps. Basically, the Large Hadron collider guy, he's a traveling vacuum salesman, and he just said he wanted to know that one of he is a traveling vacuum salesman. He said he just wanted to let us know that one of the stuff you should know. Army foot soldiers is on the premises conducting business. Good for him. Thank you, Tony. And then he sent back a follow up email after I emailed him and said that he wants Jerry to say hi and she refuses, but he requests it. Is it against a religion? I would respect that, but out of my own self interest and not to look like a jackass, I'm not sure what that means. And that's pretty much it. Maybe a horse winnie a sound effect. Just to know that she's there is what he says. Jerry's going with the against her religion thing, it looks like okay. She remains mute. That coupled with a good horse winning, will get you places. Nay. Is that a good horse? Money? Yes. And it's actually amish for no. Are there questions that should not be asked? Experiments that should not be performed? Doors that should remain forever closed? Sometimes science goes too far. Join me for this new series that explores real life stories of the dark side of science. Dark matters. Twisted but true. Wednesdays at ten on Science. Wow. If you have ever seen the movie The Thing with Two Heads and want to tell us what you thought about it, you just go ahead and send that in an email. Also, if you're going to CERN, we definitely want to hear about that as well. You can email us at stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Want morehousefworks? Check out our blog on the Housedefworks.com Homepage, brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means 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." | ||
449a3a92-53a3-11e8-bdec-4b3a7e07f701 | La Dame de Fer (Eiffel Tower) | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/la-dame-de-fer-eiffel-tower | The Eiffel Tower is one of the top destinations on Planet Earth. It turns out to be a pretty cool feat of engineering as well. | The Eiffel Tower is one of the top destinations on Planet Earth. It turns out to be a pretty cool feat of engineering as well. | Thu, 31 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=366, tm_isdst=0) | 46427405 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Jacques Clark. And there's Charles Brian, and there's Jerry Roland out there. And this is stuff you should know. That's right. The Eiffel Tower edition. At long last. Yeah. You've been there, right? Yes. I love the Eiffel Tower. Neat. It's great. I don't care what anyone says about tourist traps. It can be a little disheartening there at the bottom when they're selling glow noodles and dumb chocolate keys and stuff like that. But block all that out and the Eiffel Tower is an amazing thing to behold. It is amazing. It's also chuck, I don't know if you know this or not, but it is where I developed my fear of heights. Oh, really? It happened on the Eiffel Tower. I was never, ever for a moment in my life afraid of heights until I went up the Eiffel Tower. And it took me, like, an hour to get down because I was so afraid of falling off, even though it's impossible to fall off because there's fencing everywhere. You can't fall off. But I must have looked like the biggest psycho trying to come down the steps of this thing, and it happened. I was, like, 17. I was with my dad and sister. And you didn't take the elevator? No, we walked up the first floor and we got to the top, and I looked down and it was just, like, lights out, just from the first floor. You were busy? Yeah, I've never been higher than that, but I've had fear fights ever since then. Well, I think these days was your dad like, be a man? No, he was never just kidding. No, he just quietly judged me. Exactly. The first two floors, I think, are the only ones you can still walk up by staircase, but previously you could walk all the way to the tippy top. In fact, 1710 steps. Yeah. The first couple of weeks the Eiffel Tower was open, if you wanted to go to the top, you had to walk up, and that took an hour for people to see them. All the way up driving stairs for an hour? No, I would lose my mind because I'd be up so high, I would just start crying. I mean, I would have had heart failure probably halfway up. So neither one of us would have made it. Yeah. No, it would have been a lot, for sure. And apparently during well, we'll talk about that later. There's a little teaser for you. You guys don't even know what I'm talking about. So when you come upon the Eiffel Tower, the first thing you're going to walk upon is what's known as the esplanade, which is that whole big ground level part of the Eiffel Tower with those four massive, massive iron pillars at Cardinal, north, south, east and west. Yes. It's pretty hard to miss them. And they cover something like four acres of footprint between them. I think they're like 15 0 sqft or something like that. More than that. And like you said, they're all oriented to the cardinal directions. And if you follow upwards, it's very tough not to look up when you're at the Eiffel Tower. I dare you to not look up. You have to be a real jerk, like Castanza level jerk, to go to the Eiffel Tower and not look up. Yeah, but you would see that each of these four pillars go up and they come together a little further up, a little above the second platform, and they go all the way up in a single joint tower from that moment on. And it's really kind of neat if you stop and think about what you're looking at. These four post is kind of starting separately and then coming together to form this tower. But it's also just a marvel of engineering. Like, I had always heard that was like an engineering masterpiece or whatever, but until I started researching it, I had no idea exactly what that meant. But it is a masterpiece of engineering, for sure. Yeah. And it's a lovely scene. Aside from all the trappings of tourism, there's a lot of green space around it, there are other monuments. It's right there by the river. It's just a really kind of a lovely scene. Like, if you can manage to find some off hours to go where it's not quite so crowded, which I have done, you really get a different sort of experience. But it is what it is. It's one of the biggest tourist attractions in the world. So it's like you can't go stand on the popular edge of the Grand Canyon without being surrounded by hundreds of people. So don't expect to just sort of keep that in the back of your head. Sure. I mean, it's the most visited, paid tourist attraction in the world. I didn't know that. I believe something like 300 million people have been there, but that's just counting the paying customers. That's not including the cheapskates, like me and you. Me and my brother and sister in law and niece who went and visited and didn't pay to go up. Most recently, we just walked around it and kept walking. I've never been up. Oh, you haven't? You just walked me. Okay. I've been in that thing like three times. Never even had the urge to stand in those lines and go to the top. I'll tell you what, Chuck, you just go on to YouTube and people have filmed before. You don't have to do anything. You have to leave your house. And I saw the crowds on those elevators and at the top, and I was like, I don't need this. I don't like it. I'd rather just walk around and drink some wine and look at it. Yeah, I mean, it's really impressive just walking around the bases of the whole thing. You definitely get a feel for it. And, yeah, if you're afraid of heights, that's all you need to do. So, talking about this thing, there's actually three levels that you can get to. There's that first level where I lost my mind. Then it goes further up to a second level, and then there's a third level. And third level is, like, almost 900ft in the air. Yes. It's about 300 meters, a little less than 300 meters, that third platform. And at each of these platforms, there's stuff to do. It's not just like a steel platform that you step onto and look out, and that's it. There's restaurants, there's shops on that top platform where so many people apparently, like, two people a day propose. There's, like, a champagne bar. There's just a lot of really neat, little interesting details that make the Eiffel Tower the Eiffel Tower. But even more than that, even more than just the glow noodles that you can only get there at the Eiffel Tower, what makes it so unique is the design of it, the execution of it, the fact that it's still around, and then also some of the things that have happened. Like, it's an iconic structure, and when that many people flock to it every year for more than a century, it's going to have, like, a pretty rich history, too. Yeah. I mean, you talked about the restaurants. If you want to eat at the nicest restaurant, it will be the Jewels Murn, and I was just kind of curious about their menu. It looks very good, but it looks so good. It is pricey. Your seven course dinner tasting menu is going to run you about $275 each. Bucks or euros? Dollars. Buckaroo. Okay. And that's without \u20ac230, I think. And that's without wine or anything like that? I think it's without wine with a pairing, but it only goes up from there. So I imagine it's quite a dining experience. Maybe one day I'll save up my bucks and make a reservation. Because if you do have a reservation, you can kind of skip most of the line and go straight there, which is kind of nice. Yes. You can just take an elevator straight to the Jewels for a restaurant. I'm scared because I'll probably never eat there because I'll be too scared to go up. Yeah, who cares? You can go to another great restaurant and just pretend you're 300ft off the ground. Yeah, but that's the point. I don't want to pretend like your feet are firmly planted on the ground. And another cool thing that they have is and this is something that I didn't know because I'd never been up there, is Gustave Eiffel built himself an apartment up top. Yeah. And this thing has not really been touched since then. They've kept it in order, but I think Ed said they had recreated it. But apparently that's the real thing, that it just sort of left untouched. It's got a living room with a table, couch, a piano, grand piano, a few desks, kitchen, bathroom. There is no bedroom, and by all accounts, you probably did not sleep there. But back in the day in Paris, it became quite the talk of the town and just made rich Parisians just see with jealousy. And he was offered huge sums of money from people just to airbnb it for a night, and he declined every single time. He never allowed anyone to rent it out and spend the night. Well, you know, one of the things that I keep running up against during research of the Eiffel Tower is that it was a democratizing structure, because up to the point when the Eiffel Tower opened to the public, if you wanted a really amazing view of Paris, you basically had to rent a hot air balloon ride. That was your one shot at it. And you have to be very rich to do that, to go up in a balloon. That's just the way it was until Gustave Eiffel and then the leaders of Paris and France came along and said, let's build this 300 meters tower and open it to the public. I mean, yeah, you had to pay, but it was a reasonable price, and just about everybody could afford it. And now you could walk up and see these amazing views of Paris that, to that point, had been reserved only for the very wealthy, which, again, I just keep seeing it referred to as a democratizing structure. All right, so let's talk about the man himself. Right. Yeah. Gustav Eiffel, who is widely credited as the guy who created this structure. But it was definitely a collaboration, and he never seemed to make any secret of that. But he was definitely the head cheese on the whole thing. But he didn't create this whole thing by himself. I think you mean the head bree. Very nice. I'm a head cheese, so I could never get over that word. It's terrible. He was born in 1832 and was an engineer by trade. I went to engineering school at Caltech. No. Thought you were going to do that. You want me to say it? Okay. He went to the Cole Central de Arts Manufacturer. That's right. And he was well regarded as an engineer all over France and Europe. Had a consultancy firm, had his own workshop, had his own construction company. And it should be noted that he was an engineer first and foremost. He was not an architect. He was obsessed with function and mechanics and strength of any structure he built, because he built things like railroad bridges, where you really needed it to be strong and maybe pretty second. He did like things to look nice. It's not like that's all he cared about. But he was very big into structure and form and function, and was also a big believer in iron, as opposed to steel, which this thing could have been all steel. Steel was around could have used steel, but for something this big, he was like, iron is what it has to be built out of. That's what he was like. That was his trade. Like, he knew iron, and had he moved into steel, he would have been out of his depth. This is not a project where one should be out of their depth. Right, but then also, steel would have been prohibitively expensive. It was still a pretty new technology. So I thought that was another reason he didn't use steel. But so is iron, and it's a specific kind of iron. It's puddled raw iron to where during the smelting process, you actually swirl it, which keeps the impurities from crystallizing into the structure of the iron. So it's actual raw iron. That's what the Eiffel Tower is made out of. But if you put those two things together, that he's an engineer, not an artist, and his expertise is in iron, all of it kind of culminates into the Eiffel Tower. It makes total sense what you're looking at. Like, it couldn't have been anything else. But it also kind of underscores just how much of a masterpiece it is under those two constraints. Yeah. And he was another little fun fact is when the person that was charged with building the internal structure of the Statue of Liberty died. He came in as an emergency replacement. And he took on that project. And he built that internal lattice work of the great Statue of Liberty. And he also financed the Eiffel Tower. Largely the Paris and France said. Hey. Let's have this contest because we have a World's Fair coming up in 1899. And we want a big. Big tower. 89. 89 what? Essay 99. Yes. 1889. And he got 1.5 million francs from the state as seed money, but it was going to cost about 6.5 million. Right. And this became one of the first sort of what we look at now is how you finance projects like this. One of the first ones to do it like this, a public private partnership. Well, yeah. He went out and issued shares. He started an LLC, issued two kinds of shares, and raised the other 5 million francs to build this thing, and as a result, had 20 years to recoup money from ticket sales and souvenirs and champagne bottles and stuff like that in which he would pay this stuff back. And in that time, he and his shareholders made a lot of money in the process. Yeah, but what I saw was he was such a good businessman that he managed to get all the proceeds from admission and concessions and all that stuff for 20 years from the exposition founders. But then he also, with the people he went and raised the money from, they didn't get a huge cut of that, either. So he made out like a total bandit in this deal. He didn't screw anybody over or swindle anybody. It was just a really good deal that he made for himself, but it required a lot of vision, too. He put his own tuggers in and his own reputation on the line with this one big project. Yeah, it may have been the kind of thing where they made a certain amount of money back that was capped. I don't really know, because his shareholders made a lot of money, too. If you invested in the Eiffel Tower, you didn't do it out of the goodness of your heart. You made some dough. Sure. But I think there was a lot of certain amount of municipal pride in that project, especially with the proponents of the project and the whole design contest to create an iconic structure for the 1889 Worlds Fair in Paris. Apparently, it was at first kind of vague, and I even saw that it was Eiffel himself who suggested that they have this design competition, and if that isn't the case, at the very least, kind of guided the details of what they were looking for until it basically was his tower. The other big competitor was a guy named Jules Bourdett, and he wanted to make his 300 meters tower out of stone, which was total insanity, would have killed everybody. It would have crumbled immediately. I don't know if they ever would have even been able to successfully finish it. Apparently, there's a big push and pull in tension between Eiffel's Iron and Bourdet's Stone in this kind of transition between modern and traditional and modern in the form of Eiffel's Tower. One out. That's right. I think we should take a break and talk about what happened there and delete up to 1889 right after this. All right, so you mentioned that it was a collaboration, and not just in the building of it, obviously, which I think range from 150 to 300 people at any given time. Right. Little known fact. Eiffel did not build it himself. Single handle. He did not. It was designed by other people, too. The initial design was by Emilgir Nice and Maurice Cohen. Very nice. And apparently this first design wasn't just like with anything else. It's not like they drew it up on paper and that was it. It wasn't that great. It was four iron pillars that met near the top, like we're sort of familiar with, and it was connected by grids, but it wasn't that hot. They went back to the drawing board, sent it to an architect named Steven Sevetreyu. I was going to say earlier, you don't need me at all, but yeah, you do. Selvesta. Sure. Is that how you say it? Sure. All right. That inspires a lot of confidence. And he made it really frilly, added a lot of Victorian flourishes. They got it back from him and said, why don't we meet in the middle, get rid of a lot of this stuff, keep some of the stuff. And what they ended up with was sort of a magical little compromise on the final design. Yeah, it was, like I said, a real collaboration. And what came out of that collaboration was just something really amazing. And the fact that each group or each person or everyone involved, they all worked for Eiffel. The first two were his chief engineers, and we're just going to call him sylvester was his chief architect, I believe. And then, along with Eiffel himself, all of them kind of adding to and subtracting and like, I don't like that, or I do like this. It came to fruition and Eiffel purchased the designs from his employees so that he personally owned the design outright, which allowed him to go raise money himself and take in all of the admission and concession fees that he was going to rake in over the next 20 years, too. Yeah, man. I don't know. I looked up the brand worth and the only thing I could find was from like, seven years ago in 2013, the Eiffel brand at that time was worth like $430,000,000,000 euros. I saw that, too. I thought that was in dollars. Was that in euros? I'm pretty sure it was in euros, yeah. But that is just a crazy amount of money. And it's a shame that he couldn't work out some sort of a stake in that early on that could have been passed down to his heirs. Yeah, because he was able to break that in for just the first 20 years. And the reason why 20 years is such a significant number, chuck, I did not know this, but the original part of that design competition was that the structure, the winning structure, was going to only stand for 20 years and then it would be disassembled to make way for something new. And that was really in the tradition of World's Fairs. It's very rare for any structures to remain for very long more than a couple of decades after a World's Fair. Because they learned they're meant to be temporary. They're meant to be part of the World's Fair and to commemorate the World's Fair. But then you have more World's Fairs that come along and progress is to be made. And so the old structures get torn down and new ones get built in their place. So the Eiffel Tower was going to just live for 20 years and then be disassembled. Yeah. I bet you that does have something to do with it, because if you look at any most World's Fair structures over the years, they do end up looking very dated. Like, this is the only one I can think of that really had this indelible iconic design, and they probably just don't want that reminder of the Knoxville world spare 25 years later. Looks really kind of silly. Right? Well, the Suns fear and is still around. Is it? Yes, as far as I know. Knoxville? Yeah, it was Knoxville with the Sunsphere. I'm almost positive. But there was another building built. I mean, like, if you look at some of the buildings that were built for this Paris Exposition in 1889, these are like major huge buildings that today we would spend untold numbers, like countless money to preserve and keep from crumbling. They just tore them down for 20 years. There's one called the Gallery Day Machine, and some critics say that it was actually an even greater masterpiece of iron work and modernity than the Eiffel Tower itself. They tore it down in 1910. Wow. Yeah. So that's just kind of how it was with the World Fair, and that's how it was supposed to be with the Eiffel Tower. But if you start to dive into how the Eiffel Tower was constructed, it's abundantly clear that Gustave Eiffel never intended for his tower to be taken down. He built that thing. Ford Tough, man. If you want to make a French person's HeadSpin, tell them that the Eiffel Tower is built for tough. Oh, my God. I was trying to think of a French car. What's that one? The Renault? Yes, Renault tough. Lacar tough. They start construction in January of 1887. Obviously, that's a pretty tight timetable to pull something like this off before the World's Fair, and it came down to the wire. But they started building the tower itself in July 1887. They were building that might not make sense, but they were doing those foundations. It took a long time just to get the foundation work done. And he had a manufacturing warehouse and facility about 6 km away, so most of it was built there in pieces. They would bring it over and ship it over to the site to kind of assemble it and put it together. And this thing is right by the river, so you don't have the most stable land base in which to drill down. And they ended up did we do it showing tunnels, or was it just it must have been bridges or something, because I think we talked about the Brooklyn Bridge being built like this. Yes, it may have been it, or maybe it was the New York Aqueduct, I don't know. But basically, they had to do sort of the same things. They had to go under sea level, so they had to work in these compressed air chambers, which was very dangerous. And they ended up only losing one human life during the construction, which is remarkable. It is remarkable. And this thing was also completed in record time, too. You said it was a tight schedule to build this thing in 26 months today would be impressive. They did this in the 1880s and only lost one worker. Part of that was because Gustave Eiffel himself was well known for basically being an additional foreman on the job site. He was not one of these guys who went and smoked cigars and just hung out all day at the country club with his buddies. He was hands on on his most important projects. And the Eiffel Tower was definitely one of those most important projects. So because of this dedication to safety and this level of oversight from the guy himself, just one person, like, the person didn't have to die. They're like, no one will believe it if nobody died. So they had one guy off the top. Hi, Pierre. What's that over there? I know. Well, you've been down and pick it up for me. Poor Pierre. So the other thing he had going in his favor was, as far as getting it built in record time, was he had a great crew. Like I said, he was a big builder anyway, so he had all these regular workers that were really experienced, especially iron workers, and he was able to pull it off using a method of riveting bolts. Pretty good rivets. Better. Way better. These rivets are the reason why I say he did not mean for this thing to be taken apart in 20 years. So what they did was they use heated rivets. And here's how it works. You bring over this sub piece that's built together with temporary bolts, and then you remove those bolts and you replace it with a heated rivet. And this is on site, like they had blacksmith hammering. This thing on site apparently made quite a racket. And you would heat it in, or you would heat it up and knock it in. And then as this thing cools, it shrinks. And that just cinches everything really tight that it's trying to cinch together after it's cooled. And so you've got two thirds of this thing. Two thirds of these rivets were actually installed on site with human power and hammers. Yeah. And each side of the rivet was hammered into a head. So it's not like a bolt where you could just take off. I don't know how you would get those things apart, frankly. And the seal, like I said, I guess then the seal was so tight because it cooled and cinched them tighter together. And then the actual one of the reasons why the Eiffel Tower is just so revered, it's just incredibly precise. Like, each piece, like you said, was made off site and then maybe partially assembled and brought to the job site. But they were created in the 1880s within a 10th of a millimeter precise. And if they weren't a 10th of a millimeter precise, they were sent back to the factory to be altered so that they were brought into that level of precision. So the entire Eiffel Tower is within a 10th of a millimeter precision. The entire thing. That's just astounding to me. Yeah, and it's really cool, too, in that, obviously, you're building this thing from the ground up, and they use scaffolding until they made that first floor plateau. And then from that point on, that was their new foundation, so they could actually be up there. And the tower itself supported itself from that point forward as they moved up. Right. And this is just so scary to me. But as they worked further and further up, they got steam cranes that they attached to what would eventually be the rails used by the lifts, the very specific elevators of the eiffel tower. And the steam cranes just climbed up and up and just worked their way up the tower. 1880s, and you're in a steam crane attached to the eiffel tower that you're building hundreds of meters up. I can barely even say these words. You would have been the second guy that died because your knees gave up. Exactly. I can't even deal right now. So they eventually finish as the world's fair approaches. It didn't even open. This is how tight it was. It wasn't even open to the public until nine days into the fair, and it took two more weeks for those elevators to be operational. So if you were those first people, you paid a little bit of money to climb 1710 steps to the top, like you mentioned earlier, takes about an hour, and a lot of people still did that, remarkably. And they all smoked cigarettes at the time, so I can't imagine that was fun. That's right. So one of the things about the eiffel tower that I didn't know about was that there was a tremendous amount of protest when it was announced, when the design was unveiled, or the plans for it were unveiled, mostly by the French artistic community. There is a famous petition, again, which I didn't know about, called the petition of the 300. 300 artists, 300 architects, 300 musicians. Basically anybody who is anyone in the Parisian art and cultural scene at the time signed this petition basically saying, like, don't build this thing. This is horrible. It's going to look like an industrial iron smokestack, and we don't want this to mar the beautiful landscape of Paris that has been put together over the centuries. And, I mean, it was a substantial public outcry and kind of a campaign against the eiffel tower that eiffel and the Parisian exposition planners had to deal with. But I guess ultimately, the artists, their protests fell on deaf ears because the tower was made. But one of the great things about it was, in the years after some of those petition signers came out and publicly apologized to eiffel, they said that they got it wrong, that the eiffel tower is just that beautiful. They finally kind of came around to understanding what was beautiful about it. Did guy de mesponthisan? Rick, and no, he was one who never did. He was a very famous writer who would lunch at the base of the eiffel tower very frequently because it was the only place in Paris he could go eat where he didn't have to look at the eiffel tower. Yeah. So he wrote, and this became one of the sort of the most famous put down the eiffel tower. He. Said, this high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this giant, ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of cyclops, but which just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney. PS. I fart in its general direction. Nice. I didn't see that coming. You might not recognize his name, but I'll bet you'd recognize his pen name, jackie Collins. Oh, interesting. I'm just kidding. That's because I made it up. So, Eiffel himself, the man, I'm sure his feelings were a little bit hurt by some of these artists. He wanted to be beloved. He wasn't made of puddle iron. He was not. And I just sort of paraphrase here. He said, for my part, I believe that the tower will possess its own beauty. I hold that the curvature of the monuments for outer edges, which is as mathematical calculation dictated it should be, will give a great impression of strength and beauty, for it will reveal to the eyes of the observer the boldness of the design as a whole. And moreover, there is an attraction in the colossal and a singular delight to which ordinary theories of art are scarcely applicable. And I think that kind of sums it up. It's like, man, this is a massive, amazing, gorgeous feat of engineering. And you can't think of it with your little sculpture brain and try and look at it as that kind of art. You got to rethink what art and architecture are. And I think he's totally right. It's amazing when you look at this thing and you can sort of see maybe back then how it didn't fit the landscape, and people might have thought it was obnoxious, but they were wrong. Yeah, I guess an architecture blog on the Eiffel Tower, and it had it broken down by loads and stresses and geometry and all that, but on one of the pages, it was showing a graph of how wind pressure increases with height, right? And when they trace the curve of the different wind pressures as it went up, it made the curve of the Eiffel Tower. And he said later that the Eiffel Tower was designed by the wind, and that's what he was talking about. Like, they used math to determine what the perfect shape of this was, to have the same wind pressure. So the base is under the same load from wind that the top is because of the taper. So it was like, it's math personified. It's math in science and engineering in iron form. I had no idea about that until I started researching this, and it just made me appreciate this so much more. And it's also really strong, too. The thing can hold four and a half times its own weight. It's never going to fall down. And a lot of people were worried about that. When iPhone was building it, he publicly said, I take personal responsibility if this thing ever collapses. He just knew it wasn't going to because that's how precise he was and that's how smart he was with his calculations and the people he was working with, too. But it's masterful, it's nature revealed, just carved out of the sky and iron. Alright, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk about why that thing is still standing today and wasn't torn down 20 years later, right after this. All right, so if you build the thing to last, like we said, and during that 20 year period as he was breaking in money from Glow Noodle sales, he decides to start trying to make it useful and give it a practical purpose. So maybe they'll say, well, we kind of got to leave it up now. Right? So he started doing all these wind resistance experiments and those were fine, those were all well and good, but it was radio that really is what saved it, when in 1898, a Morse code signal was sent from the tower to another part of Paris and it was a big success. So they put in a permanent radio installation there and all of a sudden they were like, hey, this thing is really valuable, especially with wars approaching, which they obviously didn't know that at the time, but they were sending messages overseas to London and thousands of kilometers away, and they said in 1910, all right, this is actually pretty valuable to us now. The military is involved, it's playing roles in our wars so you can keep it up for 70 more years. And they then tore it down in 1980. Yeah. And that was the end of the Eiffel Town. I'll never forget that day. It was nine years old. Yeah. Do you remember how excited Reagan was? Like, what do you have against the Eiffel Tower, man? And Jimmy Carter just cried quietly. It was very sad. Yeah, I thought that was the right reaction to that. But that's the big split. There are two kinds of people in the world. No, they gave them 70 more years and obviously in 1980, I didn't even look it up, but I assume that's when they said, maybe we should just all agree that it'll probably be here forever. Yeah. So it survived. Even Adolf Hitler, the big jerk, he apparently after the Nazis had occupied Paris for years, as the war was seemingly coming to an end, he ordered not just the Eiffel Tower, but all monuments in Paris to be torn down. And the guy who was running France on behalf of the Nazis, the General Dietrich von Scholitz, just never got around to it. I guess he was kind of resisting. But speaking of resisting, one of the little pieces of World War II history was that the French Resistance cut the cables for the elevators to the Eiffel Tower so that if any Nazi sightseeors on his day off wanted to go up and see the sights, he had declined. The 1710 stairs he wasn't going to take an elevator as long as the French Resistance was around. That's right. And then the Nazis were liberated from Paris, unless you talk to Senator elect Tommy Tuckerbill. Did you hear that? Yeah, I heard all that. Former Auburn football coach, now Senator elect, has said a few times now that Paris was liberated from the Communist and the Socialist. No, they were Nazis. Yeah. There's one other piece of World War II trivia I had not heard about with the Eiffel Tower. There was a dog fight that went under the Eiffel Tower. Yes, people, that's the thing that players want to try and do now as a sort of a dare slash stunt. You should not do that. No, I think it's worth saying again, chuck, don't fly a plane under the Eiffel Tower. I don't care who you are, don't fly a plane, period. If you're a German fighter ace, and you've got an American P 51 Mustang on your tail, you're going to take some risks. Sure. Apparently, the dirty Nazi flying ace thought he was going to shake them by going under the Eiffel Tower, and that P 51 Mustang pilot went right after him and shot him down over Paris. Amazing. They had a dog fight under the Eiffel Tower. That's astounding, because this thing is made of iron. There is one big, big key to keeping this thing durable, and that is paint. It is strong. Iron is very strong. It's also malleable. I think we've already mentioned that. It does flex in the wind some. It shrinks with temperature changes and gets larger with temperature changes. And that's all well and good, but you got to have a really good paint job on there. And I think it's been painted 18 times over the years. And they're on a seven year cycle now, which they started in 1899. And it takes about 18 months to remove what paint they've removed. And it's been various colors over the years. Eiffel Tower brown is what we call it now. But Ed, who helped us put this together with zero irony, I think, said it is often depicted as simply red. I didn't pick up on that. I think it probably doesn't even know that's a band. I think it tastes a little harder than that, right? I don't know. I think he's got a bunch of varied tastes. I could see him knowing about simply red. I don't know, maybe he did mean that it's also been yellow orange, sort of a yellowish brown. And like I said, now they call it since 1968, Eiffel Tower brown, but it's lit up at night. It's marvelous to behold 20,000 light bulbs on this thing. No, 5 billion lightbulbs. I don't think that's right, dude. I looked everywhere. The only place I can find that was in Business Insider. I've seen it a bunch of places, but I guess I could see that. Man. You're probably right on the Eiffel Tower website, it says 20,000 lights, so I'm going to go with that. All right. I'll go with that one, too. Stupid. 5 billion lights. But it's all lit up. Like, they have the lights, and then they also have these projectors projecting light. 5 billion projectors. It's brilliant to look at at night, and I suggest you go at night. It's great during the day, of course, as well, but at night is when it's really special. Right. I looked up their electric bill, and it's apparently about $1.1 million a year, which is not too bad. I guess it's more in line for 20,000 lights. I was like, that's pretty low for 5 billion lights. It's like Al Gore's Electric bill. Wow. Hey. I try to take shots at both sides. Right? There you go, man. Yeah, for sure. Your centrist. So that repainting stuff, it takes 18 months. Did you say that? I did. And they take 15 tons of the old paint off every time when the whole job is done. And I think it's, like, 60 tons of new paint, right? Yes. That is so much paint. It's crazy. But the last time we were there, I remember being shocked that it was brown. I totally forgotten it. And anytime you see it, it's shadowed enough that it looks black or maybe like a dark gray or something. Does not look like it does in person in pictures. Right. But apparently there's an optical illusion where the higher up in the sky, the Eiffel Tower is that part seems darker than the stuff closer to the ground. So they actually do kind of an ombre thing where they paint it great in the same color, but yeah, a graded shade to where the stuff at the top is the lightest shade, and then towards the bottom, it's the darkest shade, so that the whole thing has a uniform color to it. Emily and I always have a running joke that we got from Saturday Night Live. There was one sketch where one girl looked to the other and said, that is one severe ombre. We say that now whenever we see a lady with an ombre hairstyle. Man. When's the last time you saw somebody with an ombre? I don't know. Is that not a thing anymore? I don't see I people don't think so. I haven't seen people either. I guess I'm just assuming it died out because nobody's going to the haircut anymore. We should maybe do a short stuff on the elevators themselves. It is probably a show into itself, but I guess the easiest way to say it is that these are not like any elevators in the world, obviously, because they go up on a slope and then straighten out. So they're built, obviously, just for the Eiffel Tower, and they would work only there, and they work on a hydraulic system. And here's my fun fact. That is greased every day with beef fat. No. From the Jewels Burn restaurant. No, I had not heard that. That's a great fact, man. Yeah. And apparently a lot of the machinery is some of the original stuff from 99 that they have just sort of modernized and retrofitted over the years. Yeah. I've got one more elevator fact for you. So, for the original opening, otis elevator was invited to build one of the elevators. Legendary company. Yeah, I think they actually built three of the ones that are there now. But this is for the exposition. And to show off, to show how great their elevator was, otis sent some representatives up to switch out the cable with rope. And then once they had the cable that was holding the elevator, aloft changed out to rope. They cut it with hatchets to show off how the emergency brake system worked. Wow. Holy cow. Yes. They all crossed their fingers behind their back. Yeah, exactly. But if you look at some of the original drawings, they were like sit down elevators with pews, basically. Like you find in a church, like, a few rows of pews where people just sit down on these things and go up. Now that I'm looking at this list from Business Insider, it also says it costs 1.5 million to build in 1880. $9. I saw that elsewhere, too. That sounds like confusion to me because they gave them 1.5 million francs, and it really costs 6.5. I don't trust anything on this list now. Okay. 5 billion lights. Is that on the list that I sent you? Yeah, that was from Live Science, not Business Insider. Well, the same exact list was on Business Insider. Yeah, that's what we should call them. So I'm guessing Business Insider copy pasted from live science. Live Science is usually pretty accurate. That's why I fell for the 5 billion. I was like, why would I fall for that from Business Insider? Now I understand. I fell for it from live science. All right, well, that's more acceptable. What else do you got? Anything? I got nothing else. Go see this thing. It's worth it. Yeah, definitely. It's worth traveling to Paris to see and then just turn around and leave. Well, Chuck, this is coming out, I think, on New Year's Eve, isn't it? I think so. Yeah. Right? Should we wish everybody happy new Year's now or after listening or mail? No, let's do it now. Okay. We say it every year that without you guys, we wouldn't even have jobs. So it doesn't change over the years. It just gets better and better, and we really value everyone that's listening to this right now in a big, big way. Yeah. Thanks for listening to us, everybody. We hope that we've kind of helped you in some small measure through 2020, because you guys have helped us through 2020. We appreciate you guys. So thank you. Okay, well, since I said thank you to all of you listening out there in podcast land, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this pet turkey. This is from steph T. Hey, guys. Turkey podcast is my new favorite. We used to have a pair of white domestic turkeys that we kept as pets. They slept in my flower bed every night and looked like yard ornaments. I can attest to their superhero as the Tom could hear a bag of feed being opened from a mile away. We kept the feed in a trash can and I had to use the lid as a shield, Captain America style so he wouldn't hop into the can and take me with him. He was a jerk. The female, however, was actually really sweet. And Docile Docile, my special needs son, was just learning to walk at the time. And she would walk beside us ever so slowly and then sit down for him to pet her. I was so heartbroken when she died that I went out in the field and read a Bible verse over her body. She says, don't judge me. We would never judge you for that. That's amazing. There are also wild turkeys in the area and often had to stop the car to let them cross the road. I love to stick my head out of the window and gobble at them because they would always raise their heads and gobble back. And that is from here's a lady coming again to the gobble. I love it. That's from steph T. Thanks, stef T. Is it really Stef T? Well, I mean S-T-E-F hard stock letter T, right. But there was a joke I made in a turkey episode where somebody was named Tom T. Like it was Tom turkey. Oh, really? So maybe this is turkey. She said she gobbles, well, if you're a turkey and you want to get in touch with us about our turkey episode or for whatever reason, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. And again, happy new Year, everybody. Happy new year's. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
c3ed3cbe-5460-11e8-b38c-bb83c8ad85df | SYSK Selects: How the Placebo Effect Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-the-placebo-effect-works | For centuries, doctors have prescribed drugs they knew weren't real – but that still somehow worked. It wasn't until the 1980s that the placebo effect was studied. Learn all about how an inert substance can have a genuine impact on a patient's recovery, in this classic episode. | For centuries, doctors have prescribed drugs they knew weren't real – but that still somehow worked. It wasn't until the 1980s that the placebo effect was studied. Learn all about how an inert substance can have a genuine impact on a patient's recovery, in this classic episode. | Sat, 18 Jan 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=18, tm_isdst=0) | 37746823 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen an episode on placebos. It's an episode chock full of facts of the podcast, and yet Chuck comes out with one of the all time rates right out of the gate. But don't stop listening. Then the whole episode is amazingly wonderful, which is why I chose it. So enjoy it. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry the placebo Deucer. No. That was bad. Chuck? Yes. Have you ever heard of the word placebo Deucer? Yeah, I've heard placebo. You know what I mean? I do. Tell everybody. I shall see. No, I will please. I shall please is what I meant. We'll see about that. I shall. Please. In Latin. Yes. Right. So, placebo. Everybody has heard of a placebo, and very famously, the placebo effect. You wonder where that comes from? The placebo effect? No, the word placebo. Oh, yeah. 14th century. It referred to hired mourners at funerals. What? They would hire mourners in place of family members, and they would start their morning wailing with not morning, but as in mour. Right. With placebo domino and region vivorum, which means, I shall please the Lord in the land of the living, but in that it means placebo. This article said it carries the connotation of substitution. Weird. Yeah. That is fantastic stuff. I thought so. This is from Placebos and Placebo Effects in Medicine colon historical Overview by Tissue cap Chuck Green and Clegon cap Chuck that guy is high quality. Oh, yeah. A lot of skeptics. Ted does. He's at Harvard. Let me tell you a little bit about Ted cap Chuck. Okay. Tony Allen. Cap Chuck. I just raised a lot of skeptics hackles because some people see him as a huckster, a fraud, or everything that's wrong with placebos. These people would probably have a problem with us even talking seriously about the placebo effect in the first place. So I don't know that it's a really big deal that I just raised their hackles. Okay. But Ted Kapchuk is a former owes me $50. Right. Let me tell you about Katchuk. Now, he's a former acupuncturist, and he apparently had some sort of epiphany one day when he was treating somebody and they started to feel better before he'd even use the acupuncture. So he started wondering, like, okay, what's going on here? And he started investigating the placebo effect. And in short order, he ended up as an instructor at Harvard and became one of the leading researchers into the placebo effect, which is a really strange journey because Harvard Medical School doesn't usually hire acupuncturists. And he had kind of a rocky road at first. He didn't know what he was doing with clinical trials, and he got publicly called out in the New England Journal of Medicine. And over the years, over the decades. I think this is the 80s that he really started to look into it. He, like I said, became the foremost researcher in coming up with quality clinical trials for trying to get to the root of what the placebo effect is and how to use it. What year was that? Do you know? He's still doing it. But when was this? When he was started, all that stuff. He got called out in, I think, a 2001 issue, the New England Journal of Medicine, basically for not using a control group in this placebo study. Okay, so when you do a study, you have a placebo group, which is your control group, and that basically is I'm giving you real medicine, but I'm giving Jerry a sugar pill. And in a proper study, I don't know who's getting the sugar pill and who's getting the medicine. It's called double blind. Right. So if you're studying just the placebo effect, I should be giving you a placebo, and I should be giving Jerry no treatment whatsoever. To truly, I thought you needed three people, one with a real treatment, one with placebo, and one with no treatment. It's another way to do it. At the very least, though, you need the placebo group and somebody who's receiving no treatment. Got you. You see? Yeah, if we're skinning cats. Well, if you're doing good science researching into the placebo effect. But what's ironic is this whole double blind placebo study came about because the placebo effect was first noticed by a Western practitioner by the name of Dr. Henry Beecher, who in World War II supposedly saw a nurse give a shot of saline to a soldier because they'd run out of morphine. But the nurse told them it was morphine, and the soldier responded to this shot of saline like it was morphine, and from that beacher was like, what is going on here? Started to investigate the placebo effect and ended up proposing the double blind placebo study to prove the efficacy of drugs. It goes back further than that, my friend. Let's hear it. Man try 1785. The New Medical Dictionary. They described the placebo as a commonplace method or medicine. And then a short time later, in 1811, and Quincy's Lexicon Medicine, he defined the placebo as an epithet given to any medicine adapted more to please than to benefit the patient, like heroin. So they were on it back in the early 1800s, which is surprising. Yeah. But, I mean, that's the basis of snake oil and hucksterism, right? Yeah. Well, they call them bread pills back then because I guess it was probably some sort of, like, pill made of yeast is my guess. And Thomas Jefferson in 18 seven, even recorded what he called the pious fraud, and he observed, quote, that one of the most successful positions I've ever known has assured me that he used more bread pills, drops of colored water, and powders of hickory ash than all other medicines put together, and people treated people with bread pills in the early 1800s. It was a thing. And like, they were way onto the placebo effect and the fact that it seemed to work. And another dude named John Hagarth in the early 1800s actually started performing the first studies on placebo effect. And he said it went back to the Renaissance idea that imagination was the major mediator between body and mind, which is starting to be proven as possibly correct. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. And in the 1930 is when they started publishing papers on the placebo and actually doing clinical trials. And they said one of their points in the 1930s, with confidence aroused in a treatment, the encouragement afforded by a new procedure, even, like, just people getting treated in a new way, people would say, oh, this is going to work. Right. And maybe he did work. And then we're up to the 40s where Beecher comes along, notices the placebo effect himself, ultimately comes up with the double blind placebo based study. And what's ironic about that is the placebo based double blind study ultimately has split back off into the study of placebo again, because there are so many trials where the placebo was more effective than the drug, even though the drug worked, but the placebo worked even better. And finally, in the 1990s, people were like, what is going on here? We need to study this thing in and of itself. Well, yeah, because one of the things I had no idea, I thought placebos were only used in studies for efficacy rates. I did not know that. There are doctors always have been and still are prescribing placebos as medicine unknowingly, even though they're not supposed to. We'll get to that later. No knowingly, no unknowingly for the patient. Right. Even though they're supposed to tell the patient, yeah, we'll get to that towards the end. But I had no idea that they were prescribing placebos to people. Yeah. And in their defense, a lot of times doctors are carrying on a tradition where they don't have anything else to prescribe. But if they say that to their patient, the patient is going to go off and suffer. So at the very least, they can use the last ditch attempt of saying psychological trickery. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not knocking it. I just was surprised to learn that that still happened. And I'm wondering if I've ever been given a placebo. And it makes me feel bum as a patient to say, like, yeah, man, whatever you gave me really helped. And the doctor's like, because it's the same thing as that high school prank of, like, giving somebody nonalcoholic beer and telling it's a real beer and watching them make a jerk out of themselves getting drunk. It's exactly the same thing. So let's talk about placebo. We assume that everybody knows what placebo is, but let's define it a little more clearly. The placebo effect, specifically is the very real phenomenon that people, when given a pill or some sort of medical intervention that feel better. Yes, they feel better even though what they've been given is not medicine and was not actually a real intervention. Yeah. And the placebo is the pill itself. That is the placebo and the effect is what you just described. Right. And it doesn't have to be a pill. It can be an injection. It can be fake surgery. True. And it doesn't even have to be pharmacologically inert. It can be a vitamin or like an aspirin, even though some argue that's not a true placebo. But sometimes that's what the doctor will give you and call it medication. But very often, things like a sugar pill, like you said, pharmacologically inert and astoundingly, depending on the size of the pill, the shape of the pill, the color of the pill, people will have different effects and responses to these things that are just sugar. So there's some really strange psychological things going on here. And at first, for a long time, everybody just kind of assumed it was just psychology, that we were tricking ourselves into feeling better or we hadn't really felt bad in the first place, and we were being tricked into not feeling bad any longer or not thinking we were feeling bad anymore. Like an offshoot of hypochondria, maybe. Very much so. Yeah. This article says they've been shown to work in about 30% of patients that's based on Beaches finding it was, like 35.2. Yeah, that's what he found out in 1955. That's what they're still basing that on. Yeah, but there's been other studies that have gone back through Beaches studies and said, no, not that much. Other people have found up to 60% respond to it. Right. And basically one of the big questions is, is it a psychological effect or are there actual physical responses that are going on? And there's been a lot of research lately that's pretty interesting, I think. Right. So like we were saying, the initial idea was that it was all psychological. Right? Yeah. Well, I guess we can talk about the two effects. The subject expectancy effect, which is basically, if you know the result ahead of time and the pill you're going to take, you're going to end up feeling that result. Right. That's what a blind study seeks to prevent, is a subject expectancy effect and also the observer expectancy effect, which is what a double blind study seeks to prevent. Yeah. And that's important because it's different, because it's all self reported. Right. Which is always a little hinky. Right. So the other idea, if it has a psychological basis, is that it's classical conditioning right. That we are raised from birth to think that if somebody gives you a pill, you're going to respond to it because it has medicine. Yeah. And that is not self reported. That is actually seeing physical responses. Right. And with classical conditioning established very famously by Pavlov and his dogs. Right. I mean, you're responding physically to a psychological stimulus. Yes. Right. So you are getting a physiological response. So classical conditioning eventually kind of came to be viewed as the more reasonable explanation for what was going on. Right. Because study after study after study has shown that we are having a physical reaction to these inert placebos. Yeah. One of them in 2002 from UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute, they had a couple of groups of patients. And a lot of the placebo studies are for mental conditions. Not all of them, but a lot of them are in, like, the clinical trials. Yeah, exactly. So this one was for antidepressants, and they had two groups that got experimental drugs, like real drugs, and then the third was given the placebo. They spent a few weeks on these pills and monitored their brain activity with the old EEG wonder machine. And well, it's not the wonder machine. The MRI is the wonder machine. It's a wonder machine, not the wonder machine. Right. And the patients on the placebo reported positive effects and showed greater increase of brain activity than those who had responded to the drug. You know, I remember that it was a study. Yeah. It totally undermined people's faith in antidepressants because it was on the other end of the whole 90s where everybody was on antidepressants and I wasn't. This study came out and was like people were saying, do these things even work? Right. It was kind of taken the opposite way. Rather than, wow, the placebo effect is really something. It was, wow, antidepressants are fraudulent. Right. Well, I wonder what they were trying to it was a placebo study, though, right? Yeah. So it kind of backfired. Or did they even care? No, I think they very much cared because when compared to placebo, the whole point of a drug trial is to show that this drug is more effective than placebo. It's more effective than the imagination. Right. And if it's not, then that means that drug shouldn't be brought to market. Even though now the thinking is more like that's not necessarily true, because we're coming to understand the placebo effect can be very powerful, especially depending on the individual, too. Yeah, that's for sure. The interesting thing about that study is when the EEG lit up, the activity was in different parts of the brain. I think the placebo patients said the prefrontal cortex was lighting up. And basically that says that the brain isn't being fooled, it's just doing something different. Yeah. They responded better to the treatment than the people who responded to the drug. So some people did respond to the drug, but different parts of their brain were activated by the drug than the people who responded well to the placebo. That's right. Even though they felt better. That's mind boggling. It is. So they had they reached the same conclusion but using a totally different region of their brain and they actually felt better. Yeah. That wasn't the first study to prove that there is a physiological response to placebos or last. There was a dental study from the seventies that I think was the first that showed that if you blocked endorphins, which are nature's pain relievers, you can also block the placebo effect. So the people weren't responding to the placebo like you would expect them to a pain reliever placebo because they weren't able to release their natural pain relievers. Yeah. And that's backed up, I guess, by this 2004 study from the University of Michigan. Go Wolverines. They basically demonstrated that it is related to endorphins specifically. So I guess that backs up that study, because if you can block them so here's the thing. That study was related to endorphins specifically. Other studies have found that it can be related to how much a person expresses dopamine specifically. Right. So there's like this idea that there's a genetic basis to our predisposition to placebos. But I think that it's depending on the drug or the effect that you're trying to induce using the placebo effect. Because think about it, if you are somebody who naturally produces more endorphins than somebody else, you're going to naturally produce more endorphins when it's triggered by a placebo than somebody who doesn't produce more endorphins naturally. Yeah. So there's a genetic basis to it, I guess. But I think the genetic basis is that the individual must be predisposition to be able to have that genetic response right. To the drug or the placebo and have that, I guess, response to it. Yeah. And like you said, it's also personal because they found that it is even affected by a person's personal experience with past pills. The color of the pill, the shape and size of the pill will have a different reaction because the person maybe took another little blue pill for something else. Sure. And actually, blue pills in particular are known to have sedative effects as placebos. Red pills are known to have stimulating and pain relieving effects as placebo. That's odd that they made viagra blue. Yeah. Like Inhabitantly marketed it as the little blue pill. Right. Interesting sedative effect. Yes. I don't think so, Chuck. Not that I'd know. We've got more stuff about all this coming up. I don't know what we're going to talk about next. It's a grab bag right now. We're back, buddy. And I tell you what, we're going to talk about something that I had never heard of, which I think is super interesting. Oh, I know. The nosebo effect. Awesome. It is super cool. And that is when well, there's a couple of things that is when you are taking a placebo and you experience maybe the effects of the pill, which is great, and the side effects of that pill that you think might be you're supposed to have. Right. You're actually experiencing side effects that shouldn't be there. Right. And then it's a sugar pill. They notice this in clinical trials, too, because when you're carrying out a clinical trial, you have to warn the patients, this drug may give you these terrible side effects. And so they started noticing, like, people who are on placebo were still experiencing the side effects, like physical reactions, like hives and itching and things. Right. So there's a negative side to placebo as well. And no SIBO means I shall harm like placebo means I shall please. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And they found that this is definitely backed up by the idea that it's classical conditioning. They found that people who have gone through chemotherapy can become nauseated when they enter a room that's painted the same color as the room where they received chemo before. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So there's all sorts of ways that the nosebo effect can pop up, but it's pretty mind boggling as well. Yeah. And the nosebo doesn't even have to be just with the placebo. You can experience side effects that aren't on the list of a real drug because of what we were talking about. Because it looked like another pill you might have had before. Yeah. Man, the brain. Powerful stuff. So going back to Cap, Chuck, I'm just kind of a fan of even though I think if you're into long form articles, which I love yeah. Go to Harvard magazine and search for the placebo phenomenon, and it's a profile of him and his work. It's really interesting stuff. But he was saying that kind of in line with the idea that the color of the pill or the shape of the pill will have an effect either on the nosebo or the placebo effect. Right. He was saying that it seems like the basis of the placebo effect is what's called ritual. Yeah. And ritual, it involves everything from the physician's bedside manor to how expensive the patient thinks the pill is, to how effective the patient thinks the pill is. And he did a study where he carried out what was called schmaltzi, like a schmaltzi care, to where he was just lavishing attention on the patient and telling him how badly he felt that they were going through this. But this pill is really effective with your condition, and apparently not just this study, but other studies show that there's a positive correlation between the ritual and response to the placebo effect. So the more you think that this drug is expensive, that this drug is effective, that this physician cares about you, the greater of a placebo response you're going to have. Yeah. Have you ever been accused of being a hypochondriac by anyone? No. It's got to be very demeaning. It is, because it happened to me. Oh, yeah. I went to the emergency room in New York, as you know, when we were up there recently for our trip, I went to the Er. Oh, yeah. Man, that was something. It was something. And it was a result of it was throwing up and nausea from anti inflammatory pills I was taking at the time for something else. I had nothing to do with being sick. Right? And they figured that out, but they kept this guy I called him Nurse Jackie. He was just like Nurse Jackie, except he was a dude. He kept coming by and treating me with things and giving me the IV drip, and I was like, Dude, I'm not feeling better, and I'm not a hypochondriac in any way. I didn't go to the doctor for, like, 18 years straight, right? And I could tell he was looking at me like, I got one of these guys. You're med seeking. Yeah. And I was like, no. And I could tell. I could sense it. And so he finally gave me this thing to drink that knocked me out. I woke up, like, 20 minutes later and felt better. Wow. What was it? I can't remember. It was something to gatorade. No, it was like three different things. It was like a cocktail of stomach pleasing things. And what's the stuff that numbs you? Numb my throat. And I can't remember. Lidocaine, I think. Okay. And it worked? Yeah, it worked. I woke up and I felt better. I said, I don't feel so nauseous now. And they were checking me out and I reached up and I felt behind my ear for some reason, and it felt like a golf ball behind my ear. And it had popped up in the last 20 minutes. Wow. So I was literally leaving. I was like, Wait a minute. I got this thing behind my ear all of a sudden, and this guy looked at me like he called the doctor over. And she was like, yeah, it's very swollen. It's your lymph node. But he wasn't there for that. So he came back over. He's like what'd you say? I said, well, she said, It's a swollen lymph. And he said, that you're a hypochondriac. And I was so mad at Nurse Jackie, I was like, Dude, look at it. It's huge. I'm not making this up. And I started defending myself like, I never go to doctors, and I'm not one of those people. And he was like, I was just kidding. I was just kidding. Yeah. But it totally made me feel like a jerk. Yeah. I mean, imagine if that happened to you a lot too. Well, that means you're a hypochondriac. But now it definitely made me feel and I know he was kidding, but it made me feel really bad, like I'm in there just what's the syndrome? 1000? Is that it? Yeah, we did an episode on that too. Yes. Anyway, sorry about that. Yeah, well, I'm sorry that that happened to you. Thanks. That is BS. But you mentioned the IV. I guarantee you that was just sailing and that's a placebo in itself. No, I mean, they told me that. They didn't say, like, this is the wonder back. Right. But there's basically no reason to give you saline solution. Well, to hydrate me, I guess, if I'd been throwing up. Oh, yeah, okay. But yeah, I guess you're right, though, to see something dripping into your arm, like, surely that's got to be doing something. Well, one interesting thing is back to placebos. There have been studies that have shown that if you don't tell the patient what they're supposed to do, that they don't work as well. Yeah. They even found that with drugs that they know for a fact work. Yeah. If you don't tell them, it won't work. Yeah. They did a placebo based trial with a painkiller, and the painkiller proved more effective than placebo. And then they did another trial with the same painkiller, didn't tell anybody what it was, and it didn't work. Interesting. And then, conversely, this is the one that gets me the study where they are so crazy. I know where you're going. They used an injection that they put into patients jaws in the study, which sounds awful mean to induce pain. Like, that was the point. They were trying to induce pain in somebody's jaw using harmless but painful jaw injections. And they would inject saline into the jaw to keep the patient's self reported pain level steady throughout the study. And then they used another injection and gave them saline, but told them this was a pain reliever. And everybody's pain across the board dropped as a result in the study. Unbelievable placebo effect. I could just sit around and rattle off studies all day. It's pretty interesting. What do you think about Obacalp? Yeah, it seems kids are dumb. You could just call it placebo. Anyway, I think it's unnecessary. Well, Obacalp is placebo spelled backwards, obviously. And that in 2008 was, I guess, sort of invented or not invented, but coined and packaged by a mother, I think, Australian, named Jin Boutner. Australian? No. I think so. Is that an Australian last name? I don't think there's such a thing. And so that's basically placebos for kids. It's marketed. You can buy a bottle of Obacalp and it's for when your kid isn't feeling good, but, you know, your kid's not sick, that kind of thing. Right. And so you give the kid the pill and it makes them feel better. And some people have problems with this and say you're teaching your child that you get relief from pills only when they don't necessarily need to be taking pills all the time. And proponents say, you know what? It's the same thing as putting a bandage or kissing a boo boo. Like you said, these are dumb little kids. Well, I remember growing up with the children's aspirin the orange aspirin. I'm pretty sure those were just sugar pills. You think I ate a whole bottle of them? I was fine. No, but those are vitamins. It was children's aspirin. Oh, they were orange flavored. Yes, I totally remember those. Yes. I think those are probably placebo. I remember the taste. Like, I can still sense that they're good. I ate a whole bottle of them once because I was a little fat kid. You didn't eat and get sick? No sugar pills? I think so, because I even remember I was old enough thinking, like, I probably shouldn't have eaten that whole bottle of those things because it's medicine, and watched it down with the Scotland. That was fine afterwards. Well, they do have legit baby aspirin now, though. Do they? I'm starting to doubt everything. So talk about doubt. There are plenty of criticisms of all this, and we'll talk about them right after this. So, Chuck, I'm bigtime into the placebo effect. I can tell you're big time into the placebo effect. There are people who are not. That's true. It raises plenty of skepticism, which, again, is one of the reasons why my hat is off to Ted Kapchek, because he has responded to the criticism. He's adjusted his methodology. He's doing really good science in the investigation of the placebo effect. I like that guy. Still, skeptics say there are a lot of things that you can use to explain away the placebo effect. For example, it's possible the person was actually a hypochondriac. They weren't actually sick in the first place. Yeah. It's possible that some people get better with no treatment. It's possible that some diseases do treat themselves. They just get better over the course of time. And if you overlay a placebo effect or a placebo, and you put that over the same course of time, it's going to look like it was the placebo that did it, when really it just healed itself. Yeah. Which is why the critics call for studies where there is one group that is not given any medication whatsoever. Right, exactly. Which makes sense. So one of the other criticisms, though, is that if a doctor is saying, and there are, like you said, plenty of doctors who do this, there were studies that found that a 2007 study from the University of Chicago found 45% of 200 doctors surveyed in the Chicago area had prescribed placebos before at some point during their career. In 2008, they did a little more robust 1600 doctors all across the US. And half of them said that they had prescribed placebos. So this is still going on. It's a thing. It's pretty widespread. Yeah. And the criticism is, well, that means doctors are lying to their patients. They're using deception to practice medicine, and that's unethical. So the AMA came out with a guideline that kind of flies in the face of the placebo effector, the idea that if you give somebody a placebo and tell them it's a placebo, that it shouldn't work. Which is not necessarily true. Yeah. In 2006, the AMA came out and said, quote, physicians may use placebos for diagnosis or treatment only if the patient is informed and agrees to it. To me, That means it's not a placebo. I guess it is, but if you know it is, I don't get it. Like, what's the point of a doctor coming in and saying, I'm going to give you the sugar pill? Right. Would you like a prescription for sugar pills? And you say yes. I would. Supposedly there are studies that show the placebo effect is still possible, still works? Yeah, sometimes. But across the board, pretty much everyone believes that if the placebo effect is a real thing, the cat's out of the bag. It is part of the imagination and that you do kind of have to fool the person into thinking that it's a real thing. That expectation coupled with imagination provides the placebo effect. Yeah. And this article points out, too, we're not just saying these doctors are lying liars. Apparently one tack that a doctor can take is to say, I have something that I think can help, but I don't exactly know what the deal is with it or how it works, but I'll give it to you if you want to try it. And people are a lot of people are like, sure, I'll try anything. Right, exactly. That's not really deception. Because if the doctors are prescribing a placebo, he or she obviously does believe in the placebo effect. So he or she does think it could work, but doesn't know how. Yeah. Or if it only really does work and 30% of the population, then you've got a 70% chance of striking out anyway with this course of treatment. Right. So you're back to where you started to begin with. Yes. And again, that falls into what's the point category. Now, again, we should say that a lot of physicians who do prescribe placebos aren't just doing it to toy with their patients because they think that their patient will suffer more without it. Sure. Or they just don't have anything that could be used to address the patient's problem. Like they can't find anything medically wrong with the patient, but just saying that the patient's not going to help. So here's a sugar pill. The other tech that a doctor can take, too, Chuck, is to say, hey, new patient, welcome to my practice. Let me tell you about the placebo effect. And in the course of me treating you sometime during your lifetime, I may find that a placebo will be the best thing to use. Are you okay with me doing that to you at some point? Possibly. Basically, like signing up for my own personal long term study, kind of, as a doctor. But wouldn't you, from that point on, be like, you gave me the placebo. It's a placebo. I know it's a placebo. I wouldn't know which way it was up. I don't know how to feel that's. The drug better, worse side effects none. Yes. And the other tech doctors can take is to knock off early and go hit the golf course. They do that one a lot on TV. That's such an old bit trope. Like yeah. Cops and their donuts. Is that doctors in golf? I think that one's pretty accurate. I mean, in caddyshack, the doctor was Dr. Beeper. He was the one who just got mad all the time, right? No, that was Judge Males. Dr. Beeper was he was just one of the guys, one of the forsome okay. That I think he played. Was it Buck Henry? Was he the doctor? No, I can picture the guy. It's Buck Henry, right? Is that who you're picturing? I don't think so. We'll figure this out offline. How about that? Yeah. All right. If you want to know more about the placebo effect, and believe us, there is plenty more to know about it, you can type those two words in the search barhoustofworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Australian last name. He says dear Josh, Chuck and Jerry and anyone else I should thank And I think we never mentioned other people that support us. Didn't we already talk about an Australian last name? Yeah, that was the joke. Okay. It's called a callback. Got you. I just felt like they listen to the mail. That made me realize that we don't think other folks a lot besides Jerry and, like, Nolan, Matt. But let's do that now. Okay. Like Rebecca. Rebecca. What's your official title? I don't even know what titles are around that. Web producer, maybe? Yeah, I mean, she handles our website and makes everything look great. And Sherry, even though we do our own social media sherry does social media? For how stuff works. Yeah, she, like, throws to us a lot. Throws to us and helps us out a lot. And Joe. Our buddy Joe. Yeah. And that's kind of the crack staff. I mean, we're answering our own emails and we're doing a lot of our own stuff, but doesn't mean we don't have help. You know what I'm saying? No, we have tons of help. So I just want to say thanks to this. That is very nice of you, Chuck. Thanks, everybody. I figured six years in, seven years in, we might as well shout out some of our help. So this is from Alex, and he said to thank anyone else he doesn't know about. And he's from Perth, western Australia, which is nothing like eastern Australia. I'm a 19 year old aspiring electrician trapped in the depths of Western Australia's mining downturn. Due to layoffs in the mining sector, I've been unable to find an apprenticeship, and I would have lost hope if it weren't for you guys. It was just after New Year's, january 6, 2014, when I came across the magical production called Stuff You should Know. At the time of this writing, it is May 10, and I have finished the epic adventure of 600 episodes, plus that's in a very short time, my friend. Yes, it is, it's been an amazing journey and I want to thank you for pulling me through the hard days of resume writing and delivering. Long days of waiting. Previously were mindnumbing, but have since been filled with interesting insightful and overall incredible, enjoyable content. My favorites gene patents, lobotomies and the Masterfully dictated Halloween episodes. We like those two. Those are some of my favorites, although Christmas, I think, is the best. So cue the existential crisis. After you guys forming such an integral part of my life over the past five months, I don't know how I'm going to acclimate myself to just two a week. And we hear that a lot from people who mainline the show. Yeah, there's like a withdrawal period. Yeah. And I've done that with TV shows. I do that with fresh air. You mainline it and then you're like, I need it. Yeah. I would just like to sincerely say thank you to both of you and Jerry and anyone else for pulling me through these times and hope the future contains a stable job for myself. More content for yourselves to pass on to the stuff you should know army in an ever growing fan base that you can both woo with your dulcet tones and enlightening information. Yours faithfully. That is Alex Giddings from Pet. Thanks, Alex. Alex yes. Thank you very much. You can get a job, buddy. Yeah, for sure. If you're in person, you're looking for an electrician contact. Alex he's shockingly good. We're ending on that one. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com. Stuffychou can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffychano.com. Stuffyhudo is a production of iHeartRadio's Housetep 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 killers 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." | |
a668db42-5462-11e8-b449-039427ba7982 | Why There Aren't So Many Hotel Fires Anymore | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-there-arent-so-many-hotel-fires-anymore | 1946 was a particularly deadly year for hotel fires in the US. Fires killed hundreds of people in Chicago, Dubuque, Dallas and, in Atlanta, the worst hotel fire in American history broke out. Find out how they made staying in hotels safe. | 1946 was a particularly deadly year for hotel fires in the US. Fires killed hundreds of people in Chicago, Dubuque, Dallas and, in Atlanta, the worst hotel fire in American history broke out. Find out how they made staying in hotels safe. | Tue, 28 Aug 2018 13:30:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=13, tm_min=30, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=240, tm_isdst=0) | 42273741 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. The gang's all here, which means that but it's time for Stuff You Should Know. So settle down, everybody be quiet. Yeah. The Hotel Fire edition, which will not be chock full of laughs, probably. No, it really won't. I don't know what it is about hotel fires that always fascinated me, but they did. I think it was the 1980 MGM Grand fire that got me. Yeah. But there's just something extra creepy about a hotel fire to me, and it turns out that there have been some big ones and some bad ones, and in this one particular year, enough of them happened that America finally got off its stuff and started doing something about it. Yeah. And also, while reading this, I was kind of thinking, like, why weren't there a dozen more of these that year? Or in any surrounding year? When you look at how well, how unsafe things were and how you know, I know people complain about the government regulating things, but sometimes it's nice to say you should have fire sprinklers and fire alarms or you can't do business. Yeah, that's a really good point. This is a great example of that. You're right. It's also a great example of how people smoking used to be able to just kill dozens of scores of people by falling asleep with a cigarette or tossing it somewhere or something stupid. Yeah. I mean, one of these hotels had and we'll get into the nitty gritty of just how flammable these places were back then. And it's amazing the steps that they've taken over the years to make things safer. But I think one of these places had, like, seven layers of wallpaper upon wallpaper which were all highly, highly flammable. Yeah, they were burlap walls sometimes like stuff that just if you look at it wrong, it will catch fire. It's like, what did you just say? Yeah, I'm catching fire. They were using Firebug special brand wallpaper. It wouldn't surprise me. Well, of course they wouldn't do that. But everything I don't know, everything was really flammable. It seemed like flammable. Dangerous. Pajamas were very flammable. Everything was flammable back then, way more than these days. All the things you smoke in, right. Smoking jackets were flammable. Yeah. Cigarettes flammable. So this one year so there were tons and tons of hotel fires. It was a thing. But in 1946, it just got particularly bad and it was just coincidence. There wasn't anything really that connected these fires, but there were a handful of hotel fires that year that happened quickly enough and were big enough or happened close enough to one another, I should say. And then we're big enough, had enough of casualties and deaths from them that it caught the attention of the public and something was finally done. And it was 1946, when it happened. And the first one was in June? Yes. June 5 in Chicago, Illinois. The La Salle Hotel. So here's how this one went down. It was after the school year had ended. So this hotel was really packed. A lot of families, and still do, if you live in the suburbs or rural areas, would flood into the city after the school year. They bring their kids, they go shopping, they go to the zoo, they do city things, sort of like a post school vacation. And so all of this hotel was full, 1000 rooms apparently were fully occupied. And like so many of these, they started late at night. And the cocktail lounge, the Silver Grill cocktail lounge on the ground floor of the Lace. And the cocktail weight staff had a long standing method of disposing of cigarette butts at the end of the night from all the ashtrays. And they empty the ashtrays. They just dump them in a cardboard box that they kept in a closet behind the bar. Yes. I thought you were going to say they had a way of getting people out of the bar, which was no, usually you crank. What's that really bad band that everyone hates? 38 Special. Oh, no, that's what everyone loves. The Canadian band that everyone makes fun of all the time. Nickelback Rush? No. Nickelback. I thought you can say they cranked the nickelback. No. Although I don't know what that would have done to people in 1946. Their minds might have been blown. Maybe they're banned out of time and place. Yeah. So they didn't Blair any nickelback. Everybody just left on their own accord. But after they left this box of smoldering cigarette butts. Cardboard box of smoldering cigarette butts in a closet. Crazy. In one of the world's most flammable hotels. Caught, like their luck ran out. I can't believe that it didn't happen sooner, but that's what happened. Somebody I think smelled smoke. And very quickly after that, they saw a little bit of flames coming from beneath the paneling around the wall. Right. One of the walls. Yes. No, but here's where mistake number two comes in, Chuck. And this is a recurring theme too, with these hotel fires. Everyone said we got this. And some drunken people went and grabbed a shelter bottle and started to try to put the fire out themselves. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to or whether it's easy to cast stones in the year 2018, but I imagine if I was hammered at a bar at 220 in the morning and I saw a little smoke and a little flame, my first reaction would probably be like, man, let's extinguish this real quick. And not let me run and call the fire department. But that's exactly what you should always do, is run and call the fire department. Yeah, that's what I learned from researching this. Is that's the implication just don't assume that you can handle any fire. That's what the fire department is there for, they're more than happy to come out to your call and deal with it. And you don't have to be embarrassed if it was just a little fire. Sure, they'll make fun of you, but it'll be behind your back. Yeah, but this one was especially egregious because apparently from that moment that they saw those flames and smelled the smoke, it took about 15 minutes before anybody called the fire department, apparently because they were arguing over, or concerned, at least over who had the authority in the hotel to call the fire department, which I don't get. There was a protocol like you had to be of a certain level of management, I believe, to officially call in a fire call to the fire department. See, that's nuts. To me. Yes. I think anybody who sees the flame should be qualified to call the fire department. Right. Yeah. But that was a huge, huge delay. 15 minutes in this place, as you'll see, was a big deal. That's all it took, rather. That 15 minutes. Yeah. It was done after that. Yeah. And they figured out pretty quickly when they ran it, to tell the manager that it was on fire. After they tried that seltzer bottle thing, I think the flames just went floor and they all ran away because they thought that this was bad. And then there was another 15 minutes on top of that. And in the meantime, this La Sale cocktail lounge, and actually a lot of the lobby had just been redone in this nicely veneered wood and everything flammable that they could possibly come up with. And so that 15 minutes was very substantial in letting this fire really get going. Yeah. They said, hey, we have this great new bar and lounge, but we need to ventilate it because everyone is smoking. So we're going to cut a hole in the elevator shaft and all of a sudden you have a chimney. And that'll be a common thread here, is just how many big open areas, whether it be a transom window above the room, doors being open, which happened a lot back then because there wasn't air conditioning in these buildings. Yeah, it's a big point. It just really exacerbates a fire once it gets going. Yeah. And with the loss in particular, the fact that they had cut an air hole from the place where the fire started into a central open shaft going up into the hotel, that's one thing. But leading into this elevator shaft, there were also air holes on every floor because these fire doors that were supposed to close off each floor from the central stairwell have been propped open to allow air to flow through better. Right. And then, like you said, there were windows above the doors that were open a little bit, the transoms, and that was letting in air from the outside into the hotel itself. So the flames and the smoke and the fumes were able to just rise that much more quickly because of the series of little tiny decisions that individual people have made that all came together to turn this thing into a conflagration. Yeah. I'm not sure if that was a little sal or one of the other ones, but they all seem to have transoms, and they all seem to make a big difference because they were largely open, because one of them, they found in the rooms where the transoms were closed, the fire damage wasn't so bad. But in the ones where they were open, they were just gutted. Right. So there was a few things that happened. As this fire is getting really bad, the fire department starts to show up, and ultimately, 300 firefighters from 61 companies showed up to this fire to fight it, which is just an enormous amount even for back then. Especially for back then. And not just firefighters. They're actually people at the hotel who were working to save lives. In particular, Chuck, there was a switchboard operator at the hotel who stayed on to call individual rooms because this fire started after midnight, so most of the people in the hotel were in their rooms asleep. So this operator was calling every room and saying, there's a fire. Get out of the hotel and hang up and call the next one. And she actually died in the fire because she stayed on to call as many rooms as possible. And the fact that more people then die, out of more than 10 people, ultimately 61 died. You can basically attribute to this lady's heroism for staying on and giving her life to tell as many people as possible that there was a fire in the hotel. Yeah, it's amazing. And she had to do that because there was no alarm system, so not even a bell ringing out. I think you said 300 firefighters. In 1000, 946, only three of these fire units in the entire city had two way radios, so the word couldn't get around fast enough. In the end, they got about 60 units there, but by that time, it was just too little too late. But the fact, like you said, this had more guests than any of the other hotels staying there. And the fact that only 61 people died out of the thousand is pretty amazing. Yeah. There's also another pair of heroes who are, I think, sailors. They rescued 27 people between the two of them. They just kept running back into the hotel and dragging people out. Amazing. Yeah. It is amazing what something like that does to people. To some people, it brings out just amazing stuff in them. Yeah. So two weeks later, on June 19, america was still sort of recovering from this news. 19 people died at the Hotel Canfield in Dubuque, Iowa. And it really was eerily similar. Like, it seemed like none of these buildings had sprinklers or alarms. They were all highly combustible. They all had these big open staircases, and the fire doors were open. Right. And an open fire door is not a fire door. No. I mean, they had good fire doors, but if it's open yeah, it's just a really easy place for smoke and fire and air to feed the fire, to just move through. And at the Canfield, I think, they had built onto the hotel. You said this is in Dubuque, Iowa, right? Yeah. They had originally built the hotel in 1891 and then added on, and the new section was doing fairly well. But when the old section, which is where the cocktail lounge was, where the fire started, again, when that burned, that burned substantially. They had to tear it down afterwards. And I have to correct myself, I made fun of the La sale's weight staff for putting the cigarette butts into a box. No one in Chicago would do something that careless. You would have to live in Dubuque to do something that careless, because it was actually at the canfield where that fire was started like that. Yeah. There was an employee who opened that little closet, also known as the cigarette dumping room, I guess, at the back of the lounge. By this time, the bar had emptied out. And this kid, again, doesn't call immediately. The fire department, he runs to find the manager, which a kid working there. Again, that may have been protocol, but you're probably trained to go tell the manager of anything like that. And when William Canfield was a manager, he actually didn't call right away either. He ran to get a fire extinguisher, ran back there. Everything was fully on fire. He went. Yeah. At that point, he knew what was going on. And some of these people burned to death. Many of them on the upper floors were affixiated by smoke. Yeah. And another recurring thing that you'll see is people jumping into nets or climbing down sheets tied together or fire escapes. Some of them made it, some of them didn't. Yes. I think a lot of the ones who tied their bedsheets into ropes and shimmy down actually did make it. But I think ultimately, there were 30 people who were rescued jumping into nets. 27 were carried down by ladders, and there were 100 guests that managed to escape. I think the total number of guests who died were 19 people died. So, again, it could have been a lot worse if the fire department hadn't gotten as many people out or as many people hadn't made their own ropes to shimmy down. But again, this was, like, less than two weeks after the fire in Chicago, and two days Chuck, again, this is making national news, these huge fires. Right. People stayed in hotels. It was like a big deal if a lot of people died in a hotel fire. Two days after the Canfield Hotel in Dubuque on June 21, there was another fire. And this one was in Dallas at the Baker Hotel. Yes. And this one seems to be like the hotshot place to be the luxury hotel in the city. Not only did it host people from Highfaluting, people from out of town, but they had several well to do restaurants and ballrooms and things. So many locals hung out here as well, like the big bands and the swing bands of the would play here, but they were forced to wear stats and hats when they did properly. So this is local custom and this was a gas explosion at this one. So it wasn't the fault of someone dumping cigarette butts or anything like that. Right. And ten people ended up dying in this one injured over 40. And the only reason that this one seemed to have they got away lighter with the death count was that it was in a sub basement and it never fully went through the rest of the hotel. Right. But again, this is so three fires in the month of June 1946 claimed the lives of 90 people, one right after the other. And this has America's attention. Right. But really the whole thing just kind of set the stage for what would be the worst hotel fire in the history of the United States. That would come in December. And we'll take a break and we'll get to the Wine Cough Hotel fire after this. So we're in Atlanta, Georgia. Yeah. Right. Literally. And in the Way back machine. Okay. Because this happened in Atlanta and we briefly mentioned this in one episode a while back and said, hey, we should do an episode on that. Did we? I can't remember why, but we mentioned it. Or maybe it was a listener mail or something. But here we are making good for once on a promise. Yeah. Not even remembering that we'd made the promise. Just stumbling backwards into fulfilling that promise. It may have been skyscrapers cause the Wine Cough Hotel in Atlanta was 15 stories high and when it was built in 1913, it was considered a skyscraper in one of Atlanta's first. Right. Yeah. 15 stores in 1913. There's nothing to sneeze at, especially in Atlanta too, right? Yeah. Is there a website converter for how many stories that would be today? Let's see, it's 50,000 big max tall. Okay, so the Wine coffee is actually still around today. It's called the Ellis Hotel. Now down by Philips Arena downtown. And back in, like you said, it was a pretty swank hotel in the Atlanta area. And this was in December 7. That was the fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor. And there were a pretty decent amount of people staying in the Wine Cough that night, I think. How many was it 1000? No, a couple of hundred. I'm sorry. It was 1000 who were in the La sale, but there was, I think, 300 people staying in the Wine Cough. People from out of town, a lot of them from out of town people who are shopping for Christmas. There was a contingent of high school kids from Rome who were Rome, Georgia much different than the other Rome who were part of the Try High Y, which is a Christian group. And they had come because they were going to take place in a mock legislature. And then there were a lot of vets returning from World War II. There were just a lot of people hanging out in the Wine Coffee that night. Yeah. And this one, we should point out, like so many buildings, and especially hotels at the time, were advertised as fireproof. Obviously, pre 1946, even fires were a problem, and it was probably on people's mind. So they started things like the unsinkable Titanic and fireproof buildings. Things were being touted as safe and somewhat indestructible by this time. Chuck I would have been like, well, I'm staying away from that because it's basically attempting fade, apparently, because when you call something unsinkable or fireproof, it burns to the ground or sinks. Yeah, but here's the thing. The outside was fireproof, okay? So I guess there was some fine print there because as you said, the Ellis Hotel still stands. And at the end of this horrible fire, which we're going to detail, the outside was still okay. It was the inside where all the people and stuff are that matters and was not fireproof at all. Right, so this one the wine, coffee, hotel, fire. Again, it's the worst hotel fire in the United States history. Hopefully, it stays that way forever. But it was started by a mystery. They still are not entirely sure what happened, but at about 03:00 a.m.. On December 7 oh, I'm sorry. It was the elevator operator who was traveling up and down the elevator just doing her thing, and around the fifth floor, she noticed that she smelled smoke. So she bolts all the way down to the ground floor and runs out in the lobby and starts shouting, Fire. And that kicks off a series of events that they're pretty substantial. Yeah. And keep in mind, this fireproof hotel, not only did it have no sprinkler system and no alarm system, like seemingly every other building, there were no fire doors and no fire escapes. So it seemed especially fire prone, not fireproof at all. But I wonder if they were saying, we don't even need that stuff because this building is fireproof. Maybe, but, boy, they didn't think that through at all, because like I said, what's on the inside counts. If the inside is on fire, it doesn't matter if, like, well, the brick is still solid, guys, right. Still standing. The structure is all right. So there are a couple of theories as to how this one started. There were a group of dudes there playing poker, just met up in a room to play a game of poker or play poker all night, and they were on the third floor some people say that it started with a mattress in the hallway outside their suite. So someone that was in this game got ticked off, left the room and set this mattress on fire on purpose. Yes. One named Roy McCullough, who is an ex con, and then a con again later on, who had allegedly seen a guy who ratted him out in prison, and that he'd set the fire after he left the poker game because he was trying to kill the guy and ended up killing 119 people. That's actually the position of a pair of journalists named Sam Hayes and Alan Goodwin, who wrote The Wine Cough Fire, a book. They very squarely placed the whole thing on Roy McCullough's shoulders. Yeah, but that is just a theory, because other people and the mayor of Atlanta, Mayor Hartsfield at the time, did invite fire experts in to look it over. And I think they kind of roundly agreed that it was not some mattress set on fire deliberately because people smelled like burning gas or tires or some weird specific smokesmell, and they thought that there was an accelerant and it was in another part of the hotel. It wasn't near the mattress at all. And so that would explain why the stairway went up so quickly. Yeah, and that was the official Atlanta Fire Department's position, that somebody had carelessly tossed a cigarette somewhere around the fourth floor stairwell and it had gone up, which, I mean, if that's all it takes for your hotel to go up, that's pretty bad, too. Yeah. And the Wine Coffee, I believe that was the one where I had the stairwell going up around the elevator shaft. Right? Yes. So we have to talk about this for a second. They added a central elevator shaft, which, again, connect very easily like a chimney, and the one single way up or down was a staircase that went around the elevator shaft. So when the elevator shaft is filled with hot gases and smoke, so too is the staircase. Which meant that when the bottom floors starting around, I think the third or fourth or fifth floor started to catch fire and smoke started pouring out, it went up. And everybody above those floors was trapped in the hotel up to 15 floors. And when the fire department came out, they realized very quickly, and I'm sure they already knew this, the highest ladder they had could go up to 85ft. Well, that's about eight stories. This is a 15 storey building. So the people in the higher stories were really in trouble. Yeah. And inside this hotel, too, there was a lot of poor design going on. There were a lot of hidden voids, there were false ceilings, there were places where the fire could be spreading and no one even knows it's spreading. Again, these open lobbies and mezzanines open stairways, the transoms really came into play again, with people just getting fresh air into their rooms. Even though they do mentioned air conditioning and the Wine Coffee. It was December. Yes. I'm not sure why either because I can understand why somebody would open the window to stick their head out. But yeah, since it's cold, the transom should be shut. I don't know. Yes. Maybe the room was stuffy or something like that. Well, everyone was smoking, so maybe they just wanted to let out some of their cigarette smoke. Right. Or they ran out of smoke so they were letting everybody else smoke in. It's a good point. Is it? Sure. Okay, should we take another break? Alright. We'll talk about how most people perished and what was done about this right after this. So the Wine Cough in all these hotels, people tried to escape through fire escapes and stuff because they had them. The Weincoff did not have fire escapes like we said. So there were a lot of people tying bedsheets. They were trying to jump onto net sell by firefighters. They were trying to leap onto adjacent buildings from lower floors. And some people just jump because you think that's your best bet. And some of those people actually survived. Many of them died. One very sad story was one person jumped and actually survived because they landed on bodies of people that had died below them. Yeah, it's really tough to get across how chaotic the scene was. Like there were bodies just falling everywhere. The firefighters had nets, but people were jumping in totally uncoordinated ways. And so very frequently there are so many people coming down that they didn't have enough nets for them all. So they had to basically pick who to try to catch with their net. There was a guy named Jimmy Cahill, I believe he was from Albany, Georgia. And he was a hero of the Wine Coff fire because he escaped and ran next door to a building that shared an alley between it and the Wine Coffee and found like some painters scaffolding like a stout board and put it between the building next door that he'd run to and the room where his mother was trapped on the 6th floor of the Wine Cough and got her out and started getting other people out too. And other people, including the fire department, started laying ladders down and getting people out this way. So a lot of people escape from going from the Wine Coffee to the building next door. But other people even climbing across this ten foot alley to the next building to safety were getting knocked off of the ladders by people who are jumping from higher buildings. Like just total chaos. Smoke everywhere, people screaming. Just chaos, man. Whenever my mind kind of like imagines what that must have been like, it just kind of snaps back to the present time as quick as possible. It's just tough to conceive of. Yeah, numbers wise, man, this is just awful. 48 people were literally burned alive. 40 people were asphyxiated by smoke and fumes. 31 people died from jumping or falling or being knocked off or shoved or whatever. And that's the total number. What was it? 119 total. And then 39 of those 119 people were under 20. And I think a lot of them were those kids there for the Mac delegation or whatever. Yeah. Super sad. And the good news is, out of all of this is it's sad that it took this. But after this spate of fires, the government finally was like, we've got to do something here, because people are just, it seems like, left and right, dying in hotel fires. Yeah. What's sad is there were people who had already been writing all of these recommendations of, like, best practices there's. The Life Safety code from the National Fire Protection Association had basically been saying, here's what you got to do. It's not like we didn't know how to prevent losses of life in hotel fires. It's just that people weren't making hotel operators do these things, and so these fire policies stayed local. Right. So there's still, to this day, a patchwork of regulations in a lot of ways, but these little towns and cities were so affected by these fires in 1946 that they started adopting these policies, including things like, you got a hotel, you got to have a fire sprinkler system. That was one a fire alarm system, I mean, really low hanging fruit, but that a lot of hotels just didn't have at the time. Suddenly, they were forced to. Yeah. Fire doors were required then pretty much everywhere. They're required to be closed at all times. Those troublesome transoms that, admittedly, I think are great and love, they were basically prohibited from that point on. Fresh air, air conditioning or no, they said no more transoms. Right. And then fire escapes, of course, were mandated pretty much everywhere. Yeah. And if you look around, like if you're into an office building or something, you ever go down the stairwell? It's totally unadorned. It's concrete and metal, and it's painted. There's nothing. There's no art, there's no carpet, there's no fake plants. There's nothing there. And the reason why is because that stairwell is meant to prevent fire from getting any further. There's nothing to burn. And a lot of that is because of these 1946 fires and the changes in the code. It changed like a fire door. It's a self closing door. It's a heavy door. It's meant to be that way, and it says, doors to remain closed at all times. All of that came out of this. And there used to be a big debate over whether existing hotels would be grandfathered in any time. The code was updated, and that was the custom of the land. And again, these 1946 hotel fires changed that. If you have a hotel and you're doing business, you have to retroactively add a fire sprinkler system now. Yeah. In Truman, president Truman the following year got. Involved and specifically called for a national conference on fire prevention. So while I don't think there were any federal regulations, like you said, it was still local. They did change a lot of the national and federal building codes, at least. Yes, and I think it is still that way to this day. It's localities that are responsible for fire codes. Right? Yeah. And I think there's been, ever since then, an eye on design and safety. Whereas back then it was just like, let's make this the most beautiful thing, I think in that first Chicago fire, didn't even test the paneling and found that the oak paneling that they used was like five times more flammable than just regular oak paneling because it was coated with this special thing to make it look pretty. Right. Like the Veneer, I think they use really flammable. Absolutely. There was that MGM fire in 1980 that was so bad. It came decades after these reforms were made. I don't remember that. Was that Vegas? Yeah, it was a big deal. It was on TV while it was happening. Wow. There's footage of people in the higher floors, like, hanging out of their window and stuff. And there were a lot of people in the hotel at the time. 85 people died. I think seven of those were hotel employees. And it could have been way worse. But the reason it was as bad as it was, again, 119 is the worst hotel fire in American history. This is 85. So it was pretty close to as bad as it gets. But the reason why it was as bad as it was is because the people who built the MGM Grand balked at the cost of adding a sprinkler system when they built it. And the people in Vegas who were overseeing the fire code and enforcing it gave them a pass because they were just glad that the MGM Grand was building there. And I think the fire sprinkler system would have cost less than $200,000 to build in and they just didn't do it until after. Yeah, exactly. That's what I mean. Like that's 1930 stuff, not 1980 stuff. Look right above us, buddy. You see that little fire sprinkler? Yeah, I know. Now it's like, cool to show your fire sprinklers and the piping and all that. Forget your drop ceiling. Yeah. It's all about open floor plans. Which, by the way, Chuck, I'm seeing more and more like of the steady drumbeat against open floor plans is, like, the worst idea anyone has ever had as far as office spaces go. Oh, really? Yeah, they're just attention killers, you know that like, how often do I pester you and bother you? Just because I can lean back and be like, hey, Chuck, shoot a spitball. Right. But they're so distracting, and I predict they're going to be gone in the next couple of years. Yeah. I don't know, man. Remember back to the high cubes or offices I don't know. I have no prediction. Actually, I was going to say I think it's just going to be more working from home and probably it will, but I don't think we're done with offices yet, so I don't know what's coming next. I went into an office building last week that had those really tall cubes that we used to be in back in the day. And it was weird. It was like, man, I remember. I don't know, I didn't like it. There was something about someone poking their head above the wall. gophering? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I don't know. I never liked that. I prefer to see my enemies coming. So I think I like the open thing. Yes, you did. Just be a lot more jumpy with those high Cubans. Man, I hated them. You got anything else? Yeah, one more thing. There's a very famous photograph from the Weincoff fire that won a young Georgia tech student, a pulitzer prize in 1947. He was a PhD student named Arnold Hardy and he lived kind of close by. He was on his way back from dancing, heard about this fire, called and found out where it is because he fancied himself kind of amateur photographer, grabbed his camera, took a cab over there and was the first photographer on the scene and took a very famous photo of a 41 year old secretary named Daisy McCumber in mid fall from this building. Her dress is blown up in her 1940s, pantaloons are showing and it's really a creepy picture. He ended up selling the rights to the AP for $300. They tried to hire him as a photographer, their Atlanta guy, and he refused. And apparently, too, and this is not well known, there was a drugstore across the street named Lanes that was closed and they needed supplies, like emergency medical supplies, and people were waiting on the owner to show up and open it. And Hardy himself kicked in the door, ended up getting arrested for disorderly conduct, but the drugstore dropped the charges even though they made him pay for the door, which he paid for with his photo. Proceed, I guess. But apparently, at least in Atlanta, local police were then required to have medical supplies in their cars for the first time. And he always felt bad. I don't know if this is still true, but as of a couple of years ago, his granddaughter worked at Twain's Indicator. Oh, yeah. And she kind of kept his memory alive. He died in 2007 and said that he was always kind of conflicted, that he got this recognition and this pulitzer prize from such a tragedy. So did Daisy die? She lived okay, although it was hard to find her because apparently I don't know if it was because her underwear was showing, but then it was the 1940. She never came out and was like, that's me. She would deny that it was her, but they eventually found out that it was Daisy McCumber, and she did live. Well, that's good. She lived, at least. Very interesting. I've got one more thing. So with the Weing Cough Hotel fire, when they showed up, it was a one alarm fire when they called, and I was like, what is that? What does that mean? One alarm fire, two alarm fire, or whatever. So apparently the alarm is the number of firefighters and equipment that are brought out. It's the number of units, right? Yeah. Or the number of people, and it varies by municipality. So, for example, I found in Louisville, Kentucky, a one alarm fire is 20 firefighters, five trucks, and two commanders. And then with each alarm, that number doubles. Right. So when the Atlanta Fire Department showed up on the scene, it was a one alarm fire. And right when they got there, the chief turned it into a two and then three alarm fire. And then within another 15 minutes, they turned into four alarm fire. And I think an hour or so after this fire had started, they were calling firefighters who are off duty from other cities, basically anyone who could get there fast enough. And their fire truck came out to fight this fire. Wow. It's a big one. Okay. And that's it. That's all I've got for hotel fires. I got nothing else. Well, if you want to know more about hotel fires, you can search those terms on the Internet, because I don't think how stuff works has anything about it. But that's okay because I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this. Good job. That's my Monica Selis. Okay, I was listening to how board breaking works, guys, and you got into a conversation on women's tennis and the shrieking and the yelling and wondering about Stephanie Graff or Monica Selis. You also mentioned Monica Sellers is stabbed. This is where my useless knowledge comes in, guys. Most women tennis players do shriek. And personally, this Chuck speaking, I think most men do, too, right? I hear a lot of grunting, sure. But he says Monica Selesis was the one that really had a very loud and high streak. So loud, in fact, that many of her opponents would complain during the match, and she would actually get warnings from the chair umpire. They would even measure how loud her streak was. I didn't know that. Yes. That seems weird. Another interesting thing to me is that when Monica Sells was stabbed in the back, she was courtside on the court side, change resting in her chair. The person who stabbed her was not a fan. He was a Stephie Graff fan who was worried that Selas would beat her record. Oh, my gosh. I know. Can you believe that? Did you see the movie about who was it? Tanya Harding. Oh, yeah. Basically. I didn't realize that it happened in tennis as well. Did you see that movie? Yeah, it was good. It was. It was very good. I was surprised that she humanized. Tanya Harding, so well, you know, that was locally made. No, that was obviously made in Oregon. No, like the Golden Buddha Chinese Restaurant indicators there. Okay. Yeah. I thought I was like, is the Golden Buddha chain? Because I think I've eaten at that one. Yeah, okay. You're right. I did notice that. And we had quite a few of the old stuff. You should know. Crew members worked on it. Awesome. Yeah. Cool. So, anyway, back to the email. Monica Selis was very young, just starting her career off, and Stephen had already been playing for a while. Monica had been on a terror and was starting to beat Steffie Gruff because of the stabbing incident, the professional tennis tour increased security protocol. If you watch tennis on TV today, you will see that there are always security on the court. During the changeovers, the security guard actually will stand behind the tennis player facing the crowd. And that is from Raul Rodriguez in Topeka, Kansas. Nice. Thank you, Raul. Or Raul. R-A-U-L. Raul Rodriguez. Thank you from Topeka. Topeka, Kansas. Holding it down. Well, thanks a lot, Raul, and everybody out there in Topeka, Kansas, for listening to us. And wherever you are, you can hang out with us on the social medias. And by the way, I'm well aware that media is not the plural of medium. Media is plural itself. I'm just kidding. So lightning up. Someone said that and I was like, what's the joke, sir? Yeah, so if you want to hang out with us on social medias now, I'm just saying it out of spite, you can go to Stuffyshanoe.com, find all that stuff there, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-11-17-sysk-cte-final.mp3 | What's the Deal with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-chronic-traumatic-encephalopat | Concussions are bad enough for football players, but research has found all of those smaller hits can add up to massive brain trauma later in life too, leading to a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition the NFL sought to cover up. | Concussions are bad enough for football players, but research has found all of those smaller hits can add up to massive brain trauma later in life too, leading to a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition the NFL sought to cover up. | Thu, 17 Nov 2016 08:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=322, tm_isdst=0) | 37227730 | audio/mpeg | "Make your business official with Google and Squarespace. When you create a custom domain and a beautiful business website with Squarespace, you'll receive a free year of business email and professional tools from Google. It's the simplest way to look professional online. Visit squares squarespace.com google to start your free trial. Use the offer code works works for 10% off your first purchase. Google and Squarespace make it professional. Make it beautiful. Welcome to stuff you should know from houserforkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chopin, Bryant and Cherry. This is stuff you should know. Breaking news from 2015 edition. No, this is still very relevant. Sure it is. It definitely is. But I mean, like the end of last year or the beginning of this year, it certainly made the rounds a little more. What was the movie? Concussion, which is apparently roundly criticized by everyone involved in the study of CTE. I didn't see it just because it didn't look that good to me as a movie. Well, apparently it really did a lot of oversimplification. It came to a lot of conclusions about science that haven't been reached yet and may never be reached. It was just kind of like but there are some really good documentaries out there and I want to tout one just right off the bat. There's a two hour frontline on this called League of Denial. Did you see it? No. Man, it is good. Yeah. I'm not quite sure when it's from. Maybe sometime between 2012 and 2014 or 15. Yeah, but it was based on this book by the Fena brothers who wrote League of Denial, the book, and it was just about their investigation into what the NFL knew or didn't know about concussions, possibly leading to this condition called CTE. We can just call it CTE. I'm practicing. You say it once, I'm definitely going to screw it up. And then we'll just say CTE after that. Okay. The condition is called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Yeah, great. Yes. CTE. Thanks for jumping on that grenade for the team. Right? Yeah, we've known about it for a while. It's gone by other names farther back in the medical literature. Sure. And we did our own in 2009, long time ago. We did one on concussions called Due concussions cause early death. Yeah. Remember that one? Yeah. And I don't even know if CT was on our radar at the time. I don't know, maybe we might have mentioned it. It started to really seep out into the news around 2009, so we probably mentioned it, but I don't think we understood it or recognized it like we do now. Meaning like you and me. Sure. Yeah. Just two vehicles behind the microwave watching from the sidelines, if you'll forgive this one. So you did mention the other names back in the day. In fact, we can go all the way back, shockingly to 1928. There's a dude named Doctor Harrison T. Martland and he published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and you've heard the term punch drunk in relation to boxers, like, outside the ring, like this big Ray. He's a little punch drunk. Right. He was a boxer. What he was talking about, although he didn't know it at the time, was CTE, which it's really remarkable. It resembles if you had no idea and you were just a doctor looking at a brain post mortem, I guess. Right. There's really no way to say it because unfortunately, right now, in order to study CTE, you have to look at a brain under microscope. Right. Which is the only way you can't really do while the person is alive. Yeah. So if you didn't know any better, you would see a brain and say, well, this person had a degenerative illness in the brain, neurological illness, and I would say Parkinson's and dementia. It's all here. But the striking thing is it's not an illness. It is literally from repeated blows to the head. Yes. It's not disease or it's not caused by disease. Right. Yeah. It's like a traumatic brain injury repeated. But some people put themselves into a situation over and over again where they're going to be exposed to the possibility of traumatic brain injury. Right. Yeah. And chief among them is boxers. And this doctor, Martin was basically describing this in the medical literature, from what I understand. Just the symptoms. Right. I don't think he was looking at brains, was he? No, I don't think he was. Or trying to identify I mean, he called it Punch Drunk Syndrome or dementia pugilistica. It sounds way more clinical name. Yeah. What he was looking at with CTE, we now know that. We know that now. But again, he was just kind of describing the symptoms. It wasn't until, I think the science got a little further that they really started to look at brains. And we understood that boxers were at risk for what we understand now is CTE. Yeah. They reach middle age, they would be a little more confused, maybe get dizzy when they're walking around, being steady, maybe just slower, generally moving around. Right. And they like, yeah, I guess. Punch drunky from Rocky four. Odd. I get them confused after Rocky three. So rocky three was Mr. T. Yeah, it was Rocky Two. Mr. T? No. Rocky Two was the rematch with Apollo. Okay, well, then Rocky Four was with Ivan Drago and Bridgette Nilsen. I didn't even really play that one all the way through, I don't think. What? You didn't? No. That's like lesser Rocky to me. Well, that was when I was running around in the woods, like, shooting Ruskies with my fake M 16 as, like, a seven, eight year old. So this would have been, like, right there for me. And it was big time. I saw it in the theater. I'm sure I saw it right when it came out on video. I'm sure. I talked to my parents and getting Showtime so I could see it. You had Burn commy burn T shirts on. And then the Iron Curtain fell and I was like, wait a minute. None of the stuff that we were told holds up. Yeah. People just trying to get by over there. Exactly. Just like us. So where were we? Well, this is where we were, Chuck. I think it's really important to say that, yes, people knew there was such a thing as CTE. They called it Punch Drunk Syndrome for a very long time. But everybody said, boxers know that this is going on. And how many people buy millions? Exactly. They're getting paid millions of dollars to do this. They're doing it on their own accord. And this is such a small tranche of the population of the world. Really, who cares? And we should definitely say the medical establishment, especially in the United States, that we care. We have been calling on the Boxing Association and the government to ban boxing. Yeah. Since the 50s. Right. But for the most part, America said, well, we love a good fight, so we're not going to go along with that. You guys keep boxing. Right. And that was the way it went until 2002. And ladies are boxing now, too. Yes, they are suffering CTE just like men. Yeah. That's not super new, but I think female boxing has grown a lot, I think especially since Muhammad Ali's daughter got into it. Yes, she definitely helped. Brought a lot of attention. Tremendously. Do you remember when the Boxing Association tried to make female boxers wear skirts when they boxed? Did they really? Yes. Interesting. The whole thing was just like an onion set up, but it was real life. First of all, making any woman in any profession wear a skirt these days is kind of untoward, if you ask me. But secondly, choose the one profession where you shouldn't attempt to tell a woman to wear anything, let alone a skirt, if she doesn't want to. Female boxing is the first one that comes to mind. It's very interesting. Is it female boxing or women's boxing? Probably both. 2002. Let's flash forward a little bit into the more modern era. There was a neuropathologist, still is named Bennett Amalu. That's who Will Smith played. Right. Wasn't that about him? Right. Okay. I guess I should see that. I'm not a big Will Smith fan. You should just watch a fan of bad biopics. Watch League of Denial. He's interviewing it. Yeah. He does a better omalu than Will Smith. Omaha does. So there was a man sitting for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Hall of Famer Mike Webster died of a heart attack at age 50. And he wound up in the care of Amalu for his autopsy. And he started looking around the brain and said, there's something going on here that's really weird. If you remember when we did, well, the concussions, then what was the other one, Alzheimer's, recently, where we talked about we did dementia. Okay. Dementia, where we talked about beta amyloid proteins. Yeah. They build up as like a plaque, right? Yeah, they build up like a plaque, and then these towel proteins come along afterward and really do a lot of damage. He noticed that Webster had a lot of these tau proteins, but not the former beta amyloid proteins, which is really weird. It was weird in that when he opened up Mike Webster's skull and started poking around his brain. Like, Mike Webster had been showing all of the classic symptoms of Alzheimer's and dementia for many years now, long before he died of the heart attack at age 50, which is pretty young. So Omalu was like, surely I'm going to find these beta amyloids. And he didn't. So the lack of beta amyloids made him dig a little deeper and really start looking at Mike Webster's brain. And that's when he found the tau proteins. And he's like, what are these doing here? Especially by themselves. Well, yeah, and that's, like I said earlier, everyone thought he had Alzheimer's and dementia, but he just had dementia, which is not the way it's supposed to work. Right. So it was a startling find, to say the least. And this was, I believe, the first NFL player, a former player that is that had this disease and was diagnosed with it post mortem. Omar, who is, I think, like a forensic pathologist with Pittsburgh, diagnosed him with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Like you said, the first football player ever to have this diagnosis. Up to this point, it had been boxers. Had he been a boxer, it would have made zero news whatsoever. Right. But the fact that he was a football player, this is kind of weird. And we'll talk about why this was so strange and weird right after this. So, Chuck, we were saying that Bennett Omalu diagnosed Mike Webster with CTE. Yes. And when he did, it made huge waves, and the reason why was because Mike Webster was the first NFL player to be diagnosed with this. But for a very long time, for pretty much the last decade, the NFL had been fighting off this idea that concussions were worse than just having your bell wrong or whatever cute thing you want to call coming close to losing consciousness because the acceleration of your brain smacking against the inside of your skull has cognitively disabled you temporarily. That's right. The NFL, oh, boy, we're getting into it now. They have a long checkered history with trying to protect players from injury and trying to protect their own interests as either a massive revenue generating corporation and one that wants to keep its players safe, but also not make them money well and not be on the hook for their injuries. Oh, yeah, you're playing the NFL. You know what you're getting into there's. Chances are and this was long I mean, everyone always knew, like, yeah, when you get old, you're not going to walk that well. You're going to have creaky knees and a bad back and all the stuff that come along with getting hammered on the field each and every week. Right. But they always did try to sort of downplay this concussion. And it's only in recent years that they've really made official a protocol for dealing with concussions. Yeah. It was always like, Get back in the game, Coach. And they're like, how you feel? You know where you are? Yes, I'm good. All right, get back in there. Right. And it was a direct result of this initial diagnosis from 2002 of CTE by benedomalu of Mike Webster. Right. That all of this change we're seeing over the last couple of seasons, which apparently are having great effects already, it comes from this moment in time. Right. And part and parcel of that diagnosis was also a lawyer that had been hired by Mike Webster or his family either right before he died or right after he died. And the lawyer was trying to build a case to get Mike Webster disability from the NFL's disability Committee. And the disability committee made a decision based on the science that was presented to them that said, yes, without a doubt, Mike Webster had severe brain damage and cognitive impairment from his years of playing football. Right. And then it was the only time they'd admitted it. They've been putting it off for years, and it got buried. And from that moment on, the NFL completely changed its course and just deny, deny, deny. And that was the state of affairs there for a while. But as that was going on, simultaneously, bennett O'Malley, who has been at times very much vilified, he's put his foot in his mouth a lot. He speaks publicly out of line. He said once that he would bet his medical license that OJ. Simpson has CTE. And the implication being that's why he killed Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown. I guess I should say allegedly. I don't know. What do you say if somebody gets off for murder in a criminal trial but is convicted of it in a civil trial? I don't know. At any rate, just saying stuff that a man of science shouldn't do. Right. But the thing is, when you look at the work that he's doing, his actual work is unimpeachable. His public persona is kind of lacking. But at the same time, the work he's doing stands up. And there are plenty of other people who have kind of come and joined the cause or we're already researching CTE who have really kind of redoubled their efforts to try to figure out what's going on here. Yeah. Chiefly, there's a neuropathologist named Anne McKee that has joined up with him, and they're sort of the main face of this CTE campaign at this point. She's in league of denial as well. There's just really interesting people because they're very much dedicated to getting to the bottom of it. Yeah. And one of the big reasons why this is a bigger deal than when we're talking about boxing and how many people boxing is a pretty niche sport, but a lot of kids play football. And what they're finding out is that children especially are at risk because they think and this is all they said they're in the toddler phase of CTE research right now. Right. So they're really learning a lot as we speak. But one thing they think is a big factor is the strength of the neck. To brace? Yeah, to brace and deal with these hits to the head. Sure. Obviously, that doesn't mean, like, you got a strong neck. You can just get hit in the head over and over and over. But they're saying for kids, especially these young boys and even girls now who play football is like early teenagers. It's super dangerous. There's a brain research named Robert Cantu from Boston University, and he was saying that in addition to the neck being less developed, the myelin sheaths, which protect our nerve endings or nerves, including our neurons in our brain, are less developed. So there's less protection. And there are other factors, too, like girls are more susceptible to CTE than boys. And, like, if you're dehydrated, you're more likely to develop CTE. There's a lot of different risk factors, but it does seem to be age is definitely one of them. And the problem is, if you send a kid in, 14 year old into a game and they get a concussion and they keep playing, they may stop playing football after high school, but decades later, they could conceivably develop CTE. They could develop CTE without ever having officially had a concussion. Right. They're doing these tests now with these sensors inside helmets, and you don't necessarily have to have a concussion. It's all about this sustained abuse over time. Right. And it's not just football. No, it's not. There's a bunch of other activities, I guess you could say, including sports, but non sports to activities like getting in car crashes over and over again. Well, true. But obviously, hockey, rugby, wrestling, soccer, all those header balls, they say, can have an impact over time. Yes. As a matter of fact, soccer internationally and nationally is starting to come under more scrutiny because they're realizing that you don't have to get a concussion to develop CTE. Horseback riding, the list, lacrosse, skiing most of those are sports based. But anything where you are getting that sort of impact repeatedly over time, it builds that damage up. It seems like. It's not like once you get over that concussion, then you're back at square zero. Exactly. That's exactly right. It's progressive. Right? Yeah. So what they're finding based on some of these tests, like you were saying, there's something called subconcusive events, too, where, say, like you're heading a soccer ball, but you don't see stars afterward, or you are fine with bright lights, there's no symptoms of a concussion, but as far as your brain is concerned, it just took an impact. And as these things accumulate, little sub concussive events, especially when an actual concussion is thrown in, or multiple concussions, that's what they think is the mechanism behind the development of CTE. Alright, so symptom wise, if you're talking to the average everyday person, they want to understand what it's like. There are different stages. There are three. In stage one, you're going to be dizzy and have headaches, and also your attention span is going to be cut down. You're going to have that general difficulty concentrating on things. You can be disoriented. You might be a little more aggressive and have bad impulse control. And I know Amalu probably shouldn't be shooting his mouth off about OJ, but I mean, that's possible. There have been all sorts of situations where these NFL players, like their families, are saying they're not the same person, they're aggressive, they're getting in fights now, which they never used to do. They're depressed or suicidal. Right. So I don't think they're conclusively showing that link yet, but it seems to sort of be obvious. In fact, we should say that there has not been a conclusive link between repetitive head injuries from sports, from context sports, and CTE. The science is still being worked out. Sure. And of course, again, there's no such thing as settled science. So if that's what you're looking for, it's never going to get there. But what they're starting to do now is Amass enough of a medical literature that, yes, the link will be conclusive, basically. All right. The second stage, in addition to all the first, your behavior might get even more unpredictable and your memory is even worse. And then finally, stage three, all those former stages, plus even slower movements, literally staggering, trembling, deafness, maybe you can't even speak correctly. Yeah. The final stages, very sad. Right. And so if you are a doctor and somebody comes to you presenting like this, you're going to be like, wow, this guy's got Alzheimer's. Or you would have before now you'd probably be a lot more likely to be like, you might have CTE. Right. But we can't check. No, you can't. And let's go a little into the brain. The only way that you can diagnose CTE is post mortem, like you were saying, right? Yeah. And what they're looking for is this accumulation of tau proteins. And again, they're not 100% certain how this is going on, but this is what they think, especially when they start to include research on tau proteins from Alzheimer's. So normally in your brain, tau proteins give structure to what are called microtubules, which are inside the neurons, and they basically act as little transport channels inside each of your little brain cells. Right. Well, these tau proteins strengthen and destrengthen these microtubules depending on whether the brain needs those microtubules at any time. And there is some type of event called hyperphosphory in which the Tau proteins actually become destabilized. They're weakened, which is normal, but they're not able to regain strength, which is also normal. So as they become weaker and weaker and weaker, these Tau proteins actually kind of break up and they start to accumulate within the neuron. They accumulate in the axon, which is where a neuron transmits information. They're in the dendrites eventually, which is where it receives information, and then they start to accumulate even in just the neural body. And with all this starting to clog up, the neuron itself dies. And when enough of this stuff happens, a whole region of the brain can start to die, often wither. And that's when you have all of these symptoms that are basically identical to Alzheimer's. The key is this. They have associated the presence of this in former football players who are known to have gotten concussions, who are known to have gotten all of these subconcusive events on a daily basis with what they're seeing in the same dead football players brains. And at this point, all they can do is say, yeah, man, of course this caused this. But they can't say exactly how it's causing it. They haven't reached that point yet. All right, well, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about where this is all headed and what the NFL is doing about it. All right, so one of the big problems with CTE is that there is no cure at this point. So the best practice is to avoid the cause, which is getting hit in the head a lot over, over and and over. Yeah, but how do you do that with football? Well, that's the rub. It's very tough. There are some schools of thought that say these players know what they're getting into. If you ask them, many of them would probably, if not most, say, we know the risks, we are willing to shorten our lives, our careers will be limited, all for the rush of being on that field, the adoration of the fans and all that money. We know what we're getting into. We know it's a dangerous thing, and we're willing to do so anyway. A lot of them would. Not all of them, though. Well, of course not. I mean, there have been some really high profile cases, like a guy named Junior Seau, right, who's like a legend in the NFL. He committed suicide, and his brain, after a very long struggle, was found to have was diagnosed with CTE. I can't speak for anybody who's died, but there are a lot of people who are suffering now who wouldn't go back and do it again the exact same way. Well, regret is different than us. The young man exiting college and he says, yeah, I know where this is going to lead me. US, the old person suffering from dementia. And they'll say, well, young me didn't know what he was talking about. I would trade all the money and all the fame to go back and lead a fuller life. Right. The key to this, though, Chuck, is would that young man, if you go back even further to that ten year old boy, would his mom, knowing all this, let him play? Yeah. And if the numbers are down in Little League football right, for sure. Which is bad news for the NFL, because those Little League players who are really good eventually become NFL stars that make the NFL a lot of money, which is one of the main reasons why they tried very hard to clamp down on public awareness of this. So the NFL, on their part, have tried to limit concussions. Now it's not working so far. As far as limiting concussions. Oh, no, I thought they were down. In 2014, there were 206. In 2015, there were 271. That's not what I saw. Yeah, it really depends on the year. Like, they're up and down each year. They're definitely not in some downward trajectory, though. Overall, PBS has gone all in on tracking CTE, and they actually did a concussion watch, and they counted the concussions, I guess, diagnosed concussions, I'm not sure, in every game. And they came up with 199 for 2015. Well, the NFL is 271. Okay. Which is sort of similar to what you would think NFL or PBS as far as the stats for football goes. Well, you think the NFL would be the ones under playing it, right. But at any rate, they've tried to change some of the rules as far as leading as a tackler with the crown of your helmet, they have moved the kick off forward. So now there aren't as many runbacks on kick offs. And that's where a lot of the high impact collisions occur, is on kick off and the special teams plays. Sure. It's a rub, though, because fans like the NFL is known, and I love the NFL, like, I'm at odds with myself on this, because part of what you love about the game is the game as it is. And you can't regulate injury out of the NFL or head injury out of the NFL, because it wouldn't be football anymore. Like, you literally couldn't have people tackling people, right? I actually went to a game have you ever been to an NFL game and sat close to the field? Cliff Fish it's like, I was talking to my buddy who I was with, I was like, you get close down there and you're like, man, I would literally need an ambulance on any play that happened, period. I don't see how these men get up at all when you see these collisions they take. But that's what the fans love about the sport and that's what the NFL is built on. So to change that would fundamentally change the game. But at the same time the NFL, they've been really shady as far as how they've handled all this over the years. There was a congressional report that found that they basically made a $30 million gift, unrestricted gift in 2012 to the National Institutes of Health to look into head injuries. They found out that the research wasn't so friendly to the NFL. So they tried to get the main researcher from, I think it was either Boston College or Bu, stripped of his position, even though they weren't supposed to monkey around with any of it. It was like, no, you do your unbiased research and we're staying out of it. Right, but fire that guy. Yeah, they didn't stay out of it. They were found out. Then they said, you know what, we're not going to give you that full 30 million. Then, oh, you're joking. They pulled the final 16 million from the research and basically denied up until literally this year. In March of this year was the first time an NFL senior vice president stood up and acknowledged the link between CTE publicly and football. Well, they also settled with 5000 former players for a billion dollars. And they settled because it was found that they had tried to suppress evidence about concussions leading to CTE. Keep the players unaware of this. Yes. And a lot of those players now are saying, no, now this all come out. And they're like, that pay off is nothing. Sure, like I want out of this suit. Yeah, because again, please take the time to go watch League of Denial. They do such an amazing job talking about the nefarious stuff that the NFL has done over the years to try to keep this out of the players awareness, keep it out of the public awareness. But they also do a really good job of getting across what life can be like for some of these players, and we should say for some of people, even players with CTE found to have CTE after death doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be suicidal or that they had Alzheimer's symptoms or anything like that. But for the ones that do, they have a really rough life and so does their families as a matter of fact. And that really comes across in the documentary. Well, there's this one study they did that they took brains of 165 former football players. It could have been high school, college, NFL, or obviously all three. If you went to the NFL, 131 of the 165, 79% had CTE. And of the 91 that played in the NFL, 96% of them had CTE. And it's shocking. And they do make the point in this article that those who choose whose families or individuals chose to donate their brains are probably people that likely have the CTE. Right? When you're healthy, you're not thinking, I need to donate my brain to science afterwards. But that's what they need going on. Sure, they need like all kinds of. People athletes will do this. Actually, there's a test that was kind of fortuitous from UCLA, actually. People are trying to figure out how they can diagnose CTE in living people. Right. And they have not figured it out yet. They're trying to figure out how to die the tau proteins in the brain to see accumulations and then check to see if there's beta amyloids too. I bet they'll figure that out. They will. But this UCLA researcher duo of researchers found that they could check for the shrinkage of volume and parts of the brain and correlate those to ones that have been found through autopsies of football players with CTE. Right? Yeah. And they scan some guy's brain still alive, former football player has all the symptoms of CTE. And crucially, he also had an MRI done like four years before so they could compare his current brain size to what he had four years before and see the regions that were shrinking. And one region lost like 14% of its volume in just the four years. Wow. But they found that these regions correlate with stuff they're seeing in CTE and former football players. So they're thinking maybe they can use this as the test. Right. Just look for shrinkage in different brain regions. Well, one thing they do know is that in 2008, they did a survey and the former NFL players get Alzheimer's at a rate about six times higher than the general population, which is no surprise. But like we were talking about earlier, that whole link to depression and suicide, apparently former NFL players are less likely to have depression and less likely to commit suicide. Almost 60% less likely. I don't know. That that says a whole lot, though. I don't think that disproves at all that depression and suicide can also be part of CTE. That smells like an NFL funded study. Yeah, I don't know. Something's not adding up with that. Yeah. Again, if you watch Legal Denials, you're going to question everything, everybody. It's a really weird situation because on one side you've got the NFL fighting for its life, throwing everything at cannon money and lawyers and doing really dirty stuff like discrediting the doctors involved, trying to get NIH researchers fired. And on the other side, you've got all of these incredibly well educated, incredibly, in some cases, egotistical neurologists and neuro researchers who are all vying to be like, the one who makes the connection with CTE. The science is out there enough that someone could come along and be like, here, case closed, put my name on this. Right. And there's a lot of gross stuff like Junior Sea Hours brain had a lot of people after it. Yeah, just the hours after he died. And they were calling his family and emailing his family and like, bad mouthing one another when they were talking to his son, saying like, hey, give us the brain. You don't want to give it to Boston University their Ghouls will probably eat some of it. It's just a weird situation that's going on. Yeah, very sad. Yeah. You got anything else? I do not. Well, that is CTE. And I can assure you there will be plenty more of that because they're still figuring it out. But if you want to know more about it, in the meantime, type the letters into the search bar. Howstop works.com? Since I said search bar is time for listener mail, I'm going to call this Halloween Response. Hey guys. I normally skip the Halloween podcast because I'm not much fan of ghost stories, but I thought it was broad daylight, so I'll go ahead and listen. My first ghost story actually gave me the creeps. The reason I'm writing though, as you pointed out that the majority of horror stories to pick violence against women. Being a fan of horror movies is interesting. He doesn't like ghost stories, but he likes horror movies. They're different. But these aren't even ghost stories. No. Being a fan of horror movies, I would be lying if I said it wasn't something I had wondered about myself. After listening to some great true crime podcasts, though, of which there are many, have concluded that the reason is that stuff is art imitating life. A lot of these movies or stories are based on true events. Unfortunately, in the real world, violence against women, especially with serial killers, is far more common. When people set out to write horror, they usually research existing crimes to base ideas off of in order to make it more realistic and in turn more frightening. So it may be easier to change fiction to be less sexist. The real issue lies more in the world that we live in. I guess we can probably convince serial killers to start killing more men. We'll probably continue to see more violence until we do that. We'll see more violence against women in horror films. Never thought about that, James. It's a good point. It's a pretty good hypothesis, actually. It makes a great case. Thanks, James. If you want to get in touch with us to say, hey man, here's something smart, we love hearing that. You can tweet to us at Xysk podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffysheno, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on thewebstepyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com. Hey, it's summer everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon music My Favorite Murder from exactly right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarra and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. 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c5ed4f54-5460-11e8-b38c-bf222fd653ff | Selects: Carl Sagan: American Hero | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-carl-sagan-american-hero | Carl Sagan was the world's first mainstream media super scientist, capapble of breaking down complex ideas for the common folk. But what made him tick? Billions and billions of great ideas. Explore his life and legacy with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. | Carl Sagan was the world's first mainstream media super scientist, capapble of breaking down complex ideas for the common folk. But what made him tick? Billions and billions of great ideas. Explore his life and legacy with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. | Sat, 08 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=8, tm_isdst=0) | 37349336 | 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 Hulucom for plan details. Hi, everyone here on December 8, 2015, in our time capsule episode, aka Weekend Saturday Selects, we are going to take you back and talk about an American hero by the name of Carl Sagan. In the appropriately titled podcast episode Carl Sagan Colon American Hero welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Noel. The stint of Noel is winding down, sadly. It's such an awkward thing having Noel here. No. The stent of Noel. Right. Oh, you mean the wording. Yeah, wording is fine. All right. How are you doing? I'm fine. Just like that wording. I'm sleepy. Why about? I've just been staying up late writing till one and two in the morning. Like a dope. Like 17. Oh, yeah. A manifesto. No, just staying up too late, typing. It's neat. Do you drink wine while you type? Last night it was bullet bourbon. Yeah. And then you're just like, I'm not typing words correctly anymore. And then it's time for bed. You get on a roll and then you look up and it's 02:00. A.m. Nice man. I'm glad to hear that. 630 rolls around and here we are. That's awesome. Yeah, that's great. So your creative juices are flowing. They're flowing, baby. You know who else's juices were flowing and still flow through this universe? Carl Sagan. He was he was a creative science type. Yeah. And it made him kind of controversial, man. It also made him beloved. Beloved. And I think one of the precursors to what we do. In fact, there's a quote on him being an explainer, which I thought was very cool, which is the geekiest term ever, but it's a good term, science. Yeah. He said, I think I'm able to explain things because understanding wasn't entirely easy for me. Some things that the most brilliant students were able to see instantly, I had to work to understand. I can remember what I had to do to figure it out. The very brilliant ones figure it out so fast. That sounds familiar. They never see the mechanics of understanding. Yeah. So I really identified with that. I'm like, man, that's kind of what we do. We work really hard at understanding this because we're not experts. And he wasn't an expert on one thing. He covered a lot of that's what made him unique. Right. A lot of different facets of science. Yeah. Which you don't see much. No, you don't. I mean, it does pop up here and there, but if you think about the people who are like that, like, Jared Diamond is a really good current example. Neil Tiger? No, that's Dustin Diamond. Okay. Jared diamond, man, I don't even remember what he's trained in. He's just such a generalist. But he wrote like guns, germs and steel. Oh, that guy. Yeah, he's got a little Robert Borkbeard. Really good guy. He's one. Neil degrasse Tyson has definitely become one. Although he's still very much an astrophysician. Right? Yeah. But he sort of talked about a lot of times in terms of being like Sagan, and not just because he rebooted Cosmos, which was Sagan's show, but he's just the face of science. He's the go to guy. Sure. I mean, he was the obvious choice for Cosmos because he was already so much like Sagan, following in those footsteps, for sure. There's other guys there's like Brian Green as a science explainer. Bill Nye is a science explainer. Yeah. Love Bill Nigh. They're definitely out there, for sure. But you make a good point that Segan was one of the originals, if not the original, but the idea that he was somebody who was willing to draw parallels from different disciplines in science or bring them together to create something approachable for people to kind of invigorate people's love of science, I think it's amazing. Yeah. It made him beloved. It also just made him not reviled this is not the right word, but he was definitely criticized in the scientific establishment in parts, for sure. Some people in the scientific establishment loved him, and some were like, you're not doing much real research. You're just sort of a face guy. And I poopoo that entirely and say that he did a lot for science and people like him are necessary, and I value their work. Okay. You're taking a stand, huh? Yeah, man. Carl Sagan's amazing. He's one of my heroes. I watched Cosmos when I was ten years old. I have never seen it. Man, it was great. I mean, it was a PBS show that had tens of millions of viewers. I know. Millions and millions. Yeah. That's your saying. Yeah. And you know what he told Johnny Carson? He never said billions and billions. He said billions upon billions. Right. I never heard it. There's a super cut on YouTube of all of his billions. Millions and trillions from Cosmos cut to hiphop music. Bed. Is that a glorious dawn? I don't remember the name of it. There is a video, a song somebody created with him, a super cut of him. It's called Gloria Stone. It's pretty great. Well, I never heard billions and billions in there. There's a lot of billions and millions and trillions. He loved those words. Right. But he said I never specifically said billions and billions, and I didn't hear it either he's a misunderstood genius yeah. I think Carson did it first, or maybe it was Saturday Night Live. And then that just became the thing. Billions and billions. Yeah. Because he is a weird little dude, for sure, in a lot of ways, easily parody. But he also seemed to have a fairly good sense of humor about himself, at least. And in general, he smoked grass. He thought grass was far out, man. We just vaulted back in time with that one. He smoked the marijuana trash. He was making a contemporary he was on the pot. Yeah, he did. He like to smoke weed. And in fact, I have a quote here. He wrote an essay. The quote reads wowee. Zowie. Best Pavement album, by the way. He wrote an essay. I don't know about that. Yeah. What's your favorite? I think Planet and enchanted. Yeah. The first one. Yeah. It's hard. Although Cricket Rain. Cricket. Raymond is pretty good. No. I've never seen him more interested in what we're talking about. It's funny. In college, we used to have a saying it's not a matter of which album are we going to listen to next? It's Which Pavement album are we going to listen to next? Just put on T shirt. Yeah. So, anyway, Sagan wrote an essay in Marijuana Reconsidered, and here is one of his quotes. He said, the cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist, which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. Is that Kermit the Frog doing Carl Sagan? I mean, it doesn't define him or anything, but yeah, he liked to smoke the pot and he like to get out his little tape recorder and talk about stuff. Put on a turtleneck. Yeah. With nothing else. It was the course. He was, I think, the maybe even into the 90s. That's true. So I guess let's go back to the beginning. We've done some pretty good teasing here, right? Yes. And when you're talking about a human being, there's no place better to start at the beginning than with their birth. Brooklyn, New York. Yeah. His mother was rachel was a garment industry manager. And apparently I think his overbearing was yeah, but his mom was overbearing. Yes, mom was overbearing. Sorry. Dad was a Ukrainian immigrant, Samuel, who worked as a garment industry manager because in 1934, they probably didn't hire women to do jobs like that, which is really stinky. It's not like we've met the lady or anything and can report that she's overbearing. The idea that she's overbearing comes from this longstanding image of her of she had very high hopes and high expectations and aspirations for Carl. Very well may have made the man. Yeah. You know, moved to New Jersey after a little while and was voted the class brain at Rawway High School. And I thought, this is interesting. What article is this? The New Yorker. Which one? Why Carl Sagan's truly replaceable. Yeah. Or Smithsonian. Smithsonian. Joel Akinbach. It was a great article, though. But they tracked down in 1953 a questionnaire from high school that he had to fill out on his own character traits. And Sagan said he gave himself low marks for vigorousness, like with sports, an average rating for emotional stability, and the highest ratings for being dominant and reflective. I'm going to start using that. Vigorousness. I worked out this morning. I'm so vigorous. So that's not just a piece of paper they dug up, Chuck. That's from his archives, which are actually sold to the Library of Congress by his widow. What is his widow's name? Anne Andrew Yan. One of his well, his widow, but he was married three times. Right. And Anne sold the papers or supplied the papers for an honorarium, I guess, to the Library of Congress. And the Library of Congress. Got that money from Seth McFarlane. So basically, Seth McFarlane bought Carl Sagan's papers and donated them to the Library of Congress. Yes. Pretty cool. That's why it's called the Seth Macfarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Anne Drurian Archive. Right. I had to put his name on there. Oh. I mean, sure, why not? No, it's fine. He's a huge fan of his work, and he's the one who rebooted Cosmos. Right. And genuinely, I got to say, whatever you have to say about Seth Macfarlane, there is plenty to say, I think, about Seth McFarlane. He proved himself a true fan of Carl Sagan and a rich guy. I've always liked Family Guy, so I don't have anything bad to say about him. Have you seen American dad? No, I never got into that, actually. It's okay. Yeah, it's not Family Guy, but it's definitely just totally different. Got you 798 boxes of stuff, archival material. The guy loves to log every conversation he ever had and every thought that ever entered his brain, mainly through cassette tape. Right. But I guess that was transcribed by other folks. Yes. Apparently, Joel Ochenbach says that his writing style is so conversational because he didn't write, he dictated into a dictaphone, and then it was transcribed. Basically. Basically, he was like the Hunter S. Thompson of science. Yeah. Remember Hunter T have, like, the real he'd wear around his neck when one is high on marijuana? It is a buzzkill to type, actually. That's funny. We bring up Hunter Thompson. Hunter Thompson loved acid. Do you know who else loved acid? Timothy Leary. You know who hung out with Timothy Leary? Carl Sagan. Yeah. Timothy Leary was trying to get Sagan to advise him on how to build an interstellar arc because Leery just totally lost his stuff by this time. Right. We should do a show on him. Oh, yeah. I'm surprised we haven't. That'd be crazy. Let's do it, man. We should we should do one on, like, the Merry Pranksters, the whole thing just basically redo the electric Kool Aid acid test. Totally. That'd be a good episode. But Larry at a mental institution because he'd been popped with a bunch of acid, I think had a visitor in Carl Sagan and Frank Drake of the famous Drake Equation, and they came by to say hi. And Lee was like, seriously, you guys have to help me design this. And they were like, the closest star is too far away. Your Kook. This isn't going to work. And Larry says he sensed that they had some sort of neural blockage. That's why they couldn't think like he could. Yeah, man. So that was Carl Sagan Timothy Leary's story. But I think they stayed in touch. Oh, I'm sure they did. So, young Sagan. His life kind of changes when he goes to the World's Fair in 1939. He was just five years old. Do you remember whose World's Fair that was? No. Was it Chicago? Eddie Bernays'oh? Yeah, that was the one. Wow. The one that changed everything, including Carl Sagan. Boy, that's a big one. Yeah. So Sagan goes to the World's Fair, and it was sort of a great time to be a young kid interested in science, because in the late thirty s and forty s and fifty s, it was like everyone was captivated by the future. Right. There's this idea that science could do anything and very soon would. It was really exciting, and it was just a great time to be into it. What's his name? OppenheimA. No, Abuhaba. Oppenheimer? No, I'm talking about the article. Right. Ohmbach, yeah. Oppenheimer. I'm become yeah, that's what I thought you were talking about in the article. He makes a great point about just that time period and how exploratory everything was really from then, like, through the was a great 40 year period in science where basically there was funding and anything's possible, we can do anything we want, until they started to, I guess, disprove things here and there. Right. And actually, what's interesting is there's a corresponding boost in technology from that era, too. And a lot of people point out that all of this stuff from about 1975 on is actually built on the backs of the stuff that was built in the 40 years before that. From about 1935 to 1975. Yes. And ever since then, we've had a technological plateau. It's really interesting. And you don't think about it, you're like, well, no, I mean, we have iPhones now. It's like, yeah, iPhones are all they're a combination of different stuff that was first discovered or invented 40 or more years ago. Yeah. And basically everything is like that. We're in a slump right now. So it was not only a time where they thought science could do anything, science was doing just about anything. And we've since had a plateau. And the author described him. I thought it was a great description, sagan as a nuanced referee, because really cool thing about sagan was he was very grounded in science and proof and facts, but he wasn't just a square and a skeptic. Although he was a skeptic and square. Yeah. But he wanted to find life on other planets. Sure. And he didn't shut things down. He was all about the discussion of everything as long as you still did the research and were grounded in fact, as a matter of fact. And he did not believe in UFOs. He did not think that UFOs were extraterrestrial spacecraft. But in 1969, he mounted a conference on UFOs in which everyone apparently had their say all sides. Yeah. It wasn't like, we're mounting a conference on UFOs. You can come so the rest of us can poopoo your ideas and beliefs. It was come and share your position on it. That's enormous. That in and of itself is worth remembering the person for. But this is 1069 before you'd even become, like, a household name or anything like it. Yeah, and I like to think we do that. And we still get emails, so we got one today from people that said it's dangerous to even mention other schools of thought. That's dogmatic. Yeah, and I just don't agree with that dogmatic. And closeminded and don't even email us with that crap. Yeah, just don't even bother because we're going to make fun of you on the air. Yeah, because that's not what our show is about. Even if we don't believe something, we like to throw all sides out there, because I think discussion is healthy no matter what. Sure. That's just me. Even when we were mocking crop circles, we still talked about crop circles, did we not? It's not like we just pretended like there wasn't such a thing as crop circles. That's right. And we have Carl Sagan. Thank for laying that golden path in front of us. So you want to take a break? I don't want to, but we have to. We need to. Man yeah. Okay. All right. We'll be right back. Hi, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary. And you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page, and enter code stuff. All right. So we've been beating around the bush here, have we? Well, not really. We've been getting into it, but let's talk about some of the things that sagan he wasn't just some Johnny come lately. He had degree upon degree. I think he had he had billions and billions of degrees. Well, he had an undergrad degree. He had his masters. He had his PhD. He was well versed in a lot of realms of science, but his big thing was astronomy. Right. He had two degrees in undergrad and masters in physics and then a doctorate in astronomy. And he did a little stint at Harvard, didn't get tenure. So he's like, I'm out of here. And Cornell was like, you come to us, and we will treat you like a god. And they did. And he settled in at Cornell and set up his own lab. Right. The Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Yes. And that was when he really started to get going. He was doing side work for NASA at the time as well, doing consulting. He did that throughout his whole career. Formulas, that kind of stuff. Sure. When NASA is picking your brain about the Apollo mission, you're doing pretty well for yourself as a scientist. So he had this potential to really go as science as he wanted to with this stuff. And he did in some ways, in a lot of ways with his consulting with NASA, but he also kind of pushed NASA into humanities direction as well. Like the Voyager discs. That's a really great example of it. Like he talked NASA, including discs on Voyager One and Two. Are you talking about the golden record? Yeah, they're basically like, here's some stuff that represents humanity and Earth. Yeah, pretty much. Like, if we ever do find life on Earth, we need to have something to offer them to represent us or life elsewhere, you mean? Yeah, what I say? Life on Earth. Yeah, there's life on Earth. It's pretty much documented as fact. Life out there, extraterrestrial life. He said, we need to present ourselves in what Earth is like and what humans are like. So he included 115 images representing the diversity of life and then sounds basically like his wife, literally. This is pretty out there. I don't know if marijuana had anything to do with it. I think so, yeah. His wife, Anne, she created her own sounds for the project. Basically, she meditated and then thought told the story of the universe by thinking it with her brain. Those brain waves were translated into music, and she said, My mind also wandered to my love of my husband. So that was translated. So they blasted that was her message that they blasted out in space, which is pretty far out. Right. But awesome messages of love. Sure, man. It's pretty neat. He wasn't afraid to show his tinder side. No, he definitely wasn't. He was vulnerable in a lot of ways. And also, on those disks, there is, I believe, etchings of a man and a woman. I think it's etched on the disk, and they're, like, laser disk size. They're super retro. Sure. And made of gold, which is pretty cool. And then there's basically a depiction of where Earth is in the Milky Way, I believe. So it's basically saying, we're here if you ever find this. And then, of course, Voyager One, I believe, got lost and awakened and became sentient and then became a god on to some beings, remember? And I think Star Trek One the first movie. I never saw those. Vijay you never saw any of the Star Trek movies? Dude, I've never seen one episode of the TV show. I've never seen one episode of Next Generation. Yeah. No. The only Star Trek thing I've ever ingested was our apologies to Will Wheaton. By the way, was that first movie that JJ. Abrams did. I saw that. I saw the second one of that. I also saw, I think, Star Trek maybe one, two, and three. In one of those, there's this god, Vijer, who's like, this artificial intelligence, and then finally meet Vijer and realize that the Oya is blotted out, and it's really Voyager One, the space probe. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I thought it was pretty neat, too. I'm not a Trekkie by any means, but it was still entertaining. I just never got into it. I was always a Star Wars guy. Not that they're mutually exclusive, but I don't know. It just didn't grab me, you know? Who would have predicted that we go off on a Star Trek tangent? And the Carl? Although I think I've told the story of working on a commercial with William Shatner. You have? Didn't he, like, bend you over a car and pretend to arrest you? No, that was punch. Hey, Shatner was TJ. Hooker. It could have happened. Yeah. He was great, though. He was awesome. He loved being William Shatner. Oh, yeah, man. You can tell that guy wears it like a suit. Yeah, he was awesome. Very nice guy. So we're getting off track again here. Say again with science. There was actual science and stuff. As a matter of fact, the idea of the greenhouse effect is rooted partially in his work. Yeah. That had been around since the late 19th century. But he looked at a planet like Venus and said, you know what? Venus is really hot. And I think, Why is because this greenhouse effect. And then because of that work, people started thinking, well, maybe Earth has a greenhouse effect going on, too. Right. It really opened the door for that line of thought. It did. And he's correct. Earth definitely does have a greenhouse effect, and it's problematic. Correct. Another one that he's widely cited for is the fate Young Sun Paradox. I don't know if he was the one who first pointed this out, or if he just kind of built upon it and it's still not fully solved, I think. So he and George Mullen figured this out. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. So the idea is that Earth, early on in its history, was a ball of ice, but problematically. There was also some liquid water on Earth, too. It wasn't all ice. This doesn't make much sense because the sun, as it stands now, is just about enough to keep Earth from being a frozen ball of ice. But back then, when Earth was mostly a frozen ball of ice, the sun was only at like, 70% of its luminosity. Or lumosity. Luminosity. One of those luminosity. Right. Yeah, sure. That it is today. And so it doesn't make sense that there should be any liquid water on Earth. And it's called the Faint Young Sun Paradox. And I believe they figured out Sagan and Mullins said, well, it's the greenhouse effect. Yeah. And I don't think they ever fully settled on that. No. Still, it's outstanding. Yeah. I think it might be a combination of that and some other stuff. That's right. What else did he do? He looked at Titan Saturn's moon at one point and said, you know what? I think there's organic molecules up there, and that's why it looks red. And he was right. Yeah. He went yeah. He wasn't afraid to throw a wacky hypothesis out there. And that did not do him any favors in the scientific community either. No. Because there is a definite arrogance associated with throwing out the hypothesis and not doing the work, leaving it to other people to do the work, and then you still get the credit for throwing the hypothesis out there. It's one of the main reasons why Sagan was highly criticized by some people in the scientific community. Yeah. In the Smithsonian article, they say there's sort of an unwritten rule among scientists. Thou shalt not speculate. Thou shalt not talk about things outside your immediate area of expertise. That's a big one that he transgressed. Yeah. He was all over the place and now shouting out horse around on late night TV talk shows. Yeah. With Carson. Yeah, he was on Carson two dozen times over a couple of decades and was, like I said, sort of the Neil degrasse Tyson he was the go to when anyone in the press needed anything for television, he was the guy. Anything that had anything even remotely to do with science. Even if I had to do a theology and somebody wanted a science opinion of theology, go to Carl Sagan. And so from Sagan's point of view, he's just furthering science. What's the problem? Sure. From the other scientist point of view, it makes it look like Carl Sagan is trained in everything from astrophysics, which he was to theology and biology and anthropology and Arrology in between, and he wasn't true. There's some professional jealousy, too, I think. You know how it is. Sure. Like, he's getting all the press and other folks are stuck in a lab doing what they think is the real work. Right. So I kind of get it in a way, but I just think that people like Bill Nye and Tyson and Sagan are hugely necessary. Sure. You got to have a face out there furthering it. You definitely do. Yeah. And you got to have a media outlet like Parade magazine to put that face on. That was his go to. For sure. Oh, is he in there a lot? Oh, yeah. That's the Sunday insert, right? Yeah. And that was, like, kind of the big joke, is that he stopped publishing in academic journals and started publishing in Parade magazine. And if you remember, in our nuclear winter episode yeah. Did he completely think of that? No, he just furthered it. He was part of a group that was organized that basically said, if you guys start setting up nuclear bombs, it's not going to be this thing that just ends. There's going to be this thing called nuclear winter. And they hadn't done all the science yet before he went and wrote an article in Parade magazine and told the world about nuclear winter, and in the opinion of the science that she was working with, really undermine their case because it sensationalized. It. Yeah. But what it also did was it got your average Joe thinking about nuclear war and the Cold War, and maybe we shouldn't be zooming toward our own demise at 100 miles an hour agreement. That's the big back and forth about Sagan's legacy. Yeah. Or the actual work he did, too. Yeah. And you mentioned the theology. He was famously spiritual agnostic. He was a spiritual agnostic is how he defined himself. Yeah. He didn't classify himself as atheist. No. And the reason why, true to Sagan's own way, was that he could not scientifically prove that there was not God. So he said, how can I call myself an atheist? Which is pretty cool. And actually, he's the guy supposedly that coined the term extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. That's what I hear, is that go back to him. So he's like, skeptics love the dude. Oh, yeah. He's the father of the skeptic. But I think he gives skeptics the good name. Sure. If you want to prove your bones to how hardcore skeptic you are, criticize Carl Sagan in the skeptic community, you can really show that you're a super skeptic. Right? Yeah. Sagan was a milk toast as far as skeptics go. Yeah. Because he would indulge other lines of thought but still require proof, but he wouldn't just shut it down right out of the gate. So we will get back to Carl Sagan right after these messages. 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 to stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No longterm commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the homepage and enter code stuff. All right, Chuckers, we're back. Yes. So there was one thing that Carlson, he would poke fun at himself, he never abandoned. It was this idea that possibly, maybe, just maybe, there was intelligent life out there. And I think he wanted there to be for sure. He helped disprove or set the conditions against life being out there. For sure. Like, for example, he suggested that on Mars, the shifting features of Mars were a result of dust storms, and it turned out he was right. But those dust storms also basically said there's probably not life on Mars just from that reason alone. Those horrible dust storms. Right. Yeah. And he actually want to pull a surprise for some of his work. I think he wrote more than a dozen books, but one of the things he wrote was Contact, the novel. He was totally into Sci-Fi and wrote the movie contact McConaughey and Jodie Foster that was based on his novel. And of course, that movie was about sending signals into outer space, trying to find life so you could tell the guy it was something he loved to talk about and write about. Oh, yeah. But he also loved it. Like, actually that kind of research yes. Which is totally up his alley. Like, SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is evidencebased and sciencebased. Search for extraterrestrials. Right. Yes. That's Carl Sagan through and through. That's just totally him. He wanted to believe in extraterrestrial life, but he needed proof to believe in it. Really. He just couldn't make that jump to just saying, yes, they exist without any proof. Yeah, exactly. So he's writing books. NASA's picking his brain. He's all over the place. And he eventually we talked about his TV show debuted on well, actually, it debuted 1981. Yeah, I thought 80, was it 80? Yeah. Yeah, I think it was 1980. So I must have been nine years old. I was four. I thought I was ten. What month was it? I don't know. I don't either. But originally the TV series was going to be called man in the Cosmos, but he thought that was sexist and he was a feminist, so he said he proposed a couple of more titles. One was called there terrible. T-H-E-R-E with some subtitle. And then the other was Cosmos along with the subtitle. And you spent, like, three years around the world filming this thing, right? Yeah. And it's not like it ran for seasons and seasons. It was like a single run of shows on PBS. Television event. Yeah, it was a TV event, exactly. One of the other things that he did, which I never knew, was he wrote along with his son now, because his son has a byline, I guess. Jimmy Sagan. Todd Sagan. No, he has five kids, I think, total. Okay. But one of his sons became a Sci-Fi writer, another one became more of a science writer. So basically he split into two. Yeah, actually, I never thought about it that way. Bam. I just explained two of his kids existence. He wrote the entry for life, for Encyclopedia Britannica. Like, this is what life is. Yeah, he was fairly energetic dude, for sure. Yeah, to say the least. I mean, he did Cosmos in his mid 40s, just out of nowhere. He had a lot accomplished for a pot ed. He really did. Yeah, he's like the Cypress Hill of science. I don't know. Hey, man, they put out, like, three albums in, like, four or five years. It's a lot of work. And then retired. Sagan did not retire. No, he did not, sir. He worked up until his death in 1996. Yeah, he dies after battling a bone marrow disease for about a year or so. Two years, I think is closer. He's diagnosed with it, and he needed a transplant, and his sister stepped up and volunteered to give them a donation and did, and apparently it wasn't quite enough because he died of an infection after about a year and a half after the transplant. Yeah. Just 64 years old. Way too young. It really is. And in fact, yesterday, the day we're recording this is November 10, I believe. Yesterday would have been his 81st birthday. Oh, yeah. You didn't plan that? No. Wow, that's pretty impressive. He's speaking to me from billions of light years away. Yeah. That's funny that you say that, because somebody wrote to him. They said, how do you know that there's not a heaven? And he had this really great response, remember, in his archives. He was a pack rat. So he kept a lot of correspondence. And from it they found in this hambach article, there's a citation of a letter that he wrote to somebody, and he said, thanks for your letter. Nothing like the Christian notion of heaven has been found out to about 10 billion light years. And then in parentheses, he puts one light year is almost 6 trillion mile. Best wishes. And the point is, he took the time to write the letter back to this guy. Like, he would engage rather than just ignore the letter entirely, he entertained and indulged people's ideas enough that he would engage with somebody he didn't even know about, whether there's heaven or not. This was sent the year he died, actually. So he's writing this from his sick bed. Wow. That's awesome. As far as whether or not it bothered him, whether or not how he was thought of in the scientific community, it kind of all came to a head. In 1992, he was on a list to be included as a nominee for the National Academy of Sciences. In the end, he was not included, and it bothered him. He kind of brushed it off to people in public saying that I didn't think I would get in anyway. But his widow said, quote, it was painful. It seemed like an unsolicited slight, end quote. And in 1994, they ended up giving him an honorary medal, which was nice, but that was definitely a big sting for him. Yeah. The National Academy of Sciences said, no, you're not a member. You're not one of us. They basically said that the actual research that you did wasn't strong enough. Right. Which stinks. It sounds like a definite calculated slight. Yeah. He's included in my book. Yeah, for sure, man. So my hat is off to you, sir, forever. You got anything else? No, man. Someone needs to make a great documentary or movie about the guy. Yes. Starring Ashton Kucher as Carl Sagan. I got to play anybody? Yes. If you want to know more about Carl Sagan, you can start with this delightful little article on how stuff works by typing Carl Sagan in the search bar. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Hey, guys. My name is Connie. I've been a listener for a couple of months after my brother turned me onto the show. Since I've been completely obsessed and haven't been able to stop listening. I'm on track to become a nurse so I can't get enough of anything science or biology related. I wanted to thank you for a couple of things. I'm in a base level anatomy class right now, and the rigor mortis podcast saved my behind and my grade on my cadaver dissection and muscles test. A lot of the things you covered, like the nature of the muscles relationship with ATP and the integral proteins, really helped me pass my exam and not pass out in the cadaver lab. You also even taught my anatomy professor something new about HeLa cells. No. How about that? Last year, I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression due to the fact that I can never really fit in the right way. I lost almost all of my friends when I made an early jump from high school to college. And being able to count on YouTube weekly has really helped a little bit with the loneliness, and learning something new is always a healthy distraction from anxiety. So you guys really give me something new and exciting to discuss and learn about twice a week when you work 40 hours. It really goes a long way, right? It would absolutely make his ear if you could give a shout out to my brother, Matt, the physics teacher. That is very nice. Yeah, he's the reason I started listening to you. And sharing a love of knowledge is really something that has kept us close in spite of our eleven year age difference. It sparked so many interesting and inspired conversations between us. So thank you for what you're doing and helping many of us make it through tough spots. That is much love from Connie from Illinois. So thank you, Connie. And hello to Matt, your brother. Hey, Matt, the physics teacher. Yeah. Thanks, guys. We love families that listen and bringing people together, man, it makes us feel good. Yeah. The family that listens to SYSK together stays together. That's right. The dire warning. If you want to let us know how great somebody in your life is because they introduced you to The Stuff You Should Know, we love hearing that stuff. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstudyteo. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast athousedofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyhoodnow.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You 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 Immigration Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-immigration-works | Immigration systems regulate the flow of foreign immigrants into any given country. But why is immigration such a controversial topic, especially in the United States? In this episode, Josh and Chuck delve into the details and debate behind immigration. | Immigration systems regulate the flow of foreign immigrants into any given country. But why is immigration such a controversial topic, especially in the United States? In this episode, Josh and Chuck delve into the details and debate behind immigration. | Tue, 28 Dec 2010 19:38:55 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=19, tm_min=38, tm_sec=55, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=362, tm_isdst=0) | 47168856 | 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. 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 amazonandhalopts.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. So you did across from me, as always, as it should be. It's charles W. Chuck Bryant. And that makes the stuff. You should know the podcast. The Dream, the Legend. Yeah. The classic podcast. Classic audio. Yeah. Look at us. We were called pioneers before on itunes. Do you remember that? Then year one. Yeah. We're like the Milton Borough of podcast. And now we're already classics owner. Next year will be on the way out. You just die already has been called. Well, you're referring to we were named the number seven podcast of the year in the Classics category. We were behind IRA glass. Well, as always. Yeah. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I don't feel comfortable being ahead of IRA Glass. I just feel like I'm walking around with a big target on my back or something. No one does. No one is stands alone. Yeah. So, Chuck yes. We should probably mention while we're at the top of the podcast, facebook Stuff You Should Know. And on Facebook, come join us. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. Give yourself a little Christmas treat. And on Twitter. Follow Josh's Twitter feed S-Y-S-K podcast. Yeah, but you run the show there for the most part. You do a good job of filling in the blanks, buddy. Rarely, but thank you, Chuck. Josh. Hey, have you ever heard of the Dream Act? I have not as of today. But today big news. Yes, the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, which is basically like a chip for illegal immigrant kids. Okay. But without the health care, right? Yeah. It was passed in the House today by a vote of 216 and 198. And that's kind of a big deal. It moves on to the Senate. Well, it's getting a little hanky because the Senate may kill this thing. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, this is like breaking news, so who knows what's going to happen in the next hour after we record. But that's the word on the street. Wow. But basically, this act provides a path to citizenship for kids who were brought to the United States as illegal immigrants and have grown up here. Well, yeah. And who qualify in certain ways. Like, they've been here five years. They've obtained a high school diploma or a GED and demonstrated good moral character. So they're not just willy nilly handing out citizenship. No. And if you're a little kid right now and you were brought to the US illegally as a child, go start volunteering at nursing homes. That can only help you. And the nursing home people will enjoy it as well. Well, this one guy they mentioned in here quickly, Caesar Vargas, of course, they pick out, like, the one shining Star as an example, but he's going to graduate law school with a 3.8 GPA and wants to serve in the US military. And potentially this is blocked. He won't be allowed to do so. No. Which is kind of sad. We need willing and able bodies, smart guys and gals, hard workers. We do need them. And actually, most of our immigration laws, as I understand from researching this article, are kind of structured around the economy. Like, the order of preference for the types of immigrants that we give visas to are kind of like, how's your back? Right. Come on. It yeah. Well, they did say that the Dream Act, the Congressional Budget Office said it would actually cut the federal deficit by $1.4 billion. How an increase revenues? I would guess by adding taxes and people to the workforce. Got. You. Will increase revenues. That's what they say. At least over a decade. And that's with offering them tuition in state tuition to college, right? Yeah. That's pretty big. Okay, Chuck, let's talk immigration, shall we? Yeah. This is way more dense than I thought it was going to be. Really dense. I knew it was going to be sort of complicated because becoming a citizen is sort of complicated, but I didn't know there were so many ways to do that. We should say spoiler alert here. Naturalization isn't even in this podcast, and it's that dense. Yeah, I wondered about that. There's no citizenship classes. There's no nothing. The word green card doesn't appear in here either. Just immigration. That is correct, my friend. Remember Happiness? One of the characters was an immigration naturalization teacher. That's your favorite movie. Well, Chuck, let's start at the beginning. Okay. Back in the 17th 70s, there's a guy named Samuel Ellis, and he owned a little island in New York Harbor. Yeah, it was very important in 1812. It was an important defensive position. After the British left, we said, you know what? Let's just use this to immigrate people. Let's just funnel them through here, build up a nice little building and change everybody's names. And that was Ellis Island. Yes. From 1892 to 1954, dude, 12 million immigrants pass through that tiny little island, and 40% of our population in this country can be traced back to an immigrant from Ellis Island. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. And I think without slanting anything or leaning one way or the other, I think it behooves all of us, while we're listening to this podcast, to kind of bear that in mind. Maybe your relatives were immigrants at one point. Yeah. So, Chuck, let's talk immigration. How do you do this? Let's talk legal immigration first. Yeah. Well, we should point out beforehand, though, when he said that we should bear in mind that a lot of our ancestors were immigrants. There are nativists that believe that you shouldn't let any people into the country anymore. Right. And those aren't to be confused with Native Americans who are actually the ones who were here originally. The difference these are people who are descended from immigrants who are saying that we shouldn't let anybody in the country. Yeah, but I would encourage any nativist to attend a naturalization ceremony. That's all I'm going to say. I've been to one. Have you really? Yeah, I worked on a little documentary on Jane Seymour's Naturalization. What? Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. Oh, she was naturalized. Yeah. I thought she made a documentary called Naturalization. No, she was naturalized and they hired a camera crew to follow her around, and I worked on that, and I went to a ceremony in Los Angeles. And it's easy to get down in this country when you hear about dosing citizens with LSD and other hinky science, human experimentation and stuff, but you go to one of these things and it's a genuine reminder. And I don't get hokey like this much, but I was misty eyed for sure. Yeah. I mean, an auditorium full of people at the Congress Center what's it called in La. Staples center? The Hollywood Bowl. Jerry Zucker's house. But all these kids and adults, just you could see it on their faces. They were so happy to be citizens of the US and said the allegiance, and it was really cool. Yeah. You're like, those people know more about civics than the average person who is born here right now. Darn straight. All right, so let's go ahead. Jane Seymour. Class act, Chuck. And before we move on, one of Dave Letterman's top ten signs you're in a bad fraternity. Every Saturday night is Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman night. Is that for real? That's good. So, Chuck, you done? You're ready to actually talk about legal immigration? That's my mini rant against people that say Close up shop. I like your rants. They're very non offensive. Thank you. Yeah. There are a few agencies that are charged with immigration, and let's make the distinction. Chuck, you've heard of Immigration and Immigration with an irony. Right? So immigration with an I means that you are going into a country. Emigrating means that you are leaving a country or exiting with an E. That's how I remember it. That's a good one. I remember it like I am nauseous to you, Chuck, because I make you feel nauseated. That's how I keep immigrant and immigrant separate. That's an interesting mnemonic device. Yeah. So it used to be ins. Who is in charge of immigration, and these days it's Department of Homeland Security. Right. Pretty much ever since 2001. And the Department of Homeland Security was organized after that. It's pretty much taking a back seat, if they're even still around. Right. And under the Homeland Security is obviously the Border Protection us. Customs and Border Protection and the US. Citizenship and Immigration Service, they handle a lot of the paperwork. Right. Customs and Border Protection handles, like, the law enforcement aspect of it. Yeah. Right. That Congress passes the laws. Right. And Congress is up to they're in charge of all immigration policy. The President can have an agenda that he tries to push through Congress, but it's up to Congress. The one thing the President does have a direct hand in is creating refugee policy. And we'll talk a little bit about refugees, but I propose right here and now that we do a podcast on refugees at some point in time. Yeah. We'll handle immigration and we'll do refugees later. Yeah, agreed. Lay office, Chuck. Yes. There are plenty of different aliens. Yeah. There's the illegal alien that you've heard of. There's a legal alien, the most famous one being Sting, an Englishman in New York. Yeah. And there's a lot of other words that get bandied about. I get the impression that alien is not quite acceptable as it once was. Just immigrant now. Okay. But it's not an offensive word. It's actually still a very legitimate word to use. Yeah. You have a resident alien who is you're not a citizen or national, but you have the right to live and work here. Or non resident alien is like, if you have a travel visa, you're an Australian, you're allowed to live here for a little while. You're an Australian, let's face it, naturalized. Not to be confused with spiritualized, but naturalized means that you are a citizen, but you became a citizen after birth. You weren't a born citizen. I can't see more. Right. Class act. Yes. She's married to, by the way, stacey Keach's brother, Todd Keach, or was it Stacey? No. Stacy keache's brother Todd. Now. It's not Todd. I can't remember. But that's her husband. He's a filmmaker, and he made the film about her becoming a citizen. That's awesome. Yeah. Well thought to bring that up. So basically they rode off about six months of their life. Yeah. And he acted for a short time. He was in vacation. Remember when the officer pulls him over for killing the dog? Dragging the dog? Yeah. That's him. That's him. James. James Keach. Really? Yeah. Okay. Full circle. Yeah. That's good stuff, Chuck. All right. You want your kid eating the best nutrition. Right. For all their days at the dog park and nights sleeping in bed your bed. Yep. We mean that, kid your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition for their best health. It's guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. That means digestive health, heart and immunity, support healthy skin and coat hip and joint support and strengthen energy. Find Halo elevate at Petco Pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores. Learn More@halopets.com only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics. Students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelvecom slash podcast. That's K twelve.com slash Podcast and start taking charge of your future. Today, there is the end all, be all of before being naturalized, the lawful permanent resident, which is basically like kick back, relax, get a job, have a drink, or don't go out. Yeah. Do whatever you want. Just apply something here or there. Sure. But you're allowed to live here for the rest of your life. Right. You're not necessarily a citizen. Don't try and vote. Right. Don't you dare try and serve on a jury. Right. But pretty much everything else is fine. Right. So how do people get here? Well, you have to apply for a visa. That's the first step in all of these processes is the old visa. Yeah. It depends on where you are. Right. Where you go apply. Yeah. Or what your status is. Right. Well, sure. Well, if you are in a country, let's say you're Swedish and you're like, I am so sick of this minimalist furniture crap. I want to get to the US. And the no crime in the gorgeous scenery this is so poor. And the women that are blond and tall, I want to leave all that. Right, okay. And move to Detroit. Yes, you want to move to Detroit. What you would do is you would go to the US. Consulate in Stockholm or wherever you find the closest one to you in your country of origin, and say, I want to move to Detroit. And after a few minutes of them, like, thinking you're joking, you finally convince them you're telling the truth. They're going to start the process of applying for a visa. Right? Yes. And this is to become a permanent resident. This isn't like a work visa or student visa. Those are all temporary. Right. This is if you want to stay here forever in Detroit, but this visa is not this is basically your ticket to get from your country to a port not even in the United States. No. Which is confusing to me a little bit. And you're setting yourself up for an almost immediate letdown because the consular officer who's going to eventually interview you after you fill out your application, can say, sorry, we don't want your type in Detroit. Yes. Or they could interview and say, great, and then you could have another awkward encounter when you get to the port of entry because they don't have to let you in either. No. The port authority agent can be like, no, I don't really like the looks of you. I don't like your mustache. I don't like that cable knit sweater. Go back to Sweden. Yes. I hate Ikea. Yeah. Is that Swedish? Yes. Okay. I always think it's Swiss for some reason. Everything over there that's over here Swedish. Okay. So let's say you do get here to the port of entry. They will ask you a few questions when you get to that point of entry, like where you're from, what do you want to do here? Is anyone sponsoring you? Do you have family here? That kind of thing. Right. And there are different kinds of visas. I get the impression that there's the like, wink wink, nudge nudge, let the Swede and he wants to go to Detroit, no criminal background, just let them in type of visa down to the we're not entirely certain that this guy is not a criminal visa. So like really scrutinize him. Right, yeah. They give out 480,000 permanent resident visas every year. That's for family. Yeah. If you want to join a family member that's in the country. Right, sorry. Right. So maybe you got married to an American Joe or something like that during the war or Jane. Sure. Or you have dual citizenship because you were born somewhere with two different parents from two different countries. Right. So you have dual citizenship, you chose the other country. Now you want to move to the US. And your parent lives here. Right. That's probably pretty easy, especially again with the economics if you're 21 and unmarried. Right. Because you're going to come over here, probably make babies with an American girl. So you're going to take care of her and you are going to get a good job. So you're going to spend money raising your kid here and you are going to do nothing but be an economic driver rather than a drink. Yes. Well put. So let's say you do have a family member here. You need to prove your relationship, I would guess, beyond just saying, I promise you it's my father, and you have to have an affidavit of support. Right. That says that you can support this person at 125% above the poverty line, which is like 19 grand. Yeah. Basically saying you're not going to be a drain on the system. You'll barely eat by, if nothing else. But as long as you can eat by as long as you can eat by yeah. Then it's got to get approved by the USCIS. Yes. Again, the kind of the bureaucratic arm of immigration. Right. Then the Department of State checks to see if a visa number is available if you might already be in the US. So you can apply to have your status changed to that awesome lawful Permanent Resident. After you get a number, or if you're outside and you get a number, you go to the US. To where they tell you to go. Well, you go to the consulate and finish the process there. In Detroit, right? No, in your country still, you're outside. So basically the whole key to immigration is down the middle. Whether you're doing this outside the country or inside the country, there's basically two different sets of it's. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Yeah. Right. If you're inside the US. Turn to page 32, right. And then apply for lawful permanent resident status. If you're still in Sweden, go to page twelve and go to the consulate. It really does get a little convoluted. I don't think they make it hard on purpose, but I think we should totally see a way. This is in no way legal advice to anybody who is listening to us in Australia or Sweden especially. We're just using you as an example. If you actually do want to immigrate to the US. We hope this inspires you to do it lawfully and to go contact an immigration attorney or at least do a lot of heavy lifting research on Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security websites, or at the very least by Immigration for Dummies guarantee is out there. Just do something in addition to listening to this show. Yeah, that's what I say. Or if you do just listen to this show and you become a lawful citizen from it. We want an email from you about that. Yeah. And send us on Facebook. Yeah. That's so cheap. So where are we here? The family sponsorship, should we go through that? The preferences? Yeah, we talked about the preferences, right. So let's spell them out. Provided you're at least 21 parents, spouses and unmarried children of US citizens, you don't have to wait like if they are citizens, you don't have to wait for that visa number. No. If your visa is approved, or if your petition for alien relative is approved, you can just come on over and become a lawful permanent resident. Right? Yeah. That's if they're a citizen. If your relative is a citizen. Right. If one of your relatives has made it over and has become a lawful permanent resident, then you can start to come over too. Right. But there's different preferences for that. It's a spouse or an unmarried son or daughter. Again, probably of 21 years of age. Or older. Yeah, that's first preference. They're not too old. The second preference is spouses of lawful permanent residence. They're under 21. Unmarried children and unmarried children of lawful permanent residences. I'm sorry. Residents. Third preference, married children of citizens, and fourth preference, siblings of adult citizens. Wow. Yeah. Siblings of adult citizens. You got a bunch of visas left over. You really need your brother over here. I mean, really? Yeah. You're 30, and you got to have your brother over here. Right. Or you're 70. Right. So, yeah, it gets a little convoluted, for sure. Checkers. There are other ways to do this. If you were the first of your family and you are starting on the path to citizenship right. There are some other ways to get in the country to get the ball rolling. Number one, one of the best ways to do this is through the diversity lottery program. That means that you are living in a country where immigration to the US. Is really not that bulky. Sure. Not a lot of swedes coming over to the US. Necessarily. Yeah. They probably get shot at it. And so the State Department sets aside 55,000 visa visa numbers every year, and actually, 110,000 is what they really set aside because a lot of people don't complete the process. They basically say, hey, you want to come to the US. Not too many people are coming over from your country. We are the great melting pot over here. We're missing a little bit of your spice. So how about applying? Yeah. And the Kentucky Consular Bureau is responsible for this. Really? And in 2011, Chuck, did you know that nine New Caledonians and one lichtenstinian were among the 55,000 who came up? Really? One lichenstinian? Yeah. Wow. And one person from the French Arctic land. I don't even know what that is. And if you're lucky enough to hit this lottery, Josh, you can live here and work here forever and bring your family. Yeah, you can bring your family. You can bring your unmarried children. They're under 21. They're over 21. Then they're on their own. Right. You become a lawful permanent resident who can become a citizen under that. But it's like a huge not just like it's like the express lane. Yeah. You're in there. Another way to do it is through employment, right? Yeah. I didn't know about this one or the next one. No. This is how we got the Nazis over here to start our rocket program through Operation Paperclip. Immigration through employment. Got you. Yeah. So, yeah, that's when the employer kind of sponsors you, and they submit a labor certification request. Certification. You like that? I like that. What was the other one you said, too? The residences and I'm all over the place. Oh. At a faded or besides Affidavit. I'm all thick tongue today. And on a review. That's my stick. So you submit that to the Department of labor? If it's granted, then the employer then files for a petition for alien worker considered by the USCIS again. Then if that's approved, then you can get the immigrant a visa number from the State Department and basically say, go to work, but read up a little qualifications there, like the types of workers, the preferences. Yeah. So you've got EB one, which is Priority Workers, which is we need a rocket program to get to the moon fast. Ed Too is professionals with advanced degrees of persons with exceptional abilities. Basically, if you live in Bangalore, India, right now, that's you. Yeah. You're coming over here, no problems. EB three skilled or professional workers. I think a lot of people have a strong back, probably. Yes. A lot of roofers made their way into Florida, I imagine, through that immigration status. And there's ebfore special immigrants. Do you know what that is? I have no idea. I can't even begin to think of what kind of job that would be. No, we need someone on the inside. If you work for the State Department, let us know what a special immigrant is. Yes. And then there is what you could call the yellow brick road to citizenship. Yeah. This is the cherry on top. Basically, if you have some money you want to throw around and invest in the American dream yeah. You can buy your visa. It's $10,000 investor visas every year made available. And there's a few different ways to do it. You have to prove, basically that you are going to make an investment in a commercial endeavor that's approved and that you're going to create ten or more jobs through this endeavor. Right. And this is half of those 10,000 investor visas are set aside for this pilot project called Regional Centers, which is basically it's a rural area, struggling business. Sure. It's a part of the US that needs some investment, needs some new businesses. Right. Detroit, here we go again. You can also get that same visa, Josh, by starting a business or purchasing a business that's not doing so hot. Yeah. If you purchase a business, you can't just purchase it. You have to show that you can inflate its revenues by 140% right. And keep everybody on staff. Right. Or the golden ticket. If you just have a lot of money, if you have half a million dollars, you can say, I'm going to invest that in a rural area. Or if you have a million dollars, you can just invest in some other venture, anything. And the best part is, if you invest that million dollars correctly, not only do you buy your visa, you might make a substantial amount of money back on your investment. Yes. So if you got a lot of dough, then you can become an American citizen. Oh, come on in. 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. 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And I have to say, I know you don't print out the pictures. You're missing out on this one. There are some cool maps that are like, inflated and exaggerated and anemic and colorful. United States based on immigration to countries. Interesting. And then there's also one where refugees are. It's really neat. I recommend going and checking. South and Central America are skinny. America is bloated. Yeah, that is cool. So is the Middle East very big? Oh, is it? So let's talk about asylum. This is pretty convoluted as well, actually. Yes. If you remember one thing from this podcast, a person seeking asylum is called an asylum. That's it. Can we just stop there? Yes. Let's go to sleep. You know what asylum is, Josh? Obviously, when you're protected from if you're fleeing persecution from your country, you can come here and say, I need asylum because I live in Sudan. Do you remember in the Rules of War podcast we were talking about World War II? Changed everything. Basically brought the whole world together to say, we need to come up with some rules, not just for war, but for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was pastor ratified in 48 countries of the world. Said, as a human being, people have the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum for persecution, which is basically like, if some horrible stuff going on over here, you have to take these people if they come to your country, that's a basic human right to be free from that. Because there's other parts of the world. Yeah. Or at the very least in the case of the United States, you can go to another country that we have a deal with, an asylum deal. Like, hey, you might like Canada, right? Not only that, if they come to the US and. They're like. I'm seeking asylum. We can be like, you are approved for Canada, and we can just take you there. Like, we'll give you a bus ticket. But yeah, it's kind of funny because we have asylum treaties with other countries, and it's interesting. Yeah. There are no quotas or limits on this kind of visa. You just have to demonstrate a well founded fear for your life, basically yeah. Of persecution in his or her home country. Right? Yeah. And you make that case at a point of entry, basically, if you're seeking asylum, here's the difference between an asylum and a refugee again, or outside of the country. Right. So let's say that you are fleeing Sudan and you've made it to Egypt, right. You're like, I don't really want to stay in Africa any longer. I want to seek asylum in the US. But I'm doing it from Egypt. You're a refugee. If you leave Egypt and come to the port of Savannah and say, I want asylum, you're in asylum. It's just where you're doing it. But it's the same thing for the same reasons. You're being persecuted in your home country, and you're seeking comfort and freedom from persecution in another country. Got it. You've heard of the is it the Lost Boys of Sudan? The Child soldiers? Why am I thinking? Is it the Lost Boys of Sudan? It sounds right. One of those guys works at Twain's. Indicator he's a former child soldier. I think so. That's wild. And he was just very happy to be busting tables at Twain's, I'm sure. I mean, everyone loved this guy. I don't know if he's still there. This has been a couple of years since I've been there, but it was really neat, the news stories all over the place about these guys, and he worked there, and the what's the word I'm looking for? People loved him. He wasn't a mascot, but he was almost like people would come to Twains and everyone said hi to him, and he's a very nice guy. That's awesome. Mascot is not the right word. Save it for the refugee podcast, will you? Yeah. Because we're talking about asylum here. Yes. So, Chuck, if you're fleeing persecution, it's kind of specific. You can't be like, no one in my home country likes me. Right. That's not persecution. Right? No, it's persecution based on race, politics, nationality, religion, membership in a social group. So if the US. Turned on the nights of Columbus, they could go to Europe and seek asylum. Or if you're in a book club. Yeah. Not sure what that means. Okay. There are two types of asylum. Josh here's affirmative. And defensive asylum. And from what I get, affirmative is when you arrive here at a port of entry within a year of being here, you submit your application, it's filed, and you have an interview. They call it non adversarial. It basically means it doesn't take place in court. Right. It's going to take place in a friendly office and everybody's going to be smiling and they're not detained. You can live here while your case is being considered, but you can't work. Isn't that right? I believe that is right. And actually, if you do this the right way, like the US is set up, we actually have an act from 1980 called the Refugee Act, and anybody can ask for asylum, no matter what your alien status is. And we actually have mechanisms, we'll go with that one in place to kind of hasten this process. So if you do this correctly, you can have this whole thing buttoned up in 60 days and be kicking back in Detroit. Yes. If it never goes before a judge and it just stays nice and affirmative and non adversarial. Yeah. Then you're in Flint in no time, right. So basically what you want to do is within a year of landing in the US, you want to go to a port and ask for asylum. Yeah, I would do that on day two. Why not? After I've gone out and seen what nightlife has to offer. I love America. And then there's defense of asylum, and that is when you are in danger of being deported and you're trying to get asylum. Yes. So that's not like you came here and you filed all the correct paperwork. That means they're saying that you need to go home and you're like, no, I don't want to go. Right. That means if you waited two years yeah. And you go, they're going to be like, oh, well, now you're in defensive asylum, dummy. Why don't you do this a year ago? Right. Or if you weren't granted asylum, you can still try and get in through defensive asylum. Right. If you went through affirmative asylum and were denied, your next step would be going through defensive asylum, which is adversarial, meaning it's in a court, everybody's a little stern talking to you, a little mean. There's lawyers and all that stuff. And we should say here, if you were caught without correct documentation, if you forfeited your alien status, anything like that, it doesn't just apply to illegal immigrants. It applies to illegal immigrants who can, again, demonstrate a, quote, credible fear of persecution or torture. This is asylum. It just applies to those people. Yes. Right? Yes. And then there's expedited removal check. Yeah. That's if you're busted, basically with no documentation coming in, coming in. And you're just like, oh, I just thought you needed a plane ticket. Is that not good enough? No. Here's my luggage receipt. And actually, this is pretty cool. The immigration officials, which I imagine includes the customs agency, right? Yeah. Which we did a podcast and didn't we? Yeah, sure. Okay. They have to ask four questions of anyone they catch trying to make it into the US illegally. Right. They have to ask, Why did you leave your home country? Or do you have any fear concern about being returned to your home country? Would you be harmed if you were returned to your home country? Do you have any questions? Yes. Anything else you'd like to add that's actually in here? So basically anybody who wants to seek asylum can say, I'm seeking asylum. And that's going to start off this process. They're not going to be like, no. Yeah. If you come here and you want asylum, you're at least going to be able to speak with someone about that. You're not just going to be turned away at the door, but if you're busted getting in yes. You're going straight to defensive asylum. Right. If you make it through and then go to a port right. And say, I'm seeking asylum, that will be affirmative. Asylum. Yeah. People like I was, or probably like, what so confusing? Yeah, just go to a port and say asylum. And that will kick start something interesting that will start the process for sure. So we're not going to talk too much about refugees, but the 2009 World Refugee Survey puts that number at about 13.6 million worldwide refugees. And then last year god, that's up a lot because this article was written, I think, in 2007. Yes, it was nice. Silverman. Did you notice Jacob Silverman made a Bruno reference? I did, yeah. He said that in 2005 there were 9.5 million refugees. At the beginning of that year, we're up to 13 million. That's what it said. Wow. And last year the US admitted 60,191 refugees and the next closest was Canada at about 11,000 and then the Aussies at about 9000. Wow. There's refugees from Canada? No, refugees that canada said, once you come on here to the Great White North, we'll let you know. They admitted the refugee and that scene refugees are looking for, at the very least, temporary protected status. Right. And that's when you're like, all right, we'll take care of you for now. Right. And then we'll work this whole thing out in a minute, but you're safe. Is that all? In refugees? Do you want to do a podcast on it? Yeah, let's do one later. All right, well, let's move on to the sexiest business of all of this. Yeah. Controversy, illegal immigration. Yeah. It's hard to say, obviously, how many there are. The numbers are kind of all over. But the Department of Homeland Security said that there were 10.8 million last year, which is down a full million from eight. And that's the largest drop in 30 years. Yeah, well, we're in the middle of a pretty big recession. Yes. Times are tough here. Yeah, I don't really think about that. That's exactly why I would still think that it'd be better than being in Juarez. Well, I'm glad you brought up Juarez because I had a question about that, about Sudan Jarez, do you like my Spanish? Yeah, but I was talking about Juarez, the place. But go ahead. That's what I'm talking about. It too. Oh, is that the full name of it? Yeah. It means Juarez city. I wasn't talking about I was talking about Juarez City. I don't know who that dude is, but think about it. I think more than 6000 people have died in July. This past July, it hit the 6000 mark. Not had died. We're killed. Right. Okay. We're killed in Juarez alone since January 2008 because of the real deal drug war. Right. So if you're fleeing that across the US. Border, how can you not seek asylum? Is it that you could conceivably go south, deeper into your home country and be relatively safe or what? I don't know. I was hoping you would. Yeah, I don't know if asylum is just for that would definitely constitute a fearing for your life, for sure. Fear, persecution, for sure. That's a good point. But that does kind of pose a problem for people in Juarez fleeing north. Yeah. Because US. Is right there. Juarez is in the middle of a real drug war and it's a very dangerous place right now. Maybe they don't think asylum, they just think cross illegally. And so I should clue them in. Yeah. And before you were talking about the controversy with illegal immigration and we mentioned the recession, it seems like pretty much I don't think too many people have problems with peaceful refugees seeking asylum in the US. Right. It's when economics are brought into it that go nuts. Right. It always goes back to money. Right? It does. But I think first we should kind of we're up here like, oh, well, they're coming in down south in the border. Right. We should probably point out that for a lot of people who are making these border crossings illegally, it's extremely dangerous. Right? Oh, sure. Silverman who wrote this article cited 3000 people who've died since 1994 trying to make the trek between the Mexico, California border oh, just Mexico, California? Yeah. Since we erected the fence there. Interesting. Yeah. Also, coyotes who you pay to get you across the border, especially if you're coming out of Juarez. They basically double as drug transporters. They use illegal immigrants as mules. Oh, yeah. Basically. Like, well, here, carry some drugs and I won't charge you. And the person will say, well, no, I'll just pay you. And the guy pulls out a gun and goes, no, you're going to carry these drugs. So these people are not just getting busted coming into the country. They're getting busted with tons of dope on them and they're going to prison. Well, and then that gives the argument to the native saying they're just coming in here bringing drugs when it may be traced back to this one drug runner. It is making these hundreds of people smuggle in their drugs. Yes. And I think there's a lot of confusion going on, but yes, it's not good down there right now. No, it's not. So illegal immigrants, as most people know a lot of times will come to this country, join up with some of their family who may be here already legally and do jobs that Americans don't want to do for low wages. That happens a lot of times. It's not legal. You're not supposed to hire these people, but it happens. Yeah. I think Colbert did it. There's a group in New York State who were offering this farmhand, like, I think, fruit harvesting job really to anybody who wanted it, any American, foreign American who wanted it. And no one took them up on it. Yeah, well, that kind of goes to the guest worker program, which is something George W was in favor of. And that has not been approved. But it's been bandied about a lot. And basically that means if you can't find any American to do a job that you want to hire someone for, then hire a foreigner for about to be a term limit, like three years. Track them through the system, make them pay some taxes while they're here, and then give them an incentive to return home. Like, hey, we'll even give you retirement benefits which you can collect in Juarez after your term is done. After you've worked for three years and I didn't know this, I did a little digging. There was actually a program from 1942 to 1964 called the Bracero Program that Roosevelt put in. And it was basically that we need a lot of labor, so let's get some of the Mexican people up here to do this work. And it was a nice exchange. But in the middle of this then we were like, Everybody get out. Well, it was till 1964. But in 1954, in the middle of this program, the Ins ran a program, no lie, called Operation Wetback. What? That was the name of it. What? And their goal was to round up 1000 aliens per day and get them out. And in the end, more than 1 million Mexican nationals were taken back to Mexico courtesy of the US. And not just taken back to Mexico, but like 800 to 1000 miles deep into Mexico to discourage them coming back to the US. Was this program headed up by Don Johnson? No, ma'am, but that was the name of it. I mean, you can Google it. So anyway, that's part of our lovely history too, here. Wow. But until the guest worker program is for real, then it's just an idea that some people say might not be a bad one. Yeah, like, if they're here working, why not see if we can? Because the reason a lot of people get mad, we should explain, is this is fun. I'm watching you tap dance. A, they're not paying taxes is what the people against to say. And B, they most times are sending money straight back to their home. Yeah. Remittances. Yeah. So they're not even putting money into the economy. Remember when we were in Guatemala, we found out that tourism number two, agriculture, number three, remittances was the number one driver of their economy while we were there. Unbelievable. That ticks a lot of people off. Yeah, right. But I think that that's kind of a flash point. I don't think it encapsulates the whole thing. It's not the beginning and the end of the problem with immigration. No, of course not. Right. Chuck, a lot of people say you want a guest worker program path to citizenship. That is amnesty. And we don't do that in the US. Right? Yeah, actually, we do. Amnesty. Yeah. We've given amnesty to a lot of people. Oh, yeah. In 1980, Fidel Castro opened up the Mariel Port in Havana. Yeah. And 125,000 Cubans said, See you later, and showed up on Mass in Miami. Yeah. Amnesty seems to have gone in big waves here. Yes. Which is what a lot of people say. That's why we shouldn't do it, because it just encourages people to come here illegally in hopes that there will be another big amnesty. Right. It rewards illegal behavior. It's federally mandated rewards for illegal behavior. I totally understand that argument. It's a slap in the face to all the people who came here legally and went through this hard kind of grueling process here legally and all the other problems as well. But I guess my point is we have given amnesty to people before and hasn't been the end of the country. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, that's good point. And by the way, that Cuban migration in 1980, that's what Scarface starts out. Oh, yeah. And the Delta Force came to Atlanta, actually, because a lot of the immigrants were moved to federal prisons just to hold for a while until the government figured out what to do with them. There was an uprising in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and the Delta Force showed up to quell it. Wow. Well, that's kind of what happened in Squareface. Right. Wasn't there a big uprising in there in tournament camp? Yes, great movie, obviously. Well, we didn't really talk about the Border Patrol. We could do a whole podcast on that. Yeah, we did with customs. Yeah, we talked about that. We can say that. That virtual border fence that was controversial and full of technical issues and delays, obama put it into that in March and said, this thing is we could use our money better than this. It's not working. But there is a fence. There's 580 miles of 20 1ft fence along the border. Pedestrian and vehicle fencing. They're working on it. I don't know. They can clearly never build a fence along the entire border. But the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps is trying to do it on their own, not very successfully, though. They talk a lot. But apparently they did a report on their fence and they basically said, it's a cattle fence. I once interviewed the guy who founded that. Really? I can't remember his name right now, but I talked to him on the phone, and you just start him talking and he'll talk. It was very interesting, very interesting conversation to just basically sit there and take notes on. Well, I mean, I guess I see what they're trying to prove, but their goal was a ten mile stretch of fence, and come on, 10 miles, you can walk that in an hour and go around it. 10 miles an hour? You're going to have to be jogging, perhaps running. Okay, 2 hours. Okay. What do you walk about 4 miles an hour instead? About I walk about a mile and a half an hour because I stop a lot and lay down while you're a stroller. What else, dude? Well, that's it. Amnesty. Do you want to talk about some more highlights of amnesty? 1997, about a million Nicaraguans were given amnesty through the Central American Relief Act. Oh, really? 1098. 1250 Haitian refugees were granted amnesty en masse. Right. And all of that is because of the 1086 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which gave amnesty to about 2.8 million illegal immigrants. And the president who did that won Ronald Reagan. Look at there? Yeah, funny how things work. He was such a dichotomous president. Oh, yeah, man. Okay. I got nothing else. I don't either. I think that's the end of immigration. We don't ever have to talk about it again. Yeah, we can do refugees. We can do naturalization at some point. Yeah, we could. How about this? We'll just play selected clips from Jane Seymour's naturalization document and just be like, oh, wow, right. Now that's something. And then we'll make sure to get a lot of you crying. Yes. Okay. So, Chuck, if anybody wants to learn more about immigration, very dense article, well written by one Jacob Silverman, who used to work here, you can type in immigration. That's two Ms in the handy search bar@howstepworks.com, which means it's time now for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this shout out request that we don't grant often, but we are in this case. Oh, this is a big one. Don't we get paid for these now? No, in karma we do. Guys. My name is Eric. Erickson. I've been listening to your show for some time now. I was actually shown them by my friend how would you pronounce I-L-O-N-A ilona. Ilona. Ilona. It's like ilona. Which is why I'm actually emailing you guys. For her birthday this year, I'm trying to do something really special. I've been emailing her favorite actors and musicians to see if they could send an autograph or a short message. So far, I've gotten messages back from Andrew Bird, who I'm a fan of, and Priscilla On, who is another singer who I don't know. Okay. And they both got back. So I felt that's the only reason I did this, I thought, well, we can't be the jerks who don't do it. Do you know how many of these we're going to get now? No, don't bother. We're going to have to do like a happy birthday segment. I figured it would be really awesome if you two could maybe give a shout out to her and listen her mail section. So that's what we're doing here. Aaron, it would mean a lot to me if you could do this. It doesn't matter when he didn't tell us when her birthday was. I'm just hoping she doesn't listen to it before I give her the rest of the things and he still doesn't tell me when her birthday is. So if we're ruining this for you, Ilona, then I'm very sorry. If you get back to me sometime, it would be super awesome. Is this us getting back to yeah. I just want to tell you why, Ilona. It means so much to me, but that is very sweet. Eric with A-C-K and I hope this gets whatever you're seeking then. Eric with a CK. You can't trust Eric to spell their names as a C and a K. It's one or the other. You should just throw a T on the end of that. He's very middle of the road. I'll bet. Yeah. So I can see your side, but I can also see your side. I'll bet. This immigration podcast has made us headed. He was. Well, clearly neither one of us are going to get through this, so they'll just think that we blew them off. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot. If you want to say Happy Birthday to somebody, apparently the border is open. Everybody is streaming through. It's not let us know why we should say Happy Birthday to somebody. Wrap it up in an email and send it to stuffpodcast@howstufforts.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 housetop works. iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you a summer school's out? The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today, you 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." | ||
03190e68-3b0e-11eb-947e-033c48473d1b | Stranger Danger! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/stranger-danger | If you grew up in the 1980s, you thought you had a 50% chance of getting kidnapped every time you left your house. But like with the Satanic Panic and other 80s hysteria, it was much ado about (almost) nothing. | If you grew up in the 1980s, you thought you had a 50% chance of getting kidnapped every time you left your house. But like with the Satanic Panic and other 80s hysteria, it was much ado about (almost) nothing. | Tue, 20 Jul 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=201, tm_isdst=0) | 46441602 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant. And we're flying solo today. But the that's cool, because God is our copilot. It's a good one. That's us. Because God has nothing to do with you and me unless he was one of us or she right. What a song. What a great song. I can't wait till that comes back in five years. Who was that? I think it's been a one hit wonder, but it was one heck of a one hit. Like I want to say Tory Amos, but it wasn't. No, it definitely wasn't. It was like, Diane West or something like that. Tory Amos too good for that dribble. She was good. I thought that was a pretty good little song. I liked the message. Sure. Just a stranger on the bus just a slob like one of us. Right. That wasn't the player, was it? Yeah, just a slob kid, you not my friend oh, boy. Yeah. Just a slob like all of us. I didn't know that was being insulted when I was grooving out to that song on the dance floor. You couldn't feel a super numerary finger poking you in your chest. I could not. So, Chuck, I feel like we should stop this chitchat and get down to it because we're talking today about something that made up our childhood and I was very dismayed to learn still makes up some kids childhoods. A lot of kids childhood still being taught today. And that you could conceivably make the case that it eroded at the very fabric of society. A very misguided campaign that came about in the very early 80s that had the very catchy term known as stranger danger. Yeah. It's funny when you look at this and you couple it with everything else. The 80s had a lot of misguided campaigns, didn't they? Yeah. Just say, no. Give me a break. No. They're all over the place. Satanic panic. It's really weird. When you look back, it was clearly like I think there are a lot of factors like the Reagan era sort of Moral Majority years conspired to kind of just they wanted to scare everybody away into everything. Yeah. Scare you straight. Straight into their political ideology. That's definitely part of it, for sure. Because there's a definite and this isn't just me riffing here. Like, I saw this in multiple places with legit sources even. And we'll talk a little bit about legit sources or not. And I think there's some good examples in here of being careful who you listen to. But there does seem to be, like, kind of a general consensus that part of those moral panics in the 80s came from Christian conservatives who very much, and to their credit are dedicated to the idea of protecting children from predation at the hands of adults. Sure. And that's where a lot of that stuff came from, but that it was really done poorly and probably overblown and in very short order. It was not the Christian right that was leading charge anymore. It was everybody. Everybody was involved in this kind of stuff. Yeah. Because I think if you were a kid in the knew a few things, you knew that if you listen to rock and roll music that you might be possessed by the devil. If you went outside to go play by yourself, there was a really good chance you might not come home. And that if you travel to, like, in New York City, like the big city or someplace, you send a really good chance of being murdered. Yeah. It was just going to happen. Statistically speaking, if you went to New York City, you're going to be murdered. Yeah. And none of those things were true. Or if you smoke a cigarette, then you're going to end up like a cocaine fiend. Right. Or if you take LSD, your children's genes are going to be all sorts of messed up, and you'll be addicted to LSD for the rest of your life and have to take it multiple times a day. Yeah. We take flashbacks for the rest of your life. That's right. If only. Yeah, for real free trip. But we'll go ahead and start because this Eddie Gravyowski, the Grabster helped us with this. And he very logically started out with some statistics. The National Crime Information Center from the FBI, they kind of are good at collecting missing person stats. They've been doing that since the Crime Control Act in 75. And it's like with anything else, when you collect statistics on, like, missing children, let's say you also have to clean up that list every year. Right. Because a lot of kids run away from home. A lot of kids come back home. A lot of kids were never lost to begin with that are reported missing, that kind of thing. And in 2019, I believe, once they added and then subtracted, they added about 609,275 missing persons. That is eye popping. Yeah. And that's all missing persons. That's not just kids for that year, though. That's not over the course of a century. That's in 2019 alone. Right. But they also purge 607,104, leaving about 2000 actual missing persons remaining in their system. And about 100 of those were juvenile. And then some of those are kids who ran away from home more than once. So they're on the list more than once. So if you just look at naked statistics, an actual kidnapping in modern times of a child is really rare, and even rarer still to be kidnapped by a stranger. Exactly. So, Chuck, I got my trusty old calculator out, and I got a lot of stuff wrong, but I'm going to read what I came up with. Okay? Does it say boobless? Just count me with that. So out of the, let's say 2000 people, 2000 kids, who are abducted every year. That's what I saw in one place, I think from the FBI. 2000 kids were abducted. That means that out of the 74 million kids in America in 2011, each one technically had a point chance of being abducted. Okay. And that's just abducted. Okay, so hang with me for one more second. You have a quarter of a millionth of a percent of being abducted. Statistically speaking, if you're a child in the US in 2011, of that quarter of a millionth of a percent chance, you had an additional 200th of a percent chance of being abducted and murdered by a stranger, which is, as anyone will tell you, the money fear of being a parent. And that is what drove it. There was this irrational fear of the worst case scenario. Even though the chances were vanishingly remote, every single parent in America, starting in the very early eighties was staying up awake at night for decades worried that this is going to happen to their child. Yeah. And we were talking 2019, which is the lowest number since they've been keeping track. I think that number peaked in the 90s, but even in the wasn't a common occurrence these days with camera doorbells and cell phones and CCTV and house security cameras. Like, obviously that kind of stuff isn't going to happen as much because it's just harder to get away with it. And you can make a case that in the was easier and maybe happened a little more for that reason. But it still was founded upon parents worst fears and it was never a statistical probability. No, not even remotely. And there definitely were more kidnappings in general. I think they used to get around a million entries rather than the 700,000 or 600,000 and change. And so that's definitely gone down and we'll talk about why and then the recovery rate has actually gone up from the 60% tile to the 90th percentile. So it definitely has improved. But like you're saying, even at its worst, it was driven by fear, which makes it the definition of a moral panic. Yeah. And driven by the media that has this statistic. 96% of newspaper articles about how to protect kids focus on threats from strangers and only about 4% talk about abuse within the family, which is far and away the most common threat to a child or people within the family. Very sadly. Yeah. I think something like 58,000 kids were abducted by familiar non family members, like people they already knew and most of the time they were targeted for sex. So it's not to say like, there isn't a big problem with child sexual abuse. Like, I think it's true. Even at the time it was a hidden problem. Even when everyone was focusing on it because everyone was focusing on the wrong group, strangers. Whereas it's like, no, you're far more likely if you're going to be sexually abused to have been sexually abused by someone you know, or even a family member, the stranger picking you up, abusing you sexually, and then murdering you. It just almost never happened in the United States. Did you happen to sit through the frustrating experience of Abducted in Plain Sight? Was it a duck movie? No, I didn't see that one. Don't bother. Well, I kind of like those vintage, like, PSA films. I mean, it's a remarkable story, but it's on Netflix. It is one of the more frustrating things that you will ever sit through in your life. Do they keep, like, going further and further back in time to give more and more backstory and context? No, it's just the story of this one family. But I don't want to give anything away. If you want to watch all right, you're going to want to throw your television into the street. You're going to be so frustrated. Abducted in Plain Sight. Yeah. I don't know if I can recommend it. It's one of those things. I kind of glad I watched it, but it was just so frustrating. Like listening to the Shaggy album or something. Hey, did you ever see that one After School Special where Helen Hunt smokes PCP and jumps out of the second floor window at her school? That was a great one. Yeah, all time. So what were you about to start with? Let's take a break. Oh, I think that's very appropriate. Man yes, we'll take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit about the beginnings of the Stranger Danger era in the late seventy s right after this. Okay. Chuck this is one of those rare things where you can kind of point to a moment in history where society changed, there was a sea change. And it really happened in May of 1979 when a little cute, cute little six year old boy named Eaton Patts vanished. He was walking for the very first time in his life by himself to the bus stop two blocks away from his family's house in Soho. And my house. I'm sure. I mean, like a 200 square foot studio apartment. Yeah. And it was the last day of school before summer. This is his last chance as a six year old to walk by himself like a grown up to the bus stop. His mom let him do it because it was a hectic Marine, and she knew he was really wanting to get more independence. He had one dollars in his pocket for a soda his favorite Eastern Airlines had on, and he was never seen again. To this day, they have no idea what happened to him. Really? Yeah. And this was a huge news story, partially as we'll see, because it was a little white boy who was very cute and media heavily slanted their news stories toward white people in general, white kids. And like I said, we'll get into that more in a minute. His dad was a professional photographer. That definitely helped. There were tons of great photos of eating that the news could dig into and put all over the place, and they did. And like you said, this is one of those deals that it's the parents worst nightmare. So when a news story gets run like this, every parent in the country is going to pick up the phone. These days, it would be online, but they would pick up the phone and call their friends and say, did you see what happened? Did you see what happened? Right. This is the kind of thing that we're also scared about, and it's actually happening. It does happen. Yeah. And there were some other extenuating circumstances, too, that just made it even worse. Like, this school didn't bother to call to ask about where he was when he didn't show up, because I guess they didn't know he was walking by himself the first time ever. And so his parents went the whole day without being aware at all until he didn't come home from school, that he had never showed up. There was just a lot going on for something about it. It just struck everybody in just the right way. It was just heartbreaking, and it scared parents to death. And that was in May. And you can fast forward to just over two years later, this time in Hollywood, Florida, 1981. Another six year old, another cute little white kid named Adam Walsh, was abducted from a Sears store while his mom shopped 2 miles over. He was playing, like, video games in the store, and his mom was doing some shopping, something that parents did all the time back then. It was astounding that he was even in the same store at the mall as her. He could have been anywhere in the mall at that time, and he was abducted while she was just a few hours over. And then even worse than, I think, eating and this really kind of cemented, like the Eden Pat's disappearance wasn't a one off. Like, we're dealing with a huge social problem now. Adam Walsh's poor little head was found floating in a canal about ten days after he went missing, and that was it. That didn't just scare parents. That scared everybody. Anyone who heard about it was now scared to death of stranger danger and abductions and being murdered by some rando who picks you up. Yeah. And if you noticed Josh earlier, say, we don't know what for sure would happen in the Eat and Pat case. His body was never found. In 2012, there was a man named Pedro Hernandez who was a store clerk that worked in the same neighborhood in New York who confessed to killing him, and he was convicted in 2017. But it was a pretty flimsy case and a flimsy confession, and I think generally, everyone kind of says it's not case. Close. We still don't really know for sure what happened, even though there was a confession because there was no body that was ever found. And I don't think the parents ever felt closure like they deserved. No, for sure. They had already previously zeroed in on another suspect named Jose Ramos, who was somebody who had a relationship with one of Eton's babysitters and who was a pedder assist. And I don't know if you ever admitted to it or not, but he was never charged. But Pats has won a civil suit against him that saying he was responsible. So two people have been, one's been convicted and one's been ruled against two different people in the murder of him, even though they have nothing to do with one another. Right. So that brings us to the famous Milk Carton Kids campaign. Not the amazing folks singing duo that I'm a big fan of. Is that the name of the band? Yes. These two guys, they're great. They sort of Simon and Garfunkel every Lee Brothers type of thing. But they play it straight. They're not like they might be giants or something. No, I mean the music is played straight, but there is a lot of humor in their banter. But they're not like a joke band. Okay, got you. Hey. Yeah, it's good stuff. I don't know if they Might Be Giants could be considered a joke fan. Well, no, I don't mean they're a joke fan, not like Weirdale. Right. Got you. Boy, here we go with the emails. Have you ever heard his real polka stuff? It's great. Sure it is. Everybody Loves Weird Al. Man, back off. His nonparty music is wonderful. Did you see the documentary? Not a good documentary at all, but it was still really interesting about The Amazing Jonathan. I never saw that. It's very interesting in that it really kind of explores the Amazing Jonathan. But the documentary itself is not great and the documentarian even knows it. Like part of the documentary is him struggling with figuring out how to do this right then a great documentary subject being made by a CGRADE documentary filmmaker. I see. There's a chance that this guy is listening right now because he looks to me like a stuff you should know listener. So I'm just going to say no. Give it a shot. Well, I'm not saying this was a C graded filmmaker, but I've seen plenty of C grade documentaries about really great topics. That's all I'm saying. I know. So the milk carton kids, not the focusing duo. This began in Iowa and the disappearance of Johnny Gosh in 1982 and Eugene Wade Martin in 1984. Both twelve year olds, both newspaper boys and Des Moines kind of spurred this campaign. I do love that Ed, dear sweet Ed, when he gave credit to the Anderson Erickson Dairy in Iowa for starting this in 1984 and he said the only source I could find was something called, quote, uncle John's Bathroom Reader. Have you ever listened to the podcast before? I could just send to you going like what? Something called Uncle Driver, what is going on here? This is like I'm in Bizarro world or something. Well that's good enough for us and I believe it. I think they were probably the first company to put kids on the side of a milk carton to raise awareness and say, hey, here's a picture of this kid. Here's what they look like, how tall they are, when their birthday is. Some things they might just like little clues how to identify this kid if you see him out. Clues. They're like putting on your pirate hat because X marks the spot and we're going to go find Johnny Gosh. Here are your clues. Well I mean this is the best they could do. Pre internet is like for sure. What's always sitting on the table while you're having your breakfast cereal that you're staring at is that milk carton? Great idea. All of us have read the milk carton out of boredom when there's no good cartoons on or something like that, you just kind of read this stuff. So yeah, it makes total sense. And from what I understand, yes, Anderson Ericsson was the first dairy to do that. And it also makes sense that they would be the first one because they were in Des Moines and Johnny Gosh and Eugene Martin were both abducted from Des Moines two years apart, probably by the same person. From what I read, this local dairy doing this is like part of a get out the info campaign. Makes a lot of sense. I did see that a local grocery store chain was actually the first to print their images and missing info on their bags. And the Anderson Eriksson probably got the idea or somebody got the idea and went to Anderson Ericsson and they said sure, the upshot of this, they were the first producers of milk cartons. And a lot of people say, well it was Eden Pats who was the first kid who was on a milk carton, probably on a national level, but on a milk carton ever, it was two kids. It was Johnny Gosh and Eugene Martin. And both of them were paper boys abducted from their routes in the early morning. Their stories are so sad, man. Yeah, super sad. The mill carton thing picked up again in Chicago and then California and then like you said eventually became a national thing. In 1985 the National Child Safety Council, which is a nonprofit, they launched this nationwide campaign and that's where Beat and Patch probably comes into play, right? And then it was on a lot of stuff. It was on grocery bags and pizza boxes and it wasn't around long though. I kind of thought it might still be a thing even. But I think it only lasted a handful of years and by the mid ninety s, the whole mail carton thing had kind of gone away with people saying it was successful while it lasted, but it just had its run. And then other people, of course, now look back and say, but was it really successful that did it lead into you finding some of these kids? And I don't necessarily think that is the only measure of success if it's an awareness campaign. But they definitely can't go back and say, well, yeah, look at this list of kids that were found because of the Mill carton campaign. Actually, there is. I saw the number three, that there are three named kids who were rescued and found and returned based on milk cartons, but there's only one actual name I can find, and you can find it all over the place. Her name is Little Bonnie Loman. I added a little. Her first name is actually Bonnie, not Little. And she has one of the most name for a kid, though, little Bonnie Loman. Yeah. Until you reach middle age and you're like, oh, my God. So she has one of the most amazing stories you could possibly encounter when it comes to kids on milk carton, don't you think? Yeah, I mean, she was kidnapped by her mum and stepdad and as the story goes, recognized her own image on a milk carton and cut it out and kept it on our wall, and I guess a friend's parents saw it and called the cops. But that's not true, though, right? My friend, I would put a significant amount of money on the fact that Bonnie Loman is not a real person, that it is a real Internet. That far, yes. Dude. I looked on the New York Times website. I searched for Bonnie Loman missing milk carton. I even put quotes around. Bonnie Loman did it on the Washington Post website. I did it on the Denver Post website. And Denver is supposedly where she was found living, abducted by her mum and stepfather. Nothing comes up, not even a vague reference. She's an Internet legend and we figured it out, we think, until someone writes us and says, no, I knew Little Bunny looming, right? We say the bonding Looman and say, Well, I don't know, actually, it was my cousin's friend's coworker who knew Bonnie Lamont. But no. Another giveaway, Chuck, is that this story is repeated almost verbatim around the Internet. They don't say where she was abducted from and returned to. The only thing I've seen consistently is that the story itself and then that it happened in Colorado, and then a lot of the sites that carry this story are like Jesusdaily or boardgametips.com, not necessarily the most credible sources for an actual child abduction case. I think we may have rooted that one out. All right, so what's going on here is panic. These milk cartons come out. It's a good campaign, but all that does is sort of reinforce the parents that a stranger is lurking outside your home kind of at all times, just waiting for your kids to be playing on the playground by themselves for just a minute, and then they're going to get snatched. And while this panic is going on, there are people that were sort of ringing the bell for good since way back in the 80s. Even the famous pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock. He was quoted in the Washington Post in 85 as saying, children are bombarded by more than photographs. They stand in line at mass fingerprinting sessions and shopping malls and watch cartoon characters on TV, reminding them to be wary of strange adults. There's a little bit more to the quote, but he was kind of saying, like, we're going overboard a little bit here, and we're actually maybe doing harm by raising children in this culture of fear. Were you fingerprinted as a child? I was never fingerprinted, but I certainly remember everything else. I mean, I forgot about the Saturday morning cartoons. There was stuff all over those, too. Yeah. McGruff. Remember the crime dog? They teach you how to run away from strangers, and that's what they would teach you, is like, you should scream and yell and kick and run for your life if a stranger ever approached you. Like, if they just hit the basic minimum thing, we're like, okay, strangers approaching you. Run as fast as you can for your little life. And it's definitely easy to buy into the idea that that culture of fear had real repercussions on us growing up, because I remember I was scared of all this, and my dad took me to get fingerprinted. Oh, you were? Yeah. I was like, Why are we doing this again? Just in case they find you with your head cut off one day. We can identify, I might have been fingerprinted. Something about that really seems familiar to me. Yes, I know I didn't commit a crime. No, not a little. Chuck still to this day, I'll bet. No, I've never been arrested. That's good. I realized later that my dad preemptively ratted me out to the cops. Really? Well, yeah, by having me fingerprinted. Okay, got you. But that was the level of, like, my dad took me to a fingerprinting fair for a little kid so that they had your fingerprints in the system in case something bad happened to you and you turned up. They could identify your body or you, even if you just been abducted, but you knew what was going on. You knew why you were going there. And that definitely did affect me. And I think a lot of kids our age yeah, this is one of those kind of stats that I think is a little dumb. But from the early 90s, there was a study that found that 72% of parents cited abduction is something they worry about. That's just a little weird. I think every parent that is a deep down worried that it could happen, but it's not like I don't know, there's just so many qualifiers there. How much did they worry about it? It sounded like it was one of their chief fears, along with failing their kid, not providing for their kids, like, deep down fears. Like a big fear. That's what it sounded like in the abstract I read. I didn't read the whole study, but that's how they do it up. A prominent fear would be the word I'm looking for, rather than big fear, because it is the biggest fear. But whether or not you think it's a reality that you really should worry about a lot, it's a different thing. I don't know. I would bet dollars and donuts that it was a prominent fear in your definition, for sure. All right. It did do some harm. Like, in actual instances that we can cite in the Boy Scouts, they still teach stranger danger. And in 2005, a Cub Scout was lost in the woods and actually evaded rescue for a few days because there were people there trying to help him, like, hey, are you lost, little boy? And stranger danger would run away. And so in that case, this kid was trying people trying to help him out, and he ran away from them. So that's one definite instance. Yeah. In that 1985 WaPo article that you mentioned earlier, it was just rattling off this is 85. This is, like, right in the middle of all this. It was kind of rare to question this mentality. And they were rattling off all these instances of kids just, like, losing their minds out of fear. Like, they mentioned a girl who got hysterical when it was her time to get off the bus because she lived on a rural road, and she was sure that if she walked alone down this rural road, she will be kidnapped. It's just a certainty in her mind. And kids were like, anytime there were parents that said hi to the little kids, they got freaked out, you know, like, you couldn't give any attention to little kids, or else they would be really scared. And there's this aspect of the moral panic as far as stranger danger goes, where the dangerous group is not Satanists. It's not witches or something like that. It's strangers. And all of us are strangers to somebody else. So that means that everybody is under suspicion of everyone else at some point in time. We're a suspicious character to somebody who doesn't know us and possibly a kid. And then that alters how you act around kids. And that has had, over the years an impact of how adults deal with kids, and it's removed us from that it takes a village to raise a child kind of community where it's like, that's your kid. I'm not going anywhere near him. I don't even want to look at them because I don't want somebody to think I'm trying to kidnap them or something like that. And that has had a real impact on how adults deal with kids. And that. Is surely having an impact on how children develop in a community, in society. Yeah. Didn't you find a thing where it said that men, and these days men are more reticent to help out a child because of that fear? Yeah, something like 67 or 70% said they would not help a kid who needed help. Smaller percent, basically. Most of them said, I'd just keep walking because I'd be so worried that people were wondering why I was approaching a little kid. And then a smaller proportion said that they would go find a woman to help, or maybe the cops or something like that, but they would not step in and fulfill their normal social roles in adults helping a kid in need. And that was a UK survey, I think. But that definitely applies over here as well, too. I didn't know it's the UK. You should told me that. Why did the study say 100 men on the way to the pub survey? It said, just a little humor there, trying to lighten the mood. I liked it. It worked. It also made me want a nice draft beer. Oh, boy. I went to this great pub in Manchester when we did that show. That was one of my great days in England. It was so awesome. That place was on probably a 1ft slant, that floor. It was so old. That's awesome. I actually found a toughest place in Manchester because, remember, we were there for, like, a couple of days and I ate there probably like three or four or five times. It was so good. But I was aware that I was eating at the top of the place in Manchester. I finally hit a pub. No, I did. I hit one in Manchester, too, kind of by the venue. Yeah. They're pretty neat little places, aren't they? That's a good time. Yeah, you got to get back there, for sure. So there's something called the children's independent mobility, and it's a measurement of how free your kid is to move about your neighborhood and to explore things without supervision. Like, sure, walk down to the playground or walk down to your friend's house, that kind of thing. And a higher CIM is a really good thing that correlates with psychological development, with analytical skills, with motor skills. It gives the kid just sort of more confidence and knowledge about their community. And get this, it makes kids more aware of true dangers than if you're constantly watching them. Instead of stranger danger, it makes kids more aware of, like, a real danger that might be out there. Like, they have done studies and figure this out. Right. We talked a lot about that in our Free Range Children episode. I don't know if you talked specifically about that measure, but we definitely found that, yes, your kid is just more well rounded and developed. If they're allowed to explore the world on their own terms, within reason, nobody's saying, like, let your kid play with flaming knives or anything like that, like we did. Exactly. Also known as the swing set. But there's a pendulum that swings between things like that and it has swung way too far in the other way. If you guys will just allow me to get up on my soapbox for a second. Please do. Okay. I just got one toe up and then came back. Alright, well, you're off your soapbox. Let's take our final break. We'll talk a little bit more about the criticism of Stranger danger and sort of some of the best practices these days right after this. All right, so we mentioned earlier news stories as far as child abductions covering cute little white kids, and that's kind of always been the case. And that's one of the biggest criticisms of media coverage is it very much disproportionately, covers white children in those cases and ignores cases of people of color. There's an organization called Black and Missing because of this. And they report that 37% of missing kids just a few years ago in 2018, were people of color, which is a much higher percentage proportionally, than the overall population. But you're not hearing about this stuff in the news like you would if it was the pageant queen. Right, exactly. The statistic kind of gets it across pretty clearly. Yeah. So what we're not saying is that there is no risk to your kid being abducted by a stranger. It obviously happens because we do see it on the news and it is every parent's worst nightmare. And I think that's probably why it's always been such a thing, because it's the worst thing you can imagine happening. Right. Because not only has that happened and that is horrific in its own right, but that also means that you have failed to do your number one job is to protect your kid at all costs. Right? Yeah, man, I can't it's astounding that people can go on from that they can manage to keep living. No, I don't get it at all. One of the things that they do, though, and I think one of the things that gives them purpose in life from that point on is a lot of parents, especially some of the early, more prominent national cases like Eden Pats parents, the Walsh's, Adam Walsh's parents, and Johnny GOSH's parents. They all threw themselves into lobbying for social reform. And their lobbying efforts did lead to things like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to be developed and National Missing Kids Day to start to be recognized on May 25, which is the anniversary of Eden pasta's disappearance. And the Walsh, I think, set up the Adam Walsh Foundation. Four days after Adam Walsh's funeral. And then John Walsh is very famous for doing America's Most Wanted thing and has legitimately dedicated himself to stopping this and so has a lot of other parents. So I think that's one way that they've put their time and effort and energy into this and poured it into doing what they can to make it so that other parents don't go through this. Yeah, there have been quite a few of those. The Jacob Wetterling act that created the sex offender registry. And interestingly, his mother eventually, on a podcast, said she expressed regret about these registries that were expanded. She felt like, overly expanded and endlessly punitive, basically, and saying that you're on this list forever and you're never allowed to reintegrate into society. Right. And is that fair? Especially when they've expanded those registries to include things like if you got caught urinating in public, you are a registered sex offender. Right. Which is really interesting. I've never been caught, but boy, I beat in public plenty of times. I've got a little bladder and sometimes I just got to go. But that happens. And apparently, again, especially the one where you're having like, consensual sex as a teenager and depending on your state, say you're 17 and the girl's 16. If you're caught, if the parents prosecute, you may be on the sex offender registry for the rest of your life. And apparently that happens disproportionately to kids of color. So the whole thing is the sex offender registry is not in and of itself a bad thing. Like, it's meant to be a tool to warn communities like, hey, there's somebody who has perpetrated, in many cases a crime against a child, and you should know that they live at this apartment. But it's not just a cut and dried issue. People can be categorized unfairly, get caught up in that drag net, the categories can be far too expanded. And then yeah, like Jacob's mom was saying, there's no redemption there. In fact, in most towns, because you can't live within X number of feet from a bus stop or a school or plate or park, there's like very small pockets where a sex offender can legally live. And that means that you've got like, these little sex offender islands yeah. Of sex offenders who are on the sex registry list, and they become shunned and outcast and a lot of them get run out of town or run to go live homeless, under, overpasses and that kind of thing. So there's a lot of tinkering that can be done to make it more dressed if that's kind of where our minds are. But I think when it comes to sexual abuse of children, justice isn't necessary. Justice for the perpetrator isn't where America's mind is typically. I mean, Jerry Seinfeld is a registered sex offender on his TV show for what did he do? He peed in the parking deck and got caught. I don't remember. Is that right? Yeah, when they couldn't find their car and they were all split up or looking for their car, he peed and got caught. Someone else might have peed too. George might have peed, technically. Sherry registered sex offender on the TV show Seinfeld. It's a good example of how it could be made better. But the point, the upshot of the whole thing is that there is a need and a desire to protect kids, and that's great, and we should be putting our efforts towards that, but we can figure out how to direct it more smartly, I guess, and in doing so, help kids more effectively. Yeah, in the UK is a good example. They have a campaign instead of like a stranger danger. It's called Clever Never Goes, which it doesn't jump off the page as self explanatory at first as an American. But the point of it is not every adult is waiting to kidnap. You go to someone with a uniform or a badge, even if that's like a store clerk or a nurse. It doesn't even have to be a cop walking the beat. If you feel like you're in trouble or something like that, you can approach responsible adults. And the idea Clever Never Goes is in never go anywhere with a stranger because that's how they operate, which is, hey, get in my car because I have a cool cartoon playing at my house, that kind of thing. Right. Like never ever go somewhere with a stranger. Clever never goes. And speaking of the UK, I saw something, Chuck, that I thought was a little surprising. So they used to have this cartoon PSA for kids called Charlie Says. And this cat would keep his little human friend out of danger by going ballistic when the kid did something dangerous. And there was a 1973 PSA about stranger danger, about not going with strangers. Oh, really? So this is almost a full decade before the US has even tuned into this stuff. The UK were already scaring their kids. Good for them. Yeah. I think we got to talk about the Amber Alert because this is sort of the smarter version of the milk carton kid and it actually works. This is named for the very sad case of Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped and killed in 1996. And Amber Alerts started going out initially to nearby radio stations. And now, thanks to the Ans, the Alert notification system, you're going to get that on your phone, you might get that on your weather radio. You might get that if you're driving down the highway. That's a big one. These sort of electronic highway signs, those are huge because they can actually say, there is a brown Ford Tourist with this license plate somewhere on this road within the last hour. And I believe they have caught close to or recovered close to 1000 kids thanks to the Amber Alert system. So it's pretty effective. And those electronic billboards that they have on highways can now flash like their picture too, along with the other stuff. And supposedly from people who are in the industry of recovering children who are missing or abducted, say that the number one far and away best way to recover kids safely is to get their picture out far and wide immediately after they go missing. And that's now kind of a big retroactive. Criticism of the milk cartons, is that they're circulating these kids pictures often years after the abduction, and they probably don't look anything like those pictures anymore, and the trail has gone cold. And the idea that doesn't mean that pictures don't work. It's just the timing of the pictures is paramount. Yeah. Nothing is more sad than when you read a story of the kids that never closure and the parents just never know what happened. Never a body, never a confession. It's just, my kids disappeared 37 years ago, and we don't know anything. It's just man, it's hard to even read those stories. Yeah. I can't think of anything much sadder than that, man. I do have one other thing, too. I saw also, in addition to that clever never goes that people are teaching their kids now. They're kind of focusing more on what abuse is like, what sexual abuse is like, so inappropriate touching. They're teaching kids that they are in charge of their own bodies and they don't have to let them do preschool. Makes total sense because it's more laser focused in the actual danger that kids can face, which is sexual abuse, because apparently we do have an enormous sexual abuse problem. The problem is we've been looking at strangers and ignoring the fact that it's almost always a family member or somebody that the kid knows. So if you can teach the kid what sexual abuse is like and how to look out for and what to do if somebody makes advances on them, then they can trust strangers because they can trust people in general. They can just know that that can come from anywhere. And if it happens, this is what you do. So I can imagine kids learning that today will turn out a lot better, a lot less messed up than you and I in our generation. We're so broken. Yeah. And the body autonomy is not just for it's obviously great for that, but it's kind of for everything. It's about with other kids. They don't want to be pushed that way or played with that way. It's like it's their body. You got to ask them for permission to do whatever you want to their body. And kids my daughter, from the time she was in preschool, they were teaching them that, and she'll tell me when she doesn't want me doing something, she'll say, My body. And I'll say you got it. That's great. Yes. That was something I saw, was like, you really have to back them up. So, like, a bank comes over and wants to plan a big wet kiss on there because they don't want it. Yeah. You have to listen to them. Yeah. Or else what? Is it worth what you taught them? Exactly. So where to go, parents of today? I'm glad you guys are figuring it out, and I'm glad that we could lead by example. Right, Chuck? Our generation. That's right. If you want to know more about stranger danger, there's a lot of it on the Internet. Just be careful to verify what you're reading and where it's coming from. And since I said that, of course, the Xysk one of our mottos. That means it's time for listener mail. They call this love from an army vet. Hey, guys. I want to thank you both for being such a valuable new addition to my routine. I'm currently going through a particularly nasty divorce and have lost my career in the process. I've been a paratrooper and a medic in the army for about six years, but now I must find a new path while bearing this incredible loss. Because of this, I've had to travel back home to live while I get back on my own. 2ft. I used to listen to your podcast in the army during field ops and began listening during the crosscountry drive from Colorado back to the Midwest. Now that I'm home, I still find myself listening to at least one show a day. Sometimes I find myself adopting a pessimistic view of humanity. And it's been very therapeutic to know that such kind hearted people still exist in the world. Your podcast has not only grounded me and ignited my fire for curiosity again, but it's also refreshing to hear from two people understand the unending beauty of the world. Hummingbirds, anyone? I just want to say thank you for the enormous presence you have been keeping in my life, making it fun and beautiful. Never underestimate the value of what you do. PS. Has there ever been a consensus on how to measure standing water on your lawn? No. Okay. And Chuck, PS also love tiny things. We used to get tiny little one inch tabasco bottles in our MREs in the army. And everybody there's something about and they still pack a punch, so it's just a little bit of it. Sure. I'm going to keep this anonymous because I didn't hear back from the person. Okay, good enough. Thank you, Mr. Anonymous army. Bet that was an all time great email. Thank you, anonymous. That was really moving. I'm glad we can be doing something to help you keep going during this time. And keep your chin up. Everything gets better. Right, Chuck? That's right. Just stay away from those strangers. Clever. Never goes. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck and Jerry or Frank the chair. Anybody? Guest producer Dave Real. Producer? Dave god, who knows? You can get in touch with us by sending us an email at stuff podcasts. I heard rates. 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." | |
96d4a2b2-440c-11e8-82c5-afcd6312d997 | What's a quinceañera anyway? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-a-quincea-era-anyway | A quinceañera is the celebration of a girl of Hispanic heritage becoming a young woman on her 15th birthday. It involves family, friends, music and a lot of great food. | A quinceañera is the celebration of a girl of Hispanic heritage becoming a young woman on her 15th birthday. It involves family, friends, music and a lot of great food. | Tue, 15 May 2018 12:48:07 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=12, tm_min=48, tm_sec=7, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=135, tm_isdst=0) | 38100404 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. And this is a very special day for us. It's very special. A special day for Jerry, because she's celebrating her very special day because today Jerry turns sweet 15. Right. Well, technically, it's a triple queensignera. No, Jerry started producing the show when she was five. Oh, yeah, she was the OneKind. She was a child prodigy through a lot of temper tantrums. Yes, but we got through that time. We did the Terrible Five, and now she's just a pretty little lady. And her pink Lacey satiny dress. Yeah, that dress is a lot even for a Kinsonyra address. Jerry agreed. Can I go ahead and say I don't do the R role very well, so I'm just going to say quinceignera okay. Instead of quinceignera. Yeah, that wasn't very good either. Right. I used to do a good R role because of German, but I feel like I've lost it a bit, and I guess it's actually an N roll. Keenaniera n. Right. Yeah. But if I try to keep it up, I think it's going to fatigue everybody pretty quick. So quincentera. Well, the last thing we want to be are two jackass white dudes. Well, that's what we're doing. Landed on too thick. 240 something. White dudes are about to talk about queens and yaris. Like, we know what we're talking about. Well, we did the research, and I think it's good to cover stuff like this. I do, too. I had very little understanding about this, just from what I've seen on MTV or whatever. Did they have a show? They have one called, like, My Sweet 16 or whatever that I might be complaining with, but I swear I knew some of this stuff somewhere. I don't know where, though. Somewhere just being plugged into culture. I knew it. I guess. Yeah. Well, I lived in Los Angeles, as you know, and they have obviously quite a Latin population. And I looked up Hispanic and Latino. I wanted to get it. All right, good. Let's hear what you got. Well, it says that they can generally be used interchangeably these days, but I think Hispanic refers to whether or not you actually have Spanish speaking routes. Oh, is that right? But Latino can be like Brazil and places in South America as well, if I'm not mistaken. I heard once that Ronald Reagan was the person who coined the term Hispanic, or at least popularized it. Really? Yeah. Well, it was that tattoo across his upper back. Hispanic for life. For life, yeah, with the number four. But at any rate, lived in La. And there's a large Mexican population, so I would see Quintana's going on all the time. When you're just driving around on a weekend, I would see stuff, and I was like, Wait a minute. It's not prom. It's summer. Like, what's going on it's like Prim times ten. And then somebody hit me in the head and they're like, you dummy, dumb white guy from the south. That's a quinton edis. Right? So I was like, well, you know what? One day I'm going to do a podcast about that. They said, what is a podcast? Makeup for all this? You said. Just watch that's. Right. So one thing I saw was with Latino or Latino, there's the ingrained masculine, but something I saw pop up in a couple of sites was they would replace the O or the A with an X just to make it gender neutral. Like Latinx? Yeah. I don't know how you pronounce it. I didn't get that far. But I saw it in printing a couple of different sites where they were trying to remove the gender from Latino or Latina and just make it gender neutral because I haven't seen it. But there's an HBO documentary about Queensland yet, and one of them is for a trans girl. Okay. Would it be pronounced Latinx? Maybe. How to see it written down? How is the X in Wahaca? Isn't it like maybe latiha? I have no idea. That's what I'm going with. Here we go. I didn't want to be too dumb dumb. And we're so far down Dumdum Lane, it's not even funny. No. So let's try to get this back on the rail, shall we? I think what we just did was great because we explored some questions we had, but now we can talk about everything we know about Kingston Gadis. Right. Which is we've been dancing around this thing. This is the 15th birthday celebration for young ladies, young women in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, in the United States, kind of all over the world. This can take place. Yeah. And it seems to be so it's actually a very traditional thing to wear. Like, the Catholicness of the girl and her even pre Catholic origins bind together with what I guess you would call like, is a universal comingofage celebration that also focuses on the individuality and tastes of the girl. You put all those things together, you have a quintignetta, which is a 15th birthday party, which is a coming out party for a girl as she transitions from girlhood into womanhood. It happens on this day, and they throw a huge celebration. And there's a lot of really cool traditions that you're going to find at, like, every Queen Sanguera that have a neat origin story to them or a neat symbolism to them. And also some great music, some delicious food, and family coming together for an important day. It's really great. Not just family, the whole community is meant to, you know, like extended family, people in the community that have had an impact on the girl's life, like a teacher. People chip in for the expense of this. It's like a real communal thing. Should we go back in time? Okay? Or did you want to go to the future? No, we'll go back in time. All right. So the origins of this, they date back all the way to the Aztec Indians. Obviously, in the 14 hundreds and 15 hundreds, they were performing these festivals because girls back then were marriage ready at the age of 15. That's kind of what it symbolized. Right. And it wasn't just the Aztecs. Like, around the world, in cultures around the world, you would find some sort of coming of age or rites of passage into womanhood. And yeah, when you came out the other end, it was like you were on the market then from that point on. That's right. And they had ceremonies, they had speeches talking about how important it is to become a wise, upstanding member of society as a young woman. Then the Spanish come along. Of course, they invade what we now call Mexico over to the Aztecs. And that brought in a European influence to this whole experience. And this is where things got a little more like debutante. Yeah. Actually, I looked into this a little further, Chuck. And they can't say for certain where Kenzania came from, but they think the Aztecs. But their source comes from a single nun working in Mexico who wrote an account that had been given to a priest 40 years earlier wow. From another priest who had supposedly, in the 1520s, interviewed some Aztec high priests about their culture. So that's where the whole idea that there was a rite of passage at age 15 comes from. Kind of shaky. And then other people say, well, no, this is obviously a Spanish colonial influence like being presented at court. But the idea that it's a rite of passage into womanhood is so universal that it probably is a combination of the two of them. No one can just say for certain, though, what the origin is specifically. Yes. And apparently until the 1960s, it was really kind of an upper class thing. But then in the 1960s, as Latinos immigrated to the United States and they became more part of American fabric, they really kind of spread throughout the US. And Latin America as becoming across all socioeconomic classes. And we'll get to this a little more later, but wonderfully. Like you said, in poorer communities, you see entire communities chipping in some money many times. Or the godmothers and godfathers of Paddynos and Madrid's. You like that? Yeah, that's good. To help pay for this stuff. I saw this photographer. Did a really great photo series of quinceignettas celebrations in poor neighborhoods in Mexico and photographed these really beautiful photographs of these young women and their dresses sort of in the middle of a very depressed neighborhood and just showing how important it was that they still had this celebration even though it was a burden financially on their families. Right. Yeah. I think Mexico City got together in 2007 and some of the businesses, some nonprofit groups held, like, a big mass keysigned, and now they do it every year for girls who wouldn't otherwise be able to have one. Yeah. I also read a New York Times article where there's a lot of bias when it comes to things like this in bar and bot mitzvahs and debutante balls, where it's very easy for someone to say, if you're poor living in Mexico City, why are you wasting that's? An air quotes your money on this celebration when your family doesn't have much money. And they say, you never hear this kind of criticism for bar mitzvahs and bought mitzvahs or debutantes, regardless of socioeconomic status. So it's just very important part of their culture that shouldn't be looked down upon just because they may not have the kind of money to throw a big one. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I'm sure one of the things that you just kind of hit on the head is that it's a part of Latinx culture, which is one reason why it's become so big in America. It's a way of people of Latino heritage to say, this is my heritage, too, and this is how I'm going to come of age in America. But because it's also in America and these are American born girls of Latina heritage, they have come over time to kind of meld together with what Americans look at and say, that's just one enormous Sweet 16 party. Right. But there are some details in there that you'll find at a keensen year that you want at a Sweet 16 party, and we'll talk about those right after this. Well done. 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, Charles. So we are going to start the day. It's a frantic day. It's a hectic day. From everything I understand. From what I've read, this is actually like a cool day for a girl, but also very stressful, right? Yeah. It's like a wedding or a prom or anything where there's a lot of pressure on this one six hour experience. But think about this. With a wedding, you've got your so to plan the wedding with. With prom, you've got a handful of other girls to plan what you're doing with prom. And plus, prom is already being planned for you by your school or whatever. This is like your day. And part of your responsibility is the quinceigneta, which, by the way, queensigneda literally translates to the girl who is 15. So this is technically your fiesta de kingsignetta or something like that. Right. Part of your responsibility as keenson yetta is to show that you can take part in this planning. On the one hand, it's to allow it to reflect your personality and your taste. So you're the one who needs to choose all this stuff. But it also shows that you can be a grown up, too, and undertake months of planning leading up to this thing and basically pull it off. Correct. Right. Okay. So the whole thing starts with a trip to church, which is not what you're going to find right. Which is not what you're going to find at a normal American, like, say, Sweet 16 party. No. And it depends on the church where you're going to have. And sometimes the celebration also occurs at the church. Sometimes that occurs at a different spot, kind of like a wedding. Sometimes you have the reception somewhere else. Right. That's not how it started, which we'll talk about that in a minute, but go ahead. But it depends on the church where you're a member or where you're having this initial ceremony. But the girl, before this all happens for weeks ahead of time, may actually be required to attend classes in advance of this. So they're prepared and they know what to expect, right? Well, yeah, that's about it. As far as the week, the head part, as far as the church and all the planning. Yeah, of course. Right. So on the day they arrive at the church and you were saying now it's kind of evolved to where you have, like, a wedding, you have the ceremony of the church and then the event elsewhere. Well, you can right. And that's becoming more and more the way. But one of the reasons that is becoming the way is because in 1990 in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Archdiocese issued like, a set of guidelines that basically put the kibosh on this idea of the Queensland Euro as a big, lavish affair. And it really dampened this burgeoning, I guess, industry or tradition or whatever. It put a damper on it for a little while because families didn't want to go against the church, so they kind of tone down the kings and Yarras. But the reason the church is doing this is because there were too many kings and years, not enough Spanishspeaking priests. And then also the Catholic Church has always had an awkward position in this tradition. It's not a Catholic tradition. It's a cultural tradition by a group of people who are predominantly Catholic and involve the Church as part of this tradition. But this tradition, if anything, is a syncretize tradition. Remember, when we were in Guatemala. The melding of Catholic beliefs and like, pagan precolonial beliefs, indigenous beliefs, is syncretism. This is an example of that. There's, like, Aztec rituals supposedly mixed with the whole thing starts at a Catholic church with a Mass. So the church has kind of had an alternately hands on and hands off view of this whole thing. And in 1990, they almost put a complete damper on it. But since then, it's just kind of said, okay, we'll just start off at the church and we'll have the party afterward. Elsewhere. Yeah. And I've also seen that a lot of churches now are straying away from me is because they feel like there's just a lot of disrespectful behavior, like people partying on the pews and taking pictures with their phone and texting, and they kind of forget that they're in a church. Right. If you step back and think about it, having a girl's 15 year birthday party in an actual church, that's a terrible idea to begin with. Probably about it, yes. So it makes sense to do this kind of solemn ceremony at the church and then party elsewhere, which I think is pretty much par for the course these days. All right, so before the Mass takes place, this young woman has and Kristin Conner. Remember Kristen, of course. What's the name of their podcast? Unladylike. Unladylike. That's right. Yeah. Kristen Caroline formerly of stuff mom never told you now with unlady. Like, she wrote this article and she said that custom calls for 14 damas or maiden attendance to represent the 14 years of her life. Up into that point, I saw elsewhere. Seven. That's what I saw. To be paired with seven young men. Do you want to pronounce that, Shamblends? Yeah, that's how I took it. Shambleon Chamberlain. I read in another place, I was like, oh, wait a minute, which is it? And apparently it can be seven to 15. So depending on, I guess, how many really close friends you have, kind of like picking out your bridesmaids and groomsmen. Yeah. And I saw plenty of videos of Kingston Yards, where, like, there were three girls. There four. Yeah. But I think under strict tradition of the King's nietzs, you would have 14 girls and 15 dudes. You got 14 damas, 15. And then one I got it. And then one Chamberlain day on air, which I totally messed up. But it's basically the escort of honor who is the keyseignetta's date. That's right. And again, I'm sure that there are some leeway. The keenseignetta cops aren't going to come by because you don't have enough friends helping you. They have larger fish to fry on Queens. And yet a day. Right. Although whoever is helping you plan this, it would probably love it if you had 14 guys and 14 girls because they all have to be outfitted oh, yeah. In exactly what you want them to wear because it's your party. That's right. And I don't think we mentioned, but the dress is a very big part of the celebration. Traditionally, it's either pink or white, very satiny. I mean, it looks kind of like a prom dress, a big, frilly, floor length gown. But then it also is 8ft wide. Yeah, exactly at the waist, like out. It's extraordinary. It's like a princess dress. Yeah, like, I want a Kentanyra. Oh, we can throw you in, buddy. Okay. You want to do that? Sure. You get all pretty for the camera. I definitely would just find a nice dress. All right. So the first stop, though, like you said, is the church. And this is where a lot of the ceremony takes place. They receive a blessing from a priest. The young woman commits herself to protecting her virginity and her spiritual devotion. And then they leave a bouquet of flowers near the Virgin Mary statue. And then traditionally they would give away a porcelain doll, one of their childhood dolls. Or again, tradition varies these days. It might be a teddy bear or something else that just meant something to the girl. One thing I saw was a queensignetta Barbie. Oh, yeah. All right. Well, they'll pass that along to a younger sister or another relative, female relative to basically say, like, again, symbolic of I'm entering young adulthood and I'm passing on this silly Barbie to you. What's the name of that? The Ultima Muneca. Oh, I don't know. I didn't see that. Ultima muneka means the last doll. Okay. And it shows that she's leaving girlhood behind. Right. And you can guess which one of those the ceramic doll or the old toy or the brand new Barbie the younger female relative wants these days. Sure. Yeah. So that may or may not happen at the church. The thing that seems to be what definitely happens at the church is the girl is presented with a rosary, a prayer book or a Bible and leaves flowers at the altar and or the statue of the Virgin Mary and then receives a blessing, right? That's right. So let's say that all that happened at the church and the girl has been blessed. Sometimes it's part of a regular Mass. Like she may stand up and come up to the altar and get a special blessing. If her parents are pulling all the right strings, maybe she can get her own Mass for it. But she may also be sharing that Mass with other quinceignetas. There's a bunch of different ways to do it, but once the math is done, once she said, I am committing myself to the Catholic Church and I'm a very spiritual girl and thanks for the blessing. I'm out of 5000. She's heading off to the party. That's right. Just like a good wedding. Get that part over with quickly so you can get your party on. Right. So while she's getting into the limo, we'll take another break. Okay. All right. Look at her trying to stuff that dress on that. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get handson, experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast. And start taking charge of your future today. Okay, Chuck, so she has gotten into the limo, she's driven off and now they're going to the venue, which is basically anywhere that you would also hold like a wedding reception. You could hold a keysen year party. Yeah. It really depends on the budget of the family involved. They could rent out a large hall or it could be in the backyard of their own home or at a friend's house. Yeah. And again, this is not just on the parents shoulders. It's very customary and very traditional for the girl to approach family members of the business community. Just anybody she can think of to say, hey, costs are really adding up and can you chip in a little bit? And the keyseniere will be sponsored by multiple people besides just her parents. Yeah. And I also read in that article on that really great photo spread the guy did. He interviewed the family members and one of the families. He said they didn't have much money and he said, how long have you been saving for this? And they said, for 15 years. Oh, man. Like they started socking away money every year because they knew this was coming. That is so great. And it was important. It was a very sweet story. Yeah. I think the aspect that the community chips in and also comes to witness this girl's transition to adulthood, I just really appreciate that. I think it's really cool that that's part of it, rather than it's just the parents are footing the bill for everything. I just think that's cool. Yeah, well, and it's a culture where family and community is such an important, revered thing and it's something I'm envious of, you know? Yeah, for sure. So when the girl gets there, the first thing that's going to happen is the music is going to be starting and her court is going to come in and get introduced. Those are the dhammas and the chamberlains. Why is that not sounding right? Because it sounds French. Right, okay, but am I pronouncing it French? I don't know. That's what I'm saying. I'm not sure I don't know the origins of that word. Okay, so those two, her court, they're going to come in one by one and get announced virtually just like a wedding when the bride and groom show up. The groomsmaids? No, the bride. The groomsmen and the bridesmaid. Eight. Yes. Come on, man. Hanging in there. They get introduced one by one as they're coming in and then finally the honorary escort is introduced. And then you finally have the quintierra come in and the music changes and she's like, raising the roof. And the parties just everyone erupts into just craziness from that moment on. Yeah. And again, it could be a DJ, it could be a mariachi band, it could be a rock band, it could be a DJ playing Mariyachi band. It could be like with my wedding, I had an ipod loaded up with my mix and just hit play. Nice. So this is probably a DJ with a light system and a dance floor. All the videos I saw are very much like that. Yeah. So the court has been introduced and then one of the first things that happens is the girl is presented with a crown tiara. She's presented with a scepter for the killing, right? For the bashing. Yeah. That comes later. And then right, the ritual killing of the chipmunk. And she's seated probably on a throne of some sort, or a central chair, maybe one of those, like, wicker remember the wicker 70s chair that flared out and up that looked kind of like yeah, maybe she's sitting on one of those. But she's basically the center of attention right now, and something kind of cool happens. The shoes she was wearing that she came in with flat sold sandals or slippers or something like that. Her dad comes over and takes those off and then he puts on high heels and snaps his fingers, twirls and goes she's a woman. Yes. And I bet you anything this young lady has practiced walking in those before. Right. I don't think she would want her first experience in high heels to be in that dress on the big day. It's just logical. Chuck talking. Although it would be fun to watch. No, come on. You don't think it would be no one wants to see kristen said they call her keen squirrels sometimes. Yeah. No one wants to see a keen squirrel fall over. It's true. Except you. But you got laughed at while you did the backstroke. I get it. Yeah. Mocked. They may also get gifts, but not always. A lot of times they're symbolic gifts. A lot of times other people will bring gifts. But from the parents, the festival and ceremony itself is the gift. But sometimes, if the parents have some dough in a big budget, they may get what's called regalo sopressa, which is a surprise gift on top of everything else. And this, of course, is including, like you mentioned, the prayer book and the rosary in the Bible and stuff like that. Right. Those are probably given to her at the church before. I'm thinking that depending on the position of her parents, socioeconomically, the girl's probably getting other presents too. Yeah, but yes, supposedly just the keys. And your party is like, this is plenty, don't you think? Yeah, but I think the gifts, too, also always represent that transition into adulthood. So she's not getting the dolls anymore. She gets maybe some jewelry or earrings and stuff like that. Right. Stuff to deliver her into womanhood. And then guests are also given gifts as well, and party favors. The way that the whole thing is set up, even though the community might have people that chip in or family members or whatever, the parents are saying, like, come help celebrate our daughter's transition into womanhood. Right. So the party is meant as like a gift for the guests. Right. So the thing is kind of meant to be like, come and get your eat on and your drink on and just have a lot of fun. The thing is part of that welcomeness and that inclusiveness and that please come and be a part of this. That backfired really hard for this one couple. Have you heard about Ruby Abara Garcia? No. Oh, my. So Ruby Abara Garcia turned 15 on December 20, 619, just like a year or so ago. And she is from La Jolla, which is in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. And it's a little tiny town, 200. And her parents decided to get with the times and make like a YouTube invitation, a video invitation to come to Ruby's Quinceaneda. But they posted on YouTube and they didn't put any privacy settings on, and it went viral. And 200 people from around the world showed up to Ruby's Kingzignetta party in this little town of 200. That's kind of great though, right? It was great on the one hand, but if you look at the photos from it, she was very much overwhelming and tired. That's true. Was not expecting apparently on Facebook, like over a million people said they were coming, but even still 20,000, and if you look there's like all these stands set up and people from all over the country and the world chipped in to feed everybody and make sure everybody had drinks or whatever. So the parents said, okay, we're doing this. And they did it. They stepped up and met. They kept their welcome to everybody, I guess, as a way to put it. That's kind of great. But I can definitely see on the day that the girl might have been overwhelmed. But I bet she also, in retrospect, is like, hey, I've got one cool story for my life now. Oh, yeah? She's got a big old story and she got a Chevy vault. Are you serious? Yes. I literally couldn't tell if you were just being jokey, Josh. There no I didn't even need to be that time. So Chevy got involved, of course. I think her parents gave her that. Oh, I figured Chevy was like, hey. No, I think that was her regalo. Sopreysas her surprise gift. Yes. Wow. And speaking of sopresas, that was ugly Spanish name, by the way. But speaking of sopreysus, there's also Chuck, go on to YouTube and type in bailla, B-A-I-L-E-S PEZA. And just start watching these videos, because the Bayes surprise is one of the hallmarks of the Keynesian Europe party, and they are about as adorable and embarrassing as you can imagine. What does that mean now? What is it? Oh, it's a surprise dance. It's like, for months ahead of time, the Quinceanera and her court will practice a dance that they make up or that they hire like a choreographer, and they will perform this dance for the guests. It's a surprise dance. It's like part of the Queenslandera. And they're very cute to watch. So they try to have fun with it. I guess they do, but they also are really very earnest about it, too. They practice this dance and they're doing it, and it's very cute. It's wonderful. You can also hire chamberlain's, professional ones. They're all like dancers by trade, so they'll really knock your socks off your guests. But it's lacking that heart of something you and your friends came up with yourself. Or if you had a lot of dough, you could hire a choreographer like Paula Abdul or something. Yeah, like her. She's still choreographing, right? Yeah. Choreography choreographing. Something bad wrong with us today. I know, man. You got anything else? I do. This is a little sopresso for you, my friend. There was a father in Texas a couple of years ago that spent $6 million oh, my. On his 15 year old daughter. Oh, my. What's his name here? He's an attorney named Thomas J. Henry of San Antonio. There were very kind of well known family. His daughter Maya is big on Instagram and social media, and she's big into activism. So she's not just your ordinary teen. Good for her. Although that is kind of ordinary these days, thankfully. To be a well known teen activist. Well, to be active, sure. Yeah. But at her quinton yetta she had Nick Jonas perform pit bull perform. Sure. Let me see what else here. 55,000 square foot space that they built. I don't think they built it from scratch, but it does say that it was built purpose built venue. How many guests? 600 guests, man. A 30 foot tall. 30 foot tall cherry cheese in full blossom. Wow. Walls of roses. A garden room, the ballroom with butterfly suspended from the ceiling. She wore a Orlando Santana dress, which means nothing to me. Yeah, me neither. But I assume that means it's something. She had her makeup done by Patrick Ta, who does the Kardashians. Her photographer was Michelle Obama's photographer? And Thomas Henry and his wife, whose name is azteca. Beautiful name. They hired a New York social event planner named David Mon. He had 150 person team to plan out this party. And finally they arrived by police escorts and nine Rolls Royces. Why not? Why not get the police involved? And not to feel too bad for her little brother. Or I guess maybe it was a big brother. He spent $4 million on that kid's 18th birthday, I believe. Queso praiser. So they dropped $10 million on a couple of parties for their kids. Man and the girls in Mexico City are happy to be part of the city wide annual one. Yes. I wonder what Pitbull got paid for that. A mill, maybe? I bet Nick Jonas got more than Pitbull did you think? Yeah. And, of course, she had her pictures with both of them. Well, I'm sure that was part of it, yeah. Man. All right. Well, that is something. What's her name? Maya. Yeah. Maya Henry. I got to look that up if you want to know more about Queensigneta. Well, just show up to one uninvited, see how that goes. You know what? You'd probably be welcomed. Probably, chuck probably. And since I said probably a couple of times, it's time for listener mail. Hey, guys. Long time listener, card carrying member of the Stuff You Should Know army. I've always wanted to write in, but just hadn't found the right topic until the It StrangerThings script retooling debate those during emojis. Stephen King is by far my favorite author, and it is my absolute favorite of his novels. Highly recommend. Also a huge Stranger Things fan. Though I have no media experience, I do have an MBA and know a thing or two about marketing. For what it's worth, I side with Josh with the studio. Definitely retooling the script to create synergies between it and Stranger Things. Aside from casting the Stranger Things kid, which to me is a smoking gun, they change the setting of the film to take place in the 80s. Like Stranger Things, the novel, the story follows the main characters is in the then again, as adults in the 80s. There are elements of the story that didn't translate as well into the 80s, in my opinion, but it was a small price to pay in order to captivate that Stranger Things audience. Just one guy's opinion, but I'd like to say one guy's informed opinion. Sorry, Chuck. For what it's worth, as a movie buff, always catch movie crush. Keep it up, mike Sanders and Mike did a very simple Google search and found that Stranger Things was released in July 2016, and principal photography of it began about a week before that. Okay, so that's therefore rendering that impossible. Here's the thing. Movies have been known to change horses midstream, right? I don't think that that settles it, if you ask me. Do you think they shot a bunch of the movie in the 1950s and said, wait a minute, this TV show over here is doing no, go make it the 80s. No, I don't think so. Let's recast this kid that we've already cast. I think that they did ritual. I do. I don't think they were shooting in the think they were probably shooting in the 80s. My whole point has been that they played up the same things that Stranger Things was known for and that you wouldn't find in the book it and that they plumped up that stuff because of Stranger Things. That's my assertion. So as they are shooting the film, it they're doing rewrites. They're doing rewrites because they're like, man, we got to lock into this TV show. Yes. And you can also do that in the editing booth, as you know, as well, which would have happened long after Stranger Things was already a smash cultural phenomenon. I don't think it's settled, man. Okay? And it never will be, all right, until the editor tells me himself or herself that I'm just dead wrong. Okay? If you want to settle a bet, you can get in touch with us on Twitter at Joshua mclark, at Syskpodcast, or at moviecrush. You can join Chuck on Facebook@facebookcom. Charlesw Chuck Bryant. You can also join us on Facebook. Comstnaw. Send us an email to stuffpodcast athouseofworks.com. And as always, join us at home on the Web stuffysheneo.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 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 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 Hardstarks, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you'd. It. Listen to new episodes of my favorite murder one week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
How Fair Trade Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-fair-trade-works | The West has gotten rich off the backs of underpaid labor living elsewhere; people who are dedicated to Fair Trade feel it's time people at a disadvantage should stop being exploited. The concept is simple - just pay workers fairly for their labor. | The West has gotten rich off the backs of underpaid labor living elsewhere; people who are dedicated to Fair Trade feel it's time people at a disadvantage should stop being exploited. The concept is simple - just pay workers fairly for their labor. | Tue, 07 May 2013 15:18:40 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=15, tm_min=18, tm_sec=40, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=127, tm_isdst=0) | 28684610 | 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 this is the 500 something time that I said that. We're not into the 60s yet, are we? No, it's going to be a little while. What are we, mid five? Yeah, I don't know. Like, we hit 500, what, around January? End of January. It's a lot of knowledge. We're doling out for free, folks. We're in 520, maybe. Oh, really? Yeah. I thought it might be more than that. You're doing okay? I'm great. Good. How are you? Okay. Like, my back hurts a little bit. And Yummy is convinced that it's a kidney infection onset. So she's like, you need to drink a lot of apple cider vinegar and baking soda, diluted in water and creamery juice. That's what I'm doing. And water. Yeah, that one too. But I've got stuff diluted in water, so that counts. Yeah, but it's kind of rough. I don't know that your coffee counts as water. No, it does, actually. You should drink eight ounce glasses of water a day. You can factor in coffee. Yeah, and it's totally made up. No one's ever said that you really should do that. It just kind of came on as, like, an early meme, I guess. And there's not any evidence that an adult human living in a temperate climate of average health couldn't survive without any additional water on a daily basis because we get it from things like food and other stuff. I think the idea is that you benefit from drinking water. Again, there's not necessarily any scientific evidence that you benefit from drinking water. Pretty much made up. I'm not so sure. I'm telling you. Look it up. Okay. All right. We'll have a lookup off. Okay. But that's not what this is about, Chuck. Nor is it about my possibly impending kidney infection and hospitalization. It is about the idea that everyone around the world deserves to make a decent, sustainable living wage. Agreed. Or should, at the very least, should see the fruits of their labor in a fair way. Yeah. This kind of flies in the face of something called capitalism in the free market system a little bit, because in the free market system, one of the big things you have is pretty much every man from Self. Now everyone in a free market system, a completely theoretical, unfettered free market system, has the opportunity to enjoy the fruit of his or her labors, has the opportunity to make a decent, livable wage. But one could also argue that the balance of power has tipped so far in favor of a consolidated, internationally connected view. That's just not a real possibility anymore. That theory, that theoretical version, is now an impossibility. Right. I think, hey, now might be a good time to recommend to people to go listen to our previous podcast, is the Free Market Really Free? Oh, yeah. That's a good one. Wasn't that the name of that one? Yeah, that's a good one. That was a good one. So because this balance of power has tipped so far, pretty much post World War II is going to happen yes. There are some people out there who have come up with the idea that maybe we should go an extra mile and make sure that the people who are actually making all the things we enjoy for example, coffee. Sure. Wine, soccer balls, people who bananas. Bananas. It's a big one. People who actually make these things get an income that is like something that anyone who is on the receiving end of these bananas and coffee would recognize as a livable amount of money in return for what they're giving us. That's right. This is not a call for communism. No. This is a call for fair pay via something called Fair Trade. Yeah. And the idea is that you and I and whoever else wants to support this kind of cause might not mind going into their local coffee. And we're going to use coffee a lot because that's one of the Big daddies. That's fair. Yeah, that's the big daddy. Right. Might not mind going into their coffee shop or their grocery store. Wherever you hunt down your coffee and paying a little bit more for your coffee, it's got that Fair Trade stamp on there, knowing that ultimately the worker who picked those beans is going to be cared for in a humane, fair way. It's going to get a decent amount of money for their product. Exactly. And you kind of hit something on the head when you said seeing that Fair Trade label. There's a really big distinction between a product that carries a certified Fair Trade label and something that's marketed as fairly traded. That means nothing. It means absolutely nothing. They might as well say, like the contents inside are orange and green maybe. Yeah. It's the whole misleading labeling of things just like the organic deal, certified organic versus this crap food that will say, like, contains natural ingredients or things like that. Emily has to fight this battle all the time with her company because she's one of the people that tries to only use fair trade ingredients and 100% certified organic. And she gets angry every day when she sees products, body products that slap something on their label, like naturally good. And people think that means it's all natural. Right. Or all natural. That doesn't mean that it's 100% organic or all natural. No, I know. It needs to be regulated more. And it's such a cynical thing to exploit. Yeah. Like something that really meant something at one point in time for dollars to market something that doesn't mean anything. It's actually not good for you. And marketing it as good for you while using an already established consumer trusted label or phrasing. That's sad. It's one of the wrong things in the world. But let's just say that. That's why Fair Trade people, fair Trade groups, they jealously guard their labels so that when you do see them, you can't trust what's going on. Yeah. And companies that mislead with their labels also make their labels look like the other labels, even. And the font and the color is just like it's so underhanded. Yeah, it's really awful. So let's talk about the background of this. All right. It started in the 1950s with something called Alternative Trade Organizations atos, not the fraternity ATO's. They were doing beer bongs and other things. I couldn't say what I was going to say. I think everybody knows they were humanitarian groups that started this. And basically they wanted to alleviate poverty in developing nations by cutting out middlemen between small producers in the North Northern Hemisphere and small businesses in the Southern Hemisphere, which meant more profits directly going to workers who picked the bean again with coffee. And then I guess over time, they found that this process could work. But you really do need middleman, right? Yeah. Not always, but depending on where you are in the process or right. But if you're using the existing, I guess, trade routes and system of trade that's been established globally in the world, there are middlemen. Like, you have a coffee grower in Ethiopia, he can't get that to you in New England. You do need a middleman. What they figured out with Fair Trade is that you can certify the people in between to make sure that the money is getting to the producer. And rather than cutting out the middleman to increase the income of the original producer in the developing country, you go to the consumer on the consuming end and say, hey, do you mind paying a little more for this? And in return, we will guarantee you that the person who made this coffee that you're enjoying gets that money. That extra money. Yeah. Like, you are basically essentially sending it to this guy. And we're the ones who are going to make sure that happens, and we're going to do so through this labeling. That's right. And in 1988 is actually when the labeling itself was born with a Dutch ATO called Solidaridad. Is that not right? Solidarity ad. Did you see? We got yet another email about our pronunciation. We try people that's part of the charm of the show. Some people don't like it. I understand that. So Solidarity from the Dutch region of the world, from Amsterdam, from the Netherlands, from Holland, from all those places, they said, you know what? We should label these things. Help people out when they're shopping, get them in the main street markets without compromising the trust that consumer has in these products. And that is basically where Fair Trade was born. And we do have one stat here in 2001, not super recent, but just to show you and how people pay for coffee. Coffee fluctuates in price. It's like any commodity. Yeah. So in 2001, the price stepped really low and the coffee growers were receiving only about forty five cents per pound for coffee. But Fair trade coffee buyers paid one dollars 21 /lb that year to ensure that these people despite the fluctuations were able to keep the lights on for their business. Essentially because every fair trade organization sets a minimum fair price that their producers are going to get no matter what, no matter what the market does, no matter what. And I believe if the market goes up, they get the higher of the two, but at the very least they're getting that minimum price for their product. So what is an Flo? This is sort of how it starts or how the process itself starts. Oh, you want to talk about that? Yeah, sure. All right. The Fair Trade Labeling Organization. So that's one of them. There's a number of labeling organizations. Like there's transfer, USA. There's a European Fair Trade Association. Right. And apparently, I guess the Flo is like the agency that oversees the agencies. Is that what it is? That's the impression that I have. Okay, but basically say that you are a coffee roaster and again we're going with coffee because that's the big one. And you say, hey, I really want to get in on this fair trade action for whatever reason. It doesn't matter if you want to increase your own sales or whatever, it doesn't matter. You can't exploit this process. Right? Yeah, sure. No, but that's the thing. The coffee roaster can be like everybody's into this fair trade thing and I think I can sell a lot more if I go through this process, so let me do it right. And they contact the Flo or a labeling organization, they say, great, we will sell you a license for \u00a310,000 of fair trade coffee beans. Yeah. So it's a contract for a set amount. Yes. Now what they could do is set the coffee roaster up with an already certified fair trade producer and supply chain. Or they can go in and say, we can go ahead and certify your existing supply chain producer. And that's what they do. The coffee roaster pays for that license, sends the flow out, they go through the supply chain, make sure that all this money is going back to the producer who is expected to get it right. Yeah. And they actually send people, human people visit farms to ensure that all their business practices and their farmers are adhering to these procedures. Not only that, they also add a dash of sustainability that they're not using horrible environmental techniques for stuff. But yes, basically to make sure that this producer isn't just like a dole disguised as some dude. Right. They're going to do some detective work. And once they figure out that everything is legit and it falls into the fair trade standards, which we'll talk about later, then that's certified, the license is exercised and that \u00a310,000 is delivered, and that guy can put that on that \u00a310,000. Yeah. And it's not always just a one time visit. They can also follow up with periodic inspections to ensure that you keep up with that kind of governance and you didn't just, like, pull a fast one on them and get out your house in order for one day while they came in. They do visit. And the license is usually there's a contract involved. So the middlemen who are involved have to participate in these standards. And one of the standards is you have to sign, like, at least a six month contract, usually, which is actually kind of a lot for these producers because the middle man can be like, oh, this guy is selling it for way cheaper. I'm going over to him. No, this producer is guaranteed six months of going to this middleman and getting the money from them. Yeah. And like you said, six months doesn't sound like much, but I get the feeling that it was just like it's the Wild West out there. Like, you can drop someone from day to day. Yeah, well, they can be like, well, this guy is selling for a penny less, and you force this guy down, and now this guy's down to two cent. And you go to another guy and be like, this guy's down to $0.02. You can just play as many small farmers as you want against one another and drive prices down as low as you want. Fair trade prevents that from happening by forcing middlemen to sign a contract. Yeah. So that's one of the tenants. Another is direct trade between the producers and buyers. So they try to eliminate the middleman when they can. In Central America, they call the middleman a coyote. Yeah, I thought that was interesting. So in order to do this, they encourage these farmers to get together and form co ops, export co ops band together. He's got a little more power. So something that he points out here too, is that the exporter, if it's a plantation, the fair trade standard requires that national laws governing the minimum wage and regulations governing the conditions be upheld and the workers rights are all upheld as well. Right. So that's when you're not, I guess, forming a co op. No, but fair trade tends to encourage co ops. Democratically run co ops. Sure. But yeah, they're not necessarily completely opposed to the idea of certifying something that's run as a plantation rather than a co op, as long as the workers are treated well. And one of the other things they do, like if they do run into a plantation system and the workers are fine, everything's good, they attach what's called the social premium. So if you are, say there's a chocolate importer called double chocolate, B-U-B-B-L-E-I think it's in the UK. And they sell fair trade chocolate. And on their site, they were saying that they pay an extra, I think, $200 a ton of cocoa per ton of cocoa. And that's just a social premium that's on top of whatever the market price is or whatever the minimum fair trade price is, whatever is higher. In addition to that, they pay an extra $200 right off the top for a ton of cocoa. And that doesn't necessarily go right back to the producer. It goes back to the producers community and is used for things like scholarships, water projects, sanitation projects, like schools, whatever. But that social premium is in addition to raising the individual's income, it raises the well being of the entire community. Yeah. Well, with the idea, too, that's just going to be good for everyone's business ultimately. Well, yeah, that's the thing. That's where it kind of turns capitalism on itself. Like the idea that you can democratize through capitalism is a huge neocon idea. And I mean, it's true, it does work, but they're saying, but we need to do that through a certain measure of Marxism. Right. It's kind of funny. Yeah. In the final tenant, which you already sort of mentioned, was the minimum prices for farmers, the idea what they want here is obviously to make sure that the price that the farmer gets is more than the cost of production, because everyone's out to make a dollar here and there. And so they actually take a survey to make sure that the price is right on the money. And it covers things like the cost of living, cost of production, and even the cost of complying with the fair trade standards. So they roll that in there as part of their accounting as well. Yeah. And we should say also it is to purchase a license for fair trade stuff. It's on the ultimate, I guess, distributor, the coffee roaster in the case of coffee, or the chocolate producer in the case of cocoa purchases, whatever. And before, I think until 2004, it was free if you were the actual person producing the raw material, the good like the coffee or the cocoa. But then the flo said, you know what, we need to charge you guys a little bit, too. So I think that further encourages co ops, because a small farmer in Ethiopia can't necessarily afford whatever it costs to be in the system. Right, okay, that makes sense. And let's take a second here, Chuck, to remind people exactly what the disparity is between the people who eat the chocolate and the people who produce the cocoa. Okay, so say you were living in Timor Lestey in Southeast Africa in 2005. Guess how much your annual income would be expected to be? Well, what am I doing? Am I growing? You're just a resident of it. You're doing whatever you want, but you're an average I have a petty cab. Okay, you have a petty cab. Since you live in Timor Leste, I think I'm saying that right. Lest one of the two men. I hope I'm saying that right. You made $400 in 2005, $400 for the whole year in 2005. Wow. In Malawi, you made $596 in Somalia, $600 in Congo, 675 for a year. A year. Wow. 365 days of labor, or large portion of 365 days. I take Christmas off in the Petticat, by the way. All right, 364 days of labor got you $400 in Timor Lestey on the high end. In Eritrea, you made a whopping $917 in the United States in 2005. The average US. Citizen spends $114 a day. Spends, yeah. So that's the concept of Fair trade. It's like you have this extra couple of dollars, pay it for this, and we will make sure that that guy in Eritrea gets it and he's going to benefit. In fact, the whole world will benefit because there's that whole democratic peace theory where supposedly there's a correlation between democratization and a decrease in war and belligerence between nations. So who knows, it could just be beneficial for everybody. Yeah. And this isn't welfare. This isn't taking from the rich and giving taxing the rich and giving it to the poor who can't get off their butts and go work. These are people working very hard at their job that you are ultimately benefiting from when you take that sip of coffee that you're enjoying. And it's like we did it in our own country when we started Enacting, like saying, hey, kids shouldn't work in factories and they shouldn't make eight cents a week. We did it here. And the Fair Trade label ensures that wherever your product is coming from around the world, that the same thing is going to be happening. Yeah, it's intervention, exploitation, but there are still critics. Yeah, there are definitely critics and criticisms with Fair Trade, and I mean, they're legitimate too. Yeah. Not a lot of criticisms about people saying, hey, you shouldn't do this and take care of workers. There's probably a handful of people out there that think that it's more the, but generally yeah, it's a criticism of Fair Trade and the Fair Trade organizations, not of the people who are actually producing this stuff. Yeah, basically saying you're ignoring the basic tenets of supply and demand in a way because you're attaching an inflated price above the market value without doing anything else. Right. And because it's difficult to kind of get these things to market, more difficult than a regular thing. There's been a real focus on things like coffee or bananas. So in these areas where you can grow coffee and can grow bananas, since Fair Trade is saying, hey, if you grow this stuff and you do it the way we want you to, you'll get four times what you're getting paid. Without us, more people are going to flock from cotton to coffee and there's going to be an oversupply and that's ultimately going to drive prices down for everybody. Right. Another criticism is that Fair Trade generally addresses these co ops that we were talking about. And maybe if you were just a single farmer, that's like, I don't want to be in a co op, but I still want to be fair trade. It's a little more difficult. And these co ops, just like anything else, when you get more than two people together in a room, there is a possibility for greed and corruption. So some of these co ops have been attacked for mismanaging fair trade proceeds, and supporters say, you know what? We can only do what we can. We're trying our best. We're not saying we're going to solve the world's poverty problems. But what we are saying is that we can ensure that these farmers and these co ops and these workers are getting paid a fair wage. Enough to live on when you eat your delicious or drink your delicious roasted coffees. Yes. And I guess the one that makes the most sense to me is the encouraging oversupply in the market and driving down prices for other people and everybody in general. Yeah. And really, that could be very easily solved by just focusing on other products as well. Yeah. Right now, they say about 800,000 farmers are benefiting from fair trade right now worldwide. Yeah. That's an eight stat. So I bet it's over a million now because it's growing, baby. Yeah. I mean, that was another thing, too, is that the sectors are growing, too. In the early 2000s, fair trade coffee grew, like, 74% within a couple of years. Really? Yeah. So, I mean, it's a good way to go if you're a poverty stricken coffee farmer. Yeah. And it depends on where you are, what kind of products are available. It's not like everything you find in your grocery store will have a fair trade option. Yeah. But it's kind of been presented and marketed in a real, like, laid back, hippie, granola way, and it's like, hey, we'll put it out there and tell people about it, and if they want it, that's awesome. If you took the same kind of marketing that's applied to stuff that's not produced fairly and applied it to fairly traded stuff, I'm quite sure you could generate a lot more interest and have people clamoring for, like, I want fairly traded beef or whatever. Yeah, people are going to want that stuff. They just don't know that they want it yet, necessarily. And I think that the NGOs who are doing fair trade could do more to diversify. Excellent. If I'm wrong, correct me someone who's in the field. You got anything else? No, that's it. Fair trade. Hey, speaking of NGOs, our favorite coed cooperative for education there, who took us down to Guatemala, and we got to see their handiwork in person. And it is good work. Yeah. They seek to break the cycle of poverty using education, and they've got a great model. Like you said, we've seen it firsthand. We believe in it. And so we are making a call out here. We're plugging for them because they have well, they're in need. Okay. They are looking to triple the number of students they serve over the next three years. So they're going to need the help of some stuff you should know listeners. All right, so we got some details for you folks, the who of this. We're talking 54 Indigenous Mayan middle school students. Right? These students are getting help, literally, like, first hand help? Yes. They're getting help through scholarships that cover tuition, school fees, and a youth development program that fosters community service and leadership among the students. Right. There are two scholarship levels. There's a diploma sponsor, which is $70 a month, and there's an Honor Role sponsor, which is $35 a month. Those are some cute names. Okay. That is very cute. So when all this is going down is they want 54 students sponsored by the end of the year, end of 2013. Right. Is there anything greater, Josh, than finding a sponsor for every single student? No. And we can do it. I mean, we have a lot of listeners, and we have a lot of listeners with big hearts. Actually, there is one thing greater. They could cover these students and have a waiting list for next year. Oh, that'd be even better. Yeah. Okay. So this is how you do this, guys. You can go to the website, www.cooperativeforeducation.org. You can sign up to sponsor a child today. Simply click on the Donate Now button in the top right hand of the corner. That's right. And you know what? A lot of our listeners have gotten involved over the years with Coed and gotten a lot out of it in return. As humans. As humans. Yeah. It's a genuinely great organization that we've seen, like you said firsthand. So we would encourage all of you to go help so that's cooperativeforeducation.org, you can become either a very cutely named diploma sponsor at $70 a month or an Honor Role sponsor at $35 a month. And if you do that, if you sign up for it, let us know, because we want to thank you on the air. Sure. Cool. That's a great idea. So go Coed. Go Coed. Thanks, friends. Okay, Chuck, hold on. Let's take a message break, huh? Yeah. And then listener mail a really good one this week, right? All right. And now it's time for listener mail. So it's Jerry. Yes. I'm going to call this Grief. We got a lot of really great responses on the grief podcast. A lot of people reached out and were like, had just had people pass away and their family and listen to the podcast that week, and it helped them out. And we always like hearing these things. So this is from John guy. I'd like to thank you for your grief podcast that helped me with a grieving process for my best friend and brother, Mike. In his death, he was driving in northern Alberta in mid December when he lost control of his car after crossing railroad tracks, got hit by an oncoming car and died on impact. Our family flew there from Vancouver and only had a few hours to spend because of some flight mishaps. We couldn't even bring his ashes back with us. Mailing his ashes was not recommended to the end of the Christmas season, so we are planning on having a funeral for him without ashes. Luckily, the company he was to work for, he was a heavy equipment mechanic and student at the time. They heard of the news and their head safety guy personally delivered his ashes to our home. We then flew to Manila on Christmas Day and right back in Canada on New Year's. I haven't felt the usual symptoms of grief yet, but I'm sure I'll break down and start balling on the sea bus or something, which would be super awkward. The first month was definitely the hardest. The moment I heard the news has been burnt in my mind. That in a single flower in front of his dorm room from one of the students. The tears really started flowing after I saw that guys and I saw life in a completely different way. The little things really do count. Anyway, Mike was most likely listening to podcasts at the time. That's what he does when he buys groceries. He's on the way to the grocery store. Your voices, in fact, may have been the last he heard. Who knows? Wow. There was a frozen pineapple in the crash site. And I know that was his because he loved that stuff. With that said, just in case he's listening to the podcast in another life, could you please do one on pineapples? And that would be for Mike and John. We will certainly look into pineapples, my friend. Cool. Yeah, I think we should. Yeah, hang in there, dude. It's very tough. I can't imagine going through something like that, but I'm glad we could help in some small, tiny, tiny way. Yeah, thanks for letting us know about that. We appreciate it. Wow, you selected maybe the best one. Yeah, and we got some good emails about Greek too. Yeah, thanks to everyone who sent those in. And people bear their soul sometimes. It's very touching. Yeah, we hope we make you feel better. If you want to tell us a story about how we made your family feel a little bit better, or you or whatever, as long as we didn't make you feel worse. Although we should probably hear about that too. Sure. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffynow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com and you can join us at our website, stuffychnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Audiblecom. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means. School is out, the sun shining, the daylight is longer. And best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing pools 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 Kilgar Sheriff and Georgia Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
What the heck is a hiccup? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-the-heck-is-a-hiccup | In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the many theories behind the mysterious phenomenon of hiccups, how long hiccuping bouts can last, and various "remedies" for hiccups. | In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the many theories behind the mysterious phenomenon of hiccups, how long hiccuping bouts can last, and various "remedies" for hiccups. | Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:32:55 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=18, tm_min=32, tm_sec=55, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=89, tm_isdst=0) | 22970772 | 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. Sure. Okay. I'm Josh Clark. That's Chuck Bryant. Hello. I think I said the same thing last time. I think you did. Hello. What a jerk I am. Hi there. That's much better. Chuck. What's up? Spice it up a little bit it's up. Maybe get the French nerve irritated. Look at you. Yeah, perfect. So Texader Me, Chuck. No, we already did that one. Yes. Okay. We're talking about hiccups today. Chuck, what do you know about hiccups, man? Have you ever had them before? I have. Josh and I will talk about a famous bout of my hiccups later. Okay. When we talk about being drunk. Oh, yeah, sure. But should we go ahead and set this up? Yeah. Chuck actually has a fairly ticklish constitution when it comes to hiccups. And he has in his hand a B brand root beer and he's about to open it and try to give himself hiccups because he says that it doesn't take very much. So we're going to see that's the bee brand root beer sometimes drinking a carbonated beverage will many times will induce hiccups. So my goal is to have hiccups through the episode. So we'll see what happens. Okay, here we go. He's drinking the root beer. He's chugging the root beer. Look at him go. Look at you go, Chuck. He's got a look of grim determination on his face. He's taking too long. Sips so far. He's looking at the roof here. Excuse me. And there's a little burp right there. This is hiccups, Chuck, not burping. I got nothing. Well, keep trying. His eyes are a little watery. Yeah, I feel it. And you can take it faster, faster. Sip. He looks pain. He's got some carbonation in. As long as it looks like man not working, you got to finish that. No, I don't have to doubt it, chug. I have that cold thing on my chest. Well, actually, cold is one way that hiccups are activated, I guess. Yeah. And I think that's what happens when I drink the soda. That's what happens. Yeah. How disappointing. Nine times out of ten, I'll get hiccups the one time I need them. Don't worry about it. We'll just have Jerry put some hiccups and we'll say, oh, look, listen, there's hiccups crazy. Let's give some hiccup facts, shall we? Oh, wait, listener request. Okay, this must be Fan Appreciation week because we did two in a row. And this is from Jess in Portland. Thank you, Jess. And she was all, what up with hiccups, yo? Is that what she said? No, of course. Okay. Alright. Chuck? Yes, sir. Did you know that you have a lifelong specific hiccup pattern? I did not until I read this. And that is way cool. Yeah. I don't know what mine is as far as recognizing it. Yeah. I've never charted mine. No. And I couldn't find anything else on an additional outside research hunt. Right. I couldn't find anything on that on specific hiccup patterns, like if there's five or six or if it's just there's as many as there are people, that kind of thing. Sure. Like your fingerprint. All right. And snowflakes. There's also the fact that the average hiccup spell can last from a few minutes to a few hours. I've never had one last a few hours. I start to get angry after a couple of minutes, and I'll just take a huge, deep breath. And that usually cures it, actually. Yeah, I've got my cures, too, but I'll talk about those later. You've heard of people who have horrifically long bouts of hiccups, right? Yeah. There's actually medical terms for these. If your hiccups have lasted, I think, longer than 48 hours yes. They're called persistent hiccups. I would agree with that. And then if they lasted longer than a month, they're called intractable hiccups. Yes. And this is actually I found out that it's very prevalent among patients with AIDS hiccups. Yeah. And I found a study that said that at least in one patient, medical marijuana or I guess even just plain marijuana, cures it. Interesting. Yeah. The patient, I think, in Spain, had intractable hiccups and tried marijuana for the first time in his life, and it cured it. And then, I think 24 hours later, it came back again. The patient used marijuana a second time, and that was it. The hiccups. Wow. Yeah. You know what people with intractable hiccups call their hiccups? Hell, those bull hiccups I can't get rid of. Wow. Yeah. That's a medical term, too. Nice. Wow. My face is red. I'm blessing a little bit. Definitely. Chuck, there's a question that's plagued humankind. He tells us the 21st century. I said humankind. He also said plagued. Plagued humankind for millennia. And that is, why do we hiccup? And actually, we don't have an answer for that. No, we don't. The Greek physician Galen hypothesized that it was angry emotions that were created in the stomach coming out. Yes. It's a stab. It's a shot at it. Right. I love the Greeks. It's as good as any others. And actually, I found another explanation that was posited in 2003 by researchers at the PT Salt Petrie Hospital in Paris. Very nice. Thank you. They hypothesized that us hiccuping is a relic from our time spent in the very distant past as amphibians. Okay. They said that there is a very close similarity to Gill ventilation, which is how amphibians breathe. Right, sure. Because they also have lungs. So they have to close their lungs to breathe, but they have gills as well. Right. And then the water has to pass over the gills without going into the lungs. Right. So take a short, quick breath, and the epiglottis closes, and we'll talk about how a haircut works in a second. Sure. But the Gill ventilation in amphibians and hiccuping in humans and mammals, by the way, are very similar. So they went a little further and said, and you know what? Here's the drumroll part. The brain circuitry that controls Gill ventilation in amphibians is still present in mammals. What? Yeah. So they're saying that they think that it's a relic left over from our very ancient past. Interesting, isn't it? Yeah. You know what I also thought was interesting was the recapitulation theory, or part of it, proposes that fetuses actually use hiccups as part of their respiration before their lungs are fully developed. Right. And they actually do. The theory part comes in as to why. Basically, it's akin to how we learn to crawl before we learn to walk. Right. Or we can crawl before we can walk. We can hiccup before we can breathe normally. We should start saying that you got a hiccup before you can breathe. People like what it would be like, hey, we're the low men on the top. You're going to say that. And that's actually supported by the fact that Premise spend 2.5% of their little premie life hiccupping. And that's a lot more than regular full term babies. Yeah. They're sitting there like, I don't have it hard enough. I pick up all the time, I weigh \u00a33 and I'm hiccupping. Give me a break. And apparently, hormones can play a role in hiccuping. Women who are in the first two weeks of their menstrual cycle hiccup more than pregnant women do. True. So there's a whole grab bag of questions attached to hiccupping. You're more likely to hiccup in the evening. Exactly. And you hiccup less as you get older. Yes. I think that's all the little factoids. Right. So we've got all this information, no answers whatsoever as to exactly why we hiccup. None. I subscribe to the recapitulation theory, frankly. Do you? Yeah. But we do know what happens. We do know the physiology of a hiccup. Right? Yeah. That's the easy part. And it all comes down to the phrenic nerves, which, after reading this article, I have concluded the phrenic nerves are the sissiest nerves of all. Yeah. The biggest nerves are in there, too. I found that if they get annoyed, then you can hiccup as well. Right. So the Frenchic nerve, right? It controls the diaphragm. And the diaphragm is that muscle that goes over your big belly. Yes. And under your ribcage. Yes. So it's in between the stomach and the abdomen. All right. It goes down when we inhale yeah, try. It goes up when we exhale. So it helps out the breathing process. Yeah. Did you hear that horrible struggle for breath? Yeah. So when we are breathing, we're taking an air through the nose and the mouth, right? Yes. Hopefully. And it flows through the pharynx, past the gladys. Hello, Gladys. And into the larynx and trachea, which eventually terminate into the lungs. Right, right. And then it follows a opposite path on the way out as we exhale. Sure. Now, that phrenic nerve that controls the diaphragm is, as I said, kind of sissy, a little crispy, kind of a punk. And any time it gets irritated well, I shouldn't say anytime, but when it's irritated, it can induce an abdominal spasm. That's a hiccup. Well, that's part of a hiccup. A hiccup is a quick short breath we take in because our diaphragm is spasming. Right? Yes. And then what makes the hiccup sound is the epiglottis, that little piece of tissue that covers the glottis and keeps this beat brand root beer from going into your lungs when you're drinking it. Yes. I hate it when that happens. It closes all of a sudden and there's your hiccup. That is what a hiccup is. Yes. Right. The end. What are some of the things that can cause that little French nerve to throw a tantrum chuck? Well, Joshua, there's only a few things that can cause this. One of the main things that can happen is that you overeat and you've got a full stomach, so you're swallowing too much food or air, your stomach destens and gets all fat and it pushes against the French nerves and they're like, oh, you ate too much hiccup. Right. So that's one way. Yeah. Another one is add hot food, spicy food to that and you're doubling your chances because hot foods will irritate your fronting nerves as well. And the last thing is smoking is not good. Excessive smoking. And drinking can also cause hiccups. Or like we propose with my thing with the coke and root beer, a rapid temperature change inside the stomach, like drinking something really cold or really hot. Right. So that can all irritate the little woos forensic nerves. I want to say frantic. I think it is a little frantic. If not hysteric, it should be the hysteric nerve. Right. And then stress and emotion on the psychological side that can cause them too. And mental illness too. I couldn't find anything on this. I saw a couple of mentions that mental illness is linked to hiccups. Right. But I couldn't find anything further than that. But I did find out that you can use chloropromazine, which is an antipsychotic, to cure longterm hiccups. Did you know that? No, I didn't. So that kind of points to mental illness a little bit, or some sort of connection. Interesting. And mental hiccups. Yes. Another layman's term for OCD. Really? Yeah. That's a good band name, too. Mental hiccups. Yeah. Actually it's kind of lame. Yeah. So my story, since we brought up the drunk thing, was I famously had hiccups in Athens one night, and this is after I graduated, I went back to see the Flaming Lips at the 40 Watt and I had hiccups for about 6 hours straight and I had imbibed a bit much. So it was kind of one of those nights I was the butt of many jokes because I was walking around and kind of doing this and it lasted forever. It was awful. What did Wayne Coin have to say about it? He said you need to be hit to death in the future. Head. Oh, okay. Which is one of their albums. Sure. Dad just made that up. Oh, he didn't really say that. No, but it is one of their albums. I'm sorry I lie so much to you. Shock. Let's say that you've eaten a lot of Indian food, you've smoked half a pack of cigarettes, drank a cord of Crazy Horse, okay. And you followed it with a big old glass of coffee for us. You have no regard whatsoever for the sensation in your hand. And your friendic nerve is going berserk berserker like a mad Viking. Yeah. Mushrooms. What are some of the things you can do aside from taking antipsychotics to cure hiccups? Are we getting into the cures now? I think so. Because boy, there's a lot of them. And even if we read 20, we'll get 1000 more from people. I was going to call for a listener mail. Yeah, we'll get them for sure. There are a few medical things that have been well, nothing has been proven to be more effective. It kind of comes down to the person. And I think a lot of it's mental. If you think one of them will work for you, then that's the one you use. And that might work. People aren't exactly sure how, but mental distraction actually can cure hiccups. Right, that's true. Especially if somebody comes up to you and demands that you hiccup on the spot. Yeah. I've never heard that one. No. If you've got the hiccups, they'll say hiccup. Right. But what if you just hiccup? You're like, Dude, that's my problem. Right? I'm hiccupping. I didn't say it was good, but I was just saying it's been shown to cure it in some people. They should go and say, don't hiccup. Right. Like I said, I can draw on a big breath of air and that usually cures it. Right. That's not my method, but I'm going to say that most of the best home remedies actually work. Stimulate the nasopharynx, and that's the part of the pharynx behind the tonsils. And like drinking from the opposite side of the glass. You've heard that one. Biting into a lemon or pulling on your tongue. Sometimes that will actually stimulate the nasopharynx. And that'll work. You can also just do it with your tongue itself, the tip of your tongue. If you rub it against the very back of the roof of your mouth. Yeah, tickling the roof of your mouth. That can help. It also keeps you from yawning. Interesting. Or tickling, period. They say if you're a ticklish person, get someone to tickle you. Right. And you might just forget about hiccupping. And if you're not a ticklish person, you have no soul. That's true. Most of the breathing things might work because you're actually interrupting your respiratory cycle. So if you do the paper bag trick or down a glass of water really quick, that's the reason why that'll work. Mine is I do the same thing with the breathing, but I don't inhale and take a big breath. I exhale every bit of air I can and then put my hand over my mouth and close my nose and literally go till I'm about to pass out. And then I'll breathe. Like, try and breathe very calmly when I come back. And usually that'll work. So you do the exact opposite of what I do well. You draw in a big breath and hold it. You exhale all of your breath and hold it. That's what I do. Crazy, but both ways. I think we're interrupting the respiratory cycle. Chuck. Josh. There's all sorts of medical treatments. Some are cool, like antipsychotics or medical marijuana. Yeah. This is if you have persistent or intractable hiccups, right? Yeah. If you start hiccupping and immediately get in your car and go see a doctor, what is wrong with you? But that being said, it is advised that if you have hiccups that last for 48 hours, do go see a doctor, because it can be kind of a problem when you go see the doctor. In addition to possibly prescribing antipsychotics medical marijuana, depending on your state, the doctor may also prescribe a digital rectal exam. I need that. Which one? I think that kind of falls into the mental distraction category, really? Maybe we're not talking ones and zeroes here. When we talk about digital, we're talking about something you might digits of your hand. Yeah. Might find in prison, perhaps. Digits. Another term for fingers. Yeah. I don't know why that would work, but apparently I'm telling you, it's the mental district. You're like what? Hiccups? We have a much bigger problem than hiccups. They will sometimes tap or rub the back of your neck, massage the cartoid sinus, which is in your neck. Carotid? I think so. What did I say? cartoid. I like cartoid. It is carotid, you're right. Or apply pressure to your eyeball to stimulate the nerves of your diaphragm. But we should also see over here and say, don't go mashing on your eyeball too hard. That's not very smart. No. You can pull on your tongue, but don't match your eyeball. Or sticking your finger in your ear sometimes will do it. But also don't stick something foreign in your ear and massage your brain. You don't want to do that. Nothing bigger than the end of a football. Is that what they say? Yeah. Really? Yeah. I thought you were just making that up now. There's also surgery to basically disconnect your French nerve, or parts of it. Make it a little less pressy. Sure. And there is also emptying your stomach through a tube inserted into your nose or mouth. That's pretty harsh. I think I'd rather have hiccups. Yeah. I say that, though. I've never had them for 48 hours or more, though. No, imagine when you sleep, you're still having them in your sleep. That'd be awful. Let's talk about a couple of people who have slept through hiccup bouts. Okay. All right. Charles Chuckie Osborne. I don't know that this man had an actual life. As far as quality life goes, I imagine you got used to it. Do you think you would for 68 years? Yes. But isn't it annoying, though? Aren't hiccups one of those things that you just can't help but find annoying? If somebody around you has hiccups, it almost brings out this anger response in people when it doesn't go away fast enough. Yeah, it's annoying, but like I said, Charles Osborne had them for 68 years. He had them from 1922 to 1990. And they estimate Guinness he's in the Guinness Book, of course, that he had 430,000,000 hiccups over that span. And I'm curious if he died in 19 nine and that was the end of the run. Well, I don't know if he was just cured. I'm sure we can find that out. There was also a Florida teen named Jennifer Me. She hiccups for five weeks in 2007. I actually remember that one. I do, too. She's on the Today Show, I think. Oh, really? So she stopped for a little while and then they returned a few weeks later, much to her dismay. And I think she does not have hiccups any longer, though, which is good. Well, yeah, another couple of people. Josh another Florida person, jamie Moseley hiccup for eight months. And David Willis of Narrative Island had two unsuccessful surgeries with a five year hiccup ordeal. Yeah, that's awful. You had the surgery and it still comes back. Can you imagine anything worse? Two surgeries and it still comes back. Well, that's what would be worse. Yeah. If you want to learn more about hiccups, I would recommend pulling your tongue, eating a spoonful of sugar, and moving from Florida. Yes. Drinking moderation. Yes. Oh, wait, you know what? There was one more that I used to do, and I think this is all mental. I was told that if you strike a match and then put the match out in a glass of water and then drink that water real quick, that'll do. It weird, but I think that's the water drinking method combined with just some mind games personally or sulfur. Well, I thought about that. I don't know if that's true. Okay, if you want to learn more about hiccups and see some cool diagrams of a diaphragm, you can type in hiccups at the handychurchbar@howstuffworks.com, which means it's time for listener mail. Josh I'm going to call this one goaded into being on listener mail. Goaded. Goaded. This guy goaded me goaded basically dared me to put him on listener mail. And you felt for it? I was like, you know what, dude? I will I can't reward that kind of behavior. Reverse psychology. Chuck. Okay, Josh and Chuck, I've made no secret of the fact that I think your podcasts are great. I've also openly declared a singular mission to achieve global notoriety by getting you guys to say hello to me and listen to mail. I don't know about global notoriety. He was written in a few times and I didn't fall for it. So I finally keep him from emailing me again. That's why I'm reading this. I've noted in recent weeks a pattern in your way to choose. You choose your mail. You invariably choose mail from those of younger persuasion, generally in high school or below. So premise one, you must be young. I've also noted that you tend to like the mail that is either written poorly or in some form of broken pigeon english premise to use bad English. I would also like to suggest that while you are often balanced and seemingly devoid of ego related behavior, you love it when people claim to be a big fan. Well, of course we do. It inflates. There you go. So, premise number three say I'm your number one fan. That actually has nothing to do with it. Finally, there usually has to be something slightly witty, but not more witty than you. This guy is dead on. Oh, that's not true. I love it when people are funnier than me. So premise number four is be smart but not too smart, which is not true. I've come to realize that I am not young. Indeed. I think I'm about your age. My English is pretty good. I did go to university, so I would expect a certain level of literacy. Is he British? No, he's not. He's Australian. I am well aware that while a fan, I am most likely not your number one fan. In fact, I'd be very disappointed if I was your number one fan, because I am not that good at being a groupie. Finally, this is the strange one to type out. I think I'm smart. Not hadron collider smart. I've read Chelsea smart, but certainly smart enough to keep up with you guys. Even typing that feels weird. He says, So, not willing to be fraudulent, I will simply continue to send you one off, slightly funny things I come across in the hope that one day, just one day, you think of me and say hello with something funny added. Mark, originally from WAGA WAGA, Australia, now in Sydney, and now you have to add something funny. WAGA. WADA is pretty funny. Perfect. Yeah. Thanks, Chuck. If you have something funny to say, Chuck and I like funny. You can be funnier than us if you dare. Send it in an email, right? Yes. Oh, and don't forget, if you have, like, a hiccup remedy, I'm sure we want to hear those put in an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Want more housestaffeorks? Check out our blogs on thehouseofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry, it's ready. Are you?" | ||
3ffda882-121b-11eb-ba6a-37470bf095dc | Short Stuff: Chameleons | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-chameleons | In today's short stuff, we bust a few myths about cute little chameleons. | In today's short stuff, we bust a few myths about cute little chameleons. | Wed, 08 Sep 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=251, tm_isdst=0) | 12598582 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. And Jerry is sitting in for our producer, Dave Cuzin. And this is short stuff. When you put all that info altogether, you got a short stuff. Okay. That's right. Let's go. Chuck, it's about chameleons. Is that what we're doing? Yes, we are doing one on chameleons, which I think was surprisingly fascinating because everything I know about chameleons I learned from watching paint commercials. I love chameleons. We don't call them chameleons. We call them lizards when we see them all over the place here in Georgia. Wait a minute. There chameleons up there? Yeah. I didn't know that. What do you think all those lizards are? I thought they were skinks. What's a skink? Is that a blue tail? I don't know. Maybe they are skinks. If that has a blue tail, it's a skink. And they are Neurotoxic. I met somebody once who was like, don't let your dog anywhere near those things. I knew a cat once that had cross eye because it had eaten too many of those lizards. What? Yeah. Apparently they have a neurotoxin. Well, now I'm looking up a picture of a chameleon and I think you are completely right. This is not chameleons that we see here in Georgia. They're skinks. They're skinks, but we call them lizards. Anyway, so I was still right. Yeah, you're still right. How do you spell skink? I think just like it sounds like you think. Well, these aren't exactly skinks. Although we do have skinks. What about gecko? A leopard gecko? It could be one of them. Maybe so I saw a skink one time at the lake that was with tail about a foot long. Well, now I don't know what we see all over the place. In the woods and on our deck. It's probably geckos. Okay. I think if it's not a skink. All right. Well, we're talking chameleons. They are little geckos. Yeah. Okay. I got leopard geckos, if I'm not mistaken. Mom loves chasing those things. Oh, my God. She loves chasing lizards. These are ones that puff up their neck and a balloon. Yeah, exactly right. They're great. They're great little lizards. They're fun. They'll drop their tail if you get too close to them and they need to escape. Yes. Right. Now, Chuck, that's absolutely wrong. First fact about chameleons is they can't regrow their tail. If their tails ever pulled off, it hurt and it's not coming back. Yeah, they don't release their tail. Well, plenty of lizards do that, though, right? Yeah. Like a gecko. Yeah. But that's not what people think of when they think of chameleons. That they can't regrow their tail. That's pretty arcane. That's a deep cut. As far as chameleon facts are concerned. What most people think of when they think of chameleons is that they can change color. And everybody knows they can change color because they blend in with their surroundings. Right. Wrong, man. We're both just batting zero right now. Yeah, we're busting some chameleon myths, and that is a myth that chameleons will be green if they're next to a leaf, or they will be brown if they are on your deck or your mulch. That is not true. That may accidentally happen to be true if you look and say, oh, look, they're the same color as my deck. But it's not because they're trying to blend in. They are trying to control their body temperature. But they do try to blend into the green as their sort of natural state. Right. But they're not doing anything at that point. Like you said, it's their natural state. It worked out that way. Yeah, it just worked out perfectly. Almost like it was designed by the hand of God himself or herself, if you watch dogma. But they're green. Well, we'll get to why they're green, because I thought that was a pretty interesting thing. But when they're agitated, when they're excited, when they're happy to see you, when they are scared, when they're trying to scare off somebody else, they're feeling emotional. And just like with humans, when you feel emotional, there's all sorts of hormones churning. Right? Yes. That's what happens with the chameleon, too. When those hormones get to churning, they start to change color. And they do it in the same way that just about every other thing that changes color in the world, every other animal changes color. Changes color. But it's slightly different in that the kind of structures that a chameleon uses is much different than what we understood it to be before. Yeah. I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, with our good old friend the octopus, they have chromatophores, and with the chameleon, they are eridophores. Yeah. So I saw that. I also saw somewhere that chromatophores is like the umbrella term for all the different kinds of color changing cells and that errrtophores, like, chameleons have are a specific kind. Okay. But that the big difference between an octopus and a chameleon as far as color changing goes. Well, there's two. One is that the octopus is using pigment filled sacks, right. And then they're opening or closing the muscles surrounding each sack to show or not show that color. And they have different colors in their sacks. With a chameleon, they're actually using, like, crystals. They're called aridophores because they're iridescent. Right? Yeah. And you know what? That's a great cliffhanger. And we're right in the middle we are in the middle of a cliffhanger. I'm about to vomit. I've never been in the middle of a cliffhanger before, and it's a very uncomfortable place to be. It's kind of like hold on, I'm not done. When I was in maybe second grade, I was on the bus, and the bus came to a red light and it came to a stop. But have you ever been in a vehicle that never fully came to a stop? It wasn't moving forward any longer. And there's like this incomplete feeling like something is terribly wrong. Like that Twilight Zone episode where Darren from Bewitched, like, flips a coin and it lands on its side, and after that, you can hear everybody's thoughts. Same thing happens when a bus doesn't fully stop at a red light. That's what I feel like right this moment in the middle of the cliffhanger. I can hear your thoughts, and I want to throw up. We'll be right back. All right, everyone. Josh just vomited. I had to turn off my computer camera. Thank you for the tell. So now I'm only listening. But we left at the cliffhanger where you were talking about the crystallike cells called iridophores. That what they do instead of squeezing pigment, is they work with actual light and color and light across the entire color spectrum. Even if human beings can't see it. Yes. That's the huge thing. Like, if you have a pigment sack, you can reflect the color that that pigment reflects. And so it's showing blue or red or yellow or orange or something like that. And a ridiforer can reflect whatever color needs to be reflected at that moment. And like you said, even ones that humans can't see impossible colors is what they're called all colors. Amazing. It really makes you wonder, like, what dazzling displays chameleons are putting on. We just can't even see it because our eyes aren't it's not possible for our eyes to pick up light on that part of the visible spectrum or the non visible spectrum. Right. And there are a lot of species of chameleon, and depending on the species, they have different kind of color changing capabilities. Some are way more vibrant and bright. Some aren't quite as vibrant and bright. Some of them have a lot of variance on the kind of colors, but it's a general thing where they can basically use any color on the spectrum. Like, it's all open. All those wavelengths are open for business for these chameleons. And it has to do with, again, whether the chameleon, the rhythephores, or the muscles surrounding each aridophor is relaxed or agitated, and that has to do with hormones. So when it's relaxed, the muscles are contracted around it and it's just reflecting short wavelength light, like blue. Right, right. And then when they're excited, the cells go farther apart and they can get more red and orange. Yes. Which is how they change color. But because they're excited and those hormones are churning, that's what triggers those iridophores to expand or contract, which is the difference between chameleons and octopi. That octopi control their chromatophore sacs with neurons. So it's like instantaneous opening or closing. With chameleon, it's fast, but it takes a little longer because the hormones have to go signal the cells to open or close, depending on whether the animals excited or relaxed. Yeah. And here to me is one of the coolest facts, is the actual natural sort of color of a chameleon is more of a yellow. But when you see them, they're usually green when they're just chilling out. And that's because and it's very simple, everybody, when they're relaxed, they're reflecting blue light, and blue and yellow make green. Isn't that neat? That's all there is to it. Yeah. Very cool. I love that one, too. So those iridaforce chuck are actually beneath their skin. You can see them, and they're able to reflect light well, because their skin, the outer layers of skin, are actually transparent. And apparently chameleons have a little quick change act where if they're really trying to get vibrant in a hurry, they'll just, like, shed those clothes. Otho in Beetlejuice, when he enters the spotlight, do you remember his leisure suit just gets pulled? No, his suit gets pulled off and he's wearing a leisure suit underneath. Yeah. That might be my favorite movie of all time, I think. I think doing a sequel. They're developing a sequel. Same cast? I think so. I think everyone's there. I can't wait. I'm behind it. Okay. Same here, man. One of my favorite parts ever of that movie is when he's in the waiting room with a guy with a little head, and he just leans over and goes, let me ask you something. How do you get them down so small? It's good stuff. How do you get them down so small? One of my favorite lines. And then the song, of course. I'll eat anything you want me to eat. I'll swallow anything you want me to swallow. What? You remember that? No. Are we talking about, Beetlejuice? Yes. He has the song. I'll eat anything you want me to eat. I'll swallow anything you want me to swallow. So come on down. I'll chew on a dog. Is that in his ad? I think, yeah. I'll cheer you on a dog. It's classic. It is classic. I was watching Michael Keaton's early stand up earlier? No, yesterday. How did that go? It was okay. He wasn't great, but you could see the seed. Okay. I can imagine. I can see him being, like, real judgy and like come on, it'll be a bonehead kind of facial expression and smoking cigarettes. No, it wasn't that. You should check it out. It's interesting. Okay, I will, because I definitely have no idea what it's going to be like then. And I met him one day. I know he came to set, right? Yeah. He lived across the street from where he was shooting and just sort of entertained the PA in the driveway for ten minutes one day. Very nice. Very nice guy. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he was super nice. I'm really glad to hear that he's a chameleon. You can blend into wherever he is. Group of PA in the driveway. No problem. Yes. Or a rock in the desert. Rock in the Painted Desert. Are we done with chameleons? I think so, man. I think we're done. I think there's no one listening anymore. It's just you and me now. Agreed? All right. Well, goodbye, Chuck. This is the end of short stuff. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more Podcasts, my HeartRadio radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Lightning Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-lightning-works | You've seen lightning before, and maybe you're even afraid of it. You should be. The air is ripped apart and a sudden electrical discharge burning six times brighter than the sun connects with Earth. Learn all about it with Josh and Chuck. | You've seen lightning before, and maybe you're even afraid of it. You should be. The air is ripped apart and a sudden electrical discharge burning six times brighter than the sun connects with Earth. Learn all about it with Josh and Chuck. | Thu, 12 Jul 2012 18:50:29 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=18, tm_min=50, tm_sec=29, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=194, tm_isdst=0) | 38390875 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopforcecom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. This is a pretty mellow intro. Yeah, man. I'm Josh. That's Chuck. This makes stuff you should know. That's Jim Morrison. Yes, it was. That was The Doors. Riders on the Storm. We have Jim in the studio with us today. Yeah. Hey Jim, did you ever see that Gap ad where they showed Jim Morrison all fat and old? No. It was a while ago. Like probably ten years ago. They did some of these 60s icons that passed away early as old people and like, really realistically it's pretty funny. Yeah, I don't recall that at all. And I watch a lot of TV rights to I think it was a magazine. Print ads. Oh, I read a lot of magazines. Oh, Fair Use Alert. Fair Use Alert. So Writers on The Storm was released on the 19th 71 album La Woman, which we would imagine is available at a wide variety of retailers online and at brick and mortar stores. Yeah. Great song. And I'm kind of over a lot of The Doors, but I like that song, man. It's like how I imagine a lot of people are with Zeppelin. It's like, oh, I love Zeppelin. I'm in 6th grade. And then it just kind of goes away. But then you get older and you're like, wow, they really were great. That didn't happen to me with separate I got over them after 6th grade, you know that. But the doors that happened to me. You're back into them again. I just constantly am like in a state of coming in or out of really appreciating The Doors. But for the most part it's solidified, it's gelled. I love The Doors. If you want to keep that intact, do yourself a favor and don't ever read any of Jim Morrison's poetry books. I have. Have you ever heard American prayer? It's like one of the coolest things anyone has ever made. I'm not a fan of his poetry. Yeah, I mean, his songs were poetry. Writers on The Storm is a poem set to music. He's the lizard king. Yeah. He can do anything. That's right. So Chuck, have you heard of a guy named Roy Sullivan? Yeah, I remember him from being a kid. Do you really? Yeah, from the old Guinness Book record. I must have skipped over his entry because I read those too. I remember when they come out and you'd be like, oh my God. It'd be like the Scholastic Book Fair, which amounted to a couple of carts with books on them in the hallway and some guy you didn't recognize standing there selling them. I missed that one, but let's tell everybody else. I haven't looked him up since then, but if I remember correctly, he had the record for being struck, right? Yeah. Lightning. Yeah. Roy Sullivan, he was a ranger, a park ranger at Shenandoah National Park. Okay. Okay. And he died in 1983. And between 1940 and 1977, he was struck seven times. Struck by lightning seven times. And actually, there's two of his ranger stats and hats that he was wearing while he was struck that are in the Guinness World Record, I guess, museums, and they have burned holes in them. Right? Yeah. He's just smiling. I remember seeing the picture. I can picture it in my head. He did not die of being struck by lightning. He died six years after the last time he was struck. Really? Yeah, from, like, plugging in something in his house and getting shot. He's, like, stripped on a banana peel, right? Yeah. So I guess I bring this up because we're talking about lightning, and you brought up a really excellent point that his stats and hat was burned, but this guy survived. Even though lightning is many times more powerful than a typical industrial electrocution voltage that will typically kill anybody, lightning, frequently people survive. As a matter of fact, like, two thirds of people who are struck by lightning survive between 90% and two thirds, depending on who you ask. That's pretty good. So I am very excited about this one. So glad. I love natural phenomena. I do too. I love Earth sciences. I don't. I do, because I get it. Once you get it, it's like geometry. Once you get geometry, you can't unkick geometry, and all of a sudden this whole segment of nature just becomes clear to you. Well, I'm glad you're covering this side of the love, because I don't have it. No, I mean, I think it's neat enough, but I'm not as into the Earth sciences, at the very least. The pictures in this article are really awesome. Yeah. Did you get to see some of them? Those are pretty black and white, and that's still worth looking at. I've got all those leaders. If you want to go to the website how Stuff works.com and type in lightning, it will bring up a lot of these pictures. But in color. Yeah, we just don't print in color here. I do occasionally, but if it's something, then I think it should be in color. I like to preserve cyan. Good for you. All right, so, Chuck, let's talk lightning, shall we? Sure. You got your statman role. Did you read that one thing, the NASA article? There are some stats in there that I thought you'd just have a bonanza with. I didn't get to it. Oh, buddy. All right. I'll play the statman role then. Okay. Because there were some good stats in there. Do you want me to start out with a few? Sure, Chuck. I got a few too. Between that payment, between this one study of lightning strikes between 1959 and 1994 found that let's see, 9818 people were struck by lightning in that time. 3239 died, 20% died immediately. You're just struck by lightning. You're over yeah. That's got to be like a direct strike, right? All of them are direct strikes. Oh, really? As far as I understand, yes, we're all direct strikes. Like, you can be struck directly. Like Ranger Roy. And he survived. Men are four times, likelier, than women to be struck by lightning. Okay. The two thirds of lightning casualties occur between 12:00 P.m. And 04:00 P.m., with the maximum at 04:00 P.m.. Yes. Most lightning casualties happened on a Sunday. And Wednesday is the second most frequent day in July is the peak month. Florida is the state that has the most reported lightning strikes for people. So if it's 04:00 P.m. On a Wednesday in July and you're in Florida and you're a man holding like a golf club yeah. Kiss your butt goodbye. The good Lord would never stop. The best game of golf I've ever played. I think I remember in a different podcast, we talked about the 4 July actually being the number one day. I think I remember that as well. And I think that's part and parcel to the fact that July is the biggest month and there are way more people outside recreating your bodies of water on the 4 July. Which water, of course, could help. Yeah. I knew this dude who actually printed the alternative paper that I helped found, and he would say that he was vacating. We're going to vacate for two weeks. Me and the family going down to Disney World to vacate. That's pretty funny. Yeah. The only little cool factoids I have are lightning is not necessarily always white or white as yellow. It has to do with the background. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn't know that. And that lightning is only an inch wide. Yeah, I saw it was one to two inches in diameter. Crazy. Yeah, that's it. And it's hot. 654 thousand deg, or six times hotter than the surface of the sun. I saw 60,000. Yeah, I'd say that's in the same range. It's close. Sure. That's 6000 deg. That's not much when you're up that high. Yeah, it'll fry an egg for sure. So you say that there are some cool factoids associated with lightning? I say that lightning as a whole is one cool factoid. Agreed. Made up of smaller component factoids. Agreed. Yeah. And also, I'm sure somebody can be like, you guys use the word factoid wrong, but we will decimate that person. All right. Do we need to start with clouds since we've covered that so thoroughly? I feel like we do, because with this process of cloud formation, it is part and parcel with lightning formation. They think we should really point out here, man, that it's not just this article, it's not just how stuff works that says that scientists aren't really sure how all this happens. Yeah. NASA says, So what's? The National Laboratory begins with the A man. Well, anyway, one of the National Laboratory says so that I read about. So basically, we don't fully understand how lightning form, but it's invisible. We have some good guesses it occurs within the second. So it's like it's not the easiest thing in the world to study. No, it's really not. If you think about it, we can recreate it, which is pretty neat. I am. Okay. But yes. Let's start with precipitation in the water cycle. Right? Okay. You've got water, say, here on the Earth's surface, when heat is transferred from the environment, remember, heat always goes from something that's warm to something that's cold. That's how heat transfer occurs. Something doesn't lose its cold, it gains heat. Right? That's right. So when that happens, water can vaporize and rise up into the atmosphere. That's evaporation. And once it reaches a certain point, it's going to lose its heat to the external environment, cool down, chilly. It's going to turn back into water. It's going to fall back down to the ground in the form of precipitation. That's condensation. Right? Yeah. So it's either going to get slightly chilly and be rain, or it's going to get really chilly and be snow or freezing rain. Right. So if you get enough water vapor going up and you get enough condensation starting to come down and they start knocking into each other, this is what scientists think. They can start knocking electrons from one another. Right. The electrons are going to keep going down. They're going to stay, say, as a cloud forms. They're going to accumulate around the bottom of the cloud. Yeah. Like a little puffy cloud couch there at the bottom of the cloud there's, all tucked in. Just settle in and nestle down. And then, just for this example's sake, think of positively charged particles. The ones that are now missing. Their electrons are just lighter, so they're going to accumulate at the top, but they are contained in the cloud. Right. So at the top of the cloud, you have all these positively charged particles. At the bottom, you have negatively charged particles, electrons, and all of a sudden you have what's called an electric field. Yeah. Charge separation, which can do some funky stuff. Well, that's how batteries work, because, Chuck, as you remember, nature loves homeostasis. Yeah. If these things are separate, they just want to bring them back together. Exactly. Electrons love to flow toward the direction of positively charged particles to neutralize it, and that's an electric charge. Electricity is just an electron flow. Okay. So you have a cloud that's suddenly like a battery, a big honking battery. Yeah. And as this charge separation becomes more and more charged, like, there's more and more positive particles, more and more negative particles. As these negative particles are the electrons are accumulating at the bottom of the cloud, the charge can become so great that here on the Earth's surface, dude, it actually presses the electrons down into the Earth. Yeah. And it's hard to imagine this, but it happens when you're walking around out there during a thunderstorm, like, it is being pushed below your feet, leaving the ground positively charged and ready to join their little buddies up there in the cloud. So you have this layer of electrons, and now you have basically two electric fields that can either go up within the cloud or it can go down to the ground. Yeah, that's a common like, that was my first question was, if these electrons within the cloud are separated, why are they going all the way down to Earth? Why don't they just have lightning inside the cloud? And the answer is, well, that happens all the time. Yeah, that's the most common form of lightning, is when the electrons form lightning within its little fluffy buddy there. It's like cloudy cloud or intracloud lightning. Intracloud is within the same cloud. Inter is between two clouds. Okay. But it still falls in the cloud to cloud category. Yeah. So I think there's two main divisions, cloud to cloud and cloud to ground. And then ground to cloud is also ground to cloud still. Sure. But it's not because it's going between the ground or between the cloud and itself or another cloud. Yeah, I like a little cloud on cloud action, that's why. Okay, so you have the Earth suddenly taking on a positive charge on its surface. You have a strong negative charge at the bottom of the cloud, and you have nature going like, what's to do? This is terrible. Like, there's an electrical potential here, and it's making me nervous. Like something has to change. So something does change. There's a process called the ionization of air, and it's basically turning air into what's called plasma by ripping it apart, essentially. Yeah. I like to call it ionic separation. I've coined that term. Nice. I don't know if it's what anyone else in science calls it, but basically the air around the cloud breaks down. So the electric field is really strong. It separates the ions. Now they can move a lot more freely and conduct a lot more electricity. Well, in the end, it takes regular air, like the stuff we're breathing now, and it separates the electrons from the positive ions. Yeah, but they're still within the same area. They're not like completely separate. Right. It's not like opening the curtains with two hands. But it is kind of in a certain way with these free electrons. It makes this little bit of air that's been ionized much more conductive, like you said. Yes, plasma. Okay. So these things, this happens in little, like, 50 yard jolts, and they call those step leaders. Each little rip, each little separation of creation of plasma creates a channel in the air that is very conductive, way more conductive than the surrounding air. And it happens a little 50 yard branches. Yeah. And they don't have to go straight down. They're looking to get to the ground with the path of least resistance. So if you see this discovery had a show did you see that on YouTube? The what was it called? Raging Planet. Discovery had a show called raging Planet. For the first time, they filmed a lightning strike in the super slow mo. So when you see this, like, with your naked eye, it all happens in a blip and you see a lightning strike. But when you see it slowed down, you see the lightning working its way down in the 50 yard bits and fracturing off to the left and to the right and basically, like, disappearing again because it didn't find its way all the way to the ground. Oh, yeah. It would just go like, left and then disappear. And then it will go down and then it will go to the right and disappear. Really cool. These channels that form, basically, you have a bunch of these step leaders coming down and whichever reaches the ground first wins. But just because one reached the ground doesn't mean the other ones automatically disappear. So that flow of electrons is going to fill up all of the associated ion channels yeah. These created right, sure. With this flow of electrons. Right. So before that happens, though, you've got these step leaders coming down from the clouds. You also have something called positive leaders, right? Positive streamers. I'm sorry. Yeah. You also have positive streamers coming up from the ground. So a positive streamer is a step leader is a plasma channel forming in the direction of the flow of electrons. A positive streamer is a plasma channel forming in the opposite direction of the flow of electrons. So it's kind of stretching up and it could come from the ground, it could come from your head, it could come from a tree or that golf club you're holding. And they've captured these in photographic form, and it's the same thing. It looks like a little purplish bolt of lightning coming up from the ground, trying to join up with this buddy that's coming down from the sky. Yes. And like you said, it can come from you. The reason your hair lifts up when you're in an electrical storm, you just become a positive streamer, which is not good. It sounds nice. It does. And you're glowing a little purplish, but you're in big trouble if it connects with you. Yeah, it's the same concept if you've ever shocked yourself on a doorknob. It's the same thing. The closer once you've built up that energy, the hand gets closer to the metal and it leaps out from your finger and out from the doorknob and you've got lightning. Okay. So, I mean, we're drawn this out like I'm about to hyperventilate, I'm so excited. Finally, at one point, you have a step leader. And like you said, it's taken the path of least resistance. Right. So it's not going to come straight down largely because the shape of the cloud is not equal or is not totally flat particles in the air can get in the way, all that stuff. Right. So they're coming down in little branches that branch off some lead nowhere. Eventually, one comes down, and a step leader connects with a positive streamer. And all of a sudden, you have a full, uninterrupted path for these electrons to flow. And boy, do they flow. What you have is lightning, right? That's right. You have a sudden current exchange from the cloud down to the Earth and then from the Earth back up to the cloud. Because the lightning strike isn't just from the cloud to the ground. It goes down and then back up immediately. And it's on the back up. Yes. A return stroke. Thank you. On the way back up, that's when you see the light, literally. So lightning is we don't actually see the electron flow. We see the local effects of the electron flow. And this electron flow produces a tremendous amount of heat energy. What did you say it was like, hotter than the surface of the sun? Yeah, six times hotter. So that's what you're seeing right there is an explosion of heat. Right. And then the heat actually explodes the air around it, and that produces thunder. Yeah. The way I understood it was the ionized plasma channel that's created. When it goes away, the air collapsing back in on itself is what creates that sound. That sound wave. Is that right? What I heard was that it's actually exploding outward, and it's compressing the air, basically exploding the air around it. That converts into a shock wave in the form of sound that travels outward. That's how I understood it. Well, maybe it collapses in and explodes out. That's very democratic of you. And then one more thing about thunder. Chuck, get this. There's three segments to the sound of thunder. Did you know that? I thought Pink Floyd said there was like, four. Really? I'm just kidding. Okay. Because I remember delicate sound of thunder, but I don't remember four parts. No. Okay, so there's the first part. I mean, think about it. Think about when you've ever heard thunder. There's like, a few sounds to it, right? Sure. So the first part is actually caused by the step leaders, right. That's a tearing sound. The second, a cracking sound, is actually caused by the positive streamers. Right. And then the third part is the explosion of the air blowing up. But what you're hearing those first two parts is literally the air ripping open. Isn't that crazy? Yes. And if you are out in the country, you might be able to hear that as far away as 15 miles. If you're in the city, maybe about 5 miles, you'll be able to hear that thunder. And it is true that you can divide by five, and that is roughly how far away your lightning is from you. That's true. Counting from the point the lightning strikes till you hear the thunder, divide that amount of seconds by 510 seconds. It's 2 miles away. How does that rule of thumb work? I mean, don't storms travel faster? Well, no, I think it has nothing to do with how fast you're traveling. It's the speed of light versus the speed of sound. Yeah. Because the speed of light travels at the speed of light travel. The speed of sound is far, far slower, which is why the sound of thunder lags the flash of lightning so much, you just explained it to yourself. Thank you. Thanks. No problem. Josh, I think it's time for lightning myth number one. That was a good sound effect. Way to go, Jerry. All right. Lightning myth number one. Once again, the tallest objects in a storm don't always get struck by lightning. It would make sense that lightning, if you know, if it's going to be reaching something that's sticking up from the ground in the way of a positive streamer, that the tallest thing will always be that thing. And that is not the case because you can never really predict the path of lightning. No. It might strike the ground right next to the tallest thing. It might also, yeah. Because that path of least resistance, whether it's dust or the curvature of the Earth or whatever yeah. You can't predict where it's going to go. And even more than that, once the lightning is struck, it may jump. Oh, yeah. That is a property of lightning. It may jump to something that has an even lesser path of resistance. That's right. And that could be you. So it could strike a tree that you're standing by, and you could be like, Woo. And then yeah, I guess. What? Way to bust that myth. Thank you. I think since you brought that up, we might as well talk about the fact that when you see lightning and you see it in the clouds and then down on the ground and then flickering in the clouds afterward, and remnants branching off, that's, like maybe 40 or 50 lightning strikes you're seeing all at once. Right. It's very cool. The whole idea that lightning doesn't strike the same place twice. Every time it strikes it twice it strikes it, like you said, 40, 50 times. That electron flow the back and forth between the ground and the Earth, which neutralizes the electrical charge. It's not just one stroke. It's 40 or 50. Yeah. And that's what you're more likely to see, unless you just happen to be looking in the field of view of that original blast. Right. That's why it's so tough to capture. Like the Discovery Channel guy on Raging Planet. He sits in a room with this little camera, and I would just let the camera run. I don't know why he sat there with his finger on the button. It's like, Dude, just press record and walk away. Right. But I guess he's a purist. Well, I think maybe because it's such a high speed camera, plus also, hip stomatic, doesn't have a video function, but he likened it to fishing. He said it's a little like fishing. Wow. Did he say it like that? Like a jerk? Yeah, he was a little bored, but he got it. It was all worth in the end. Yeah. That's what counts. Okay, Josh, I think it's time to talk about various types of lightning. Yeah. So we talked about cloud to ground under an umbrella, under which ground to cloud falls. Sure. And another way to put it is that's triggered or artificial and natural? Natural is when it comes down from the cloud to the ground. Triggered or artificial is when some sort of man made structure, say, skyscraper, initiates this lightning. So it's sending up a positive streamer, like, hey, man, come on, let's do this. Right? And the cloud is like, okay. And then it comes down rather than the cloud pressing down the electrons, I think, on the Earth's surface, and then just hitting a cow. Because what's more natural than lightning striking a cow? That's right. Instant prime rib. Yeah. Types of lightning. Normal lightning, which pretty much is what we've been talking about. Sheet lightning is reflected in the clouds. And I guess that would fall under intra and intercloud lightning. I would think so. Heat lightning is my favorite because that reminds me of growing up, going to Florida and swimming at my cousin's house. And heat lightning is basically lightning is so far away, you can't hear the thunder. Right. And it's hot enough the reason they call it heat lightning is because it's hot enough that it's being reflected a tremendous distance by this higher temperature atmosphere. It's a comforting lighting, though. It is soft and reddish and during the summer months yeah. Ball lightning, which we have talked about before, we weren't entirely certain back then that it actually existed, but I think since we've mentioned it oh, really? Is it super proven that we've figured out that it can exist, but no one understands it? Yeah. That's the phenomenon where you will see a ball of lightning going through your house, correct? Yes. Remember, some listener wrote in about it. Yeah. Was it like the sponge combustion? I don't know that I've ever seen it captured, though, on film or anything. Has it been yes, it's been recreated. Okay. I don't think it's been someone hasn't caught the natural version of it, but yes. So we've proven it can't exist, but yeah, it'll burn you and then it'll blow up. It's really dangerous, scary, crazy lightning that no one gets. Josh, is it time for lightning? Myth number two? Sounds like it number two. And this is something I learned today. A search protector will not save your computer and your television from a lightning strike. I thought that's what they were for. Yeah. Apparently they can only save your computer or TV if it's something that the power company has surged right. The surge from your electrical supply. So what you need is something called what's it called? A lightning arrested. Yeah, and I've seen that and they're relatively inexpensive, and it's filled up with a gas that compared with diffuse. Well, it was like $30. Oh, yeah, that's not bad. I thought you were going to be like, compared to a new Volvo. Well, that's what I thought. A lightning arrestor sounded, and it was filled with gas that diffuses the charge. I thought it'd be like $10,000. But now, even with gas prices today that's right. So we talked about types of lightning. We should probably talk about lightning rods at some point, like maybe now. So do you know Ben Franklin actually invented these things? I went and double checked. I was like, this sounds like four year old textbook stuff. Yeah, but it's true, isn't it? I also remembered oh, wait, his kite experiment. He ripped off a couple of Frenchmen. I went and checked that out. And now actually, Franklin had conducted some sort of experiments and possibly proposed a kite experiment. Oh, yeah. And these Frenchmen, he published his results in the early 1750s and a couple of Frenchmen carried them out. So the Frenchman actually did do this. But Ben Franklin did develop lightning rods as early as the 1740s, I believe. But he did have a kite key experiment, right? He did. Okay. I don't know if he it's not 100% certain that he actually carried out the key on the kite experiment or just said this theoretically could work. It's a thought experiment. Don't be so stupid to go do this. Well, let's call that lightning myth number three. Okay? And here's some retroactive lightning for that one. And thunder. All right. But he did develop the lightning rod. And basically a lightning rod is a metal rod on the roof of a building that is attached to a metal wire that runs into the ground. And its job is to either divert that direct lightning strike into the ground and defuse it quickly, or if it's jumping around to collect that and diffuse it so it doesn't cause, like, super lots of damage to the Chrysler Building. Right. But it doesn't attract lightning. It says, hey, lightning, I got a positive streamer, and I'm not going to resist you at all. Just take me. And the lightning will be like, hey, you look pretty good, and there you go. But it doesn't attract lightning. And I know the article says that's nitpicking, but it's really not. There's not a difference between offering a good path of least resistance to lightning and attracting it. Yeah, because whoever wrote this article who was this? I didn't recognize the name. I think it's an old article basically said the lightning is going to be happening anyway, so it's not like it's going to cause lightning to strike there. So that made a lot of sense. They also made a pretty good point that because lightning rods conduct electricity so well, that makes them. They're not going to be singed or burned or whatever. It's when you resist that lightning burns you. If lightning strikes, like the wood of a house, then the wood is not a very good conductor, which means it's going to be a high amount of burn and heat damage. Right. Because the resistance produces this heat energy. That makes sense. Yeah. What else do we have? Do we have another lightning myth? Man, they are just coming hard and fast these days. Well, we saved them. All right. Lightning myth number four the Faraday cage. Right? Yeah. So you are in a car and it's a lightning storm. You've actually sought shelter in a car. And most people think that's because the tires on the car are touching the ground and they're rubber and they're a good insulator. Not true. In a lightning storm, rubber actually becomes pretty conductive, especially when it's struck by lightning. But if your car is struck by lightning, you should be fairly protected because of this thing called the Faraday Cage, named after Michael Faraday, the early electrical genius from, I think, the 18th century. Yeah, I think he's the one that first described what an electrical field is, period. Yeah, he was just a very smart guy. The fact that he didn't die of electrocution is really something. That means he's super smart. But he realized that if you put something in a metal cage and apply an electrical charge current to the cage, what's inside the cage will be fine, because electricity passes along the outside of the metal cage, the Faraday cage, while engineers incorporate that into automobile design. So it's a pretty good place to seek shelter. Yeah. You don't want to be laying naked on the hood of your car. No. But being inside your car would be a pretty good place to be. Yeah. It has nothing to do with your tires. Don't be a dummy. And I guess that's our first tip if we're going to give some lightning tips. If you are out and about and if you're driving around Kansas, I don't know why, God forbid, you would be doing anything like that, but stay in your car or get in your car. If you don't have a car, don't go under a tree. Don't go climb the flagpole. They say to put your feet close together and crouch down to the ground. Yes. But keep your head as low to the ground as you can get it without touching the ground. Don't let anything but the bottom of your shoes touch the ground. Yeah. Because when lightning strikes, it sends an electrical current across the ground as well. Right. So if your head happens to be touching, all of a sudden you've just had a stroke or some sort of neurological damage because you just got struck by the very least. Yeah. But also, if you are crouched down, you're providing less of a chance to create a positive streamer with your body. Right. So you want to find shelter. And if you can't find shelter, you want to crouch down, keep your head low, but not touching the ground. Right. And also there's a study in Japan, Chuck, that found that once you hear thunder, there is no safe interval where you're not vulnerable to a direct lightning strike. By the time you hear thunder, it's already there. Yeah, it's already too late. You could be struck by lightning at any second. So there's no warning sound then? No. And you also want to get out of pools because they are really good at conducting electricity. Yeah. Don't stand around in water. No, it's not a good idea. Stay off the telephone. If you still have a telephone that's plugged into a cord on a wall. Yeah, if you buy things that have the as seen on TV label, stay off the phone means you're also in Kansas, too. Interestingly. And they say stay out of the bathtub a because it's got water. But one of the other reasons, if you're in an older house, your plumbing pipes are going to be pretty good conductors and attractors of that electricity. Newer house PVC. Right, exactly. Or if you didn't skimp when you redid your house, you might have paid for copper. Yeah, it's true. You really want to remember or we should just be like, let's just not take a bath or shower while there's a lightning storm and then I guess is that it for the lightning myths, too? I think so. I have no more little factoids on my sheet either. I've got one. All right, let's hear it. Okay. The study of lightning's effects on the human body. The study of the pathology of lightning. Oh, is this the NASA thing? It was mentioned in there, yeah. Okay. In that cold talk about a specialized field, like not the effects of electricity on the human body, the effects of lightning striking the human body. Did they study people like Sullivan? I imagine he saw a keranopathist or two. I bet you he had to have become more susceptible, right? Is that possible? I don't know. I think it could be a lightning myth that we might not dispel at this time. I mean, I would think if the guy, I mean, granted, he's a park ranger, so he's out there at least you mentioned his status and having a burn. So despite the fact that lightning is six times hotter than the sun, produces heat six times hotter than the sun, heats the air to like 18,000 degrees, causing it to explode, it can still hit a human. And the only burn wounds typically are at the point of entry and the point of exit. How does it not kill people all the time? I don't know. The one thing that they say is possible, the one possible explanation is that it happens so fast that it doesn't have the same amount of time that like an industrial electrocution has interesting. And remember the hysterical strength thing? Do you want to tell them why people are thrown with electricity? That's right. It's not the actual blast. The surge of adrenaline is so great that you have this superhuman strength and sort of leap back from it. Yeah. Your muscles can track so hard and so fast that you throw yourself. Yeah. That's crazy. With lightning. I don't think that's true. I think the shockwave can actually throw you. My grandfather eventually led to his death. He was an electrician. Oh, yeah. I think I might have told the story. He was at the top of a thing and used to test electricity with the back of your hand so it doesn't latch on. Yeah. And it popped him out. He hit a live wire, and it knocked him out of a telephone pole, and he landed on his head. Oh, man. And it was bedridden for the rest of his life. Oh, man. Are you serious? I did not know that. Wow. That was granddaddy, Bryant. I was a little kid. I mean, he died when I was, like, six, so all I ever knew of him was he was kind of the big, scary guy in the hospital bed. Got you. Who gave you candy? Candy and, like, buffalo nickels. Well, okay. That was a bummer way to end this one. Yeah. Let's see. You got any other terrible stories? No. Okay, well, then let's go to listener mail. Oh, wait. At first, I didn't even say how stuff works. What is wrong with me? If you want to see some very pretty lightning pictures and read more about lightning, you can just type that in. This is, like, a seminal article for house Stuff works. It's like bread and butter stuff. Lightning search bar. Howstep works.com. Now it's time for listener name Joshua to call this email I just received 10 minutes ago. Oh, okay. Hot off the presses. Wow. Guys and Jerry have been wanting to write for ages, and now I actually have things to say. I've been listening to the podcast for years, and I probably listen to 99% of them. I never listened to the few in the beginning before you two teamed up. That's pretty nice. I learned so much from them. Your podcast is the reason I survived mowing lawns for a summer without my brain becoming much from the endless walking back and forth. What I really want to write and say, though, is thanks for helping me get into my college. My main essay for applying to colleges was about your podcast. I entitled it Healthcare to Zoot Suits, and I talked all about the things I'd learned from your podcast, hoping it would show the colleges that I was curious, well rounded, and had a thirst for knowledge. Right. Apparently it worked because I was accepted to several colleges. I will be a freshman at St. Olaf College next year, next fall. I don't know if they have a team St. Olaf. They're like the fighting roses from golden girls. Really? That's where Rose from. Golden girls are from st. Olaf. Really? Yes. I didn't watch golden girls. What? I don't know. It's not too late. It's on lifetime every day as far as you know. Really? All right. So Erin M from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Congratulations for getting into St. Olaf College. She says thanks for the inspiration. That's awesome. And good luck in college. It's going to be great. It only gets better from there, in my opinion. Yeah, life aging. Agreed. But then it starts to go down. But that will be a while. I thought that was like 50 when that happened. Yeah, well, we'll see. Okay, so congratulations, Aaron. If you are someone who has used us to further your own agenda, say, like getting into college or getting a date or whatever, we want to hear that kind of story. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffytoe and you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-01-13-sysk-typhoid-mary.mp3 | SYSK Selects: The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-the-wind-cries-typhoid-mary | In the 19th century, typhoid was considered a disease of the lower classes. When an outbreak occurred in wealthy Oyster Bay, New York, a mystery was afoot. Tune in to learn how this event began an ongoing debate over public safety versus civil rights. | In the 19th century, typhoid was considered a disease of the lower classes. When an outbreak occurred in wealthy Oyster Bay, New York, a mystery was afoot. Tune in to learn how this event began an ongoing debate over public safety versus civil rights. | Sat, 13 Jan 2018 05:00:20 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=5, tm_min=0, tm_sec=20, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=13, tm_isdst=0) | 34991217 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, everybody. Welcome to stuff you should know selects It's a Saturday, but I'm here anyway because I love you. This week I am choosing the wind. Cries Typhoid Mary from October 13, 2011. And to be honest, honest, I picked this one, well, for a couple of reasons. A is because I love it. I love our history podcasts, and this one was super interesting. And the other reason is, to be honest, I really just love this title, the Wind Cries Typhoid Mary. I titled this one myself, and I just wanted to see it in our feet again because I like looking at it. So here we go. The wind cries. Typhoid mary. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W. Greeny boy. Chuck Bryant. And Jerry back into his house. Yeah. No more guest producing. No, that was a rough week. But she's back. Yeah. Hey, Jerry, did you hear that, everybody? Probably not. Chuck. Yes, Jerry. Have you guys ever heard how much manure a horse produces in a day? I'm glad you went with this. It never really occurred to me. Go ahead. \u00a325. \u00a325 of manure. Did you do the math? Because I did. Well, you come with that in a second. Okay, so just go back with me a little bit, Chuck, to the time when Daniel Day Lewis was walking around New York with a meat cleaver over acting a little bit, in my opinion. And it's the late 19th century, and the horse is the preferred mode of transportation for everything from the most humble delivery cart to the greatest ambulance to people who like to ride horses, three musketeers, that kind of thing. Everybody had a horse to the limo to the airport, wherever. So there were about 200,000 horses in New York City in use in 1895, right? Yeah. Multiply that times \u00a325 of poop a day, and what do you get, Chuck? Well, I did 225,000 because I thought that was the number. Okay, so that's fine. We'll go with that. More than \u00a36.2 million of horse poop per day deposited on the streets of New York. Okay. Now, let's say that's 1894. There's that many horses. There's \u00a36.2 million of horse poop every day. It's a lot of poop. But not only that, there was no one cleaning it up. It was not enough people cleaning it up, let's say that for sure. It was just left there basically, in a lot of cases, to basically be grounded to the cobblestone. And it makes you think, I'll bet there's a substantial layer of horse manure under the streets of New York that make up, like that initial stratum of earth. They call that the pooposphere. Oh, that would be in outer space. No, because the lithospheres yes. So you are dead on. Thank you. The poop is fear. 1895, things changed a little bit. The New York Institute's Department of Health and basically an army of cleaning guys, very much like the garbage man that Homer Simpson envisions in the garage garbage commissioner episode. I can't remember which one it is. The Love Day episode is what it is. Okay? These guys. They're called White Wings. They are deployed to clean up the streets of New York, and they do a heck of a job. And possibly the fact of the episode, if I may take it, please. This is where the term cleanliness is next to Godliness is coined. Pretty cool. The New York Department of Health slogan. Downtown New York, Josh, at the turn of the century, back then, was a disgusting, filthy place. And yet I love New York. I love the history of New York. We both watched the same Nova video on Typhoid Mary today, and they had photos of mountains of manure pushed to the sidewalks and sort of like if you've ever been to New York on garbage day, imagine all those garbage bags as poop. Yeah, but not poop in bags, just mounds of poop. And they were dead animal carcasses. Did you see that one shot? Probably those, like, these boys playing in the street with just a dead horse right in the middle of their little stick bald diamond. I guess he was home base or something. And it was just a foul, disgusting, unclean, unsanitary place, which, like you said, led to the formation of the Department of Sanitation. Right. The Department of Sanitation was imbued with a lot of clout from the, as you said, the Nova documentary on Typhoid Mary. It's called, like, the most dangerous woman in America. I believe so. But it's also on YouTube under Typhoid Mary Nova. Yeah, it was, but they had a lot of cloud. They could forcibly inoculate you with these newfangled inoculations. They could forcibly remove you to a quarantine island. And New York had a bunch of them. Yeah, that was popular at the time. Yeah. But basically, your civil liberties could be entirely suspended without any sort of due process of law and if you were considered sick. And a lot of this was based on this new understanding of science of germ theory, thanks to our buddy Louis Pasture Bacteriology. Yeah. So the problem was science reporting hadn't been established yet. So all of the people who were in charge understood what was going on. They understood germ theory, they understood inoculations, they understood forced quarantine, but no one had explained it to the public fully. Right. So it's a recipe for disaster. Right. So there's this thing called typhus or typhoid. I'm sorry. And apparently they were one and the same until the 19th century. About this time, typhus and typhoid, typhoid fever were separated. But typhoid fever. Fever, which is the star of this co star of this episode. Sure. It's particularly nasty, isn't it? It is. Josh, we're talking not just ordinary diarrhea, but doubled over, cramping, painful diarrhea, I think you'd call it. Violent diarrhea. Violent diarrhea, high fever, red rashes, sleeplessness, death if you don't treat it. A lot of people through history have been stricken with it, including Mary Todd Lincoln, georgia O'Keefe, ravi Shankar Roy Cohn. Oh, really? No. Frank McCourt, author, and Wilbur Wright, actually of the Wright Brothers fame, died from typhoid fever. No way. Wow. Pretty sad. And that's a scant sampling from a long, long list of famous people that have those are the people who count, who had type. Yeah. I think Lincoln's son actually died from it as well, but I don't think Mary Todd Lincoln died from it. Yeah, but you can no, she died of vanity or something like that is what they would have called. No, that was Abraham. Hysterics. Right. Okay, nice. So before we started to get a handle on typhoid fever, by the way, it's caused by the bacterium salmonella. Typhe, it's a type of salmonella. And before we got a handle on it with antibiotics, apparently 12% of people died from typhoid. So that's a big public health problem. Yeah. New York especially. There were 4000 new cases per year and killed one in ten people at the time, or one in 12%. Okay. However, that goes nationwide. Yes. Understand. It before antibiotics got you. So let's even just say 10%. That's a big public health problem. And because it's spread by the bacterium salmonella, did that come out weird? Because it did in my head slightly, a little bit of the lazy tongue there. Because it's spread through salmonella or because it's a result of salmonella, it's very easily spread from handling your own poop eg. Using the bathroom, not washing your hands, and then handling food, uncooked food specifically. It was normally considered to be like a disease of the lower classes. Yeah. Until 19. Six, was it, chuck the summer of a wealthy quarter of the United States on Long Island called Oyster Bay. Billy Joel's home, I believe. Neither here nor there. Okay. Still, that's one extra fact you just gave everybody. That's true. Yeah. When it happened in Oyster Bay, it was a much bigger deal because it was more closely associated with, let's say, the Lower East Side of the housing, the fifth of Lower Manhattan at the time. They've cleaned all that up. Now, what you get, though, when you're in Oyster Bay is you get wealthy families who can spend a little money. And that's what you had in the case of the Thompson family. They were afraid that they would not be able to rent out the house that they were living in because people are getting sick in the house over and over and over and they couldn't figure it out. They decided to hire an investigator who turned out to be a very prominent figure in this case named Dr. George Soper, a sanitation engineer and epidemiologist. One of the first epidemiologists really looking to make his career well. He had a reputation of being able to track any illness back to a source. So this family, the Thompson family, is that the one who owned the house or the one who got sick? They owned the house, and I believe some family members had also gotten sick. Okay. But there is a family that rented it originally. That's where the typhoid outbreak first happened. Oh, so maybe they were just the homeowners the Thompson family hired. Soper I believe yeah. And said, hey, we can't rent this house anymore because people are dying from typhoid. That was their concern. Right? Yeah. So soper gets on the case, finds the family where the typhoid outbreak occurred, and starts interviewing the heck out of them. And he's stumped. He can't figure it out. Where did this thing come from? These are clearly patient zeros right here, like nobody else I know. We're bay had it before. They didn't bring it with them from the city. There's somebody missing. There's something missing. And he finally says, have I talked to everybody who was in this house in the summer of six? And they said, you should talk to typhoid Mary. I don't know why I didn't think of that. He goes, what? No, what he did was he interviewed kitchen staff, and it turns out that there was a former employee that was no longer there mary mallan. And he said, wait a minute, maybe I should check this lady out. Turns out she loved to serve this ice cream in fresh peaches, which is uncooked. She was noted for that dessert. Right. But even more incriminating than the dessert is the idea that when he looked into her history, she'd worked for eight families in ten years, and six of those families that had typhoid outbreaks. 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. So he began to think that there was something special about Mary Malin and that she was what's called a healthy carrier, meaning and I'm just going to paraphrase this awesome way that Nova doc put it. Right? When you get typhoid fever, there's almost always a clear winner. If the bacteria wins, you die, and if your immune system wins, the bacteria dies. But there are sometimes where there's a stalemate, where your immune system continues to function and you live and the bacteria continues to live in your system, which means you're healthy, but you're also extremely contagious. And that's what Soper came to believe. Mary Mallin was. She was technically, she actually had typhoid fever, but her immune system was able to suppress all of it except the killing of all the bacteria part. Right. Pretty cool. So pretty cool, but interesting because this is brand new. Yeah. And this guy is on the cutting edge of this kind of thinking. Yeah. And he knew potentially she could be the face of bacteriology. The first bacteriology lab had just set up in New York City, and it was a burgeoning, not industry, but science. So he was like, man, this is really going to put me on the map if I can prove this, at least. So he didn't have any training in science reporting either, though, did he? He didn't have training and people skills either. He goes to her and he's like, I finally found you. I believe you're infected with Typhoid. So I need samples of your stool, your urine and your blood. By the way, my name is George Soaper. Good to meet you. And she's like, oh, no, you're not. Yeah. So it's about this time that Mary Mellon, we should describe who she is, at least. Go ahead, Chuck. Mary Mallen was Irish, or Irish came over as a teenager by herself. She was born in the poorest town county in Ireland, and Ireland at that time, especially in the poorest county. Not a great place to be. No. Also dirty. Also lots of death and dying and filth and disease. And she was born in 1869. So I think that's on the heels of the potato famine, if not still in the middle of it. So she comes over as a teenager, lives with her aunt and her uncle, who passed away, and then is basically on her own in New York. And by all accounts, as a result of how she grew up and then being on her in New York, she was very tough and fiery and independent and resourceful. Like, had it been anyone else, this might not have gone down like this. No, they picked. Literally not picked. But as it turns out, it sounds like she was the toughest, most obstinate, stubborn, fiery woman in New York City. Right. But she was also good at what she did. She worked her way up in the domestic servant classes to the pinnacle of it, a cook in that era in domestic service and sort of manager of the kitchen staff. Well, not just that. Almost the whole house, basically all of the servants. The cook was pretty much at the top, may be tied with the butler, depending on the house. But she was a cook for all these families, and not just families that could afford to cook, but like, very wealthy families. She's doing really well for her. She was good at her job, but she took no guff from any man. And when Soper came and told her that he wanted her feces, she chased them off with a carving fork. Supposedly, that's how Soper reported it. Yeah. And we'll get into her specifics later and she got a real bad rap. But at the time, like you said, there was no understanding on the public's behalf of this this whole zero I'm sorry, healthy carrier is not even proven yet. So what is she supposed to do? Just say, like, sure, I'll go with you, stranger, take my poop and put me in a quarantine? Yeah. So she fought it like she probably had every right to. Right. Most initial, though, wouldn't normally brandish a fork, a carving fork, on somebody. But again, it's lost to history whether she really did do that or not. It's a good story. So super takes off, and he's not one to let his career just kind of slip through his fingers, and he goes to the New York Commissioner of Health, Herman Biggs. So Biggs, he was the first one, and he was the one who was like, oh, by the way, we can come into your house and forcibly inoculate you and your children if we want, and we will do that too, if we think that it's in the interest of the public health. So Biggs was very sympathetic to Soper's description of the story of this crazy Irish woman who was just patient zero in more than one outbreak and basically needed to be dealt with. Yeah. So he ordered one of his caseworkers, a few cops, in an ambulance, out to where Mary lived. A tenement. Yeah. Josephine Baker was the inspector, not the dancer. No, but she apparently was a pretty tough lady as well. She started her own Rainbow family. Oh, really? Yeah. And we should also point out one of the reasons that Malin was so upset initially was that she got the feeling they were essentially calling her dirty and unsanitary. Right. Yeah. Because he explained to her, like, oh, you go poop and then you get poop in your hands and you handle peaches that you feed people. And so she was upset that they felt like they were picking on her cleanliness. Right. Dirty Irish McGregor said. Yeah, exactly. They were dirty, drunks and causing problems. And that was just the stereotype at the time. And she wasn't like that, she said. Right. So super goes to Biggs, orders some people out, they use their power and grab Mary. Well, she hides out in the house for a while, though. Okay. It took 3 hours to find her well, when they finally did, apparently it took all either three or four cops to drag her to the ambulance. And then the female case worker sat on her for the whole ride to this hospital, this quarantine hospital, where she was kept for a while. And like you said, it just happened to work out that the person who was Typhoid Mary was this very stubborn, obstinate, selfassertive woman from Ireland. And she came about at a time where there was a big question about public health, like, where do an individual civil rights and the greater public good begin? That's still going on. It still is. But she forced this conversation into the national spotlight starting about now. So they keep her, they test her. They're like, you need to poop into this bag right now. And she did. And they tested it, and they said, well, things lousy with typhoid. They calls her stool a factory for typhoid. Yeah. And what they did was they said, here's the deal. Give up cooking, because that's how you're transmitting this, and we'll let you go. Did they say that immediately? I caught that from the article, but not necessarily from the documents. I think they initially offered her that deal that she refused, which was one reason why she was lambasted in the public later on in newspapers. But again, at the time, she had managed to climb up out of the poor conditions that she was living in in Ireland and did a really good job, and one that she was good at, and she didn't want to have to learn something new and start over again. So at the time, later on, I can dole out some of the blame on her. But early on, she still feels well. Right? It's like I'm not sick. This doesn't make any sense. What is this healthy carrier thing? Yes. Yeah. She was not buying it at all. No. And she basically came to believe that the public Health department had a vendetta against her personally and felt quite persecuted. So when she said no, she wasn't going to stop cooking, they said, okay, well, we're going to take you to a nice little island called North Brother Island. It's not a nice island. They took her there and quarantined her there. North. Brother island is a tuberculosis hospital. Quarantine quarantine hospital, I should say. And she didn't have tuberculosis, and she wasn't even sick. She didn't have any symptoms, and yet she was being kept here against her will on North Brother Island, which you sent a killer urban exploration photo spread that I want everybody to go check out. Screeching it's on Gothamistcom, and that's Gothamist. And it's titled a Trip to the Abandoned North Brother Island. It is so cool. Yeah. Located there was a riverside hospital, and initially there was nothing there. And they said, hey, the idea of island quarantine was pretty popular at the time, so we should build a hospital there. So we can treat these people. But North Brother Island sort of gained a reputation over the years because, one, it was much more than tuberculosis. Later on, it was like heroin junkies were treated there, syphilis, like any kind of nasty disease or addiction. They would dump you on Riverside Hospital. It was in asylum. It basically was it was sort of like, what's the DiCaprio? Shutter island. Shutter island. But they had a hard time staffing it with real doctors for a while because doctors, understandably, didn't want to work there. So they had nurses only for a time. Eventually, there was a public campaign to clean it up and to build better buildings and change his rep, which sort of worked, sort of didn't. But in New York City at the time, especially in the Lower East Side and where poor people lived, it had a very bad reputation as you don't want to go there because you go there and you don't come back. Right. People were afraid of it. Right. So that's where they send this Mary Malinoff to when she gets there, she starts trying to get out. She hired not escaping. Right. No. Using legal channels. She hired a private lab and started sending them samples of her stool. And they were testing it, and they were not getting the same results. Me and her boyfriend would sneak her poop to the lab and they weren't getting the same results that the Public Health Department said that they were getting as far as her being a factory for Typhoid. Right. Which could have been a false negative. Right. It could have been. Because they said that you don't always find it in the testing. Is that what they said in the documentary? I believe so. But there was a discrepancy, and it was enough for her to get her day in court. Yeah. New York Supreme Court. So she makes her way, she's allowed to leave the island to go for her court date. And basically the Public Health Department was like, look, she's a healthy carrier and she's a public health threat. And Mary's like, these people are holding me against my will. And the New York Supreme Court said you're a public health threat. Go back to North Brother Island. Yeah. And around the same time, it started getting newspaper coverage courtesy of William Randolph Hearst, who may have financed her law. That's crazy. Her legal expenses, imagine. It was great for the papers, so I could see him throw a little money toward it. Totally. But that's where she was dubbed Typhoid Mary, and that's where the public sentiment really swung because she was painted as someone who was willingly giving people typhoid fever. Right. Well, no, she was called Typhoid Mary because they were protecting her identity as well. That didn't work too well. No. So Mary goes back to North Brother Island and is there for another well, she was there for three years total, I believe, in the third year, New York City got a new health commissioner, and he was not about basically squashing people's civil rights, literally. So he not only freed her, he got her a job. Yeah. And a lot of people while she was incarcerated, and it was an incarceration, I guess there were a lot of people that did cry out for her release at times, public officials even, but the department of health, basically. It was such a unique case. They wanted to experiment on her and said, no, we're going to do some tests on her and not let her out. Well, they did do some tests on her. They thought that perhaps her gallbladder was the culprit. So they were like, we're going to take your gallbladder out. And she's like, no, she's touching me. She's afraid they're going to kill her. But it could have to. They did forcibly medicate her. They tried some stuff out, and she said that she wrote in a diary that if they keep this up for much longer, she'll surely die, because the side effects were so horrid. So it wasn't just like, hey, stay in this cottage. There's a nice view of the water. It was rough for her. In addition to the civil liberties being squashed. Exactly. And so, as you pointed out, the new commission comes in Letterly of public health and a bit more sympathetic. Like, he said he found her a job in laundry, which apparently was the bottom of the barrel for a woman's career aspirations in domestic servant. Like, no money, like the lowest pay, the worst work. And she was like, this sucks. I don't want to do this. I don't want to work in the laundry. Did you know that Atlanta has one of the taxi drivers in Atlanta is a ghani's king? No way. That's what I thought of when I was reading about that. When she got a job in the laundry, it's like she worked her way past that. She's way past that. Is he really there's a ghani king? Like, coming to America? Who operates a cab here in Atlanta? Ain't none but ultra firm. Yeah, that was a good movie. I could quote it from heart, I think, in full start. Okay. Bark like a dog. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office when you could be using Stamps.com? Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else. Like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Alright, so back to Mary. Where are we here? She's just been released or he offered her the job, right? Yeah. And she's out and she's making three years, but she's making contact with the health Department. They're like, we need to be able to keep up with you and make sure we know what you're doing and everything. And then they're like, we know where she is, we know what she's doing. We talk to her every day and okay, we lost her. Yes. We don't know where she is anymore. It's pretty cool. At the time, you could disappear. Yeah. And if you don't leave a forwarding address, it's like no Google searching going on there. You could disappear into the folds of Daniel Day Lewis's over acting. So a few years after this, Josh, after they had lost her, dr. SOAPERS brought in again to investigate another Typhoid outbreak at the upscale hospital, Sloan Hospital. And I think it was a baby birth in hospital at the time. Yeah. Maternity in the hospital. Yes. And what they discovered was Mary was cooking in the kitchen at the hospital. Yeah. Under an assumed name. 25 doctors and nurses were sick and I believe two of them died. And they said, you're in big trouble this time. Yeah. But not only did they discover it was Soper himself was called into the case. This is like Les Miserable. Exactly. It is very much like that. And he comes to the hospital and he recognizes Mary by sight as one of the cooking staff. And he's like, you were kidding me. She's whipping up her ice cream and beach and just stops, like mid stroke, like poop on her hands. It's awkward. So this time she goes willingly. She knows that it's over, it's done. She still doesn't believe that she is a carrier or the problem, but she knows that they think she is and that she's broken some sort of horrendous law. It was kind of sad at that point from the way it was described in the documentary. She was just sort of like I mean, all the fight of this fiery woman was gone. She's just like, I just can't fight this anymore. Take me. And part of it also, I imagine was public opinion turned against her, like you said the first time she was incarcerated at North Brother Island. There's a lot of public outcry this time there's a lot of public outcry. But it was against her because she had willfully and knowingly gone back into cooking and had gotten more people sick. Yeah. I. Think 50 something cases were attributed to her in three deaths. Yeah, I think 49 to 52 is what I read. We got to say, like, I'm defending her in a lot of ways, but they gave her a few pretty good deals along the way that she did not take, which was, A, to give up cooking, b, I think at one point they said, Why don't you just move to Connecticut with your sister? And she was like, I don't have a sister. And they're like, sure you do, Jane. Yeah. She's like, Wait, are you having a stroke? Exactly. So she didn't take him up on that offer and soper promised her 100% of the profits of a book that he would write about her and about the situation. And she was like, no, it wasn't that weird. Anthony Bourdain is one of the experts in that Nova documentary. A little odd. Yes. I guess he knows his typhoid. Mary yeah. He lives on Oyster Bay, I guess, with Billy Joel. So the legacy of Typhoid Mary is this great debate over how much civil liberty, how many civil rights does a person get to keep when they pose some sort of public health threat? And I guess the answer to that is contagion. Yes. Have you seen it? I have not. You did the other night, right? It was good. I like it. Is it frightening? No, it was definitely my back was tense the whole time. It wasn't frightening, but it was good. There was a really good editorial piece, too, that I read I sent you, where basically this could have gone down in so many different ways. It was sort of like the perfect storm of headstrong. Woman health guy that didn't have a lot of people skills. They said his opinion was if that initial meeting had gone down differently, the whole history might be rewritten, but it went down as them butting heads and just got worse from there. It's pretty interesting. Yeah. So Typhoid Mary, was she a bad person? Josh, I reserve judgment on historical figures, okay? I don't know enough about them. I think you can only judge your contemporaries, really? All right. What about me? I reserve judgment on podcasters. So if you want to know more about Typhoid Mary, you can watch Nova's excellent documentary, the Most Dangerous Woman in America. If you want to know the origin of the word quarantine, you should go back and listen to our Black Death episode. But if you haven't heard it before and you've read 1491, don't bother emailing in. I know already. I know. I'm sorry. You can also look up the House of Forks article, who was Typhoid Mary? T-Y-P-H-O-I-D-M-A-R-Y. Question mark. You want to type that into the search bar@howstepworks.com? And that means it's time for a listener mail. They should do a good movie about that. I can't believe they have it. Yeah. This is, like, great. At the very least, there has to be a book on. Soper, like, this is the kind of thing that the public's eating up right now, thanks to this SARS. Thanks to this economic collapse. The Sarsgard Sarsgard. Did you ever see that Saturday night? It was during the SARS outbreak in Sarsgard. The actor, what's his name? Peter Sarsgard. He was on there pitching. It was like a little infomercial. And he's pitching the sarsgard. Sarsgard. Awesome. All right, Josh, I'm going to call this Moon Moon SmackDown. The nicest Moon SmackDown we got. All right. Because we got a lot of them. And this guy was actually really get this over with hind about it, guys, love the podcast. I listen as I ride my bike to and from work past the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on my way to the Moon. Learning interesting facts makes my day a little better. However, I had to send a note about a couple of mistakes in the Moon podcast. You got the current theories about the formation of the Moon and how it affects Earth's precession, right? As far as I know. And those are really the hardest things to understand, things well done. But you did perpetuate a few myths. Number one, the Moon doesn't rotate and is dragged along by the Earth. Well, sort of. The Moon is held in place by the Earth's gravity, but it does rotate. The reason it doesn't appear to rotate, which is what we were trying to say, is because its period of rotation is exactly the same as its period of revolution around the Earth. About 29 days. It's tidally locked. Which brings me to point number two. The Moon has a, quote, dark side that has never eliminated. Not true. I don't remember saying that. Did we say that? We must have, because everyone said that we did. Maybe we didn't say this. Okay, we let people believe that. We don't know it. All right? The Moon has one face we never see from Earth, but it's not permanently in darkness. That's known as the far side of the Moon. So it's Gary Larson, not Darth Vader. Wow. And number three, we have tides because the Moon, quote, pulls up on the water on the Earth and pulls up on the Earth underneath as well. Definitely not true. While the Moon's gravity does pull up the Earth in its water, the effect is minuscule compared to the Earth's own gravity. It's the horizontal differential in the Moon's gravity across the Earth that causes the water to slide towards and away the direction of the Moon. So the water slides sideways, not up. Wow. That's pretty cool. And that is from Chris B, and he was very cool about it. And he says, P s. I'm a little worried about going back and listening to the sun podcast because the sun is way more complicated than the Moon. And Chris, don't do it. Don't do it. Just skip it, brother. Yeah. Go. Listen to Cannonball Run. Yeah, that's a good one. No mistakes. That is a great one. Or Twinkies. That was pretty good, too. Yeah. Muppets. Yeah. Anything but the sun. Anything but now. I guess if you have a correction, we want to hear it. We've been reading them again now, lately, I think. That's good, Chuck. I forgot all about them. I forgot about being wrong. Well, we were right for a good stretch. Well, we weren't doing ones, like on the moon or whatever. Yeah. These tough ones are hard. Yes, they are. Yes. If you have a correction, you can tweet it to us at syskpodcast. You can see us on Facebook at facebook. Comstuffyturnnow. And you can send us a plain old fashioned email at stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
Do People Really Run Off to Join the French Foreign Legion? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/do-people-really-run-off-to-join-the-french-foreig | Anyone who knows anything about Jean-Claude Van Damme knows he played a French legionnaire in the movies. He was just one of many actors to star in films that romanticized this mercenary force. Check out the details in this episode with Josh and Chuck. | Anyone who knows anything about Jean-Claude Van Damme knows he played a French legionnaire in the movies. He was just one of many actors to star in films that romanticized this mercenary force. Check out the details in this episode with Josh and Chuck. | Thu, 07 Mar 2013 22:33:15 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=22, tm_min=33, tm_sec=15, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=66, tm_isdst=0) | 19612427 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Josh, before we get started, we want to remind our loyal TV audience, we hear from you guys that say, this show is really growing on me. I'm really liking it more and more. And we really appreciate that. We sure do. Your last chance to see said shows will be this Saturday, March 9. We got our final marathon coming up. That's right. It starts at noon Eastern time. That's right. And that's on Science Channel. And it's a whole marathon featuring some classic episodes called Rerun, plus two new episodes, both written by Mr. Charles W, chuck Bryant. Beautiful episodes, and one of which is the pilot. But even more confusingly, the fact that we're airing the pilot as the season finale is that that's not even the pilot pilot. The pilot pilot will air after that, I believe. Yeah. So to avoid confusion it's a little late for that. We've got John Hodgeman in the next episode. Yes, which is a great one. A lot of fun. It's about private space exploration. That's right. And then we have the originally, it was episode one to set up this whole shebang. They're airing this last, which is very unique in television. And then the lost pilot that we shot over a year ago, but really not even in the format of the actual show. Yeah, we're airing that, too, because what the heck? Let's just throw it all at the wall and see if it sticks. That's right. So, noon o'clock, set your DVRs. This will be the last of the original ten, plus the bonus season one. And dudes and dude, check it out on Amazon Instant or Google Play or itunes, or watch it live, or watch it on your DVR. And we appreciate the support yeah. In the rest of the world. Hang in there. We'll try to get it to you somehow, some way. We are trying. In the meantime, those of you in the States, if you really like our TV show and you want to see more stuff like behind the scenes clips, videos, read blogs from characters, go to Stuffyteano.com, our website and just click on the TV show tab. Yeah. And if you're one of those people that says, hey, this shows really grown on me, why don't you go to the Science Channel Facebook page and make a little noise? Keep these guys around. We enjoyed it. Sure. It couldn't hurt, right? I don't think so. Unless Science Channel sends guys to your house for commenting on their Facebook page. No, they welcome that. Yeah. All right, podcast. Let's do it. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Which makes this stuff you should know. The lightning quick addition. Is this lightning quick? Yes, because of the lightning. Oh, yeah. We have tornadoes and stuff coming in, so it's like holding out of the okay corral as the storm rolls in. Right? Well, we'd also like to get out of the Oak Corral before the storm. That's the point. Yeah. You're saying there's a tornado flipping cars on like 75 up north? Apparently. And I know my dog Buckley is at home just waiting to pee all over the place once the thunder starts. So if I can be there and hold him, he's fine. The French Foreign Legion, chuck, they are a fighting force, a military fighting force. That one young man by the name of JeanClaude Van Damme ran off and joined. Did he really? In the movies. Oh, crap, I got you. Totally, totally got me. I was like, I never knew. Can you imagine? No, it was in the movies. He wasn't really a legionnaire. It's a bummer. What movie was that? I think Legion. Was there a movie called Legion or Legionnaire? Never heard of it. Yeah, he's a legionnaire, actually. I don't know that there are that many big fans, but I'll bet his big fans are like big time John Claude Van Dam fans. Oh, yes. Like Steven Seagulls fans, probably. Yeah, probably. So. Just hardcore. But you could tell that John Claude Van Dam was in this movie because he's wearing a hat with a little cape in the back. Yeah, the cape, is that what it's called? Yeah. Spelled K-E-P-I pronounced KP. And they still wear those. And it's a tradition that is still true today. The little flat cap, very stiff and rigid. And they don't always have the capes when they're out where they need them. They will. Well, the reason that they would have them is because for the better part of two centuries, the French Foreign Legion was stationed in Algeria. And the reason they were stationed there is because that's where their headquarters were almost from the moment of inception of this military group. Yes. And the reason they were stationed there from inception was because they were a bunch of nerdywell criminals in many cases. And so they're like, you know what, you guys are great and you're super tough. Let's move you to Algeria to help our colonization efforts and get you out of France. Do you want to talk about the history first? Yeah. Well, today let's talk about today just for 1 second. There are 7286 Legionnaires as of December of last year, 2012. And to the date to this date, 35,000 have died in battle over the years. I saw that, which is not that bad, but it's a small group. 7000 isn't much. Right. And they are the fighting force in the world that has seen more continuous action than any other. Oh, really? Yeah, they've been fighting constantly. Well, and they're bad dudes. They even say in this article. And they're well known to be much tougher than the regular French Army. Right, because they're not French. Actually, I don't know what that has to do with it. But they're known for being tough dudes. Yeah, and they're also a Special Forces unit, basically. Now, women, when we say dudes, we can say dudes. Yeah. There's never been a French Foreign Legionnaire who is a woman, and they've been in just about every conflict that the French have been in since 1830. And did you know that the French Foreign Legion invaded Mexico in 1061 and stayed there until 1865, when they were finally beaten back? No, I didn't know that. Yeah. They tried to assassinate the President and install an Austrian prince named Maximilian as the ruler of Mexico, set it up as a French puppet state. I wonder if that had any influence on Culinarily speaking, I don't know, French food. You don't see much French stuff pop up in Mexico like you do in Vietnam during that colonial period or Indo. Sheen. Okay, so do you want to go to the history? Yeah. How do these guys start? Well, in 1830, Josh, let me tell you a little story about a guy named King Louis Philippe. Okay. It's known as the July Revolution. He replaced King Charles Ten X, and after the Bourbon monarchy fell, and Parisian radicals were involved in this overthrow. So even though he was made king in large part because of these radicals and because of radicalism, these radicals were some tough guys. And a lot of them were kind of brought in this criminal element in some cases. And I don't want to say they were bad guys, but maybe they were bad guys. Well, the King Louis Philippe thought that they were a threat to the monarchy because he had gotten to the throne by these radicals, and it attracted radicals from all over Europe, and a lot of them were very soldier like, and he was like, we're former soldiers, period. And he said, welcome to France. Let me figure out what to do with you. I can't legally make you a part of the French army. Yeah. So how about I just make a Foreign Legion made up of foreign dissidents foreign nationals and send them elsewhere? And they were pretty happy with that plan. It was March of 1831. He laid out his eight articles, and pretty much that was what the Foreign Legion was from, who they were to be, where were they to train to where. And a lot of the traditions were established in that very first set of articles. And then included in that, Chuck, was one that said that you had to check for a birth certificate, a certificate of good life manners, and a certificate from a military authority saying that this person is a good soldier. And you had to have all that if you're going to accept a recruit. That or it was up to the Commandant's discretion. Yeah. It reminded me of how they'll be a paragraph in a legal contract that says all these things, and at the very end, it'll say, like, or we could just change our mind about all that. Right. So basically yeah. We need all these papers and documents. And that was in article six. And then the 7th article said or just let them in if you have a good feeling right. About them. Exactly. And then don't worry about the papers so much. And that led to this thing called which is anonymity in French, and it says that you can join the French Foreign Legion under an assumed name, because we're going to give you an assumed name one way or another for the first year of your service in the French Foreign Legion, you need to basically take on an assumed name. You're leaving your old identity behind. And it's a really strange, unusual aspect of the French Foreign Legion that still exists today. Yeah. In fact, it was mandatory until just a few years ago, until 2010, you had to sign up under a different name. And then at the end of that year, you could go through a process called military regularization of the situation, which basically meant you could get your old papers back from your home country and go back to your old name. Right. And you can still do all that. It's just not mandatory any longer. No, but a lot of guys, it's like the fresh start. That's what they're looking for, a lot of men who join the army, and that's one of them in every country. That's one of the things that the French Foreign Legion touts when you join it, is that we're a place you can have a second chance. Yes. Forget your past, even forget your name. Minor criminal records. I mean, back in the day, they would accept major criminals. Now they're a little more selective, and they'll overlook, like, a minor criminal record, but nothing like they won't accept murders and things like that. Right. And for a very long time, they would accept no one but foreign nationals. You couldn't be French and join the French Foreign Legion. You could join the army, but not the Foreign Legion. Right. They recently changed that. So you can be French enjoying it. Right. Yeah. And you can gain your French citizenship as a foreign national by serving, what, three years. Three years in good standing. Yeah. And I think you have to go back to your original name and stuff. Yeah. If you're going to get citizenship, you can't do it under your declared name. Right. And you were talking about that, what was it called, where you go through that process of the military regularization of the situation. Right. It's such a weird name for name changes. It really is. But it's not just the name change. It's basically like that represents the end of your first year, and it represents the end of the French Foreign Legion owning you during this time. During your first year. You cannot have a civilian bank account. You can't get married, you can't wear civilian clothes, even off duty. You can't buy a car, you can't travel abroad. On leave to anywhere but France. You have to wear a uniform. Yeah. All the time. Yeah. In some form or fashion, you have to wear a uniform. So yeah. They own you for the first year. It's definitely harder than the French army, like you said. Yeah. And whatever status, if you're married and you join the French Foreign Legion, you have to enlist as a single man. Right. So I don't know if I guess you can remain married technically, but the papers say that you're a single man. I would imagine if you run off to the French Foreign Legion, marriage might be on shaky ground as it is. Or you're not married. Yeah, that's a good point. There's probably not of already married men. It doesn't seem like a very family supportive place. It's kind of like you are getting away from a situation or something like that. Honey, I'm going to have to deny your existence and change my name. Right. But it's really worth it because I want to be a legionnaire and we're the KP right. And gain the respect of the French. You think? Just kidding. Well, you know what's funny is I read an article, there's an article in the December 2012 Vanity Fair called The Expendables that's pretty interesting. It's about the French Foreign Legion. What they're doing now. Yeah, I saw some of that. You remember in our gold episode, we talked about illicit gold mining in Guiana? Yes. Apparently one of the things the Foreign Legion is doing now is they're fighting those gold miners now. Oh, shutting it down. That's one of the things they're doing because Afghanistan is winding down for the French, so they're kind of looking for new stuff to do. And that's one of the things new guys to go beat up. Right. Your first contract, if you join up as a Legionnaire, is a minimum of five years, and pay for a corporal starting out is 1043, I guess, euros per month, plus, of course, all rim and board. But that's your take home pay, right? Or not take home, but that's your salary, and you get 45 days leave. And then there is a path to prosperity to some degree in success, just like any other army, you work your way up through the officer ranks, and after that first five years, successive contracts are six months to five years. And I'm not sure how they determine that. Whether it's up to you, like, if you're like, I just want to go six months at a time here, guys. Got you. Or I'm not sure. I couldn't actually find any information on that. If they were like, no, you must sign for three years. Right. Six months, whatever. Yeah. They're like, you'll probably be dead by then anyway, and we'll keep all of your euros. So in that article, one of the things that I came across was that the legionnaires view themselves, and apparently are viewed by the French as that's why the article is called The Expendables, as basically there to fight and kill and die and that there is a lot of honor in dying, even if it's unnecessarily. But they kind of are nihilistic, I get the impression, and I think they even use that word, they're nihilists. Oh, really? Well, nihilists not say nihilist. Yes. I did repart of the article, though, and they said that normal people don't join the French Foreign Legion. Right. They said they're all just a little off, which good. I bet they're tough, dudes. Yeah. And the Spanish try the same thing. In 1920, they tried to form the Spanish Foreign Legion and it didn't take. So now it's just called the Spanish Legion. It's made up of spaniards. Yeah. And some folks say America could try something like a Foreign Legion with the influx of non Americans in this country to maybe serve under our regular armies. And I don't know if that's ever been pitched. Patch of citizenship should be in the Dream Act. Yes, why not? Dude, I don't know. I'm sure people would be like, this is why not. Yeah, you can email us later. Yeah. I didn't consider it. It just came to my head. Anything else? No, I want a KP. I'll get you one for your birthday. Do you remember when those were like hip in the 80s with the breakdancing? Yeah, those are awesome. It's so funny what different cultures latch onto from different eras. Yes. Somebody said, that will look very cool when I'm doing a HeadSpin and the KP was adopted. Awesome break in Ohio. It's like the painters cap. When I was growing up, the painters cap and the bicycle caps were very big in the bike caps with the bill folded. I had a couple of Italian ones. I just thought it was so cool. What was the name of that one brand that everybody had? You know what I'm talking about? The trick? No, it was like a French name, I believe. Oh, I don't know. I think I had one, though. It's similar to the word shimano or something. But it wasn't shimano. That's Japanese. I know what you mean is going to come to me. I wonder if it is Japanese. I'll bet it's Italian or something and I'm saying it's Japanese. Shimano. Yeah. I love it when we do these things, though, where we can't think of something because we always get emails where people are like, oh, screaming in my home. The name we're sorry for all of Campanali. Yeah, that sounds close. It's not so close that we're not going to get emails. But those of you screaming right now, settled down, you only get a hold of yourself podcast. If you want to learn more about the Foreign Legion, you can type that word or those words into the search barhouseofworks.com and that will bring up this fine article. There you go. And I said, search bar. So it's time for listener mail. I guess before we get into that, Chuck, you want a message from our sponsor. And now it's time for listener mail. Yeah, this is from Donato, and it's about autopsies. Dudes. Just finished listening to how autopsies work. I wanted to mention a couple of things. I'm currently in law enforcement and have attended a few of them. My first one was really fascinating. The Me. Tried to get me to bomb it by handing me a brain to pass to his assistant, but it actually really turned out to be extremely exciting for me. So screw you, Emmy. I'm not vomiting. Look at me. I'm juggling this brain. I'm excited. I wanted to point out you did not mention the extraction of vitreous fluid from the eyeballs using a needle. That part was a little freaky to me, I have to admit. And after a couple of times, that's why it was done. Which leads me to toxicological examination. Right? Fluids and samples from some organs were sent for examination in these cases. And in my experience, emmys will not provide a final autopsy before toxicology results come back. And lastly, the difference between cause and manner of death. Cod and mod. They are used interchangeably often. But Cod is the physiological mechanism responsible for death, where mod is the explanation how the Cod can be for example, Dysphia is the cod, and murder is the mod if a person is smuggled with their pillow. Got you. So Cod can be considered purely medical, while the mod is a combination of medical and investigative and evil. So I hope it did not double tap something you guys covered. Oh, that's an old time you referenced. Nice call out to Green Berets. Delta Force. Delta forts. Thank you, Denato. Thanks, Denato. Appreciate that. He's written in before. Awesome. Thanks for writing it again. Have you made listener mail before? No. I'll tell you what, he wrote in before. After. Okay, I just winked it. If you want to write in, you can write in as many times as possible. See if you can get on this or mailed twice. I don't think anyone ever has. Right. Well, Sarah the amazing 1112, now 1314, probably 15 year old. Yeah, that's right. Thank you for correcting me and Sarah. Come on. We haven't had a letter in a while. Yeah, it's been a long time. We don't know how drama classes going and all that. Geez, get on it. All right. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com, STUFFYou know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and you can join us at the Universal Churchofchuckandjoshstynow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com." | ||
c3414dbe-5460-11e8-b38c-4f20287a498f | SYSK Selects: How Dying Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-dying-works | Chuck and Josh have covered just about every aspect of death except dying itself. Here, they fulfill the death suite of podcasts with an in-depth look at just how people die, what happens to the body during the dying process and how people accept death -- and what they regret not having done while they lived. | Chuck and Josh have covered just about every aspect of death except dying itself. Here, they fulfill the death suite of podcasts with an in-depth look at just how people die, what happens to the body during the dying process and how people accept death -- and what they regret not having done while they lived. | Sat, 18 May 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=138, tm_isdst=0) | 62368368 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, everyone. Hope you're having a good weekend. Here's a podcast about dying from September 9, 2013. It is my stuff you should know. Select pick for the week, how Dying Works. This is a tough one, but necessary, and this may be as much or more so than any any other show we've ever done. We got a lot of feedback on just understanding the process of dying literally, physiologically, has helped so many people over the years, over the past five or six years, when their own relatives are going through this kind of thing. So I'm glad it's helped people out in the past, and hopefully it will in the future. So enjoy may be the wrong word, but hope you learned something today with how dying works. 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. How are you doing? Hey. And Jerry's over there, jerry, for the first time, just saw a meme that's been out for a couple of years. Yeah, that's like when you rick rolled me, like, two years after it was popular. You're like, Isn't that the best? I was lying in wait. Yeah, I bet that happens. So and there's nothing more obnoxious than sending someone something and be like, I saw that two years ago. Well, I'm so sorry. I tried to show you something funny, right. But yeah, Jerry just saw the do we even say the mummy mouth reporter, maybe? Yeah, the lady who supposedly had a migraine but appeared to have had a stroke reporting from the Grammys in Los Angeles a couple of years ago. Yeah, I still don't know whether it's okay to laugh at that, because I don't know, really, what happened to her. Well, we didn't laugh. We very solemnly showed jerry yes. And she laughed terrible. Jerry. Jerry station. I've got one for you. Okay. I've got a bit of an intro. It's not much, so get your hopes up. All right. Have you ever heard of the Population Reference Bureau? No. You have, because I've mentioned it before. I've mentioned this article before. It's on Prb.org. It's called how many people have ever lived on Earth? Okay. And I don't know what we mention. It may be the population episode or something, but it's a really cool little article by this demographer named Carl Hobb Haub. And there's even a video of him explaining it if you couldn't get what he was going with. But Hobb, he reckons that modern humans, people who are virtually indistinguishable from you or me, aside from the fact that they're not wearing, like, any clothes, really sure showed up about 52,000 years ago. Okay, so Hobb puts the population of humanity at two in 500 BCE. Okay. Yeah. So from that point to 2011, he extrapolates, does the math, does a little demography thing, and Hob comes up with the number that 107,602,707,791 people have ever lived between 50,000 BC and 2011 Ce. That's pretty neat. It is. It's a lot of people. He says that means about 6.5% of that are alive right now. Or we're in 2011. All right, so we're dying off. Yeah, that's the point. All 107,602,707,791 of those people had one thing in common. One thing aside from being humans. Taxes. No, not even tax. Yeah. They didn't have tax and 50,000 BC. They had running from, say, we're tooth tigers and death. Death. It was death. That's the one thing all 107,602,707,791 of those people had in common. You know, when I was thinking of your intro driving here today, I thought, that'd be funny if Josh was like, how long people have been dying, Chuck? And you know what? This wasn't that far off. Nice. I was like, he wouldn't do that. You're like, It'd be way too boring. What a stupid way to that's a good number. I like that. 107,602,701,000. 7791. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And that includes you and me, pal. You know what that means? You're going to die. I'm going to die. Jerry's going to die at least two or three times. We're all going to die. Yeah. This is our dying podcast, and we have covered just about every aspect of dying can you die from a broken heart? How rigor mortis works. What's the worst way to die? Is there a best way to die? Did we do that? That was kind of in the is there was a way to die? Yeah. We've covered everything from autopsies, peak oil, what can be done with the dead body? Ninjas. Yeah. Or ninja, at least. You should know better than that. Yeah. We really have danced around everything except just how dying works. And this is going to be a sad podcast in many ways and gruesome in some ways. Yeah. Because we're going to touch on some of the stuff we hit on in, like, rigor mortis and autopsies and the actual dying process. Right. So brace yourself. And I've mentioned this guy scores of times, at least, but as the Charles Mania thinking of okay. The great psychologist Ernest Becker, shout out to our pal Joe Randazzo, who's, like, in the Becker now, isn't it Ernst or is it Ernest? Ernest, okay. You're thinking of Max Ernst. Okay. Ernest Becker wrote The Denial of Death, seminal work that basically says we're all just doing everything we can to think about our own demise. And there is some sort of health, whether it's spiritual, emotional, there's some sort of health or well being, I think, from facing the fact that you're going to die. Sure. And talking about it. Yeah. So let's talk about death, baby. Let's talk about you and me. Let's do it. Okay. So Molly Edmunds, who used to be on Cinti stefan never told you we call it cementy. Sure. Wrote this one, and I think it is interesting, and I usually don't like it when articles say, like, the definition of blah, blah, blah. But it's kind of interesting that in the first encyclopedia, it was just the separation of the soul from the body, and now it's 30 times that long in the encyclopedia. Right. And that's just sort of indicative of how we used to think of it and how I don't know if it's ironic or not, but how medical science has complicated that over the years. Yeah, well, it's definitely ironic because we used to be confident that we understood death. It's like that person isn't moving anymore. If you ask him what he wants to eat, he's not going to respond. If you choose something for him to eat, like a block of cheese, it's not going to be swallowed like that's. Death. And since there was perhaps a lot more religiousness associated with death and dying than there is today, that kind of underscored the belief in death. It's the soul departing from the body. That's right. What more do you want to know? Egghead? It's death. Oh, yeah. And way back a few hundred years ago, you'd call in a priest and they'd check the body, see if it's breathing, and say, yes, they're dead. And that was pretty much it. The doctor wasn't even involved at that point. Well, there may not have even been such a thing as doctors, and if there were, they were wearing, like, masks that made them look like crows to protect them from the plague. So they weren't any better at ascertaining death than a priest was. That's true. When doctors did come along and they invented things like the stethoscope, they could actually check and see if there was a heartbeat. Before that, there was bowel force test, which I couldn't find out a lot about this other than you stick needles into the heart with little flags on it and see if the flags move. I think that's pretty straightforward. Really? Yeah, I think that's about it. Okay, the test. I'll buy that. And there were other tests that, like, a priest who may have come to say whether you were dead or not would use, like placing a feather above the mouth or around the mouth or nose to see if it moves. The old mirror. The mirror trick. Yeah. That's still useful. It is, but only if the mouth is still moist. If it's a dried mouth, it's probably not going to fog up a mirror. Well, if it's not breathing, it's not going to fog up a mirror. Right, exactly. So I said that medical science has complicated it. And that's exactly what's happened over the years, because as we progressed with medicine, we discovered a lot of ways to actually reverse death, like bring people back from the dead, whether it's something as easy as CPR or as complicated as machines that help you breathe and feed you. Right. And not only that, we've entered this really awkward period in human medical history where the machines that can tell us whether someone is alive or not are more advanced than our machines that can bring a person back from death. Yeah. So we have ways to sustain the body. I see what you mean, but not necessarily the person. Depending on your definition of death. Yeah. Like the faintest trace of a brain wave, maybe. Right? Yeah. So we went from holding a feather under somebody's mouth or nose to see if they were alive to using MRIs sure. To see whether there's electrical activity. And we're finding that all of these old signs, these old outward signs of death don't necessarily mean that the person is dead. And even if the person is dead, we have technology, like you were saying, to resuscitate them. The question is, if we resuscitate them and they're still not talking, they still don't tell you what they want to eat, are they alive? Well, yeah. This hasn't been that long. In the 52,000 years or whatever, the people have been dying. It's only been the past 60 something that we've had to come up with terms like persistent vegetative state and irreversible coma because of those machines that can resuscitate or sustain a body. And in 1958, that was when a French neurologist described the coma deposit, which is a state beyond coma, basically brain death. Although that didn't come along until technically until 1968, when Harvard Medical School basically defined it for the first time. Although they didn't call it brain death at the time. What did they call it? Just irreversible coma, like, you're not coming back. Got you. Brain death was kind of tagged on later. Coma, DePass, persistent vegetative state, brain death. All of these things would indicate again that you're dead. The problem is we have these machines that can keep your body warm. They can keep your chest rising and falling, can keep your body going indefinitely. But the thing is, there's something that's not there. And does that mean you're dead? There's been a lot of talk about exactly what constitutes death. Defining death is a very difficult thing to do, especially with through the advancement of medical technology. It's kind of changed every time you come with a okay, I got it. This is the definition of death. Right. Medical technology can provide some picture of a state of consciousness or life that throws a wrench in the works. Yeah. And actually, after 1968, it took until 1981. A presidential commission is when they finally, in the United States, wrote a paper called Defining Death medical, Legal, and Ethical Issues and the Determination of Death. That was the basis for the Uniform Determination of Death Act, which basically rejected the Harvard idea that the higher brain, which is like when your personality and your memories are gone, the cortical brain, that means you're dead. And they rejected that in favor of the whole brain, which includes the brain stem, which is what keeps you breathing and functioning. They rejected in favor of that so Harvard was like, right? I don't know. I think I subscribed to the higher brain death definition of death. Yeah. The brain stem. Yeah. It's pretty significant. Sure. You can be born with just a brain stem. We talked about Mike the headless chicken before. Yeah. He had his head cut off, which included his brain, but his brain stem was still there, and he's a chicken, so it didn't really matter. But there's a huge division between the two because there's a big difference between breathing and being able to swallow for yourself and making a conscious decision whether, again, what you want to eat right then yeah. Or having memories or just reacting to people. Aside from physical reaction to stimulus. Yes. And that's one of the one of the there's a whole article on brain death. Maybe we'll do that one. I thought we did that now. I think we did it in the organ donation procurement episode. We talked about brain death and testing for brain death. Like they shoot ice cold water in your ear canal. Definitely remember covering at some point how yes. I think it was in the organ donation moment. Or maybe living wills. Obviously, we might have touched on it. Did you do that one? We did. Well, we did wells, but we hit on living wills. Okay, but you mentioned organs. I don't think we said that. That was a big kind of a quandary in the 1960s. I'm sorry. Mid 1950s. And then really in the 1960s is when we went organ transplant crazy, actually, kind of not just the United States, all over the world, doctors said, hey, we can actually give people a shot at life because we can now transplant kidneys and lungs and hearts. The problem was, and this is sort of one of the sad things that Molly points out is that the definition of death kind of came about, was hurried along, maybe because we needed organs from these bodies exactly. That were still technically alive, which is very ghoulish proposition. I mean, it makes sense from a very utilitarian standpoint. It's like this guy doesn't even know he's laying there. Yeah. And he's got a great kidney that could go to his sister, who knows that she needs a kidney, she's going to die, and she's got kids that she wants to hang out with and can put this kidney to good use. So let's figure this out. But as Molly says, like, most developed countries have signed on to the brain stem, where it's like your brain can no longer keep you alive on your own. You can't swallow, you can't take a breath for yourself, so you're dead. The problem is that's different. It's a narrower definition of death, I guess. And I think that probably rules out a lot of people who might otherwise be used to harvest organs. Yeah. Harvest. I know. All right, so let's talk about death itself. It's funny that you well, it's not funny, but out of all the different ways people can die, I thought it seems simplified to break it down into three ways, but that's really kind of the three ways. Yeah. I think we talked about that in Autopsies, too, right? Yeah. It can be an accident, obviously. That's called the motive death. Yes. The violent death. Which is also an Opsie, I guess. Well, not an Opsie. No. It's tragic homicide or suicide. So, Chuck, let's talk about what it's like to die from different types of death. You dug this up. Yeah, because I really wanted to know what is it like to drown or to be burned alive? Yeah. And people have survived some of these things and come back to tell the tale. That's obviously the only way we're going to find this stuff out from lucky people drowning. I've always heard drowning is a good way to go because it's not so painful. Yeah. Like the brain supposedly releases endorsements at the end. Yeah. Same with freezing, I've heard, too. Maybe. True. Although drowning victims have reported, aside from the panic, a tearing and burning sensation when your water starts filling with lungs, and hopefully really quickly after that, is the feeling of calmness that overcomes you and tranquility. Yeah. A heart attack. You've got the squeezing pain in your chest or your left arm. Yeah. Like a weight on your chest. Right. What I didn't know is that because of the heart not delivering oxygen to the brain any longer, you can lose consciousness within, like, 10 seconds. I didn't realize that. I thought there was a lot more to it. Well, it depends. Everyone has their own signature heart attack as well. Sure. If you bleed out, I imagine this is not one of the best ways to go. After about a liter and a half of blood, you're going to be thirsty and weak and anxious. Anything over two, you're going to be pretty confused and dizzy and probably lose consciousness pretty soon after. And all of that would relate to how fast you're losing blood. Sure. And it would probably be very unpleasant depending on how you're losing blood. Like why? Because you would imagine that if you're stabbed in the gut or something like that, you got the attendant pain in addition to this dying from loss of blood. Yeah. Or like Man Reservoir Dogs. Yeah. It's like one of the most hardcore ways to open a movie. Yeah. Or not open. But they cut right to that scene after the diner scene, right after the walk. Yeah. Electrocution. If you're in your house and you get electrocuted, it could stop your heart right then and there. And if you're in an electric chair, you may have actually heated your brain up to the point where you die or suffocated to death. Right. But there's indications that being electrocuted with enough voltage that instantly you lose consciousness. Right. That's the idea. Probably with the, quote unquote humane. I'm sorry, quote, humane, end quote. I'm going to stop doing that. I'm going back to, quote unquote. Yeah. What if you fall from a height? If you fall from a height, supposedly time slows, which is awful. Yeah. It's like, well, you're going to experience all of this. Yeah, that's the idea that you really can take it all in. That's really awful. So they did a study of jumpers from the Golden Gate Bridge, which is 75 meters. What is that, 230, 40ft. It's high enough. And they found evidence that a lot of them died from exploded lungs, exploded hearts. Their organs were all cut up from their ribs, which would indicate that it was pretty much instantaneous. Yeah, we talked about that on something, too, recently, I think, or maybe I heard it someone else talking about it. It's a pretty bad way to go. What? The Golden Gate Bridge. Or just dying from a height? Yeah. I can't remember who I was talking to about jumping in the water. I was like, what actually kills you when you jump in the water? From the eye, and it was like your organs smash into each other and explode. Yeah. I guess from any height. When you die from that, it would be from organ explosion or whatever. Yeah. Or the brain, obviously, if you go head first, hang. Yeah, the long drop back in the day. Although you can get hung in certain states if you choose. Really? Yeah, washington state. I know. You can. You can choose that as your method, and they'll build you the gallows. And the idea there is you want your neck to snap, otherwise you die slower and suffocate. The problem is, there is a study of 34 prisoners that found four fifths of them died partly from asphyxiation. Really? That's the wrong way to hang somebody. If you don't snap their neck or they don't lose consciousness immediately, they sit there and hang and die of asphyxiation. That's a bad way to go. And speaking of bad, I think being burned to death may be one of the worst. Isn't that what we came up with on the worst way to die? I think so. Because you feel it and you'd think, like your nerve endings. That's what I thought. Like, oh, your nerve endings are probably like, stop responding quickly. But apparently that's not the case. No, not only is that not the case, apparently your fire further sensitizes your nerve endings, so you feel even more pain. Wow. Yeah. But luckily, most people, I think the vast majority of people who die in fires actually die from smoke inhalation before they ever feel pain. From fire. Yeah. I don't know about before they feel pain, but hopefully quick enough. Well, carbon monoxide sinks, so there's a lot of smoke you are download to the ground, and that's where the carbon monoxide is. So you're endealing mostly that. So it's possible it's before that's true. And then the natural death which is passing of old age or disease. And here in this country, we have kind of whipped up a lot of the disease over the years. They've sniffed them off the case, right? Well, it depends. Like some of the ones that kill undeveloped countries, like diarrhea diseases, like dying from diarrhea. You don't have that much in the US. But we have chronic disease like obesity and diabetes and cardiopulmonary disease. Yeah, we have that down pat. I've got the top five here, actually. I think they're all in there, aren't they? Heart is number one. Cancer is number two. Lower respiratory is number three, stroke is four, and accidents are five. Yeah, and it's a huge drop. Cancer and heart are close to 600,000. And then number three at low respiratory is only 138,000. So that shows you what cancer and heart disease are doing. Right. In the United States at least. The upshot of all this is that most of us are not going to die suddenly, either by accident or by violent death. Yeah. Dying of all days didn't used to be a thing. No, it's like a lot of ways to die, but that wasn't one of them. You ticked off some traveling night or there was a dispute over grazing rights or the plague. Yeah. You walked into a bear cave. The plague. But yeah, old ages, it's kind of a new thing. But it's one of the most prevalent forms of death in developed countries. It actually has its own name, frailty. Yeah. Which is great. It's sad, but it's great that now we can live out our lives and we're about to talk about it, but sometimes the body, just like any other machine, just stops. It's not designed to keep going indefinitely. And ultimately the system shuts down as the subsystems shut down due to shutting down every second. Right. Right now our bodies are shutting down very slowly, and for that reason, because you and I are both dying. I guess once you're born, you start dying. After you stop growing, you start dying. Right. Is that just a positive outlook? But I mean, like, you're shedding cells and we're in the midst of the dying process. Just this natural system is in the winding down, although it takes decades and we still have plenty to do. Like you said, you're dying, I'm dying. That's why they have a more specific definition of death, which is called active dying. Like, you and I are not actively dying right now. No. Instead, if we are actively dying, we're in the midst of the dying process. Yeah. It has started. The dying process has started. The dissent, if you will, has started. Right. So all this kind of happen since different types of cells die at different speeds. That's what it is. It's cell death. Right. I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, but oxygen doesn't happen to different parts of the body. Your cells are going to die. Exactly. And so as the cells die at different speeds, different systems are going to shut down. But just from watching frail people die of old age, they kind of have the order in which it happens kind of down path. So there's the pre active dying phase which can take about three weeks. Starts about three weeks before death. Two or three weeks, yeah. And then there's the active dying phase which can take a few days. And obviously that's not set in stone. None of this is set in stone, but this is all just kind of accumulative knowledge from observations of people dying in like hospice and things like that. So you get the preactive phase of dying and like I said, it starts a couple of weeks ahead of the actual death. Because this is a big deal right now, what we're talking about. It's becoming very clear in our modern age that death is not an instant, it's not a moment, there's a process. Yeah. Well, unless it is in an instant, but yeah, old age dying. Yes. Or like other kinds of dying. But how about non accidental dying? Okay. We'll call it that because that's like the instantaneous thing. Right. And even sometimes in a very short scale that can follow some of these. Oh, yeah, forgot its audio. Yes. That was nodding my head. So the pre active phase of dying. Chuck, what do we got? Well, you're going to get sleepy. You're not going to have much energy. You're going to start sleeping more and more. Your skin might become cooler to the touch, might turn a little bluish gray. Yes. Cyanosis, what's that called? It's just becoming oxygen deprived. Like apparently your body is like, okay, don't really need to use the legs anymore because we're bedridden. So I'm going to start focusing more of the circulation on the inner organs. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. Well, that probably causes the modeling too, which is your skin can become sort of like splotchy with reddish blue splotches as well. Right. You're going to be a little restless probably. Yeah. You're going to possibly come off as confused. You're not going to be hungry. No. You're going to probably withdraw from social activities. Yeah. You're going to become a little withdrawn. You might want to settle unfinished business with family. You might request family come visit you for that kind of thing. Oh, sure, the nonphysical parts, that's definitely something you'd be interested in doing. Right. But that's like apparently something that people intuitively know. Apparently patients know when they're dying. I've seen that happen. And one of the signs from that's mentioned in hospice care, palliative care, is that the patient may even state I'm dying. Yeah. Like I started it's coming. That's pretty common. Yeah. And that's sad. That when you realize like, alright, this is it. Like, I feel myself, I'm going to be gone soon. But that's neat though, especially if you have time. Yeah. If you're like. Okay. I'm going to put everything in order. Sure. Then die happy or peacefully. That's neat that you have that time to take care of that. Yeah. If you're fortunate enough to go that way, for sure. Back to physically, you won't be able to heal from a wound or an infection any longer. Yeah. You might lose control of your bladder and your bowels over the course of some time. You might be in pain, but chances are, here in the modern world, they're going to take care of you in that respect. Right. And again, that's called palliative care, where at some point, it's very obvious that you're going to die. And a lot of it can be based on what you want. Sure. Even without your wishes. There is probably a point in time where medical science says, there's nothing we can do for you. We just want to make you comfortable. Exactly. So we're going to give you pain meds. Your care is being transferred over from a physician to who wants to save your life and keep you going to hospice workers, healthcare professionals, who are trained to just keep you as comfortable as possible for the duration of your life. Right. Man, hats off to those people. Yeah. Like all health care professionals, of course, but, man, hospice nurses, that's tough stuff. You got to be made of the right qualities as a human to be able to tackle something like that and still get up and go to work every day. Like they're literally in the business of dying. Yeah. I mean, very valuable service people provide. So that's the pre active phase. I'm getting ready to die. I got a couple of weeks, and all of my systems are starting to wind down. In the active phase, the systems are starting to shut down. You may not have consciousness, and if you are able to be aroused from unconsciousness, you're going to slip right back into it again, possibly. And apparently families find this very disconcerting. You're probably going to talk about people who are dead as if they're in the room or you can see them or hear them. Yeah. It's just the mind slipping. They don't know. Hospice workers, from what I can tell, tend to just treat it like it's real treated on its own terms. They're not saying it's real or it's a hallucination or something like that. And they advise families not to treat it like a hallucination, just to not to correct them. Yeah, that makes sense because you're there to provide comfort, not say, no, Grandpa, Grandma has been gone for years. Exactly. Why would you want to do that? There is an exception to that. You would want to do that if they're fearful from their visions okay. Then you can say it's not real. It's just your brain that's not real or whatever. Yeah. Again, all about comfort. Yes. But you don't want to contradict them if they're happy or. Even saying it in a neutral tone. It's only if they're fearful that you want to say that. But apparently families are kind of like, oh, God, they're going crazy. But it's a natural part of the active dying process. Breathing is going to become really weird. The patient's going to stop breathing for disconcertingly long periods of time. Yeah. This is called Cheney stokes. Respiration stokes. Sorry. Cheney Stokes. Name for John Cheney and William Stokes. Obviously the first dudes who described it. They always get all the press, quick, deep breaths, sometimes very slow ones, like you said, sometimes stopping altogether. And that is caused by receptors in the heart and brain stem basically being too sluggish to respond to different amounts of oxygen and CO2. And it's just kind of lagging behind. Again, think of it as a machine that's just slowing down and those receptors can't pick up on it in time. So it doesn't know how to tell you to breathe. Basically, like, at a steady rate. We should say that there isn't evidence that that is physically painful. True. Again, awful. For the healthy person in the room. Yes. For the family watching it, you think that the person is suffering. There's not evidence that they are, in fact suffering, but it seems like it. And that, from what I understand, with palliative care, not only making the patient comfortable is one of the priorities. Making the family comfortable is a priority as well, because how you die has a very lasting impact on the people who are there to witness your death for your family. So explaining that they're not suffering is helpful, but not necessarily enough. Yeah. And I think actually this podcast itself could help some people, because I don't think a lot of people do this sort of research when they go into a hospital room in the last hours of a loved one's life. Yeah. And they may not be told, even if it is explained to them, it might not sink in what they're being told. Yeah. Because seeing somebody gasping for breath and then being told that they're not really suffering, those two things might not job well. Yeah. Your instinct is to probably try and get help if they can't breathe clearly. Let's get a nurse in here. And the nurses like, no, that's part of it. Yeah. Another one that's very disconcerting. Another sign of active dying is the death rattle. And I did it. I guess I don't be dumb on death rattles. Oh, really? And basically, either you have fluid in the lungs or when you clear your throat like I just did yeah. That's a normal ability. Until you start dying, you can't clear your throat anymore. Yeah. Those are your laryngeal muscles. Right. Basically spasming what, clearing your throat? No, the death rattle. No, the death rattle is just breathing through the myer. It's both. It's either liquid or it's the muscle spasms. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. So did you find that that's painful because I found that it doesn't cause pain. It sounds terrible again to the people in the room. Exactly. Yeah. And I don't think we pointed out this is the agonyl phase of death. And it's Greek for struggle and agony. Yeah, that sort of just encapsulates it. I think that's probably why they call it the active phase of death now rather than agonol. Do they don't even call it that anymore. I think some people do, but I think the active and agony are the same one in the same got you. It's just they're in the agony phase. Right, or they're in the active phase. Your muscles, aside from your vocal cords, might start convulsing and spasming. You can get all her jerky and do things that wouldn't seem like you should be able to do in your state. Like card tricks. I don't know if you could do card tricks. Shuffling card tricks from one hand to the other. Grandpa never could before. Yeah, I knew he could. Some humor in here somehow. What else? Well, let's see. Your blood pressure is going to drop, your jaw is going to drop. You might end up in a really weird, rigid position. Yeah. And I think we said your extremities are going to be cold to the touch. Yeah. Actually, the death rattle, as a result of the spasming of your laryngeal muscles, that can also produce what was described in what I read as a barking sound. Oh, yeah. And I didn't search that out to see if that was recorded anywhere, but I'm curious what that sounds like. I've heard everything from gurgling. Like gurgle, it sounds like there's marbles in your throat. Right. Barking. That's a new one. But I think everybody has their own signature, death rattle. Yes, but the rule of thumb, apparently, among hospice workers is once the death rattle comes, it's a sign that they got about 48 hours or less left to live. Yeah. And all of these are tells, really, and all of them and we'll talk about what happens after the body is dead, too. And that helps with finding out in forensics, I think we pointed out plenty of times at the time of death, depending on the various things that happen when they find you. But all of these are almost like markers on a clock. Yeah. And if you're in hospice care, you know these things like, oh, this means this. Well, there are signs and symptoms of the system shut down that the person's body is going through. The senses apparently also are lost in a healthy person or a person who has all five senses they're lost in a certain order, and touch and hearing are the last to go. Oh, really? That's kind of nice. Another very important point that hospice workers make is never ever talk about the patient like they're not there because they can hear you up until the end. Like hearing is kept so long as the person could hear before then. There's not any damage from during the active dying period. They can hear you until the moment they die. And you need to be careful what you say. Yes. And I think that's a really nice thing that the last things that you can experience are the touch of a loved one or the voice of a loved one. Right. You need to see them. You may not even be able to respond to that, but you can still hear. That's true. I would definitely pick that oversight. I'd rather hear someone's words as I pass, rather than having silence and just seeing their faces staring at me, so long as the words are, wait, one more thing. I think it would be almost cruel to be able to see and not hear at the end. Yeah. He wants to see your family upset. You want to feel them hold your hand and say, everything is going to be all right. So you raise a good issue if you have a dying family member, especially if they're dying of frailty or they're just dying like they're in the dying process. So they're about to enter the dying process. Yeah. You could do worse things than to go online and educate yourself on how to be around them. I think people don't intuitively know how to be around a dying person. There are certain things that you should do, certain things you shouldn't do. Like, for example, they say that you should talk to the person, not the condition. Yeah. So don't treat them like they're frail or dying. Like, treat them like they're your old friend, who they are. It's extremely important to make sure that they're in a peaceful, calm environment. Sure. So maybe yelling at somebody over the will is a really bad idea. These seem like no brainers, but I guess some people need to be told this stuff. Yeah, but I mean, think about it. It can put you on edge being around a dying person. Like, do you mention the fact that they're going to die or do you dance around it if they make a joke or something? Can you laugh or do you laugh too hard? Do you not laugh enough? I think it's not necessarily like yeah, I think it's just put you on edge. Not everyone is as sensitive, too. I'm going to add one. Don't bring your laptop in there and watch reruns of the office. Yeah. Are you speaking from experience? No, I'm just going to add that. Okay. That's on my list. Okay. Get off your cell phone. Yeah. Pay attention to them. Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's what you're there for. As hospice workers put it, you're giving them a very heartfelt gift by being there with them while they're dying and maybe receiving a gift. Sure. In many religions and cultures, it's very much an honor to be a part of this whole thing. And even if you're not religious. You could just feel that way. Spiritually is a human. Yeah. Okay, well, let's pause here because, Chuck, it's time for a message break. And we're back. Okay. So are we dead yet? Are we at that point? Yeah, the person has passed. You just sounded very cheery. Yeah, well, I mean, we rattled off some pretty what seems like suffering, but now the suffering is over. If there was any other person is dead, immediately after you die, your pupils are going to dilate because the muscles controlling the iris are going to have their final rest. So your pupils are going to dilate, and then have you heard of the terminal tier or the Lacroma mortise? No. This is usually in the right eye, and there's no real explanation for it, but it is a final tier that you shed. Wow. And it doesn't always happen right after you die, although it can. They did a study in the early 90s in New Zealand, and out of 100 deaths, 14 of them right at the time of death, had the lacromo mortise here, and 13 of them in the final 10 hours. And they say to look out for that if you're the family, because it can be a sign. And also they try to talk you into the fact that it's a comforting thing to see that tear being shed. Wow. Yeah. And since we're on eyes, you know the old thing where you close someone's eyes after they die? Yeah. Or you put silver dollars on if it's the Old West. Yeah, I guess people do that, too. So you're not having someone a dead body staring at you. Right. Because if they're looking dead forward, straight forward, they're, like, following you all throughout the year. Yeah. And it's definitely a movie trope, but if you don't close the eyes I never knew this. Something called T-A-C-H-E Noire. I don't know if it's tash or tash noir. Okay. That is a dark reddish brown strip that forms horizontally over your eyeball. And I guess it's just your eyeballs dry out and has the air. So if you don't close the eyes and I looked it up, you're going to see this weird horizontal stripe across your eye, plus the effect it has on the living. The difference between seeing a dead body with their eyes closed and a dead body with their eyes open is just like a galaxy between the two. As far as discomfort goes. Yeah. Somebody should edit together every time that's ever been done in a movie. Yeah. Just, like, super fast. All right. So that's all I got on the eyes. So, Chuck, I want to alarm you right now. Oh, boy. You have living in your guts right now. The very organisms that are going to decompose your body when you die, they're just sitting around waiting for action, waiting for the signal. Yeah. When you die, there's a lot of stuff that's still alive. That's still going on even though you're brain dead. Whole brain, higher brain, heart dead. Your heart stopped, you're dead. That's another definition of death. I don't know if we mentioned your heart's not beating anymore. Right. You're dead. Yes. There's no bringing you back. Your brain hasn't had oxygen for a while. You died of hypothermia and they warmed you up. So now you're officially dead. You're gone. Right. But there's still a lot of stuff. Remember the Poop Shake episode? Yeah. We can forget. We talked about the microbiome. We have this whole other part of our life, our living organism that's still around, that's still operating and a lot of stuff living within us, including part of our microbiome. They're still carrying on processes. Like apparently you can harvest skin cells for 24 hours and they're still alive. Just use them for all sorts of stuff. Yeah, you can harvest them. And then of course, inside your intestines there's little tiny organisms that are still living and are going to help do the work that comes next. Starting a couple of days after death. Like if you just fell over in the woods and no one was around. I always loved the setting. Right. And you just left there. Within about three days, these organisms, the microflora is going to go to work on you starting in your intestines. Yes. And this is after the various mortises, correct? Yes. I guess we should kind of go over it, but I would recommend everybody go listen to what causes rigor mortis. Yeah, for sure. It's on the website. You can go to Stephenko.com podcasts, what Hyphen causes Hyphen mortise? We'll just run through the mortises real quick then. Algor mortise or the death chill, that's the first thing that's going to happen. That's where your body starts dropping in temperature about a degree and a half Fahrenheit per hour until you are just like a nice red wine at room temperature. Yeah, actually that's not quite true. Red wine is like 64 deg. I guess it depends on what kind of room you're in. Yeah, if you're in a 64 degree, it's perfect. All right, what else? Well, after algor mortis, you got rigor mortis a couple of hours after death where the body settles into a stiff state. Yeah. And that lasts for what, like 24 hours? I don't remember we talked about it. Yeah, I think so. And then between those you have liver remortis or sutulation. That's where like all the blood coagulates at the bottom. Yeah. Basically your red blood cells are pretty heavy and they just sink. And it's about 20 minutes to 3 hours after death is when you're going to be in live remortis. Yeah. And then after that is rigor. That's right. Okay, so now back to putrefication. Right. That's the best thing to talk about. Yeah. That's basically like these organisms going to work, breaking down your body and they do it pretty quick. Yeah. The pancreas apparently has so many in there that it just eats itself. It eats itself? The pancreas consumes itself. It's pretty efficient. Your other organs are going to eventually be consumed, turned into liquid. You're liquefied from the inside out. Yes. You're going to turn colors in this order, green, then purple and black, which is just like a black eye, I guess, in that the same stage. Yeah. Except it never fully heals. It explodes. Within a couple of weeks, you're going to be liquid inside. The organisms that are eating you produce a gas as a byproduct from their consumption. So you're going to be bloated. Your tongue is going to stick out. It's going to turn dark, too. Your tongue? Yeah. And that gas really stinks. Your eyes are going to protrude. Yeah. There's something called purge fluid. That is a putrid reddish brown fluid that can be expelled through just everywhere. You've got an opening. Right. Can come out of your mouth, your nose, your vagina. It can be mixed with feces and come out of your rectum. There's something else that can come out of your vagina, too. Yeah. This is maybe the worst thing I've ever heard. I had no idea. Yeah, I had no idea. I know all about death and all that, and it interests me. I had never heard of this before. I don't even want to talk about it. You don't either. Maybe we should type it into the computer and make the computer say it. Do we have that ability? Wow, that was pretty good. That was a good computer impression. So, wait, that's what you do when you don't want to say something yourself? You pretend you're a computer? Yeah. Emily and I, most of our fights are like that. Really? Yeah, it's pretty cute. I go into war games mode. What was it again? Computer coughing. Coughing. Birth. So basically those gases that this is a real thing. We're not making this up. Yeah. Post mortal fetal extrusion is another name for it. So the gas that build up in the body before the body ruptures, which comes a little later, can become so pressurized that a pregnant woman who has died with the fetus still in utero, the gases can push the fetus out of the vagina, which is coffin birth. Yes. And this doesn't happen much anymore? No, thankfully, because we take care of dead bodies pretty quickly. Although they did find evidence of it in the case in 2008 where this one was found, like, in the woods. But it was described a lot in 16th to 18th century medical literature. Oh. You know, it just drove them crazy, for sure. She was obviously alive for weeks afterward. Yeah. And archaeologists apparently, too, have to rethink sometimes when they find because sometimes you would die during childbirth, but they would bury the baby with the mother. Right. And so you would find the bones, like, cradling each other almost, but then they've had to go back and look at somewhere, they find between the legs the bones of the baby, and they think that might be the case of a coffin birth. Right. So there's the worst thing in the world. Yeah. There's probably death metal band with that name. If there's not, there is now. So the gas is ultimately eventually, once they really get down to business and they're no longer just what's it called? Where the fluids coming out a little, orifices here? There purge fluid. Okay. So once it's like enough with the purge fluid. Yeah. We're just going to tear the sucker open. Your body ultimately ruptures. Yeah. And your skin is already blistered at this point. Your hair, nails and teeth are falling out. They don't keep growing. No, it's your skin receding from drying out. From Desecating. Yeah. So pass that around. In school kids, when someone says that your fingernails keep going after death, you set them straight. Tell them, Josh. Oh, God, I just realized there's kids listening to this. And then the old D gloves, which we've talked about before. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Remember that? Yeah. That can happen to you. If you drive at ten and two and you have an airbag, the gases that expand the airbag out of your steering wheel are very hot. And if you're not driving at nine and three and you have your hands at like, ten and two or something, you're going to be declared really alive. Yeah. But your skin is just burned right off your hands. Or it's burned and separated and then eventually comes off. So ten and two is not how you should drive. Anything more or none, really. That's what I've learned. Yeah, I drive it either just a straight up 06:00 with one hand yes. Or noon. Or just a straight up noon. Noon. I rarely have two hands on the wheel. You don't drive with, like, your knees, with your hands behind your head, relaxing occasionally. If I'm relaxing? Yeah, or playing the guitar or something. Okay. So deep lobbying. Yeah. De globbing is I know we talked about this in probably rigor mortis, but that's when you're four body farms, maybe. Yeah. That's when basically your skin is removed, still attached to things like fingernails and things like that. And they call it degloving for a reason. I don't think we'd need to explain. No, it makes perfect sense. Or Destocking. Sometimes it can happen to your feet. Well, I hadn't heard of that one. Did you just make that up? Well, they said gloves or socks if it's your feet, but I did make a Desalaking. I have to use that from now on. Yeah, that's good. That might be a new thing. So the body, once it ruptures, your organs are already liquid and all that's left is a skeleton, which will eventually turn to dust, too. Can we be done? No, wait, we can't be done because we do need to talk a little bit about assisted suicide. Yeah, I just heat that up for you, boy. You shouldn't. It's quite a controversial subject, like we said. I don't know if I said or not. This has just been such a huge whirlwind of input of information in my head in the last 36 hours studying for this sure. That I don't know what I've said yet or not, or what we talked about in another podcast. So we talked about dying of frailty, of old age, and that it's increasing. Supposedly, five out of ten people in the United States will die in the intensive Care unit. And I saw this Ted Talk from Newcastle, Australia with this guy. I can't remember what his name is, but it's about dying, I think it's called. Can we talk about Dying or something? And his point was, you're going to die in the ICU whether you want to or not. If you die of a degenerative disease or frailty, unless you say you don't want to die there because the way medical science is currently set up, you are going to be treated most of the time up until the bitter end with life saving measures. Sure. And you're going to die in the ICU with tubes hooked up and things beeping, and like, other people having crash carts taken in and out of their room and people making a big ruckus up until the point you die unless they give you palliative care or you say, I don't want to be sustained like that. I don't want to go to the ICU. And his point was, if half of Americans are going to die in the ICU, you have to assume that maybe not all of them would want to die in the ICU. Right. And therefore, they need to think of things like, I want an advanced directive, a living will, I want a living power of attorney to somebody to say, no, do not put them on a ventilator. Do not put them in feeding tubes. They don't want that. They just want to die. Or they want to go to hospital. They want to go back home. Right. That's another big one. They don't let you go back home. Right. Especially if you can't speak for yourself to medical science these days. That's crazy. You don't leave the hospital when you know you're dying. You stay in the hospital, and we keep doing stuff until you die. Right. That's not the way it drives with a lot of people. But if you don't stop and think about it and then write it down or tell somebody who can speak for you, you're not going to go home, you're not going to go to hospice. You have to do this ahead of time. And part of that that's kind of come out of this idea is, okay, well, if we have autonomy to say, I don't want you to intubate me, why don't we have the autonomy to say, I want you to give me some stuff that's going to painlessly end my life? Because it's either that or facing a tremendous amount of pain and suffering through this degenerative disease. Yes. Basically saying, I'm ready. I am ready. It is my life. It's like the Richard Dreyfus movie from the 80s whose life is anyway, I think I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, I think so. It was a movie okay. About assisted suicide and should you have the right to be able to it's a hot button issue, for sure, but apparently most Americans, or the majority of Americans actually support it until you start using a word like suicide. Right. When you pull them and say, are you in favor of doctors helping someone to painlessly in their life or something at the end of life? They say, sure, yeah. And then they're like, okay, so you're in favor of a physician assisted suicide. No. Right. What's that word? Doctors who are in favor of euthanasia is another term for it. Look at palliative care. It's like half of a step away from physician assisted suicide. Like you're keeping somebody, if they request it, knocked down on morphine for the rest of their life, so they're never going to regain consciousness. You dug up this one article by a British physician who argues that agonal, gasping reflex, apparently, when part of the Apnia is that your body has a reflex where you gasp for air. And it's really disconcerting to family members, even though they don't think that you're suffering, it looks like you're suffering. And this doctor argued, well, we have drugs that can block this response so that the person can't gasp for air. Right. And what it's going to cost them? Their last couple of breaths. But these last couple of breaths make it appear like they're suffering, and the family remembers that their kids suffered, so why wouldn't we do that? And there's this conversation that's taking place more and more and more that ultimately it's kind of like, who is somebody to say that somebody can't choose to end their own life painlessly through the use of drugs? Yeah. Or like Hunter Thompson did. Well, I mean, that's another way to go, and anybody can do that. Sure. But there are some people out there who don't want to die violently. They want to leave that with their family. Like, that's the part that I was upset about with that was his wife finding him and stuff. Yeah. His wife and his son. Yeah. And it was like, not only that, he did it in his own basement, which I can understand doing it at home, but he left quite a mess in his own basement for his family to clean up. But if he had other options these days, like doctor assisted suicide, he might not have had to make a mess in his basement for his family. Yeah. And Chuck, we know that Hunter Thompson is far from the only person to make his own exit his own way. Sure. Another very famous person. Sigmund Freud did too, huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know that assisted suicide? Yes. Literally, physician assisted suicide. He was diagnosed with cancer of the palate because he smoked tons of cigars right. Which were sometimes just a cigar to say. And for 16 years he lived with that diagnosis. And finally, toward the end, he asked his surgeon, his physician, go ahead and hit me up with, I think, 5 grams of morphine. Like, just a ton of morphine. And he died 3 hours after the injection of it, which was more than his usual 2 grams of morphine. Right. Or cocaine. He loved cocaine. Yeah. But he had developed what was called tooden angst, that's German, which is a dread of death. So he lived with that for 16 years, but he decided along the way, like, I fear this, but I'm going to take it into my own hands. Physician assisted suicide. And there's definitely more than one side to this coin. There's very strong opinions on either side, but I think at the very least, even if you remove emotion from it's an extremely interesting conversation in that it reveals so much about our attitudes toward death. Totally. And autonomy and who has the right to decide whether they're going to die or who has the right to tell somebody that they can't do that. Whose life is it anyway? Yeah. Richard dryfus and then chuck. One other thing that we want to hit on is regret. Yeah. I actually saw this a few weeks ago, just by chance, and then you send it to me. I think it was an England hospice nurse spent a lot of time researching life regrets over the course of a certain amount of time and came up with the five most common life regrets. And I think this is like a good way to end it. Number one, I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself and not the life others expected of me. Right. That was the number one regret. Yeah. Number two was, I wish I didn't work so hard. It didn't surprise me at all. Yeah. Number three, I wish I had the courage to express my feelings. Number four, I wish so I'd stayed in touch with my friends. It's a very sad one, and I wish I'd let myself be happier as number five. Yeah. Like she was saying that they didn't realize until the end of their life that happiness is a choice that you make. It's not something that happens to you. It's something you go search out. It's a state of mind that you strive for. Sure. And to figure that out at the end, that's a regret. Yeah. So call to action, people. Yeah. Really. Like, think about the stuff. You don't have to wish these things on your deathbed if you start doing something about it now. Exactly. Dying, Chuck. You know what we might have just done? We might have just finished it. The death of the death suite. I bet there's something else. Yeah. Only time can tell. But I don't know how much more aspects of death we can cover. And I'll tell you what, I'm going to put all of them together in a blog post. The death suite. So everybody can go listen to all things death via stuff you should know. What a gift. Yes. In the meantime, if you want to look up more about dying, just type dying into the search bar. How stuff works. I think it has its own channel. There's so much to it. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. This is a nice one. We don't normally do shout outs, but this was a nice one. And I thought, what better way to end such a depressing show? Hey, guys. And Gerry, love the podcast. Josh had to thank you for teaching my fiance, Danny and me about the flashlight trick to see spider eyes. Yeah, I still haven't done it, man. I never think about it at night. Jerry, you said you tried it, right? And it worked? Yeah. Okay. I need to do it. I need to set a reminder. And my response to people who've been like, can you explain it again? Practice. That's my explanation. Just practice. Just try it from a different angle. Okay? Just practice. It's a real thing, not a trick. It is completely amazing. And this is from Peachy, by the way, and it's wonderful and frightening at the same time. But the problem now is that whenever we walk our dogs at night, I just can't have my normal fiance. I have this dude with a flashlight stuck to his forehead stopping at every field to let me know just how many spiders our dogs are stepping on and how we are always surrounded. Thanks for the show. And now for a shameless request. I know you don't often give shout outs, but it would be the most amazing thing ever if you could give a shout out to Danny on the podcast. The air is sometime before our wedding on October 13. Oh, nice. Let him know that I love him more than anything, and then I'm excited to share my life with him, even if he does have a flashlight stuck to his forehead for the rest of our lives walking our dogs together. I know this is totally blown away, and I would even let him listen to that podcast first. So thanks to Jerry. Thanks, guys. That is from Peachy. Way to go, peachy. In Thousand Oaks, California. I think Peachy just expressed it very nicely. Yeah. So, Danny, Peachy, congratulations. Best of luck. Best witches from us. I told her, Listen up for it on that dying podcast, and she thought that was kind of funny. And it's like, great. Yes. And Danny, maybe put down a flashlight once in a while. Yeah, and Peachy, don't use the word fiance so much, okay? That's a life lesson from Chuck right there. No one likes to hear that. If you want to see if you can talk Chuck into a shout out, take your best shot. You can tweet to us at syskodcast. You can talk to him directly on Facebook. Comstychano, so he spends all his time. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetepwork.com, and you can join us at our website. Our very own website. It's called Stuffyouheanow.com. STUFFYou knows is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school is out, the sun shining, the daylight is longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing 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 Hardstarks, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more Via 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." | |
Addiction: Why you can't kick SYSK | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/addiction-why-you-cant-kick-sysk | Modern scientists have extensively researched addicts and the things they abuse, but we still don't understand everything about the nature of addiction. So how does it work? Tune in to learn more about addiction (and why you can't kick your SYSK habit). | Modern scientists have extensively researched addicts and the things they abuse, but we still don't understand everything about the nature of addiction. So how does it work? Tune in to learn more about addiction (and why you can't kick your SYSK habit). | Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:57:08 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=15, tm_min=57, tm_sec=8, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=308, tm_isdst=0) | 41937692 | 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. You Chuck Tran Bryant. Chucky Chuckles. Chucks. Chuck sir. Whatever. Chuck train is new. I had something that I was working on in my head, but it got pushed out by the 8 million other things that I have to keep in my working memory. Another nickname. Yeah, it was a good one too. I think it was really going to knock everyone's socks off. Chocolate? No. Cheers. Like that. It was an Lll. Yeah. She's getting a lot freer with the last these days either or she's moving her chair closer and closer or she's on lol cats right now. She's not even listening. Yeah. Chuck. Yes. We're talking about addiction today. That's right. Do you remember Science Phasing Out Sleep podcast, which strangely enough, comes out today on the day we're recording it. But this will be released like five weeks later. You talked about recording this? Yeah, we talked about doing addiction and lo and behold, here it is. So really, if you think about it, we are on track in real time. But in podcast release publishing time, it seems like there's a big lag. True. But we're giving people what they want, right? That's right. Addiction or what we want. Did you like this article? Yeah. Did you know that there are many stories about addiction in our society today? Yeah. The most rigid article of mine you've ever read. Oh, you wrote this? Yeah, dude. I went back when I read it, I was like it was very scientific sounding, like it could have been on the National Institutes of Health website. And it was very bland. And there was one thing I remember going back reading I didn't pull the trigger on. We're talking about addiction and researching it compared to our views of addiction even 2030 years ago. Like in the 80s. Right. God can't believe that was like 30 years ago. 1980. Crazy. That whole Nancy Reagan Just Say no campaign scared the bejesus out of a lot of people. But it also had a very negative impact as well in that it so grossly over exaggerated the effects and the addictiveness of drugs. That for kids who were, I guess, gutsy enough to go ahead and try the drugs that they've been warned against. Gutsy once they tried them and found out that they didn't turn into like a donkey as Nancy Reagan told them they would. Sure. Then they were like, well, I wonder what other drugs are going to do. They get a little more bold and courageous. So are you saying that the Just Say no to Drugs campaign may have had the reverse effect on people who actually tried drugs? And it's not just me saying that. There's a lot of consensus in the addiction field, which is multidisciplinary, that Just Say no campaign or any campaign that over exaggerates the effects of drugs sure. And deviates from a straight science based reporting of what addictive substances can do to you can have a negative impact or reverse effect. Well, you think we would have learned a lesson from reef or madness back in the day. You would definitely think so. You know, that whole dope fiend thing, Chuck, it's funny that you bring up reefer, madness and the dope theme thing, because that was the way for a period that people looked at addicts, it was a major character flaw. But before that, it was just no big deal. Well, there was no such thing as addiction up until, like, the late 18th century. It was called how things are. Exactly. Did you see that little thing I sent you about the funeral of a Boston minister's wife in 1678? Yeah, I didn't get a chance to read it. Was it so there's this really cool paper, if you ever have some time to kill, which I know you never, ever do. But it's a 32 pager by a guy named Harry G. Levine called the discovery of Addiction colon changing Conceptions of Habitual Drunkenness in America. Which sounds really boring, I think it's like but this guy is tracing the history of addiction and he's saying, like, prior to the 18th century, the end of the 18th century, there was no such thing. Like people drink because they wanted to get drunk. Sure. Right. So in 1678, people in America drank their faces off Chuck Eg at the funeral of a Boston ministered wife. Mourners consumed 51 and a half gallons of wine. Wow. And think about how many Mourners. How many could there be? It's 1678 in Boston. It's like 50 people who aren't, like, Native American in the continental United States or what would become well, maybe there were 51 and a half people and they drank a gallon. And then at the ordination not a funeral, in ordination of Reverend Edwin Jackson of Woodburn, Massachusetts, guests drank six and a half barrels of cider, 25 gallons of wine, two gallons of brandy, and four gallons of Rome. Yeah. And that was just for the guy becoming a minister. You know, our Boston listeners right now are like, that's right. They're like, Whoa, that's wicked awesome. The wicked oracle facts. And then in the 18th century, everybody's just drinking, drinking, drinking for fun. Then the 18th century, some people are like, you know what? I kind of have to have four gallons of brandy. Right. Help me. And then we started to get this idea that there was such thing as addiction, but it wasn't the person, it was on the substance. Right? Yeah. It's the absent or the opium. Those were like the drugs of choice back in the day. Right. That's the problem. Those things are evil and they're bad. Right. And actually, opium addiction was so widespread. Did you see that little sidebar? I did not. Opium addiction opium was everywhere. Right. Like, you could get it in any kind of tincture or tonic for any kind of malady whatsoever. And so many middle aged women became hooked on morphine and opium that it was seen in the late 19th century as a woman's problem. Really? PMS or menopause? Interesting. That's how people viewed addiction for a while. But it went from the substance to the person, the character flaw, the dope fiend. Right. I thought it went from the person to the substance. No, it went from the I'm sorry, the substance to the person. Right. So it went from it's the problem of the substance to the problem of the person is a character fallout. They're dope feed. And then finally we arrived at the idea that addiction is a disease, a chronic disease, and a person who is addicted is a sufferer, not a fiend. That's where we are now, for the most part. Right. But we still don't fully understand addiction. We have a pretty good view of it. Right. I feel like a lot of things with the human body we explain. We always lead in with like they sort of know, but they sort of don't. Well, it's that point where all the pieces are on the table. We just haven't put them all together, remember? Do you know why, Josh? Why? Because the human body is a miracle. It's a big, mysterious miracle when you think about it. Really? About all the things going on in the brain and the body and the fact that it's wrapped up in bones and skin. Yeah. It sounds like intelligent design to me. There you have it. Do you remember your theory of what happened to the neanderthals? Didn't they say they froze? No, they got thirsty. Yeah, they got hot and thirsty and they died. All right, Chuck, I stand by that. So the whole point of addiction is it hijacks the brain's reward system. Right? Yeah. The limbic system. And that's exactly what it does, Josh. When you are born and you're a human being, you've learned very quickly that you have to survive by eating and sleeping and taking care of yourself, and that's because it triggers the limbic system into shooting a little dopamine out, and your body says, hey, I like that, I need to do that again. Right. And that's what drugs do, except they do it two to ten times as much, and it's false. Fake dopamine is like the doggy treat of anything with the brain. Yeah. So if you can get ten doggie treats immediately instead of the one, then you take it, and then your brain says, well, this is great. I could get used to this. And it does. Right. And since we learn, we're pretty much hardwired to learn from that release of dopamine, to repeat that behavior, like reproduce or exercise or eat. Yeah. If we're getting ten times that amount, we pick it up even quicker, like, oh, okay. Well, this crack cocaine makes me feel really good, so I'm going to try that. You need it more. Right. And when it goes away, it makes things a lot worse than just sleepy because I didn't get enough sleep. Well, we should say also that the current view of addiction, the brain disease model right. States that just because you try something doesn't mean you're going to become addicted. The process, or addiction is a process, and a person goes from a user, crosses a threshold at some point and becomes an addict. So a user and an addict are not synonymous. No. They exist on two different parts of the spectrum of addiction or spectrum of substance use and abuse. Right, use and abuse. Those are the two different words. Right. Well, you summed up, I guess, the way that addiction works. Pretty succinctly. Chuck well, it becomes physically addictive. Basically. You develop a dependency on this shot of dopamine, this huge shot of dopamine, and your body needs it. All of a sudden you lose control. Right. And we should say that drugs, generally all drugs of addiction, hijack the reward system. We talked about other drugs I can't remember in some other podcasts that don't necessarily work the dopamine, therefore they don't necessarily produce addictive properties. Right. But those that do hijack dopamine transmitters. They either stimulate dopamine release and or they bind to dopamine receptors and prevent it through uptake. Yeah. Right. So you got a bunch of dopamine release and you got a bunch of it staying in between your synapses longer. Right. And then, like you said, you become dependent on that. You want that feeling. What your brain does, even if you don't even know this is going on, your brain is saying to your body, you need to go out and get more of that because that was really awesome. Right. Because your reward system is there to motivate us to do stuff or to do stuff, the reward system. So, yeah, like you said, your priorities become reprioritized and drugs get to the four or whatever that substance or behavior is, right? Well, yeah, you always hear like the hardcore abusers of heroin or cocaine. Literally, they say it overtakes your life to where your job is, to every day get the money that you can find and find the drugs so you can use the drugs. Right. Full time deal. And so you've got the hangover withdrawal. That's where your dopamine basically your brain is like, okay, right, I sense that something artificial is going on, so I'm going to stop producing as much and you're going to have to go through a horrible little period that's the withdrawal or hangover. Right. Then you got physical dependency and at about this point you've crossed over into addictive being an addict. Yeah. You're not a user anymore. Once you have physical dependency, that's where because your brain is not producing that dopamine naturally any longer. And the withdrawal or the hangover is so bad that you can't stand it, you will do more, and at that point, you're like Crusty the Clown with moon rocks. You're just getting back to normal. Yeah. Now you're physically dependent. That's the key. I'm not sure if that's getting through, because I can picture people out there looking concerned and bewildered right now. Your brain actually stops producing dopamine. If it's getting it in an unnatural way, it goes, you know what? I don't even make it anymore. There's enough of it out there floating around already. It's just so messed up. You're literally tricking your brain into doing something that it should be doing naturally. Right. And that's why with a lot of drugs getting high, getting that high is harder and harder or easier. There's that flip side, too, which I thought was interesting. It is. And I don't fully understand. I don't feel bad, because I don't think science fully understands it either. But that's two symptoms of physical addiction. Either you need more to get high, or you need far less than you ever did before. I would think if you're an attitude, you want to choose the sailing. You'd be like, man, I can get high off of $2 worth of heroin like I used to need. Unfortunately, you don't get that choice, though, now because of this, because your brain has been basically hijacked by this drug. And I guess we probably shouldn't anthropomorphise drugs, not actually hijacking anything, but because your brain reward system has been reprioritised to serve this drug. Thank you. Yes. The whole point of treating addiction and I actually wrote a companion article on this, how Rehab Works. It's pretty interesting. Was that based on your experience in rehab? No, not true. The point of treating addiction is, in most cases, to just completely discontinue use, which is called abstinence. Right? Yeah. For most all addiction, abstinence is the way to go for, of course, like, eating addictions and stuff like that. Right. And sex addiction. Yeah. They don't want you to never have sex again. No, because I have a problem with sex addiction. Okay. Not. I have a problem. I have a problem with everyone saying all these athletes are sex addicts because they cheat on their wives. Oh, yeah. I would think that it's probably the most exploited addiction ever. For sure. So, Josh, we're talking about addiction. What are some of the symptoms of addiction? How do you know if you're an addict? Well, there's two types. Yes. There's physical and behavioral. And I should say those two types are specific to substances of abuse. Right? Yeah. You can have and or physical or behavioral if you're doing, like, coke or heroin or drinking with behavior, behavioral addictions can be behaviors. It's just behavioral. But that doesn't mean it's any less addictive. That doesn't any less addictive or harmful to your life. Right. But we said one of the physical symptoms is that you either need more or less of the drug, right? That's right. That's a physical symptom. Then there's a lot of stuff that you could easily guess. Trouble sleeping, sweating, hand tremors, nausea, physical agitation. Yeah, that's if you don't have the substance in your body. Right. Those are the withdrawal symptoms. Basically, your body is telling you, like, go do more, because we don't feel good right now. And you get that from everything from alcohol to cigarettes to caffeine. Caffeine headaches are supposed to be pretty bad. Right. I've heard people that try to kick Diet Coke, it can be pretty awful. I've had caffeine headaches before. They're not that bad. But I have heard of people who really suffer from them. The physical stuff, really, it's using more or less, or just using to get back to normal. Right. That's physical addiction. And then anything that happens to your body as a result of abusing a drug that's physical, behavioral, which is also called psychological symptoms, is the stuff that happens to your life, basically. Right. So what are they? Well, you may have tried to quit doing whatever this behavior is, whether it's gambling or overeating or sex, and you're not able to, so that's one of the traits. So you're not going to have much success there. Or maybe you spend more time doing it to the point where it's like you might lose your job or go broke or something like that. Those are all behavioral traits. What else? Well, basically, you're still using the stuff even though you know it's having a harmful impact on you or your life or others, or you might stop doing stuff that's good for you. I used to be a jogger, but then my sex addiction became so great, I don't even jog anymore. Right now. I just have sex all the time and play professional football and chuck, because of this brain disease model that we talked about, because of these symptoms, the view of addiction as it stands today, the most widely held model is the brain disease model. And the basis of that is that addiction is a chronic disease, right? Right. So as such, just like, say, asthma or tuberculosis or whatever, you're going to have flare ups. Relapse, right? Yes, relapse with addiction. And so if you go into treatment, you need to have booster sessions as well, after you're cured or clean or whatever. Well, yeah, that's sort of the basis of AA. Right. You still got to go to those meetings. Right. Which is why I think it's so radically successful, the LST and the coffee. Right. That should be out by now, I think. Otherwise people can go. What? I need to get to AA. I had an AA joke, but I'm not going to tell it. That's good. We've both grown up so much, haven't we? Yes. In the past 30 minutes. What else we got here, Josh? Behavioral psychologists, they used to think that I thought this is really interesting. They sort of understand addiction a little bit, but they used to think that if you just tried drugs in the first place, drugs or alcohol or any kind of addictive substance, then there was just something wrong with you. But there's actually genetic basis for even that, not even whether or not you get addicted, but whether you try it to begin with. Well, yeah, it's not just that. Like, genetics is one of a number of risk factors. There's also, like, your susceptibility to peer pressure, your feelings of self worth at that moment or at that period in your life. If you have anxiety or depression, that's been shown to increase the likelihood that you're going to try drugs. So it's not just like a kid's like, yeah, I'll try this, let's see what happens. Yeah, that's how they used to see it. Now they see it as like, no, there's some other comorbid factors going on. It's both nature and nurture. So, like, a good example would be like, if you start having sex to increase your sense of self worth, that could lead to a sex addiction. That low self esteem would be a risk factor that led you into your sex addiction. Right. Or if you're depressed and you just self medicate right. Or if you tried drugs and you're like, wow, I really like this. That's another one, for sure. So we were talking about physical and behavioral symptoms. Right. Again, under the current brain disease model of addiction, basically the double whammy is psychological dependence, which can be just as bad. Right. Because it has not only an effect on the person, it has an effect on the society as well. The person's life can be ruined by addiction. Sure. But they may also commit crime to feed their addiction. Right. Or break up their family on a personal level or both. Or commit violence, other accidents. The worst one is psychological or behavioral. Yeah, for sure. Which makes both substances of abuse and compulsive behaviors, addictive behaviors, equally bad. Oh, yeah. And what that means is you can't be one of these hardliners it just says if someone wants to go out and kill themselves on dope, then that's their business. Right? Well, yeah, because there's a lot of other things going on. It's a great argument against it, but other impacts. Right. But is prohibition the answer? Well, it certainly wasn't with alcohol, was it? It did not work. You know why? Because no one stopped drinking. Yeah. Prohibition didn't really go over too well. So, Chuck, you want to talk about some specific drugs and behaviors that people get addicted to? Yeah, we've talked about meth a little bit and what a stupid thing that is to try. Right. What was that in our big anti meth rant? I think it was when we did the meth labs. Crime scene clean up. Yeah. Methamphetamines. The good news is the use is going down. It looks like. Yes. Which surprises me. I never thought it would be steady or still going up. Well, maybe people are starting to realize that it's not very smart, but they actually study brain patterns of long term meth users, and they found that 50% up to 50% of their dopamine producing cells were damaged or just shot. Yeah. So you literally I don't know if they can regenerate, do you? That remains to be seen. Remember, there's a whole study on MDMA that got it out in the first place about serotonin levels being able to regenerate. Right. I don't know. I don't think anybody knows yet if we're capable of doing that. We've not been studying it long enough, I think. Let's get some stats going, too, while we're doing this. But yeah, I was going to say what's encouraging about meth prevalence is that it's cut in half. People who have used it in the past month has gone down from 731,000 in 2006, and this is in the US. To 314,000 in 2008. That's half of what it was. Yeah. That's great. That's significant. In two years, that kind of dropped. So, yeah. I would say that the antimeth campaigns are working, but they're all dying. Yes. Which is possible. What's next? Prescription drugs. Now those are on the rise. Yeah. They're probably the most abused drug in the United States because everybody's on them. There's a huge problem with the elderly population right. Basically getting hooked on meds. Sure. There's a huge problem with the adolescent population basically getting hooked on their grandparents'meds. And there's been a four fold increase in people checking into rehab who are on prescription medications within the 21st century. Within the first decade, four times as many as there were before. And in 1998 right. 2.2% of people seeking treatment for any kind of drugs were on prescription drugs. Josh also with the scripts, as I like to call them, prescription drugs. In 1998, 2.2% of people seeking treatment reported abusing the pain relievers. And in 2000 and 810 years later, 10% reported abuse. Right. And that's just among people who are seeking treatment that can supposedly need it. Yes. I think one of the reasons why prescription drugs are so abused is because they're legal technically and they're socially accepted in a lot of ways. Oh, yeah, totally. People don't look at them as, like, a blanket drug. They look at him as all these different little drugs. Yeah. I mean, Robert Downey Jr. Used heroin, so he was this lawless scoundrel. But Chandler Bing gets hooked on back pills because he had a bad back and it's sort of dismissed. Yeah. You know, Jodie Foster said she would never work with Robert Downey Jr. Again after home for the holidays. Yeah. Was he messed up during that? Yeah, that was right in the middle of it. Yeah. That's a good movie. That's a shame. I never saw it. Yeah, it's a Thanksgiving movie. You should rent it for Thanksgiving. Speaking of heroin right? Yes. Apparently it's a lot more socially acceptable than it was before. But it's still pretty much like a junkie is a junkie in the US. Nobody's like, oh, he's just a junkie. It's like he's a junkie. That's kind of a huge deal. Well, they say that 23% of people who try heroin become dependent on it, so that's pretty substantial. Yeah, that's about a quarter. But at the same time, it's surprising though, if you were raised in the 80s, because you would think that 108% of people who try heroin become hooked on it. Yes. I remember the one big one that they used to say is if you try heroin just once, you're physically addicted to it. Yeah. That was one of the big campaigns for free. Same with crack. They said the same thing about crack. You tried one time and you're addicted. Right. In the US. There's actually been something of an increase from 2007 to 2008, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, from 153,000 people aged twelve and older in the US. Who said that they used heroin in the past month really? To 213,000 in 2008. I guess that is substantial, especially if you look at the population of heroin users. That tiny amount, that's kind of yeah, that's a big increase. Actually, now that I think about it. You got cocaine and cracker drugs. Josh, from 2002 to 2008, rates of past month cocaine use among kids declined from zero 6% to 4%, which is good. Sure. And it also dropped among young adults 18 to 25. So it seems like those drugs are sort of on the way in a little bit. Yeah. And again, if you look at meth, prescription drugs, or painkillers, especially heroin, coke, crack, all of these have an effect of targeting your reward center, producing that high, and you're learning to repeat this behavior. Right. Yeah. Again, this can also happen very strongly among compulsive behaviors like sex addiction. And Chuck, before you go off on sex addiction, let's say that according to the National Association of Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, the NASA, obviously there's about 3% to 6% of the American population that suffers from sex addiction. Right? Yeah. Which is the real compulsive behavior that's diagnosed. So, Chuck, sex addiction go well, clearly there is such a thing, but it's just so overused. Like you said, Jesse James is a sex addict. It's just these are men of privilege, is what it is. Tiger Woods, Jesse James, Brett Fare, they're guys that are in the position that they can have sex with whoever they want, whenever they want, and a lot of guys will take the opportunity to do it. Doesn't mean they're sex addicts. No. And like you said earlier, we may have even cut it out. I think the bad thing that it does is that it gives them sort of a free pass because they're just helpless to it, which is supposedly a bunch of things. Yeah. It is really I mean, basically, it seems like a defense for poor character. Yeah, exactly. Unless all these guys are in that 3%. Right. And again, I'm sure that there is, like, an actual sexual addiction. Viggo Mortensen had it in 28 days for three to 6% of the people. Right. And that's sad that there's probably a lot of people out there who need help or who actually are sex addicts, and people just don't believe them because it's like you're full of it. I don't believe Brett farb either. Right. And that's not as Brett Farv is. And the other thing with sex addiction, too, that we should point out is that, like many addictions, it's not even about the sex anymore. And apparently, once you are a sex addict, you're not even getting the enjoyment out of it anymore. Yes. It sucks. Yeah, I'd say so. I think, like we said, the point of sex addiction treatment is to restore the person back to a point where they can enjoy sex without being addicted to it. So it's not abstinence. It's having a healthy sex life. Right. And the same goes with binge eating disorders, which is about 1% to 3% of people have a binge eating disorder in the general population. If you're obese or you seek weight loss treatment or help with eating, the population is far higher, about a quarter of people who are obese and seek professional help for it to have binge eating disorder. And it's pretty much what it sounds like. It's like binging and purging, which is bulimia, but without the purging part. Right. Binging and binging. Yes. And gambling, Josh, is another compulsive behavior that I think has risen since Internet gambling has become more accessible. And another name for gambling compulsion is ludomania. Oh, really? Ludomania. Interesting. 15 million people, they say, display some sign of gambling addiction. Is that in the US. I guess, yeah. I think in this article originally, I had, like, 18 million or something like that. No, 2 million. So I guess it's gone up because that was a recent stat that I looked up today that you just read. Yeah. And I actually looked up one today that said 2.5 million people are gambling addicts. So there may be a variation between a gambling addict and people who display some sign of gambling addition, I guess. So, alcohol, josh, we haven't even talked about that yet. No, we haven't. I got some stats for you. And these are staggering because alcohol is the one I mean, most of these other things we talked about, aside from the prescription drugs or illicit drugs that you have to get illegally, but alcohol is the one that you can buy at the corner store, and not surprisingly, it's the biggest problem. Yeah. I'm glad you found this, too, because I had trouble finding some stats. So lay them on me, string bean. 43% of US. Adults have had someone related to them who is presently or was. An alcoholic. That's crazy. That sounds a lot like the kid who says that you wouldn't know his girlfriend because he met her at camp and she lives in Canada. That sounds like that kind of stance. Does it? 3 million US citizens older than 60 abuse alcohol or require it to function normally. And that's going up. You mentioned that your grandparents prescription drugs grandparents are like the baby boomers now. So as the baby boomers have aged into, quote unquote, the elderly range, a lot of them are still alcoholics and pill addicts and more so than their parents generation was or were. Yeah, what else you got any more on alcohol? Yeah, I got a bunch of good ones I'm seeing which ones are good. Men are three times more likely to be alcoholics than women. Wow. Did you know that? No. It's kind of surprising. And if you are happily married, you only have an 8.9% chance. Whereas if you are single or have a bad marriage, you are 30% more likely to become an alcoholic. I can see that. Especially if men are three times more likely to be an alcoholic. I could see somebody's wife saying like you need to stop drinking as much. Exactly. And I've got one more really sad. 1500,000 children aged nine to twelve are alcoholics. In this country they call them the party kids. Oh, really? So sad. I always forget about Drew Barrymore. Remember her little she was an outlier. You think so? Yes. Again, Nancy Reagan, 80s. She was the poster child for Nancy Reagan to Just say no campaign. Yeah, but she was drinking and doing cocaine when she was twelve and she was like the only kid in America who is doing those things. Okay, I thought you meant that and it was like eight actually, I think that she was doing cocaine. I got you. I thought you meant that her story was exaggerated. No, I'm just saying on a graph she's like way out here. Oh yeah. Well you always forget about that now though, with her because that was so yeah, she's definitely cleaned up. Well, she's cleaned up and I think she can go out and have a good time now. I think she had her demons when she was a little kid. I can't imagine being a kid and being an alcoholic. You know, that's the second podcast, I'd say this month that she's come up for roller derby and then this one. Yeah. So Chuck, you have a pill addiction. Sorry. We should also say that physicians tend to see alcohol withdrawal as far more dangerous physically than even heroin withdrawal because of the symptoms it produces. Yes, they have the pills kill you. We'll talk about what should we talk about is now the pills? Yeah, I was going to say that if you have a pill addiction, what's the best way to treat that? With more pills? Right. That's the human answer to things. Let's throw a pill at it. And we actually have come up with some pills to treat addictive behavior. Yeah, right. Well, I know they have one called Disulfourum, and it's sold under the name Antibuse, and that's the one they give you for alcohol. But basically, you take this pill and you drink even a little bit and it makes you feel awful. Yeah, basically, it does the opposite of your reward circuit punishes you and you learn the hard way not to drink anymore. And apparently you don't get used to that. So it's not like you can be on this bill and just kind of fight through it. It doesn't work that way. There's another one called now trek zone. Yes, I found that one, too. And that one's used to treat alcoholism as well. But basically it's an opioid antagonist, which means that it doesn't allow alcohol to give you that inflated sense of self worth like a gun does. Yeah, I think most of those affect the opioid receptors. Right? Yeah. But strangely so then there's also nalmaphene. That's an opioid antagonist, just like naltrexone. So they should both be able to treat alcoholism. Right. But strangely, naltrexone has shown most promise in treating alcoholism. Nalmapine has shown the most promise in treating gambling addiction, even though they're the same type of drug. You know what else to use it for? What? Shopaholics. Yeah. And I don't know, I think it just cuts down the throat, right? Yeah, I guess so. Any sort of compulsive behavior like that, it looks like it might target. Yeah. Interesting. It is interesting. And then, of course, you can just go after the genes, right? Yeah. They're coming a long way and targeting genes. And what they don't think at this point is that there's like a single gene that they can find. They think it's probably a combination of genes. And it's probably also largely epigenetic as well, too. Yeah, well, you should explain what that means again, just in case people didn't listen to that one. How could they not have I know that was a good thing. If you didn't go listen to can your Grandfather's Diet Shorten Your life? Basically, we found through epigenetics that what makes us us isn't just our parents genetic contribution. We can actually affect the way our genes work, turning them on and off and amplifying them and lowering their frequency by the stuff we do, including drugs, drinking, the way we eat, pretty much everything has an effect. Yeah. And the other thing, too, you pointed out, which I thought was really interesting, is not only are there gene combinations that make you more susceptible to this, if you're not susceptible to it, it's not like you just are lacking those genes. They're actually genes that make you less susceptible to addiction. Right. So like the ALDH two gene, people who have two copies of this gene don't become alcoholics as easily as people who have just one or don't have it at all. Yeah. Isn't that weird? That is very weird. And if you have low neuropeptide y, which is a hormone, well, if you're a mouse, I should say, you're probably not going to want the booze as much as your fellow mice. Right. I did find another interesting one, too, about relapse rates. They've even kind of pegged it down to that level. They found that a variant of the opioid receptor gene, ASP 40, you have a lower rate of relapse with alcoholism if you have the ASN 40. Really? By 26% to 47%. So even if you try to quit, certain genes will say you're more likely to relapse than others to just give up. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of relapse, there is some interesting tidbit to bat interesting, Tibet, that we left out about heroin relapse. What did we say in 2004? Get this, the entrance rate for heroin treatment, right, in the US yes, for the fifth time, was higher than the entrance for heroin treatment for the first time. I believe that. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. It's really hard to kick, I guess. I would think so. But try, try again. Or go watch train spotting and never try it in the first place. Yes. Or watch Sister Act two while you're high on heroin. And I'll bet that does the same thing. That has a similar effect of strange fighting. I'll bet it's horrific. Back in the habit. Yes. If you want to know more about drugs and addiction in general, we strongly recommend you read this strangely prim article. Is that early on in your career? It's pretty early. I was a little stiffer back then, too. It's called how addiction works. You can find it by typing that into the handysarch bar@hotelforce.com. And while you're doing that, try rehab, too. Interesting one. Yeah, well, we should tackle that at some point, too. Maybe we will. Something happened to me throughout this podcast since I said handy search bar. That means, of course, it's time for listener mail. That was the breaks being applied because we have a small bit of administrative detail here, Josh, at the onset to plug our new app for the iPhone that is coming soon. I'm very excited about this. I am playing with it right now because I was looking up to get a beta version because I work here and you can access all of our podcasts, video and audio. When you click on our big dumb faces, you can access every single episode we've ever done. Listen to it right there. The new episodes pop up automatically. You can go to our blog through there, you can go to Facebook and Twitter through there. You can watch our video podcast from our stuff they don't want you to know and cool stuff on the planet. Or you can just go back and stare at our faces all day, too. You can do that if you want. It's also got a huge repository of articles from the website housetoforce.com. Yeah, and they're broken down into their chapters as well. It's really easy to navigate. Like, we created a new way to access the site and all of the related content for the iPhone. Like for a mobile system. Yeah, they did an awesome job with the design. I was like, I wasn't sure at first, but it looks really awesome. And like you said, it's easy to work and free. Yes. I'm very excited I can finally go to sleep when this thing finally comes out. So looking forward to it. And no more excuses about not being able to listen to our show. Because if you get the app, you will always be able to listen to the show. Exactly. So you can just enter the App Store on your iPhone or go into it via itunes and download the How Stuff Works iPhone app free of charge. Got us. Now back to our regularly scheduled program. Then I'm going to call this an update from Sarah, the amazing 13 year old fan. Awesome. Yeah, I saw that yesterday. My goal is to eventually do this podcast through graduation for Sarah, and we just have updates from her from the age of eleven to 18. That's Michael. I wrote her back. You did? Jerry, did you? She did not. All right, this is from Sarah. Hey, guys. Chucker's, Josh, Jerry and Frank. The chair. I haven't chatted with you in a while, so I'm going to tell you all what's been going on in my world. School started about two months ago, and believe it or not, I actually like it since I'm in the 8th grade now. I feel like no one looks down to me. They didn't really anyway, since I'm five foot eight. Crazy. She's five foot eight. She's like almost as tall as I am. This school year will be full of fine arts, which are my favorite inquired drama. We have been working on Susaco Jr. Which is a musical based on the works of Dr. Seuss. I'm having a ball in that class. I get to act, sing and dance. Three of my favorite things. By the way, you all are on my favorites list, too. In honor of this unique musical, I was wondering if you guys and gal would consider doing a podcast on theater. Guys. All aka doctor Seuss. So when I wrote her back, I was like, I have to run this by Chuck, see what he thinks about it, but I'm totally down with that. Well, we covered him on the webcast. I know, I loved him anyway, but once he really got into his history, he was pretty awesome. So you want to? Yeah, let's do it. For sure. In school, we have a cooking class. In our first class, we made a meal. We have about ten students in this class, so we split off into three groups. One group, not mine, was assigned to make cookies. They made the batter, but messed up and put a quarter cups of salt in the cookies instead of a teaspoon of salt. That's so crazy. Yeah. The girls baked the cookies and when the teacher tried them, she came up with a brilliant idea. We should give them to the 8th grade boys. Let's just say the look on their faces was really hard to describe. It was hilarious watching the boys run to the water fountain. I can't think of anything else to say. Thanks for reading. From Sarah, the now amazing 13 year old fan who started out as the amazing eleven year old fan. Yeah. That means I'm almost the amazing 40 year old podcaster. So I'm reading this book called The Consumer Republic and I just found out did you know that homemade classes are the earnest result of the consumer empowerment movement of the Depression? Really? Yeah. Did you take Comic? Yeah. Me too. It was one of my favorite classes, actually. That's awesome. Wow, this classroom looks like a house. Yeah, I like that. And we kind of just get to cut up and make cookies and eat them. Exactly. Did you take shop? I took that one, too. I was much more intimidated in that class. Like wood shop? Yeah, some schools have a car shop. We never had that. Did you all have that? We had one. I never took it. Auto shop? Yeah. Those kids could take a car apart and put it back together. I wish I would have. I wonder how much more I would have liked shop had I been as comfortable then as I am now around people missing a finger. I could have been a changed person. I got nothing else. Well, if you have a story about losing a finger, we want to hear it. It better be for real, though. None of this lupaga stuff. Wrap it up in an email and ship it post haste to stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more Housetofworks? Check out our blog on the Housestepworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy See, 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." | ||
How Dreadlocks Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-dreadlocks-work | Dreadlocks are matted coils of hair that form a very distinctive (and often misunderstood) hairstyle. So what's the deal with dreads? In this episode, Josh and Chuck examine the long history of dreadlocks and walk you through the process of dreading hair. | Dreadlocks are matted coils of hair that form a very distinctive (and often misunderstood) hairstyle. So what's the deal with dreads? In this episode, Josh and Chuck examine the long history of dreadlocks and walk you through the process of dreading hair. | Thu, 25 Nov 2010 06:40:29 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=6, tm_min=40, tm_sec=29, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=329, tm_isdst=0) | 30620178 | 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 am. I am Josh Clark. With me is Charles W, chuck Bryant. I knew you were waiting for it. You had no idea. I didn't know that. But I knew there was some sort of reggae thing coming up. That was all the cuff. Really. No way. It really was. I thought about it and my stomach got all butterflyish and I was like, I'm going to do it. No, I did it. A plus, sir. Thank you. Chuck, how are you doing? I'm great. You're feeling good today, aren't you? I've been under the weather again. Yeah. I just don't feel quite right. Like, if ten is feeling great and one is sick, I'm at like five or six. Wow. Is it that staph infection still? I don't know what the deal is. I would imagine that would have lasting effects after. It's not like a normal stomach bug. Sure. It's like a stomach terrorist. Our podcast is on a watch list. Now that I just said that is it. I think so. Does that mean more audience? Possibly. At least the NES will be listening. Good. Chuck? Yes. Back in my hippie days, there was this question that was on everyone's mind. There was a piece of knowledge that wasn't passed around adequately among the hippie counterculture that I was hanging out with. Okay. And that was exactly how to dread your hair if you didn't have kinky or curly hair. So the people that did that kept it a guarded secret or else they didn't tell anybody or they were vague when they did tell. What I suspect is based on my experience with humorless hippie people. Sure. They did say because they didn't want to overtly make themselves look like jerks and say, I'm not telling. Right. They would just be very vague and unhelpful. Plus they probably don't want to make it seem like it took too much work. That's probably part of it as well, because that's not as cool if you had to work at it three or 4 hours a day or if your mom was helping you on a Saturday night in the kitchen. It just kind of happened, man. So I remember having this conversation with this friend of mine who actually ended up on TV later on because I guess the dreads didn't work out. He had a TV show on Http actually. Really? Yeah, it was called bushwacked. He went in like gorilla, garden people's, landscapes. That's awesome. Anyway, he was talking to me once. He was playing with his hair and I noticed that it was really greasy, hadn't been washed in several days. Greasy. Just when he had dreads. Now he was trying to get I asked him, what are you doing with your hair? Right? And he's like, I'm trying to dread it. I was like, you actually have to wash it, man, because that grease is keeping it from tangling. And I remember this look coming over his face like, wow, you just blew my mind. That was the closest I ever came to being able to explain how dreadlocks work until today. Now, after years of wondering, and then even more years of not caring, we get to the point where I finally understand how dreadlocks are formed among white people, especially. Yeah, sure. And I think the history is a little more interesting than my stupid anecdote no. Than the actual process. But we'll cover the process, too, because there's people out there right now that are wondering. It behooves us. There are 1920 year olds out there who have greasy hair and can't figure out why it's not dreading or they put gasoline. You ever hear that? No. That's a very bad rumor that gasoline in your hair helped it not up. Not true. Gasoline helps your hair catch on fire. Yeah, I'm sure that happened more than once. All right. So, Chuck, you were saying about the history of the dreadlock. What are we talking about? We were talking about the history of the dreadlock. How's that for a comeback? I can't wait to hear how Jerry edits that. Good luck. So, Josh, prehistoric humans probably had some form of dreadlock from the neglect method of forming dreadlocks. Yes. Letting it tangle up, letting it do its own thing and matt up and weave itself into dreads. Right. And right about here, I think people are going to have a question like, well, didn't people who lived in prehistoric areas, they didn't wash their hair, so how did their hair dread? Why wasn't their hair greasy? You want to know the answer to that? That I've heard? I do. Prehistoric people lived out in the woods and slipped on the ground and leaves and dirt got in their hair and actually carried the grease away. Oh, really? Is that true? That's what I've heard. I didn't do my standard intensive research for this particular podcast. I don't know if that's true, but let's go with that. That's a Josh theory. I like it. Thanks. Well, dude, they had discovered mummies. Peruvian mummies as old as 200 to 800 Ad. Had dreads. Wow. And more recently than that, Aztec priests in the 14th and 15th century had demanded dreads. Right? Yes. And they're not all there's also, contemporary groups, religious groups specifically. Dreads tend to pop up, it turns out, as a sign of religious devotion in a lot of cases. Right. Yeah. The fact that this is God's body and even grooming, it would not be an aesthetic valve. So if you take that aesthetic valve, you're not going to do anything to your body. Right. You're just leaving your hair to do what it will naturally. Right. Exactly. Who do we have? I know the Coptic church in Ethiopia. Priests in that church still Christians, right. I say that there's Christians in africa, in India, the Sadhu sect of Hinduism, they have the old dreads in honor of Shiva. Wouldn't it be weird to see an Indian guy with dreads? I've seen dreads on so many different kinds of people now. I don't think anything would surprise me. No, I'm with you, but I think one of the few ethnic groups that I've not seen dreads on are South Asians. Yeah. Well, and actually in Japan, it's pretty popular now, but yes, I've seen agents with dreads. I've never seen an Indian. Interesting. Yeah. With dreadlocks. That's why I'm like calling for listener mail right now. If you are of Indian descent and you have dreadlocks, please send in a photo. That's right. Okay. Now back to the show. Rasta Buddhist in Japan. That's what we were just talking about. Members of the Black Muslim Bay Fall sect in synagogue. Right. Maori's in New Zealand. The Kiwi are Kiwi friends. Maori, isn't it? Maori. I don't know. I'm going to go with Maori. Okay. And different African tribes were dreadlocks angola and maybe places like that. Right. And the rosters, right? Well, yeah, sure. So when you think of dreadlocks, you think of Bob Marley, and when you think of Bob Marley, you think of reggae and rostafarianism, basically, right. Among other things. Yeah. I left one thing out, didn't it? Yeah. And he was pretty much the poster boy for dreadlocks and Rastafarianism, and he almost say single handedly, but he was a large force in introducing dreadlocks to the west. Sure. And the symbolism, the mythology behind them, and how it was associated with Rosafarianism, which, it turns out, Jamaican rosafarianism isn't that old. Yeah. I thought it was much older than, what, 80 years. Yeah. It came out of the thirties when Haley Selossi, the first, was thrown emperor of Japan. Did you know that? Ethiopia. Right. And apparently a sect of Jamaicans believed him to be the Messiah. Right. And built a religion, Rastafarianism, around him. Exactly. And the dreadlocks are a big part of that because they feel that it has to do with keeping you in a pure state as God created you as well. And they point to Samson in the Bible, even though we're going to get to that. That's a myth. Yes. So they say. And they also it was sort of a sort of rebelling against the European invasion of the world. Right. The imperialism. European imperialism. And the author of this article, Matt Sailor, who I do not know, do you know? Must be a freelancer. Matt Sailor points out that it's rooted in the idea of the west as a place of captivity, Africa as paradise. And as you were saying, it kind of rebels against European ideals of beauty. Right. Or it did at the time. We're not going to have the lustrous blonde hair or fine hair. Exactly. We're going to grow together. Matted Clumps right. And we're going to be proud of it. In your face. In your face. And it's possible that the Rosafarians were inspired by the Mao tribe. Yeah, that's what I wanted to know, is where it came from. Well, this is possibly where it came from. The Mao Mao are located in Kenya, and they were a tribe that rose up against British colonial rule. Right. And actually, there's a Magnum Pi. Episode that puts Jonathan Higgins in the middle of a Mao Mao uprising. Really? In the 50s? Yeah. Interesting, that one. That's good. That sounds familiar. I think I might have, actually. There's a guy with a spear there's, like a Mama warrior that's stalking the estate. The Robins nest, as it's called. Yeah. Anyway, they think that they were inspired by the Mau Mau in their uprising against British colonial rule, which makes a lot of sense. And they also think that this may be where the name Dreadlock came from. Right? Yeah. That it inspired dread in the hearts of the British soldiers. Right. And it's possible that it's not necessarily attached to the Mao Mao. That Rastafarians realized that it possibly inspired dread in the hearts of Westerners. Right. It's always dread in the heart. Yeah. You're not going to feel that anywhere. Maybe just in the heart. Maybe the stomach. Dread in the loins of the British soldiers. Loin. Dread is the worst. Josh It is so dreadlocks today. They spread, obviously. You said Bob Marley had a lot to do with that, with his popularity. So I'm told in the 1970s, I posted a Bob Marley video on the Facebook page one day, and I got killed for it. Why? I didn't know that there were so many anti reggae people out there. And I'm not Mr. Rega at all, but I like a little Bob every now and then. Sure. As did some people. But some people are like, I can't believe he posted this. Reggae is the worst. No, it's not correct. Thank you. That's really weird. I've heard of people who are like, no, I'm not really into reggae. It seems like one of those music genres that's not really polarizing. It's either you kind of like it or you're really into it. Not you're really into it or you hate it. They hated it. That's crazy. I think they were are you sure they weren't confusing it with country music? Maybe. So maybe they thought, Bob Marley is a country music guy, so he and his whalers in the 70s made it very popular in the United States and actually everywhere. Sure, he made it popular on one hand, but it also increased the anti dreadlock. I wouldn't say it's a movement, but, like, with the whole marijuana thing and it was tied to, some people would say, like drug use. How so? Well, the Rostafarians, they like their pot explained. From what I'm told, there's no explanation. And the writer Mr. Dream. Sailor also pointed out movies like Marked For Death and Predator Two. Predator Two, both released in 1090 actually had something to do because they depicted menacing gangs with dreadlocks. I don't know about that. I don't know if they hastened it or else if they were maybe born out of some sort of public view of dreadlockianism. Sure, but it's a good point. Like he's saying, we used to view people with dreadlocks as menacing drug dealers who corrupted children, and now we view them as wealthy kids who go to college and follow fish around on tour, because that's popular. So, Chuck, let's say you are an aspiring fish tour kid, right? Is fish even on tour any longer? Do they get back together and break up and get back together again? I don't know. We'll find out. Let's say you're following somebody string cheese incident. Let's say you got your hula hoop and your little fairy wings, and you're like, it's time for me to take the third step, which is to dread my hair. Right. And you want to get things started, and we'll talk about how to do with kinky hair and with straight hair, right? Yeah. Much easier with kinky hair. Let's start from the beginning. What's step one? Because there's literally a step by step list of instructions in this article. Step one, Josh. Yes. Which is what your friend did not do. You got to wash your hair and you got to dry it. Yes. That's the very first thing you do. And a really good recommendation is to wash your hair with a very natural type of shampoo, because those things strip your hair and you want your hair stripped and dried, basically. You don't want any residue on it whatsoever. None. Certainly no grease. No grease. Step two, Joshua, divided into sections. And by sections, what we mean is when you pull a clump of your hair together, and you can either clamp it with something, or you can just do one section at a time, or you can separate it all out. Right. You want to clamp it at the end, the tip. Well, yeah, but what you got to remember is make little squares, basically, so you can see your scalp and a little square, and that's a section. But each section, in theory, will end up being its own dreadlock. Right. So if you want five huge dreadlocks, then you're going to have five sections. But you don't want that. Well, some people do. Well, yeah, sure. Some people. Let them grow together. You ever seen those? Like the beaver tail? Sure. Those are awesome. Yeah, they're impenetrable. We'll talk about that in a minute, actually. Who will? Step three, Josh, is. Well, like I said, pay attention to the size of the section. Right. Like you said, when you pull your hair, it should form pretty much a perfect square. And the bigger the square, the bigger the dread is going to be. Yes. Right. So that's kind of your rule of thumb. Exactly. Step four is you want to add a little product this is probably the most contentious step. Yeah. Because some people are purists. Right. They don't do that. Some people just use a little water. Right. Some people say wax. A lot of people say wax. Aloe cream. Yeah. We should say this is for kinky hair. Is it? Yeah, aloe and cream is for sure. Okay. Well, they say the Rossafarians are really the purest, and they only use, like, purified water, too. Right. They're not putting wax in their hair. But if you use straight hair and you're going to use products, you should use wax. Okay, where are we? Step five, you want to start twisting in a clockwise direction. And the reason you do that is so you always remember which direction you started. Because if one day you go to palm roll, it counterclockwise. You're going to start undoing your dreads unknowingly. And when you twist your hair lock, you want to clip it at the end and explain backComing, because I don't fully understand that. It's easy. If you ever approach the cat and it's just sitting there, it looks all happy and content, and you're like, I hate cats. So you pet it the opposite way of the way its hair goes. Yes. Cats don't like that. No, they don't. It's hilarious because it rubs them the wrong way. That's where the phrase comes from. This is pretty much the basis of backComing. So what you do is you have your tight product counterclockwise rolled hair. Actually, we should say this is for straight hair. You don't back comb kinky hair. Okay. So you haven't hand rolled your hair yet if it's straight, but you have some products in it. You have your segments that are eventually going to become dread. Maybe it's clipped at the bottom. Okay. What you're doing is you're taking a fine toothed metal comb, okay. You're holding the tip of the hair and you're combing it upwards all the way to the root. And you keep doing this again and again and again until basically you really can't get the comb up through the hair any longer because you just tangled it so badly. And then you move on to the next segment and do that again and again. Basically, what you're doing is you're just jumpstarting your dreadlocks. Well, yeah, we say jumpstart because if you want dreadlocks tomorrow, you're out of luck. Not necessarily. You can pay through the nose and probably be made fun of in certain circles. A loctitian to go to a loctian who will use a crocheting kit. Do they really look like dredge or they look like braids? I don't know. It probably depends on how messy the loctitian makes them look. I'm going to go ahead and go on limb and say that's not genuine and they don't look like real dreadlocks. Well, yeah, if you're one of those people who will only wash your dreads in natural, pure water and that's it, you're probably not going to go to a lactician. I'm a purist. Josh. Are you? That's how I roll. Okay. So if you are a purist and you don't want to go to a loctitian and pay a lot of money and look silly, then it's going to take a while. And it ranges, depending on your hair, the texture of your hair, anywhere from a few months to a year sometimes. Right. And for kinky hair, there's actually a couple of stages. The budding stage is where the locks really start to kind of intertwine. This lasts anywhere from two months to six months. Right, right. And then at the end of that budding stage, where it's really starting to kind of like not close to the scalp, it'll start growing out and it'll keep nodding as it grows out. Right. What you have, my friend, is called a dreadlock. You're in the locking stage, aka the point of no return. Yeah. And since you mentioned the route, you don't want to tangle it too close to your scalp because it can actually break off and kill that knot. So you want it can also really hurt. Well, yeah, I'm sure give you the old headache. You want to have a little bit of space there so your hair can still grow normally. And this is something I didn't know, but it makes perfect sense. As your hair grows and dies, it just becomes part of the dread. Right. So it's not like when you see a 14 inch dreadlock, all that goes back to the root of the scalp. Right. Most of that is dead hair. Yeah. It just kind of, like, gets caught up. It never falls out. You can't shed. It's pretty cool. And you're certainly not cutting your hair off. We should say what palm rolling is. I think we mentioned that twice, and we didn't really say what it was. So let's say you decided to use wax or something like that. Let's go with wax because that seems to be the best thing. Okay. You put a little on your dread and you roll it in that clockwise position again. It's basically just maintenance and encouragement of those tangled knots to stay tangled. That's a lot of work, man. It is. So all that was for you. We entered the locking stage with kinky hair. With straight hair, you want to keep applying wax a few times a week, actually, after the initial tangling. The initial waxing? Yes. Well, they said to blow dry it, so the wax actually kind of melts into your hair. Yes. So we'll get to that. Let's talk about how to do this. There's something that a lot of people don't understand, and that is that if you have mature dreadlocks, let's say it's been six months to two years yeah. You've got your actual dreads going. They're all looking sharp. If you don't take care of your hair, you're going to have all sorts of little critters growing in it. Well, sure. Aka. Mildew is a big problem, actually. That's why a lot of people wash their hair with, like, tea tree oil based soap, because it'll get in there and kill it's an antimicrobial well. And that's also from improper drying, too right. So when you wash your hair, a lot of times, especially when you're washing it while it's in the budding or locking stages, they're not mature dreadlocks. You want to put a pantyhose on your head, son. You got a penny on your head, right. And you want to basically just let the water go through. Get your fingers in there. You want to keep your fingers out of there. Right. Let the hair go through, wash it with tea tree oil soap. And then when you get out the drying part this is very important, you squeeze it out, ring them out, especially if they're mature. You can ring them out more easily. Sure. If they're not mature, possibly, you just roll them in your pantyhose and then you blow dry the heck out of them until they're totally dry. Right. The funny thing is, there are very few blow dryers on tour. Yeah, I imagine. So you're saying they have mildewy heads haircare products. This is sort of, again, like with all things, if you're purist, you're not into it at all. And everyone has their own thing they use from hot oil treatments to gels and salt water accelerator and stuff like that, to really tighten them up. Right. Linen crabt style. Again, if you are washing your hair using a product and you don't want to use the standard leaves your hair silky and lustrous because silky and lustrous, by encasing the hair in, like, some sort of substance that keeps it from tangling with other stuff. So that's the opposite of what you want with threads. A chemical agent, probably. That's the European standard of beauty. Yes. Josh if you sleep, you should wear, like, a bandana or one of those cool knit caps or a pillowcase, so you don't, like, crush your dreadlocks and misshape them unless it's what you're going for. Right. And you're talking about dreadlocks that they'll eventually weave together into one big dread. Yeah, if you want if you want that, go for it. Just don't keep them separate. But if you don't want that, you should probably be aware that your dreads are eventually going to go to that place. So you want to kind of keep them separate, rolled apart. That's part of regular maintenance. Josh you have dreadlocks and you don't want them any longer. Do you have to shave your head? Pretty much. No, not true. Pretty much, too. I've known people that got rid of their dreads through a lot of work in combing, actually. Remember the kristen who wrote in with the sun solely yeah, a long time ago. Of course I remember. She's an artist. She had dreadlocks and she got rid of them because I remember she sent in another picture, like eight months later or something, and she had lustrous European beauty hair. Really? Yeah. And she said that she was able to use lots of conditioner, I think, and comb it out, and I think it takes a long time. So you don't have to shave your head. You probably will, though. Probably? Well, I would imagine it probably depends on a couple of things, like how long the distance between your scalp and the start of the real dread is. Right. And if it's close to the scalp, you probably are going to have to cut them off and shave your head to make it even. Yes. I think you would want to. Like, after having dreadlocks for that long, why untangle them just to have a big mop of hair? Just go the opposite. That's what I say. And it's funny that this was brought up because I was recently reading about your Balkan vampires and apparently one light reading, you just laughed at me. I don't know. I didn't know that you were into that. Well, I'm not. It was in Harper's. Okay. It was interesting, though. Sure. Anyway, the author was talking about how this one particular type of vampire in Croatia was known to braid the mans of horses so tight that they couldn't be detangled. And if you cut it off, it was so close to the neck it would kill a horse. Really? It's what I hear. That's awful. So, Josh, you want to end up with some myths and truths? Yes. Did we cover everything else? Yes. Samson had dreadlocks in the Bible. True or not? I'm going to go with myth. You're right, Sampson did have the long hair. I don't know if you noticed enough, but all of these were myths. They are actually just ruined it, though. Sampson did have the long hair, apparently, where he got all the strength and all that stuff, but they said it was more likely, like ornamental braids dreadlock. More likely, though, we don't know. Josh ancient Celts and Egyptians had dreadlocks. Myth or not. True? It's a myth. Oh. And this came from artwork. Ancient artwork was misinterpreted, basically, over the years, and the Egyptians, I think, shaved their head and wore headdresses made out of braided hair. Easily confused. Yeah. Josh dreadlocks can stop bullets. This has not been tested. I know. Bob Marley was shot like, eight times, once in an assassination attempt and survive that, it's possible that his dreads deflected. It interesting, but a very tight weave has been shown to deflect bullets. Yeah. Just last year. That lady I remember, I think we talked about on the webcast. No, you blogged about it. Oh, did I? Yeah. She was shot in the weave. Yeah. And it stopped a bullet. Well, in theory, because the way dreads work, it's like jute rope or a woven rug. Each hair is intertwined. And that's sort of how, when we did the bulletproof fest. It's a similar theory, just a really tightly woven fibers, right? Very strong fibers. But yes, the weave is definitely part of it, a huge part of it. You need to get one of those guys with the big beaver tail dread and just hold it out and shoot a gun through it and see what he says. He'd be like, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? And finally, Josh, dreadlocks can be donated to charity, cut off and donated just like regular hair. I'm going to say that that's a myth. That is a myth. Locks of love and wigs for kids do not accept dreadlocks, and you can actually get fired for having dreadlocks. Did you know that? Yes. This makes sense to me. There's a lot of discrimination that corporations can still exercise against their employees, and one of them is like, if you don't appear clean, you can be fired. You can be fired if you are too fat, in your company's opinion. Really? Yeah. In this particular article, though, Dream Seller makes a point that if you are a rostafarian or practicing rostafarian and they fire you because you got a pretty good lawsuit on your hands, but if you're just some kid with dreads and they fire you because of your dreads, you're going to be fired. You go back to selling T shirts out of your van. Yes. In the parking lot of the fish show. Yeah. I got nothing else. Nor do I. So if you want to learn more about dreadlocks, seriously, this is one of the most helpful articles I've seen. Steps one through six of how to make dreads. There's another eight or ten steps in dreadlock haircare. It's really when you should go to if you want to know how to make dreads. If you want to make dreads out of your hair, go check out how dreadlocks work in the search bar@housetofworks.com. It means it's time for listener mail. Yes, Josh. I am going to call this from Eddie, who hopes things get better. Hi. My name is Eddie. I'm 15. I was 16 in the 10th grade. The comment you made about how it will only get better if I just hold on and work through high school was something I really needed to hear. Awesome. With friendships that I have no idea what's going on, to work that keeps piling on. I was worried I would be stuck like this after school ended. The news about the real world being a lot worse than high school doesn't give me easy thoughts, so I'm glad to get a different viewpoint. Thank you. And I will take this opportunity now, Josh, to mention the It Gets Better project, because we didn't even know about this when we mentioned that. No, if you were listening to us mentioned that I don't remember what podcast it was transgender. No, it was jealousy. I think we're talking about high school and kids killing themselves in high school and we didn't mention that. It gets. Better Campaign. We just pretended like we made it up ourselves when we recorded it. It Gets Better campaign had been launched, like, the day before, and we hadn't heard of it yet. Honestly, we weren't shirking it. So, along those lines, we want to give it an official plug. It is a project called itgetsbetterproject.com, and it is targeted at LGBT youth right now. My personal hope is that they expand that to include anyone who feels like an outsider in any way, specifically anyone who feels like an outsider in high school. Well, yes, because if you feel like an outsider is an adult, I mean, high school outsiders. But it's a really great program founded by Dan Savage in September, and users can upload videos of themselves testimonials as adults, talking to kids, saying that, trust me, it gets better. Hang in there. Yeah. And everybody's been doing it. I know. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both have. Oh, really? Yeah. That's nice. What about Carl Rove and Dick Cheney? They actually did one together. It was so cute and adorable. It's so playful together. So that was from Eddie. And if you want to check out Eddie on YouTube, he's a YouTube channel called Comic Dud, and he draws comics for that channel, and you can go there and see what Eddie has to say. Okay. And, Eddie, it does get better. Trust me, buddy. Thank you for that, Eddie. And if you have a photo of an Indian, Asian, Indian with dreadlocks, we want to see it. Send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit Howstofworks.com the Housestepworks.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 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." | ||
a6900230-5462-11e8-b449-9be1d18b7c52 | How the Concorde Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-concorde-worked | The concorde was a wonderful thing, a super fast commerical airliner that got you across the pond in half the time. But it was small and cramped, noisy and a big money loser. Climb aboard and get ready for Mach 1. | The concorde was a wonderful thing, a super fast commerical airliner that got you across the pond in half the time. But it was small and cramped, noisy and a big money loser. Climb aboard and get ready for Mach 1. | Tue, 02 Oct 2018 13:42:20 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=13, tm_min=42, tm_sec=20, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=275, tm_isdst=0) | 54074380 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there frank the chairs in here. My thick tongue, chuck's haircut, chuck's beard, chuck's hat. Jerry's glasses. Jerry's on the phone not knowing what's going on. Everything is right with the world. Oh, I've been spelling this wrong all these years, by the way. You've been spelling out, like, flight of the Concord between that and Concord with no E. Okay. And all my writings on the Concord. Right. Well, you have that blog concord days. Yeah. And I noticed there's no E on it. And I spelled days D-A-Z-E. You did? Chuck, we share a mind sometimes because I was about to had I not been taking a sip of coffee, we would have said that at the same time, daze. Yeah, well, I was waiting on you to take a sip so I could steal that. Thanks, too. In fact, I tried to get a and we're going to talk a little bit later about the experience of flying on the famed and fabled Concord jet airliner. That's what we're talking about. But I tried to get in touch. I know a person who made that trip. Who? Justin's mom. I don't know her. Justin I've never met as well. Well, imagine Justin, but a mother. Okay. Yeah. Justin's mom, Carrie, from England, and she made, since I've known her, took, I guess, one of the last trips, early 2000s. Yeah. That would have been I think it was 2003, October 2003. When it was decommissioned. Yeah. So I hit her up on Facebook and was like, Carrie let me know what it was like. But she's in Hurricane Ravage, North Carolina, so she's probably like, buzz off, Chuck. Everything all right with her? Yeah, they're good. They went inland. Shout out to all of our peeps who had to go through Florence. Yes. My sister was there right in the middle of it. She okay? Yeah, she's good. Trees down in the area, but, like, minimal house damage. And they're high. They sit higher up, so it's not like they're not flooded. That's good because a lot of the area is. Yeah, and she was also I mean, she said it's bad, but she said the news is always just so sensationalized. Dude. She's like, this is not like Hurricane Katrina or anything. Did you see that clip of the Weather Channel, dude? No. So what, was he just, like, making stuff up? No, leaning into the wind like he was about to be blown over. And then in the background, two guys just stroll by in, like, shorts and flip flops. I don't even think their hair was blowing. That's shameful. It is shameful. And I'm so glad that that made the round, because that's ridiculous. It is. Especially for a weather event where there's genuine fear and you could incite panic. I think that there's a lot wrong with that. So let's shake on it. Done. Okay. All right. So Concordes. Oh, yeah. So we're talking Concords today. I never got to fly on one. You didn't? We're going to go ahead and assume Jerry didn't. And I don't know anybody who did, but I would have loved to have and I think I've stepped on board one. There's one at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. By Dulles, I thought you meant you boarded a flight and they're like, sir, you're on the wrong plane. Right. Back when you could do that. Sir, you're asleep right now. This is a dream. I can't remember if they actually let you step on it or not. Where was this? Dulles. Dulles Airport. The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Is there one still there? Yes, it's called the Steven f udvar haze center. I just call it the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum at Dulles. Right. It's really nice. They have like a Stealth blackhawk? No, not Blackhawk. Blackbird. SR 71 Blackbird. Oh, yeah, sure. Did you know that those things are built so that when they're on the ground, the plates that hold them like that make up the plane. They have gaps in between them. And the reason is because that thing flies so fast and gets so hot that the plates expand. Wow. And it becomes solid when it really counts. But on the ground, apparently, when it's taking off, it would just leak fuel everywhere because it doesn't have like a solid plate to speak of. That's like us, basically become solid when it counts. Anyway, at the Saran Space Museum at Dulles, which is frankly worth flying to Dulles just to go to it's. That good. Is a Concord. I think it's an Air France Concord. One of the last ones that was ever flown. Yeah. I'm a fan of air and space museums. You would love this one, ma'am. I wouldn't say I'm like an aviation hound, but I know people that are. Well, you don't have to be to appreciate this. It's for everybody. And there's a space shuttle there, too. Yeah, I'm going to have to check that out. Yeah, for sure. I used to go to the one in Pensacola, the Naval Air Museum there, growing up, and I just thought it was cool. Walk around looking at planes. You're going to love this. Well, all right, so let's go back in time to the swinging 60s in England. Yeah. Which was pretty swinging. It was. In fact, very quickly, I want to recommend that Michael Caine documentary My Generation. I haven't seen it. It's not just about Michael Caine. He's sort of like the host of what London was like in the late sixty s. Oh, cool. So pretty cool. That whole Alfie thing. Alfie and the Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithful and he and Albert Finney and just like saying to the class establishment, yeah, we're young and also super rich. Well, eventually, sure. But anyway, in the sixties. This is the early sixty s and quite a swing in. Then the British and the French governments got together and they say, hey, let's build a really fast plane together. Yeah, because it turned out that the British and the French were both building what's called a supersonic transport plane SST. And they weren't the only ones doing it either. It was the Soviets and the Americans. The British and the French were all working on their own supersonic transport plane at the same time. Which is weird until you think about jet airliners were really new and so everybody was all about jet airliners, which made them think, well, what goes even faster than that? Supersonic planes that travel faster than the speed of sound. So everybody was working on them at the time. Yeah. I'm surprised that it was that early in airline travel when they thought, hey, maybe we can go really fast. That seemed like it would be like a 30 years on development. I think there was a lot more like inspiration and enthusiasm and let's shoot for the stars, money to burn. Sure. Who cares about the environment kind of thing. Yeah, but I really get that sentiment because think about it, four different nations working on the same kind of pie in the sky project. It's impressive. So they built a couple of prototypes and then the very first flight of the Concorde was 1969. Together they made about 20 or they made 20. Not about this is actually something where they know the number. Although I did see 16 and 14 production models, but every place I've seen 16 was in more places. So not 20. No production models. Got you. So like, I guess prototypes and stuff don't count. I see like 16 that actually flew commercially. Gosh, what did they do with the prototypes and just trash them or something? I don't know, maybe that's dulles or no, that was probably a production model. Yeah, it definitely was because you want seat stains right on display in all their glory. This one smells like Gerard departure. Oh, God. Not that guy. All right, so you talked about the Soviets they built, and this is hysterical, but they built something called the Tu 144. The Tupolev, and they nicknamed it with a K, the Concord ski. Right. That seems like a joke. Well, I think the Brits and the French nicknamed it. Okay. And kind of derisively too, because what the Soviets came up with looks an awful lot like what the Brits and the French came up with. Sure. And it makes you wonder one of two things. Was there like espionage going on on one side or the other? One group was spying on the other group? I would say yes, probably. Or is it just that the Concord follows these aerospace principles that any highly skilled, well trained aerospace engineer would follow and come up with on their own? Probably that too. I wonder. That makes more sense, though, because Concordsky was so hysterical that it seems like something from the Benny Hill Show or something. Right. By this time I can laugh just hearing Benny hillshaw. Yeah. By this time, the French and the British are coming up with their own Concord, the Soviets have come up with their own, and the Americans are like, we're out. I think Congress funded a report just saying, like, how much is this thing going to cost, by the way? And got back the bill. And we're like, no, we're not doing this anymore. And they scrapped the Boeing, which is the 27.7. Oh, is that what it was going to be? And I think they made hay about the sound and the noise of the sonic boom. That's supposedly why there aren't supersonic planes anymore. They're going to be up there again, though, I think. Well, we would have to repeal a law in the United States that you can't have overland sonic booms from commercial airline. Right. And you've got the same law in Europe. So there's two huge continental markets that are just you can't service anymore because right. It's illegal to fly over. I'm in a supersonic plane that, from what I understand, is the true reason why there's not Concords any longer. Really? Just the boom? Not just the boom. They're really expensive and muddy. Sure. But the boom killed it and it kept it from coming back. Right. Have you ever heard of sonic boom? Yeah, I don't think it's that bad. It depends on the sonic boom, I guess. It depends on how big you wouldn't want one eight times a day over your neighborhood. Well, that's the thing. If everybody was flying supersonic, think about how many planes fly overhead of a place where you live by the airport. Imagine each one having a sonic boom. No, that would get old. But I'm saying, like, if I'm at the beach and there's like an F 16 and I hear the boom, I'm kind of like, oh, that's awesome. Yeah. You like toast them with your beer. I love it when those guys buzz the beach. Sure. Like, send everything tumbling. Fun stuff. Boy. Should we take a break already? Sure. All right, let's do it. We'll describe what these things were right after this. Chuck, before we describe the Concord, I'm kind of excited about, we should say what happened to the Soviets. Concord ski, so it very publicly flamed out and crashed at a Paris air show, killed everybody on board and killed several, I think, eight people on the ground at this airshow, which air shows are super dangerous to begin with. But apparently, and I saw footage of it, the Soviet pilot was basically flying a Concord like a stunt plane and overstressed it, and it came apart in the air and just crashed. Yeah. That's not a good idea. No, it's not. It seems like these things were definitely agile, but the best use was to fly straight and fast and high. Right. And their performance at the air show followed either, I guess, the Air France Concord, which just took off, did its thing and then came back down like a normal flight. Right. And the Soviets were trying to one up it because, again, it's the Cold War in France's, friends with the US. Yeah. Look at me. This would get back to the Americans. Well, maybe we should talk about the other famous crash, too, because that had a lot to do with its ultimate demise, combined with many other factors that we'll get to, like you're saying, the expense and the boom. But had it not been for the crash on July 25, 2000, of an Air France Concord flight from Paris to New York, it may not have been killed off as quickly. Right. So this one, it was flight 45 90. It was a charter that I think had a bunch of mainly German tourists headed to a cruise to depart from New York. And about five minutes before this thing hit the runway, there was a continental jet that took off, left behind a piece of metal that was about 16 inches long and about three inches wide. Very small. No one caught it. And then this Concord runs over this thing at, like, 370 miles an hour or something. Yeah, we'll get to that. But those things were fast when they were taken off. Yeah. So who knows if it would have happened on a regular flight? And this thing popped up and it blew out a tire and disturbed the fuel tank. Yeah. Well, the tire blew the debris into the engine and blew out one of the engines. Yeah. And it ruptured the fuel tank, too, so fuel just comes spewing out of it. Okay. And there's a very famous picture of that Concord taking off with just a trail of flames coming out of it. And you see it and you're like, wow, the Concord was cool looking. And then you realize it's not supposed to look like that at all. Yeah. 200ft of flames. Yeah. So we'll talk in a minute here about the weird fuel distribution in this thing. But it was about \u00a31800 overweight at time of take off. They said that didn't necessarily have anything to do with the wreck, but because it was overweight, they had one of the fuel tanks, 94% full, where otherwise it might have been a little redistributed. So that was most of the fuel at the time. Again, it probably wouldn't have mattered. Like, any fuel on fire is not good. Right. But what struck me was that it was on fire before they took off. Like, they told them, you're on fire and you're still on the ground. But apparently they were going so fast that it was too dangerous, like you couldn't stop the plane. Well, the reason that I saw that the pilot tried to take off even though he knew he was on fire was because he figured he could put the fire out just from the thrust up in the air, starving it of oxygen and basically blowing the fire out from the engine. See, I saw that he couldn't stop because he was going almost 400 miles an hour and they had to go somewhere. Right. I also saw that had they not had more fuel than what they should have had or had they not been overweight, they probably could have gotten aloft. Right. And I think the flight engineer also shut down one of the engines inexplicably. So now they were down two of their four engines and they just crashed into a hotel. Right. Which is remarkable that more people in a hotel didn't die. Yeah, but I think only one person in the hotel was critically injured and then everybody on board died. The plane. Yeah. Which I mean, did it blow up into a fireball or something like that? I don't think so. They just go in that fast? No, I think they just crashed. I'm sure there was a lot of fire involved, clearly, from that photo. Yeah. So Continental and one of Continental's mechanics were actually found guilty of manslaughter, but then it was later overturned oh. Because of their debris. Interesting. But they were exonerated in 2010. That really yes, that piece of metal did start the series of events, but had it just been the piece of metal and nothing else, they probably would have survived. They would have taken off and then been able to come back in for a control. I wonder if the airport was sued. I don't know. It's not the Continental plane's fault, necessarily. From what I understand, france sues everybody when there's a plane crash that has to do with France. They might sue us maybe about this. Right. All right, so you want to talk about that was a tragedy. That, combined with the memory of what happened to the Soviet Concord, really shook people's faith. Right. But as we'll see later on, there were a lot of people who were involved in this project who, if they canceled it, would lose a lot of faith that, I think, hopped on the opportunity to be like, yeah, Concords aren't safe. We tried. Right. We'll just scrap it. How about that? Interesting. Yeah. This is a movie. Totally. Concord the movie with any all right, so let's just talk about the plane and what made it different and special. A normal 747 Boeing 747 goes about 560 miles an hour at just cruising speed at about 35,000ft. The Concord, its cruising speed was about 1350 miles an hour at almost twice the altitude, between 60 and 70,000ft. Which is faster than the speed of sound. Yeah, by a long shot. I think mach One is the speed of sound. This thing would fly at Mach Two at cruising speed and 60,000ft. That's 18,300 meters above sea level. Yeah. That's ridiculously high. You're basically kissing the edge of space right there. Yeah. It's not quite suborbital, but you're flirting with it. Right. So I was like, Gosh, I guess it's about where Felix Bomb Gardner jumped for that one stratosphere jump. Remember when he did that, he jumped at twice that height, 100, and I think 28,000ft. Yeah. That's insane. That guy jumped out of a platform skydive from that height. Yeah. That's almost so high that it's like, what's the difference between that and $60,000? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. And he lived. He did live. And he really pulled out because remember, he started to spin and they were worried he'd blacked out and he was done for. I bet he's not finished. No. I'm surprised he hasn't done anything recently. It's been long enough. Yeah. All right, so let's talk about the design of this thing. Because you can't just soup up an engine on a 747 and say, all right, now you can fly faster and higher. Right. Like this plane had to be completely designed for this purpose. Yes. Because, again, 747, which flies pretty fast, would just totally break up if you could somehow get it to the speed of sound. Because the speed of sound itself is really fast and it's a different type of flying just from the friction and everything in the air. Sure. But also to get to the speed of sound requires a lot of effort on your planes part. Did you ever read The Right Stuff? No, I never read that. Tom Wolf did a great explanation of Chuck Yeager being the first person to break the sound barrier. No one knew what happened beyond this wall of sound that forms, or wall of air that forms at the nose of the plane. And Jager was like it felt like the plane was just going to break the pizza couldn't imagine. Just knew that if he just got on the other side of it, it would be smooth sailing. Right. Absolutely right. Yeah. Supersonic sailing, or supersonic flight, is smoother than subsonic flight, and it's definitely smoother than flying just below the speed of sound. But it's just a beautiful description of how you're doing it. That's awesome. Yeah. But the point is, to fly at supersonic faster than sound speeds, you have to have a specialized plane, I think is what you're trying to say, like, five minutes ago. Sure. So we're going to go through each one of these sort of design features and one by one, starting with the fact that it was streamlined to begin with and it's designed. So, like, you were talking about that wall of air. In order to help punch through that, you have to streamline your plane. And the Concord had very famously it just looked cool, but it had a very specific purpose, that needle like nose on the front, that's to punch through that wall of air. Yeah. Was it to look cool? No, but it did look pretty cool. That's just a side benefit. And the plane itself was very sleek and needle like, too. Yeah, for sure. The wings, it had what's called a swept back delta wing. So the wings were triangular and connected to the fuselage all along. So it wasn't just like a rectangular wing coming off. You've seen pictures. It's just like a big folded napkin, like a big triangle. Yeah, kind of. And for those of you not in the know, a few solos like the main body of the plane, right. Where the passengers go. That's right. And not many of them in the case of the Concord. No, because it was much smaller width wise than a 747. 747 is like 20ft across. This is half that. And so it would fit about 100 passengers in two rows of two with an aisle going down the middle. It was not a big plane. It was small. No. And apparently there was a bathroom in the middle. So it sort of divided into two sections. But they weren't different. Like one wasn't first class and one was business. They were all identical. But I have pulled some quotes from riders and one of the guys was like but you still felt better if you were in the front, like you were a better person, right? I guess. Which is crazy because you will die sooner. Did we determine that at one point? Yeah, you're slightly more likely to survive in the rear plane crash in the middle of the rear, one of the two. Probably not the front, though. No. To take that first class Snobs. Yeah. So nine and a half feet wide, 202ft long. So it's a little shorter than a 747, but not much. No, not much. So it's just narrower and more streamlined. It's a little dark. Just punch them right through the air. Yeah. The other thing is the fuselage, like you said, the body and the wing, there was no space, like I mentioned, it was all just attached and the engine mounted not on struts, but directly to the wing. So that was very different. Yeah. That's one of the things that's so iconic about the Concord's design is that it appeared to be like all one piece. Like the body just kind of moved out into the wing. The wings dropped down to produce the engines and then dropped back and then went back up into the wing. It just looked super cool. And I'm sure a lot of it was aesthetics, but even more so, this thing has to have as few separate pieces as possible because more pieces means they could break up. You want to just basically be one solid plane. Yeah. And because of that wing design, it meant not only did you have reduced drag and better lift for takeoff and landing, but there was no horizontal stabilizer on the tail. So when you look at a regular jumbo jet, you see like, the horizontal piece of the tail goes up then you have the two little tiny wings on that. They didn't have those tiny wings. Right. So again, just kind of streamlined. Right, exactly. The nose itself, too. So the wing, that's a pretty significant aerospace design. I didn't realize that until it started popping up. In researching this again and again, it's one thing to design a wing that can cut through the air at supersonic speeds, but you aren't going to land or take off at supersonic speeds. So that wing has to do double duty. It has to be able to keep you aloft at supersonic speeds. It also has to keep you aloft at subsonic speeds. So from what I understand, the wing on the Concorde was like a triumph of engineering. Yeah. I don't know about you, but I don't get scared to fly. But sometimes still, when I look out and I see the wing wobbling and kind of flapping, I think, man, I wish more of that was connected to the plane. It just looks like more stable. It looks like it's trying to flat between. That always is disconcerting to me, I have to say. I have come so far with fear of flying, and I've thanked her before, and I'm going to thank her again. Thank you to Yuumi for getting me over my fear of flying, because my life would be so much worse if I was still scared to fly. Well, yes, and she was probably like, dude, I want to go places right, with you. You're going to have to get over this, buddy. Yes. I remember the days when you were what was it? The dark night of the sky or the black ghost in the sky? Oh, I'm glad you brought that up. Josh would wear a blanket completely over his head while you flew. So it could be the Black ghost or the Red Ghost or the Gray Ghost, depending on the color of the blanket. Chuck to my greatest may, I found recently that they washed those blankets maybe once every four flights. Maybe once every eight flights. Do you think they washed in between every flight? I thought it was new every time. I wouldn't have put it over my head if I had known that. God knows who did what into that blanket. Did you know? I thought they were either single serve and then they donated them, or if they did rewatch them, then it certainly was not every flight. I wish you would have brought this up because I can still, like, taste old blankets in my mouth now. I think I'm hallucinating, but I can still taste it. It's real to me. All right, so I believe before we got sidetracked a minute ago, you were about to say something about the nose tilting and moving. Yes. What's the deal there? Okay, so the angle of attack, if a plane is flying straight, we'll call that a horizontal angle of attack. Sure, call it getting there. What is this 90 degrees. What are you talking about? So what angle is this 90 degree? Well, you're not saying an angle. You just have your arm out straight. Okay. So let's say a plane is flying completely horizontal, parallel to the ground, okay. But it's flying forward. So if we pop it up so the nose is up, it's flying at a steep angle of attack. Okay. I think if it's coming down really fast, it's also a steep angle of attack. But the Concord is meant to come in so that it's noses popped up way higher than like a 747 when it lands. Right. The angle of attack. The problem is, because of that long needle like nose, if you're a pilot, you can't see past that when you're flying or taking off because the angle of attack is so steep. So they actually designed the nose to basically elevate downward to get out of their view when the plane was taking off her landing. And then before it went into supersonic speeds, it would pop into place so that it was a pointy needle. Yeah. So it actually yeah, it moved in flight, and it also had a little visor because you're going so fast, I guess, just to break that wind over the window. Or that bird. Can you imagine what that thing did? The birds that ran into yeah. No bird. No. Like a Randy Johnson fastball. Yeah. Did you ever see that big unit? Wow, look at you. Sure. It's almost like when Emily throws out a sports fact every now and then. I was alive in America in the Nineties. Everybody knew who the big unit was. No, that's true. She was talking one time about she said something about Eli Manning. I was like, how do you know Eli Manning? She's like, I know the Manning guys. She's like, One of them wears the orange outfit and one wears the blue outfit. At least she didn't say costume. I may have said costume. Outfit. You know who's got me and Emily combined? Beat is Hodgman. Oh, for sports. Yeah. He's just willfully. Ignorant of sports. Yeah. Although he has gotten into a thing here in his middle age where he will go to a sporting event if someone offers him the chance. Oh, really? Because he just was almost more like a sociological experiment. Not like, oh, I want to go root for the giants, or whatever. Just like, oh, well, this is fascinating to observe. Count the number of hot dogs that are eaten by Hodgman? No, just by everyone around him. Oh, yeah, sure. All right, where were we? The visor and killing birds. Now let's talk about the engines. Okay, so those engines on a Concord, there were four engines, two on each wing. RollsRoyces. Yeah, RollsRoyce. How about that? How do you say the other company taking a stab at it? I would say the S is silent, so I'm just going to go the neckma. Olympus or. Snekma. I would have gone with Snema. All right. Maybe it's snccma. It sounds like a skin condition. It does. So the Rollsroycenekma engine were capable of 18.7 tons of thrust each, which I have no reference. It sounds like a lot. It does sound like a lot, yeah. And if it doesn't sound like a lot, to prepare for this, the four engines aboard the Concord combined burned 6771 gallons of fuel per hour. And not only that yeah, that sounds like a ton. Well, supposedly it took a ton of fuel per seat. That was the rule of thumb for the Concord. Oh. Like literally a ton of fuel per pass a day. That's what I read. Wow. And the fuel they use was kerosene, which is so redneck for, like, a British Airways Air France joint thing. It was burning kerosene. Hank Hill City. Yeah. Well, that was propane, but still. That's right. All right, so like we said before, though, these engines were attached directly to the underside of the wing. There were no struts. I know. When you're in a plane now and you just look at a normal jumbo jet, it looks like that engine is attached to the wing, but it's part of the wing. But it actually is attached with these metal poles called struts. Right. Which is fine for subsonic flight. Sure. Again, though, the engines for the Concord basically part of the wing, right. So that they wouldn't come off. And then the after burning, that is probably the coolest part of this whole thing to me. Yeah. The Brits called it reheating, or having a wet engine. Yeah. But after burning is like what an F 16 will do if you want extra juice. You mix raw fuel. You know how you see, like, the red flame coming out of the back of an engine? You actually mix raw fuel with that after it's been burned once just to juice you even more. Yeah. The whole reason they have tests of your car's emission systems is because you don't burn all of the gas that you're trying to burn in your engine. Some of it escapes unburned or partially burned. What an after burner engine does is it captures that exhaust and puts it through a second burner to get as much of that what would have been lost energy from being lost, and just giving it that extra boost. That is how it would reach supersonic speeds. And it would be so loud in there, apparently, when the after burners were on. Yeah. But in the British French Concord, you didn't have to have the after burners on all the time. In the Soviet Concord ski, you had to have the after burners on the whole time. So it was, like, ungodly loud in the cabin the entire flight. That was another mark against it. Well, that's crazy, because after burners are for, like, even in fighter jets, it's like, for minimal use. Right. When you're, like, on the highway to the danger zone that's when you kick in the after burn yeah, it's just like every now and then to get more thrust that is crazy. It's only meant to be for short bursts. Right from what I saw they had to have the after burners on the whole time to maintain supersonic flight in the Tu 144 is that right? Yeah, the Concord ski that is nuts. Well, no wonder it didn't work. Should we take another break? Sure. Alright, we'll talk more about fuel and paint right after this. All right fuel and paint what's the deal with the fuel? 17 fuel tanks. Almost 32,000 gallons yeah. That's a lot of fuel yeah. And I think it does I did see a ton of seat which we'll find made the Concord really expensive to operate yeah so that fuel against kerosene. Which just blows me away they had it designed really ingeniously because again. When you fly supersonic all sorts of different things happen and one of the things that happens is the balance of the plane that what you would call the center of gravity shifts backwards and when that happens it's tough to imagine because you think the opposite is going to happen but imagine you have like a little dowel. A little stick balanced on your finger okay if you move your finger further back along the dowel sure you'll notice that the front of the dowel goes down because the center of gravity is further back it's balance is further back. So that would happen when you hit supersonic speeds in the Concord yeah so in motion that's called the aerodynamic center okay, I like center balance but that's fine. Well, I think that's the same thing but in motion. Right maybe I might be wrong and aerodynamically speaking yeah so they had three auxiliary or trim fuel tanks if you've ever been on a boat. A boat has a way to trim the motor you might have trim tabs on it or you might have a little button that makes your boat motor go up and down and that's to keep you're not cruising along through the water with your nose way out of the water you trim that thing and then it'll lower the nose a little bit. I had no idea what that was. Yeah, trim so it's the same thing in this plane but they use fuel that they would shift backward and forward to level this thing out to find its aerodynamic center balance. Right, if the aerodynamic balance center balance was that what it was? Aerodynamic center they could pump just as much fuel as it took to these empty tanks to balance the plane out and make it fly perpendicular or horizontal parallel to the ground again like they wanted to and then when it was coming out of subsonic speeds the opposite would happen the center would move toward the front and the back would go up so they would pump gas back to the other tank and level it out again. Really ingenious stuff. Yeah, just think of a seesaw and however many little kids you would need to put on there to equalize me. Yeah, because you're moving the fulcrum from different places. Yeah. That's just great, man. Way better than my stupid dowel on your finger idea. Well, imagine me on that dowel. Same thing. Broken dowel. And that's when I mentioned earlier when it had that famous crash in 2094% of its fuel because they had to have it in a certain place for takeoff. It was all concentrated right there where that fire was. Wow, so bad news. Yeah, that's just bad luck. And then the paint was special paint even because crazyly enough this thing got super hot. Right. They came up with a shade of white that's like four times more reflective than the white you see on normal planes. Parisian white which apparently look at the Concord and blind you on the spot. Yeah, parisian white sounds pretty nice, man. It does. But they would do this to reflect heat and they wanted to reflect heat because they needed to get rid of as much heat as they possibly could because this thing would get really hot at the speeds it was going just because of the friction it's going through the air molecules in the air and the faster you go. The harder you run into these air molecules the hotter things get. And the Concord would actually you could touch the windows from what I saw and they would be warm to the touch of the flight. Whereas if you touch a window on a 747 you're freezing because it's like negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit out there. It would get up to positive 260 deg Fahrenheit on the outside of the nose in particular of the Concord. And that's despite the air temperature. Yeah. Which would be even lower higher up. Right, right, yeah, like negative 60. Yeah. So in the end the paint was about double twice as reflective as any other jet. So that solved that problem. Yeah, pretty well. Alright, so I guess let's talk about flying on this thing. Like we say, it can only hold a hundred people, right? 100 wealthy. Wealthy people. Yeah. Like round trip was ten to twelve grand. And I don't know if we said this allure of the Concord was not just that it looked cool and it went really fast. It cut the time to get from London to New York or Paris to New York virtually in half, which is huge. Like if you've ever made that trip it's just long enough to be starting to get pretty uncomfortable. So half the time, like three and a half hours basically from London to New York. That was a really valuable thing that people would be willing to pay for. And you had to pay a lot to get on the Concord. I saw upwards of $12,000 round trip which correct me if I'm wrong, but if that's, like, 1980 money, that's like 32 grand today. Yeah. And that's for sitting in what amounts to, like, a bucket seat. Apparently the meals were very nice and the service was impeccable. Sure. And you felt special. The lounges were more did they have lounges? Yeah, they had special Concord lounges. See, I didn't see anything but seats in a bathroom. Well, no, I'm sorry. At the airport, they had special lounges just for Concord passengers. Yeah. They had to gussy it up, I guess. Got, like, a foot massage. Yeah. But, I mean, if you're talking $32,000 round trip tickets, like, you were sitting there rubbing elbows with, like, the world's elite and celebrities. Yeah. And on one particular day in 1985, one of the people you might have been sitting next to was none of them Phil Collins. That's right. You want to tell them about Phil Collins in the Concord? Yeah. All right. I remember because I was watching Live Aid at the time, and as if Live Aid wasn't a big enough awesome thing to do on a I can't remember if it was Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Tell the kids what Live Aid was. Oh, jeez. We should do a live aid episode. Yeah, we should. Live Aid was a benefit concert, and not the first benefit concert, but the first huge multicontinental benefit concert. There was a Led Zeppelin reunion. It was that big. The first ever back when they hadn't been broken up for that long. Right. Which is crazy. Yeah. USA for Africa. Wasn't that what it was called? I don't know if it was Live Aid. I'm not sure if USA for Africa was different, but they're basically trying to alleviate the droughts and famines in western Africa right. Headed up by Bob Geldo. I'm sorry. Yeah. Who very famously portrayed Pink in The Wall. The movie The Wall. Okay. You've seen that, right? Yeah, but I didn't know that was Bob Geldo. Yeah, that's Bob Geldo. Okay. In the movie, the character's name is Pink. Right. Not in real life. Yeah. Everyone I know that. And he was the singer. He had the big hit for the Boomtown Rats. No idea. I don't know why. I don't like Mondays. No. I thought that was an Elvis Costello song. No. Boomtown Rats. It sounds just like Elvis Costello, doesn't it? It sort of does. I never thought about that. I always thought that's who it was. Yeah. Okay. All right, so we got Bob Geldoff. He put on this huge concert to help fund this charity for Africa, which we've mentioned before was actually, like, a terrible move that went straight to the warlords, remember? Yeah, it did. I think in our famine's episode, we talked about this good one. But it was such a huge concert that it took place at the same time in Europe and North America. Like, this concert spanned the Atlantic, wasn't it? In Philly? Yes. Right. Philly. And I believe London. Right? So that's the stage. It's the hugest thing ever. That's where Queen very famously just brought down the house at Wembley Stadium and one of the great performances of all time. Many, many performers did so. And Phil Collins, as if that wasn't big enough, was like, here's what I want to do. I want to play on both continents. I want to do both of these shows. So he did he did a show at Wembley Stadium. From what I understand, it went pretty well. Sure. And then he went to the, I think, Heathrow and hopped on a British Airways Concord and flew from London to New York, took a helicopter from New York to Philadelphia. And I think he went on stage at one or 02:00 p.m. In London. And he made it to Philadelphia on time to take the stage at, I think, 02:00 P.m. In Philadelphia. He time traveled. Yes, because that was the thing. The Concord got you there so fast that it was less than the time difference between the East Coast of the United States and London or Paris. And so it was actually like a four hour trip, but there's a five hour time difference. So you could actually travel back in time, figuratively speaking, with the Concord, and that's what Phil Collins did. So he went off a stage in London and then came on stage in Philadelphia. It was pretty great, thanks to the Concord. It was amazing. And then they had a camera crew following him and stuff. I remember seeing, like, he's at the airport now and he's getting on the helicopter. It was a big deal. Yeah. And apparently Cher was on the Concord, who was Cher with Phil Collins and was like, hey, what's going on? And Phil Collins is like, oh, we got this live aid thing. She's like, what is that? And he told me. Really? She was like, you think I could come? And he's like, yeah, sure, just show up. I don't know if she did show up or not, but she didn't know about Live. Maybe she joined him. She was probably like, Why wasn't I invited? I would say that fire Cher. What's wrong with me? Yeah. She would have been like, Snap out of it to Bob Gelda. All right, so Phil Collins is on this plane. Through his eyes, this is what it looks like. You take off, nose down, \u00a338,000 of thrust to get you going from zero to 225 mph in 3 seconds. That is mind boggling. Yeah. Like, you feel a little bit of, like, push you back in your seat on a regular plane, but not much. This is like you're sitting normally, you're back in your seat, like the snap of a finger, from what I gather. Yeah. Okay, so Phil Collins face is, like, smashed off under the seat behind him. And he's like, what have I done? All right? I should have never left Genesis. I don't know about that. I don't know that he left Genesis. He just did his own thing. Yeah, that's right. Great solo career. That's a good documentary, too. There was a Genesis dock out a couple of years ago. Yeah. Like, it covers starts with the Peter Gabriel years, all of it. It's good stuff. All right, so you're back in your seat. Phil Collins is drinking his vodka cranberry sloshing all over his face. They reach cruising altitude very fast and pass the sound barrier. The nose is up now. And inside this is very clever. They had a display sign on what mock you were flying so everyone could see. Yeah, mock and altitude. Pretty cool. Yeah. And again, the inflight service was just bar none. Like, the cutlery was amazing, the food was amazing. The wine on board was amazing. The service was amazing. When you run the Concord, apparently you would leave with a signed certificate saying that you had been on the Concorde. That's pretty cool. That's how important it was even to like the super rich and famous. And the whole presumption was that the super rich and famous would pay to go on this flight and everybody else would just fly subsonic. Yeah. But it was just too expensive even for the super rich and famous. Yeah. And we didn't mention even before you took off, I think the pilots made a bit of a show of it and they told everyone, like, prepare yourself. What you're about to experience is not like a regular flight. You're going to be pushed back into your seat. We're going to be going this fast, this soon. And everyone's getting all jazzed up because like, hey, this is awesome. We're all super rich and we're all going super fast. Then once you get up there and you look out the window, what do you see? Apparently you can see the curvature of Earth. That's crazy. There would not be any flat Earthers had everybody ridden on the Concord if they were still around. Right. You'd be like, no, it's around. And apparently you don't really feel the speed. Even when you're hitting like when you're cruising. Yes. Even when you hit the speed of sound, it doesn't feel much different. Although I did see it was very noisy in the plane because of the after burners. Yeah. I mean, this one dude, I got a bunch of quotes from people. He said it was more like office chairs, bucket seats, very small windows, very noisy, extremely noisy. But I challenge anybody that didn't have a smile from ear to ear when they got on it. The seats looked like the bucket seats of a Ferrari. Like an expensive sports car. They were pollstered that way. They looked like a sports car. Very nice sports car seats, but it was a plain full of them. It was really cool looking. Yes. This one guy, Fred Finn, international businessman, apparently took 718 flights on the Concord. I saw that he holds the record, right? He's got to, yeah. He has 718 signed certificates. So he was on the Concord, so they definitely made it special for that price tag. About two and a half million people flew flights on the Concords. That's a lot for how expensive it was. And the fact that it really just ran from 1970 to 2003. Yeah, that's a lot of people. But like you said, it wasn't affordable, right? No. So from the outset, apparently, the Brits were like, oh, my God, what have we gotten ourselves into? And I saw it compared to the brexit of the time, that the politicians all knew that this is a terrible idea. It was just a huge money pit. Right. But they pretended in public like it was going to do great things for Britain. And I think this is right before the European Union started, and I believe the Concord actually was probably one of those projects that helped foster the European Union at the time. Yeah. Because Europe was not that many decades away from being ravaged by World War II. Oh, sure. And again the Marshall Plan came along. And by the way, I have to say, in the think tanks episode, apparently I said that the Marshall Plan was based on the New Deal, which is totally wrong and I know it's wrong, but some listener wrote in and said, you were really wrong. And I was like, I didn't say that, and apparently I did, but I know that that's not the case. But the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe and at the same time, it brought Europe together and helped foster the EU. But I think the Concord was a project that helped bring the EU along. But it was a money losing project. And the reason the Brits stayed in it was because they were afraid the French were going to sue them for even more money if they backed out. I love history, man. Yeah. And I think that was a money suck, even at full capacity. But when you start having, like, half full flights, you only have 50 people on a plane. It was just blowing through money. Plus, also, nowadays, if the Concord were still around, there would be huge issues with it because it burned so much gas. Yeah, kerosene, sure. But it just burned through so much and created so much greenhouse gas and was just such a polluting monster that if we had gone just to supersonic planes, that would be an issue by now. Yeah, for sure. But yes, expense, the sound, the sonic boom definitely got rid of it. But I think also British Airways and Air France, the only reason they took these planes on is because they got them for free from their governments. Right, yeah. They bought them for a dollar or something. And there was this point where, you know, in the seventies, and I think again in like, the early nineties, where it really seemed like supersonic passenger travel was this nut that we were going to crack, and it just went away. And the reason why Reagan actually wanted NASA to work on a transport plane that basically went suborbital and could get you to Tokyo in 2 hours. That's crazy. It is crazy, but it's basically what Elon Musk is talking about with SpaceX. I think he says he could get you from New York to Tokyo in 39 minutes. But again, the environmental impacts just the fuel. It's just mind boggling how inefficient it actually is. Yeah. And there's something about building something just for the super rich. Right. That's not a great time for that. I think he said he could do it for about 20% more than an economy class ticket on a plane, though. Really? Yeah. Which would be pretty amazing because he's a magician. Did you see the Deer Moon announcement last night? No. Oh, dude. What's this? He's building a rocket. It's a transport, like, passenger rocket that will go past the moon like it's a tourist trip past the moon. And this Japanese artist no, he's a Japanese entrepreneur. Can't remember his name. He bought all the seats. And he is going to, over the next five years, I think, before the flight, invite an artist from nine different fields to come with them just on the premise that they go back and make something that they were inspired to make from the trip. It's like his gift to humanity, this art project that he's basically kind of clumping on to. Elon Musk's BFR rocket. Well, sir, I think a podcast eloquently describing that trip would be a great contribution. Yeah. Podcasting is an art. Yeah. Why not choose the most downloaded podcast in itunes history to do that? Yeah. He'll be like, okay, sure, but you guys have to choose which one go. You could go. We'd flip a coin. We'd leave it to Javier Bardem to decide who gets to plug through the head. So we had the famous wreck in 2000, and finally in April 2003, air France president Jean Cyril Spinetta said, May 31, we're shutting it down. And then I think on June 12, they delivered to Dulles that one Aaron Space Museum, that very first production, Concord, that was delivered to Air France. Yeah. I believe October 24, 2003, must have been the last British Airways flight then. Yeah, I guess they stuck around a little bit longer. You know, the Brits. You can also go to the aerospace Bristol Museum. That one you can definitely get on board and wander around. Yeah, I saw a video of that in France. The museum air and Space paris lebourger Intrepid sea Air and Space Museum in New York apparently has one that has a space shuttle too. Auto and technic museum sunshine in Germany and the Museum of Flight in Seattle, I think, has one. Nice. All worth visiting, for sure. It's neat. And you don't have to be like an aviation buff. You can just be inspired by that kind of thing. Yeah. Can't wait to hear back from Carrie and see her first hand insight. Maybe I'll read that as a listener mail. Oh, that's a good idea. She'll probably say the same thing, which is like so loud. So loud and cramped. And there were a bunch of snobs on board. Phil Collins was crying. So scared. Okay, well, that's Concords and it's done for now. Who knows, maybe it'll make a comeback and we'll do a follow up. Agreed. If you want to know more about Concords, type that we're in the search barhoustofworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mate, I'm going to call this one one I found in a stack that I meant to read a while ago. So sorry to stefan, you've been waiting on this. Hello. My name is Stefan. I'm 23 years old and I'm from Stuttskat, Germany. I started listening to your podcast because I want to improve my English for my bachelor's degree. That hats off to you, Stefan. I love it. So I searched at Spotify for English podcasts and I found a playlist with some of your podcasts. I found out that they were from 2009. It was so much fun to listen to these. They were about castles, ninjas and hiccup. And after listening to these episodes, I thought, they are from 2009. I don't think Josh and Chuck do these podcasts still today. Wrong. But I searched and I saw that you still make podcasts and I was very happy. Right. That's the story. How I started to listen to you two guys and I found nothing that changed from 2009 to today. You make the same podcast the same way. So great. The greatest. It's true. I really like this guy. Hope you read my email, would be very glad. With the best regards, Stefan. Stefan from Stuttgart. I love it, man. Thank you, Stefan. That's really awesome. That was great. That was really well written. Yeah, you're doing great with your English coherent. Everything about it couldn't have done any betterment. Yes, we understood that more than we understand Jerry, I must say. If you want to get in touch with us like Stefan did and let us know how great we are and how good we're teaching you English, is that correct? Sure. You can write to us or you can hang out with us on social media, go to our website, stuffyshow.com, and you'll find all the links there. And you can send us an email directly. Just send it off to stuffpodcast@howstofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetepworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. The sun 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 is that we'll have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
How Crime-Scene Clean-up Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-crime-scene-clean-up-works | Cleaning up crime scenes is a niche industry that's both lucrative and messy. This episode, Josh and Chuck take a look at how crime-scene clean-up works. | Cleaning up crime scenes is a niche industry that's both lucrative and messy. This episode, Josh and Chuck take a look at how crime-scene clean-up works. | Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:01:29 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=19, tm_min=1, tm_sec=29, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=250, tm_isdst=0) | 30731366 | 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 what if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the awardwinning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org about tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, and global health. Listen in. As host baritonedate, Thurston connects with impactful organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors without Borders, and the University of Kentucky. Plus inspiring individuals like Amy Allison and Juan Acosta to discuss ways to maximize our impact. Listen to Force Multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. And that makes the stuff you should know Freshly shaven. I got rid of the beard. Yeah. I cleaned up this crime scene of a face. Your hair is sticking out in a really weird way. Is it out for my hat? Yeah. Thank you. Now it's even crazier. Please don't, like, lick your thumb and come over like Mommy's to do. I should say for those of you who might be experiencing some sort of alarm or tear right now, chuck kept the goatee. He just shaved the beard part or the parts that made it a beard. I guess the burnside. Mutton chops. Yes. And the neck fuzz. Yes. Looking good. Thank you, Chuck. Have you ever seen a movie called Curdled? No. It's a 1996 little sleeper produced by one Quentin Tarantino. It's about this very quiet, kind of demure woman who gets a job as a crime scene cleanup person. It's the girl from Pulp Fiction. The cab driver, right? I believe she was the taxi driver who drove Bruce Willis around after the boxing match from Pulp Fiction. Oh, really? I haven't seen it, but I think that's her. It's worth seeing. Is it? But now that I've read this crime scene clean up article on our Fairsighthouse Steelworks.com, I realized just how far off the mark some of the details were on that. Was it pretty far? Yeah, a little bit. Have you seen Sunshine Cleaning? No, but from the previous, that one looks pretty far off the mark, too. I remember seeing them carrying out, like, a mattress, just like, Mrs. Brady spring cleaning type outfits. Yeah, you remember those? She had, like, the little d rag, and she had, like, the little clam diggers rolled up and, like, some Converse on, just cute as a button. That was one of the jokes of the scenes, actually. They were carrying out this Amy Adams and the other girl carrying out this nasty, like, bloody mattress, and one of them dropped her end and the other one fell on the bloody Stain, and it was just like it's a really good movie, though, actually. Yeah, it was great. Is it by the people who made Loma Sunshine, or am I just confusing that? Because Sunshine is the name. It's a little indie, though. Alan Arkin was in it, so maybe so I wonder. It's good. All right, well, both of these movies are utter frauds when it comes to the details. Right, Chuck? Yeah, for the most part. Okay, let's talk about Crime Scene clean up, the real stuff, because there's nothing cute or about it. It's actually horrific work, and it takes a very specific kind of person. And those people last an average of about eight months before they get burned out in this business. Right. Yeah. All right. So it's actually called it's part of the cleaning industry. It's a niche part of the cleaning industry. Very niche. Not very heavily marketed in traditional channels. Exactly. It's not how it works. But it's called CTSD con crime and Trauma Scene Decontamination. Right. Yeah. And basically what it is is it is a cleaning service on steroids. There's no Mrs Brady outfits. You're wearing full biohazard hazmat suits, no French maids going on here, nothing like that. Because you're dealing with some really dangerous stuff. You're dealing with blood, which often feature, appropriately enough, bloodborne pathogens. You're cleaning up meth labs. Yeah. That's a big one. And a lot of times we should probably warn people, this is going to get a little graphic here. Sure. You can't do time scene without being a little graphic. Right. But I mean, you're cleaning up, like, there may not be a body there anymore, but you're picking up pieces of bone that the Crime scene investigators missed. You're scraping brain off of walls. It's not normal work. Right? Yeah. I mean, I think that's where the decontamination part of the CTS decon comes in. It's not just cleaning. Your goal is to return the spot to its original condition. Right. So it made a point in this article, like, you don't just clean the carpet because if the carpet has a two inch blood stain on the carpet, there's probably a two foot blood stain under the carpet on the floorboard. Right? Yeah. So cleaning the carpet doesn't work. You got to cut the carpet out, maybe cut the baseboards out. Right. So it is decontamination. Who wrote this? Julia Leighton. She's got the goods. She definitely has the goods. But the way she put it has to be actually clean, not just apparently clean. Right. Yeah. Which I do, apparently cleaning in my house. I do, too. But I mean, we're not cutting up carpet and replacing floorboards or anything, so it takes a very certain type of person because of the gore that you're going to have to deal with in a large number of your cases. So a lot of the people in the CTS decon industry are former or maybe even current EMTs emergency room nurses. People who are already trained to deal with this kind of thing. Yeah. That one article I sent you, I think that company said they hire a lot of former firemen and I would think probably military people, people that have dealt with high stress and dead bodies. Yeah, basically. But it's not just that. I mean, you have to also, as a crime scene clean up person, you have to have sympathetic nature is one of the points in this article. Right. Sympathetic, but not empathetic. Right. Because there's a lot of times when all the ambulance is gone, the cops are gone, but the family is still there. Yeah. And they may be sitting there sobbing while they're watching you clean the house. And you have to be able to sympathize with them without getting caught up in what they're experiencing. Right. Then you have to be able to remain detached, but you have to be understanding to what they're going through, too. Yeah. The one guy in that article that they interviewed said that he's cried along with families and stuff like that. And I think they also said that some companies offer grief counselors along with their service. Yeah. Upon request. Apparently. If you want a grief counselor, usually that can be factored into the price or else the company will give it to you for free. Yeah. In Sunshine Cleaning, there was never anyone at the scene, but it was realistic in some ways because one of the subplots involved, one of the girls found a wallet and an identification from the deceased and ended up looking up her daughter and befriending her daughter, but not telling the daughter that she had cleaned up her mother's suicide or homicide scene. So they kind of dealt with that delicately. That's great. Yeah. That's probably the one thing you should deal with delicately. Right. Because some of the stuff that you're cleaning up is pretty rough stuff. So let's talk about the three main scenes that you're going to encounter as a cleanup technician. Josh yes. Number one, you've got violent death, which is homicide, suicide, or bad luck accident type of thing. Right. You've got a decomposition, decomposing body happening. And meth labs, a lot of their business comes from meth labs that have exploded, because meth labs are known for exploding. I don't even know that they necessarily have to have exploded. I think just the fact that there is a meth lab there oh, yeah, that's true. Means that you have to decontaminate the scene. Yeah, absolutely. Apparently meth labs are so toxic that they're capable of making people who live in a former meth lab sick, like a decade on. Some of the toxins that you're running into are things like acetone, methanol yeah. Benzene, iodine, hydrochloric acid. This is like the ingredients of meth. Right. This is what people are snoring kids. Unless you want to turn into a disgusting, haggard, wreck mess of a human, stay away from meth. Math equals death. Just look at those pictures. Have you seen those pictures on the internet that showed the before and after? Yeah. God, that should be like on billboards in Oklahoma. We should probably podcast on meth sometime. We have a good article on the site. Tom she wrote it. Oh, really? Yeah, we absolutely should. So one of the reasons why meth labs are so dangerous is because you are going to absorb this stuff through your skin. It leaves a toxic grasp not just on walls, but on the air as well. So another, I guess, prior job experience that is good to bring to the table if you're a crime scene cleanup person, is construction background or at the very least demolition. Because a lot of cases like with meth labs, like if it was a house or an apartment or something, you have to knock everything out. Anything that can't be put in some sort of decontaminating chemical has to be taken out, thrown away. That includes drywall, floorboards, carpet, all this stuff, until it's just down to the bones of the building. Yeah, or they will tear it down or more likely haul the trailer away. Right. Well, let's talk about this. We said that you're not wearing just normal everyday spring cleaning clothes. You're wearing like a full on biohazard suit. Right. What are some of the other tools of the trade checkers? Well, there's a laundry list, josh, you definitely want your protective gear. You have to have biowaste containers, right? Like big 55 gallon drums to hold the stuff. You can't just throw it in a bag into the back of your van. No, there's regulations you got to follow. Right. You're going to have your regular cleaning supplies that you would need to clean up any kind of mess and disinfectants and that kind of thing. You've got your more hardcore supplies like industrial strength, like hospital strength disinfectants. Right. Which only allow the MRSA bug to survive. Really? Now there's like hospital acquired MRSA infections. I don't know anything about that. Yeah, or they get used to the industrial cleaners and they're like these superbugs are like you're going to bring it when you spray it on them. That's worse than ticks. Sorry about that one. You can have an ozone machine which removes odors. You can have a fog, which they will use to shoot stuff into like air ducts to get rid of odors. Right. Well, it takes a chemical and kind of gets it around corners and stuff. You get everywhere with it. When you run it through a fog, apparently you've got some enzyme solvents. You want to kill bacteria. And it can also liquefied dried blood, which can be pretty nasty to get out once it's coagulated and dried. Right, which is why you want shovels. Yeah. Apparently Chuck, after what, 3 hours? 2 hours. Blood coagulates into kind of a jellylike goo that you can shovel into bags. So gross. But very thick bags. Yeah. Biohazard bags. They also include in this article, putty knives to scrape brain matter from the wall, because apparently brain, when it dries, becomes like cement and will stick to something like cement. Right. Which is really gross and sad. You can also use basically a steamer to steam it back into gooeyness. Yeah. And then my favorite thing, which would be the first thing in my van, would be the no touch cleaning system. These are like big, long scrubbing brushes, heavy duty sprayers, things like that. Right. Like pressure washers and no touch cleaning system. Seems like the smartest cleaning system. Yes, it is. Yeah. Then, like you said, you want some carpentry tools, probably ladders, stuff like that, and then a camera, because you need to take before and after pictures for insurance, and you wouldn't think about that. Right. And actually, apparently most insurance covers this, right? Yeah, insurance covers it a lot of times. Or if it's a homicide, I think it's paid for by the state, by the federal government. Oh, really? Crime Victim Reparations agency. Okay. And I know there are state agencies that do that, too. Well, we're getting ahead of ourselves. I don't mean to jump the gun, but let's talk more about some of the scenes. Specifically, we talked about meth labs, chuck, one of the other big ones that you'll be called out to that makes quite a mess is when a decomposing body is found. Yeah, right. Absolutely. Decomps. You had to call them Decomps in the trade. That's not going to be like usually it's not going to be some big, nasty blood sprays and, like, brains and things. It's not going to be all over the place. But it can be pretty nasty because a decomposing body, Josh, is really gross. Your body swells up, insects move into your body and take up residence. Your organs are going to digest themselves and your skin liquefies. Yes. Remember we talked about rigor mortis? No. I think it was on the Body Farms episode. We talked a lot about how decomposition works. So if you want to know more about decomp, go listen to our Body Farms EPI. Right. Yeah. And of course, there's the smell. You can't talk about decomposition without the smell. No. And as Julia Layton puts it, it would bring an average person to his knees. Yeah. That's bad. Yes. Apparently, it's ammonia. It's an ammonia based smell created by decomp. Like the litter box. Yeah. You ever cleaned out a litter box? Sure, I have toxoplasmosis all over the place. That's right. The other thing, too, with a decomp is and you don't think about these things when you hear about it on the news, but someone actually has to go behind after the body has been removed. There's probably liquefied parts of the body there, and there's also maggots that have already feasted and have the blood inside of them. And you got to get rid of them, too, because they're carrying disease, maybe. Right. So you have to basically scour the place looking for maggots. You collect the maggots and then you dispose of them through burning, right? Yeah. It tastes like burning. Wow. This July on Disney Plus, don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, new episodes of Marvel Studios ms. Marvel, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series, and zombies. Three plus don't miss National Geographics. America the beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. With fewer 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. That's decomp. That's decomp. Now let's get down to the one that everybody is fascinated with, that all the movies are about. And those are murder scenes, suicide scenes, accidental shootings, basically, where somebody was shot. It's specifically in the head, I guess is the worst. I mean, you've seen Full Metal Jacket, right? Remember Pile? Yes. Someone had to clean that up. Somebody did. Yeah. I'll bet it was Joker. Well, somebody in the art department for the movie. But yeah, a violent death is not good because there's going to be lots of blood. Especially suicides, they say are probably the worst for the blood. Yes. Which is why I guess I can't see shooting yourself in the head at home, that's just so much of a problem. It's a huge problem. At least go to a hotel or a motel. And that one Hunter Thompson did, he shot himself in his basement while he was on the phone with his wife. So awful. But I think it's fine for him that he was on the phone with her because apparently he let her know that this was happening. It wasn't like she had no idea that something like this was going to happen. Right, but at home. He did it at home, which I can understand wanting to be at home, but yeah, I guess shooting yourself in the head if you're going to I don't see why you would do it at home. Yeah, I agree. And as we said earlier, it has to be really clean so any bodily fluid is a potential pathogen. And not only that, but after you leave, if you don't get it all out, it can lead to mold and bacteria and cause people to get sick, like months afterward. Right. You got to get it all out. Yeah. You have to, like you said, restore the place to the state it was in before the trigger was pulled. Right. Yeah. And it can take up to a few hours to up to like 48 hours to do this. Yeah. Depending on how quickly. And apparently a good crime scene clean up company is going to charge you about $600 an hour. Yeah. It ain't cheap for one room with lots of blood for homicide or suicide. It's going to cost you between three and six grand, I guess. Right. Yeah. One of the reasons why it's so expensive is because these people don't just take the stuff home and throw it in their trash out front. Right. There are really specific permits and rules that govern disposal of this, which, by the way, we should say the actual industry itself is not regulated. Yeah, it's not nationally regulated. No, but they generally follow OSHA's bloodborne pathogen standards, which requires training and certification itself. Right, but to be a crime scene cleanup technician, there's no national certification or even state or local certification. It's just company training. Yeah, right, but we'll talk about the training in a minute. But they obviously want to do a good job because the last thing you want is the turnover is already high enough. Sure, but like we said, there is plenty of permits and standards and procedures to follow in disposing of this waste. Right? Yeah. Like you said, you can't throw in the dumpster like they do in Sunshine Cleaning. You have to incinerate it. And there are medical waste incinerator companies, and the one thing I thought they charged by the pound, which I thought was kind of gross, but how else are you going to do it? Because it's a pound of nastiness. Yeah. And the other thing I thought was kind of gross was that a lot of them have minimum charges. So if you don't have the minimum, you have to keep this human bio waste in your van. Well, not in your van, but if it's hot and like a refrigerated space until you have collect enough of it to go to the incinerator. You know what I'll bet is funny? I'll bet the same companies that operate medical waste incinerators also just so happen to have some cold storage units that you can put your waste in until you have enough to burn, too. That'd be smart. But I'll bet if you're in the industry for a while, you're friends with some guy who operates it and you kick him like $50 to throw your stuff in with somebody else's or whatever, but you better be incinerating it following proper procedure, else you're a horrible jerk, right? Yes. And it's not just the gore that has to be disposed of. If you have just deconstructed a house that was a meth lab, you've got to do something with this waste. Again, you can't just take it to the dumpster. You can't take it to a normal dump. You have to take it to special dumps that are out of public reach right. And just transporting it. You have to have a special permit for that, right. You have to have a hazmat permit. Yeah. My friend Timmy, he works in hazmat disposal, and now I met him. Yeah, you met Timmy. Now, he does a lot of train derailments and stuff like that, but he used to live in Oklahoma, and in Oklahoma, nothing but meth labs. Nothing but meth labs. And he didn't do crime scene clean up, but he worked on teams that investigated sites, I think, and he said that he saw bodies that had dirt. They shovel dirt in their mouths and would choke on it sometimes because apparently once whatever badness happens and it becomes airborne, it's such an awful reaction like that you're breathing us in. They start just putting something in their mouth to try and quell this nasty taste. So they would, like, stuff dirt in their mouths until they died. Wow. How nasty. Sad. That's horrible. It's another reason not to cook or do math. Yeah. What a mini all of this is like. Yes. Okay. And you're looking to earn, I don't know, between 35 and 50 grand without a high school diploma, we should say. What do you need to do to become a crime scene clean up technician? Well, we already talked about some of the traits they look for in somebody. Like, to be empathetic and maybe to have prior training with dead bodies and stuff like that, but they will actually give you a test to make sure that you won't throw up on the scene in front of a family. Yeah. It's like monsters ball. Yeah. That would be awful. Can you imagine losing a family member in your home and then someone coming in to clean it, and then they start throwing up all over the place? Plus, if you're the owner of the company, that's just extra work. That's more clean up yeah. That you can't charge for. Right. So they will actually put you through a test to pass a gross factor that it ranges from looking at pictures of dead bodies to actually cleaning up dead animals carcasses to make sure that you won't bomb it. Right. And I wonder if they tell you that it's actual, like, human stuff, but it's actually like a fox. Oh, like Halloween when you reach into the drapes and their eyeballs. Yeah. You also really need to get a hepatitis B vaccine every five years. As a matter of fact, as many letters as there are types of hepatitis, I would get a vaccine for each of them probably every month. Yeah. What do we get? HEPA for Guatemala. So we still wouldn't qualify, huh? No. Also, Chuck, even if you are a very strong person, like we said, the turnover is about eight months on average. Yeah. And you are really at risk for a couple of stress disorders, critical incident stress syndrome and secondary traumatic stress disorder. And basically the first one is you are on site of horrific events routinely. It's tough to shake off. And then the other one is if you become too attached to the family's grief, you basically can leach off of their post traumatic stress disorder. Right. And have secondary stress disorder. Secondary traumatic stress disorder. Yeah. They also obviously look for people going in that don't have any sort of depressive disorders or things like that. That probably wouldn't be a good job to put someone who was manic depressive into a crime scene clean up situation. It wouldn't. This July on Disney Plus, don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness, new episodes of Marvel Studios ms. Marvel, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series, and zombies. Three plus. Don't miss national Geographics. America the beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking, landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa line jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that roll up their own sleeves. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comitoimation. Let's talk about the business a little bit. I think you said $600 an hour, but, like, a bloody room can cost up to $3,000 to get clean. I thought it was three to six. Yeah, it's one to three. I misspoke. I'm sorry. Well, it could be six. It depends on how many people were killed in there. If it was a really nasty scene, sure, it could be six. I'm sure. Yeah. And you said also that the crime victim reparation act pays for agency pays for the cleaning bill. If it's a homicide, I don't know if it's a suicide, because I know the insurance generally doesn't cover suicides for anything, but maybe if it's an accidental death or something like that, your homeowners insurance will cover it. In most cases, you're not going to have to pay the bill. And we said also that marketing and advertising can be tricky. And Touchy hotels and motels are the two largest businesses that have to deal with this. Yeah. With suicide. If you own a CTSD con company, you probably go to every hotel and motel convention there is, which appropriately are held in hotels. Right. And you hand out cards, right? Sure. You hand out cards to homicide detectives. You make friends with ambulance drivers. You just make sure that everybody is going to contact these families first if they're asked. You don't want to pimp in your card. But if the family is like, what are we going to do about this? They can say, well, I know this guy's good. Yeah. That's actually how it worked in Sunshine Cleaning. Really? Yes. Amy Adams was a regular house cleaner making beans, and her boyfriend was Steve Zon and he was a homicide detective. Steve Zon is great. He's awesome. And he told her that you can make a lot more money by doing this. And he got her her first job and first referral, and it just kind of grew from there. I got you. It's a burgeoning business, right? Yeah. And apparently if you like to name your business after yourself, first and last name, this is the industry for you. Oh, really? That's in waste disposal. Yeah. What was the company from San Francisco in there? There is. Neil Smith's, Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. Right. And they have people they send out all over the country now, but I think it said that they do about 400 cleanups in San Francisco alone each year. This is 2006. That's more than one a day. Right. And here we reach the debate. Right. Crime scene clean up companies literally make money off of tragedy. Right. Horrific tragedy. And a lot of people argue like that. There's this kind of commercialization of death, of tragedy. Sure. Why are we so okay with this? Right. And I can kind of see that, like, maybe this is something that should be a free service of a police department worked into the budget or something that a city does. But at the same time you can really make a case. Like if you need someone like this, it's a really good thing that they're around, whether it's a commercialization of death or not. Right. Because before this, it was up to the family to do it or maybe some friends of the family or something like that. But isn't that just way worse? How do you cleaning up your loved ones brains in your home? Yeah, that's obviously way, way worse. I would think so. But like a private tow truck company comes and gets a car after a car accident. Sure. So that's not taken care of by the police. Right. So sort of the same thing. I definitely fall in the line like. Yeah, this is fine. This is perfectly acceptable capitalism. Yeah, well, and until it is covered by the police department, then somebody should be making money and it should be top dollar because it's no fun to clean up brains and bone out of drywall. I know. And I mean, if you leave it to the city, can you imagine the job a city worker would do? Well, that's the other point, man. These people are paid good money because they restore it to its original condition. And you're right, I would not want a city employee doing it. If you're a city employee who is good at your job, we apologize in advance. It's the rest of the people in your field that make it hard on you. And if you are a crime scene cleanup technician, we want to hear from you. Oh, yeah. Send us an email to the email address that I will give at the end of the show because I got ahead of myself. If you want to learn more about crime scene clean up, go type that into our search bar. Crime scene is crime. Hyphen scene clean up is clean hyphen up. And that will take you to this really good article. And that means now, friends, that it's time for listener mail. Jerry had a big problem with the hyphen thing. Like you were out of the room getting some coffee, and I had to explain to her the hyphens in that you capitalize the first one and you don't capitalize the second. I can see that. And she said, this is the most difficult title we've ever had. Is it really? She said she said yes. Okay. She's tittering josh, this is prison email part two. We have part one. Was it right before this one or are we going to split those up? We have to have the one that we recorded go first or else we've got two and then one. This is Thursday, right? That's more confusing than college football rankings in quantum physics. So this is the end of the prisoner's email. The guy who was busted for meth and then went on the lamb and then went to prison and is now a fine, upstanding citizen. We will continue with this. Food items available from the commissary, like ramen noodles, can, corn or chicken and soda pop were valuable for trade as well. Pack of ramen noodles were often used as currency for bets on things like football games. So betting ramen noodles on a football game, I guess when you're in the houstka, you're doing what you can to make it just like the outside. Sure. Or prizes and handball tournaments organized by enterprising inmates who would often keep 10% as an entry fee for putting the tournament together. Is that crazy? I think it's crazy that this guy wasn't in a minimum security federal prison and he was still playing handball. Yeah. There were two escapes during the year that I was at the camp, one person took a blanket and threw it over the top of the barbed wire fence. That was just regular barbed wire, he said, not razor wire. Well, sure. And he climbed over in the middle of the night and that was pretty much how he got out. Did they catch the guy? Yes, both were caught. The second guy left his job at the state and motor pool during the day. So I guess he just got one of the cars and left. Which is a pretty smart way to escape. It's a pretty typical way to escape, I guess. Well, that's actually what he says. He stole a state vehicle. He said both were caught in under 48 hours. Shank. And here's just some little points he makes. Shank is indeed both a verb and a noun, although shiv was much less common in usage. Somebody said it was East Coast. West coast, but I know their credibility well. This is Nevada, so shank is what they said there. In addition to the whole, the special housing unit was known as the shoe, as an S-H-U and it was more frequently referred to as the shoe than the whole. Got you. So we were sort of wrong on that one. And one of the more colorful terms that you can hear in prison was to Keystar something. Yeah. And can you imagine what that might be? Of course. I mean, to hide something in a very uncomfortable place. You're wrecked them. Yeah, I know. Like the stopwatch. Did you not know that? Sure you did. You get Dysentery from that when you put a watch on your keystone. Yeah, or a wristwatch. Sorry. It wasn't a stopwatch. I got disempted, little man. Another term was man walking, which meant the correction officer was out in the yard walking around. So someone would yell out, man walking. And that was a queue to hide any contraband or dissert any activities like tattooing, which was you didn't want the corrections guys to see tattooing each other. They're heavy critics. Yeah, exactly. I've already written much more than I intended, guys. I could go on for much longer about many of the topics, including racism, which was extreme, the power structure, and what it was like not having freedom, even though I worked outside the camp in mostly an unsupervised fashion, favored trading, and so on and so on. It's weird that I have so much to write about, even though I was only in total for about 18 months. So it wasn't three years, it was 18 months total. 18 months, man. Can you imagine? No. Oh, my God. So that's the end of part two of the prisoner email. It's part two of two. Yes. And he's on the up and up now. And we wish him all the best. It sounds like he's doing really good. Thank you, anonymous jailbird. We appreciate you. It doesn't work here. Right? It is not Jonathan Strickland. Okay. Let's see. We already did this whole email thing, right? Crime scene clean up. Yeah, just say the email address. Yeah, just send your emails to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want morehouseofworks? Check out our blog on the Housetofworks.com homepage. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's s kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | ||
457dee74-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-0f6347ee63fe | Short Stuff: Emu Wars | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-emu-wars | Did Australians really wage war on a group of emus? YES. Learn all about it in today's short stuff. | Did Australians really wage war on a group of emus? YES. Learn all about it in today's short stuff. | Wed, 17 Apr 2019 14:56:58 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=14, tm_min=56, tm_sec=58, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=107, tm_isdst=0) | 12165225 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry. Let's go. So, do you remember when we went to Australia on tour? Yes, I do remember how fun that one's? It was fun. It's like it was just a dream. It was like a dream, a good dream. When we were there, like we do at all of our live shows, we do some Q and A at the end and take questions. And on more than one occasion in more than one city, we had someone stand up and said something along the lines of, you should cover the emu wall, mate. We were like, we thought emus were birds. And they went, Just look it up. Right. So we did that and here it is. Go. Okay. All right, let's go. So to go, Chuck, we have to go back to the end of World War I and a lot of Australian veterans were returning from the war. And the government said, you know what? We want to show you guys how happy we are with you. And to say thanks, we're going to set you up with a bunch of acres of farmland and you can start farming. And not only can you start farming, if you grow wheat, we'll buy it from you at ridiculous prices. So basically, we're setting you up to go set up a life for yourself as farmers here in Australia. And it sounded pretty great, right? Like all the veterans were like, yeah, let's do that. Give us some land. And that's where the first problem comes in. Yeah. Because they didn't have enough land. I don't know if they didn't think as many would take them up on it or if they didn't count. Right, right. But they had about close to 222,395 acres of land to split between 5000 soldiers. It was doled out in order. Obviously the best stuff went away first and then if you're at the end of the line, you got your land in Perth, which sounds like a dig. I love Perth. I thought it was great. It was much different than I thought. It was pretty amazing. But it's apparently not great for farming. Right, it's not great for farming. There are also rabbit infestations. I believe there's also a drought in Western Australia, which is where Perth is. So all of this happens right after the government agrees to set all of their veterans up like this. So it looks really bad that immediately there's hardships associated with this kind of government dole plan. Right, yes. Then the Great Depression ends up hitting, but as it's hitting, they're debating exactly how much they're going to pay for this wheat that their veterans are going to grow for them. And it starts out really generous, they say like four shillings. Which is per bush, right? Per bushel. I'm sorry, no, per piece of wheat. Which at the time that was pretty good price for a bushel of wheat, and it was like government subsidized wheat. And then the government said, yeah, we're not going to do that, let's try again. And they came up with another bill and they said three shillings, said, okay, that's still pretty good. And they finally settled in 1931 at four and a half pence, and there's not many pence in a shilling, so that was a pretty steep reduction, between four shillings down to four and a half pence per bushel. So that's kind of like they're starting to add insold on the injury now. All right, so park that to the side and we'll tell you a little bit about the Australian emu, which I saw on a couple of my little adventure trips. I'm sure you did. Sure as well. A dumb American might say it looks like an ostrich. I was about to say it looks like an ostrich. Yeah, we're dumb Americans. Let's say this, it looks more like an ostrich than it looks like a cardinal. Right? Way to save us, Chuck. They're tall, they're about six and a half feet tall, depending. They can weigh up to \u00a3100 or more. They kind of do their own thing for the most part. They get together to breed, but they really don't like to be around other emus, usually, except when they go off and get food, they're grazers and they will graze together, but they're all just sort of in the same area, grazing. They're not like forming a pack or forming a bond or anything like right. They're just hungry and they're big and they like to hang out generally by themselves. Unless you've got tons and tons of new wheat fields in Western Australia. Yeah, they'll eat just about anything, but if they have a plentiful supply of wheat, you can attract a lot of emus with a lot of wheat. And so all of a sudden, there's a big old supply of wheat in Western Australia because all these veterans showed up and started growing it there. And so the emu started to come and they started to eat this wheat and the veterans said, Whoa, whoa, whoa, emu, this is my wheat. I'm growing this because the government's going to pay me for it. And emu said, we don't care, we're going to eat your weed anyway. And all of a sudden, the first shot in what would become the Emu War was fired by the emus. And we'll come back right after this to finish this ridiculous story. If you want to know that you're in luck, just listen. These veterans are growing wheat in Western Australia and 20,000 emus seed. Nothing, basically, but a big wheat buffet in front of their faces, right? And so they descend upon Western Australia. These veterans are like, it's out of control. I don't know if anyone's noticed, but we actually need help. Government, you gave us this land, you're not paying us well for it. And now these emus are eating at all and this is going to be a big problem for the country if Western Australia is tanked all of a sudden economically, because of these emus. And so the army, under the direction of Major General PW. Meredith, said, let's go kill a bunch of emus. Right. Because this is a problem that has kind of saddled the Western Australia veterans who are growing weed out there. But it's also a really big opportunity for the government to show just how much they care about their veterans. They're going to send the army out to take care of this emu problem. And so the government saw it as enough of a propaganda move that they actually sent out a Fox Movietone News cameraman to film this whole thing to be used as propaganda to show what the government is doing. And I guess because they assume that most Australians would want to see 20,000 EU slaughtered by machine guns. Of course they would. So they sent somebody to go film this massacre. Yes, but this was all under there was a deal to be made. And they said, alright, we'll do this, we'll help you out, but you got to pay for the ammunition veterans, and you got to provide food and lodging for these soldiers. And the veterans said what? The veterans said, all right, I guess we have no choice. So sure we'll do that. Here's the other thing about the emu. If you get a gun out and you start shooting at them, they're going to stop grazing and they are going to go berserk. Right. Because, remember, they don't actually have much of like a society or a pack or anything like that, so they're not coordinating. It's just every emu for itself all of a sudden. And if you have 20,000 of them doing every emu for themselves yes, it's like what you said, they go berserk. Yeah, it's a big problem. You've got machine guns, these emus, 20,000, it's not like they're all packed in a couple of wheat fields. They're spread all over Western Australia. They're all over the place. It's crazy town that these emus are running everywhere like crazy birds with their gangly legs. And have you ever seen an emu run? It's pretty funny looking. I've seen an ostrich run. It's probably close. More the same than a cardinal running. Right, exactly. And if you got a machine gun, you're just spraying bullets, basically hoping that you're going to hit an emu, there's no, like, take aim and fire. They're just, like, shoot in that direction. And the result is they're not killing many of these things at all. No, I mean, they were surprised to find that they might as well have been deployed to go shoot at a b problem with machine guns for the effect it was having on the emu. The EMU's were basically indestructible, it turned out, not because they could withstand a bullet, but because they were just moving too quick and too berserk. To get hit by a bullet. You're like, I put three bullets into this thing. But it just made them angry. It didn't even break eye contact. So they have these machine guns are jamming. They didn't have a lot of guns. You know, it's a problem if they're worried about the cost of ammunition to begin with. Right. They stage multiple offenses over the course of about six days, none of which were very effective. And media coverage starts pouring in. It's not a very good look. So six days later, they kind of bail on that stage. Another attempt a few weeks later that was not much more successful. We're talking about killing a few hundred birds out of 20,000. Right. And they were a portion 10,000 rounds of ammunition. They used 2500 rounds just to kill 200 of the 20,000 emus. So they were pretty surprised that when those numbers started coming in and the rest of Australia heard about this, it did not look very good for the military. No, it did not look good. And even at the time, and even in Australia at the time, it wasn't a good look for the army to be slaughtering birds. Sure. Even though they had been classified as vermin at the time. I think most people were like, what are you guys doing? I'm glad the emus are winning. So people started rooting for the emus. Yeah, so it's pretty much a big disaster. Like I said, they had a couple of offenses they mounted. None of them were super successful. They eventually just stopped. Basically, the emus won the war of the emus. Right. For the time being, at least, with the military. After that, the farmers in Western Australia said, we'll just take care of this ourselves. And so they found that just using a single shot rifle was much more effective. So much so that within a few months, something like 50,000 emus have been killed in Western Australia by gun. Just not machine gun. Yeah. And you know what really helped was in 1930 when they started to build fences around these farms. Right. Helped a lot. It didn't help, though, that the army had actually broken one of the fences while they were still shooting at the emu. They had mounted a machine gun onto the back of a car so they could catch up to them. Yes. And we're riding along and I guess they ran over an emu and it got caught up in one of the axles so that they couldn't steer. And they drove through somebody's fence, which made all the papers as well, because that was a big part of the emu wars, too. Q yacity. Sex. Exactly. Apparently the people of Western Australia asked for assistance from the government again for emus in 34, 43 and 48. And each time the government and army said, no, we're not going down that road again. No. The email said, can you guys just please leave us alone? And the government finally said yes and protected them once more. They were no longer vermin. So we'll say this is a happy ending. I guess. Not if you're an emu, but sure. I got nothing else. All right, that's it, short stuff happy 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." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1221067381178hsw-sysk-ultimatum-game.mp3 | What's the ultimatum game? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-ultimatum-game | The ultimatum game is an economics experiment that provides insight into the human psyche. Check out our HowStuffWorks podcast to learn about the rules to the ultimatum game. | The ultimatum game is an economics experiment that provides insight into the human psyche. Check out our HowStuffWorks podcast to learn about the rules to the ultimatum game. | Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:03:55 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=12, tm_min=3, tm_sec=55, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=260, tm_isdst=0) | 12401002 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Stuff you should Know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things we like to think about. Online fraud shouldn't be one of them, because with every purchase, visa prevents, detects, and resolves online fraud safe, secure Visa. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Josh Clark. Chuck Bryant here. How's it going, Chuck? It's going great, Josh. You? I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing pretty good. I've often wondered, Chuck, if you won the lottery, who would you share any of your proceeds with? Obviously, your wife Emily would reap the benefits of this, but is there anybody else like your parents? Would you buy them a boat? Who would you share it with? In what amount? Have you ever thought about that? Yeah, I think everyone kind of thinks about this. I don't play the lottery, first of all, because I think it's a sucker's game. Sure. But if I found a lottery ticket and won a lot of money, I would be pretty generous. I think I'm pretty yeah, okay. I've always liked to think the same thing to the point where I kind of have allotments of who would get what based on how much I want. The thing is, it's all kind of esoteric at this point. Everyone is generous in theory. Yeah. I wonder how much that would change with cash in hand. And I was actually reading an article about a guy who's in Melbourne who this actually happened to one of his friends offhandedly suggested he buy a lottery ticket, and the guy went in, bought it, and actually won $13 million. He's got the money in hand, and he's still sharing it with his buddy who just suggested he buy a ticket. That's nice. So it is nice, but at the same time, this guy's actions fly in the face of all theories in all sorts of different disciplines evolution, economics, game theory. Right. Have you heard of this guy named Ariel Rubenstein? I have. I like old Ariel. Do you? Yes. He's pretty approachable guy. From what I understand, he came up with this thing called the ultimatum game, right. In the early eighties, I think. Yeah, something like that. Let me just give a quick rundown of the ultimatum game, okay? Sure. Okay, so basically, some guy comes up to you and I Chuck, and he hand you $21 bills, and he says, I think you know where I'd be headed. Yeah. I'd say, Chuck, come back. And that guy would be like, what's your friend's name? And I'd be all like, I don't know. I don't know him. I just met him at number 16 bus shelter. Somebody would get those $1 bills. Right? Exactly. Right. Let's say you did stick around. Your curiosity was piqued because some stranger came up and gave you $21 bills and he had some instructions that went along with it, namely that you had to split it with me in any way you saw fit. Right. I had the ability to reject any offer you gave me. But if I reject your offer, then neither one of us gets squat. He takes the $20 back. Right? Right. So I could give you a dollar, keep $19. You could say, no thanks, jerk. Right. And the guy takes his money back. Right. But the thing is, under this thing called rational maximization, which is an economic theory that basically all people are out for the most for themselves, you shouldn't even be concerned with the idea that I would reject your offer. Number one, you should give me $1, because that's the least amount you have. Right. And secondly, I should take it. It's found money, and that should be that. You've got $19, I've got a dollar. I may be mad at you, but still, I didn't do anything for the buck. Right. So that makes perfect sense in theory. And Ariel Rubenstein is very, very well respected game theorist, except for this one. Just magnificent. Just terrible prediction. This is a blot on his record. Right. So these German economists put it to the test, but Ultimatum gave him to the test in real life, and they found that what they found was that there was no support for Rubenstein's hypothesis whatsoever. Right. People, I think they found, gave an average of 37% of the money away. And then what I thought was really interesting was that half of the people who received 30%, 30% or less would not accept it. They rejected the offer. Yeah. Even though it was found money. And in other cases, there were more generous offers than they needed to be. Right. So if they got, say, it was 20 deutsche marks, I guess now the euro, but back then it was deutsche marks. Sure. They would give them three and they just threw it right back in his face. Exactly. That doesn't make any sense again. Right. So it was enough to get the curiosity of economists and mathematicians and all sorts of other people peaked. Right? Right. And so they started looking into this, and they're like, well, game theory, it makes sense, but there's a flaw here. There let's tweak it a little bit. Right. They tried variations, right. And one of the ones that they came up with was the dictator game. Right. I like this one. Yeah. This one makes a little more sense to me. And yet it still just doesn't make any sense. Basically, under the dictator game, it's the same thing as the Ultimatum game, except they give me $20 to share with you. I can either take $2 and give it to you and keep 18 for myself, or I can have the $20 with you and split it equally. Either way, you have to accept the offer, and I get to keep the money no matter what. Right. So there's no loss for me. And yet they found that 76% of the people who played the Dictator Game split the $20 in half, even though they knew that if they gave the other person $2 that they could, they kept 18. And as far as I know, these people are actually keeping the money to make this a very real thing, to really gauge people's reactions. And the vast majority of the people were splitting things evenly. This is mind boggling, don't you agree? It is. But it was Germany, and it's called the dictator game. So they made a little bit of a fright on what was going on right, exactly. With their rib turtleneck sweaters and all that. Yeah. So this further piques people's curiosity. Like Rubenstein inadvertently just set off this huge chain reaction. People's entire careers have been built on his one prediction of the Ultimatum game. Right, right. So they start looking into theories about sharing and altruism. And we actually did a podcast, how Altruism Works, based on an article called is There Such a Thing as a Truly Unselfish Act? Right. And altruism shouldn't exist rational maximization should, because it falls in line with evolutionary theory. But is that the human spirit, or is that something we've developed? No one has any idea. We don't even know if it's human. Actually, they've done some studies. They did one on chimps, and they show zero. They don't show any sense of fairness. They don't mind if they're getting screwed out of something. As long as they get something, they don't care in what amount or how much someone else is getting. But other monkeys have shown a sense of fairness, specifically the cappuccin monkey. Yeah. This is a cool setting. Do you ever see Monkey Shine? No, I don't. Monkey's? You didn't see Monkey shine. No way. Okay. Wow. It was pretty good, actually. It's a horror movie about an out of control helper monkey who just goes on the rampage. I remember. Like Silent Night, Deadly Night, except with a monkey. That's exactly why I didn't see it. No, thank you. It was okay. Well, basically, this is the same kind of monkey, and they're very smart, and they're often used for helper monkeys. And these researchers just down the road a piece at Emory University ran this experiment on them. And so they would put some monkeys together, and they'd have them retrieve a pebble, and in return for bringing the researcher at pebble, both monkeys would get cucumbers. Now, after a while, one monkey would get a grape in return for retrieving a pebble while the other still got cucumbers. Right. So one monkey is kind of like, what's going on? And then after a while, while one monkey still had to retrieve a pebble to even get a cucumber, the other monkey was getting grapes for doing nothing. Right. And this led to monkeys getting upset. Yeah. Throwing food, refusing to play. Right. And really capture monkeys. If you've never seen one, you really have to go on to what's? The Ultimatum game on how stuff works. They're the cutest things on the planet. I can't imagine seeing one of these just acting out hurt. Yes. It's kind of a mean experiment. It happened just down the road, but apparently it let us know that humans aren't the only ones with this higher mind, sense of fairness kind of thing. Ultimately, though, we still have no idea what's going on. Right. I did think it was interesting that people that participated in the game, they found that they looked for nonverbal cues from their partner in the game to try and pick up what they think they should give. Right. And it kind of made me think any study where you know you're being studied, I kind of have not problems with. But you wonder, if I knew that someone was giving me this $20 bill, I would give away half of it just so it wouldn't seem like a schmuck. Right, exactly. It's like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Just by observing something, you change its behavior. Exactly. And I wonder how much that factors into this, too. And that nonverbal cues study you were talking about, it seemed a little hanky to me. I wasn't sure how much faith I put in it. But I wonder how much of that lack of faith is derived from just the idea. That's just such a depressing notion that we're really always in fact out for ourselves and trying to rationally maximize and we're actually doing it through nonverbal cues, sizing up how generous we think the other person will be for a big pay off later on. Right. You and I are walking down the street and I see a 20 on the ground, I pick it up. And then I looked to see if you saw me pick it up. Pretty much. And maybe if I noticed, you saw I'll me share it with you. If you didn't notice, then what 20? Right. And even if you just kind of go across the board and help everybody equally, just as a general rule, how much of that is based on a belief in karma, karmic debt, karmic payback, that kind of thing, that you think that you're going to ultimately receive a reward and that's why you do it. Which leads us back to that altruism. Definitely. Which apparently doesn't exist. And I don't know, I figure five to ten years down the road we'll have the specific genetic code for altruism or faking of altruism down. Well, I do know if someone came and gave us $21 bills and we'd probably head down to the dance club and everything would be fine, we wouldn't split it evenly. We just go ahead and throw it on stage at the same time. Exactly. Okay, that's altruistic. Yeah, exactly. This is a pretty dense topic. It's a really interesting article. I suggest you guys go read it. What's? The Ultimatum game on howstep works.com and stick around to find out which article has Chuck very nervous for next week. So, Chuck, what article has you very nervous? Well, Josh, next week I'm going to visit the in laws in Akron, Ohio, and we have plans to go to Cedar Point. Cedar Point, which is the greatest amusement park on the planet. That's what I've heard. My wife has been touting it for years. You got to go on the millennium coaster. It is the scariest experience you will ever go through. You're basically falling forward as you go down this, I think, 90 degree or maybe more than 90 degree hill. It's mind bendingly scary. I can't wait. And I love roller coasters, but it does have me a little worried in the article that we have on our website. What if I were on a roller coaster and the safety harness broke by our veteran writer Katherine Near? Yeah, I don't know that you should read that before you go. You might want to save that one for after. That's a good idea. Yes. So you can find out what would happen if the safety harness broke while you're on a roller coaster on HowStuffWorks.com. But again, like Chuck, I advise you to read it after you get back from the amusement park. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@housetofworks.com brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you." | |
45b0c04c-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-13c65478b0f9 | Short Stuff: The Coconut Cult | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-the-coconut-cult | Why we love short stuff - because we can tell stories like this one. A man goes to an island to start a commune of sorts that subsists entirely on coconuts. It didn't go well. | Why we love short stuff - because we can tell stories like this one. A man goes to an island to start a commune of sorts that subsists entirely on coconuts. It didn't go well. | Wed, 10 Jul 2019 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=191, tm_isdst=0) | 15899212 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's other Josh who's basically fast becoming he's gunning at Jerry's heels. I would say Chuck, wouldn't you agree? Well, I think at the very least, he's the newest to Frank the chair, for sure. He may soon be the new bird, the Bobbing bird. Oh, that's right. Yeah. At any rate, we're glad Josh is here. We are almost two inanimate objects. Exactly. We just ate up about a third of our time, so we're going to have to remove the ending from this one. Okay. Yeah. This one is interesting because I read the original New York Times piece from 19 Five or whatever. Very different than the story we get here in a lot of ways. Oh, I can't wait to who knows? I'll just point out what the New York Times article said compared to what we have in front of us. Do it like a cranky it guy. When I say something, just be like, wrong. Well, who knows? Okay, it is The New York Times, but I don't know what their standards were like in I don't know either. Settling fake news. Exactly. Right. So there's this article from How Stuff Works that we found does a really good job of placing this in context in the world and saying that in Sanskrit, the word for coconut is kalpa vrishka, which means tree, which gives all that is necessary for a living, which is a mouthful. I mean, that says a lot about what you're saying about the coconut. You're saying you don't need anything else but this one tree. That's how great this tree is. Yeah. And that's also just a slightly fancier way than saying Websters defines a little bit. A little bit. It's definitely fancier, for sure. It's got, like, cursive everywhere. But the whole point is that coconuts are pretty fun and good to eat and offer a decent amount of nutrition. It is. It turns out, though, that the Sanskrit thing is quite wrong. Like, it's not everything you need. You couldn't just subsist on coconuts. And there was actually a guy who was born in 1075 named August Engelhart who basically proved that inadvertently it wasn't his intention to prove that the Sanskrit term was wrong. But he actually took it to heart and tried to live exclusively on coconuts because he believed that all you needed was coconuts and sunlight and ended up living on. I don't want to say deserted island. But certainly a sparsely populated island living and dying there to spoil the ending. Yeah. This is interesting mostly to me because it was when it happened. He was born in 1870. Like, if this happened in the 1970s, it'd be like, sure, of course this happens all the time. Right. But this guy was born in 1875 in Germany, and then after college sort of became well, there's a lot of debate on whether or not he was mentally ill, but regardless of that he became very much into the laban's reform, which is life reform movement. Basically, what you would think of these days is like a very 60s hippie American thing. They were doing, I guess, in Germany in the early 20th century. Yeah, I took it to be kind of like a prototype for Goop. For who? For Goop Gwyneth Paltrow's site. Oh, good Lord. Yeah, like raw foods, alternative medicine. There was a lot of crossover between what this guy believed and what you could find on some of the sites that Goop endorses and Goop itself. Especially if you take into account this book that he wrote. It sounds a lot like the advice that Goop offers these days. You got to quit saying Goop. So in 1898 he wrote a book called A Carefree Future the New Gospel semicolon that's rare glimpse into the depth and distance for the selection of mankind, comma for the reflection of all, for consideration and stimulation. And he should have just put an exclamation point at the end just to cover all the basis. He missed that Oxford car after consideration, though. But it was a kind of a cookie book. He talked about life, his lifestyle, and what he believed his version of the Laben's reform was. Then he also wrote poems about coconuts. Yeah, like Mother Coconut. The Coconut Spirit how To Become A Coconut? Those were titles of some of the poems and tracks that he included in this book. And it's really hard to overstate just how much faith this guy placed in the coconut as the source of not just life, but health. And it was based on somewhat unfounded ideas. So it tied in very much with an idea that he had that the sun was the source of all life in the universe, and that coconuts grew on coconut palms toward the top, just like the brain in the human head does. And since the brain is closest to the sun, coconuts are closest to the sun, ergo, the coconut can care for the brain and everything else you need in life. That was it. Yes. That probably would have been the end of his story had he not had a substantial amount of money. I was about to say donated, but I guess he inherited it from a relative. So he had some cash all of a sudden. He bought 185 acres of land on a tiny little island called Cabacon off of Papa, what is now known as Papa New Guinea. And he took along 1200 books, got rid of most of his clothes and went out there and lived by himself. Well, not by himself, because there are indigenous peoples in the area, but he was certainly the only white German there. Right. And his whole jam is that he's he had either heard or figured out that humans had evolved in the subtropics between tropical cancer and tropical capricorn. And that's what we were basically evolved to. That's where we were evolved to be. So the idea of living in, like a house and driving a car eventually, I don't know if cars were invented yet, but I'm sure this guy prefigured them. The idea of just basically living in a boxy cubicleized stuffy life, it was antithetical of how we were designed by evolution or natural selection or even God, if that's your bag, right? And so he moved to this island so that he could wander around naked, walking under the sun, eating coconuts, living how this guy genuinely believed humans were meant to live. And from what I can tell, he fully expected to basically be free of all disease and any kind of terrible condition living this way. But that's not the way that it ended up at all. No, because first of all, coconuts, you cannot live on coconut alone. They do have a lot of good stuff in there. They have good carbs and fat and stuff like that, sure. But they like a lot of vitamins, notably B, twelve, B, six, AK, calcium and protein. There's a little bit of protein, about 3 grams or so, but that's not very much protein. So if you're going to eat enough coconuts to supply your body and he was about five foot eight, didn't weigh a lot and weighed increasingly less as time went on, obviously, he would have had to been eating between 14 and 18 coconuts a day. That's a lot of coconuts. But I mean, if that's all you're doing, if you're wandering around naked on an island reading some books, you got time to eat 14 to 18 coconuts a day. So he could have, but it's not clear that he knew he needed to eat that amount, and it's also not clear that he would have responded to that information. So he didn't, and he started to wither away, which, as you said, probably would have been the end of the story had this guy actually not managed to convince other people through his book and then through correspondence with them to come join them. And so people started to show up on this island, and we'll talk about what happened after that, after this. All right, so this is where The New York Times story has diverged already. Okay. They wrote an article and everyone if you don't know that The New York Times has pretty much every article they've ever written scanned online. It's kind of great. Yeah, it's pretty boss. So there was an article called Failure of a Woman Less Eden in the Pacific. A strange story from the South Seas. It's a great title. As the New York Times tells it, only two people joined the Sona Norton cult. The Order of the sun cult. This article that we have says, and I'm inclined to go with ours because investigative journalism has gotten better since 19 five. Oh, yeah. But The New York Times said a boat showed up in the end, that he was thought was going to be full of like 20 people and there was only two guys. The rest of the people got word that the Allen was full of cannibals and decided not to show up. Which if that's wrong, it sounds like it was completely made up by the writer. Because our thing says that about 15 people showed up and took their clothes off and were basically like, let's do this. They did agree on the two dudes, though. One guy's name was Einric Eukins. He was 24 years old, he was a vegetarian and he was away down with this. And the other was a very famous person, actually, or at least medium famous in Germany at the time. That's a lot of qualifiers. His name was Max Lutzow and he was a concert pianist and eventually conductor of the Lutzo Orchestra in Berlin. Right. So you can and letsaw basically showed up from what I understand, and said, we're here, we're very enthusiastic for this, let's eat some coconuts. They took their clothes off, they started to live this way. But there were two big problems for Yukon's. It was that his body did not take to this diet, despite, from what I understand, being a vegetarian, if not a vegan ahead of time. Right. Still the coconuts got him. Maybe he had an allergy, maybe he got too much sun, who knows? But he died. This article, from How Stuff Works puts it he dropped dead within weeks of showing up and starting this coconut subsistence. New York Times confirms that. Okay, good. Alright, so we've got a fact. We've unearthed the fact here. It's double sourced. Unless how stuff Works article. Use that New York Times as a source. That's how fax get generated. And then the other guy, Lutzow, the conductor, he was doing fine and apparently he got along with August Engelhardt, the leader of this cult. But he also they had varying tastes in music and that actually created a bit of tension between the two. Yeah. Apparently Inglehart hated batsat. I think Lutzao loved batset. And it says that Litzao brought his music collection. The only thing I can figure is that he brought over he was a violinist as well, that he brought a violin. I don't know, he could have brought like one of those cranky gramophones maybe. Or maybe a bird with a beak, like Flintstone style. Or maybe a person dressed like a bird who could take direction really well. Yeah, maybe he did bring records. August Inge brought 1200 books. He could certainly bring a crank up record player. Sure. So maybe that's what happened. But the way the New York Times described it is they started getting into arguments about music and because it was just the two of them, according to that article, it's going to get a little crazy after a while. Right. And Lutzow was like, I don't want to spend the night next to you tonight. And he applied for permission, supposedly with Inglehart, to go spend the night on a missionary boat that was nearby at one of the other there's a bunch of islands around, and I guess Inglehart granted him this. He went on board this boat. He spent the night. He would refuse to eat any of the food that they had, and apparently there was a storm that prevented him from getting back to his coconut paradise. And he died. Yes, he died. If two people showed up, 100% of the visitors died. But even if there were more in this house, that Works article is right, because this guy carried this guy, August Engelhard, he carried on even after these two deaths for more than a decade beyond that New York Times article. So maybe more people showed up afterwards, and that accounts for the discrepancy. But as this House Stuff Works article tells it, more people showed up. More people died from things like dehydration, heat stroke, and then this one. This is tough to swallow. If it is true, then there is a Creator God who does take pleasure in messing with us, but somebody died from being hit by a coconut. Somebody in the coconut worshipping cult died from being killed by or died from a coconut injury, which happens. Sure it does. But, I mean, imagine traveling from Germany in the 19th century, early 20th century, showing up to eat nothing but coconuts and then dying because of coconut hit you on the head. Pretty ironic. It is pretty ironic. So August Engelhardt himself died, too, but he hung on for a really long time, considering he had the true grit of somebody who really would have just eaten coconuts. From what I can tell. Yeah. I mean, there are some pictures, some rare photos at the time from people who I guess were nearby, and he looked awful. He looked like you would expect someone to look sure. They described him as a bearded bag of bones. There were lesions on his body. It was clear that he was suffering from severe malnutrition. As the New York Times tells it, he eventually was. One of these missionary boats came and got him and literally wrestled him onto a boat where he fought them physically as best he could while they tried to care for him. It's probably not much. No. Until he jumped off the boat to swim back to the island where he died. According to our article, and perhaps further, more accurate research, he did go on that boat. He was kind of nursed back to semi health and then left again, went back to the island, survived until 1914, and then because of World War One, he was captured as a prisoner of war, released from camp. When they realized he was mentally ill, they're like, Wait, what is this about coconut you're saying? And he carried on, apparently until 1919. Okay. All right. When he died at the age of 44, weighing less than \u00a370 so this guy did this for maybe 20 years ish? Yeah. I mean, 18 years. That's impressive, man. Hats off to this guy for that level of commitment. So that's the story of August Engelhart. You can learn more about them on how stuff works. They wrote this article. I also want to just throw my two cent in and say I would put pretty decent money on the idea that Engelhardt spent at least a significant amount of time married to a coconut on the island. Probably so. Well, with that, everyone, we bid you from Short Stuff. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, you." | |
How Flesh-eating Bacteria Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-flesh-eating-bacteria-work | Possibly the most horrifically-named disease anyone could contract, flesh-eating bacteria can lead quickly lead to amputations and death. Learn about how this disease works and how to prevent it in this episode with Chuck and Josh. | Possibly the most horrifically-named disease anyone could contract, flesh-eating bacteria can lead quickly lead to amputations and death. Learn about how this disease works and how to prevent it in this episode with Chuck and Josh. | Thu, 30 Aug 2012 15:05:22 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=15, tm_min=5, tm_sec=22, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=243, tm_isdst=0) | 26005084 | 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, and with me, as always, is Charlie L. W, Chuck Bryant. He's giving me the AOK symbol. So we're all set to go. And we have a bowl full of dinosaurs in front of us. Pants are off. Pants are off. Mics are on. Yes. That should be our motto. That looks great on a T shirt. Sure. But all of our open wounds have been treated according to the step by step process included in this article. Yeah. Did you read that sidebar? I did. It's gruesome. Yes. And you know what? This kind of thing can strike fear into you when it's in the news, which it has been lately in Georgia and nationwide. But it's rare, and we can't say that enough. True. So don't freak out and don't start slathering yourself with antibacterial gel. True. And to the writer's credit, it is pointed out in this article, it's, like, 500 cases of this a year worldwide. Right. I didn't get that either way. Really? Still? Even in the US. Sure. Now, in Maybe. Andora that'd be huge. Yeah, true. But, Chuck, after researching this, fleshing bacteria scares the target out of you. Exactly. Yeah. We can't beep any longer. It's sad. You just did, man. You just found a worker just said beep, so that's not the same thing. Yeah, it's pretty scary because it's silent, and it can silence the silent killer. It can creep up on you. And in the case of Amy Copeland, who will get too sadly, like, she was going to the hospitals for three days before they diagnosed it. Yeah. And by that time, it was too late. Right? Not too late, because she survived, obviously, but we'll get to that. I was reading an article about her, and she's just like, tough as nails. They said. It's incredible. We're going to have to amputate your leg. And she said, let's do this, is what she said. She couldn't even talk. She mouthed it. I know. Far braver than me. I would have been like, let's end this. Right? Exactly. She wouldn't plug me. I'm such a was. Right? Yeah, I heard. Now that she's up and about, the first thing she did was take, like, a half gallon shot of Scotch and punch out a doctor just for fun. All right, so we'll get to her tragic but inspiring story. Okay. I was going to use her as an intro. Oh, go ahead, then. All right, so we get to it. Right. Now, Amy Copeland, she's 24, she's a Georgia lady, and she was on a Zipline at a friend's house and fell off. I don't know if the Zipline broke or if she let go or whatever, but it was a malfunction. It was over like a Ravini creek over some brackish water. In in brackish water, actually, in all fresh water. There is a bacteria called aeromonus hydrophilia, or a hydrophilia, and it's everywhere. Normally, if you ingest a little bit of this, it's through swallowed water. Sure. And it gives you the poops. Just diarrhea, though, that's it. Yeah. The reason why just diarrhea is because you have whole colonies of bacteria and antibodies in your stomach that are designed specifically to take on a hydrophilia and put smack down on it part of your immune system. Right. Thankfully, the thing is, with Amy Copeland, she had a gash in her leg from when she fell and the bacteria got in that way. And that is a whole different host of problems. Exactly. Your body is not used to fending off bacteria through wounds. And there are certain types of bacteria, which are generally known as flusheating bacteria, that basically mounts the largest, most vicious, virulent campaign of any bacteria around in your human body. This is what I didn't quite get, though, because you did this part as additional research, which I appreciate, but I'm not quite sure is it a dummy attack is going on. You want to get into this? This is how fresh eating bacteria yeah, we might as well go ahead and tackle this and then we'll finish up Amy's story, then get into it. Okay. So what happens is the bacteria, which is, again, a hydrophilia, it's everywhere, and our bodies are used to it. Right. Strep. The same group, a strep. Strep. Strep, yeah. That's what gives us strep throat. Sure. It's everywhere. 15% to 30% of people are carriers. Right. These things are everywhere. And normally when they get into our body through normal channels, our body knows how to ward it off. When they come in through a wound, you have potentially big trouble. And these bacteria are capable of producing toxins. There's intra toxins, which are cytotoxins, meaning they directly go and kill cells. They weaken the membrane or something like that, so they can go and attack tissues. And then another thing that they might express genetically is exotoxins. Right. These are the ones where if you have a bacteria that expresses exotoxins, that's good, right? No, I thought that prompts the immune response. It does. The problem is these bacteria are setting off almost, it seems like purposefully, an immune response from your T cells. Okay. But it's too big. And this huge response comes about and it's like this big, lumbering, clumsy response from your T cells. So your T cells are going haywire because this basically dummy attack has been launched by this bacteria to distract the T cells. So this is what I don't get. Are the T cells attacking the wrong thing? The T cells aren't attacking anything. The T cells going on high alert signal the production of cytokines, which are like signals. They're like triggers like histamines. Are they're an immune response? Trigger cytokines. Are the cytokines in turn overproduce or over? Excite macrophages. And those things go in like eat cell detritus or detritus actually, I listen to the pronunciation. It's actually Detritus. Okay. So it's cell detritus. Yeah. So they're going haywire, and then last but not least, they promote the release of free radicals, which normally go and target bacteria. But in this huge, undirected immune response over which bacteria has purposely triggered, the free radicals are attacking all this tissue. So you have cytotoxic and tarotoxins that the bacteria is producing directly, and then it's also indirectly affecting this healthy tissue by promoting the release of free radicals. It does seem purposeful. It very much like it sits around and reads The Art of War and decides, this is how I'm going to take you down. Exactly. And it works like a charm. So you have your tissue that's being destroyed, right? Yes. Which is where you get the term necrotizing facitis, which is the correct term for flush eating bacteria. That's right. And it also promotes something called toxic shock syndrome. Is that when your organs start shutting down? That's part of it. Wow. Yeah. All right, well, that makes sense. And that's scary. And the scariest part of all this is that it starts out by something really tiny. Like, it can be a pinprick of an open wound. It doesn't have to be some big gash on your leg. And it starts out as something small and turns into something big, which is really scary. And if you have a cut on your hand, on your leg, and actually, even if you haven't been in any kind of bracket water, if it starts to hurt a lot worse than you think it should, then it's probably not one of the 500 cases, but you should probably start looking into it. Well, what was surprising to me was it doesn't even have to be a cut, man. It could be an abrasion. A bruise. Yeah. How could a bruise? I don't get that. I don't know. If your skin is thinned out at that site, really? Like so thin it can just get through the outer dermis, maybe. Wow. And it doesn't just have to be, like you said, brackish water. Like, if you have a cut, an open wound on your finger and you're around somebody with strep throat, you could conceivably. All the stuff is in place for you to contract necrotizing fasciitis. And it can go person to person for sure. But without an open wound, it's pretty unlikely. Right. That's how they get in. Yeah. And they eat the fat, they eat the tissue, and then they start to consume your organs. Right. And the reason the flesh eating bacteria is clinically. The clinical term is necrotizing fasciitis, which means the killing of fascia. Right. Fascia is like this membrane that acts as connecting tissue between your skin and fatty layer and your muscles and joints and tendons and ligaments and bones and organs, and it's this uninterrupted membrane that covers your entire body beneath your skin. It's like one of those what are they called? One guy. Send it to us. We have a green screen one. Oh, the root suit. Yeah, the body suit. It's like a root suit, but it's between your skin and your muscles. This is where this infection takes place. And since it's uninterrupted, it can go everywhere. It just basically chugs along and separates your skin from your muscles by killing all the tissue around it. Well, and the other scary part is it's really fast. Like, this football player from the University of Tulsa died in a weak, big, healthy tight end. Like, you don't have to be weak, and you don't have to be old or a child. It can attack anyone that gets it and take you out pretty quickly. Yeah. In just a matter of days. Like you said, it can go from a pinprick to you just lost your leg. Yeah, well, which is what happened with Amy Copeland. I mean, it's a miracle that she's alive right now, but she ended up having her left leg completely amputated. Her right foot, both of her hands and part of her torso, and she got out of the hospital. It took a while, but then I think two or three days later, she already had taught herself how to eat. This company has thrown in to build, like, a 30, $40,000 addition to her home for rehabilitation and stuff. Yeah, pretty amazing. Like her spirit. Her dad has been posting, like, crazy on Facebook and on her website. They started and she's a bad man, madama. Way better than me. She's tough. Yeah. Very inspiring. It's also crazy. Chuck, it's not just her. There was another dude from Cartersville, Georgia, who had another necrotizing fasciitis case, and they were actually in the rooms next to one another. At one point. They're at, I think, a burn center in Augusta because this place is like, one of the few places in Georgia that knows what they're doing with necrotizing fasciitis. Right. How do you treat this thing? Well, the first thing you do once it's diagnosed is like, huge, heavy doses of antibiotics, obviously, to try and kill it. But we're not talking, like, pop a pill every 6 hours. No, like constant drip, just basically flooding your body with it and globin immunoglobin. Terry thought that was funny. Yeah, I heard. So they want to remove any of the dying flesh and try and isolate it and remove the bad parts, which is what they were doing with her. And it just spread so quickly. They were, like, fighting a really uphill battle in her case. I read a case study. Have you seen any pictures of this stuff? No. So I read a case study of this woman who came in, and she had it in her arm. And first of all, her arm is swollen. It was like Cabbage Patch Kid's arm. Yeah, but then there's, like, splotches of purple and then splotches of black and then what's called descalamation, where the top layer of skin is just peeling off. And all of this had happened to her, like, over the course of hours. And as they were treating it. One of the things that they'll do before amputation is called debridement, where basically they take the limb that's infected or the area that's infected, and they just scrape the tissue off. Yeah, I read about that. I saw a picture of it. It's horrific. Yeah. I didn't look at the pictures. And then after that, they have to treat it with skin grafts. After they got all of it, hopefully. Well, that's what she did on her torso. Yeah. Okay. And if they can't get it, then they amputate. It's a pretty serious condition. Okay. So what to look out for? We said if you have a smaller wound that's, like, disproportionately, painful, you should go on high alert. If it becomes, like, swollen and red and hot, that's a really bad sign. If you get typical things you might associate with bacterial infection, like diarrhea and fever and chills, nausea and vomiting, that's a really bad sign, too, especially if you have just a small cut on your arm. So that knowledge of vomiting, all that stuff, could be the result of the infection. It could also be the infection leading to toxic shock syndrome. Right. Which in and of itself is pretty interesting. Apparently, we've only known about that since 1978. Really? Yeah. Do you remember associating it with tampons? No. Well, when it first came out, almost all of the case studies of this toxic shock syndrome, which is, like, basically your multi organ failure, which is three or more, lowered blood pressure, all this other stuff. All of the cases were of people who are using, like, high absorbency tampons. They were women. Then they started to look more and more, and they realized that didn't hold true. When you looked at more of the case studies, there are a lot of men and everything, and now they realize that it's the result of an infection. So, like, the lower blood pressure is like, your body mounting this huge immune defense, and so histamines are released, so your blood vessels dilate, so your blood pressure decreases to a really dangerous level. It's basically your body having this enormous allergic reaction to an infection. And it had nothing to do with tampons? No, it did. It still did. But they thought it was just tampons that triggered toxic shock. Wow. Yeah. Even still, there's, like, warnings on boxes, I think. Toxic shock syndrome warning. Jeez, that's pretty scary. I had older sisters. I did too, but I didn't get in her business. So in the first 24 hours, you're going to feel these pains. The second three to four days in, there's going to be some swelling, and that's when you might get this purpley rash or, like, blisters that are filled with a dark fluid. That's not a good sign at all. And your skin, even at that point, even three to four days in, might start to flake off and turn white or dark, and that is definitely a bad sign. That's the disqualification then. Four to five days, and that's when the toxic shock happens. And you're pretty lucky if you haven't been treated at this point to make it out alive. Right. Toxic shock alone, 50% of cases are fatal with fluctuating bacteria overall. 30 to 40. I saw 25 is the lowest. 25% to 40% of cases. So should we talk about wound care? Sure. I've never cleaned a wound like this. Well, then you haven't been cleaning your wounds correctly. This is one of the ways to prevent flushing bacteria. That's right. You want to flush your wound with cold water initially, no soap. And in fact, you don't even want to get soap into the wound, apparently. You want to clean around it with soap and the cloth and then get some alcohol and put it on your Tweezers. Use the Tweezers to clean out any gunk that's in there. In the wound site. Yeah. I've never gotten Tweezers in one of my cuts, ever. Well, that means you didn't have anything in there or you didn't know it. I didn't. I was like, I'm not putting Tweezers in there. Then you want to apply a bandage if it's a place that can be exposed to dirt. And they say to ask a doctor whether or not to bandage, because sometimes wounds are better unbandaged and heal quicker. Sometimes they're better bandaged, and then the old antibiotic appointment will always do you, right? Well, yeah, I almost always put a bandaid on. Really? I never had a wound where I'm like, oh, I probably shouldn't put a bandaid on. Symbolic bandaid. What else you got? I've got some other stuff like risk factors. You can be totally healthy just from the badness of Amy Copeland, I assume. She's probably a healthy person. Yeah. I think a lot of people typically are healthy, so you can still come down with flesh eating bacteria, negrotizing, fasciitis as a healthy person. But there are some risk factors that would put you in the higher likelihood camp if you've had an infection recently, especially with a rash like chicken pox. That's one. Cuts abrasions. Those are big ones. Steroid use. You don't want to be using steroids anyway, but even if they were prescribed yeah. And you have a cut medications that are good, I think steroids prevent cuts from healing as fast. Is that what it is? So I think those two combined make you at a higher risk if your immune system is lower. Sure you've just been sick, maybe, yeah. Diabetes is a big one. And then if you are a black tar heroin user, there have been outbreaks of necrotizing fasciitis among heroin users before. There was one in the late 90s in San Francisco. Really? And black tar in particular sets you up for it because it's like this lower purity heroin that's gummy. It's gummier than regular heroin. So it collapses your veins, like, almost immediately. So people who shoot black tar heroin do what's called skin popping, where they shoot it just under the skin or into their muscles, and then, because it's not the least bit refined, that's why it's gummy. There's often impurities, and sometimes some of those impurities are clostridia, which is a kind of bacteria that can be a flesh eating bacteria. So basically, if you're shooting black tart hair, when you're running the risk of directly injecting flesheating bacteria, and there are people who have lost arms, shoulders, ribs to flush eating bacteria by shooting black tar heroin, I think the stuff you should know advice is to not do heroin. Let's just go ahead and just throw that out there. Sure. I could get behind that. You're avoiding a whole host of problems if you don't do heroin. The h. So what else can you do to prevent it? Well, keep the wounds clean. Wash your hands a lot. And that means warm water and soap and like, 15 to 20 seconds of good scrubbing, like you're going into surgery. Get between the fingers, dry it off really well. And then after you dry it off, don't go and put your hand back on the faucet. Right. To turn it off in a public bathroom or even your own bathroom. Although I don't know if I would do that on my own home. No, I think your own home is okay. Yeah, I feel like there should be some sort of I mean, it could lead to a rise in superbugs, but we already faced this, so what do we have to lose? But I feel like there should be more cleaning products handy in public bathrooms. Well, there are increasingly. You see those little hand sanitizer machines? No, I mean, like, here's a bottle of bleach water and just go ahead and spray that toilet seat. Well, I'm not like a Howard Hughes type, but after I wash my hands in the bathroom in public, like, I don't put my hand on the door handle or anything like that. I always try and muscle my way out or put a paper towel between me and the thing. I'm extremely conscious of that, too. Especially at the gym. Yes, I've been more conscious about it. Which pops up with your character in an episode in our TV show that's coming out. That's right. Little teaser. Yeah, big teaser right there. That's true. You got anything else? No. I mean, Amy Copeland's story has been prominent lately, obviously, and they are accepting donations. And I think we would be remiss if we didn't announce that she spells her name A-I-M-E-E. So it's A-I-M-E-E-C. Donations. And just go to the website anyway, and her stories on there, and her progress is on there. It's both frightening and inspiring in her case. I think that triggered our desire to do this right. Or did it? Well, yeah, not only that, but it seemed that nobody really had a good idea of what flush eating bacteria does. A bunch of lousy local news reports. Yeah, not even local. Like the national stuff, too, is like really misinformed. Like it eats through your tissue. It doesn't eat through your tissue. Nobody dug into how it really works. It was very frustrating. You know why? Because it's way easier just to scare people with things, with non facts. Right. But this is one of the ones where it's like the more I looked into it, the more scared I became, even well, people are lazy. Yeah, I've got a little more so it wasn't until 1952 that somebody used the term necrotizing fasciitis and we really started to understand that it was bacteria or whatever, but we knew about it since the Civil War. Wow, that's crazy. What they call it, though, in the Civil War? Well, they used to name it, according to the doctor who reported it, and it was also based on the area of the body that was infected. If you hadn't green, it meant that you had fluiding bacteria around your genitals if you had Lewdwigs angina and you had flushing bacteria around your face or mouth or jaw. Really? Yes. And then they figured out, like, oh, wait, we should classify by the kind of bacteria and that these are not separate things. Like this is all the same thing. These people has had like a cut around there that this got into. Boy, you're in big trouble back then, too. Oh, yeah. If you're in big trouble now, imagine back then. Pretty scary. Yeah. Well, the first guy to describe as a Confederate Civil War surgeon named Joseph Jones really? And I'm sure he was like, I can't do anything for you, man. Right. He retired to the country. That's it. Flesh eating bacteria. If you want to learn more about it, you can type that in flesheatingbacteria into the search bar@housetopworks.com and that will bring up listener mail. I am going to call this we love the Irish, as always, Josh and Chuck and Jerry. Just a short note from an old geezer living in Limerick in Ireland who is one of your most devoted fans the last number of years when walking my dogs every Sunday on the mountains of Ireland and Alpine areas, occasionally I'm listening to stuff you should know on the ipod. My biggest problem is that I have not been able to source a set of earphones that will suit my border colleagues who is cool, intelligent piece would easily tune into you laid back Southern dudes. So he wants his dogs to listen. That's nice. I thoroughly enjoy the show, in particular your easy symbiotic style and I've recommended it widely. In particular, I enjoyed the Shrunken Head show because I used to have one. Nice. How you might ask. My sister worked in Columbia in the brought me home a present of a shrunken head. It looked very real, so the first question I asked was, is it real? No, it's not, she said, but added, if you really want a genuine head, I'll bring one next time. Needless to say, I declined, which is a big mistaken. The original head is still hanging behind the bar of a pub on the west coast of Co Claire. Is that County Clare? County Claire. All right. That's what they do in Ireland. Coco. And that is from Mike Keys. And then Judy and Glenn are the dogs. He named his dogs Judy and Glenn. He's a nice couple from the know. And he's just marching around Ireland listening to us with a shrunken head around his neck, I guess. Well, keep marching. Glenn and Judy and Mike is the human. Mike the human. Thank you very much for writing in on behalf of all three of you. Pretty cool. So this one was a human request. If you have a request, we want to hear it. We're always looking for good topic suggestions. You can tweet to us at sisk podcast. Top request is less than 140 characters almost every time. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffynow, unlimited characters there, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com from more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you." | ||
Does oil speculation increase gas prices? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/does-oil-speculation-increase-gas-prices | In an uncertain economy, investors often flock to commodities like oil, trading oil futures in a derivative market. Some believe this creates an artificially high price. Join Josh and Chuck and learn if this market is responsible for inflating gas prices. | In an uncertain economy, investors often flock to commodities like oil, trading oil futures in a derivative market. Some believe this creates an artificially high price. Join Josh and Chuck and learn if this market is responsible for inflating gas prices. | Thu, 07 Apr 2011 19:19:40 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=19, tm_min=19, tm_sec=40, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=97, tm_isdst=0) | 32447936 | 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. The Neogen device developed by Rst, Syndnexis, is a well established, advanced quantum based medical device using electric cell signaling technology. Treatment is noninvasive, safe, effective, and used in managing pain associated with neuropathy and other painful conditions. It helps improve circulation, offers better rehabilitation through pain relief, and activates the recovery processes, giving better patient outcomes. Visit Neogenrelievespane.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen system. Come chat with us. That's Neogenreliefspain.com. Your patience will thank you. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Across from me is one Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And since there's a couple of microphones in front of us that would make this stuff, you should know the all audio podcast. All goodness, all the time. And then the other room is guest producer Elizabeth Lizzie. Yeah, our old buddy is back here working, which is nice, giving us pieces of drive mango. And in between, she worked for Emily, and so I haven't been able to lose Lizzie. That's good. She's not when you want to lose Lizzy's. Awesome. Stop picking on Lizzy. Chuck. I'm a big fan. I started a Lizzy fan club here. Oh, really? Yeah, and then I dissolved it. I was going to say I've not been invited to that. It was just me. Chuck, you remember when we were on the call with a senior White House official yesterday? Yeah. That was kind of cool. Yeah. White House, Obama administration. That's who's in there. Basically, we were talking about the well, we were basically going over the talking points for the energy security policy that he unveiled today as of this recording. March 31, right? That's right. Oh, is tomorrow 31st? Yeah, that's right. March 30. So he goes over this or she's going over this with us. And basically Obama has said that over the next decade, he wants to reduce American oil imports by a third. Right. Something that every president going back to. I think Nixon has said that. Okay. All right. So it's an ambitious goal, is what you're saying. Well, not so third, but yeah. There's a video that John Stewart ran on The Daily Show where it literally showed the same clip from our last five presidents awesome. Saying reduced foreign dependency on oil. They have the best researchers on that show. Yeah. Okay. Well, Obama took his rightful place following in the footsteps of Richard Nixon and has said that he wants to reduce our imports by a third in about ten years. And one way to do that is to figure out how to conserve oil, how to reduce use, E-G-A smarter grid, more wind power, more nuclear, more clean coal is another one. Natural gas? No, clean coal. And to basically get online our reserves that we have now. Right. So the big talking point around Washington with the Democrats right now is that the oil companies have leases on something like 79 million acres of oil and suspected oilland that we're not tapping. Right. Not being used. They just own these leases. Right. And then I think, like 19 million acres are actually being mined for their oil or natural gas. And Obama's position is, hey, you fat cats, you need to go ahead and start producing or else we're going to penalize you, like invest in the United States, yet come off some of these profits and start spending on exploration and production and get American oil out of the ground, which is hugely different than what he was saying he should do before. Right. Which is like, no offshore drilling, nothing like that. So it's kind of a big deal that he's really putting oil at the center of his energy security policy. But one thing we ask that they didn't really answer very well is what role does preventing speculation in the commodities market play in energy security? That's my question. I get the sense, and this is one of those topics again, that Chuck's little guitar playing, English major brain has a hard time wrapping around this. Yeah. But I get the feeling that there's not a lot of people in the government that want to talk a lot about oil speculation. It's sort of like don't bring that up. No. Which is strange because there was that whole kicking around Wall Street during the recession thing that was going on, and that seems to have been largely abandoned. Right. But the question of whether or not oil speculation is affecting oil prices today, it still remains oils up to, I think, AAA saying a national average of 360 right now for unleaded, for regular. That's a national average. Yeah. That's crippling. I know the recession ended. I just made air quotes. But people are hurting. Food prices are increasing. Oil prices are increasing. Gas prices are increasing. And a 3.60 cent gallon of gas is crippling to the average American. Yeah. And that's average, you go to some places like California, and in the summertime they may be creeping up over $5 a gallon. Yeah. Lot of money for a gallon of gas. Yes, it is. A barrel of oil today is trading for OPEC, by the way. It stands to make 1 trillion in revenues in 2011. That's the course it's on right now. Yeah, it's a lot of kelsey, there's this idea out there that oil trading at 115 a barrel should actually be trading at something like 90 a barrel. Right. And that oil speculation is accounting for on top of the barrel price and accounts for a lot of this increase in the price of oil. So this is nothing new. This is going on right now in 2011, but it just happened in 2008. Do you remember when oil hit $4 a gallon, it hit 411 as a national average, which is the highest ever. Yeah, July 14, 2007 to 2007. 2008, yes. I remember when it took the first big jump, whenever that was, I was living in La. And I remember it got over $2 a gallon and it was a big jump. It was like one weekend it was a dollar 85, then the next weekend it was like 235. So it would have probably been like 2003 or 2004. Yeah, it was a big 50 cent jump or something like that. Don't quote me, I'm going on my feeble memory. But I remember saying at the time, you know what, I just had a feeling, said, this is something different. Gas is never going to be this cheap again, never going to go back down. You know, in 1999, the average was ninety cents a gallon. So twelve years ago, ninety cents a gallon. Now we're at 360. We've already hit four and change for an average. Yes. I remember feeling a little Honda for like $14. Yes, that was just so beautiful. Now it's like so good. $60? Yeah. So, Chuck, from 2004 to 2008, the price of a barrel of crude oil increased from 31.61 $2004 to $137.0.11 in July 2008. Crazy, right? So gas prices grew from 193 to 409 over that same period. There's so much that goes into oil production that could affect the market's instability. Right now, people are taking to the streets of Yemen and Syria, and once in a while in Iran, they are overthrowing the government. In Egypt, there's a civil war going on in Libya. Libya's oil production is virtually offline right now. Yeah, Venezuela little unstable. Well, it depends on who you're asking. It's actually pretty stable. It's just socialists. Which is why everybody's like, oh, that's a dangerous country. Well, yeah, sure, if you're America, it is. Right. But that's one of the reasons that people said geopolitics in these unstable regions that produce oil has a lot to do with it. But Michigan Senator Carl Levin, during a hearing said you know what? Yeah, it's unstable, but it's been unstable for decades and we've been buying oil from them, no problem. That's what he claimed, at least, right. And Hugo Chavez, remember, through Cicco, that's the Venezuelan oil company that's here in the US. Through Citco, remember, he used to donate like a million gallons of heating oil to people in the Northeast to keep them alive. Right. That was like basically him saying like this with socialism gets you people of Boston. When you think of that, how warm are you? Yeah. So it's unstable in that he's not a friend of America, we're not capable of pushing him around, and we need their oil. Right. But we have a Daytone because people like money, economies like money and we want to buy their oil, so everybody's chill out. What's more, with this recent drop in production that's represented by Libya going into civil war, saudi Arabia stepped up and said, you know what, that's 3% of the oil that's produced every day and we're going to add an extra 3% to make up for this temporary shortfall. Right. So there actually isn't any kind of dent in the production or supply side? Well, no, because you mentioned in the article, like, could it be peak oil? But no, it's not peak oil because tell them what peak oil is. Well, peak oil do we not podcast on the end? No, we never have. We need to do that. That's the point where there's only a finite amount of oil. So once we cross that little threshold, it's like all of a sudden there's getting less and less oil. Yeah. And there's a whole group of people out there, very educated, smart people are not crack pots, although sometimes people look at them like that who believe we have passed peak oil and it's going to take us five years or ten years to figure it out. But by that time it will be way too late and the world is going to come to a grinding halt for a while until we can figure out what to do. A lot of people think that we haven't hit peak oil. And if you look at at least the published figures, like Saudi Arabia is often accused of fudging on their numbers. I think they were found to a while back. But most people say no. Supply still exceeds demand, which, if you look at Mr. Adam Smith's The Wealth of nations, the basis of the capitalist Economy, if supply exceeds demand, prices should remain low and oil, isn't that the kind of thing you want rewriting the rules of base economics? No, because ultimately it's a commodity, and a commodity is something that we can make things out of or something we need. Wheat is a commodity. We need that pork belly. Pork belly is a commodity, the most delicious commodity, and oil is a very vital commodity. So if Carl Levin is saying, yeah, that's unstable, but we can deal with them, right? If Saudi Arabia is saying, yes, Libya is offline right now, but we're going to make up the shortfall if we haven't actually passed peak oil and the supply still exceeds the demand, a lot of people are saying, why is oil so high? Why is it increasing and increasing? And there's a correlation that's going on right now. Right. The answer to that obviously for a lot of people's minds, and I'm not taking a position on this because it is a very controversial thing to say. That is oil speculation. Yeah, there's speculation that the speculation is what's driving up the price. Right. That's perfect, Chuck. Yes. And one of the ways that it's being, I guess, suggested is that from July of 2008, there were 617,000 oil futures contracts on the market. On the oil commodities market. Can we explain what the future is? Hold on. We'll go back. All right, I just wanted to give this one last stat out, and we'll go back to the beginning. And then January of, 2011. So, July 2008, 617,000. January of 2011, 1 million futures contracts on the oil market. Right. And between those two times after the last bubble burst, it's been creeping up and up. Prices have basically commensurate with oil futures contracts. Right. So it really looks a lot like it could be oil speculation that's driving up the prices. Yes. So let's talk about oil speculations. Yes. And my mind starts to melt starting now. Okay. All right, Josh, the future and you're going to help me with this, but any kind of future is a contract between a buyer and a seller. Buyer agrees to purchase a fixed amount of a commodity at a fixed price. In oil future, we're talking about oil, obviously. So it's different than actually buying into a commodity because you're just betting on whether or not it will be higher or lower at the end of your contract. Right? Is that correct? A future is a derivative, and a derivative is any kind of financial contract or instrument, the value of which is based on the value of something else. You know what it is to me, to my little brain that doesn't think about this stuff? Well, is it's a made up way to make money? Almost. That's exactly right. It's like someone created this and said, hey, this doesn't even exist. Right. But as long as there's someone buying and selling it, it does exist. So a futures contract is very standard. It's not an exotic financial instrument, but the way that it's being used in the derivatives market is extremely exotic and volatile. Today's episode of Stephanie Shannon is brought to you by SimpliSafe home security. SimpliSafe believes that your home should be the safest place on Earth for every family. So they offer advanced, whole home security that puts you, your home, and your family safety first. With 24/7 professional monitoring, SimpliSafe agents take action the moment a threat is detected, dispatching police or first responders in an emergency, even if you're not home. Yeah. And SimpliSafe uses proprietary video verification technology so that monitoring agents can visually confirm the threat in order to get higher priority 911 dispatch and simplyafe offers comprehensive protection, not only against intruders and burglary, but against expensive home hazards. From flooding to fires, you can customize the perfect system for your home in just a few minutes@simplisafe.com. Stuff. Go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20% off with interactive monitoring. Just go to SimpliSafe.com stuff. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions. Faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feel like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. So, Chuck, you have a bunch of oil, and I have a refinery over here. Sweet. In my backyard. Are we podcasting? Well, I'm saving up for a better life for it, so I want to buy some oil from you. All right. But I think that the price of crude is going to go up a year from now per barrel. Right. So I'm going to go ahead and buy it for the market price now, and you're going to sell me a futures contract. So we have an agreement that a year from now, at the end of March 2012, that contract expires because I have to buy that oil from you. Yeah. Okay, but not now. A year from now. Right now, if I'm right and oil goes up, say I'm buying 100 barrels at $50 a barrel. That's our future contract. So our contracts are five grand if it goes up. If the price of oil goes up to $52 a barrel a year from now, I just got 50 barrels of oil for $200 less than I should have paid. It's a good deal for you. It is. But a future contract is also well, it's a bet, right? Yeah. Because the price of oil could go down. I said in 2012, at the end of March 2012, I'll buy those 50 barrels of oil from you for $50. But if the value of oil in March 2012 is $48 a barrel, then I'm paying 200 more than I could have if I just bought on what's called the spot market, which is I go to you. I want your oil right now, and you sell it to me for whatever the market price is. Right. And it just sounds weird. It's not so different than betting on whether or not a stock will go up or down. It's the same thing. It is. But in a lot of ways, it also comes into play. If I don't need oil right now right. But I'm going to need it in the future, and I think it's going to go up. Right. Right now, when the real bet comes in, when I'm saying that I think it's going to go up, I'm going to go long. It's called going long. Yeah. And at the end of this contract, you're actually going to get oil. Correct. If you're holding the contract that I have with you then. Yes. So that is to buy oil from you. Right. That is a company and be like, give me my money, I'll give you your oil. Right. But that's an important thing to distinguish because that is the future. And that means actually oil is being traded at some point. Right. And that's a normal thing. Right. Okay. Now that's going long. If I'm betting that oil prices are going to go up, if I think oil prices are going to fall, I'll go short. Yes. Right. So it's virtually the same thing. We go into a contract. Right. So, Chuck, let's say conversely, you think the oil is going to go down, so you're happy to sell me a futures contract. Yeah. Right. The price of oil goes down. Right? Yeah. We say for five grand, the price of oil goes down to $48 a barrel. Right. And you buy that contract back from me at the market price you just made $200. Sweet. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So there's going short and there's going long. But as you said, in a standard commodities market, that there's not a secondary derivatives market going on. Right. Then ultimately there's going to be an exchange of oil. Yes. The secondary derivatives market. You never get caught with the contract when it expires. You're trading contracts day by day, moment by moment, as the price of oil changes up and down throughout the day. You're making money off of those fluctuations by buying and selling, by shorting and longing the price of oil on these contracts, and that is speculation. That leads to what's called an artificial market. Supply and demand no longer applies to the commodity itself. Supply and demand is also subject to the financial instruments as well. Yeah. The whims of who has a lot of money and can affect the market with a big purchase. So that's called an unstable market because it's very volatile. It's not nearly as steady as a real tangible market. No. If you look at just a regular commodities market where there aren't any futures or derivatives trading by anybody besides the people who actually will end up with this stuff, the changes, the fluctuations over a month or a year or a quarter are pennies or a buck or two here. It's when investment banks and hedge funds, who, by the way, when interest rates are very low, tend to turn to the commodities market to safely park their money. Right. Or maybe they're not going to make much money when interest rates are low. They turn in the commodities market. When they get involved, that's when things start going from $30 a barrel in $2004 to $140 a barrel in 2008. Right. And that's what happened with the housing bust. All of a sudden, Wall Street housing wasn't a good place to put any money. So Wall Street flocked over to speculation futures, oil futures. Right. We should say again that this is all very much debatable. If you believe that oil speculation is affecting oil? This is how it happens. Right. We're just explaining that that's what we do. Well, what we just explained was how derivatives trading works. This is no secret. It's the effect that it has. That's what's debatable. So the people who believe that there is consequences for oil, for derivatives trading say that here's what happens. Right. If you want to get your hands on actual oil, you aren't going to be able to keep up with an investment bank or hedge fund manager who is buying up futures. Right. So you're going to need oil now and you're going to have to stockpile it's. One good thing about oil is you can stockpile it for a while. Right. Well, and oil producers can hoard it. That's exactly right as well. But the derivatives market in futures can also inadvertently force a hoard among people who actually use the oil, who are buying oil for use, not just trading in the derivatives market, by saying, okay, I can't buy futures because they're just too expensive right now, so I'm going to buy whatever I can get my hands on. So the spot market that deals in actual oil right that moment has a higher demand, which means the actual price of oil goes up, which means those oil futures go up even further, which means prices across the board rise, especially for gasoline. That's right. And when big companies like Goldman Sachs and City Group are these huge financial institutions are buying up tons and tons of speculating, then that's going to have a really big sway on the market. That alone will right. They stand to gain tons of cash. Tons of cash. But imagine if you not only stood to gain tons of cash from the secondary market, but you're an oil producer as well. Yeah. And all of a sudden you're speculating on your own production or buying oil features. If you buy a bunch of oil features for a higher price, you can actually the market trades on rumor. Right? Right. So people are like, well, somebody's buying up a bunch of this stuff and the price is actually rising. Right. So that a lot of people are going to be willing to pay more and more and more. If you're an oil producer doing that, then you're going to stand again through the financial instruments and through the actual sale of your oil. And there was an investigation into this, the secondary oil markets that found that in the New York Mercantile Exchange alone, which is the commodities market, or one of them for the US. Right. 11% of the oil futures contracts were owned by Vital, which is a Swiss oil producer. So how, Chuck, how can an oil company be allowed to artificially inflate the price of oil for its own gains? And how can investment banks be allowed to drive up the price? If that is in fact what's going on? How can they be allowed to drive up the price of a commodity as valuable as oil, if normally it should be something like 30 or 40 or $50 a barrel, and it's double or triple or quadruple what experts believe its actual value should be. Well, it shouldn't be able to happen because they're starting in 1974 with our Congress, there was something put in place called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC. And they were put in place specifically to prevent this kind of thing from speculation artificially inflating prices of commodities. So they were like, they've realized a long time ago, this could be a real problem. Let's put this thing in place and let's make them keep it in check. So if you are trading on that exchange, you got to file reports every day. The Commission looks him over, keeps an eye out for speculation. They know if somebody's trying to corner the market, they know who, and they try to stop it. Yeah, but quite a few things have happened to neuter, for the most part, the CFTC. Yeah. Because you can create a federal agency and empower it all you want, but if successive presidents disagree with you about the value of that agency, they can neglect it, they can strip it of its powers. They can, as you say, neuter it and not even have the courtesy to put nutrials on it afterwards. Just leave it laying there. So in 2000, a very big thing happened. Prices were still pretty low for oil, less than $30 a barrel. But a little company called Enron started lobbying Congress to remove regulatory powers of the CFTC. And basically what the deal was, the CFTC had regulatory powers over the official exchange. Right. Enron said the New York Mercantile Exchange. Yes. And CFTC, I'm sorry, enron said, hey, we've got this software that allows futures to be traded over the counter, which is something outside of the formal exchange market. Right. It's basically like I can say, hey, Chuck, you've got a bunch of features in your pocket. Can I come to your house and buy it? Yeah. And it'll be a legitimate exchange, but it's over the counter. It exists outside of the market. That's right. And that became known as the Enron loophole, because all of a sudden, OTC trading was allowed for futures exchanges with no government oversight because it was out of the jurisdiction with the CFTC. So, Josh, that was one thing happened in 2000. Another little thing came along called the intercontinental exchange. The Ice was set up in London, and that was to trade European oil futures. And the funny thing about that is it was headquartered here in Atlanta. So it's headquartered in Atlanta, but it's European oil futures. So the CFTC didn't have any oversight over them because it was European. Right. So you could trade American oil features on this exchange. Well, six years later, that's when they set up the American terminals. Think about it like the time in London and the time in New York are totally different. And that's kind of a problem. Right. So really, if you can get these commodities, the same commodities trading on the same time zone, you can really create you have a more robust market. That's right. And now all of a sudden, the CFTC couldn't even regulate these formal exchanges on the formal market. Right. Even though it was based in Atlanta. They set up trading post terminals inside the United States in New York. But it's almost like the OTB, like, oh, horse racing is illegal, but this race is in Cuba. Right. But you can bet on it on the Lower East Side. Yeah. And so as these things just kept going and going, the CFTC just lost any jurisdiction whatsoever. And people that are coming up with these things yeah. They're basically saying, like, let's set up a way where we can make gobs of money outside of regulation. And I mean outside of regulation. Yeah. People have no idea. I was reading some blog post and it was about how the aluminum market was being cornered by somebody and they thought it was some hedge fund manager and they had an idea who but not enough to publish, but they have no idea who's buying what. It all exists in the shadows, the derivatives market, too, because it's outside of the jurisdiction of this federal agency that was created specifically to police these things. You know, I'm never going to be wealthy. Why? Because I'm one of those dumb schlubs. It's just like, let me go out and earn my paycheck. And I'm not like, against the stock market. Like, I'll invest in the stock market and set up my 401 and all that, but I can't even fathom the kind of what causes someone to think of like, hey, how can I really make tons of money with no oversight? And I'll invent this way to trade ether and not real ether. People would buy ether from me, especially drug dealers. Patrick Bateman would have eaten you alive. Oh, man, I'd be so dead. So there was a July 2008 report by the International Energy Agency that concluded that speculation didn't really have anything to do with it. They were like, no, that's not what's driving oil prices up. Yeah. There's another report the next September contradicted the Ie. A report said, no, there's actually a lot of correlations between this big influx of money and oil futures, the rising cost of oil. I'm a dummy. To me, it kind of looks plain. That's probably what's been happening. But there's probably a lot of people are going to write and say, oh, what you guys didn't consider was XYZ. No. There's a lot of factors that go into producing and buying and selling oil, and there's no way you can cover all of them. And that's not the point. And I don't think that's anybody who's accusing the speculation of influencing the. Price. Right. That's not the point of anybody because there's nobody who's going to say, this is 100% of the problem. There's other stuff that does have this effect. I think what gets people to say speculation is having an effect is because there are people out there who's like it has no effect. And it's just not possible that a million futures contracts can't have some effect on the end price and it is just correlated. It's not causal, but it shot up so quickly exactly right along with it. Yeah, I don't know. And I mean, ultimately what it comes down to is the average American who's still maybe unemployed, paying tons of money for food, is getting reamed at the pump still. And if there's anything that can be done to reduce that without causing harm to the markets, why not? But, hey, good news, Josh. In 2008, Congress introduced the consumer first. Hey, how about that? Consumers first. Right. The Energy Act in May 2008. And that would have extended oversight for the CFTC to foreign lands. Probably would have helped a lot. And it died on the Senate floor a month later. A month later? Yeah. They said Consumer First. Yeah. Let's kill it. They're talking about it now. Like this whole Obama push is basically making the oil companies out to be bad guys. So the Democrats are really taking they're banging the wardrobe against oil companies right now. And then investment bankers are a fun target, too. So this is coming up again, right? But it's coming up like it did in 2008 because oil speculation is rampant. Today's episode of Stephanie Shannon is brought to you by SimpliSafe home security. SimpliSafe believes that your home should be the safest place on Earth for every family. So they offer advanced whole home security that puts you, your home, and your family safety first. With 24/7 professional monitoring, Simply safe agents take action the moment a threat is detected, dispatching police or first responders in an emergency, even if you're not home. Yeah. And SimpliSafe uses proprietary video verification technology so that monitoring agents can visually confirm the threat in order to get higher priority 911 dispatch. And SimpliSafe offers comprehensive protection not only against intruders and burglary, but against expensive home hazards, from flooding to fires. You can customize the perfect system for your home in just a few minutes at SimpliSafe. comStuff. Go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20% off with interactive monitoring. Just go to Simplisafecom stuff. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpaline jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule of their own sleeves. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comitoimation and I know everyone thinks we're anticapitalism, but that's not true at all. Just play fairly, just play fair. At the very least, admit that you're having the effect that you're having. Right. That's what I think would gall anybody who is like, yes, oil speculation has an effect. And it's not just oil, by the way. If you want to read a really cool article on speculation, commodity speculation, read Frederick Kaufman's The Food Bubble. He tries very hard, but fails ultimately, in the end, to connect Goldman Sachs, trading wheat and creating a wheat bubble that created the food crisis in the riots in Haiti and Egypt in 2008. But he failed to connect it. He came so close, but he wasn't able to. But it's worth a read anyway. It was in Harper's last year. Interesting. Yeah. So that is oil speculation. It's us speculating on oil speculation or speculating as little as we can. Right? Right. If you want to learn more about that, type in oil in the handychurchbar athouseofworks.com. We have a bunch of cool stuff on the site about that. And I said oil, followed by handy search bar, which means listener mail. Josh. I'm going to call this sperm donation dear Josh, Chuck and Jerry, but I didn't say Lizzie today. Yeah, because Jerry has left us. Say it again. Dear Josh, Chuck and Lizzy. My name is Melanie. I'm a college student from Seattle attending full time school in South Korea. I was listening to how twins work and it made me think of my own unique family situation. My mom and legal father, her husband could not have a child together, so they decided to get a sperm donor. The laws are looser now, but 20 years ago, information was more closed off and secretive. I grew up not knowing really anything about my real dad until just about a month ago. In late February. The day before I was to depart back to South Korea, I got a letter in the mail from my real father. He lives in Athens, Georgia. Pretty cool. Yeah. We have been communicating through Facebook and email and I've discovered that we have quite a bit in common, despite never knowing each other. Of course you do. Genes, baby. It's all the jeans. I wonder if it turned out to be biker. Lee we have very similar handwriting, religious, spiritual beliefs, paranormal experiences, TV sounds like bikerly. TV show taste. He is a nurse and that was the first job I ever wanted. So it's not by grip. No, it's not. And he was a journalist, and my main talent and a large interest of mine is writing. On top of all this, five years ago or so, my mom received a letter from a lady who had registered the same donor number. So, in short, I also have a half brother. That's cool. That's very cool. We were able to meet once, actually, my senior year, and also discovered we had several things in common. My boyfriend was a part Japanese guy named Max, and as was his best friend apart japanese guy named Max. What? Same political views. Both played guitar. Same favorite band. Half brother, half sister reunited. Does she say the same favorite band? She doesn't mention what the band is. Okay. But she said, this leads me to my request that we do an episode on sperm and egg donation and how relationships can develop. So let's add that to the kitty. Okay. To the queue. Yeah, let's do that. Melanie A. Thanks a lot, Melanie. So we got to come down to Athens for a little while, right? No, she did not come down. She just was in contact. You definitely have to go to Athens. While you're there, make sure you eat at Harry Bassett. I strongly recommend the Chicken Rochem. Bob. Okay. And they do not kick you in the crotch when you order it. I promise. This isn't like a prank. No. If you were produced outside of the traditional means of reproduction, we want to hear about it. Yeah, good one. Wrap it up. Send it in an email to staffpodcast@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 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 four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You 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 as Pepco Pet supplies plus and select Neighborhood Pet stores." | ||
How Spies Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-spies-work | Psst. You want to know how governments and corporations get the drop on one another? The frontline of intelligence is populated by spies. Learn about how spies get and transfer information (and why they do it) in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Psst. You want to know how governments and corporations get the drop on one another? The frontline of intelligence is populated by spies. Learn about how spies get and transfer information (and why they do it) in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Sat, 23 Feb 2013 17:22:49 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=17, tm_min=22, tm_sec=49, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=54, tm_isdst=0) | 41936836 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself. With no must, no fuss, turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell. Anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. comSK and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant in fast motion. Yeah. And that makes us the super fast episode of Stuff You Should Know on Spot. Super fast. It's going to be not short, okay. We're just going to be talking really fast like this pretty much the whole time. All right. We can start. Yeah. Pick up, will you? All right. Yeah. Spies like US. Yeah. Did you like that movie? I did. I was raised to dislike Chevy Chase. Really? By whom? My dad. Really? Yeah. I don't think my mom liked him, either, but my dad definitely thought he was a jerk. His word. He was kind of a jerk. And yeah, apparently I read this Saturday Night Live biography about, like, the show. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. And they talked about how he was the first one to be able to develop a cocaine habit because he was the first one to start getting paid. Oh, wow. And apparently he didn't share. Really? So that made him a jerk. I don't think it's what my dad thought he was a jerk. Anyway, all apologies to Mr. Chase. If you listen to this, I have always been a big fan. Have you? Yeah, and I was very saddened when his career kind of faltered and I missed Chevy Chase. Well, okay. He's on TV now, though. He's on the TV in the community, right? Yeah. Is that it? He was on it. I don't know if he still is, but he watches the show. Yeah. I don't either. But no, I hated Fletch. I'm just going to come out and say, I hate that movie. Fletch. I hate fletch. Two, I hate fletch. Eight, I hate all the fletches. I think it's a stupid movie, and I hate fletch. But I did like Funny Farm a lot. That's weird that you hated fletch. I hated fletch. Interested? I still hate fletch. You could show me Fletcher right now. I'd be like, this is stupid. Turn it off. It's so funny. So, Chuck yes. You know a little bit about spies. I believe you had a bit of a story to share with everyone. A little bit. I mean, obviously, spy stories of real life spies are kind of fun. And to me, the best all time, real, true life spy story was the story of Christopher Boyce and Dalton Lee. Okay. The falcon and the snowman. Oh, yeah. I've never seen that movie of you. Yeah. Is it good? Yeah, really good. Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn. Right. Yeah. Nice. And that is the story of these two guys, two youngsters living in Southern California. And Boyce was hired by his father, I think, as a guard at an aerospace firm called TRW Incorporated. And that gave him access to a lot of CIA documents that were working with the aerospace firm. They were drug dudes, and he was like, hey, we can make a lot of money selling these secrets to the Soviets down in Mexico City at their embassy, make money for drugs, to run a drug operation. And they did so for, like, a year, successfully a year from 76 to 77, and were caught, of course, and jailed for espionage. And I had a little trouble, for some reason, finding out the current status of Lee. I did find out that Boyce actually escaped from prison in 1980 from Long Park, was picked up again in one, I think, and then was released in 2003 and lives, I think, in the San Francisco area. Wow. I've got this. Awesome. La. Times article that I'm going to read tonight for fun, because I didn't have a chance to read it before. Is it, like, a long read? Yeah, it's one of those, like, 15 page articles. Nice. His big interview he did after he got released. But I can't find out what happened to Lee, aside from a rumor that he was eventually released and Sean Penn hired him as his personal assistant. And I don't know if that's true. Weird. I can't verify that. I understand. Sean Penn's, like, the real deal when it comes to combating poverty in Haiti. He's in there in the trenches every day. He is? Isn't that crazy? Some people think he's a jerk. I happen to like the guy. I like the guy a lot. So, Chuck, how did the Falcon in the Snowman become spies? They were working or boss was working at an aerospace firm as a night guard and had access to sensitive documents. So why did he start to make money. Okay, so that's actually one of the main ways that a spy is recruited. There's several nice intro, by the way, dude. Thank you. That makes, too. Yeah. Times error changes. Give me your punch card. Okay. There are a few ways for a person to become a spy. Probably the most straightforward way is to maybe join the army, army Intelligence. Join the CIA right out of college and basically just join your country's intelligence agency, be trained and then sent into the field. Sure. Maybe posing as a diplomat or being a diplomat. Apparently the line is very fuzzy between a person who's actually a diplomat and diplomat who is a spy. Oh, really? Yeah, it's like one and the same. I mean, they're still performing the same function. They have a job as a diplomat, but they're also just spying, too. Sure, I guess. What's the basis of spying? Well, what they're after, obviously and this is the no brainer stuff, but we always have to point it out they're after any valuable information to give to the country that they're working for. Right. It's obviously usually military secrets, although we will talk a little bit later about corporate spying, which is huge these days. But typically people with access to these either offices or high ranking officials, they do have recruiters that go out, like you said, a little money in front of your face if they think that a person is someone they can turn right, like, hey, you're not happy with your own country. We know this. You want to sell them out? Or we know you really like money and you're kind of unscrupulous. Do you want to sell them out? Right. Or we know your mother needs surgery and your government insurance. Although the gold standard of health care is American health care. It's part of the American system, therefore, it's not going to really cover the surgery. So here's some money. Or. Hey, mom. The surgery. You want a movie made after you about you right after you're executed? You want to be famous. You want to feel important because you're nobody. You want to be somebody wants you to dig up some secrets for us. Right. And that's actually like a really good recruiting tool or recruiting methods to identify somebody who has a menial job, some sort of file clerk, but has access to really sensitive information. Exactly. Go in and, like you said, pump them up. I mean, I don't think you would actually say you're a nobody. You would maybe promise making them a somebody. You have to break them down before you build them back up. It depends on what you're trying to do. Okay. Did you touch on ideological disillusionment with your home country? Yeah, a little bit. Like, communism obviously was a big thing we covered in McCarthyism. Yeah, like the Rosenberg. Sure. They were at the very least communist sympathizers who supposedly allegedly spied for the Communists. By the way, did you see the email we got about that? No. We got an email from a guy in the Air Force that said there was a great interview with I can't remember who it was that basically said, the Rosenberg did have a lot more to do with it. At first, they were like, oh, they're guilty, guilty. Then later on, as we pointed out, they were like, they didn't exactly sell the deepest darkets of secrets, and maybe they were made an example of, but then apparently more recent interview does implicate them a little bit more to the extent that their family even was like, oh, it's so weird for McCarthy to be vindicated. Yeah. So you've got blackmail too, as a way of getting people to do what you want. Like, we have these photos of you that you don't want published. Like, you clearly have a lampshade on your head, and now you have to be a spy for us. And then once you have the person agreeing to spy oh, there's also walk ins too. And I think that might have been boost deal was an opportunity. I want to be a spy. Yeah. Who do I call about that? Exactly? And usually if you're going to be a spy, you identify a country who's probably got the most money or the most desire for the information you have, and then you go to their local embassy. I guess it would be a good way to do it. Yeah. You just walk right in. But if you are that country's diplomatspies working at the embassy, you're going to be immediately suspicious of someone like that. Very true. Apparently the US. Had a Russian defector. I can't remember. It may have been Dmitry. Yeah, it may have been the guy who's mentioned no Olig Penkovsky. Penkovsky. He was a Russian general, I believe. Soviet general with the KGB. And I think he was a walk in. He made a secret trip to the US. And over years and years and years, he finally gained the trust of the Americans. He's like, look, this is legitimate information. This is Cold War stuff. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Well, that was like, the height of spydom. Not quite, so okay. Yeah, we'll get to that later. I read a recent article. That can't wait. Yeah. There's like, a lot more going on now than you might believe. All right, so you have a paid blackmailed or ideologically disenchanted spy sure. Who you trust, and you assign them a person named a controller. Harvey kitel, probably, yes. In most cases. Yeah. Controller is the person who I think they're just like your only contact, basically right. Who you're going to be given the information to. Yeah. Or getting information or instructions from. There's going to be one person you meet. Yeah. You don't want a large you don't want your spy to know a lot of people because they'll be compromised. There's not a Christmas party. They should, though. No, they shouldn't. They all just sit around and look at each other very wearily. Right. They don't make eye contact. Right. The reason why they do this is called compartmentalization, because if the spy is caught, there's only so much information they can give. Like? Well, I was meeting Mr. Orange. That may or may not be his real name. Right. I never really saw his face, and actually I never met him. It was all hand off stuff. The park bench. Well, you're talking about we might as well go ahead and cover that. The drop. The dead drop. The dead drop? Yeah, you see it in movies, apparently. It's real. You'll drop something in a public place, very nonchalantly, and then send the signal that it's been dropped to your controller. Then they will go to the little hidden loose brick in the public park wall and fish out the microfilm. Yeah, the microfilm. The micro dot, maybe. What has always struck me about spy work, or articles on spies, and especially the gadgets and technology they use, I always just assume it's like 20 years out of date. Yeah, me too. I was reading this book called Veil by Robert Woodward. Excellent book about, like, Reagan Secret Wars. Really good book. And they're talking about this light beam, I guess, a laser that you can point at a window and it measures the vibrations from a conversation and translates them into audio. So it's an eavesdropping device that they were using in the early 60s. You're talking about? The laser emacs. 3500. I am. Well, they have these now. I'm sure it wasn't that. There are different ones, but yeah, it's an invisible infrared beam, hits the window and records the vibrations, filters out all the gobbley cook, and then amplifies it and records it. It's amazing. And it's been around since the 60s. What do you think they're doing now? Well, this is the one that's available now, so it's probably just the slicker, better version. Well, in the article I read, too, on modern spy equipment, basically said just that is it's a lot of the same stuff, it's just faster and smaller. Got you. And digital. What's that one called? This is called the laser emacs 3500. And the cool thing is, when you go to their website, it said, as used by David Letterman and Jay Leno and Fox Five. Undercover weird. Yeah. I don't know, I guess they've done little bits where they spy on people. Well, I don't know. Jay Leno spied on an NBC board meeting when they were trying to figure out whether to go with Letterman or him through Carson. Yeah. You had to see that movie. No, I've seen it. I don't remember that, though. Yeah, well, he was just sitting in another room, like taking notes, like in a closet right now. Post it. Exactly. Okay, let's get back to it, man. You have a controller. Your spy is compartmentalized very much before you start doing dead drops and everything. You don't want to get ahead of yourself because your spy is going to get greased. You have to first create a cover and support it with the legend. Yeah, right. So it covers just like your secret identity or your false identity. Sure. And then the legend is the backstory around it. Yeah. It needs to be detailed and thorough. Right. So, for example, if you're into fishing, I think the article uses, it's a good example. Or your character is your cover is right. You're going to have fishing gear. And if you have that's part of the legend, the legend is that you are into fishing. You're fly fisherman big time. So then at your house, your apartment, whatever that's set up for you, you're going to have fishing equipment. And if you're good, it's going to be used fishing equipment, and it's going to be of a certain quality depending on whether your cover is frugal or kind of spending or likes the best of the best. That's a good point about you. I didn't even think about that. Oh, yeah, that'd be like a movie. Thing is, the guy sees the supply fishing gear and it's got a tag on it or something, right. Or boom, or both. If you are, say, a Russian accountant posing as a Russian accountant yeah. You probably should know the ins and outs of Russian tax law. Sure. You should also probably speak Russian with a Russian accent from the region that you're supposedly from, that your covers from. You saw no way out. Right. Is it the one with Kevin what's his face costner? Yeah. No, I didn't. That's a good one. I've heard that was like a couple of years ahead of my I think I was watching Disorderly while my family went and saw no way out. I'm not going to ruin that one. Actually. I'm a spoiler guy, usually for movies that are like 15 years old, but I'm going to leave that one to the people to go see it or to rent it or whatever because it's got a nice little twist. Okay, what else, Chuck? Oh, this is not a quick thing. No. If you establish a cover, it takes years to establish a cover. You're not going to waltz into the Russian embassy and say, hey, I'm just a Russian accountant and where are your documents? This is not a small camera in my tie. It takes a long time. And people go, it's like being an undercover cop. You have to establish his trust over a period of months and years, even. Yeah. And you're going to, in the meantime, be performing accounting as part of your business. You better be good at it. Yeah. Or at the toast. Yes. Or you could go to jail for tax fraud. Wouldn't that be surprising? That would definitely help your cover, though, wouldn't it? To go to prison for the state? Yeah, sure. You are not going to be memorizing things, although in a pinch, I'm sure they're probably trained to memorize a certain amount of information. But what you really want to do, and it is like in the movies, is to make tiny little copies, photocopies or photographs of sensitive documents and relay those to your controller, and then that ends up on the microfilm micro dot. Or it could even just you could make copies if you are like, that file clerk who has regular routine access to that information, just make copies of it and take it out of there. Yeah. And they had the little handheld copiers. Have you seen those are cool. Yeah, those are pretty cool. What you don't want to do is take anything. No, because then somebody might notice that exactly. The documents are missing. Right. But you don't have to listen to us. Your controller is going to tell you how he or she wants the information. Sure. And there are plenty of female spies, so we definitely don't mean to say he a lot, but we're dudes, I said he or she. Yeah. So I'm saying, I mean, Valerie Plain, she was a spy. Yeah, very true. It's not just on the ground either. It's not just human spies. We've been using satellites for years, since the fact of the show for me is that before the digital age, the satellite would take photographs and I guess drop them, develop them and drop them in a bucket in the ocean. I think it was undeveloped. Oh, was it just the film canister, of course develop it. Yeah, it's like a photo map up there. Yeah, there's like some stoner up there, like, lives inside developing pictures. You remember the photo map? Yeah. What a bygone era that is. And those stoners, where are they working now? They're not a video stores either. Places coffee shops, I think so. That's where I always see them. They are the 99%, so they don't obviously have to drop them in the ocean any longer. They can just relay them digitally. And they've actually been doing that since 1970. Yeah. That's pretty cool. So long before we were taking digital photos and sending them wirelessly yeah. Over radio. I think they did it. Well. That's what wireless is. Yeah. Radio. It's pretty amazing. It is. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You called IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule of their own suites. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com It automation. Hey, everybody, chuck here. Did you know there are millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb right now? Yeah. Which means that's a lot of amazing homes that are making people a lot of extra money. And it doesn't have to be an everyday thing. You can host when you want. Like, let's say you're taking a week's vacation. Why not host your home? Because that money could go toward paying for your current vacation or towards your retirement fund or even towards your kids college fund. Yeah. For anything. And listen, if you're worried about your stuff, don't be. Air cover for hosts. Let hosts welcome guests into their home without having to worry. You get $1 million in damage protection anytime you're hosting, plus pet damage protection and income loss protection, too. And are you ready for this? Air cover for host is completely free every time you host on airbnb. Free with a capital F with air cover for Host, it makes hosting a no brainer, and the benefits really start adding up. So learn more and host with peace of mind at Airbnb Comaircoverforhosts. So, again, that kind of proves my point, though, Chuck. What are we on to now? I know it's faster, smaller, better. There's got to be some cool stuff that wasn't around before, though. Well, spy planes back in the day were large, like the u two spy plane, and it would have to fly right over the enemy. These days, of course, we have drones flying them. Well, not flying themselves, but unmanned drones. Right. Doing the dirty work. All sorts of very dirty, dirty work. That's right. All of this, Chuck, is called technological intelligence, or techint. I'll bet everybody at your work thinks you're a jackass if you call it tech integrity in the CIA, they're like, It's ti, dude. Right. Exactly. Or if you want to just really be in on this line, just t. Just t. So you've got spy planes technically, at one point, where T satellites, which now apparently can read a headline on the newspaper. That's crazy. Yeah, well, you see, Google Earth yeah. My car in my driveway was on it, and that was a little creepy. I know. I had bird poop on the roof. There's, like, wire taps, that whole laser listening device. Do you want this into do you want to talk about some more? They have seismic equipment to detect nuclear testing. They have underwater sensors to find things like submarines. Yes, which is a big deal, again, in veil, which, by the way, I recommend. They were talking about how back in the day, to eavesdrop on Russian cables, like the Soviets didn't encrypt all of their stuff on certain cables that were transmitted underwater, especially ones that were close to the motherland. Right, right. So the US. Would send subs to go and clamp on to these cables and listen for a few days. Wow. And they were, like, right off the coast of the USSR. Holy cow. Really dangerous work. And then they finally made a recorder that they could go clamp on, drop off, and then leave for, like a month or six months or whatever, and then come back and get it. So there's only, like, two windows where it was really scary, rather than several days just having to sit there quietly on the bottom of the ocean. This isn't new stuff. That evolution of spy tools article I read was like, have you ever read The Art of War? What was it? Sunsu. South Laosu. Southan Sunsu. And there are more than 100 references to spies and espionage intelligence gathering in the Art of War. I didn't know that. It's very old. And in the Revolutionary War, they would use invisible ink called jay's. Sympathetic stain was apparently the best one to use. And they still use or up until recently, they still used invisible ink to transmit messages. It's crazy. You heat up certain things and it will appear or hold it under certain light. Like lemon juice. Yeah. That's the old little crafty trick, how to be a fan. It turns like kind of this ugly burnt sienna color. Does it? Yeah. But also, if you look at it, you can be like, oh, it's written in lemon juice. I can see without even just by moving the paper a little bit, I don't think it's real bona fide spy stuff. Apparently, the Spartans would spy, and they had a device called the Sky Tale, and it was a long, slender rod which was wrapped with a thin strip of papyrus, and the message was written on the wrapping and it was passed on to a messenger. And apparently it could only be read if it was rewound around a rod of the same diameter. So it was sort of like an Enigma machine. Yeah. There you go. Let's talk about that. Okay. Have you read Enigma? No. There's a book about this whole thing about people who are cracking the code. The Nazis had this very clever system of encrypting messages where they would have what's called an Enigma machine, which is kind of like a random typewriter that would assign a code to a message, and it could only be decoded by the same machine. Like a twin machine right. That would get this message and then turn it back into whatever it was originally supposed to say. Wow. And the British apparently got in on breaking this at a place called Benchley or Blanchley, I think park, where they had a few of these captured Enigma machines. And we had secretly cracked the code, I think the polish, even before that, discovered it. You're right. And then shared it with the Brits, who probably a little further along. Maybe not. Well, I think Alan Turing, who invented the computer, essentially was one of these Enigma code breakers. Yeah, interesting. Yeah. The information that was code named Ultra, and it was obviously something they kept on the very down low, because you don't want Hitler to know you've got an Enigma machine because then Hitler kills the guy who invented the Enigma machine. I think they got one from a sunken sub. Oh, really? That the Germans were like, well, it's on the bottom of the ocean. We'll just leave it there. It'll be okay. And somebody in the Allies went and got it. Yeah. It's a pretty cool book. Enigma. I'll have to check that out. Yeah. What about the number stations? Did you see that? Yeah, that's pretty cool. So remember we talked about the Yosemite Sam transmission? Yes. A data burst. And then I'm going to blow you to Smithereens farm. Yeah. I imagine that that has to be from some sort of numbers station, but what is it? Well, it's a radio station that the government operates and it broadcasts on short band frequencies just intermittently. Right. So they'll have a clue, like a song or an announcement that will mark the beginning or the end of the secret broadcast. And obviously they won't say like, and now we will play the secret broadcast. Right. Some sort of hidden message, and then it will be just a bunch of a series of numbers that is obviously a coded message. Right. What's awesome is it's not secret. Like any schmo who's tuned into the right frequency can hear this broadcast, but he won't be able to make heads or tails of it. And apparently this stuff happens all over the world. It's crazy. Yeah. Codes are huge though, right? Secret code. The US. Isn't like, well, yeah, we're doing this, but it's kind of like use your brain. Yes, that's exactly what we're doing. Well, the article I read on the modern spy says basically the Americans and the Russians, while getting along, just have this sort of implied understanding that we're both still spying. Like, let's not get each other. Oh, yeah, everybody's spying on everybody. Is the WikiLeaks cables revealed true? You just want to gather intelligence or information on whatever is the case, from trade policy to defense, any information that you can get gives you an upper hand, and I think everybody does it. Well, since we're there these days, you're going to find a lot of spying going on, I think. The Washington Post said last year that there are more than 1200 government organizations and close to 2000 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism. That's a huge way that they're spying these days, obviously, is terrorist cells, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations all across the US. So these days we're spying mainly on terror cells. Iran, North Korea and China, obviously. Right. And it says that the US. Is the recipient of hundreds of thousands of cyber attacks every day from Beijing. Basically, they're trying to penetrate our firewalls and seeing what they can get. Does it work? Well, I hope not. We are also spying on Israel. Sometimes you spy on your buddies because in 2008 there was an Israeli report that said that we have a long history of spying on Israel in regards to their secret nuclear program. So even if you're friends with the country, it doesn't mean you're not keeping tabs. Yeah, well, that was one of the things about the WikiLeaks cables is a lot of them were about our very close allies and friends and it was just very embarrassing. And now Bradley Man is going to spend the rest of his life in prison because the State department was embarrassed. And then corporate spying is huge these days. Private sector spy firms, basically, they. Said that there is nary a large merger acquisition deal that goes down these days without a lot of spying going on, a lot of corporate spying. And the CIA even lets people spies moonlight for corporations to make a little extra scratch. Is that right? That's what they said. And they said there's even an entire network of people who do nothing but track corporate jets and their flight patterns. Wow. Isn't it crazy? That makes sense. It does make sense, because you go to where the money is, right? Yeah. Or I think was it Coke that had the girl that worked there, the lady sell out. Oh, yeah. Or almost sell out to Pepsi. They're the secret formula. Yeah. Two years ago, she was a walk in. That's right. He approached Pepsi with the secret formula for Coke, and Pepsi told Coke about it. That lady got in big trouble. Oh, Pepsi came out. Yeah. We got our own formula. Yes. We don't mind being second tier. They like it. There's less pressure. So what are you going to do with all this stuff when you got all this information? Who's going to be looking at it? It's obviously not the spy. Well, that's the thing. You don't have one controller with one spy. And that's what all of your information is. You have all of this information coming in from all these different sources, whether it's satellite photos or human intel. And you have people called data analysts who are putting it all together, and they write daily briefs or papers or profiles on, say, like, the newest leader of North Korea, Kim Jongun. It's basically just like, here's this threat, here's what you want to know about this person. There may be an attack from this group. And it's basically this picture that's cobbled together, like, a mosaic of creative of data and information. Yeah. Stalin apparently received information that the Germans were going to turn on the Soviets in World War II, and he said, yeah, I don't believe so. He ignored the data, and look at what happened. Like a million people died in St. Petersburg or Stalin garad, so he did not analyze the data to his advantage. Apparently. Also, you can use these data analysts, a gap here that we need to fill in. So go do this. It's a two way street as far as data collection and data analysis goes. Right. A pretty good example was the purple code of Japan in World War II. We had a pretty good idea that Midway Island was going to be attacked, but we didn't know if we were reading the code for Midway Island correctly, which is AF. We thought it was, but we weren't sure. Right. So I guess Army Intelligence or somebody said, hey, get Midway to issue a plea for fresh water, so they're low on fresh water. And they did. And then we intercepted a Japanese transmission saying that AF was low on fresh water. So we knew that AF was Midway, and we knew then that Midway was definitely going to be attacked, and we won the battle of Midway as a result. USA. USA. Misinformation is just as important as the real information spies spend. From the sounds of this article, just as much time doling out misinformation as they do collecting the real stuff. Right. It's a very important part of it. Yeah. And one good way to do that is to get caught spying. Double agent. Yeah. What's a double agent? Well, a double agent is somebody who say is an American who's spying for the Russians. And then the Americans say, wait a minute, this guy is spying for the Russians. Let's make sure that all of this information that he has access to is altered and wrong and flawed. And then he'll pass it along to the Russians and he'll be what's called an unwitting double agent. Right. Or we can go to him directly and be like, we're going to fry you, pal, unless you start giving fake information to the Russians. And then that person is a wedding double agent in that case, and he'll say, you're no pal of mine or Josh. You can be a triple agent. Or even, I guess, a quadruple or quintuple agent. It happens to where the Americans NAB you and then they turn you into a double agent. But the Russians know about that and you're still secretly working for the Russians. Was this the grabster that wrote this? He points out that it's gotten so convoluted with the quadruple and up that sometimes in the end, history can't even tell what they were. Yes. Like who the person was actually, whose side they were on. I would imagine that person is probably on their own side after a while. Yeah. Just trying to not get thrown in the hooscow. Exactly. For the gulag. Yeah. I guess we can talk about Operation Fortitude because that's kind of cool. Yeah. This is a really big misinformation campaign about the invasion of Normandy on DDay. A very elaborate one. Well, yeah. It included creating fake troops, fake tanks and troops transport fake fuel depots. Like built out of wood. Yeah. And amassing them on the southern coast of England to make the Nazis think that the invasion of France is going to come from no, I'm sorry, the northern coast of England. Right. To make them think it was going to come from the north. Exactly. And instead of the south, where Normandy was, and part of this was a big part of it, was feeding double agents false information. There was one guy named Garbo who is a big player in this whole thing, code named Garbo. I like that. Right. This is like Blazing Saddles. How so? Well, they built a fake rock ridge at the end with fake townspeople, and when they came a riding into town, a whopping in a whompan, they found out it was not real, and then cleveland Little was able to prevail. Nice. Well, in this case, the Allies prevailed. Yeah, sort of like Cleveland Little. Yeah. They even went further than painting a bunch of fuel depots to look like the real thing. They created a completely fake battalion, the first US. Army Group. It was led by General Patton, even though it was totally fake. They had fake radio chatter about this group and the invasion. And on the day of the invasion, they dropped all sorts of aluminum from planes to reflect radar to make it look like there's a big movement of an air force across the English Channel. They did the same thing with submarines. And it looked like there was an invasion coming from the north, while there was really one coming from the south. And it worked, right? Well, yeah. We took Normandy. That was the first 15 minutes of saving Private Ryan. Yeah. So I don't know if it worked. I guess it worked. Well, not the first 15 minutes. I think you're forgetting about the book ends of that movie with old Matt Damon in the cemetery. Right. And then they went to the awesome part. Yes, you're right. It was like the first five minutes kind of sucked. Was that Matt Damon? Yeah, it was him growing up. I just thought it was uncanny. He hit the uncanny valley. Yeah, if it was an actor playing him. Or was it Matt Damon and makeup? No, it was an actor who looked a lot like an old Matt Damon. Got you. Well, he was in the uncanny valley. I'm not sure he exists. Yeah. You know, here's my advice to filmmakers, to people like the Steven Spielberg of the world, don't book. Injure movie like that, it's always a bad idea. You think so? Yeah. Man, that movie would have kicked so much more. But if it was just started with the DDay invasion and ended how it ended. Okay? Everything from that to what was the clinicwood? Bridges of Madison County. Terrible bookends on that one. Whenever you show, like, the modern day bookends, just don't do it. Just stick to the story, okay? We're clever. We don't need old Matt Damon in a cemetery breaking down. No, that was a little off putting. A little heavy handed. Yeah, it was kind of like, Suck it up, pale, but who am I? I'm just a podcaster. Steven Spielberg You're definitely not part of the greatest generation, I'll tell you that. No, I'm not. Do you want to hear a pretty cool story about the D Day invasion? Sure. No, I'm sorry. The month before the invasion of Normandy, the D Day invasion, the turning point of the war, one of the Mi Five guys was doing the Daily Telegraph puzzle, and he started noticing that a lot of the answers were kind of curious. Like, for example, one of the answers was Utah. Another was Omaha. These were code names for the beaches at Normandy where landing points were going to be for the invasion. Another answer was Mulberry, which is the name of a floating harbor that was going to be towed across the channel to accommodate the supply chip. Another weird. Another was Neptune, which was the code name for the naval support for the operation. And then they also had the answer overlord, which was the name for the whole operation for D Day invasion. So Mi five is like, what's going on? Clearly somebody's feeding information. One of the ways of disseminating, like you were saying, getting in touch with your controller or letting them know that you've done a dead drop is through the newspaper. Yeah, like a classified ad or something. Right. And so they went, Mi Five sent some guys to go rough up the person who wrote this crossword and find out what the deal was. He's a 54 year old school teacher, and he had no idea. The whole thing was total coincidence. What? The Mi Five? Finally, they were convinced, like, this guy has no clue what's going on. Really? He is not an agent. They looked into his background, and it was total coincidence. How many words total? There was, like, six, I think. Interesting. Big ones. Wow. Isn't that weird? That is really weird. A month before the invasion, I'll bet that guy was nervous until they believed him, but he was pooping his pants. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You called IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that roll up their own sleeves. IBM. Let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comitoimation. Hey, everybody, chuck here. Did you know there are millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb right now? Yeah. Which means that's a lot of amazing homes that are making people a lot of extra money. And it doesn't have to be an everyday thing. You can host when you want. Like, let's say you're taking a week's vacation. Why not host your home? Because that money could go toward paying for your current vacation or towards your retirement fund or even towards your kids college fund. Yeah. For anything. And listen, if you're worried about your stuff, don't be. Air cover for hosts. Let hosts welcome guests into their home without having to worry. You get $1 million in damage protection anytime you're hosting, plus pet damage protection and income loss protection, too. And are you ready for this? Air Cover for Host is completely free every time you host on airbnb. Free with a capital F. With Air Cover for Host, it makes hosting a no brainer, and the benefits really start adding up. So learn more and host with peace of mind at airbnb comercoverforhosts. Well, I guess that does it for pooping or pants on this one. If you want to know more about spies, you can type Spies, S-P-I-E-S into the search bar athowistofworks.com and it's going to bring up listener mail. That's right, Josh. And before we read listener mail, we want to announce that our email address has officially changed from Stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com Right to Stuff Podcast@discovery.com. Oh, yeah. Discovery has finally said, all right, I guess you guys are really working for us. We'll give you addresses with our name on it. Here your official yes. So that's how you can reach us now. And we're going to point this out quite a few times over the next few weeks. Well, yeah. Plus at the same time, what we say at the end of the podcast every time. Sure. What else? Oh, we have a newsletter. Yeah, go ahead, spill it. We have a Stuff You Should Know newsletter that you can subscribe to. There's a little link to it on the left rail of our Facebook page@facebook.com, stuff You Shouldn't. It's free. It's not spam, it's bacon. Because you have to opt in for it, and you'll probably like it. It sends out a link to the newest episode. It has a bunch of articles that we wrote or like on your site. It's just cool, fun, and south by Southwest people of Austin, Texas, we're coming back and we will be podcasting live on Sunday, March 11. Not quite sure exactly what time this will be a badge event. If you have a badge, please come out and see us. But if you're not, we are also trying to get a non badge event together at a local watering hole for regular old fans to come out. Yeah. So stay tuned for information on that. We're working on it. Hey, if you've got a place, hit us up. We're looking. Yeah, please do. But hopefully we'll have a non badge event. That will be pretty cool. We got some fun stuff cooking here. Yeah. You got anything else? Yeah, just a listener mail. Oh, yeah, that's just a regular listener mail. About that, this is a correction, and while we're correcting, I want to point out, as I have many times, that polar bears do not live in Antarctica. I was very ill that day and shouldn't have probably even been podcasting, but I misspoke Josh, technically was talking about emperor penguins. No, I'll tell you what I was talking about. You know how you're saying polar bears only live in Antarctica and they only live in the Arctic? Well, I didn't say that. Yes, sir. Isn't that the gist of what you're saying? Yeah, okay. I was saying that penguins don't live in the Arctic. They live in Antarctica. They are also found in places like Australia. I'm sure Argentina has Share, Chile places not too far away from Antarctica. But what I was saying is they're not found in the Arctic. And emperor penguins, though, are only found in Antarctica. Thank you. Originally, that's what you're talking about, so I'm depending on there. Okay, so let's hear yet another correct, yet another correction. And we messed up Edmonton, too. The Canadians aren't very happy with it. No, I know. So let me clear this up, okay? Calgary, Alberta, is a city in Canada. Edmonton, Alberta, is also a city in Canada. Alberta is a province in Canada. So it's like Atlanta, Georgia, new York, New York. And here's the thing, I love Canada. I hate that we mess Canadian things up because we got a lot of fans there and they are sensitive people. I know. The only problem with Canada is it's so close to Detroit. We love Detroit, too, by the way. So I think that's good. We don't need list or mail because all those corrections were enough. Cool. So thank you to all the Canadian fans who wrote in and all the polar bear and penguin defenders of the earth. We are sorry. We are human, and we do we did hopefully, we will do better. Let's make it a stepping Senate resolution to do better in 2012. Well, that's supposed to be done before, so let's just make it for 2013 and let's just keep screwing up. No. All right. Let's do both. Okay. I want to hear spy stories. Okay, me, too. We want to hear them in 140 characters or less on Twitter at syskpodcast. That's all one word. And you can also reach us on Facebook at facebook. Comstuffyshow. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.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 homepage. The housetoporks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylight is longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music. My favorite murder from exactly right media. My favorite murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarriff 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 Eight is natural science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leaving brands? 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a6e33f5e-5462-11e8-b449-5b854a53a248 | Are good samaritan laws effective? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/are-good-samaritan-laws-effective | Good samaritan laws have been around for many years, helping to provide legal protections for people who try to help other people. But do they work? Decide for yourself today!
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Good samaritan laws have been around for many years, helping to provide legal protections for people who try to help other people. But do they work? Decide for yourself today!
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 13 Dec 2018 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=347, tm_isdst=0) | 44307521 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself. With no must, no fuss, turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell. Anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce, templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comsysk and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstepworkscom? 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. Just a trio of helpful types who like to go around the world and escort people through Crosswalks and get sued for it. It's escorting someone through a busy intersection against the light. Right. And then you get to the other side and hold out your hand, say, Lay some bread on me, sucker. All these are bad ideas. They really are. They really are. But, I mean, we're full of those, aren't we, Chuck? Yeah, I mean, just brimming with them. That's our log line. Ten plus years of bad ideas. Oh, God, you've been listening to us this whole time? Are you crazy? Oh, boy. So you're feeling pretty good about this one? Because I got to tell you, I am. Yeah. I mean, if folks listen to our, I think, dare I say, was a good episode on the very sad case of Kitty Genovese in New York. That was a good episode. You can go back and listen to that. And that's a pretty good set up. Because just to recap very quickly, in the mid sixty s, a young woman was raped and killed in a very busy area of New York City. And it was very famous because many people supposedly heard the attack, watched the attack, perhaps didn't do anything, made the news, and created something that they studied still today in psychology classes called the bystander effect. Yeah, this idea of responsibility diffusion, where if you have a bunch of people standing around, no one, everybody just assumes somebody else will help. And they don't help. Yeah. Joshua Clark or some help. Sure, leave it up to him. And I'm sitting there like, well, obviously Chuck's going to help. He's a better person than me. And then we both just stand there and do nothing. Yes. In the meantime, Jerry's just laying there with, like, a Jolly Rancher in her throat. Right. But everybody knows she can't talk anyway, so she can't call for help. It's very hard to tell sometimes if Jerry's in need of assistance or if she's just being Jerry. Right. Or if she even exists. However, our article says that the bystander effect, in this case in particular, led to the first Good Samaritan laws in our country. That is not true, because two years before that, right here in Georgia, our first laws went into effect. Yes. The one I found that was the earliest was in 1959, five years before Kitty Genovese was murdered, and that was in California. And that protected doctors who were administering aid in emergency situations. Hippie liberal elitists out there. Right. The Left Coast. But it's a weird thing to tie together the bystander effect and Good Samaritan laws because they don't actually go together. You want them to fit together, but when you lay them side by side, you're like, oh, these are two different types of sea monkeys. I thought they were husband and wife, but they're not. I see the correlation. I want to my brain just won't quite make the connection. Like, if someone had raced down to help Kitty Geneviece and render her aid and not been a bystander, then that falls under the Good Samaritan laws. It does, but really it falls more under the duty to act laws. You'll get in trouble if you are just a bystander if you don't do something. Whereas a Good Samaritan law basically says if you do do something and you help Kitty Genovese or somebody who's in trouble and you make their situation worse, you can't be sued for rendering aid because you were acting in good faith. So it's kind of there, but it doesn't click. I got you. You know what I'm saying? I hear you. All right. Okay. I just really wanted to get that off of my chest. Well, so, yeah, you just kind of said it like those laws are in place now as protections generally for Americans. They happen all over the world, and we'll talk about a few of the laws here and there. But all 50 states and Washington, DC. The District of Columbia have some sort of laws on the books that you can basically be protected potentially and not held responsible for your actions even if they cause harm. But because it's state law, if you're not American, I'm not sure how it works in all countries. But the laws from state to state on the same thing can vary wildly. And certainly in this case, it's what they call a patchwork of state laws in need of a federal law. For sure. Yeah, for sure. So because there's so many different laws in so many different states, the actions that you perform in one state might get your mug on the front page of the paper being celebrated, and in another state, your mug's on the front page of the paper because you just got sued. So we'll dive into that a little more. But first let's talk about where the name for the laws come from. Chuck yeah, I remember this story from my church going days as a kid that really stood out to me back then because well, it's in Luke. And the story is that a Jewish man was assaulted and robbed on the road and left for dead, basically, and some people passed by without rendering aid. A Jewish priest and the Levite, which is an assistant priest, basically, or assistant to the priest. Do you have the impression that the priest and the Levite were together or that the priest passed and then at some point later on, the Levite passed? You know what? This is going back a lot of years, dude, but my memory is telling me that they were two separate things. Awesome. Okay. I knew that question would pay off. I might be wrong, but I still have some old church memories rattling around in this dusty noggin. Just saw like smoke come out of my ears. I thought that was flour. Oh, sure. I'm gluten free, though. Oh, are you? No. Emily is by default. I sometimes am. Right, sure, I know what you mean. You know how that goes. But finally, as the story goes, the Samaritan, that is, the person from Samaria who were bitter enemies of the Jews came by and what did he do? He said, hey, buddy, you look like you're having a pretty rotten day, let me help you out. That's right. And he did. He not only said, here, let me pick you up and get you out of this dusty road, I'm going to take you to an inn, and not only am I going to do that, I'm going to pay for your room at the end, and then I'm going to say, I bid you good day and good health. Audio enemy and he did. Imagine this, Chuck, this Good Samaritan story, it's entirely possible that this actually took place, that this is a real story that happened, right? It's not just a parable. Sure, it may have. Imagine if you were that guy, that Samaritan who did this thing, this act of goodwill, and 2000 years later, people around the world are still talking about it. How great would that be? Yeah, like 20 minutes after our show ends, no one's going to talk about it, right? It'll be just like all of the talk shows we've been on the kiss of death that we have. But yeah, for sure. Even if you are like the most atheistic, agnostic human on earth, you've heard of the story of the Good Samaritan. It's just one of those things that is transcended religion into pop culture. Yeah, and I had never known that at the time. Like you said, the Jews and the Samaritans hated each other. And apparently I looked it up, they really did not like each other. It wasn't just like over religious stuff. It was over political stuff, too, and how those things intertwined. So they really did not get along. So not only did this guy help somebody in need, he helped an enemy in need. So I think he does deserve to be commemorated for eons over that. Sure. But that's where the name of the law comes from. Good Samaritan laws are when you stop and help somebody, whether it's your enemy or your friend, in an emergency situation, typically you should not be penalized if your good intentions cause further harm. Right. Which seems very much like a no brainer, but it is complicated. The more you read into this stuff, the more you're like, man, there's a lot of nuance to the variations of these laws. Yeah. The more you read into it, the more you're like, I am going to end up second guessing myself the next time I'm faced with an emergency situation. I hadn't thought about it before, but it's like, yeah, you could totally get sued for helping somebody out, depending on where you are. Yes. I've never come across this. Not even close. What an emergency situation? Yeah, I have. Yeah. I was one of many at an accident. I witnessed the accident. It was like one of those things where you see it happening, you just see it in slow motion, and you're just, like, trying to will it to stop with your body, and it doesn't work. It was a man who got T. Booned by another car that he didn't see coming. And I was one of the people on the scene kind of helping out, but it didn't even occur to me that that man could be like, these people hurt me in helping. I didn't touch the guy or anything like that. But other people were, and we called for help and all that. So I think we did it about as good as you can. But nothing about the situation was like, well, I need to watch out for my legal exposure here. Right. Or Google something real quick like, what state am I in? Let me just check out what's going on as this person is bleeding in the street. Right? Exactly. But it is nuanced, and after reading some of these examples, I get both sides of the coin, for sure. For example, there are a couple of things that all of this patchwork of Good Samaritan laws will have in common. Basically two, as this article states. One is that you can't be compensated for helping out, and that's a pretty literal reading of the law. I think it's meant to exempt emergency workers, paramedics doctors. They've got their whole own set of laws governing their actions or inactions. Right. So to keep them from giving preferential treatment. I think it's mostly to say, this is meant to this is my interpretation of it, but from what I've seen with Good Samaritan laws, it's totally in the eye of the beholder. But that's meant to say, like, this covers nonmedical professionals, is who we're talking about. And to define that, they're saying, this covers somebody who isn't compensated for their assistance, and that's been transmuted into, you can't be compensated for your assistance, or else that leaves you exposed to legal action later. So when you were sort of kidding around at the beginning, though, but if you saved, let's say you performed the heimlich at a restaurant, and the person's like, man, you just saved my life. Here's a Finsky. Right. Don't take that $5 bill and also throw it back in their face and say, this is what your life is worth. Right, exactly. And they say, yeah, I don't really love myself. Well, then you introduce them to a good analyst and go about your day. Sure. What is that? What do you mean? A New Yorker in the like kerry Green. Nobody says analyst anymore. That was weird. I think that's what Bob Newhart was. Was he? I think yeah, he did consider himself an analyst. That seems like an antiquated term, though. Yes. Now it's therapist. Right. Or shrink. Yeah, shrink headshrinker, I think, is the preferred term. Yeah. I don't know. I haven't been in a while. Oh, yeah. Years. It's good to go talk to people, you know what I mean? Yeah. But I got it all figured out now. Oh, well, that's good. You're cured is what they call that. Yeah, they cured me. I hope they gave your shrinking award. Yeah. Do you know what the cure is? What is not really thinking about things too much. Yeah, that's a good advice. No, I'm just kidding. Because people have real problems. But I never had the real problems. Yeah, but I think even if you don't have real problems, if you don't have some sort of chemical imbalance or diagnosable condition, just about anybody can benefit from time to time to go. Absolutely. Just talk. It's not even necessarily the counselor helping you. It's just being in a situation where you're talking out loud and talking through your problems to find out what you actually think. It's very helpful. Yeah. I mean, I do that at my doctor and my dentist, and they're like, dude, we don't want to hear this. Go see an analyst. No, I'm knocking out two birds at one time. All right, let's go over just a couple of these. I mean, like I said, they're different everywhere. But hold on. There was one other thing, Chuck. Okay. So I said that there were two things in common, and one of them is you can't be compensated. The other one, almost across the board with any law you're going to find is that you can't act recklessly or negligently. Well, that's tough to get out. You would not hold up in court. No, I'd be like, Give me my $5 as your lawyer. Or maybe that's your defense. You're like, Your Honor, I can't even say yeah, those are two important factors for these laws. For sure. That's what they all have in common generally, right? That's right. But from there, like, if you go to Oklahoma, let's say, you are only given protection if you are untrained. Like, you're just a regular person. Right. You're not a medic, let's say, or a doctor. And only if you're giving CPR or trying to stop blood loss. Right. That's weirdly specific. I've seen that. Like, you could say that that was the third thing that they all have in common. Like, if you're administering CPR or something really basic that any person would want to do or try to do, you're probably protected by a Good Samaritan law. Yeah. And defibrillators are covered in a lot of these laws since those have really gotten, I guess, just more common, like and I looked into buying one of those. They're expensive, though. Yeah, you looked into buying one? Yeah. Just carry around with you? No, not to carry around, but to have sure. Like, not in my car. I got you. You could help somebody stranded on the side of the road with a jumper cable or get their ticker going again. The key I've heard is that when you're setting them up to be defibrillated, you have to shout hot stuff right before you engage it. I thought it would be like, three or $400. How much are they? I mean, thousands of dollars. Oh, really? I can't remember how many thousands, but it was enough to where I just kind of closed the browser and went and looked at cool news or something. Well, you know, God bless those malls in America, having them every 10ft and keeping us all safe. Sure. I'm sure their insurance helps pay for that. I guess you're cynic. Here's another one. In Vermont, you can be fined, actually, if you are a bystander and don't do anything. I kind of love this one. Yeah. This is what I think the law should be. Get a penalty unless you're jumping in there. Yeah. And, I mean, obviously not putting your own life in jeopardy. This is not like if you see somebody getting mugged, you have to go wrestle the gun away from the guy. Or jumping into the frozen Potomac River. Sure. But that if you see someone in need and you just keep walking by, you should suffer some sort of consequence for that. You should act. This is a very slippery slope right here because compelling people to act a big infringement on personal liberty. But at the same time, it's kind of like, come on, if you have to invigorate somebody's humanity with a little bit of law here, there I'm kind of in favor of that. One of my favorite stories that I can ever see on any news program is when you see a group of people coming together. Saving people is great, too, but, like, to pull a goat out of a river or something, and there's like, the guy with the truck, and another guy is like, I got rope. And this lady comes up and I'm a goat whisperer. And they all like, you see six or eight strangers come together to rescue like an animal. Yeah, but they tied the best they tied the not too tight and accidentally pulled a goat and two and then the goat suits. Yes, that's how it goes. And then Michigan, just forget about it. Like, it is so convoluted and weird. In Michigan, they protect people who decline to offer assistance, but then they also protect, like, what is it? Ski patrol. What else? There's like three very weirdly specific. If you're a block parent, which means that your house is designated Safe place signs that you see on stuff. I never noticed it's. If you're a little kid and some stranger danger guy and a trench coat is following you, you can run into a thing that has a safe place. I've never noticed this. And they will protect you and all the cops and call your parents in Michigan, I guess you can volunteer as a person whose house is a safe place. Oh, cool. And you're exempted through Good Samaritan laws. Right. But you show up and they're like, you're an Ohio State fan, right? You can't come in. So potential assistance medical personnel block parent volunteers and national ski patrol in Michigan. Or if you're giving CPR or using an emergency defibrillator again, I think that's pretty well, that's like, covered almost across the board. That's like the one area that they just want to make sure that everyone would jump in on. Yeah, I think so. And I think that's one of the reasons why they make them so prominent in public. I mean, it's not like you have to break glass and there's like a fire hose that you have to know how to get off and turn the thing on like it's meant for the public to go grab and use, not just for emergency personnel. Because using a defibrillator in a timely manner has such an impact on the survival rate from a heart attack that you want people walking around knowing how to use one and ready to use one in an emergency situation. Argentina, this is tricky. Yeah. You could face jail time for either putting a person in jeopardy or abandoning a person to their fate. That's a real fine line. It is, for sure. Yeah, it is a tricky one. I went back and reread it too, and I'm like, no, it's a tricky one for sure. But I like the idea of abandoning their fate if they need help, like somebody on a mountain or something like that, and just being like, sorry, chump and walking along. I like that idea that you have to do something for them. Okay. You like the idea of just saying, well, it's kind of in God's hands now that's Michigan michigan protects that, right? Sure. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's all right, let's take a break, and we're going to talk about a very interesting case from California about 15 years ago right after this. Today's episode of Stephanie Shannon is brought to you by SimpliSafe home security. SimpliSafe believes that your home should be the safest place on Earth for every family, so they offer advanced, whole home security that puts you, your home and your family safety first. With 24/7, professional monitoring simply saves agents take action the moment a threat is detected, dispatching police or first responders in an emergency, even if you're not home. Yeah. And SimpliSafe uses proprietary video verification technology so that monitoring agents can visually confirm the threat in order to get higher priority 911 dispatch. And SimpliSafe offers comprehensive protection not only against intruders and burglary, but against expensive home hazards, from flooding to fires. You can customize the perfect system for your home in just a few minutes. At SimpliSafe. comStuff go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20% off with interactive monitoring. Just go to Simplisafecom stuff. Okay, friends, so imagine you're in an accident, and your injuries are extensive enough that not only do you have to spend time in the hospital, but you're going to need rehab, too. Well, you have insurance, so no problem, right? Well, not entirely. You get back from the hospital and notice there's a gap and that your insurance is only covering part of your bill. And it's a big bill. Yeah. And until you get back on your feet, you can't get to work. And now you have this financial burden hanging over your head like some dark rain cloud. So what do you do, Chuck? Well, if you have Afflac, you can worry less knowing they can help with the expenses health insurance doesn't cover. Aflac pays cash, which can be put toward expenses which may be impacted by a covered medical event. Things like your medical bill, copays, or even routine things like rent, groceries, childcare and more. Yeah, that's Afflac in a nutshell. They care about what health insurance doesn't cover, so those they insure can care about everything else. And care has always been part of Affleck's DNA. It's the foundation that the company was built on more than 65 years ago, and it's at the core of who they are still today. That's right. They believe the cost of health care shouldn't come at the expense of peace of mind, which is why they are on a mission to help close health and wealth gaps for Americans everywhere. So when the unexpected threatens your peace of mind, let Aflac stand in the gap to help you. To learn how Aflac can help with expenses health insurance doesn't cover, visit Aflac.com. That's Aflac.com. All right, dude, we're back, and we're in California. And during the ad break, we got in the wayback machine, and it's 2004. Yeah. Oh, wait, I was still living there. Oh, yeah. We're going to run into you. I've arranged it. I just didn't know you. I'm like, who's that guy? I got in touch with Patrick, and I said, you're going to want to meet somebody special. You're like, Just wait for that beard you're going to have one day. I'm like, What, I can't grow a beard? Yeah. And he'll be like, well, at least I got all my teeth. That checks out. Oh, the salad days. Yeah. All right. So this case is really interesting. Lisa Torte and Alexandra Van Horn were makeup artists that work together, friendly acquaintances as co workers. But I didn't get the picture that they were, like, best buddies or anything. Yeah. I would guess the lawsuit implies that they weren't. So they went out as a group of not just those two, but a bunch of people from work went out for some drinks in the La. Area. One of them, Alexandra Van Horn, was headed back and crashed her car. Pretty bad crash. I think it was, like, 45 miles an hour into a telephone pole. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Jeez. Like, all the airbags deployed. Lisa Tortillas saw this, got out of her car, saw smoke, saw liquid, and was like, I think this car might explode. I need to do something quick, and pulled Alexandra Van Horn from the car, which seems like it had a hand in paralyzing her. Yeah, I mean, that's one thing you want to really be careful doing, is moving somebody, and you probably don't want to move them at all. But again, Lisa Toherty thought that Alexandra Van Horn's car was about to blow up, so she decided that she was better off trying to get her out of the car. And in court, Van Horn said that torture yanked her from the car like a rag doll. Tortie said, the smoke the smoke. Looking back on it, probably it was Annie freeze on a hot motor. But even still, she acted in good faith. Right. So California's good Samaritan laws. She said, you can't sue me. I was trying to help you in an emergency situation. Sorry. The Good Samaritan laws cover this? And by the way, I'm no longer speaking to you. Yeah, probably. So it went all the way to the California Supreme Court, where they ruled that she could sue her friend and coworker, because protection at that time, at least for the Good Samaritan law, was only for those administering medical care, not rescue care. Well, so the law says that it was emergency care, and the court interpreted that to mean medical care got you, which was like, what? And the legislature even said, no, that's not at all how we meant it. Interesting. Yeah. In fact, they amended the law the next year to say specifically medical or non medical emergency care. But that vagueness got Lisa Tort sued. Yeah. And it's hard to find out sometimes, final results of legal cases. We've had that problem, I feel like, a lot over the years. Yeah. The media, they have a short attention span. Well, it's that, and I think sometimes these things are just still dragging out. Oh, really? You think it's still going on? I think so, because I found an article from, like, three years ago, because I was just trying to find out what happened with the lawsuit. And apparently the woman who pulled the woman being sued tortilla had two different insurance companies, one of which said, I'm not getting involved in this, the other of which said, you know what? We're going to agree to defend you against the lawsuit. It was settled for $4 million. Wow. And then the one insurance company that agreed to help Defender sued the other insurance company and said, you got to pony up half of this. And the last thing I saw was a district court judge ruled for the defendant insurance company. In other words, the one that said, I don't want any part of this. Okay, you don't have to pay. But then it said an appellate panel reversed that decision on Wednesday, and that's literally the last thing I could find. Wow. That is still dragging on. Holy cow. Chuck, nice research. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, there may be something newer out there, but there are probably tricks that legal scholars know that I don't know about researching this stuff. I mean, what does that say, Chuck? That like an insurance company can just be like, we're your insurance company, but we're not touching this one. Well, it was complicated, though, because it was insurance. It wasn't, like, just insurance for me walking around if I want to help someone, it was car insurance. So it all came down to whether or not it was considered a use of a car by her opening that door and unbuckling her seatbelt and pulling her out, whether that was using the car I got you. That makes a little more sense, though. It's just you know how convoluted that stuff gets, though. It does, for sure, legally. So the whole legality of this whole thing that made that whole Lisa Tority and Alexandra Van Horn case, I mean, I heard about that when that was going on, everybody heard about that case because it was like, well, wait a minute. She was trying to help, and now she's getting sued? Yeah. Why are friends fighting that whole kind of thing? That was 2004, and then two years later, China started to rise as a great power of anti Good Samaritanism big time in a lot of different cases. And all of it started in 2006 in the case of Pengu, who was a man who got off of a bus in China and saw that an older woman had fallen and broken her hip. And so she had been trying to get on the bus, paying you, was coming off of the bus, and he went to go help the lady. Well, the lady later said that he was the. One who caused her to fall and sued him, and he was like, I'm just an innocent bystander. He was being a Good Samaritan, helping this lady. Well, the court said, no paying you. We've decided that you probably did cause the fall. Otherwise, why else would you have helped the lady? That's crazy. And there's more nuance to it. There were a couple of things Pengu said. He was the first one off of the bus, and the court said, well, then you were probably the person to bump into the lady and knock her down. And also, why did you give her 20? You on. Which is about $30 if you didn't feel responsible? And then, thirdly, if you were acting heroically, why didn't you go apprehend the person who knocked her down? Why would you go help? So there's a little more to it than just, like, nobody would possibly help someone out of the goodness of their heart, so you're guilty. But that's kind of how it got played up in the popular media, both in China and in the rest of the world. And so paying you became this cautionary tale. Like, if you see somebody hurt in the street, don't help them because they will sue you. And people started to do that. And so people in China, a few really big cases, sensational cases, did just that. They stopped helping people who clearly needed help, and people were dying as a result. Yeah, there's just one case I can't even talk about. I know, but it was just awful. People not helping people clearly in need became sort of an epidemic in China until they finally changed some law just last year, I think a national Good Samaritan law in 2017 that does offer protections. But you said that one article that was like, it's out of hand in China now and the other way. Right, because this one, Donald Clarke, a law professor who actually specializes in Chinese law at GW, said that in China, you can see someone choking in a restaurant and attempted tracheotomy with a butter knife with no training and be covered, and you can't be sued, which is I think everyone would agree that's a little too far. Yeah. No matter what you do, you cannot be held liable for acting as a Good Samaritan, even if it's the most reckless, negligent thing you can imagine trying something you're not familiar with at all. You can't be sued. And so some people said, well, not only does this Article 184, this new law, it goes too far in covering protecting people. It doesn't address the problem, which is this culture of distrust that's been kind of fostered by these judges who are ruling in favor of people who are accusing the Good Samaritans that have helped them of actually causing their injury and creating this chilling effect in helping people. I mean, people literally, elderly people getting hit by cars and being left in the street as people walk around them and then being hit by another car and killed later on, like a half hour later, like, this was happening. This is going on. And people wouldn't go anywhere near these people because they were afraid that they were going to get sued. And it was mostly because judges in the court system were saying they were siding with people with zero evidence whatsoever, just basically on a suspicion of someone's good intentions. Yeah. I mean, that original case, when they said what was the man's name again? Ping Yu. Ping Yu. They had no evidence whatsoever. It's not like it was on closed caption television or anything like that. It was just like you said, the judge going to me like, it's pretty weird that you would have helped had you not been the one that actually knocked her off to begin with. Right, exactly. So, I mean, it's good that China has this good Samaritan law, and it's a very broad law, and it probably needs to be walked back a little bit. But they also need to go after the judges or the I guess kind of the sentiment or thought process of judges that kind of just says, why would you help somebody out if you weren't the one that caused the accident? Until they do that, and until they go after this group, Peng Xi, which are basically crooks, people who lay down in front of cars and pretend they got hit and then sue the people and are frequently found, they're ruled in favor of their case. Until that is rooted out, people are still going to be distrustful of helping people who are in need. Yeah. And even the Band Horn case, I know she's trying to help, but you're not supposed to move people. Everyone kind of knows that. And this woman ended up paralyzed, and if it was a direct result of that, then I don't know. That's a tough one. Well, they say that the road to hell is paved with good intention. I know. That's kind of like where that lies. Yeah. I mean, I feel bad for both parties, for sure, because the torty was legitimately trying to help. She wasn't like, well, let me do something that might really hurt my coworker further. She thought the car was going to blow up, so let's get her out of there. Right, exactly. It wasn't like she'd always harbored some deep resentment of her, so this is her chance to paralyze her. Yeah. Not funny at all. Not for the way that you said it. So we should probably take a break, then we're going to recover from that and distract you with an ad. Okay. Yes. Today's episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by SimpliSafe home security. SimpliSafe believes that your home should be the safest place on earth for every family. So they offer advanced whole home security that puts you, your home, and your family safety first. With 24/7. Professional monitoring simply saves agents take action the moment a threat is detected, dispatching police or first responders in an emergency, even if you're not home. Yeah, and SimpliSafe uses proprietary video verification technology so that monitoring agents can visually confirm the threat in order to get higher priority 911 dispatch. And SimpliSafe offers comprehensive protection not only against intruders and burglary, but against expensive home hazards, from flooding to fires. You can customize the perfect system for your home in just a few minutes at SimpliSafe. comStuff. Go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20% off with interactive monitoring. Just go to Simplisafecom stuff. Okay, friends. So imagine you're in an accident and your injuries are extensive enough that not only do you have to spend time in the hospital, but you're going to need rehab, too. Well, you have insurance, so no problem, right? Well, not entirely. You get back from the hospital and notice there's a gap and that your insurance is only covering part of your bill. And it's a big bill. Yeah. And until you get back on your feet, you can't get to work. And now you have this financial burden hanging over your head like some dark rain cloud. So what do you do? Chuck well, if you have afflac, you can worry less, knowing they can help with the expenses health insurance doesn't cover. Aflac pays cash, which can be put toward expenses which may be impacted by a covered medical event. Things like your medical bill, copays, or even routine things like rent, groceries, childcare and more. Yeah, that's Aflac in a nutshell. They care about what health insurance doesn't cover so those they insure can care about everything else. And care has always been part of Aflac's DNA. It's the foundation that the company was built on more than 65 years ago, and it's at the core of who they are still today. That's right. They believe the cost of health care shouldn't come at the expense of peace of mind, which is why they are on a mission to help close health and wealth gaps for Americans everywhere. So when the unexpected threatens your peace of mind, let afflac stand in the gap to help you. To learn how Aflac can help with expenses health insurance doesn't cover, visit Aflac.com. That's Aflac.com. Okay, Chuck. So there's another big push in Good Samaritan laws in the United States. It's interesting how they're kind of, like, refined as things go on, but there's this thread, the sentiment that runs through them that's like, okay, we need to make sure that people don't hesitate in helping their fellow human in need. Yes, a lot of these, it's labeled as special interest Good Samaritan laws. But these are great. It makes a lot of sense, especially what they all do. But this one about the food donation. In the mid 1990s, there was a realization that a lot of food was going to waste \u00a314 billion specifically of food going to landfills when people in America needed that food. And you've heard stories about grocery stores can't be held liable, so they just have to throw that stuff away. Right. So they pass the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which is to provide some protection in case you donate food and someone gets sick from eating that food. Right, exactly. So I remember back when grocery stores did have to throw that away before that law, and it was just so wasteful and so just morally wrong. So they passed that 196 good year for passing laws, I guess. And then there's even newer kind of push of Good Samaritan laws that are protecting college kids who drink too much even though they're underage. They might be worried, oh, man, I'm going to get expelled or kicked out of college if I call for help. And so apparently some of them weren't calling for help. And so some universities, I think it's up to 240 universities and 35 states now have something called 911 Lifeline or 911 Good Samaritan law where if you call for help for yourself or for somebody else who's had too much to drink and it's like a medical emergency, you won't get in trouble for having been drinking underage. But it's laid the groundwork for a larger law about opioid abuse that we really kind of need. That's a Good Samaritan law that protects people who are calling for somebody who's overdosing on heroin where under normal circumstances, they might hesitate because they're on heroin themselves and they don't want to get busted for it. Yeah, it's called nowadown. And this is basically it comes with, like an EpiPen now, and it's something that cops have in their emergency kits. And just like an EpiPen is something that a civilian can use. You don't have to have medical training if someone is overdosing on heroin or some other kind of opioid. You just inject this thing and that can save their life. And so junkies don't want to call the ambulance or the cops or whatever. Just the same as an underage college kid doesn't want to call the cops. So they're often described as medical amnesty laws. And it's great, and it's making a difference. There was one study in 2002 at Cornell about the alcohol one, and they said there was a rise from 22% to 52% of counseling sessions attended by students in 2004 because students weren't afraid. I'm 19 years old or whatever, and I need help. So it's shown that it's working. And I think the same is going on with this naloxone drug. Right? Yeah. So, like, the nalixone kind of has its own protection where whether you're somebody who's on heroin or not, if you administer that, you could be a medical professional. It's like such a new thing that they've realized they need a specific Good Samaritan law for that to cover anybody who's administering nalaxone, like, if they do some damage or whatever, they were still trying to help. But then also, if you're on heroin yourself, just calling 911, you can have immunity in some states from getting busted for heroin for being on it yourself. Right. So, like, hey, we're going to save you and you're under arrest. Right. Which I guess is still in some states. It's still a possibility. You don't want people worrying about whether they're going to get popped themselves and then saying, well, I can't really call for shorty juju over here, which is, I guess, a heroin user's name. Yeah. So the heroin user who is overdosing, who would otherwise live, dies because the person they shot up with is too worried about getting busted themselves because the last thing a heroin addict or drug addict might do in the throes of that drug is think, let me call a cop or an ambulance. Right. You know what? I need a police officer. They might help. Right. They say, like, as far as advice goes for Good Samaritans, this article counsels people to think sensibly. Most states do have laws to protect people that if you're doing something reasonable to try and help, which all goes back to the split second, is kind of tough. But that all goes back to what you're saying, like reasonable maneuvers to help somebody. Yeah. I mean, it's not necessarily like, don't try the tracheotomy. Right. So that kind of ties into a second point. Like, don't try things you're not trained to do. And it just kind of ties into reasonable. Like, is trying to administer CPR a reasonable thing if you come upon somebody who's not breathing? Yes, totally reasonable. Is it unreasonable to try to get their heart going by pumping their arms up and down and accidentally dislocating their shoulder? It's probably not going to be protected by a Good Samaritan law. Yeah, but how much can he get sued for for a broken collarbone? Probably a lot, especially if the person is like, a Ping pong player or a professional illustrator. Yes. You ruined my Ping pong crew here. Right, exactly. You like Ping Pong? Love it. We need to do an episode on Ping Pong. I love Ping Pong too. I'm surprised we never squared off. I am as well. Chuck well, we've never been in the same room as a Ping pong table. That's what I was thinking. I was going to make a camp joke, but you beat me to the truth. You got anything else? Oh, yes, I do. There's one thing that came up, if you don't mind talking about it. The Seinfeld thing. I think we need to talk about it. Do you remember how that yeah, the final episode. Right? Right. Yeah. Which is like, the least funny episode of Seinfeld ever. But it has a weird message when the gang gets put in jail for watching a guy I think it was Jonathan Panette get carjacked by somebody with a gun and just sitting there making fun of them while they're videotaping it. Right? Yeah. And that kind of raised the site. It kind of ties into Good Samaritan laws. A lot of people are like, is there any place in the country where you can get in trouble for that kind of thing? And it turns out, no, that kind of falls into that duty to act law where you are in some places like Vermont or I think in California under some circumstances, you are required to report a crime, but you're not required to actually intervene. That is like, kind of that big point I made earlier at the beginning of the episode. That's a big distinction. Right? Yeah. And not only are you not required to interview, you're not even required to report the crime during the commission of the crime. For most duty to act laws, you just can't walk away and pretend you never saw anything. That's the key. That's where you will get prosecuted. So the Seinfeld gang probably would not have gone to jail. And this article that I read quotes a guy who's an attorney in San Diego named somebody List. Oh, man, I wish I could remember the guy's name. Franz List? No, not Franz List, who's a great composer, but a li s. Peter Liz. Yes. His name is Peter Liz. He's a criminal lawyer from San Diego who ended up in this article. He basically says not only should they not have gone to jail, they provided very valuable evidence by recording the entire crime. So let them off the hook. Has there ever been a tougher show to end than Seinfeld? No. Yes. Probably not. But they really chose a very specific, unsatisfying way to do it. What about Sopranos? Everybody hated how that ended. Yeah, I loved The Sopranos, but then moved to La. During its run and didn't have TV, so I quit watching it. But I do remember all the hooplaw. But Seinfeld just one of those. I mean, the last episode stunk, but it's just a hard show to end because it was the most uncertainly show probably in TV history. Sure. And most shows have a finale that is highly sentimental. Right. And you couldn't do that on Seinfeld. It would not have been true to the show. So I don't know what I would have done. It's a tough one. It is a tough one. Maybe it was the perfect ending and it just wasn't a great episode. You could make that case for sure. You know, I'd like to hear maybe if someone had a better idea. Okay. Rewrite the Seinfeld finale. Yeah. In 160 characters or less. Tweeted to us. Or 240. Now, what is that? It's weird. Anyway, I think that's the end of this episode. We kind of let this peter out too, huh? Yep. Okay. If you want to learn more about Good Samaritan laws, that's actually a tip. Go learn your state and or country's Good Samaritan laws so you know what to do when you're ever faced with an emergency situation. And since I said that it's time for listener mail. This one is great. I'm just going to call it great email. Good guys, in the spirit of Thanksgiving and this glass of wine I'm drinking, I wanted to reach out and tell you how thankful I am for you. I've been listening to the show for a few years and your comforting voices, light dad, humor, and interesting topics have become increasingly important to me. My brother passed away almost two years ago at the age of 24. He was an incredible soul and would have loved your show. I had trouble falling asleep for a while and began playing your podcast when my mind was racing and I needed the distraction. I fell asleep to many interesting topics for months and I greatly appreciate your help through the sad times. Last year I sailed from Seattle to San Diego with my uncle and father. This was the scariest and most exhilarating trip I've ever taken. Ever. We kept a watch system 2 hours on and 4 hours off. During my first two hour night watch alone, I was scared pupils with no land in sight and my life has secured to the boat. I plugged in my headphones and listened to the Stuff You Should Know selects Fecal transplants episode. Midway through my watch, a pot of porpoises started following and playing with the boat. I could only spot their phosphorescence, but I was so darn happy sitting there in the cold and dark listening to you both talk about poop while watching the porpoises create tubes of glitter in the Pacific. Wow. Can you imagine that? Dude? Yeah. That's amazing. And our voices didn't ruin it. I know. This brought me so much comfort in a time of such great discomfort. Now you've heard it before, and at the risk of sounding sappy, your podcast brings comfort and joy to your listeners and we appreciate you. My brother's birthday is tomorrow and I have been catching up on your latest episodes, thinking about the time you helped me get through and I wanted to say thank you. Thanks for being there for me in a weird way and thank you for your friendship and your jokes and your comfort. And that is Jane from Seattle. Awesome, Jane. Thank you so much for letting us know that story that's like the deer on the tracks story that Will Wheaton hadn't stand by me. That's right. That's a pretty cool story. Yeah, it's a good one. If you want to get in touch with us, like Jane did, to let us know one of your coolest stories, you can tweet to us. You can join us on Instagram, you can hang out with us on Facebook, you can find links to that on our site, stuffysheno.com, and you can send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@housetuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housedefworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it, because we're pet moms, too. We've 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." | |
What is a Numbers Station? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-is-a-numbers-station | If you think secretly coded messages sent via short wave radio is Cold War relic, think again. Chuck and Josh are here to dispel that myth, along with many others relating to numbers stations, including why they might still be operational. | If you think secretly coded messages sent via short wave radio is Cold War relic, think again. Chuck and Josh are here to dispel that myth, along with many others relating to numbers stations, including why they might still be operational. | Thu, 07 Aug 2014 14:21:32 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=14, tm_min=21, tm_sec=32, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=219, tm_isdst=0) | 36066611 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuckle Bryant. And this is of Jerry. And this is stuff you should know. 74258. Can you say it in German? You speak German? Don't even jive me. It's fine now. Can you do that in a little girl voice? You're just toy. Come on, do it. No, you always make me play St. Pauly girl. I'm tired of it. St. Pauly girl. Now, this is apparently even younger than the St. Pauly girl. It's like a little girl. And it was a live little girl who in the Swedish Rhapsody number station. It was a little girl reading out numbers and letters in German, which makes it even creepier. Yeah, it's very creepy. This is a very neat subject. So kudos to you for tossing this one out there. Well, I've been waiting for it to publish. I'd seen it in the calendar coming up and coming up, I'm like, Come on and publish. I think it published on Friday. This is Brandon Tuesday, right out of the oven. Yes. And we're talking about it just as they are completing their decline. So we are on top of this. Well, we'll get into it. I think that's what makes it even more interesting is that it's still happening. All right. Numbers stations. Numbers stations? Yeah, like you said, number. Both words are pluralized. It's a little clumsy. And number stations are we should just come out and say there's short wave radio transmissions or transmitters making really weird baffling is the best word for it, transmissions, and have been doing so, apparently since at least World War One. Oh, really? Yeah. Supposedly the first mention of a number station came from a German magazine in World War I, world War Two. They were in full swing, sure. But apparently they somehow popped up first around World War One, which makes them some of the earliest short wave transmissions in the world, because shortwave radio didn't come around, at least into commercial use until about 1920. World War I was a few years before that, if you'll remember. Correct. Yeah, that's why I didn't even think that that was possible. But like you said, World War Two was when they were in full swing. They really peaked in the Cold War and they have been dying out slowly ever since. But I think one of the neatest things is they are still if you have a shortwave radio, you can tune into a frequency. And here 12758. It's usually like some sort of tone. We should mention to Jerry of the future. You're supposed to leave that beep in because it's part of the number station. Yes, we beat Jerry to signal when we want something edited. But yeah, number station, it's not always a beep. It'll just have some sort of sometimes it's a bit of a song. Yeah. Like the Swedish rhapsody or the Lincolnshire poacher. A British English UKish folk song. Whenever I say stuff like that. And the reason the transmission starts off with a tone or beep or song, it alerts, like, Here comes the transmission. Tune your station, hone in, make sure you get some good reception, because the secret code is about to be revealed. And that's exactly what everyone is pretty much in consensus on. That what comes after this and what is broadcast over these numbers stations are secret codes. Again, like for the Swedish Rap city station, it is a little girl speaking in German, reading numbers and letters, seemingly random numbers and letters, and then the transmission is over and that happens like or it used to happen. That's a defunct number station now, but it happened on a fairly regular schedule. There's other ones. The Attencion station is a woman saying Attencion and then reading Spanish numbers and then repeating them over and over again and then going on to the next set. And everybody, no one can say for certain, but virtually everyone in the world, from Cecil Adams at Straight Dope, to the head of the UK's Trade and Industry Agency, say these are secret transmissions for spies. The whole basis of them was for espionage. Yeah. And the reason why everyone is speculating that that is absolutely the case, which it almost certainly is, like we said, is because no government to this day has come forward and admitted this or owned this. It is all still technically speculation because you cannot point to a factual statement. The closest we've ever come is they finally got someone from the United Kingdom, a spokesperson. That was the dude from the trade agency. Oh, really? Yeah. The exact quote is, people should not be mystified by them. They're not, shall we say, for public consumption. Yeah. And that's the only thing on record that any government has ever spoke about what these transmissions are. Right. So the idea that they are government transitions, the reason we have to speculate is because the government has never claimed them. On the flip side, the reason everyone thinks that they are government backed clandestine transmissions is because these are pirate radio frequencies. Pirate radio transmitters? Yeah. My first thing was like, just find one of these and look it up and find out what the deal is. Yeah, you would think so. They're totally unlicensed. Nobody knows exactly where they are. They're illegal. Technically, yes, they're very illegal. Because they transmit over air traffic control frequencies. Well, that's a big one. Yes. And no one investigates them. There's no investigation into these numbers stations whatsoever. So the fact that the government won't say anything about them and the fact that the government isn't investigating these very blatantly out in the open, weird, baffling transmissions suggest that yeah, everybody's right. That these are government backed transmissions used to communicate anonymously and in one direction. Two spies embedded in foreign countries. Yeah. I was about to call it a conversation, but it's really not. I think on the BBC documentary I saw, they called it a monologue. Right? You're just sending a one way message. Exactly. All right. Right after this break, we're going to talk a little bit about shortwave radio technology. The secret key to sending these messages after this break. All right, the key to this whole thing is sending a short way. You might think, in this day and age, why not just send a TeleTax? Why not send an email? Or surely there are safer ways to send espionage this information, highly classified instructions to go kill the leader of the country, perhaps. Right. Like. If you want to activate Reggie Jackson to kill Queen Elizabeth, kill Norberg. Yes. How would you do it in this day and age? You think an email would do it? No. And you want to know who proves definitively that that is not safe for secure? Who? Jay Fallon? Edward Snowden. Yeah. If you use the command computer, you leave a trace. It's virtually impossible to erase anything on a computer. Yeah, if you think you have, then you haven't. Plus, if you are, say, emailing somebody, you're transmitting what's supposed to be highly sensitive, even encrypted information over a network, that stuff can be captured. Like, go listen to your employer spying on you episode. Yeah, you can't do it. You can communicate like that, but you're leaving digital traces everywhere. The beauty of the short wave radio transmission is that, again, it's anonymous and it's one directional. But if you get caught with a short wave radio, at least say, back in the something. It wasn't weird. It didn't prove that you were a spy. Yeah, I'm just tuning into my stories. Exactly. I'm just listening to the BBC World service. Shortwave energy, radio energy, it's all determined by the power of your transmitter. So if you've got a humongous transmitter, you can send and it didn't need to be that big, but you can send a message, one way message, to the other side of the world. Right? And the reason it can travel across the planet is because it literally is bouncing off the ionosphere of the Earth, 50 to 375 miles up above our surface. It's in the upper atmosphere, and solar ionization creates an electrical charge, and that charge reflects that signal right back down to Earth. It's called sky wave or skip. I like skywave. Skywave. Yeah. And that's why you can with a seemingly pretty simple piece of equipment, I can send a message to the South Pacific yeah. From my bedroom. Well, I don't know if I'd have one big enough for my bedroom is pretty big. I wanted to see how big these things were, actually, if they had really big ones, to send them further and further. Like, how big do they get? They get very huge. They can cover scores of acres. Okay. A big shortwave antenna, which is why it can get very expensive. So that's bigger than my bedroom. You can also use ones that are the size of your bedroom. It depends not only, like you said, on the size of the transmitter, it depends on the atmospheric conditions, too. So those really short wave transmissions are received best at sunrise and sunset. And no one's 100% sure. But it has to do with the ionosphere. And because that's where the northern lights are happening. That's where solar rays hit the Earth's atmosphere and the atoms loose their electrons, I believe, so they become ions forming the ionosphere. And because this is constantly changing, you can't predict exactly how a short wave radio wave will act, but you can kind of guess. Well, this time, the Sun's least active, or most active, whatever, it has some impact on that sky what's it called? The sky what? Sky wave? The sky wave effect. So you can communicate with somebody in a foreign country, right? Yeah. And not only can it not be tracked, it's very difficult to trace who sent that, where that transmission is coming from. It's impossible to trace who's receiving it. That's right. So you have no idea who in your country is getting this, which means that you're broadcasting to anybody and everybody who feels like listening to this. A secret code. But the fact is, if you use the right kind of secret code, no one can crack it. All right, that brings up an important point, because you would think also you can hack into the most secure computer system on the planet if you're good enough as a hacker. Right. So how in the world could sending a coded key like it's? And you're trying to get your decoder ring from the Red was it the Red Rider? No. Story? No. That's way off. No. What was it? It was Orphan Annie. No, I'm talking about in the Christmas story. Yeah, it was the little orphanny. That was the show. Yeah. I didn't think it was. He didn't care about pirates and all that jazz. Pirates and smugglers and all that jazz. He listened to Little Orphan Annie. All right, I'll take your word for it. I remember now. Do you? No, but I'll take your word for it. Dude, I'm telling you, it's little Orphan Annie. My hat. I don't have a hat on right now, but I would eat it if I were wrong. At any rate, you're not little. Ralphie decoding the message from Little Orphan Annie. But it is actually the most secure way that you can send a secret message is by creating a unique code that you know and have written down on a piece of paper and your buddy knows. Who hasn't written down on a piece of paper? You only use it once. That's the kind of the key here. Yeah. And then you destroy it afterward. That is still the most it's unbreakable. So what it's called is a one time pad, the old one timer. Because you only use it once, and it is old. It's from the 19th century. Yeah. And it's still uncrackable. It is. And the reason why it's uncrackable is because you each have, like you said, you each have a copy of this code, but it's randomly generated. Right. So let's say you have the sheet of paper and the other person has a sheet of paper, and the sheet of paper says it's just like strings of random numbers, like four or five numbers long, and it's just totally random and it just covers several sheets of paper. When you guys start at the same place, and when the person transmitting the message wants to encrypt it, they run their message. So say you guys have agreed, like, zero is A, B is one, C is two, etc. For so you take that and you get really bad. I know, dude, it is mind boggling. Like, this is about as simple as cryptology gets, and it makes me bleed from my ear. Because all you have to do is agree on what's what. It could be anything, right? So you're agreeing on what's what. But you also have this randomly generated code key, right? So let's say I want to say, what up, Chuck? That's who. That's eleven letters, right? So if you have your key and you're encoding it, you would use the first eleven numbers to encode what's already encoded. So the W is the number 22. Okay? Right, and then so on. So there's a number assigned to each letter. So you have that, and then you run it through this code, this randomly generated code. So you add that and then you have 22. Yeah. And then say the first letter or the first number of this code is seven. So you have 29. So that's what the little German girl reads on the air. 29, 52, 30, 718. It means nothing to anyone else in the entire world except for you and the person who has the other copy of this code, since there's only two copies and you're only using it once, and you're going to eat it afterwards. Yeah. And the key is that it's randomly generated numbers, then theoretically, it will never be broken. Yeah, but I mean, that's just one example. You could have five pre code rules to confuse someone trying to crack this code, right? The simplest code is this letter represents this number, this number represents this letter. It gets more complex than that. If you could both have agreed upon a book, you'd have to Kill a Mockingbird. I've got to kill a mockingbird. Right. 4812, 9013. Four means go to page 413, means now you're really going to page 13. Ignore four, then look at the 12th line, then look at the 8th word on that page. Right? What a one time pad would do is take that already agreed upon code and encrypted even further. Yeah, but the point is, it doesn't have to represent letters. It can represent full words in a text that you've agreed upon. And it's basically like thumbing through this book, picking out all these various words to make a sentence. Right. The problem is that's its vulnerability as well, to get a copy of the randomly generated key that's used to encrypt this message, right? Yeah. You have to have some sort of contact with somebody. So that's one vulnerability of it. The thing is, depending on how long this is, as many numbers as there are as many transmissions as you can transmit. Does that make any sense? No. Say it clear. So I said, what up, Chuck? Yeah, that's eleven. That uses the first eleven numbers on this key. Right. But say there's 50,000 numbers on the key. Well, we have a lot more messages I can send to you that we're going through the pad. Eventually though, we're going to use up this pad and we need to meet again. So I can give you another randomly generated key at Kinkos. That's the vulnerability of it. Well, the other not a fail safe, but the thing that makes it even safer is a lot of times they would send, and presumably are still sending dummy messages. So you don't even know if it's real to begin with. And there are only so many person hours you can dedicate as a government to code crackers and they might be working on a code that's not even real. Right. You don't know which transmissions are legit. And that is a proposal by a group called Enigma. And we'll talk about Enigma right after this message because they're pretty awesome. So. Chuck, we were talking about Enigma. I mentioned Enigma, and Enigma is this group that of basically amateur radio people, shortwave radio enthusiasts. They really get into this. Yes, it's a thing. And they started this was pre Internet days. I think it was in the late 80s, early 90s that Enigma first came around and kind of coalesced. And Enigma stands for European Numbers Information Gathering and Monitoring Association. And basically it was just a group of these people who had all Enigma. Yeah, right. I think they reverse engineered, they always do. But they had all kind of started to talk or find each other and say, have you heard this weird transmission? And they're like, yes, I've heard that one and you should check out this frequency on Tuesday nights at 08:00 P.m. Because it transmits this. And they suddenly realize there's this whole community of people out there. So they set up a newsletter, they started a naming convention and they started collecting and assigning names to these different things. So like E designated an English speaking trans number station. S was Slavic, v is various, which encapsulates everything from French to Spanish. Right. And Enigma really took this thing and put it into understandable terms and they are basically eavesdropping, or they were eavesdropping on the spy community. Are they not doing that anymore? So Enigma disbanded I think, in 2000. And then almost immediately, another group came and said, well, we're in 2000, we're going to carry this on. And that's pretty fortunate because they were around to put all this on the Internet. Before, it was like you had to subscribe to newsletters and have a short wave radio. Now it's like you can just go on the Internet and listen to all sorts of archives of these defunct numbers stations as well. Yeah, I mean, they're creepy sounding, like it's kind of cool. I've got one for you. We've talked about it before. Do you remember the Yosemite Sam transmission? Yeah. I'm convinced that that's just a person having fun. Well, let's play it. I like that one. I think it's full of info. It's cool. It's coming from somewhere out in Albuquerque, in the desert in New Mexico. And it's been going since 2004. Yes. And what makes this one interesting is that it's not a code. It is just Yosemite Sam saying that thing. Well, then it's followed by that databurst, which they think is some sort of compressed information. Yeah, see, I don't believe it. I think this is a short wave enthusiast having a good time. Well, he's been doing it. It's pretty sophisticated. It does it over and over again, I think for 40 seconds and switches to the next frequency and it just goes through the band. Then he's got a computer doing it for him. Maybe if it is just some dude, but either way, I like the use of us saying, but it's exemplary. Of a numbers station, of a numbers transmission. There's something that indicates that this is about to happen. And then there's the happening, the transmission of the secret code, whether it's digital in nature or whether it's spoken, and then it is ended by Yosemite Sam again, or something like that. It's saying, here's the beginning, here's the information, here's the end, now go kill Norberg. Right. One of the other cool things about this is when we were talking about surely there's better ways, and the government could theoretically shut down the Internet. They could zap satellite transmissions, they could shut everything down. This is almost unstoppable. You can't shut down shortwave radio. I guess you cut power, maybe. Yeah. Well, no. And then I guess if people have batteries, though, in the shortwave radio, the one way to combat it is called jamming, frequency jamming. And basically it's just broadcasting on the same frequency that these other transmitters, the numbers stations are transmitting on. And so if you're broadcasting within your country, you're probably going to reach those shortwave radios better than somebody on the other side of the planet's transmission. Well, yeah. And so apparently Russia spent billions or the Soviets spent billions of dollars during the Cold War jamming frequencies from all sorts of different transmissions, and they play things like the sound of seagulls or random beeps or whatever. And it was just to prevent people from transmitting into Russia. But even with all of that money and technology mustered or marshalled against it, they still weren't entirely successful. Like, shortwave radio transmissions get through. It's just too big to fight. Yeah, you can't jam the entire frequency of all short wave, like, every single frequency. If you've ever heard the Wilco member Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, that album that was on the album at some point, I can't remember what song, it Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in a woman's voice. And that is a famous code. Was that from the Connet project? No, I don't think so, but we should talk about that for sure. That was a project, and it was also, I guess, in the Wild West days, where you're talking about pre Internet and people wanted to hear the stuff. Some people got together and put together a greatest hits sort of on CD with a lot of accompanying material about what you're listening to, and none of them, obviously, can't break these codes. That's the thing I find interesting, is people sit around listening to this stuff, but with no aim of cracking the code. I think some people do attempt to crack the code. That's impossible. Well, it's not impossible, and we should say the reason why it's not impossible is because if you're using a computer generated random number, a computer is not capable of truly of generating a truly random number, because computers run on algorithms, and algorithms are designed to follow patterns, so they're just incapable of it. So you could especially today, a hacker, could conceivably crack one of these especially old transmissions, but you still don't know what those numbers stand for. Even if you find a pattern of numbers, right, there's still an agreed upon thing that you would have to figure out, but it makes it possible. If you could crack that one timepad key, then you have a real chance at deciphering the message itself. Well, yeah, if you know what they stand for. But I still maintain, if only you and I know what those numbers represent. Right. To Kill a Mockingbird page. Yeah, exactly. Well, you were saying the Connet Project thing. Yeah. So it's a four CD compilation, and apparently I read an article from the time when it came out, which is the it's, like, perfect timing because there was y, two K going on. There was Millennium Angst, there was the X Files, and this thing came out in 1997, and Salon wrote an article on it. And this guy who wrote it was like a music concrete aficionado. So people appreciated it not just for the fact that it's like recordings of real live spy transmissions, but some people like the kind of avantgarde noise that had gone on, too, I'm sure. The Flaming Lips are currently planning an album composed of nothing but messages from number stations. Number eight. There's a movie that exists that I had never heard of called The Number Station. I hadn't heard of it either. Yes. I don't think it was released. Really? It said it's from 2013. I know most movies that are released. It probably went straight to video or something, but I watched the trailer today. It's John Kusak and Melan Ackerman, and they work at a number station and he's to protect the number station, but something bad happens and they're compromised and is who he says he is and is she who she says she is? Right. Who knows? You'll have to rip that turkey to find out. Did it look bad? Yeah, sure. It looked pretty bad. Sorry, John Kuzak. Yeah, sorry, John Kusak. I think one of the most interesting things about number stations is that, like you said, they peaked during the Cold War. Yeah, right. When the Berlin Wall fell. And then in a few years after that, the number of transmissions supposedly just dropped off dramatically. Although I did see in at least one place that supposedly they increased, but I didn't see that supported anywhere else. But the idea that they're still around at all in 2014, that there are still numbers stations transmitting gibberish, really says a lot. So it does a couple of things, and you've already mentioned one. It's possible they are just transmitting gibberish to throw off anybody listening. Yeah, that's one. To basically just kind of SAP their resources. Right. Like keep them risky's busy listening to our Jewish wish. Sure. Another one is that they're keeping them going in case they need to use them again. I think that's totally the reason. In which case that's pretty smart because you're not showing your hand, like, where all of a sudden an inactive radio station suddenly starts up again, indicates activity. Or it's been doing the same thing for ten years, and on year seven, it actually transmitted a real secret message. But it seemed just like everything else in those ten years. You're doing some pretty good spy craft there. Yeah. Or just to keep that, like, you may not be actively using it, but just to keep that method relevant. Right. If you quit doing something, it's going to die off. No one's going to know how to do it anymore. Sure. Yeah. So just keep those people working and they may not even know if they're transmitting real messages or not, I would guess, if you're just saying, oh, yeah, if you just hand them a sheet of paper. Yeah. In fact, that may be a pretty safe way to do things. Sure. It's like the person with the nuclear key. Yeah. This test who knows war games, we'll find out in 30 minutes. There are also other theories that they are, and I think some of this does go on, maybe drug runners using stuff like this because some of them are less than professional. Apparently the ones from Cuba or Cuba? Sorry, Jerry. Are a little comical. Well, they were renowned for just having really bad slip ups, especially during the Cold war. Like, you'd hear people talking and laughing in the background or an accidental transmission of a radio station. Right. Radio Havana. Right. Yeah. So they were kind of known for not being too skilled at it, but I imagine the drug runners are the same. Yeah, it's virtually the same thing. There's absolutely no reason why drug runners couldn't also use this alongside the espionage community, too. Yeah, there might be. A is one, B is two, and they get the message. That shipment of kilo is coming in Miami Beach tomorrow night. Let's go get them. Kill one, arm one. But I do think there may be a little bit of that. I think it's a mixed bag of why they're still being broadcast. I think there are enthusiasts that are probably just doing their own thing for fun. Yeah, that'd be fun, man, if I was in Guam and I could send you a private message via shortwave yeah, I thought you meant people who are just doing it just to mess with, like, the enigma community or something. I think that probably happens, too. I bet it's all kinds of things. Yeah, I'm sure you're right. There's one guy out there, trust me. There have been some actual spies who have been busted in this century, long after the Cold War, who had short wave radios and one time pads in their apartments or houses. Apparently in 2011 in Germany, a couple who'd lived there since 1988 and were spying for the Russians were caught in the act of receiving a number of transmission in their home when they were apprehended and busted for spying. I can see that scene. He's got, like, one headphone up and he's holding it with his hand, and he's writing something down in pencil, and his wife's trying to eat it really quick. And in 2001, Anna Amantez worked for the US civil Intelligence Agency, and she was convicted of spying for Cuba. And when they searched her home, they found a short wave radio in a code sheet. It's still going on, man. I think it's pretty neat. Yeah, I do, too. Like, it's old school, but almost foolproof. Yeah. The big vulnerability is getting the randomly generated key to the spy. Yes. And they also point out in the article who wrote this one, by the way. Nathan Chandler. Nathan points out that these days you're likely your one timer might be sent to you maybe digitally somehow, but it doesn't, like, tip anyone off necessarily. Yeah. I'm not quite sure how. Yes. I would think if you're being watched, then an email with a lot of random numbers might dip them off. Right. Well, it used to be they'd print them on that kind of paper that dissolved quickly or burned and left no ash or whatever. Right. They were on such tiny piece of paper, you had to use a really good magnifying lens to read it. And you could hide them in, like, a walnut. Shell or something like that. Wow. Who knows what they're doing now? Yeah, but they are doing something. Yeah. I thought about getting a short. I was a little bit inspired, but then I thought, oh, man, I've got so many other things to do. I don't know if I could fall into that rabbit hole. So that's numbers stations, if that piqued your interest, just type in numbers stations into your favorite search engine and it will lead you down the rabbit hole of shortwave radio. Did you say rabbit hole is where I got that from. I said rabbit hole, but I didn't invent it. No, I know, but it just popped up in my head and it wasn't my own invention. And I think if you have a short way radio, you probably tune into these anyway because you're just into that lifestyle. But I think there's a website called Spy Numbers where you can actually find the frequencies and just go right there and you don't have to search for them. Right. And if you want to read this article, you can type the words numberstations in the search bar@householdforce.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listing or mail. I'm going to call this a bit on sushi from someone in Japan. Hey, guys. And Jerry, he spelled Jerry right as well. Man it's Jerry's day. I enjoyed the sushi episode quite a bit and have something to add. As a result of modern food production following World War II in Japan and of course the US and elsewhere, the quality and traditional methods of making showyou miso and other Japanese food items sadly plummeted. For example, miso can be fermented and aged matter of weeks with the use of temperature controlled tanks where traditional dark miso would age up to two years. Same goes with other fermented products like show you mirren. No longer a sweet rice, cooking wine is practically sugar water. Speaking of sugar, modern Japanese food wouldn't exist without it. Umiboshi, the sour, salty pickled plum is lousy with artificial color sugar and refined salt. It's still good. As much as I love Japanese food and culture, it's quite heartbreaking to see these centuries of traditional food processing supplanted by the Japanese version of a twinkie chemically made in process. As an alternative, there are good quality Japanese products to be had, particularly those imported from eating foods. Just high quality, organic and widely distributed. Is this the President of Eden Foods? No. Are they based in Alameda, California? Sounds like, yeah. That is from Le in Alameda, California. I meant to mention to you I had the worst sushi I've had in my life the other day. Oh, no. Where? I'm not going to say it, but I'm not going back. I'll tell you off air, please. I don't think you wouldn't go there anyway. But it was the rice was gummy and really gummy to the point where I ate it just because I was starving and I ate it really fast, and I was like, oh, this is kind of gummy. And then afterward, I was like, man, that was terrible. Yeah, like, you say that to yourself and, like, you smiled and your whole mouth is coated in rice. It was gross, man. I was ticked off afterward, after I paid the bill and complained the whole way home to Emily, I was like, I really should have said something, because that was like, they should have known. They shouldn't have served that rice. Well, why didn't you say something? Because, like I said, I just think shoved it in my face hole and left and complained afterward, which is that's how I do things usually. I don't like to make a scene. I just like to play the martyr. Afterwards, I talked about that gummy sushi for two days. Yeah. Oh, it was that bad? Yeah, the fish and stuff was good, but that rice was just very subpar. They should have known better. Okay, well, tell me where it is afterwards. I will. Okay. If you want to, I guess inadvertently or quietly, clandestinely promote your business. Like Led with his eaten foods subversively. Yeah. You can tweet to us at sisk podcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstepycheanow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushaneo.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetoftworks.com. A summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music and listen today." | ||
How U.S. Marshals Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-u-s-marshals-work | Thought Chuck and Josh had already covered every law enforcement agency? Think again. The Marshals Service is the oldest law enforcement branch in the land, dating back to 1789. Listen up for how to get a free ride courtesy the Marshals in this episode. | Thought Chuck and Josh had already covered every law enforcement agency? Think again. The Marshals Service is the oldest law enforcement branch in the land, dating back to 1789. Listen up for how to get a free ride courtesy the Marshals in this episode. | Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:58:25 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=15, tm_min=58, tm_sec=25, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=272, tm_isdst=0) | 29132664 | audio/mpeg | "This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney Nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Hey, everybody, if you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to Squarespace.com SYSK and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, chuck Bryant. Which makes this stuff you should know. And we're about to present part 80 in our series on law enforcement agencies. Pretty soon we're going to just start profiling like ex cops and stuff like that. Did. We still haven't done ATF. Or CIA. Or FBI. The CIA article leaves a lot. Now, I'm sure it needs some stuff. So we're going to do that week when we have extra time to do a lot more research. Okay, deal. Today we're talking about the US. Marshals. That's right. So, Chuck, have you ever seen the movie The Fugitive? I have. Well, then we don't need to do this episode. Why? Is that it? That's it. It's the most accurate portrayal of a US. Marshal ever created by man. Tommy Lee Jones. Yes. He was good in that. I'm a big fan. No, he was great. Okay. It's really tough to go wrong with Tommy Lee Jones. Yeah. What was he in? Was he in no country for Old Men and he has the last lines and stuff like that? Yeah. Actually, if you've read the book, the main character is pretty much his character. That's why when you see the movie and gosh, I hate the spoilers. Spoiler alert when you see the movie and what's his face dies. Javier bared down. No, what you think is the main character? Yes. What's his face from the game. Josh Brolin in the movie, it's kind of like, wait, he just kind of unceremoniously died. And they did make a big deal about it. Remember in the movie? Yeah, but if you read the book. He's not really the main character, so it sort of makes more sense. I got you. Anyway, I love the cone brothers. They know what they're doing. God, they're the best. But again, Tommy Lee Jones. This is how Tommy Lee Jones works. Episode and he's a class act. And Chuck, we're talking about the federal marshals. Really? I was joking about Tommy Lee. Did you know that they are the oldest law enforcement agency in the land? Yeah. And most versatile, they claim. Yeah. Very proud of that fact. Yes. They do a lot of stuff. They really do. In a lot of ways, they're very unsung. They have a very long history. They were first created in 1789. The first time Congress met the Marshal Service was literally created. And they've had their highs and their lows in the 225 years since George Washington appointed the first 13 Marshalls. That is very cool. Yeah. Right out of the gate. And basically they set up the federal courts and they said, well, we need some people to kind of protect these courts. We need some people that crack some heads. US. Marshals. Done. Yes. And apparently, as far as law enforcement agencies in the US goes, the federal marshals have kind of had the short end of the stick, traditionally, especially early on in the country's history, when state's rights wasn't just relegated to like it was a big deal to everybody. Right, right. So you had this guy who was sometimes the only law enforcement official in the entire land, in your whole area, and he's trying to shove federal laws down your throat when you're all about states rights. That's right. And that was pretty much the beginning of the Marshall Service, was basically being at odds with their friends and neighbors about the stuff that they were doing. A lot of times it was stuff that proved to be unconstitutional. Like the Alien Ins edition. Act. Remember our buddy Eugene Debs, who ran for president and got a million votes from jail here in Atlanta? The socialist? He was jailed for the alien insidition act. Oh, really? Yeah. Remember, you couldn't even speak against the government publicly or else it was considered treason around World War I am. Yeah. Marshall's had to arrest people like Eugene Devs for that kind of stuff. So there have been plenty of points in the history of this agency where, like, they haven't had to do very good stuff and they've suffered for it. Yeah. And the Grabster, ed Grabandowski, who wrote this, as well as many other cool articles that we podcast on, pointed out that the Civil War, or not the Civil War, but slavery was kind of a contentious point because in the south, they had to enforce slave trade bans on slave imports, and then in the north, they had to prosecute people fugitives on the run. Right. And Northern abolitionists are like and in the south, they're like, we can't bring in our slaves and the marshals were like, man, no one likes me anywhere. I'm going to go out west. And they were liked in the west? Yeah, in a lot of places, probably, yes. Because literally out west, it was lawless in many, many respects, and literally and figuratively, there would be a Marshall out there. And the Marshall, as you would see, just some guy, like, sitting in an office in some boom town, right? Yeah. Like Bat Masterson. And that's it. And then he would deputize the posse. That's extremely accurate. There would be a marshal out there, and if you needed some extra help, he could grab some law abiding citizens who had guns and say, you're now an official of the US. Government and you have to come crack heads with me. That's really how it happened. But yes, like you said, in situations like that, most of the law abiding people are the people who are just trying to mine some gold and leaving other people alone. They were very happy that there was a marshal there. Yeah. A little order for a change, right. So there's like a little uptick in martial appreciation in the 19th century. The second half of it out west. Yeah, that's kind of their heyday, too, from what I gather, if you don't count now. And I actually found, too, that a lot of states still have a posse, but it's like the Arkansas US marshall pose, and it's just the organization that helps to raise awareness and stuff. It's like the PBA. Yeah. They'll go around to schools and stuff like that. That's the Marshall's Posse? Yeah. Wow. It's very valuable job they do, Josh. Well, remember, there's the Posse Comatatus Act that prevents posse, doesn't it? I've never heard of that. Yes, we talked about in the Delta Force. Oh, we did episode. It's the law that prevents Delta Force from operating in the US. Ostensibly. Well, these days you try to get a posse together and people are like, dude, I'm watching Lost Boys. Come on. Nice. Early 20th century, they were pretty close to obscurity because they had a reputation for being fat, lazy, retired cops. Dimwitted grabanowski puts it. I love that word, dumb, fat, retired cops. Yeah, basically. I don't know what led to that, but they just kind of lost their shape and everybody knew it, too. And then the respect for the Marshall service went down tremendously. It sounds like it was a place where old cops go to die or to retire. And then a guy came along in 1939, his name is Frank Murphy, and he became Attorney General of the United States. And he said, you're going to stop being so pudgy. See, we're going to get you to work out. You're going to be good at arresting criminals. They said, whatever you say, Murph. Yes. And that was that. Yeah. And they started taking shape again, literally and figuratively, I guess. And throughout the 20th century, made their name for doing such brave things like escorting black students to school during segregation. Those were Marshalls. When you see that famous picture. Although I think some of them were National Guard as well. No, the National Guard were ordered out by racist governors to block the coming in. Really? Yes. And the marshals were at odds with the National Guard? Yes. National Guard state. I feel like a dummy. Okay. I mean, it just makes sense. While the National Guard is going to be out there protect no, that's a big black eye on the state of Alabama in particular. And Mississippi. That's true. They also kind of mix it up with anti war protesters during Vietnam and basically made more of a name for themselves as the 20th century advanced as hippie beaters. Yeah, that's true. So what do they do, though? And also, I just want to point out I don't advocate the beating of hippies. And if you're going to send me an email, go back and listen to the whole catalog first. Okay. Except hippie Rob. He deserves a good beat down. Stupid. Not really. Not really. So, Chuck, finally we arrived to current day as far as when this article was written in 2007. And at a place called Fort Smith, Arkansas, you will find the National Museum of the US. Marshalls. Still to this day. It's there. Oh, really? Four years later. I did not know that. Yeah, and they changed their badge, too. Used to be a six pointed star. Oh, is it five? Yeah. Okay. It did start out to be a six silver star in a circle. Yeah. Okay, so now it's a five pointed star in a circle, but apparently up until 1941. So there are 94 districts that coincide with judicial districts, federal judicial districts that marshall serve. That's right. And every district was in charge of creating its own badge until 1941 when they standardized it. And each district only has one official Marshall. The rest are like deputies and things like that. Right. There's like about 4000 deputies and 94 Marshalls working. That's true. 3953 to be exact. I saw that. It said on their website 3900, approximately 3950. And I was like, we don't round up to 4000 anymore when we hit that. Well, it's better than having a ticker that's like takes one down every time someone dies in the line of two dressing up one when one is born. Yeah, that's true. Or a new hire. Right. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to sex by cravings from Tokyo to Toledo. So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate covered goodness with real time data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create Learn More@ibmcom consulting Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. 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, so, Chuck, you said that the Marshal Service is pretty versatile, and for good reason. They have at least four main areas of operation, and probably the best known one, thanks to Mr. Tommy Lee Jones. The class act is catching fugitives. And not just federal fugitives, they also support state and local law enforcement groups in catching their fugitives, too. So the Marshals are basically just big show offs. I got a couple of stats here, Josh. Okay. In 2010 I'm just going to pepper your information with stats. How about that? In 2010, they arrested more than 81,900 state and local fugitives. That's when they're helping everyone out. It was $89,901. And as far as federal fugitives, they arrested more than $36,000 in 2010 alone. Yeah, that's a huge uptick in New York state and local, because in 2007, in the article, it sites 46,800 state and local fugitives close to double. Yeah. Good work. Yes. Well, part of that was Operation Falcon. Yeah. That was mainly to NAB unregistered sex offenders, right? It depends. It's a fugitive capture operation, and in 2007, they were up to the end of phase three. And I think each phase would be a different part of the country and then maybe a different emphasis. So, Falcon Three in 2007 was launched to catch people who are supposed to register as sex offenders, but never did. Making them fugitives. Right. In the eastern US. And it nabbed 10,733 felons. Wow. Sex offenders. The people we do not want on the street. Just a few. And gang members. More than 4800 gang members. And I think that's a part of Operation Falcon, right? I believe so. Gang stuff. Yeah. Because Ice is responsible for immigration. Right. So although the Marshall Service have four outposts, mexico, Jamaica, and a couple of other places in the Caribbean yeah. Columbia and Dominican Republic. Okay. I think that's all drug related. That's just a guess. Yeah. And they do arrest people in those countries. One of the guys on their Most Wanted list was arrested in Mexico, so they can operate outside of the country, but they wouldn't have anything to do with immigration. Although I can't see them not working with Ice they might. Yeah. It seems like they will work with whoever asked for their help. Right. They're like, sure, we can send a team down there. One of the other big aspects of their job is prisoner transport, because they're in charge of basically looking over the court system, the federal court system, anything that has to do with protecting a courtroom, transporting a prisoner, keeping the security aspect of the federal judicial system functioning. That's what they do. And a big part of that is shuffling prisoners from place to place. Yeah. And they do that via the justice prisoner and alien transportation system. And that is literally their own bus line, airline, van line, whatever they need. If you've seen them. Pretty bad movie, con Air, those were Marshalls. And every day they have 63,000, roughly 63,000 prisoners in custody. And then they transport these dudes and ladies, I guess, all over the place. On planes. Yeah. No beverage service. I'll bet not. And I'll bet those, like, the stuff on the seat backs where you rest your heads haven't been washed in a while. No. Inflight movie. No, it's no frills exactly what it is. Yes. If you want to see a very frill laden aircraft, you should see airport 78, I think the third one. Did you watch that recently? Yeah. That's awesome. You know what I watched the other day? What? Towering Inferno. I've got my instant queue. It's pretty good, man, I got to say. Like, it's way too long. First of all, it's like two and a half hours long, and it didn't need to be like, they should have cut out a lot of the plot points, but as far as just like, oh, my God, what's going to happen? It was pretty ranks. Still suspense. Yeah. That's the word. Yeah. It's among the best of the 70s disaster flicks, right? Yeah. And you got Paul Newman and Steve McQueen in the same movie. That's just off the tough guy meter. Yeah. Well, I didn't have my full attention last night, so I didn't watch that. Instead, I punished me. And you meet with beyond the Poseidon Adventure. That's so funny. We're on this kick of old disaster. It's weird. Unbeknownst. Yeah. I had no idea until just this moment towering in front of watch it. Airport 78. Okay. So, Chuck. I think it's 78. There's also 77. Yeah, there's a few 75. 77. I think it's 77. Okay. It's the one where Jimmy Stewart owns a luxury airliner, is flying these people who end up beneath the surface of the Atlantic and the Bermuda Triangle. Okay. And you know who was in Towering Inferno? Who? Fred Astaire. Yeah. When his last movie and actually, there's one small scene where he's dancing, and my eyes were just like, oh, my God, freddy Stairs dancing. Well, apparently in the Towering Inferno, they had, like, 50 something sets, and all but eight of them went up in flames. Really? Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. Jeez. That's a sidetrack that's much more interesting than Marshalls, I think. So they transport prisoners, they capture fugitives, and then we did a whole podcast on witness security program wit SEC, the Witness Protection program, but we'll talk about it briefly here. Basically, it was conceived in 1070, and since then the Marshall Service, which basically hides federal witnesses and keeps them hidden, gives them new lives or just keeps them in safe houses during trial, depending on the arrangement. They say that since the beginning, not one witness has been harmed if they follow the rules. Right. Plenty of witnesses have been wax because they went to a movie or something with, you know, look at me, I'm Jimmy two legs. Josh also, we said protect the courts. They still do that today. More than 2000 judges and 400 courthouses nationwide. They install security systems, they provide personal escort and watch over high risk trials. And there's also a few other people they help transport, I think all federal judges, us attorneys, personnel and jurors they provide protection for. And they transport the Supreme Court justices outside of Washington DC on their annual picnic. I guess so. I guess in DC. I'm not sure who it is. It may be Secret Service or something or maybe just, I don't know, local Marshalls. Okay. And we should point that out. Marshall is a term that's used a lot, but unless you are a US Marshal, then you're not part of the US. Ms. Okay. You can be a marshal like some countries have marshalls as military ranks or air marshals are not related to the Marshall Service. That surprised me. Yeah, I thought they were US. Marshals. They are not. Also, we should say if you're a drug dealer and you get popped for a beef by the feds and they take your stuff, it's the Marshalls who have it. They're in charge of asset seizure? Yes. And distribution too. Like selling off stuff to give reparation to families and victims and stuff. Or to fund the Marshall service. Or to fund the Marshall service. Daniel Picnic what else can they do? Josh they have a SWAT group, special operations group, which basically does the same thing that SWAT teams do, but for federal stuff. Okay, that makes sense. And they once arrested and making air quotes, a fleet of 18th century shipwrecks off the coast of Rhode Island at the request of the governor to protect it, to take these into federal custody and protect them from vandals and salvagers. Wow. Yeah. I got a stat on the assets they currently manage 18,000 assets valued at $3.9 billion. That's a lot of cigarette boats. And in 2010 paid victims of crimes about $350,000,000. So they do use it for reparations. Some of it. They also made payments to state and local law enforcement agencies of 580,000,000. So maybe they repay. Like if you wreck your police cars in the pursuit of this guy, we'll pay you back. Here's some money. They're going to sell off their stuff, and we'll pay you back. Just remember, Uncle Sam takes care of you. 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. 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Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K Twelvecom podcast. That's K Twelvecom podcast. And start taking charge of your future today. What else? Josh? Well, we talked about how the Marshal Service is set up within the 94 districts and the 39 53,953 deputies. But how did they get there? Chuck apparently, they used to have an exam, and then now they use the standard federal career intern program, which takes a couple of years to get you to make sure that you're not just some jerk, too, could fill out an application. Yeah. Or want the free gun. Yeah. So you got to pay your dues for a couple of years, and if you've got the right stuff, then you have to go through a 17 and a half week training course at the US. Marshal Service training academy in Glencoe, Georgia. Did you know the Marshalls Training Academy is here? I didn't. And I didn't even know there was such a place as Glencoe, Georgia, actually, and it's sort of halfway between Jacksonville and Savannah. Okay. It's down on the coast, and you're St. Simon. It does ring a slight bell. I think it was not even a place until they put the thing there and they named it Glencoe. I don't know if that stands for anything, but I don't even think that was a legitimate town until they set up a 1600 acre campus got you. That has its own zip code. That is very neat. It's big. Chuck if you want to become a US. Marshall now, you can't just fill out an application. You have to go through the training program. But even to get into the training program on the US Marshall check. There's some qualifications you have to have. You have to be a US citizen track. You have to be between the ages of 21 and 36. No, you could still I could. I'd better hurry up. Being good physical condition. I would say I'm not, and you're so so would you say you're in good physical condition? I would. So you could pass these tests? I could. You could do the 50 chin ups and run the mile in a certain time, over a long enough period of time. I could. Okay. A bachelor's degree check. Three years experience in law enforcement or other qualifying job experience. No. A valid driver's license. Yes. And a good driving record. Yeah. Okay. I'm good. Well, aside from the age limit, then you're fine. And the physical condition and the experience. So pretty much I'm a US citizen and I have a driver's license, but that's what qualifies me. There's some famous Marshalls besides Tommy Lee Jones and Matt Masterson, who I mentioned. Did you mention him? Yes, I just kind of threw him in earlier. Was Marshall Dylan a real person, Matt Dillon, or was he just a fictional character? I think he was a fictional character. Pretty sure TV baby Wyatt ERP was real, though. Yeah. And Virgil and Morgan Earp, his brothers, they were all Marshalls. As was Wild Bill Hickok. And while Bill is the tie that binds the Marshalls podcast and the sword swallowing podcast because he brought in a cowboys and Indians set up to the 1893 World Fair in Chicago. Look at you. He popped up in both. Wow. Yeah. Frederick Douglas had no idea that he was a US marshal. No. And the Marshall for DC, too, which I imagine is probably a pretty busy district. Yeah. You don't watch Louie, do you? No, he had episode where his daughter dressed up like Frederick Douglas for Halloween. Wow. And apparently that was what he wanted to be when he was a kid one year. So he brought it back years later for a show. Yeah. Nice. What else? Josh? They have a most wanted list that is different than the FBI's. Yeah. Remember they caught that one dude in Mexico? Yeah. They caught one of their own dudes in Mexico that went to the other side, I think, too. Oh, yeah. Down in Juarez. That's right. He, like, went renegade and turned into a drug dealing murderer. Allegedly. These days, Josh, the director is a lady named Stacia Hilton, and it was a really controversial nomination, actually, by Obama. How's that? Well, she's a socialist. Yes. She had strong ties to the private prison industry. Oh, yeah. And the US Marshals is also responsible for awarding contracts to build federal prisons. Oh, yeah. So basically it was one of those deals where they're like, hey, she made a lot of money as a consultant for all these companies. You appoint her and she's going to give her friends in the private prison industry fat contracts. So she had petitions going around, basically, but the nomination did go through. I see. And apparently it was kind of sped through. So all those people out there, we like to call out folks on both sides. Yeah, we're doing it. Good going, Chuck. Thanks. And also, I should say, there's between 204 hundred Marshalls that have died in the line of duty since 1789. That's not a lot. No. And the first was a guy named Robert Forsyth, and he went to go serve court papers for a civil case to two brothers, Beverly and William Allen. And he took the Allen brothers aside to say, hey, I don't want to embarrass you, but here's some papers. And rather than come with them, they ran upstairs, locked themselves in the door. When they heard foresights coming up the stairs, they shot through the door and hit them in the head and killed them instantly. So here's the first Marshall shot during the line of duty in Augusta, Georgia. Yeah. And I actually saw that he was the first law enforcement officer ever killed in the line of duty in the United States. And he wore, like, powdered wigs and everything, too. It was like old timey Colonial 17. Just post colonial. So that's it. That's US. Marshals, right? That's right. They do a valuable service. And now you know what that is. Thanks to Chuck and his law enforcement crush. You and the Grabster. You guys are kindred spirits, for sure. I do watch Cops. Yeah. Do you? Yeah. I don't know when it comes on, but if I'm in the right mood and I'm channel surfing and I'll see it's on, like, nine times in a row, I'll watch five or six of them. Do you ever watch real Stars of the Highway Patrol? Yeah. Real Stories. Yeah. Yeah, I've watched all those shows occasionally. I just want to point that out. This happens, like, once a month. It's not like I know in there. I don't schedule my time. Got you. And then Emily always fussed me, and it's like, oh, my God, how do you watch this? Right? I was like, well, these people make me feel better about myself. That would make you a fan. Yeah. If you want to learn more and you, I'm speaking to you, the listener. Now. If you want to learn more about the US marshalls, you can type in Marshalls one L. I was looking at that show in Plain Sight, and even on the USA Network site, they spelled Marshalls with two L's, which is a name of a person with two L. So it's M-A-R-S-H-A-L-I got it. You can type that in the search bar@housedefworks.com, which means it's time for listener mail. That's right, Josh. And this is a little Kiva related thing. You want to tell everyone about Kiva real quick. We have a Kiva team. It's kivaorg K-I-V-A right. And. It's a micro lending site where you can go on and lend 25 or more bucks to people in developing countries. They use it to ostensibly keep their businesses afloat and grow. And basically you're fighting poverty and all sorts of other problems through micro lending. And what's our goal here? Our goal is to get to, I think, 600,000 or three quarters of a million. I think 750,000 by when? The end of this year. Okay. Yes. We're supposed to get to three quarters of a million by the end of the year. Yes. And we have to thank Glenn and Sonya for kind of heading that up. Our fans who set the goals for us because they're smarter than we are about figuring out if it's attainable. Yeah, they boss us around. They do. So, anyway, this is from Aaron H in Denver. Hi, guys. I wanted to write in and let you know how glad I am to support Kiva.org along with you. I found the site before your microlending podcast but didn't completely understand it until then. Since the date of that podcast almost two years ago, I've made 26 loans and I'm a member of the Stuff You Should Know lending team. Nice. The other thing I wanted to share with you is that I just started volunteering with Kiva. I applied over a year ago to be on their volunteer editing team and they finally had an opening last month, invited me to join. Long story short, they won't let me leave. Please send out. My job is to get the loan descriptions directly from the field partners and then edit them before they go live on the web. Kind of cool. Yeah. Didn't know that they did that to volunteers like that. We edit for grammar and clarity and also check to make sure that the loan details are correct. I usually edit around ten to 25 loans per week, and I love knowing that when I hit the submit button, I'm directly improving someone's life. And that is from Erin H in Denver. Awesome. Thanks, Aaron. Pretty cool. She's given money and she's launching her time and expertise. That is very cool. Very neat. If you want to learn more about Kiva and micro lending, you can listen to our Micro Lending podcast or episode. You can also check out our Kiva Team Kiva.org teamstuffynow to join. That's right. And let's see. You can also tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can check us out on Facebook, and you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseupworks.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House Depork staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder and Smalltown Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You 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." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-10-14-sysk-truth-serums.mp3 | SYSK Selects: Is there such a thing as a truth serum? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-is-there-such-a-thing-as-a-truth-seru | In this week's SYSK Select episode, ever since people have had secrets, other people have been looking for ways to get it out of them. Law enforcement and chemistry alike have searched for a drug that can remove the ability to lie. Join Josh and Chuck as | In this week's SYSK Select episode, ever since people have had secrets, other people have been looking for ways to get it out of them. Law enforcement and chemistry alike have searched for a drug that can remove the ability to lie. Join Josh and Chuck as | Sat, 14 Oct 2017 17:49:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=17, tm_min=49, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=287, tm_isdst=0) | 35256215 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's SYSK selects I've chosen one on truth serums, which originally came out in April of 2013. Turns out what we always thought was a truth serum was actually just a handful of goofballs. Enjoy. 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, back in the saddle again. Man, it's been a while. That was a goat boy being whipped. That's you. You're the Goat boy, right? Do you remember Goat Boy from ceremony Life? Yes. What was his name? Jim Brewer. Yeah. He was Go boy, wasn't he? I think so. Was it called? Go boy. Great. Classic s. I don't care. Agreed? Yeah, agreed. That's pretty good. Thanks. How are you doing? Oh, I'm great, man. Good. Inject me with truth serum and ask me and then you'll get the truth. It may or may not work, and it's not even serum. You know? We've got a pretty cool case coming up where this is going to be used. Wow. Cool. Well, no, but I'm saying thank you for correcting me, because now it's not cool. It's interesting. Sensational. Yes. And this is actually what made me think that we should do something on truth, sir, was the James Holmes case, the Aurora, Colorado, Batman shooter, who has been saying that he's insane or acting insane ever since he was caught. But a lot of people think maybe it's not so insane. Right. And a judge just recently, in the middle of March, approved him to be tested under Narco analysis. Yes. Which is narco interrogation, really, is what it is. Yeah. It's unusual these days in the US. For something like that to happen. And a lot of folks are saying, what's up with this judge? Are you for real? Yeah. And it turns out that there is a very long history, especially in the 20th century, of people using what has been popularly dubbed truth serum, but incorrectly dubbed truth serum because it doesn't necessarily generate the truth or uncover the truth. And it's not a sera. Yeah. Watery part of coagulated blood. Is that right? Is that all it is? I believe so. And I think there's a plant based serum as well. But either way, none of the truth serum drugs that they use our serum. No. And we should probably get out of the way right now that LSD not a truth serum or a truth drug. Okay. Well, no, that's what I think most people think about when you think of being interrogated under the influence of drugs, that they give you LSD and start shouting at you on that. I had no idea about this. But it reminds you, you hearken back to the days of the polygraph when that first started, it was like, well, okay, society is saying that we shouldn't beat people with rubber hoses to get the truth out of them anymore. Sure. And it's possible that this isn't even the truth. They're just saying what we want to hear because they want us to stop. So let's try some other techniques. And as a result, you had the polygraph truth serums, which we're going to call incorrect or no, that's what they're called, basically. Sure. Because there isn't really a clinical name for them, is there? I don't know. Narcoanalytical drugs? Well, that's kind of like the yeah, I just made that up, but that's really what it is. So basically, there are two reasons why you would use truth serums, and they come down to narco analysis and narco interrogation. And the one, I should say, that James Holmes is going to undergo is, I guess, kind of a combination of both because they're trying to get at the truth of his sanity. Sure. But at the same time, it will be interrogated because he's a suspect in a massive murder trial. Although I would say that's just the psychological because the probative truth is they're trying to get a revelation of a crime. Oh, yeah, I guess that's true. And not necessarily their mental state. Yeah. So those are the two differences. Are you trying to inject you and say, did you steal the painting? Yeah, it's a good one. Art Theft. We've done podcast on that. Or like some sort of psychological truth that they're trying to uncover about themselves. Right. And that one, as far as truth serums go, is probably the one where the drugs will be most effective. Yeah, sure. Because it's kind of unlocking, like, an unconscious revelation of person, like uncovering neurosis that maybe they didn't understand that they had. Now there's some sort of catharsis that these drugs have allowed to just kind of let their guard down. Now they're flowing out with a catharsis and they're feeling better afterward. Yeah. And most of those studies, too, have been not been on, like prisoners, but maybe volunteers and things. So it's a more friendly environment. Right. So maybe they get further that way, but we'll get to all that. All right, so let's talk about the history of this, Chuck. They're not so old, the idea of using drugs to get the truth out of somebody. And actually, there was a Texas doctor. Dr. House. For real? Yeah. The real doctor house. Bobby house. He was a Dallas, Texas doctor, an obstetrician. And back when he was delivering babies, they were using a combination of chloroform, morphine and escopalamine, which you may have heard of before if you've ever taken motion sickness drugs that patches scopolamine. Yeah. And he noticed that when women were on this combination of drugs, they tended to be very candid and forthright with stuff sometimes that didn't have anything to do with the child birthing process. And Dr. House said, hey, I wonder if you could use this on criminals. Yes. In truthful, that's the most important part. Well, yeah, they found out that they were accurate. And so yeah. He said, you know what? Who's not forthcoming and who doesn't tell the truth? Or lying? Lying criminals. Right. So maybe we should get them pregnant and then give them scoplamine. Actually, not to get them pregnant. And he sort of resisted the whole truth surround thing. Supposedly that came about in 1922 at the Los Angeles Record was when it was first used. Yeah. He eventually would come around and embrace that term and use it himself. Because once things take hold in the public consciousness, you just sort of have to give in. Yes. And in that way kind of resembles, though, that the inventor of the polygraph or the guy who brought all these disparate parts of the polygraph together, william Moulton Marston, the guy who invented Wonder Woman, just kind of became a promoter of his law enforcement tool, of course. Sales comics. Yeah. But he found out that it worked the first time. Not by getting a bunch of guilty guys found guilty, but of a study with three men who said they were innocent. He gave them the scopolamine, I guess, interrogated them, found that they still said, no, I'm innocent, all three of them. And then they later got off even though, like, all the evidence was against them. They didn't get off because of the truth serum. That was a separate study. He just kind of compared the two and said, hey, this is going to work like gangbusters. Yeah. And despite that, I guess, sort of success, I guess he certainly touted it as such. But there haven't been a whole lot of studies on scoplamine. Just a few different cases. They've actually had, like, police interrogations using scopelamine and interestingly, I totally buy this because it kind of harkens back to old movies. Just the threat of it was sometimes enough to induce like a confession. And that reminds me of the movies of the guy approaching with a needle in his hand right, exactly. Squirting it in the air and saying, if you have a's of making you talk and all of sudden A, they go, Screw it, I don't want that junk. I wonder if it's because they had committed so many crimes that they hadn't been caught for. They didn't want to implicate themselves in a bunch of other ones, maybe. And they were just being utilitarian, saying, I'll give you this one. I bet it was more they were just like it became a big thing in the public consciousness, like true serum. And so they didn't know what was going on. Right. Well, also if they were using it enough that it had gotten out how unpleasant the whole experience was, maybe that was what they were protecting themselves against because there were a lot of psychological effects, including falling asleep. What's wrong with that? Babbling. What's wrong with that? Becoming delusional and having hallucinations. Those are great. And then the physiological effects far outlasted the psychological effects. And you would have probably dry socket. I get the impression of the mouth. Your mouth is so dry that your saliva glands dried up, too. Just extraordinarily painful. Yeah. And they would actually use that in surgery, too, because they wanted you to have dry mouth surgery. But also, like, headaches, rapid heartbeat, blurred vision. It didn't last long as a truth serum because of these reasons. It didn't. Despite Doctor House's efforts, it did kind of follow the wayside. But if you are interested in Scopalamine, there's basically a legend that Colombian drug gangs use this. If you go on a Columbia and you order a Coke, you better watch them pour it because they will dos you with Scoplamine. They being Colombian. Drug gang. They're living in the 1920s. Yeah. I guess one of the effects that it has is amnesia, but you're still conscious and moving around and hanging out and using your ATM card to get the money up for them because you're very forthcoming with whatever is asked of you. It sounds like one of those things, like the old white traveling wives tales. It definitely does sound like that, and I'm sure it is, largely. But I read a Vice magazine article on it, and supposedly the author went down to Columbia and found all this stuff out first hand. It was pretty eye opening. You ever seen Flirting With Disaster? Yeah. Remember that Mary Tyler Moore had the story about on the highways, they'll bump you in the car and then get you to pull over and rob you, and then they get bumped on the highway and they think they're being robbed, but they're not. I don't remember her in that. Yeah, she was the adoptive mother of the Ben Steeler characters. Really? Yeah, she was great. Scoplemine X out. Scoppamine is out. Up next, we have everyone's favorite truth serum, barbiturates. And they were discovered not barbiturates, but to use them like this was discovered by accident by Arthur Lovinhart. And he was at the University of Wisconsin Go Badgers, and he was doing some experimenting with respiratory stimulants and injected a dude who was catatonic, mute and rigid. And all of a sudden he loosens up, opens up his eyes and talks a little bit, and they think, wow, this could be a big deal. This seems like this drug woke this guy up, and we are getting information out of him about his life. Maybe we can use that as a truth term. Yeah. So they started to a guy named Clarence W. Molberger head of the Michigan Crime Detection Laboratory in East Lansing started using barbiturates. And if you hear of truth serum being used in any narco interrogation, including James Holmes, they're talking about the use of barbiturates. These are the only ones who have been proven to even possibly uncover some sort of truth in an interrogation. Right. So you've got Amabarbital, Thiopental, and Cicobarbital, and any of these three, aka. Yellow Jackets, Pink Ladies, Goofballs, Red Devils, all those guys any of them should be in the hands of an expert capable of producing some sort of truth or at least get somebody talking. And they aren't quite sure how, but they think possibly that the cerebrum is detached. The cerebrum, which monitors the higher functioning of the cerebellum, is detached. And so it doesn't say things like, you don't want to say that you should probably stop talking now. Right. That's what they think is happening. So they have used those with some success, anecdotally, or I guess not anecdotally, but in experiments. But they still have the battle of actually using them in an investigation because courts aren't prone to allow a confession if you were doped up, it depends. I mean, this judge in the James Holmes Aurora, Colorado trial said, go to it, I sign off on it, which means that it should be admissible in that judge's courtroom, you know. Well, that's not a confession, though. They're looking for his psychological wellness. Again, it depends. And I kind of been thinking about what you're saying. I don't know, because right. But is he faking? Is he malingering? And this is how barbiturates have been used as truth serums in the past. One of the first cases, one of the first studies was carried out by a couple of people named Gerson and Victorov, and they used sodium amatol to interview 17 suspected malingerers at Fort Dicks, New Jersey. Basically, some army guys who were thought to just be lazy and shiftless and faking an injury so they didn't have to do army stuff anymore. Right. So they gave these guys sodium amatal, and they found that they were forthcoming, seemingly against their will about their conditions, about faking it or not. Right. That is true. They did not tell them they were going to be taking this they sprung it on them. Yeah. Like a minute before. Yeah. And they interviewed them before they took the amateol at all by psychiatrists. So I think they wanted to get just a comparison, I guess. I don't know if you call it the control, because it was the same people, but at least a control interview. Right. And they dosed them up. Yeah. And they said they had no say in this. They had to do it. That's right. The difference between that and the therapeutic is who wrote this? Do we have an author's name? Yeah, his name, he works for the CIA is George Bimorell. So Mr. Bimarrell points out that the setting and the type of patience and the kind of truth is going to make all the difference. So it depends on what you're looking for and what kind of setting, because like I pointed out earlier, when it was like student volunteers, it's way more friendly, and a lot of them reported like, oh, I feel you fork, and this is great. I'll tell you whatever you want. Not criminals who are hiding a crime. Yeah. So Beymerl points out that the rapport between the interviewer and the interviewee is extremely important and important anyway. Yeah. And one of the flaws or one of the significant points about that Fort Dick's interview or experiment was that these people still fest up to being malignant even though there was a hostile attitude toward the interviewer because they didn't have any choice in the matter and the guy sprung it on them. Yeah. And they also manipulated them. And I think this is one of the reasons that I didn't find any cases where the court had actually admitted a confession, drug induced confession to a crime. Really? No, I mean, I saw all sorts of uses, but never one that said, all right, we put the Scoundre drugs and he confessed and we can use that. Did you find any? Yeah, there was in the Jersey man shot his ex girlfriend at point blank range and he said that he had seen the devil when he did it. Right. And he used Narco interview to basically have his sentence cut in half and it worked. But again, that was psychological wellness. That wasn't confessing to a crime. Right. No, he was guilty. There was psychological wellness. Yes. I'm saying I found a single case where the confession under a drug was allowed. So I see what you're saying. Yeah. It also said that the judge didn't allow any use of the words truth serum or barbiturate or anything like that. But the psychologists and psychiatrists who gave their opinion of this guy were allowed to use that Narco interview to help form their opinion. Right, exactly. But yeah, so I guess it is just kind of a tool that you can't use in court, but you could use to kind of further explore other evidence. Right, well, and one of the reasons, which is what I was getting to was that they would manipulate people. Like when these soldiers were coming out of this state to a more fully conscious state, they would lie to them sometimes and say, hey, you already confessed. Like all this stuff, like in Zero Dark 30. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because you have amnesia. You don't form any memories. You're physically incapable of forming memories when you're under the influence of barbiturates at a certain point. Yeah. They think they've used this before on terror suspects, like in the course. It was a big part of MKUltra, our favorite sure government program of all time. Yeah. So I guess we should say there's different stages to being under the influence of barbiturates. Right. There's the sedative stage. There's unconsciousness, where you are hyperactive, but you're unconscious, but you got the jimmy legs. There's unconsciousness without reflex, even in noxious stimuli. And then the last one is death can't help out at that point. Right. And you can also see why you would want to have a skilled physician present at this interrogation because this is a possibility, which is also one of the problems with using it. Sure. You can't just like the Joe Cop can't administer this stuff. Right. And Joe Cop, even if he could, couldn't just give you pills. No, this has to be done through an injection. And what they do is they take you into the sedative stage, which can be divided into three planes. Well, Beamerl does at least plane one, there's no really obvious effect. Plane two is cloudiness calmness, you're kind of a little high. Yeah. You forget everything. Yes. But you still kind of have your wits about you. From what I can tell, plane three is slurred speech like that. You're right. I'm on the third plane. Man. Old thought patterns are disrupted. You have an inability to integrate or learn. New patterns also form memories, poor coordination, and you're unaware of painful stimuli. And this is what they call the psychiatric work stage. Right. They get you to this stage, which only lasts for like, five or ten minutes. I'm sorry. They get you to unconsciousness, that first stage of unconsciousness. And then as you come back out of it, you pass through that third stage and they start asking you questions. Then as you start to become more and more conscious, they inject you again and make you unconscious. And then you come back out of it. And they may do this like, several times. There was one psychotic prisoner who's given a gram and a half of barbiturates wow. Over the course of this interview. So, I mean, that's probably a pretty long interview that the guy underwent. And that's a lot of barbiturates. Well, yeah, but that's one of the problems. These are heavy drugs. And back to the fort. Dick soldiers. Some of them experienced delirium and fantasies and delusions and said that they have kids that they didn't have and that I'm going to kill my stepfather who was already dead. So it's kind of like sort of just throw it all out the window at that point. Well, they don't know what's the truth and what's not. Exactly. So I guess what they'll do is they'll put you into sleep, bring you out, ask you questions, and they probably write down everything you say. Sure. Yeah. And then they'll go back and fact check that kind of stuff and see what they can use against you, or in addition to probably as you're coming out, finally, at the end of the interview, there may be some things that they know. Like if they suspect you of something and you say something that implicates you, they'll probably work that up pretty hard when you have no memory of it. Or they'll just lie and say, you admitted to a lot of stuff. Do you want to talk a little more about it? Exactly. And you think you're a friend. Right. Have you ever been with Yumi when she's coming out of, like, twilight sleep for a procedure or anything? No, she's been there for me, though. It's good stuff. Yeah. That's where you get the good stuff. If you ever do have some questions ready or your tape recorder. Like, Emily had to go under not too long ago, and I went in, and I was, like, typing everything she was saying to me because I wanted to read it to her later. That's pretty funny. She thought they were throwing her a party because they had, like, the curtain that they pulled around the hospital bed, and she thought that they were decorating for a party. And I wish I remembered everything she said is really funny. And then when I had my tooth done, I said all kinds of crazy stuff to the doctors. I'm sure that's the best part of their day. Are there recordings of that? No, I don't think so. You may records me when I'm talking in my sleep. Oh, really? Yeah, it's really intrusive, man. And then she'll play it for me the next morning and laugh and laugh. And you'll delete it? No, she's got it all on tape still. Oh, really? Yeah. I would get rid of that stuff. I'm trying to. I don't know where she keeps it. All right, so you pointed out one thing that they actually did mention in the article, too, is that persistent and careful questioning is the only way that you're going to reduce these ambiguities that are going flying around. It's not just like a regular interrogation. You have to understand that this person is heavily drugged, right. And you got to weed through a bunch of stuff to get to what may or may not be the truth. And here's the big thing about using narco interviews, narco analytical interviews. If you are a skilled interrogator, you should be able to get all this from the same person without the use of drugs. Well, that's what they say, too, right? Most of the experts said I would have eventually gotten to this point had I just done it clean. Yes. Had I had enough time, or had we had somebody in there who knew what they were doing more to interrogate the person, we would have gotten the same thing. So, yeah, I have the same impression that barbiturates are a shortcut as far as getting probative truth using a narco interview or interrogation. It's a little bit of a shortcut, but it also makes it much harder, like you were saying, for even the most seasoned interrogator, because there's so much baffling stuff that they include that may or may not be true, that may or may not be related to anything that can actually kind of cloud the truth more than if they were just sitting there lying. Yeah, well, and if you're just Joe Cop, you may not be some trained psychologist, and a lot of times it helps to weave through that stuff. I think Joe Cops should stay away from the barbiturates and the suspects at the same time. You know, benzodine has actually been used as well. You wouldn't think stimulants would be effective if you were trying to question someone, but benzidine and methadrene, they found potentially met. Amphetamines and methamphetamines. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's hardcore speed. Pharmaceutical speed. It was what Neil Cassidy died doing. Ben speed and Scoplamine. No way. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. How weird. At this wedding, I just saw that on the Road movie that made me think of that. You don't remember him dying and on the road? No, he didn't die on the road. Okay. But he died neil Cassie was the real dude that the character was, but in real life, he died at some wedding in Mexico. But it's not necessarily in the movie. He'll just have to see it. So is it moving again? Are you on the Road fan? Yeah. It's very faithful and it's very beautiful. And the casting was great. Okay. That was what I was worried about the most. They do a good job with it, but you know how tough it is to make a coherent, traditional movie out of that book. Right. So I think he did a good job. I enjoyed it. Okay. So anyway, hardcore speed was used for a while because they thought that there was so little time for them to consider formulating a lie that people, when they're on the speed, would just barf out everything as quick as they can and just talk. Talk, right. So if you're going to do that, you could still maybe formulate a lie even though you're talking really fast. Let's put the barbiturates and the methamphetamines together and see what happens. Right. And I think he mentions at least one study that found, like yeah, it kind of works a little bit, at the very least if you're a motley crew. Wild Ride if you're a motley crews. I just finished their autobiography, by the way. Really? Yeah. That's what made me think of it. Is it good? Oh, it's amazing. Is it really? Yeah. That's cool. I'm surprised this dudes are alive, let's just put it that way. Oh, I'm sure. So, Jay McDonald, he's a psychiatrist in Denver and he's had a lot of experience with this. And he is one of the people that is pretty hardcore against the confession aspect of it. We can use it for a lot of things, but we can't use it, too, as the truth of a confession of a crime. That's just sort of his stance here's. Why? Do you remember the psychopath I said that got a gram and a half of barbiturates? Yeah. This guy was totally in control. He was completely self possessed, as I think they put it throughout this interview, and actually was asking more than once, like, hey, can I have another injection? I have a feeling he was a serious drug user. Yeah. Or at the very least he was after that sound like he had experience. He didn't give up anything. And what McDonald thinks and what I think a lot of psychiatrists believe is that if you are a very self possessed person with a strong mind and I guess a strong will, you might put it sure. You're not going to give up anything all the way until unconsciousness, they can knock you out, and you're not going to say it even faked amnesia as part of the whole ruse. Right. Have you seen side effects? Not yet. It's good. You don't even say anything else. No spoilers. Yeah, all right. Yeah. Well, you're exactly right, though. He faked all this stuff. And if you're neurotic, on the other hand, or the kind of person who is prone to confess, like a guilty conscience type anyway, right, exactly. Like, you feel relief by telling people things, then you're more likely. Right. So it depends on who's asking what they're asking, who the person under the drugs is. A lot of different factors on whether or not it's legitimate at all. Right. So, Chuck, like we said, this is a CIA white paper from 1993 that we're working off of. It's a white paper? Yeah, it is. And it was recently declassified. Pretty cool paper, if you ask me. Although it is really kind of all over the place, the structure. Sure. I've become an admirer of it. I know you're not, but I liked it. The guy's in the CIA, he's not a professional writer. He did a fine job. So he points out that, okay, I'm in the CIA. How do we use this for the CIA? And he says that it has been used before, for example, to find out if a foreign subject knows a language that they say they're not. Like maybe they're actually a foreigner, a double agent or something like that. You get like, no speaking English. And then all of a sudden you get them under the under the shell of the thanks for the truck. Exactly. So they can sniff out someone who says they don't speak your tongue. Right. And he says that one of the problems is you're going to have a hostile interrogation. Right. And rapport. Like some of the guys in the field of psychiatry have done studies on this show. It's really important. But he kind of comes to the conclusion that if you use a doctor, you have automatically somebody that's universally trusted to some extent. Sure. And if you use a doctor to conduct these interviews, you're probably going to have a little more rapport. And if it's a doctor who knows what they're doing with interrogations, then this could be kind of useful. The problem is, in the west, as he puts it, the use of truth serums is not frowned on. Sure. It seems unfair. He's done it behind the Iron Curtain, though, right. Was it Russia big into it? No, the CIA writer found that there were two mentions of Russia and truth serums. Really? And in one of them they said, Russia doesn't use these. I don't buy. That? That's what he says. He's the CIA author. Right. So you'd think he would know? Was that from the comrade files that you found out or was it like real information? I guess he was doing a survey of publicly available stuff. Got you. I'm sure the Russians wouldn't be like, yeah, we use this stuff all the time. He did say that. Okay, if we're not going to use it, our guys should be aware of possibly having to experience this and there's only one way to train somebody and that's to do it to them. Oh, really? So I'm wondering, as a result of this 1993 paper, how many CIA agents have been dosed up with barbiturates and given the third degree? Because that's what this recommendation was like. If you're an agent, you should be tested on this and not only will it give the agent the first hand experience and you should videotape it so they can see they didn't actually talk about this. So they can't be manipulated into saying, oh, you said a bunch of stuff. Right. They'll know. Right? Yeah. But also it gives the agency the awareness of like how much this person is going to give up under interrogation when they're drugged. Yeah. And maybe they shouldn't be sent to Lavia. Maybe they should just be sent to Brazil instead. That's a good point. So like testing the dudes to see how they would react in the field in case they're in some back room somewhere. Right. And Ben Roll. Yeah. He also suggests remember we said LSD doesn't work as a truth serum. Right. He suggested that agents possibly be given LSD. So if they're about to be dose with true serum, they can take some LSD and just start going crazy is how he puts it. In essence, all the stuff they say will be bizarre and unreliable. Wow. Yeah. Pretty cool stuff. You got anything else? I think that's about it, man. Yeah. I'm curious to see how this homes trial, what happens with that because there's so little like I think it was well, you said you got the idea from seeing that. Yeah, I was going to say it was coincidence, but I guess not. No. There's very few cases to even draw upon these days. So well done. Well done to you too. Can't wait to see what happens. So, truth serum, we'll keep an eye out for the James Holmes things. That's right. If you want to learn more about truth serum, you can try the search bar@howtofworks.com. But you may also want to read this CIA white paper, truth Drugs and Interrogation by George Beymerl. And it's from September 1993, published by the CIA. And now it's time for listener. Yes, Josh? I'm going to call this one oh, I can't remember what this is going to call it. Wait, let me stop you for a second. Before we get to listen or mail, we need to give a shout out. Remember our horror fiction contest. How could I forget? And we said that any of the people who entered as thanks, if they went on to publish anything, let us know and we would tell everybody. Well, one of our horror writers, Melissa Minini, has a short story called The Hangar that's included in an anthology of women horror writers called Mistresses of the Macabre. It's available on Amazoncom and on Darkmoonbookscom. So go check that out. Yeah. Excellent. Way to go, Melissa. Congratulations. Okay, now it's time for listener mail. Sorry. That's right. I was able to title it in that brief break. This is Aaron's grandpa is what we call it. Hey guys, today at work I was relistening to older podcasts. When I heard how tickling works, I was delightfully surprised to hear you call out for stories about Disney. In particular fascinating ones about the dark side. This isn't one of those females however, but my grandpa Ron Brown, worked as an actor for Disney in the late sixty s to the late 70s, making movies and TV shows with animals and also behind the scenes doing animal taming to a point in training. He was well known for being able to train bears, but most love for his strange assortment of critters he would bring home from work to entertain my mom and her siblings. During her childhood. She had a pet squirrel, skunk and multiple pigs that would make their home in her bed. He was the lead in two movies which I am almost positive you have not heard of. Charlie the Lonesome Cougar and Lefty the Dingling Links and I have not heard of either one of them. Disney was pumping them out though, even though he never made it big in Hollywood in his older years. He would always tell interesting stories hanging out with John Wayne or how he was one time in an elevator with Walt Disney himself chickened out, telling him how much he loved all the time spent working for him. Wow. When he moved to Sequin, Washington, he helped move retired show bears up to the Olympic game farm where he would continue to train them and impress tourists while making bears do fun tricks. Anyways, I love my grandfather very much and I mostly just want to share these memories of him have been passed down to my favorite podcasters. That is from Erin and she sent a photo to of Grandpa Ron with John Wayne, so he wasn't making that up. Wow. That's pretty cool. That is cool. So Aaron, we love stories about cool grandpas and thanks for sure, thanks. And thanks to your grandpa for being a cool grandpa. Exactly. If you want to tell us about your cool grandpa or any cool relative that has a pretty interesting story whether it relates to the podcast or not, what we want to hear, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com, STUFFYou Known and our home on the web is our website appropriately titled Stuffyknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.com. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime 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. 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2a72ff7c-3b0f-11eb-a672-c76448eae2c4 | How Classified Information Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-classified-information-works | The government loves to mark just about any information as secret, which wouldn’t be a big deal if it wasn’t so contrary to running a healthy democracy.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | The government loves to mark just about any information as secret, which wouldn’t be a big deal if it wasn’t so contrary to running a healthy democracy.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 20 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=20, tm_isdst=0) | 47222366 | 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 there's Jerry over there on the down low. And this is stuff you should know. Know the podcast. The top secret edition. Yes, exactly. What you should know is decided by us MOA. That's right. We give clearance. Clarence, that's a good one. I wouldn't have put that one together, but it's great. Thanks. So, Chuck, we're talking about classified information, top secret information. A lot of people call it by, especially if you're twelve years old or younger, but it's actually a real thing that's like a real designation. Top Secret. Yeah. Which, by the way, I went back and watched that movie again for the first time in years and it is hilarious. Yeah, I just made an airplane reference. And top secret is same guy. Zuckers, right? Zuckers, yeah. I think they worked with somebody different that time. I'm not sure what capacity, but the Zuckers were involved for sure. The Valkyrim, that documentary on him is fantastic, by the way. I've heard I have not yet to watch it. We just got through. Made. Have you seen Made? Haven't seen Made. Wow. Even after Andrew, it's like, I wonder what bad thing is going to happen to her next. I know something bad is going to it really wears you down. Like that for sure. But it's good. It's worth watching. Well, since we're on it with TV Rex, before we get going, I've been watching Station Eleven and it's one of my favorite shows in years. Station Eleven. What's? It on HBO. It is from a novel. A post apocalyptic virus, actually. Pandemic weirdly, but it's more on the order of like 99% of the earth died, but it's not The Road. It's more interesting, more hopeful and artistic. Cool. I'll check it out. Did you ever see The Leftovers, I think is what they recall. Well, what's funny is we're watching that, too. We just started that because we were in that groove and we never saw the leftovers. And I heard it was really good and even got better through the years. Yeah, I envy you. I wish I could see the leftovers again for the first time. It's that boy, I'm really excited then. It's very good. All right, now we should get to it because this is dense. So we're talking about yes, it is super dense. I mean, we asked some help from Ed Grabinowski the Grabster, and he turned into James Missioner novel. It is so dense. Every paragraph is really dense. And it's inevitable. Like just researching this one, there's so much to just go and read and so many rabbit holes to go down. Because what we're talking about is really like simple concept on its face. Like there are secrets that any government would not want other governments or other people, sometimes even their own people, to know. It would just make the functioning of that government that much harder. It might make the country vulnerable to attack. There's a lot of reasons why you would not want to share all of your business. So you want to classify information based on how damaging it could be to national security and then you just decide who has clearance to see those various classifications of information. That's it. That's classified information. But in practice, in reality, it's such a behemoth concept that is so fraught with problems that is so often completely and utterly antidemocratic and then it's just so bureaucratically layered that it is extremely dense topic. I just want to make sure we added a good extra three minutes onto this episode with that. Well, I think the good news is the history can be condensed really easily. And they had state secrets back in ancient times too. But back then it was a lot easier to keep secrets because there was no technology and there was no bureaucracy generally. So if the Semiauto's A leader said it was a secret, then it was a secret. And that was kind of the end of it. Things changed because of technology and because of bureaucracy and because of the development of nuclear weapons, when there was truly something so kind of world ending at stake that things needed to be ratcheted up. And this all started with a series of acts and even more so, a series of presidential executive orders over the years to really sort of put these executive orders in place, to vaguely say who can know what and how we're going to do it. And then the acts come into play to say, how are we going to punish people who do it the wrong way or don't do it. Yeah, and it's like you said, the executive orders are where the kind of classification and how things are classified, how they become declassified, how that got all sorted out. But Congress has largely been left to figure out how to punish people who transgress against sharing that information. And that whole thing started with the Defense Secrets Act of 1911 appropriately, which evolved into the Espionage Act. But you use a word that I think is really important and really describes one of the big problems with the classification system in the United States, which is vague. The descriptions, the explanations, the rules are very vague and nebulous. And so there's a lot of room for objectivity and there's a lot of room to just say, I don't really know what this is, so I'm just going to put it on the highest possible level of secrecy that I can. Yeah, this is interesting because I think the vagueness is definitely a problem that leads to part of the bigger problem with classification and over classification, which we're going to talk a lot about. But I also think that in a lot of cases like this, vagueness like this is one area where human what was the word you used error objectivity where human subjectivity kind of has to come into play. And this is jumping ahead a little bit, but as far as what to classify something, the way they decide that is, how bad will it hurt America? Is it grave danger? What was the second one? Sort of like medium grave? Yeah, pretty much. Danger. Hohum danger. People have complained that, like, well, that's not really spelled out, but I don't know if you can codify that to a tea of how dangerous something is. I don't know. I believe that human subjectivity has to come into play. I'm not defending overclassification, but I don't know. This is one of those things that can be bureaucracies and legislated to the nth degree. Well, that's ironic because the whole reason this exists like this is because of bureaucracy. But you make a good point, and I think that is ultimately the reason, the driving force behind keeping things vague, because you couldn't possibly describe every situation and say, well, if this happens, then it would cause grave danger, and you want to make it top secret, et cetera. Right. But like you said, the Espionage Act in 1917 was brought upon by the advent of World War I. Already sort of, from the 1911 version, had the vague terms that said, you can't provide this information related to national defense to people who shouldn't have. It started out vague, but this is where the teeth came in as far as punishment goes, because it was during wartime, so it was super harsh. Yeah. Remember we talked before about Eugene Debs, who was the Socialist candidate for president in the I can't remember what election, but around World War One. And he ran his campaign from prison because he was put in prison for basically denouncing the US. War effort during World War One. And you could not speak out against the United States military. The United States itself. The United States Constitution. You couldn't say anything critical about it, or you could be put in prison, and people were put in prison because of it. And they walked that stuff back, the First Amendment violations back. But the point is, a big part of it was it grew out of this idea that if you share state secrets, you can be seriously, harshly punished, like the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were. They were actually put to death under the Espionage Act, and it's still around today. Chelsea Manning, reality winner, Edward Snowden, all of them were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, which basically says if you share any state, any classified information, you can be severely punished and lose years of your life in prison or again, ultimately put to death. I'm not sure if that's still on the books, but it very well may be. We should also talk about this other sort of precursor to what we have today, the system we have today, which was in 1869, and this addresses the technology kind of for the first time, the War Department, they brought out General Order number 35. So cute back then, number 35, what? They basically said, hey, there are cameras now that exist, so you can't be in a fort and take pictures of the fort, or above the fort, or around the fort, like no pictures basically anymore. And so they're acknowledging technology for the first time. And the other big thing is this is a peacetime move. So it's the first time we weren't at war and sort of putting these rules into place. Yeah, because there are rules about that kind of thing, like even dating back to the Revolutionary Army and the Continental Congress about this stuff. But that was a peace time one. And that was significant because the classification system is a peace time and now largely civilian system, but it found its roots in the military, quite rightfully. I mean, even still today, even people who are highly critical of the American Classified Information System say it should basically be kept to military maneuvers, maybe State Department negotiations. And even then it should be a very short time. But the general consensus is yes, you would not want anyone understanding or knowing what your military was doing basically right the first time that they sort of, or at least somebody started to say the word overclassification. And the fact that they needed a sort of a tiered system was Brigadier General Arthur Murray, who is Chief of Artillery at the time. He wrote a letter to the Secretary of War that basically said, listen, all we've got is this one classification. It's confidential. And they're stamping everything confidential, even if it shouldn't be confidential. And if everything is being stamped this way, then it loses its meaning. And they didn't call it over classification at the time, really. I think that was just sort of the first person to mention this, but he said, what we really need is a tiered system of how classified it should be. And they're already doing this in Britain. They have their four tiered system. For Your Eyes only. For purchase. Eyes Only moon Raker. Live and Let Die and Gold member. No, gold Member Finger. Gold Member was a good one. No. For your eyes only is the actual classification. Then you have for the information of Commission Officers only for Official Use Only and not for publication. And the Chief of Staff said, you know what, I think it's a great idea. This four tiered system is probably something we should use, but not the way you're doing it. We need to be able to kind of make this up as we go, too. It seems way too tee and crumpet stuff. We need to come up with something else. Well, I think too rigid. It sounds like they wanted to be able to decide, be a little nimble with how they classified things as they went. Yeah, because the system they initially came up with was to just basically put at the preface of say, like a manual or a document that says this is only for this division or this armed services or type of officer, whatever, and then it should not be given to anybody else beyond them. And you could conceivably just do that for every single document. But the problem is this is stuff that they were talking about in America was still fairly small federal government wise. I mean, it was growing big time after the Civil War, but compared to today, like the bureaucracy was just nothing like it is. And so you could conceivably do that in the armed forces. But as things grew and the bureaucracy grew and the government grew, it just became impossible to come up with this kind of thing for every single document. And much easier to just say this is this category, this is that category, and this is that category. Right. And we should mention as a little sidebar, there was even one debate for a short time where they were coming up with the different classification levels, where they wondered if they should even make up words that weren't words. I guess to make it even more confidential or confusing. But then they said, oh wait a minute, this is more confusing to us even. Right. And we don't want someone high on the totem pole, which really means low. Very nice. Not understanding what this word even means and then making a mistake because of that. Yeah, let's use real word, private piles. Like red turtle. Doesn't sound very important. I'm sure I can tell everybody about that. That's right. So when you say private pile, do you mean gomer pile or full metal jacket? Take your pick. Okay, you're both doing that. Should we take a break? Yeah. Alright, we'll take a break and we'll talk about the Atomic age and how that played in right after this. Okay, Chuck? So it was all just kind of willy nilly and the Armed Forces of America were figuring out how to set up their own classification system and it was actually supported and codified, starting with one of those executive orders that came from President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 with EO 83 81. And it basically said everything the military is doing is right. They've got some great terms over there, we've got some secret, we got restricted, we got confidential, let's keep going with that. And it just kind of was mainly coming out of the military and the military was figuring it out. But then, like you said, the Atomic age came along and the stakes became exponentially higher because we had different countries conceivably working on an atomic weapon the likes of which had never been seen, the destructiveness of which had never been seen ever in the history of humanity. And things got real and the need for secrecy got real. So much so that even before the Manhattan Project started, the scientists that were working on atomic research, were keeping their research secret to themselves, like, by their own consensus. We have to be careful publishing papers about this. Yeah, I think that's interesting that they just sort of knew to shut up about it, even, I would imagine, within their own families. It was probably back in the day where they were like, daddy doesn't talk about what he does at work, kind of stuff. And finally, when the Manhattan Project the Manhattan Project, excuse me, officially got going, there was a dude, one loan man, General Leslie Groves, that kind of controlled the set of rules for secrecy. And things got a little more codified at that point through him basically saying, you know, I'm going to use whatever means I have under the law and even outside the law to make sure this stuff stays a secret. But it wasn't until these executive orders started rolling in I think they called stuff like restricted data and stuff like that, former restricted data, which actually was the progenitor of what would become declassification. But it was still a little willy nilly in that it took these executive orders and eventually Congress to really make this stuff law. And at the time, even within the Manhattan Project, it was still like this one guy saying, here, we got to keep it a secret or I'm going to do something bad to you. He was like the ultimate project manager. He was the sole person on the planet who understood everything that was going on with the Manhattan Project. Even the top scientists didn't fully have the entire picture. Only Leslie Groves did. He wouldn't let some of the top physicists working on the bomb talk to each other about their work. There was a tremendous amount of compartmentalization mail was read and censored. There's just tons of stuff that this guy was basically saying, we have to do these extreme measures to keep this under wraps, and once we enter the atomic age, you can't go back. So his ideas about the secrecy needed and the measures he needed to take to protect atomic secrets eventually became the inspiration for how America's classified information system was created. He created it inadvertently. He just basically came up with such a great tight set of rules that when the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 was created and they took basically atomic research and put it to, like, a government funded civilian research from the military, they said basically everything Gross was doing, we're just going to keep doing that and codify it. Yeah. And you know how I mentioned that he kind of inadvertently created declassification with the former restricted data? He also inadvertently created the derivative classified designation, which is basically, if part of this project we're working on is classified, then it's all classified, right, and we'll get into the different layers of classification later. But it was like, this whole thing is a big secret. It's not just you can't talk about this one thing and everything else is just whatever. Talk about it in the country club. It's no big deal. Right. And so after that, so you've got Congress setting the punishment for sharing state secrets, and then you've got Leslie Groves coming up with the kind of the framework for how to carry out a classified information system and protect information. And then you've got the President, a succession of presidents, starting with Roosevelt and then picked up by Truman in 1951 issuing executive orders that really kind of spell out how these classification systems are meant to work. And Truman had a Top Secret, the Top Secret category in 1951, and then the big one was Executive Order 100 and 290, which was also issued in 1951. That said, hey, it's not just the military who has secrets that they need to keep. Basically all of the executive branch needs to be able to create secret and top secret information classifications. And he extended that power to classify information to basically every agency there was, including, like, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Education to say, no, this is classified. This can't be released. Yeah, they had to walk that back a couple of years later a little bit because people were worried that it was too broad and that too many people were classifying things and had access to it. So they reduced the number of agencies in 1953 with another Executive Order, and then what we ended up with was Top Secret, secret, confidential, and restricted. And should we talk a little bit about what you sent over, like how it literally works in practice? Yeah, I think that's a good spot for it. All right. So if you get a document and let's say one day you get your through a FOIA request, which we'll talk about later, freedom of Information Act, you get your hands on the document, and it says it might have the title right there with the letter U saying that it's unclassified at this point, but that's within that title. Yeah. Within the document, you're going to have different paragraphs, are going to have designations like one might say Secret, one might say Confidential, one might say Top Secret. And this whole thing rolls up to its initial top classification. So if part of it is Top Secret, then all of it is Top Secret. But I guess the deal is for future declassification. They want those sub designations in there, is that right? Yeah, to make it easier for the person, you know, sending the document out for a FOIA request to black out any paragraphs that are secret or top Secret or confidential. Because part of me is like, if it all rolls up to Top Secret, if one part is Top Secret, then what's the point of even subcategorizing it? But that does make sense. So in this case, you said that they might have the letter U next to the title in that case, they're saying you can acknowledge the existence of this document in the title of this document, but the document itself is considered top secret, so no one would be able to see it without a top secret clearance. Right. And then depending on what agency you're with, they also have different terms. I think the State Department says sensitive but unclassified. The DoD and Homeland Security might use for official use only. And I guess the Parks Department says it'd be a whole lot cooler if you didn't mention this. Is that from Parks and Rec? Yeah, from my brain just now. Oh, I liked it a lot, Chuck. I like it now, my friends. So those ones you just said sensitive but unclassified, these basically made up ones, those are to keep people like you and me from being able to see this stuff. Right. Which is a big problem, as we'll see with classified information and over classification, is that the public is basically looped out by this whole thing. But they have a stamp. That's no dopes, right? No. Grass one of the other things that we should say is that you talked about derivative classification, which we'll talk more about in a second. There's also original classification. An original classification says this new thing that we're talking about, let's say somebody comes up with a new gun, right? Somebody along the way will say, we don't want anybody to know about this gun. We certainly don't want to know how it works. So I'm going to deem this gun top secret. There's only a handful of people in the country who can do that. And it sounds like a lot, but when you really step back and think about it, it's not that many. 2200 federal officials typically work in the executive branch, can declare something originally classified that's just original classification. Yeah. And just quickly, by the numbers, that's 2200 people can classify, and this is 2015 numbers. But more than 4 million people have security clearances, including one 3 million with top secret clearance. Right. So those other 4 million people who can see classified information, they're the ones usually who make derivative classifications. So when they come along and they say they're tasked with creating a handbook or an instruction manual on using that new gun that just got a top secret classification, when they're making that manual because they're talking about a top secret gun, that manual is top secret. Yes, that's a derivative classification. Now, let's say you're emailing your coworker about the progress on the manual. That email is top secret because you're talking about a manual that's top secret because it's talking about the thing that was this gun that was originally deemed top secret. Now, if you're talking about millions of people with access to secret and top secret information and they're all talking to one another, trying to make all this stuff work, you can see how quickly that derivative classified information can explode exponentially. And in fact, it actually has over the years. Yeah, I guess we could go through them. Are you talking about the overclassification numbers? Yeah. So the Information Security Oversight Office reported six years ago that cabinet level agencies alone this is not the military, right? Right. Classified more than 55 million documents. And then the Public Interest Declassification Board estimates that the intelligence community, just by themselves, classifies multiple petabytes of data every year, which is about a petabyte is about 86 billion pages. Billion pages of either text or it points out a lot of that could be photographs and videos. But point is, lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of stuff. Yes. And that's just the classification. There's an entire other process for declassifying, and that can be pretty nebulous, too. Supposedly nowadays, if somebody doesn't get a hold of us and very few people are authorized to declassify stuff, apparently the President can declassify anything at any time. But there's procedures for other, like, agency heads to declassify stuff. If they don't get a hold of a document and decide to declassify it after ten years, if it's not that big of a deal, it can automatically be declassified if it's very sensitive. And again, none of this is defined. They're not saying really sensitive, like the Milan massacre documents, that kind of stuff you want to hang on to for 25 years. So there's like a system involved or in place, but it's not a very good system. And even still you're saying what is the stuff that can just be automatically declassified after ten years? Should it even be classified in the first place? Which is something we'll talk about too. Yeah, and the whole thing with the 25 years is like what they're basically saying is we want to wait long enough to where a lot of the people may be dead, a lot of maybe the statute of limitations could be up for any crime, or maybe people hopefully have just gotten over to enough to where they're not super mad about something. Right. It's really interesting. All this comes out of shockingly. The last executive order on this kind of thing was from President Obama, which was in 2009. Executive Order 13,526 replaced all previous orders as far as classification goes. And I'm shocked that it wasn't thrown out and redone. It was a little shocking, isn't it? Yeah. I guess no one told the last president that Obama had the last word on that. I'm not sure how that got through, but that is when it moved things into Top Secret, secret and Confidential. And then that's when it talked about whether it was grave damage, serious damage or damage and stuff like that. So that's sort of the last word on it. We also should mention there is a level above Top Secret called Sensitive Compartmented Information, and this is with them. If you have top secret clearance, they're like, yeah, but you can't even know this only people, these very few people that deal with this thing specifically can even know this. Right. That is an SEI designation. Sure. And that makes total sense. And it's a very general Leslie Grove's idea, the compartmentalization of information. So that if you have top secret clearance and you're in the Department of Energy, they're like, no, you can't have access to this. Top secret weapons information has nothing to do with your job. You can have all access to the top secret information about the Department of Energy's new cold nuclear fusion reactor that we're secretly building. But no, you can't see this new gun design, which makes a lot of sense, but it really just kind of goes to show you how compartmentalized this classified information is, even in the echelons of top secret clearance. Yeah. And within that Obama order, there are eight types of information that can be classified. I don't know if we need to go through all these. Do we? No, not necessarily. But they generally all make sense to me, though. Like, there's not anywhere I'm like, oh, this one doesn't matter. Like military stuff, weapons stuff, foreign government stuff. Yeah. Vulnerability of infrastructure, just things you would not want an enemy to understand, which it makes sense. And yet this executive order may have cleaned up the process some, but it hasn't helped, it seems like. Should we take another break? Yeah. All right. I'm in agreement on that, by the way. I don't want to keep people in suspense. And then we're going to come back and talk about what some of the problems are with overclassification, and there's a lot of them. All right, so overclassification is the thing we talked about how many documents are classified each year, how many petabytes and billions and billions of pages of information and video and photos are classified. And there is a worry that's obviously been around for a long time that people are and there's a lot of reasons and costs for over classification. But one of the big reasons is that I think a lot of people don't want to be on the hook for it, so they'll just default to classifying something. And one of the things the Obama order did was you had to have your name on it if you classified it, so at least they knew who it was and they could go back to when it came to challenging that classification. Right. Which makes sense. That's good. They added some kind of accountability to it. Right. But what are some of these costs? Well, one of the big ones is corruption. Like, if you keep secrets and you classify everything, it's really fun to go look for examples of absurd over classification. There's apparently some facetious plot to overthrow Santa Claus and some report on it was classified. They routinely classify menus at state dinner banquets, just stuff that does not need to be classified. It reveals just how if everything is classified, it. Makes it really easy to classify, which means that you can cover up just about anything by classifying it. And so it's a real breeding ground for corruption. Of course, it's a real breeding ground for authoritarianism as well, because if you're allowed to do what you want and then cover it all up and make secrets and keep those secrets and hide what you're doing, essentially, then that's just a breeding ground. That's a petri dish for authoritarianism. Well, I saw another really interesting explanation about how it can breed authoritarianism from the outside too, from a guy named Sean Holman. He was a professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, and he basically said, when you have a government that overtly has a mountain of secrets that the public knows about, it creates uncertainty. And so people look for certainty, even if it's not truthful. They want it. They seek it out. So anybody can come along and make up whatever they want about what the government's really doing or filling in the blanks in the public's knowledge, and people will hunger for that and listen to what that person is saying, and that can breed authoritarianism as well. Yeah. And another thing we failed to mention, and the problem with overclassification is they went so far with the Manhattan Project that Russia was tipped off because all of a sudden, there was no science, no scientific papers coming out. And Russia was like, that can also be a bad thing, because they were like, all of a sudden. Or the Soviet Union, I guess, was like, this is very interesting. It's been very quiet over there lately, so my spidey sense is going off. They haven't used the word Adam in quite some time. Another thing is that it hinders research. Of course, we talked about the science. Science should be shared. And I know first hand that people on the Manhattan Project were frustrated by Groves and the fact that they couldn't even share stuff with other science departments. Yeah, he just banned them from speaking to one of them. Finally relented and let Oppenheimer hold weekly symposiums, trying to hammer out problems that were just intractable. But even still, they were closely watched, and it was a difficult research climate from what I can tell. Sure. It's also a challenge when you're an agency like the CIA and you're not sharing information and things like 911 happened possibly because agencies aren't sharing information or that they're not sharing, that there were no weapons of mass destruction and we end up in war. So sharing of information between agencies is something that needs to happen more, I think. Yes. That was also a big problem on 911. I remember seeing on a few documentaries that came out around the 20th anniversary this past September where there was, like, real knowledge about a couple of the hijackers being in the United States and that they were a problem and we should be keeping tabs on them and the information was just not properly passed along. And I think the 911 commission settled on the idea that had this overclassification not hindered information sharing, there's a possibility that 911 would have been thwarted before it could have been carried out. Sure. Leaks is another big one because when you control the information and have all the information kept secret, you can also leak out bits of that information to Wield as a weapon against a political enemy. And we've seen that happen time and time again. Yeah. Like Valerie Plain right. With Dick Cheney when he outed her to punish her husband for criticizing the Iraq war. Yeah. I think some of the Obama executive order is to protect whistleblowers, too, I'm not mistaken. Yeah. And also to protect people who say this document is being over classified. When they bring it up to their superiors, they should not be punished for that. Right. And I think the executive order even encourages people to not protest, but to question the classification of your superiors and to be allowed to bring that up. Yeah. You're supposed to be like, that's way off. You really screwed that one up. There's one other thing Chuck Too about leaks is that overclassification in a climate where we're prosecuting leakers and whistleblowers like never before, if we are classifying things that somebody would feel morally obligated to put their own self at risk to release to the public, should that stuff be classified? Should we be classifying that? And the answer is probably not that. It's probably being covered up is what the classification is being used for. And yet, under the letter of the law, because this is classified information, the Espionage Act says that you can be prosecuted and spend years in jail for following your conscience. Yeah. That's another problem with leaks and overclassification. Yeah. And to fight overclassification is, I guess Ed pointed out very kind of plainly, like, as a president, you're kind of in a no win situation if one of your big mandates is to make a lot less things classified. Right. You might win over some freedom of information enthusiasts, but as a general rule, you're not going to do yourselves any political favors by going in there and being like, hey, you know, what we need to do is declassify a lot of stuff and not classify nearly as many things. You're also going to upset the intelligence community greatly, I would assume. Oh, yeah, that's a big part of it. But some people have said, okay, well, there's got to be some stuff we can do. Time limits is a big one. Yeah. There's a guy named Erwin Griswald who I found in Washington Post op ed. He wrote he was the guy who prosecuted the Pentagon Papers on behalf of the government. So he prosecuted to that time the biggest leak of government secrets ever. And he came around years later and said, we're way over classifying. He basically said, there may be some basis for short term classification while plans are being made or negotiations are going on. But apart from details of weapons systems, there's very rarely any real risk to current national security from the publication of facts relating to transactions in the past, even the fairly recent past. So to put a time limit, especially a short time limit on classified material, that would help a lot. Yeah. I mean, is he also the guy that said if you know a lot about this system, then it's pretty clear that a lot of these classifications are to cover up embarrassments? Yeah, he's won in the same so that's not good. It's like, oh, boy, this doesn't look good, so let's just classify it. And depending on who you talk to, estimates are anywhere from 10% to 90% of classified information can be put in the overclassified bucket. Yes. And one of the things that he's saying and that statistics says is that a lot of the reason classified material is classified as to loop the public out, either because Congress is being fed a load of BS by some lobbyists that don't want public input about what they're telling Congress right. Or there's a real concern that a lot of federal agencies can protect or do protect some of the corporations that they regulate from public scrutiny. That could be a really big issue too, right? Oh, for sure. Like, I think the FCC and the early 2000 said that they weren't going to allow reports about outages among wireless carriers to be made public out of a fear of it being a threat to national security. Yeah, there's a lot of that stuff. The other one with protecting the Department of Agriculture protecting I guess it depends on who you talk to if you want to think it's protecting. But food producers from if they introduce a Foodboard illness into the food supply, like they might not allow that information on, like, who it was to be released as a protective measure. And that's when it gets a little dicey that and the FCC is like, I don't know, these are big public companies and you're talking about the public good, but you're throwing like a shield around it and maybe that's not the best thing to do. And even still, you can take it to an even more extreme degree right up to the CIA's doorstep and say, I've seen people argue that by looping the American public out about the secret torture program, the ghost prisons program, it kept the public from being able to hold the debate on whether this is something we want America to be doing or not. And that's a huge part of it, Chuck. I mean, like the basis of democracy is the public being looped in and then the government carrying out the wishes of the public. If you're looping the public out, then that's just the government operating and deciding on your behalf without any input from you. Whatsoever because you're being completely kept in the dark. That is a huge basis of the classification system in America, sadly. Oh, yeah. I mean, the agencies in the military, I think, firmly believe that the public is better off if they don't have any knowledge of this stuff and any opinion on what we're doing behind closed doors. Yeah. And I mean, they're like, what do you want to know? We're Waterboarding people. And I think a lot of people would say, yeah, I would have liked to have known that, so I could voted whoever was supporting that right out of office because I don't support Waterboarding, even terrorists. No one was given that opportunity. The public, even the people who agreed with it, weren't giving the opportunity to debate the merits of it in public because everyone was kept in the dark. Yeah. And you might think, okay, well, I actually do agree with Waterboarding terrorists. Well, that was something the CIA kept that you agreed with. What about all the other things that are kept secret that you don't agree with that is being kept out of your ability to debate? Yeah. The quick movie recommendation on that note, the new Paul Schrader movie, the Card Counter. Fantastic. Oh, yeah. Won't give away too much, but Oscar Isaacs plays a sort of a very solitary gambler poker player who is haunted by his past as a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib. Oh, wow, okay, I'll check that out. Paul Straight is still making this really being Paul Trader so tough, challenging hardcore movies. What else has he done? He wrote Taxi Driver. He also made a movie called Hardcore back in the, I think, the 80s. It's always just very grizzly stuff. And he also did Meet Me in St. Louis, like the last movie he did before this one was First Reformed, the Ethan Hawk movie where he played the priest. I don't know if you saw that, but I haven't seen any of his movies. I saw a taxi driver. I thought that was lighthearted and fun. He used to write more movies and now he directs quite a bit. But he also wrote last sensation of Christ. Wow, this guy is good. Raging bowl, american Gigolo, stuff like that. Love his stuff. Yeah. You know Paul Straighter, you just don't know him. I got you. Anyway, great movie recommendation, but we were talking about secret prisons and it felt relevant. So, I mean, there's like a lot of things that people say, okay, here's some fixes we can do. But it seems like it all kind of comes down to Chuck putting time limits on classified material and really raising the bar for what qualifies as a classified material or not. And then in conjunction with that, making the act of classifying material accountable. Like saying if you overclassify, you're in trouble, there's something you're doing your job wrong, and you're going to get fired and replaced. Those three things seem to kind of be the bottom line and there seems to be almost no movement whatsoever on it. Yeah. And I think the other two that are could be pretty impactful is make declassification a real thing sort of like a practice? Unless, like, well, someone has to submit a FOIA request or really bug us. And then within that system, we could do an episode on FOIA requests because if they don't want you to find out something, they can sandbag you for years. They can put you off. They can release a document that is redacted. Like 98% of it is redacted and go like, here's a bunch of adjectives. So I think making that real would help, but I don't know if anyone's going to have the guts to kind of stand up to this stuff because it's not a very electable position. Well, my friend, I'm going to do you one better. We actually have done an episode on for you. Did we? I'm going to double check, but I believe we did. I know we've talked about it extensively. We have. We probably did. Yeah. We don't even have to do that. We can just go back and listen to yep. How foyer works. Okay, well, in my defense, in April, everyone, it will be 14 years. That's true. And this is from like four or five years ago, so don't I thought you were going to say like, last week. All right, you got anything else? I got nothing else. This is a good one. Yeah. Great. Well, thanks to the grabster and to all the people who wrote the articles that we use for research here. And if you want to know more about overclassification, seriously, if this struck you, is at all interesting, there's a whole world out there of debate about what should be classified and what shouldn't and how to fix this that you might find interesting. And since I said you might find it interesting, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this court reporter. Oh, I like this one. This is a good one. This is a little lengthy, but I cut it down some. Hey, guys. I'm sitting at my desk in the courthouse in North La County and just finished listening to Unsung Heroes of the Court and I am still beaming. I am a court reporter. Stenographer I went to court reporting straight out of high school after taking a speedrunning class. Just like Chuck. I learned about court reporting from a career day speaker and spoke to our class and knew immediately that this was the job for me. I learned how to type on an old manual typewriter in 7th grade, took typing every year because it was an easy A. By the time I graduated, I could type 65 words per minute. A couple of years later I got my California court reporting license at the age of 19. I turned 55 next month. So 35 plus years later, I'm still loving my career. Nice. We court reporters are truly unsung heroes in the courtroom. I often compare my job to a wedding photographer. Once everything is said and done, the transcript we create is all that remains, and we're fairly invisible, so make sure you have a good one. Our steno machines are incredibly high tech, equipped with Bluetooth communication for real time, simultaneous transcription to laptops, iPads, and the Internet. We can access the transcript immediately for feedback and clarification for the record, which is extremely useful to assist the lawyers, parties, the judge and jury. That said, we are in desperate need of more court reporters. Guys, tech schools lost their luster in an era where everyone felt the need to have a college degree. But just like Bayless that we cherish in our own courthouses, court reporting school doesn't require a college degree. It just requires hard work and a dedication to your profession and nerves of steel. That's right. I've never regretted my career choice, and I thank you, Josh, Chuck, and Livia. Livia. For shout out. Yeah. For highlighting we court reporters and the crucial role we play in the courtroom. That is from Linda Davidson la. Superior Court official court reporter and proud of it. Very nice. Thank you, Linda. That was a great email. I appreciate that one big time. That was a great idea for an episode, too, Chuck. It turned out to be pretty good. I haven't heard from a bailiff yet, but we've heard from actually just a couple of court reporters. Now, this is right. They're quiet. Yeah, they're quiet. But get this. I was watching, I think, the Galaine Maxwell case, and clearly the sketch artist who had drawn that Tom Brady one that went viral, she was producing sketches for, I think, NBC's National news. I recognized her style. I was just looking at the one for the Elizabeth Holmes case this morning, and now when I see those, I'm like, okay, nice work. Looks good. Yeah, right. Well, thanks again, Linda. If you want to be like Linda and get in touch with us, you can send us an email to stuff. Podcast@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." | |
How Fleas Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-fleas-work | Fleas are the bane of the existence of pet owners. From their eggs to their lifespan to their feeding habits, fleas are practically designed to be a nuisance. They are parasites, after all. Get down on flea level with Josh and Chuck in this episode. | Fleas are the bane of the existence of pet owners. From their eggs to their lifespan to their feeding habits, fleas are practically designed to be a nuisance. They are parasites, after all. Get down on flea level with Josh and Chuck in this episode. | Tue, 10 Mar 2015 14:27:40 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=14, tm_min=27, tm_sec=40, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=69, tm_isdst=0) | 38003422 | 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. 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 one 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 Clarkson, charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry. And this is stuff you should know. Hey, dude. How's it going? Good. How are you, man? Good. Chuck. Yes. Chuck. Yes. You love New York, right? Sure do. I love New York, too. It's a good city. It's a great city. In fact, I think we suggested first someone do that on a T shirt. I love New York. Yeah, I don't recall that. Sure. Oh, man. You haven't been getting your checks? No. Well, I'll make sure you get those. I don't think the person who really created that has been getting any checks for a long time. Yes. That'd be an interesting little thing to look up. I bet you it's unknown to history. Who did it? Yeah. Who did? I heart New York in that iconic font? I think it is known. Yes, I think it is known. I think it was probably somebody who's contracted by, like, not the Chamber of Commerce, but some tourism board, maybe, for New York. Like the guy who wrote Rudolph the red nose reindeer. Yes. But he got his copyright back from Montgomery Ward, remember? Yeah, that's true. It's like the most benevolent thing any corporation has ever done. My mind is still blown. And that was two Christmases ago that we first learned about it. Yeah. Anyway, I wonder, though, if Iheart new York is actually in the public domain or if it's just been pirated so much that they just don't even try to police it any longer. Maybe because we for our Canadian tour Yuumi. Designed the icanadian Leaf Canada shirts right in place of the heart. Those are great. You can actually buy those in our store. It's true. We never plug our store. No, we don't. It's crazy. It's like we just pretend it doesn't exist. But it does exist. Yeah. I felt like a jerk for a second there by plugging the store, and I was like, Wait a minute, I think we've ever plugged it. We're allowed to do that? Yeah. You can actually buy shirts. Yeah, it's on our website, so youshouldnow.com all right in the top. Nav, I think it says store. You just click that. The classic S YSK bowling shirt is on there. Classic. There's just a lot of stuff. Yeah, good stuff. So, anyway, New York made the news recently, as it does from time to time, Chuck, and that it was discovered that the flea that was responsible for spreading bubonic plague has been found alive and well on the rats of New York. Did you know that? What? Yeah. Now, the people who conducted the study, they just rounded up, like, some rats and tested them, and they're like, yeah, this one's got it. Yes, this one's got it. They were quick to point out that the bubonic plague itself, which is called Eurocenea pastelis, it's a bacteria that causes the plague, which is nasty. Right? Yeah, we didn't do a bubonic plague. Black plague. Yeah. Or Black Death or something. Yeah, that was a good episode. I think this is different. Sure. But the bubonic plague is caused by a bacteria. You're sending a Pistolis. And they said that they didn't find yosemia pistalis in the fleas. They just found the fleas, the Oriental rat flea on the rats of New York. So they're saying, you're probably not going to catch the plague. It turns out the most people who get the plague, all seven of them every year in the US. Get them here in the south. Oh, really? Yeah. That's nice. So steer clear of the Southern rats. But the New York rats could just as easily spread it, too, because everything's in place for it to spread. Right. So fleece, man. That's good. That's an old school intro. It was okay. It was a little rusty, so yeah, fleece. We've done ticks and we've done flies and we've done bees. Termites is a really good one. Remember them termites we have dabbled in the insect world? Yes. And this is a Tracey Wilson article who wrote, like, all of the insect articles? She did. You could tell this one came later, and she's like, I'm so tired of talking about the Thorax, and I'm not even going to mention it in this one. Just go read any of the other articles. Yeah, there was one line in here where she was like, yeah, the life cycle is like most other insects. Don't be dumb. Can't read any of these hundred other ones. I've written about it. Yeah. So fleas are the bane of my existence, and I'll pepper throughout the podcast my experience with my animals and fleas, because I've had a couple of major infestations in my life, but they are parasites and that means that they feed on the host. In this case, drinking your blood like a tick does. Yeah, that's true. For some reason I don't equate fleas with ticks, though, even though they're so similar. But yes, they both drink blood and in fact, what the flea eats is called a blood meal. So gross. It's not just called dinner, they call it a blood meal. Yeah. There are about 2000 species of flea we are mainly going to concentrate on. I think they call it the cat flea. That's the most common here in the States. Yeah. And the cat flea is not just attracted to the cat, it also likes dogs. Sure. Also likes humans a little bit. And then there's the dog flea, which is also attracted to cats and dogs and humans, but it'll also attach itself to raccoons, pigs, livestock, wild animals. It's not very picky. Yeah. Like the flea you get on the squirrel in your yard. That squirrel that haunts you in your yard is going to be different than the one on your pet inside. Largely because that squirrel is never laying down for hours on end during the day where the flea will find a nice lazy dog and be like. This looks like a great place to fornicate and lay eggs and have a blood meal or two. Do my whole thing with my mouth parts. But for that reason, if you ever do find a squirrel that's stunned or possibly deadly in there, don't roll on it because the fleas will jump out onto you. Have you seen those photos? They're old. But of the dead squirrels with the action figures. I showed this to Scotty the other day, he had never seen the oh, I should tell everybody. It's made an inquisitive. Yeah, it's super old. But someone at one point found a dead squirrel and got like GI. Joe action figures and as if he had hunted it like doing a hunting pose with his leg propped up on the squirrel's head. And there's another one with the guy, like holding up the squirrel's head like it was no, I think that it's really funny. And it's funny because they didn't kill the squirrels to do it because that would be a different deal. Squirrel died naturally. I'm assuming the squirrels yes. Run over in the road and someone was like, hey, let me get my GI just out. Like they were hunting the game. Because that's what you do. But you should not ever stage one of these by killing an animal. No, you really probably shouldn't stage them anyway because the people who did stage them probably did get fleas and they got cat fleas or dog fleas. I'm sorry. And maybe the plague. So Chuck yes, we said that they feed on blood, they have blood meals, they are kind of picky, but not altogether picky when it comes to the kind of hosts that they have. Right? Yeah. And you said that they're parasites and they're specifically ectoparasites, which means they live outside of the body. Yes. Rather than endoparasites, which live inside the body. Like a tapeworm. Right. But the thing that they have in common is that all they do is take take and they give nothing back in return but grief. Right. Which you don't really want. So it's not a symbiotic relationship, it's a parasitic relationship that you have with your fleas. Yeah. It's a one way street. Right. Fleas are the little guys. Of course. I think you know what we're talking about. We will describe it. It's wingless. They have these hard plates called squareites that their body is covered with. Which is why, if you've ever had a flea and just mashed them between your thumb and finger and been like, Take that. And then he goes dang and jumps off, you're like, how did that happen? It's because they're covered with these small plates to help that sclerote. Yeah. You got to really work to kill a flea, like with your fingernails. And it not only protects fleas from fingernails, it also protects them from falls, because they will jump. They're known to jump. Yeah. Should we go ahead and talk about that? I think we should. It's pretty amazing stuff. Really pretty neat. What are the stats there? So a flea can jump about seven inches vertically. That's up and down. Yes. Seven to eight and 13 inches horizontally. Right. So big deal. Seven inches. Right. So remember in the cockroach episode, where they can move 50 body lengths in a second? To humans, it's like 250 miles an hour. This is very similar in human terms. A fleas jump would be a 250 ft vertical jump from a human. That's a lot. That is crazy. And a 450 foot horizontal jump. Yeah. So when the fleet jumps six inches, you should be very impressed. It is impressive because the current record for a standing long jump is 12ft. And a flea could jump the equivalent of 450ft. That's right. Setting world records from your dog's butt on a daily basis. Just one of the amazing things about a flea, and creepy, the exoskeleton is smooth looking when you're looking at the little flea on your knee. But what it really has is a bunch of little tiny hairs sort of comb back, like a cool guy would do, like the fonts, like the Fonz would do. They're pointing away from the head. And those little backwards pointing hairs mean that they can sail through your dog or cat's fur without getting hooked. But if you go and try and get the flea out, that will serve as a hook. Like Velcro. Yeah. And anchor it in that fur. Exactly. Which is why fine tooth combs work, but other, like a brush won't because the fine tooth comb is so close together the tines are so close together that the flea still just can't hang on. But a brush, it's like, that was nothing. Yeah. And if you have a flea infestation or a bit of a flea problem, your flea comb is going to be a good way to tell, but it's not going to get rid of that many fleas. No, you can flee comb twenty four, seven and still have fleas. It's the canary in the coal mine. Yeah. But it's a good place. Like, if you do that, or if you separate the hair and you see that dirt. Flea dirt, they call it. That's like either dried blood or poop. And a good sign that your dog or cat has fleas. Yeah. It's not flea eggs. No, flea eggs are clear. That's right. And smooth. So fleas, like you said, suck blood. They eat what are called blood meals, which I just can't get past. And they do so because they have specialized mouth parts, which is basically a combination of two saws on the side that puncture your skin. These are called I was going to say lacinia. Great. And they form a saliva channel, which will come into play later on. Yeah. And then they also surround what's called the epiphynx, which is the needle that sucks the blood. That's right. And that is a style altogether. It forms a style, which is the puncturing organ, and basically it all just jabs into your skin. And that epipharanx is working with, basically, stomach pumps to suck that stuff out. Yes. Which is pretty impressive because it requires a lot of suction to get that blood out. Sure. So, again, pretty impressive with Fleece jump far suck really hard. They do suck. Yeah. All right. Right after this break, we are going to talk a little bit about that life cycle that we mentioned earlier. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office, then? You could be using Stampscom. Yeah. For more than 20 years, Stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS rates and 86% off Ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. All right, josh flee lifecycle. Yeah. Again, you can just look at Tracy Wilson and be like, there's like other bugs. It's like a butterfly. It's still worth mentioning. So an adult has some eggs, and those eggs are totally smooth. They don't just appear smooth like the fleet itself. They are totally smooth. And one of the reasons why they're smooth is because the eggs are meant to fall off of the host. Like the flea itself is having a blood meal on your leg, laying some eggs, pooping, just doing all sorts of crazy stuff. Right. And when it lays its eggs, the eggs fall off and they fall into, if you're in the house, carpet fibers deep in the carpet. Yeah. Cracks in your hardwood floor. Oh, man, that's the worst outside. They'll fall into the soil and they are just meant to be sequestered away. Yeah. In order to hatch and develop, they need warm, moist environment, about 70 deg Fahrenheit, 70% to 85% humidity, although they'll go as low as like 45, anything below that. And they're just not going to hatch. Yeah, exactly. That's why a good winter freeze is going to help your sleep problem. A dry winter freeze. A dry winter freeze. Your eggs are going to hatch in about twelve days. And that twelve day span is one of the things that makes fleas so maddening, because you can think you've killed all your fleas and then there are tens of thousands of them that are going to hatch twelve days later. Right. And you go kill those. And by the time you kill those, they've already laid eggs and the cycle continues, which is why, and we'll get into it, you have to kill the fleas and their eggs to take out a flea infestation at the same time, it's challenging. The egg is sitting there in your hardwood floor, your carpet, or out in the soil, and after about twelve days, if the conditions are right, it will hatch and it'll turn into a larvae. And the larvae goes through three in stars or cycles of development, stages of development, and they molt after each one. And after the third install, it says, I'm going back to my home in the cracks in the floor and spin me a nice cocoon and turn into a pupa. That's right. And like we said, it's sort of like a butterfly. An adult flea is eventually going to emerge from that cocoon. It's not nearly as pretty as a beautiful iridescent butterfly. No, butterfly doesn't have blood meals, as far as I know. There's your next scifi movie, blood Meal Butterfly. Yes. Look for it after sharknado three from March. In a population, if we're about half of them are eggs, which is why we said they're so problematic to get rid of. And only about 5% reach adulthood. Right. And one reason is because females can only lay the eggs if they've had that blood meal. If they're starving, they will die before they reproduce. Yes. And what's neat about them, too, is when they're in the pupil stage and they're up in their cocoon and hanging out developing and everything because they emerge from the cocoon as an adult. But while they're a pupa, they can tell through either vibrations and or sensing body heat. It's crazy whether there's food nearby, like, should I hatch? Right. Because they feed on warm blooded animals, so they can tell. And they find these signals in the environment. And if the signals are right, they'll come out of their cocoon in, I think, a week or something like that. Yeah. If the signals aren't right, they can stay in their cocoon for up to a year. And they actually camouflage themselves. They roll around their cocoon and, like, debris and hair and stuff like that, which is pretty cool. Yeah. That's why if you have, like, a vacation house and you've eradicated your fleas and then left for the winter, I guess you'd be there in the winter. You've left for the spring. Right. Depending on I don't know how you do your vacation house, but when you come back, that could be the signal. Hey, there are hosts here now. It doesn't mean you've been overrun by fleas that whole time. They just been laying in wait for you to come back. Yeah. And then you're back and they're saying, we're here some blood meals on you. The females can lay about 20 eggs at a time, or about 500 during a long life. I saw up to 2000 in another article. Oh, they'll say between 2000. Yeah. But again, they won't lay eggs if they haven't eaten. No. One of the other cool things about the flea larva is that they actually don't eat blood meals. They eat just about everything else. Hair, dead skin cells, flea droppings, nasty things. Just about anything that they'll find in the cracks in your floorboards or in your carpet or out in the soil. Right? That's right. But then once they hatch, they go after the blood meal. One of the other things that the flee larva eats are tapeworm eggs, which makes fleas, again, super nasty and dirty little creatures, because once they eat those tapeworm eggs, they grow up to become fleas that have tapeworms. Yeah. The tapeworm actually forms in the gut of the flea. It can be that tiny. And then all of a sudden, your animal has tapeworms because they got bitten by a flea who injected that junk into your dog. Or more likely, you accidentally ate a flea or a flea got into your food or your dog ate the flea. The tapeworm lodged itself in your dog's gut. The tapeworm eggs were excreted through your dog's rectum onto its bedding. You pet your dog, and then you touch your mouth and the tapeworms crawl into your mouth. The tapeworm makes and then now you're infected. So there's like, 80 different ways that a tapeworm you can become infected with tapeworm just from fleas. And specifically dog fleas are the ones that carry tapeworms, most likely fleas on dogs or the dog fleas. The dog flea. Okay, so that's nasty. Here's some more nastiness for you. The reaction that you get when you get a flea bite or your dog gets when your dog is scratching, that is from the junk and the saliva of the flea, specifically the CTEF one protein. Yeah. And it affects some people and animals more than others. It was really bad on my dog, Charlie. Like, she had the hair falling out and the bald spots and the hot patches. She was like, these fleas are driving me crazy. I know, it's terrible. And the same thing can happen to people if you get a flea bite. You can see sometimes you have a few little bumps. Yeah. Some people react to it worse than others, but everybody pretty much gets bumps. Those bumps make it even worse because you can scratch it. And some of those bumps will have bacteria flea excrement around them. When you go to scratch them, you can break the skin and actually move the flea excrement. That's dirty as all get out into your newly open break in the skin. And you get all sorts of nasty infections from that. Yeah. You can also get urine typhus in the southern and southwestern parts here where we live, that is caused by the bacteria rickettsia typha and mainly on the catfly and the oriental rat flea. But that's one of the things you can get when the flea is defecating while they're eating, you scratch and you get that infected waste in the scratch or if you've broken your skin. So you get typhus from it, from the fleet poop that you scratch into your skin. And then, of course, we talked about the plague, which is pretty interesting. The plague bacteria actually infects the flea itself, and it develops this film in the flea's mid gut. So when the flea goes to eat a blood meal, it can't digest all the way, and then it goes to feast on the next person. And when it punctures your skin, it actually barks up the undigested blood meal that's now infected with the plague into your skin. Now you have the plague. Man, when you hear words like mid gut and blood meal and mouth parts and barf, like, barf is the least offensive of all those. That sounds cute. So we can understand why everyone wants to get rid of fleas, but some people learn to love fleas, especially in the 19th century, and we'll talk about those people and their flea circuses right after this. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. All right, josh, you mentioned flea circuses. I always thought that flea circuses were just fake and that they use magnets and other little things to move the bicycle. And that can be a flea circus. Sure. Those are called, I believe, illusory flea circuses. No, they have a name. Humbug Flea Circuses. Oh, that's cute. But there are and I guess there are in some places, flea circuses actually attach little leashes and chains to fleas and they do things they pull things around. Yeah, because here's another astounding thing about fleas. They can lift up to 60 times their body weight. So they're enormously strong. Yeah, 60 times. Think about it, man. Imagine lifting 60 times your body weight. You'd be crushed. That's a huge rock to you. Yeah, it's a boulder. It's a boulder. So fleas can lift their equivalent of boulders, and these boulders, especially in the 19th century, but starting about in the 1600s, came in the form of things like chariots coaches, horses, just things that like, say, a horse would draw, but in miniature. Yeah. And apparently before that, even in the late 1500, a guy named Mark Scaliat in 1078, he was a watchmaker. And apparently watchmakers were the first dudes who had the idea to attach a flea to a chain. And in 1578, he did. So it was a lot consisting of eleven different pieces of steel, iron and brass, which, together with the key belonging to it, weighed only one grain. Whatever one grain was it's like a pound and a half? No way. So this is the late 1500. Yeah. And he was the first guy who was like, hey, this little flea can actually carry something. Right. So that caught on. But apparently the paying public didn't catch on to what was really going on, which was the guys had figured out how to actually train fleas. One of the first things you have to teach them is to not jump. And apparently you train them not to jump. By keeping them in a sealed container. I was going to say by beating them, by holding their parents hostage. You keep them in a jar, I guess. A see through jar, so they can see their parents on the other side are being held hostage, but they jump and jump, and they get nowhere, and they learn jumping is futile. So very shallow something, I guess. Yeah. And then after they learn not to jump, you tie them up to this harness, this very tiny harness, and then they live in the harness for the rest of their lives, which is a long no, it's about three months. Yeah. So let's say flea lives a year. The first six months, it has to mature to about the age where it can learn. And it's big enough to put in a harness. You spend three months training it, and then it has a performing life of three months where it's basically just living in this harness, carrying chariots around for people's entertainment. There are probably people out there feeling bad about the flea. Yeah. But don't forget plague and flea, all that stuff. It is kind of sad to an extent. Come on. But in the 1600, apparently the public thought that the flea circus trainers were sorcerers. That was a big thing, because that explains it, actually. Just as well. Well, they really caught on in places like Octoberfest in Germany. They loved it. They still do. I saw a video of a dude in Germany, like, today yeah. Showing his fleece circus off. It seems like a very German thing to do. We train the fleece to pull the things. Is that Andy Kaufman? Sure. Coney island and the long beach in California and New York city, places like Blackpool, England, wherever there were circuses and freak shows and stuff like that, you might find a flea circus going on. Yeah. And there's a dude named Andy Clark who's got one going now. He's got his hands on 19th century manuals, magazine articles, reviews of the real flea circuses, and he's recreating them, I guess. But we'd be remiss to not mention Albertoe isn't that his name? Who? Elbertolatto, who was here. He was, like, the flea circus guy, just a legend in the field. Oh, got you. He was the chief flea circus dude. He's over in his house. He's got, like, fleas doing the dishes, and pretty much he's cleaning up after him. Yeah. So, Chuck, flea circus kind of hard to do. Most people just want to get rid of fleas. Yeah. So there's some ways. Yeah. And like I mentioned, I've had two major infestations one in Los Angeles where I could not find here's my advice. This is off script. If you want to get rid of your fleas, try and find the source area. Find the head flee. Find the head flee and take a meeting. Work out a negotiation between the two of you. And it should work out no chariots, no cherries. Let all the parents go. So find your source. In La. I could not find my source. It was driving me crazy. Finally, I was outside. I thought, let me go in the yard. And we had this sort of a dead squirrel. Now it's a garage on the side of the house filled with dead squirrels and filled with dead squirrels, and that was it. And on the other side of the garage it was like 2ft of space, about 15ft long between that and the fence. And that's just the place where nothing ever went. Yeah. Except the dogs. I was walking over there and what I do is I walk around the yard barefoot if I'm looking outside, because yeah, that's the thing. Yes. You look down and see if they jump on you. And I walked around the corner to this thing, dude, and in 5 seconds I had probably 1000 fleas just crawling all over me. Was it sandy over there at all? It was kind of dirty. And it was dank and dark. Okay. Yeah. Humid and warm. Like I said, it was not well traveled. And, dude, I was like, all right, this is it. And I did the thing I don't normally do, which is get a lot of chemicals and sprayed all over it. Did you set it on fire? Set it on fire. Blew it up and pooped on it. And that did it. Here's some of my excrement, please. And then I had a situation here in Atlanta where I actually had a guy come out and spray nematodes instead of chemicals. Oh, yeah. You can apparently spray your basement and house and floorboards with Nematodes. Those are flatworms, right? Yeah, they're living things, apparently that, I guess, hit the fleas. I would guess. I have no idea. But that worked. And I also use your overrun with nematodes now. No, they were great. They left. Yeah. Sprinkle a little on your coffee. So those chemicals you mentioned, there's some pretty cool chemicals. Yeah, there's some topical treatments that you can use on your animals which they say they're safe. I try to avoid them just because I don't know. I just don't think that chemicals that seep into the skin of your animal is ever good. No, I mean, you make a good point. I'm forced to use them, which I hate. But if you could control the fleas in the environment you could conceivably not have to use the chemicals on the site. That's what the nematode guy said. He's like, I don't ever use that stuff. He said, you stop it before it starts. And I was like, well, good for you. You've got tons of nematodes in that. Can you get a fancy pants dog? But when it comes to those topical things, IGRs insect growth regulators. My favorite is the chitin synthesis inhibitor. That's mean it basically creates mutant fleas, soft fleas that never grow their exoskeleton. Right. Which means they never develop fully. Which means they're toast. Yeah. Which means they can be killed by dog scratches and bites and things. Those IGRs keep, that I mentioned keep fleas from hatching because they mimic flea hormones and some of these things will kill just the eggs. Some kill adult fleas. Some kill both. You pretty much want something that kills at all. Yeah. You want to get the worst thing you can get for the flea. So if you do have an infestation, tracy Wilson recommends some steps to take all at the same time. You don't want to do one or the other. You want to treat your pets and the dank area between your garage and the fence at the same time. You want to wash all of your pets clothing, all of their betting, their sweaters, all that stuff. You want to wash it like 5 million times in the hottest water. You can probably with bleach, if you can find it. Yeah. Which it's not that hard. Just go to the store. You want to bathe your pet. You want to use a flea comb. Yeah. You got to vacuum a lot. A lot. Like, every day. Really? She says at least every other day? Is that what you said? Well, I mean, every day. If you really want to. Yeah. I would recommend twice a day. Yeah, and don't just vacuum and then put it in the closet. If it's a canister or bag, you want to empty that immediately outside. It's nice. Yeah. And you want to chase squirrels away. Yeah. And there's a lot of stupid home remedies that say they work that don't brewers yeast, garlic, vitamin supplements, ultrasonic collars, flea collars. None of that stuff really works. Trust me. Chance, I got this one more thing on sand fleas. Can you read this? Yeah. Talk about it. Sure. Sand fleas are found in tropical areas. I know they're in Florida, but it mentions the Caribbean. Well, the South America and South Africa. I think they were native to the Caribbean. I'm sorry. Sub Saharan Africa. And they were taken to Africa in the slave trade, actually. So that's how they spread. Yeah. So if you've ever heard of chicos or Chiggers or Jiggers or Nigoas or Pequas or Bicho de PES, these are all names for the San flee, right. And this lady was studying them, and she said she's a PhD student named named Marlene. She was studying ways to prevent tungiasis infection in Madagascar, which is spread by fleas, these sand fleas. Right? And she said, how are these things reproducing? And she said, Look, I've got a flea, and they host in the body. These are different kinds of fleas. They actually root under your skin and live there forever. Yeah. So it's disgusting. Well, it's not just to extract them. Right? It's not just disgusting, too. Once they move in and live there and they'll move in as groups, often they spend the rest of their life there. Over time, walking becomes painful. Eventually, walking becomes impossible, and all of a sudden, there goes your livelihood. So apparently this article mentions it affects the poorest of the poor. So especially in Sub Saharan Africa, it's a real problem among the poverty stricken areas because you get a sand flea in your foot and that's it. You're toast a year later, pretty much. So she noticed that she had one between her toes and she said, you know what? Let me just let it burrow and see what happens. And she did. And it lived a lot longer than usual, two months. And she said it was still regularly expelling liquid from its abdomen, but she never got any eggs. And the reason this happened, she learned, and they now have a new theory cooking is because she put a sock and a shoe over it and didn't let any other fleas in there. So basically, this flea never had sex and so never laid eggs. And what they theorize now is that these female fleas can basically lay there in a waiting state for longer than they should ever be able to live, waiting for a male feed to come around and fertilize the mature eggs. Science. Science. So now they think, basically, that this is the deal. And they don't know quite how that's going to help them with fighting it, but they do know that it takes two to tango for sure. In your foot. In your foot. Yeah. Having sex under your skin. And speaking of sex and fleas, we have to mention The Autobiography of a Flea, which was an anonymous erotica book written in the 19th century. I think the 1880s is huge in London. And it is about a flea that tells the tale of a girl it's attached to who becomes the sex toy of a bunch of priests. What? Autobiography of a Flee. Wow. And I guess that's it. You got anything that can top The Autobiography of a Flee? Definitely not. Fanfiction is the ultimate. So if you want to learn more about fleas, you can type the word fleas into the search bar@houseofworks.com. Since I said search bar, it's temperate. Listener mail spoiler alert on this, people. This has to do with movies that you may not have seen. Stop the podcast now. That is so nice if you don't want to be spoiled about birdman in particular, which we have already talked about. Okay, guys, for the last few years, I've cringed and groaned every time you make an error or sweeping statement about films. Chuck, you discussed guillermo del Toro is the director of the orphanage and he had nothing to do with the making out. That film. I misspoke it's. The Devil's Backbone, which was about an orphanage, didn't he? Wasn't he also directed by Latin America? No, but I was thinking of the Devil's backbone. He's right. Chuck, you also stated once that James Cameron has not made any good films since terminator two, ignoring the fantastic blend of comedy and action that is true lies. Oh, yeah. That was pretty good, man. I didn't like it. That's why I didn't mention it. But when it comes to some movies, that change filmmaking. I had strong suspicion that would be my first listener. Mail so, Josh's criticisms of Birdman, he suggested first that the scene where Reagan confronts the critic represents the director's pull pitting to the critics, he says, the critics who have attacked them. And he says that can't be right, because the guy has gotten universal praise for his movies. I'm sure he's been criticized potentially unfairly in the past. That's what I think. And the ending of Birdman, Josh, it is heavily implied, and we had a bunch of people say this, actually, it is heavily implied earlier in the film that the type of psychosis he suffers from. His daughter also shares the moment when he returns to the room to find she returns to find that her father has gone out the window. We hear sirens indicating that he has, in fact, jumped to his death in reality. But she looks out the window and up to the sky, seeing a hallucinatory image he will now live on for her as Birdman and no longer never their father. Her reaction is also strongly indicative of this, as her face does not reflect that of a sane person seeing a human flying through the air, but instead of blissful ignorance. So I've heard that theory that he did jump to her death and she just suffers a psychotic breakdown, or that he actually did kill himself on stage and all of that last stuff is not reality. Whose reality is it? I don't know. Who cares? He also takes us to task on Eight and a Half being the birth of surreal cinema, because that goes to Unchin and Lu from 1929, and that Citizen Kane was a genesis of dark lighting. Not so, because Phil noir goes all the way back to 1920. The cabinet of Dr. Caligari and M in 1931. I hope this guy is fun to watch movies with dude. This is the tame version. He was actually it was funny because he was kind of rude, but then he was like, I love you guys. I want to wear your skin. I think he was just being cheeky. And also, too, by the way, dial in for Murder. That was Anatomy of a Murder that you were thinking of from Auto. Premature. I looked maybe not. But there was a movie called Anatomy of a Murder by Autoimmune. Yeah. DIALM. Right. That's what you said. And I said, I don't know. And then you kept talking and I looked it up. Right. And apparently some people didn't hear me correctly and say, yes, you were right about Hitchcock. I guess it was Anatomy of a Murder I was thinking of. Or there was one that was just called M. That was also noir. Well, M is the first toe to use Mr as a wilder release. Wide release. Got you. And that was premature. No, maybe it was. We're going to need corrections for this correction. He said this email has already exceeded the link that moderate sanity would allow, and it was even longer. And I disagree, sir. You're clearly crazy from the first sentence. I'm just kidding. That is Travis Duclo, and he's a good guy. He's a film buff and took us to task. Thanks a lot, Travis. It wasn't too bad. We've survived worse. That's right. If you want to correct us or throw in your two cent or whatever, because film appreciation, I don't care what you say is subjective true. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffyshow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyouw.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing 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 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 the debt ceiling? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-the-debt-ceiling | Lately it's been common news fodder that Congress uses its ability to raise the debt ceiling to hold the executive branch hostage to its demands, but exactly how does that work, and what does the debt ceiling do? Learn about it in this fascinating episode | Lately it's been common news fodder that Congress uses its ability to raise the debt ceiling to hold the executive branch hostage to its demands, but exactly how does that work, and what does the debt ceiling do? Learn about it in this fascinating episode | Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:00:36 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=36, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=28, tm_isdst=0) | 32568305 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Dr. Brian, and this is stuff you should know. Financial Times edition. And you know what? Usually I shy away from finance, as you know. I know you're very coquettish. Yeah. This was good, though. Like, timely and easy to understand. And I don't think a lot of people well, that's not true. I don't know how many people I hate when people say that. I don't think many people most people don't understand what I understand. But I think if you were like me before, you probably didn't know what the debt ceiling was, and it's really not that difficult. I mean, yeah, I had an idea what the debt ceiling was. I certainly didn't understand the nuts and bolts of it. And I also didn't understand that it's fairly straightforward, the whole thing. Yeah. Or that our company or company how's that for Ford and Slip, our country the way they do business is just kind of staggering. Oh, it's an enormous shell game. It's pretty weird that's being held together with duct tape and bubblegum. Yeah. It's disheartening and frightening and all that stuff. So, Chuck, the debt ceiling has been around for a while, and we'll talk about the history of it in a little while, but it really kind of came into focus in 2011. There was a big fight over raising the debt ceiling, which to that point had happened more than 100 times since the beginning of the 20th century, and it had been routine at any given point in time. Like, it was just that sailing needs to be raised. Congress says, okay, raise it, and that's that. Yeah. In 2011, thanks to a faction of the Republican party known as the Tea Party, this very normal procedure or routine, I should say procedure of raising the debt ceiling was basically, like, held up, and therefore the function of government was basically held hostage, and it happened again in 2013 to even greater effect. But what's crazy to me, after understanding and investigating what the debt ceiling is and what's going on, I'm chilled to say that I understand it from both sides. Now I get where both sides are coming from and why the debt ceiling is it is literally the fulcrum on which the entire federal government, the entire country, and not just the operations of the government, but the whole US. Economy, and in turn, the global economy sits rests. And if you hold up the debt ceiling, you hold the entire global economy hostage. If you hold up the process of raising the debt ceiling yes. Okay. You might hold it up like a buttress. Yes. If you're doing that, then you're back hurts. Yes. But that's the point. That's why it was pretty shrewd to target the debt ceiling. But it's not just shrewdness. I understand that the people who held it up characterize as political terrorists. I think even if you take that aside or not. It was pretty smart to target that. Sure. Not just because that's a great thing to hold hostage, but because you can make a case like, therein is the greatest symbol or functional symbol of all of the problems that are plaguing the United States today or the solution to all of its problems. Man, you are right down the middle on this one, aren't you? I truly understand it from both sides. It's really weird. I think that's a healthy perspective. I guess so. Maybe that's what it is. I'm like, oh, I feel healthy. Perspective. Yeah. It definitely beats hardline partisan views on things, I think, when it comes to something that's huge and complicated. Right. Well, the irony is that the people who were holding it up are about as hardline partisan as you can get. But the prospect of attacking the debt ceiling and focusing light on it is, I think, a very smart move politically. Yeah. It may not make friends on the playground. No, it definitely will not. Yeah. It is effective. Yes. Okay. So, Chuck, let's talk about this. Let's talk about the debt. Let's talk about the federal government in general and how it operates. Yes. There's a thing that I didn't know existed until recently that is issued every day called the Daily Treasury Statement. And if while we're doing this, it sounds just like a company or just like giving your own personal finances as it is, it's just a large lot more zeros. Exactly. A lot more zeros. But it's the principles the exact same. Yeah. The Daily Treasury Statement is basically just the balance sheet of what we spend in a day as a government and what we take in a day. So let's just pick a day at random that's featured in this article. Okay. Let's say October 3. Okay. October 3 of last year, not too long ago it's a Thursday, the sun was shining here in Atlanta. The federal government took in about 110,000,000,000 in revenue. We are in Los Angeles. Yes. The sun was shining there. Took in about $110,000,000,000 from things like massive amounts of taxes that we have to pay. Yeah. My words bailout loan payments from Tarp, selling old jet planes and things and guns to other countries. About $27 million made on that day alone. And then we spent $143,000,000,000. So if we took in $110 and we spent $143,000,000,000 and we spent 143 on hundreds, if not thousands of programs. Sure. Just all sorts of everything from Social Security, which I think made up the lion's share of the spending that day, which was $24 billion down to tax refunds. Yeah. And not just programs, but, like the electric bill at the White House. Right, exactly. Paying the private in the army everything the government pays for. Right. Which includes a lot of programs. Right. So that is a difference of $33 billion in that one day. A bad negative difference. Right. So that's a deficit on that day. We ran a deficit, which is not unusual. Okay. $33 billion deficit on October 3, 2013. Okay. So the rest of the 364 days of that year. Fiscal or otherwise. Fiscal or calendar. Even if we didn't let's say we had a day where we ran a surplus. You take all of those together. You take your surpluses and your deficits for all those days. And you add them up. And you have whether you have a surplus or a deficit for the year. If everything equals out. You have what's called a balance budget for that year. Which just doesn't happen. Not very frequently. No, I haven't seen any balance. I've seen, like there's been some reports here. For the most part, though, we've been in a deficit, especially since well, for many years. Well, I've got some numbers, actually. And I'm not saying this president is good. This President is bad because Congress and the House have probably more to do with it than a president does. Well, not only that, it's possible some presidents have inherited the reap the benefits of policies from other presidents. Like economists don't know. Yeah, we're very contentious, too. Man, when people start I read a few articles, it's really pretty interesting to see people's takes on the economies of the presidency. But in 1993, regardless, bill Clinton inherited a $255,000,000,000 deficit starting in 1998, we had the first budget surplus since 1969. And then two years later, in 2000, we hit the high watermark of $236,000,000,000 surplus in $2,000. That's mind boggling these days. Yeah. Oh, man. To think about that. That means that the government, after paying all of its bills, still had $236,000,000,000 left over. Yeah. And people today still are like, Clinton got lucky because the Internet boom or no, Clinton's policies were wide or no, it was the Republican controlled House in Congress right. That forced him. It was kind of a lot of stuff. Right. I think the rational approach is it was a lot of stuff. Regardless, those were great years. And then so in 2230, $6 billion surplus, clinton left office with $127,000,000,000 surplus, and just a year later, we had $157,000,000,000 deficit. And by the time Obama came into office in 2009, we had a $1.2 trillion deficit when he came into office. Yes. And now it's at about 759 billion dollars, depending on what numbers you look at. That's just the deficit, not the national debt. Okay. All right. So this is a very big point of clarification that we need to make. That's the annual budget, right? Yeah. That's the deficit. Now, when you take all of those annual budgets over all the years, all the money we've ever owed, all the money we've ever came out on top with, come on top with, and you put it all together, you have what's called the national debt. Yeah. That's basically the money we borrow to cover those losses. If you ever took all of those years, together and we had a surplus, then you would call it the national surplus. I don't think that's ever happened or ever will happen. I don't think that's ever happened. The national surplus. Yeah. Since we started borrowing money, even though we've had budget surpluses. Right. Yeah. Because let's say we've had a good year. $250,000,000,000 surplus year. That's a great year. But we also maybe had $5 trillion in national debt that that had to be thrown at. Right. So when you take all of those deficits and all the surpluses and you add them all together, what you come up with is how much in the whole the United States is, and that is the national debt. And as it stands right now, it's at about $17,282,575,044,755.35. That's as of January 21, 2014, and with every minute getting more and more. Yeah. So it's higher now than it was when you read it, which is a pretty significant amount. Yeah. Especially if you consider that in 2000, it was at about 5 trillion. Yeah. You know what number is bad when you have to look at it from right to left and count the zeros? Like, I got to see what the thousands and millions of billions. Oh, that's trillions. Right? Yeah. So if you think about that I mean, think about that, Chuck. In just 14 years, we've gone up well over $12 trillion in debt. $12 trillion. Our national debt has increased by that much. And so now we kind of come to my intro again, if you'll indulge me for a second. If you look at the increase, right. Of course, there were two wars that we fought. Their wars are very expensive. They didn't help anything at all. Finn was not at war. So that was a lot of people to say. Those were eight peaceful years. I think they call it a peace PAX peace dividend. Okay. Yeah. Clinton preferred the surgical air strike. That was his big thing rather than troops and relying on NATO. So wars, they cost quite a bit of money. So we are fighting not one, but two wars. Then all of a sudden, you have the global markets just go into the toilet, and now, all of a sudden, you have a lot of people who are unemployed, which means your tax revenue goes down, and you have in office a president who believes in spending your way out of a crisis, a debt crisis. And this is why the Tea Party hijacked the debt ceiling, right. Because a lot of people are saying, we don't agree with you. There's a lot of people who believe in austerity, which is you cut government spending to get your way out of a crisis. And if you look at Greece, that pretty much proved that you can't do that, that it will just completely destroy your economy and possibly your entire government. Right. And that was actually based on a paper by a couple of economists who came out with this data that any government whose debt to income ratio was 90%, if your debt was 90% of your GDP, you didn't grow as fast. Right. And so all of a sudden, you had all these people saying austerity, and then it turned out that this grad student from, I believe, NYU got a hold of the original data set and basically saw that they didn't carry, like, a zero and got an incorrect thing. And the government of Greece almost toppled because of this incorrect paper. Oh, that was why. Yeah. Wow. But at the time, there were a lot of people saying, well, first of all, we don't agree with deficit spending as a means of getting out of an economic problem. But also, you have some other people saying, maybe that works, maybe it doesn't. History hasn't proven that yet. We still think it's $12 trillion increase in the national deficit is too much. Sure. So we need to curb this runaway spending, and one way to do that is to target the debt ceiling. Yeah. And debt ceiling, I don't even think we've even said specifically, is basically the maximum amount of deficit that we can incur. Literally, it's got a ceiling when we borrow or when we have a deficit that hits that, we're at the debt ceiling. And the only way to change that is for Congress, like we said, to raise the debt ceiling. Which has happened how many times? I think at least 100 times. Since it started. Well, since 1960, they voted 78 times. Yeah. So let's call that modern times. Yeah. Okay. So no matter what your politics are, no matter what's going on, no matter who is president, this is the way the federal government is set up. You have a bunch of money going out. Yeah. You have a bunch of money coming in, usually in the form of income tax or, like you said, selling old fighter jets or that kind of thing. Sure. And the amount you have coming in very rarely exceeds the amount you're putting out. So there's two things you can do. You can increase your income, or you can cut your spending and raise taxes. Right. Well, increasing income by raising taxes. Right, exactly. Or you can cut your spending. We have two political parties. One is completely attached to not increasing taxes. The other one is completely attached to not cutting spending, especially on entitlement programs. So it doesn't matter who's in office these days. The way that things operate is you just go borrow more money. That's how you fund the government. That's how it's been done. That's how you've gotten around the politics to this point. Yeah. And Congress could erase that. Like you said, raising taxes, that's not popular. Right. Or cutting spending, and that's not popular either. So it's really kind of a bad situation. So what we have is the US. Treasury, which issues death. That's right. US. Treasury securities to people regular old shmos well, not regular old Chimos. No. Well, that's true. You can go buy a US treasury bond. Banks, corporations, governments. It's basically a very low interest rate loan and up until recently a very safe one. Right. And you would still think it's pretty safe, but that could go off the cliff. It could. And that was the big problem in October of 2013, is a lot of people were saying, like, we're going to default on our loan obligations. Yeah, we'll get to that though. Okay. All right. Because that's the bad news at the end. This is the bad news in the middle. China and Japan, for instance, each own more than a trillion dollars in treasury securities as of July of last year of 2013. Right. So a lot of people borrow money from the United States at pretty low rates. I think it's worth explaining again, like a treasury bond is you, Chuck, going to buy, going to the US government saying, here, I'll give you some money. Give me a promissory note that says you'll repay it with a little bit extra. The vig right. At the end when this thing matures and the government says, thanks, we're going to take this money and we're going to use it to pay our bills. Yeah. Because Congress is going over and saying, yes, we want to keep our national parks open and we want to fund like Social Security, whatever and we have bills to pay so thanks for the money. We're going to pay the bills because that's what treasury does. Congress spends the money, treasury pays the money. Yeah. And if you're under the debt ceiling, then it's all good. Yeah, it's fine. Just figure out a way to pay the bills. And it's just like a big company and treasury also has more than one financial security. They have all sorts of ones that mature at different times and all that and they do a pretty good job of figuring out how to raise money. But the problem is, for every treasury bill that they sell, checkers that's that much more in debt. The federal government has just gone okay with the debt ceiling. Like you said, there is a certain limit to the amount of outstanding debt the Treasury Department can issue. And it's just like a credit card limit to an extent, yes, there's one pretty big difference. But it is a helpful way to think about it because most people have credit cards, but the bank set your credit card limit because they say, josh, you're risky as a spender. We don't want to give you a credit card more than like ten grand, let's say. Yes. So the bank puts the cap on it there. On the other side of the coin, foreign governments that buy treasury securities, I'll take all you got, basically. Right. So it's a reliable investment and the credit limit is imposed by the borrower instead of the lender. Right. That's the big difference with your credit card. It's the person lending you the money that wants to say that says, no, you can't borrow anymore with the debt ceiling. It's us saying, no, we can't go borrow anymore. We could issue as much as we wanted, and people would buy T bills all day long because they're so safe. That's right. Supposedly, or at the moment, they are. All right, you want to talk about the history a little bit? Well, hold on. Before we talk history, let's do a message break real quick. Okay. And now we are talking about the history of the debt ceiling. Right. I think that's where we left off. Yes. Back in the day, Congress used to be a little tighter with this. A lot tighter. In fact, we could not sell securities without explicit approval. Treasury wanted to borrow some money, so Congress would say, hey, what kind of securities should we sell? Large or small? What should the interest rate be? How many should we sell? And they kind of worked it out that way up until war in 1898. The War Revenue Act of 1898 basically said, you know what? In times of war, we need to loosen the chains a little bit, and let's say we can borrow up to $500 million by selling these securities yeah. To fund the Spanish American War, right? Yes. And then after that, they were like, okay, that worked, but let's just leave that b. And then there was World War I, and there was the first and Second Liberty Bonds Act, which basically did the same thing to help fund World War I. It worked really well. And the secretaries of the Treasury, I think Andrew Carnegie. No, mellon. Andrew Mellon. Yeah. You can understand why it would be confused there. Sure. And Henry Morgan Thou, later on in the 1920s and 30s basically said, why not just do this to fund the government as a whole instead of just in times of war? And now today, if you could go back and sit down with them, you could say, because it gets out of control when you do that, because it's cray. Right. But they got was it Franklin? Yeah. FDR. Yeah. They got Roosevelt on board, and they got Congress to pass this, for the first time ever, an aggregate debt limit, which is all the debts that the US. Owed, as long as it was beneath a certain amount. The treasury could do whatever it wanted to pay its bills, as long as it didn't need to borrow any more than that. And that was the first time that a debt ceiling was ever set. In 1939, I think. Yeah. 39. And that was pretty similar to kind of the debt ceiling that we have today. Not too different. Right. Congress approved spending. Treasury figures out how to pay for it all. As long as you're under that, it's all good. The problem is, when you bump up against it, like we've been doing, over and over again lately, it seems like. Yeah. So like you said, that is a problem. You just vote to raise it. Yeah. And again, this has been pretty routine 100 times since 4100 times this thing has been lifted. And you just say, okay, well just go issue some more debt. People want the debt. Yeah, people want to lend us money, so go issue some more debt and we can keep paying our bills. Because here's the thing with the debt ceiling. When you raise the debt ceiling, a lot of people are like, well if you don't raise the debt ceiling it curbs spending. Right, that's true. Indirectly what the treasury is doing is paying for stuff that we've already received on credit, whether it's meals for soldiers from a private contractor to a bunch of Boeing jets, whatever. We've already received these things and now treasury has to pay. So if you don't extend the debt ceiling, then you're defaulting on payments. You have to make bills you have to pay. Yeah. Just like your credit card. Exactly. And that's not good. And it's kind of the same thing happens really, if we default. Well, here's what happens. If we don't raise the debt ceiling and we are in danger of defaulting. Defaulting would basically start raising all other interest rates across the board. Well the micro, anything your average Joe would go out and get a loan for, your rates are going to go up. Right. And the reason why is because the ten year treasury note is what the home loan rates are tied to. And if the value or the credit rating of a T bill goes down, then the people who are lending money in return for a TBill are going to be able to say like, yeah, I'll give you some money, but you're a little more risky than you were before. I want a higher percentage rate and interest. Which means it's more expensive for the government to borrow money. And if the percentage of interest goes up on the T bill, anything that's attached to that, like home loans, business loans go up as well. Which means what? Well that means everybody suffers. Exactly. And the whole country goes into an economic drag and maybe even worse. Yes, it could get a lot worse. Did you see that thing I sent you from Forbes? Yeah. So a lot of people were saying in October, like outgoing over defaulting on our debt. That's not that big of a deal. You remember that? Really big deal. It's a colossal deal. It doesn't matter what your politics are. One thing that could happen is we could actually lose our AAA credit rating, which would be horrible. It would be horrible because people who buy T bills would be able to say, I want a higher interest rate. Yeah. They still want to borrow the money. They would just stick it to us. Right. But the thing is to make it more attractive because fewer people would want to borrow money. So to make it more attractive, the government would have to raise the interest rate on what it paid back. Right. Yeah. Also, the T bills, if everything just went off the cliff and the government said, you know what? We can't pay back this debt, any T bill you hold would be as valueless as any other T bill. No one would know what they were maybe going to eventually repay what was worth what, so they would all, in effect, become worthless. Yeah. The problem is not only do entire foreign governments rely on T bills for their reserves yeah. So do banks. Banks also use T bills as collateral for overnight loans. Yeah. Sometimes companies cash them in because they need to be more liquid. Right. So there's a lot of use of T bills that's totally entrenching the economy. And if all of a sudden they went valueless because the government defaulted on its loan obligations on its debt, then that would be that the entire banking system would lose at least a third of its collateral reserves. And they would actually probably be holding these things illegally, so they'd have to get rid of them. So they'd be selling these things off for whatever they could. And a genuine collapse of the markets. Whereas this Ford writer puts it, it would make what happened in 2008 after the Lehman debacle looked like a children's exercise. It would be catastrophic. Cats and dogs living together. Exactly. Mastery. Yeah. And that's really not hyperbole. That's obviously the worst case scenario. But the point is, these T bills are so entrenched in the global economy. If they became valueless, so too with the global economy. Yes. I wonder how you regain your credit rating. I don't know. Or how long it takes. Sure. It's probably much the same as an individual. Yeah. So one thing that would happen if we decided not to raise the debt ceiling is Congress would have to operate within a budget, which means the things that we were talking about before, like huge spending cuts or raising taxes. Or both. Probably. Or both. And that's just tricky politics. People would get upset, like, what programs do you cut? Whose taxes do you raise? It's just a very dangerous game. They'd be very deep cuts, too. Yeah. And the problem is, anytime the federal government makes huge cuts, so too do corporations. And then all of a sudden unemployment goes up. So you have to raise taxes even further because there's fewer people who are employed paying taxes. Yeah. Or they may fall onto the teeth of the government as well. Because they're unemployed. Man. Should we be worried? No. Because they're going to vote to raise the debt ceiling every time. There's no way that they would ever default. It would just be too, again, catastrophically bad. Yeah. I think, though, you could be worried about continuing on like this. Yeah. I mean, it has to pay. You got to pay it at some point down the road. Yeah. There was one thing we didn't quite touch on that I think really kind of reveals just what a big shell game this is. Right. So again, if you don't want to raise taxes and you don't want to cut programs, you just go to the treasury to get more money. Well, if the treasury doesn't have that much more money, you can also go to your own accounts and take whatever you can. So Social Security, for example, is a trust fund, and you're not allowed to take from Social Security except to a certain amount. Right. So say Social Security at any time has to have $2 billion. That's a ridiculously low number. Let's say it's 2 billion and then one day Social Security has 2,100,000,000 in its accounts. Federal government takes that extra 100 million because it's over and above the legal mandate and then uses it for whatever else. Right. Well, it gets Social Security from payroll right. From payroll taxes, through you being employed. So basically like a hidden tax. That's like a hidden way of generating revenue. Increasing Social Security tax isn't actually helping Social Security. It's helping fund the government. That's just like hemorrhaging money left and right. It sounds like the old saying, robbing Peter to PayPal. That's exactly right. Yeah. That's what Al Gore was talking about in the 2000 election with the famous lockbox thing, like put Social Security in a lockbox, if there's a surplus, you can't touch it. Right. And then that way Social Security will be able to actually pay for the people it's supposed to in 30 years, rather than being robbed to fund the federal government, which won't either raise taxes or cut spending or both. Yeah. I think most people I don't know when it's going to happen, but at some point someone's not going to get their Social Security that they paid into. Oh, yeah. I think we're definitely in that generation. You think so? Yeah. I don't think it's going to keep going on much longer. Or if we do, it'll be such a paltry amount that it'll just be laughable. Right. Not like other people getting rich off of security now. Well, I mean, there is no and you certainly can't just live on it. You can't, I'm sure, in certain parts of the country, but for most people it's a supplement to something. But I think it would just be like $50 or something for us. Yeah. Who knows? I'm depressed. Don't be depressed. Why take action? Yeah. By taking care of your own personal finances in spite of the government. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. It's weird. And this one is I think it's great because everybody is involved. Like, all political factions are involved in this and everybody has an opinion of how to do this best. But I feel like aside from the people who are ready to push this into default, Everybody has an understanding that this is a very fragile game of Jenga going on right now, and we could conceivably go on like this, but it'd be better to fix it. But we need to do it surgically. Yeah, Jinga, that's a good analogy because the wooden tower feels like it could topple at any moment. Yeah. Okay, so you got anything else? No. All right, well, that was the debt ceiling. If you want to learn more about it, you can type those words into the search barhostofworks.com. Since I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. That's right. I'm going to call this shout out to my GMOs. He calls her Momo his grandmother. Hey, guys. I had How Dying Works podcast my playlist, for quite some time now. Afraid to listen to your take on what is happening in my life at the moment. I lost my father to a rare form of cancer at the beginning of the summer, and I'm currently caring for my grandmother, who's in the closing days of her life. I'm an avid listener, and when the title appeared on my podcast list, I began to avoid the topic. I decided to finally listen to your take on the end of life today, and I have to let you know how much I appreciated your take on death and dying. It's a topic that is never far from my mind these days, and I found the information you provided, both informational and uplifting. Thanks for informing me that death is a process, not an event. I got a lot of information, as I always do from your show, but a surprising amount of comfort and reassurance. I also know you guys don't do shout outs a lot, but I took the challenge at the end of the show seriously. Would like to ask if you'd give a shout out to my grandmother. Mama. It's a great grandmother name who is the person who originally instilled the curiosity and love of learning in me that led me to your podcast in the first place. Please let her know how grateful I am for all the things she's given me, and caring for her at the end of her life is the greatest gift I could ever ask for. That is from Chris Howell. So, mamo, I hope you're still with us and listening. Thank you for raising an awesome grandson and instilling that curiosity. And Chris, if Mama was no longer with us, then God speed, I hope that end process was comforting. Nice. Somehow. Very nice. Yeah. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Momo. That was a great one. Yeah, it was a good one. If you have something, some nice email that will knock our socks off like that, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com Stuffyhindo, you can send us a regular old email to stuff. Podcast@discovery.com, and you can hang out with us at our website. It's called Stuffyoushouldno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Visit howstofworks.com. With over 1000 titles to choose from, Audible.com is a leading provider of downloadable digital audiobooks and spoken word entertainment. Go to Audible Podcast.com UFF 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 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." | ||
How Homelessness Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-homelessness-works | Today, millions of people around the world are homeless. In this episode, Josh and Chuck take a look at homelessness in the United States, discussing everything from the factors that lead to homelessness to what you can do to help alleviate the situation. | Today, millions of people around the world are homeless. In this episode, Josh and Chuck take a look at homelessness in the United States, discussing everything from the factors that lead to homelessness to what you can do to help alleviate the situation. | Thu, 23 Dec 2010 17:47:46 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=17, tm_min=47, tm_sec=46, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=357, tm_isdst=0) | 38957213 | audio/mpeg | "Sharks, the most famous and majestic apex predators on Earth. Introducing Shark Week. The podcast. I'm Luke Tipple, the marine biologist and shark expert with over 20 years experience in the field. I'm gonna take you on a dive with to me, you are going to learn a lot about sharks, and you'll also hear exclusive interviews with the stars of Shark Week to get a behind the scenes look. Listen to Shark Week, the podcast on Apple Podcast spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. What if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the awardwinning podcast from iHeartRadio and salesforce.org about tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, and global health. Listen in. As host veritude, 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. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from householdworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, fresh off of the Stuff You Should Know Facebook page, where we've been discussing all manner of interesting stuff, like Bob Ross has come up. Have you been posting Bob Ross videos? I did. He's the best. I posted the Peanuts Christmas time here little segment. You've been posting some pretty good stuff, too, bud. Thank you. What's one of your favorite things that have gotten people buzzing lately? Did I post about Bonnie Prince, Billy? Or was that on my own Facebook page? I don't know. Yes. Did you? No. Because you would have taken it down. I would not have. I would respect your post. I'm sleepy today because of Bonnie Prince Billy last night. I would scoff at it, but I wouldn't take it down. I love that that's become a running gag, is me loving him and you making fun of him. Go ahead. Okay. Are you ready for me to make fun of him? Yeah. I'm not going to. He seems like a nice guy. Okay. So, Chuck yes, Josh? I wrote a blog post, actually, recently on homelessness. I read it. Did you read it? Really? I read your stuff, man. Are you kidding? I'm a fan. Really? Yes, really. So the whole thing, then, you know, this already was centered around well, it started around this news that came out in July that the population of homeless school children had risen dramatically to about 1 million kids unbelievable. In US. Schools public schools, I would imagine, who are homeless. Right. And in one particular area, I think, by the numbers, statistically speaking, in Sue Falls, South Dakota, that's a homeless kid per classroom. Yeah. They had a huge increase, did not they, there? Oh, yeah. Something like that in that state, period. Yeah, in Sioux Falls School District, it's jumped 44% over the last five years. And what in Texas? Like 100 plus percent. Yeah. So across the US. There's been an increase of 41% nationwide. Right. Of school children. Yes, of homeless school children. And so Texas has seen an increase of 139%, iowa, 136%, the lowest of the highest five is New Jersey, with an 84% increase. And this is, of course, all due to the Great Recession. Sure. That's going on right now, right? Yeah, of course. And somebody actually posted I haven't read the links, but somebody actually posted a comment on the blog that said, it's bad enough homeless school children are depressing enough, but there's plenty of homeless kids out there who aren't in school. Well, yeah, sure about that. So with the economic recession, is clearly to blame for this 41% increase in homeless school children. And there's a lot of other factors that over the years have contributed to homelessness, which we'll talk about. But, Chuck, let's talk about homelessness in the United States, shall we? And we should say we're just going to concentrate in the United States. Actually, I've got a few stats. Well, just some stats. Okay. So let's go ahead and talk about this and get the around the world out of the way. Worldwide, they approximate. And we should go ahead and say that counting homeless people is a tough bag because it changes drastically week to week sometimes. Well, we should say that there's two ways of doing it. One is called a point in time count, where it's basically like, all right, everybody go count the homeless people in your area today on this one particular night and then report it in, and then we'll tally the numbers. And then the other way to do it is basically over a year. And that's like, a huge undertaking usually done by the Census Bureau that identifies how many people have used homeless shelters, how many of them have been different, and it comes up with a pretty rough number. Well, yeah, but one of the reasons it's difficult is because fortunes change rapidly in this crazy, fast moving world. Right. And homeless people sometimes are in cars and campgrounds and places where you can't find them. So it's tough to get the dead accurate numbers. But having said all that, my friend, I do have some stats. Worldwide, approximately 100 people around the world are homeless. The UN what did you say? 100 million people in the world? It sounds like you said 100, not 100 million. Okay. The UN says there's about 30 million displaced indigenous people. I don't know if they count that as homeless necessarily. I would imagine. So that might be a part of that larger number. And then I started thinking about, are they homeless everywhere? And of course there are, but I said, what about places like Sweden and Norway, like, where you would not expect homeless people. They have them there. But Sweden only has about 17,000 homeless out of 9.3 million people. Just pretty small percentage. Yeah. Norway, though, has one point for homeless people, for every 1000 people, which is not too far off America's percentage, really, because we have about 1%. Right. About three to 3.5 million people is the latest number I saw. The latest number I saw was actually less than that. What was it? And this doesn't make sense because the homelessness population has increased in the US. Since the recession. Yes. So the 2005 number, I think, was 2.3 and 3.5 million between those two. Right, like you just said. But then there's another one from 2009. It's 1.56. So the numbers are all over the place. I bet that's not right. Yeah. So that's a little bit from around the world. Russia, China, Africa, Canada. It happens everywhere. But most of this is US. Based because that's where we are. What we can say, though, is that, percentage wise, there's a disproportionate number of minorities that are homeless. Minorities in this country make up about 12% of the population, and African Americans make up about 50%, and another 13% are Hispanic homeless in the United States. Right. African Americans, they account for between 38% 50% of the homeless population. Right. But they only make up about 12% of the US. Population. Yeah. Right. And obviously you'll see most of this in big cities, but it's a problem in rural areas as well. As well, yeah. And typically homeless families make up a greater proportion of the homeless in rural areas, which is any kind of homelessness is sad, but an entire family being homeless, that's really tough. Chuck, we talked about what was driving homelessness. Right. Now, driving the increase is the recession, but in the late 20th and this century as well. Right. There's been a combination of factors, and the two biggest drivers are poverty, an increase in poverty and a decrease in the availability of affordable housing. Two huge factors in addition to others that we'll talk about later right. That have contributed to people not having a home. That's what's the status? That well, because we'll talk about all the other factors like drugs and alcohol and mental health and stuff like that, but it's sad. That the reason why people have homes, because they can't afford housing. Right. And here's something I just want to put this out there now. I was reading a history of homelessness in the US. And the author was basically saying homelessness has been around forever. Like, apparently 14th century England had vagrancy laws. Right? Sure. Yeah. People have been homeless have been not necessarily living on the streets, but don't have a permanent residence. And that's an important point, too. When we talk about homelessness, we're not just talking about people sleeping on the streets. We're not just talking about people sleeping in emergency shelters or even in their cars. The true, genuine definition of homelessness is you don't have a home. Right. You don't have a place that's your own. You're staying with family, you live in a weekly motel. Right. That's homeless as well. Yeah, true. Right. But back to the history of homelessness. The author was saying we've had homeless in the US. Since we've been here. The difference is we used to have homeless because we couldn't afford to give them work, we couldn't afford to take care of them. Now we can't afford to take care of them, we just don't. Right. Well, yeah, that's interesting you brought that up because I was reading about other countries, and America seems to be unique in a very bad way in that a lot of Americans feel like it's deserved and because you messed up by doing something really bad or you're on alcohol or drugs. And a lot of Americans take that attitude that homeless people deserve to be homeless, and then most of the rest of Americans just don't think about it at all, and it's a very invisible problem. Or there are people that do care and don't think they deserve it. Right. And they're what we call good people. Or advocates. Yeah, advocates. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up because Adventure is around the corner and there's a card that's going to get you closer with the City Advantage Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you Advantage miles and loyalty points, and two times Advantage Miles at restaurants and gas stations so your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, card members get access to builtin travel benefits. For example, your first check bag is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs. And with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 50,000 Advantage Bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on. So fasten your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see. And the city advantage. Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. So how do people get homeless? Josh well, Chuck, let's talk about it. We said that poverty and lack of affordable housing are two of the biggest drivers with poverty. Okay? Yeah. Right now, when you quantify poverty and the poverty line, you basically figure out how much the average person pays in a state or in a nation or something like that, for housing, utilities, food, that kind of thing. Then you set a line and say, anything below this is you're eligible for government assistance. Right. Your poverty is stricken. In the US. The poverty line is somewhere around 17 grand a year for a family of three. Right. The problem is there's a big disparity between the poverty line and the minimum wage. Yeah. So the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, right? Yeah. For a person to work 40 hours a week, that's a normal work week. 52 weeks a year. Yeah. No vacation? None. Like, they work five days a week. Every week they would gross $15,080. That's not very much money. Right. So you're actually falling below the poverty line, making the federal minimum wage. Right. Yeah. And then consider that actually, to afford a two bedroom apartment, this is the median across the state to afford a two bedroom apartment at 30% of your income, which is the definition of affordable housing. Yeah. 30%. At making 725 an hour, you'd have to work 87 hours a week. Ridiculous. So there's a big part of the problem right there. Well, yeah. It said one of the stats in here that was shocking was about 15% of homeless people actually have jobs. So I saw 44%, actually. Oh, really? Not in this article, but just across the Internet. What is clear is that a lot of people end up homeless. They don't think they would ever end up homeless. They live paycheck to paycheck. They have a job, and they're getting by, but then something happens. They either lose a job or they have some outrageous medical bills, or some catastrophe happens, and then your average Joe or Jane with a job can find themselves homeless pretty easily sometimes. It's not always just some schizophrenic who has a heroin problem. Right. In fact, most of the time, I would say it's not. We also talked about a lack of affordable housing. Right. We said the definition of affordable housing is 30% of your income. Right. Apparently there are 5 million. Is that what you're shooting for? Yeah. 5 million US. Households pay more than half of their income in rent. Right. That is unbelievable. That's called worst case scenario. Yeah. And the rule of thumb is if you pay a quarter, you're doing good. Oh, really? Yeah. So, yeah. Half of your income and rent you're in a bad way, you should be living in whatever big city you're living in. Well, that also encompasses that worst case scenario also encompasses people who live in substandard housing as well. Yeah, true. So it's not just how much you're paying out, it's what you're paying for. Right. Or a combination of the two. Right. Part of the problem, chuck, do you remember Techwood? Yeah, Techwood Housing. Techwood Housing, right across the street. No, it's not. Remember they demolished Techwood, which is like the projects in Atlanta right before the Olympics, they're just gone. And it was like, okay, you poor people, you don't have to go home because you don't have one anymore, but you can stay here. Right. And that was that. And apparently that was a nationwide trend since the between 82,003, more than 2 million low rent housing units were basically they're demolished or turned into high rise, expensive high rises. Right. And during that same period, from 80 to 2003, government assistance for housing fell by half, decreased by half. So that's going to equal a lot of homeless. And not only are we not helping the homeless, we're actually creating homeless. Right. So we talked about, obviously pay and being down on your luck, temporarily living paycheck to paycheck. Right. Why else would you come home? Well, you kind of hit the nail in the head a little bit when you talked about heroin addicted schizophrenics. Those can be a combination of those two or separately. Mental illness and addiction are two big factors in homelessness as well. With the mentally ill, apparently, about 20% to 25% of all homeless people have some type of mental illness. Right. That brings up a really interesting point. Have you ever heard the urban legend that Ronald Reagan is responsible for the increase in homelessness because he closed down all of the mental institutions? Yes, I have heard that. That's actually not too far off the mark. When he was governor of California, from like, 67 to 74, he shut down a lot of these state run psychiatric hospitals. Oh, really? When he became president, one of the major things he cut funding to was the treatment of mental illness. And because of this cut in funding, a lot of mental hospitals shut down and a lot of mentally ill people found themselves homeless. So, kind of indirectly, in that sense, he definitely contributed to an increase in homelessness. Well, should we go ahead and talk about the McKinley Vento Act then, since we're talking Reagan? Well, yeah, there we go. He also signed the first, it says only Significant Homeless Act of Congress. Right? Yeah. The McKinney Vento Act. That had a different name, but then they named it after Stewart McKinney and Bruce Vento, who were two of the biggest champions. Right. And it had all sorts of cool programs in it, right? Yeah. Emergency shelter, transitional housing, health care, food, job training, substance abuse services, all kinds of cool stuff. Yeah. And it's really ironic that he was the president that signed that into law because he is also widely credited and this take off so many Republican listeners. Yeah. He is widely credited as creating the homeless problem in the US. Really? Not just through the institutionalization, but through the creation of the wealth gap that we've seen between 1980 and now. You talk about substance abuse, and about two thirds of homeless people struggle with some kind of alcohol or drug problem, not surprisingly. And then, sadly, domestic violence has a big part to do with it, especially with women. About half the women are battered women, and they often times don't have anywhere to go. They flee. If they're brave enough to actually flee their jerk husband, abusive husband, then they have nowhere to be because their husband might be the sole breadwinner sure. In that kind of circumstance. So they have battered women shelters. Thank God. Yeah. Just for women that suffer from abuse and chuck kids, too, I think. Half of homeless runaways being domestic abuse or homeless kids on their own, I guess. We're fleeing domestic abuse, and about 20% we're fleeing sexual abuse. Yeah, right. But it doesn't stop there. Unfortunately, when you are homeless on the street, you encounter even more abuse. Many times you leave home, you leave an abusive situation at home. You live on the street, and you get attacked on the street for being homeless, or you are forced into doing really bad things for food and shelter and stuff like that. Untoward things. At the bus station. At the bus station. And veterans, Josh, are a big part of our homeless problem in that I can't see status of all, because it's all really sad. Yeah. But when you're veterans, when you've got a fight for this country and you end up one of the 200,000 homeless single men, usually with mental illness, substance abuse problems because of maybe post traumatic stress disorder right. That is heartbreaking. Yeah. And again, you just keep hitting that nail right on the head, man. There's a lot of overlap and problems or factors in homelessness. Like, homeless veterans may be more prone to having a substance abuse problem or suffering from a mental illness like PTSD or substance abuse and mental illness overlap in other people as well. And part of the problem is you get to get into a vicious cycle. There are far fewer, far fewer services available, easily accessible on the street than there are if you have a house and an income and an address and a phone number and all the normal stuff that you just kind of need to be able to get by in the US. These days. Yeah. And you look at something like the Department of Veterans Affairs, which does as good a job as they can, as far as I know, but they can only accommodate about 25% of homeless veterans. But what's so frustrating is that they could accommodate all of them. They could not if they wanted to, if they had the funding. Right. So you see these record bonuses for CEOs on one hand, and then you hear about homeless veterans. The money is out there. Yes. And I'm glad it was veterans that got you. I hope it's homeless school children that get somebody else. I hope somebody hears us and realizes that we have all the money we need to serve everybody. Sure. It's just some of the wealthiest are going to have to give up a little bit of it so that some of the poorest have a house. Right? It's as simple as that. We have the means of will. And we're not talking about just some social program with these alcoholics living off my dime. We're talking about homeless veterans and children and abused women. Right? And even if it is alcoholic veterans, we've already learned. Have we not learned already that alcoholism and all addiction is a brain disease that follows the brain disease model these days? You need treatment. Well, that's the whole stupid American idea that I talked about, was that some people feel like they deserve to be homeless. They see them on the street and they think, what did you do to get here? Yes. Instead of, what can I do to help you? Yeah, well, this is touching the nerve today. It's homelessness. Well, you really should I'm glad I'm angry. That's what I'm saying. Okay, good. I'm glad you're angry, too, Chuck. So, Joshua, let's talk about some of the effects. And a lot of these you can file under duh, but it bears saying. You're talking about women's shelters. Yeah, well, women's shelters only let him women. And if you have a teenage son, you can kiss him goodbye. Bye bye. Family unit, physical attacks. Homeless people are attacked, beaten, kicked, chained on numbers, urinated, spray painted on, lit on fire. Pedon is pretty bad. Yes. Just because they're homeless, people will go out and beat up homeless people. Yeah. 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 are in 50,000 Advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on. So fasten your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see. And the cityadvantage Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with Cityadvantage. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets you call IBM to automate your It infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes. And you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that roll up their own sleeves. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. It automation. Well, there's, like, a whole line of thinking that serial killers practice on drifters early on. Yeah, sure. Health effects for kids. If you're homeless, you're going to have a higher rate of stomach problems. Asthma, ear infections, depression, anxiousness. PTSD is pretty prevalent. It's a cause of ang is caused by homelessness. And not just adults, but kids as well. Right. You can actually start to develop PTSD because you don't know where you're going to sleep the next night. I mean, think about it. Chuck, have you ever been without a home? No. I would think it can be really weird to not know where you're going to stay or to not just have a hard day at work or a hard day at school, and to know that at the end of this day, you have no idea where you're going to sleep. Maybe you're going to sleep in your car, maybe you're going to sleep in the woods. But you don't get to just rest. You don't get to just take a shower, have a beer, and watch TV or whatever it takes to unwind. So your stress level is heightened constantly without any resolution to it. And of course, you're going to suffer PTSD or at least stomach aches. Something bad. Right. Adults, too. It's not just kids. They can get frostbite, leg ulcers, respiratory infections, HIV and AIDS and diabetes. Yeah. Way more common than the homeless population. So lots of health effects going on. Josh. I agree. Chuck. So, Chuck, we talked about Reagan as both creator and alleviator of homelessness. You talked about some of the programs that the McKinney Vento Act created. Some of the other programs that have been developed in the United States are, like, Section Eight housing. Yeah. Right. Do you know about this? Well, there's homeless shelters, which are like the emergency beds when it's cold, that kind of thing, where you can go temporarily. Right. And a lot of those are I would say most I don't have any numbers on this, but I would say most of those are privately operated. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. And then there is the Section Eight things that you were talking about, which is not public housing. It's when you fill out a Section Eight voucher and you can go find just a regular private apartment to rent from a landlord. It's got to fit certain requirements. And if you meet all those requirements, you only have to pay 30% of the rent and bills, and then the government pays the other straight to the landlord. So that's Section Eight. But Section Eight, they're a huge waiting list. And I read that a lot of cities have shut it down until the list gets smaller, and they're like, there's no point in keeping a list of four years, five years. We're just going to shut it down, get the list smaller and then open it back up in a couple of years. Yeah. So good luck getting Section Eight, if that's what you're trying to do. And did you mention public housing? No. Well, you talked about shelters. Apparently there were 500,000 beds in 2005. There's now 643,000, or there was in 2009 and about 3 million to 3.5 million homeless people. Yeah, but that's a pretty significant increase in five years. Yeah, that's true. But with public housing, if Section Eight is not an option, there is public housing, or there used to be, at least at Techwood. Right. Which is basically like an apartment block where you go and live and you pay what you can, and as long as you follow the rules. I just made air quotes. You can stay there as long as you like. Right. Ideally. Right. Again, there's not that many public housing units or not as many as there used to be. We need to talk about food banks because that's a big part of being homeless, is getting your meal. And the United States it's not like starvation in other countries where there is no food. There's lots of food here. Lots of food is thrown away. So since the 1960s, do you know that there's an estimate that up to half of the food we produce is thrown away? Really? Half in the US. And the low estimate is a quarter. Wow. Yeah. I tell you what, never go get a job in the film industry if you want to. Food waste depresses you. Oh, the craft services just catering the whole thing. It's ridiculous. But food banks have been around since about the everyone knows you can donate canned goods and non perishable items, and they will distribute them to homeless shelters and homeless people directly sometimes. Yeah. So it's a big deal. You ever volunteered, anything like that? Yeah, I've done the Thanksgiving thing before. This makes me want to do more than that, though. That feels like going to church on Easter. You know, we should build an addition on your house that we can house homeless people in. We can go, there you go. Squatville we can put up a lien to or something. Squatville not a bad idea. Job training, though. I mean, we talk about things like public housing and the projects, and then it's all well and good to get people placed to be, but at the same time, this is where the Republicans can go. Yes. At the same time, you don't want to support a nation of people on the government's dime without offering some kind of job training and something to say, hey, let us help you get on your feet. Let us help you get a job in data entry or on the manufacturing line or whatever. So luckily, there are groups like the Coalition for the Homeless First Step that provide this kind of job training, and the veterans are doing the same thing with the homeless. Veterans Reintegration Program. Right. And I should say there isn't a homeless alleviation program in existence in the US. That's geared towards simply taking care of people. All of them are geared toward ending homelessness in the individual and collectively through things like job training, through things like helping to write resumes. Yeah. Rehab is a huge one. Mental health treatment, giving people cheap drugs, like getting them to a point where they're not homeless anymore, it's addressing the factors of homelessness, not you don't feel like work, and so here's some money that doesn't exist. And I suspect that there's not really a desire to just have somebody give you some money and not do anything ever and just be poor in anybody. I don't know. That's my opinion. We disagree. That's awesome. Well, I don't know if I disagree or not. I don't have enough time to think about that right now. All right, what can you do, though? Well, we can build lean twos on your squatting land. You can volunteer, like you said. Right. Give your time if you don't have the dough. Give a little time if you do have the dough. And it's not necessarily just dough. You can donate old toys and books and toiletries and clothes. That old computer that's gathering dust that you could get $75 for on Craigslist, you should donate that instead. Write it off in your taxes, and maybe homeless people can get trained how to use that computer. Yeah. Or you could donate your car. Yeah, that's a big one. Yeah. You can be an advocate, try to raise awareness, letter campaigns, all sorts of things you can do there. You can hire homeless people. Yes. They do have skills, as we've seen. A lot of people who are recently homeless may also just be recently unemployed as well. Yes. And have job skills. And then the last one on the list in the article, which I thought was, bring it home. Great respect. Huge. When you see that homeless person on the street, don't let the first thought to be in your head, hey, jerk, how did you mess up to get here? Maybe you should think, hey, did you develop schizophrenia in your thirty s and lose your job because of that? And get split up from your child because you couldn't care for your child even though you want to, because it happened to Will Smith? I was hoping we can make it through this without bringing up that stupid movie the Pursuit of Happiness. Yeah, well, they make a movie about it. It was such a big deal. Everyone knows that guy was homeless with his son. Now he's rich. He's worth $65 million. Yeah. Actually, you know what story I like better is the one in this article. That was a guy. What was his name? David. Yeah, he's quoted David Pearl. Yeah, he was quoted in that respect part. Yeah, he was just a regular dude. Had a job as a restaurant manager, college graduate, and for 15 years as a restaurant manager and developed schizophrenia, got fired, ended up hitchhiking and homeless for two years on the streets of DC. And now I think he's heading up a homeless group in DC nowaday. Yeah, I think he's an executive at It. Yeah. But he's quoted in this article in the Respect, like, what can you do? He says most of the despair in being homeless comes from being treated like you don't exist. Right. And there's something we should point out, Chuck, throughout this it's, however many minutes into this podcast, we've just now used the first homeless person's name, first and last name of the whole podcast. There's a whole conception of invisibility. Yes. The nameless they are, they're not the nameless. You can completely interchange that with the homeless. That's just as faceless, just as nameless, just as genderless, just as identity list. I just want to close and get everybody over to ondesign. There's this awesome blog post by a guy named John Thakara. T-H-A-C-K-A-R-A called look or Connect. And he's talking about he's using photography to demonstrate how we treat the homeless and how we should treat the homeless. And there's a photography book called Shelter. And this guy roamed around Europe and took photos of homeless, like impromptu makeshift shelters, like blankets hanging over a limb in the woods or someplace under an overpass. But in every single picture, it's just the shelter. Not one homeless person appears in this whole book. Interesting. And the cara is pointing out, like, this is kind of emblematic of how we view the homeless. Right? And then he was also kind of crediting a girl named Erica Schultz, who is a photographer out of Seattle, and she has a series called Invisible Families. And she photographs the homeless, but then the caption she includes captions beneath the photograph, right? And it's of that person. So there's one of a little kid walking through a homeless camp, and he's got, like, this bamboo stick up, right? And the caption is here jack Ahern, age nine, marches with the bamboo stick while staying at a city located in Skyway. Sometimes Jacqueline and Less fellow Nickelodeon quotes to help him look for worms. On other days, he'd play on a pogo stick in mud puddles or with the resident cabin kitten that had six digits on one paw. The bamboo stick was a gift. So that's a person now, not a homeless kid, right? That's Jack, a her in age nine. Well, and the gentleman from DC suggests that if you have a regular walk to work in a city or something where you see the same homeless person on a daily basis, then ask them what their name is one day. Call them by their name, look them in the eye. You don't have to give them money if you don't want to. Little things like that can make a big difference in a person's self esteem and maybe allows them to view themselves as human again. And you can give them, if you're worried about giving the money that they spend on alcohol or something, get a little food, gift voucher, something like that. So there it is, everybody. Our fifth summation of the podcast. Fifth and final. Yes. If you want to learn more about homelessness, you can type that word into the search bar and how stuff works. The blank generic genderless identity list. Search bar. Very nice. And since I said that, it's time for is it listening to mailman? Yeah. And in the spirit of this podcast, we're going to do a big old Kiva round up. You want to explain what Kiva is real quick? Kiva is a website where schmoes like you and me can go and donate well, I shouldn't say donate lend increments of $25 to entrepreneurs in developing countries and people on their way up. Here in the United States, even these loans are pulled together to create a larger loan, which ultimately repay a loan that's already been made to the person, and then that person uses it for their business. Repays the loan, you actually get your $25 back. That's right. If you want. And you can reinvest it. And basically it's micro lending. Yes. And we have our own loan team, which we are proud to say is the number four team and members on all of Cuba. Now, I know that's really something behind atheists number one. Yeah. Christians are number two. They're, like, so angry. And right behind the atheist. And Team Obama is number three. And little old us are right there in front of Australia. So let's go over that list again. Go over it, Chuck. From wonderful atheist of America Christian Coalition. Team Obama. Stuff you should know. Australia pretty cool. And as of today, we've loaned as a collective 3406 members of loan, 10,813 loans to the tune of $313,825. That is not bad. Is this going to be up for Christmas? I don't know, Jerry. Yes. We would suggest you can get a Kiva gift certificate and give it to your loved one at Christmas. It's a nice little cool thing to do, like a stocking stuffer, right? And they go and lend it, but ultimately, if they want, they're just postponing getting that 25 or 50 or $75 cash for a month or two. It's repaid. It's not a donation. No. And with that, here comes a listener mail, because this one really got me two of them really quick. Hi, guys. My name is Kara, and I am another one of your 13 year old fans. Just want to say hi and how much I love your show. Some friends and I make and sell jewelry and donate the profits to Kiva. That is awesome. I know you guys have your own Kiva team, and I love that you use your power to do good. Since most people haven't heard of kiva, please mention this on your show. It would be so great to get some business that we can reload. You can see some of our jewelryandloans at www.tinyurl.com. Project Raw and I went today, and they have these little earrings and little necklaces and rings and things that these 13 year old girls make by hand, and they've loaned $375 so far. Awesome. And that is Kara in Kensington, Maryland. And that is so cool, I can't even talk about it when 13 year olds are doing stuff like this and CEOs are getting rich and thumbing their nose at the rest of the world. So karma is going to bite you one day, sir. And this one, we usually don't plug other Kiva teams, but we're going to because this is from our buddy sergeant, newly promoted Staff Sergeant Walker. All right, Mr. Bryant, with your inspiration, I've started my own Kiva team for the armed forces. With the whole armed forces? Yeah, he started an army team. Okay, so it's different. Well, he says armed forces Kiva team, but it says army in the URL. Okay, so if you're in the Marine Corps, do not give it is www.kiva.org team us. And he's wondering if you could just give a little shout out to all the armed forces personnel listening to your show and can they donate to our army team? And so I'm going to encourage you to donate for the army team. Everyone else donate for the stuff you should Know team and support Project Raw. I can't believe you did it without checking it. You know what? Supporting NMC. So sorry. Anyway, good holiday mojo coming your way if you get involved with stuff like this. Well, congratulations on the promotion, Staff Sergeant Walker. Kara, congratulations on being a very cool 13 year old. Actually, a very cool person in general. That's right. Since it's around Christmas time and I'm about to weep, why don't we just bring it on home, drive it through my heart with the sweetest Christmas story you have ever heard in your entire life. That's fact based. Have you got one? No, I'm just saying. I'm asking for them. I'm on the verge of tears. I want to just go ahead and have my consultant this one has been the first. I got a little weepy a couple of times, too. Did you really? No. Okay, good. If you have a good story for us, a good holiday story, we want to hear it. Send it in an email. You can wrap it up, tie the ribbon on tight, make sure the card is attached, and send it to stuffpodcast@houseupworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetepworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The house upworks. 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 the best pet mom. 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How Ejection Seats Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ejection-seats-work | When the Jet Age came about, pilots found they had a brand new problem with their brand new planes: how to bail out when they found themselves in a pinch at 700 mph. In the mid-1940s, aerospace engineers got to work coming up with a fascinating and comple | When the Jet Age came about, pilots found they had a brand new problem with their brand new planes: how to bail out when they found themselves in a pinch at 700 mph. In the mid-1940s, aerospace engineers got to work coming up with a fascinating and comple | Tue, 20 Aug 2013 15:19:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=15, tm_min=19, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=232, tm_isdst=0) | 36123869 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. Welcome to stuff you should Know from housetop workscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. That's is Charles W, Chucker's Bryant. This is stuff you should know. You can just call us MAV and Goose for this one. No, you can't. Okay. It depends who's MAV and who's Goose. The email I said, that's very appropriate for the show. Why? Well, because Goose died because his ejection seemed malfunctioned. I know he hit his head on the canopy. I know I broke his neck. It was because he angered God earlier that day, I guess. So I'll be Goose. Are you planning on dying? I'm just planning on you feeling guilt for the rest of your life. You cause the spin by being a guns blazing maverick. That is true. But I would be like, I didn't design the ejection seat. That's the guy who should feel guilty for the rest of his life. I'm going to go get a taco. Yeah. I'm going to go ride my motorcycle around Miramar. It's funny, when I saw Top Gun and I may have talked about this before, I remember thinking at the time, like, people don't die in training exercises like that. It's so Hollywood. As a matter of fact, that happened very well two years ago. It happens all the time. You never hear about it. Yeah. There's a guy to make the papers. It doesn't. It's sad that it doesn't, but, yes, it happens. Our military died during training, and it's awful. My brother in law's as a helicopter pilot, and he's lost several friends through the years in training. Yeah. Is it in crashes or from ejection seats? Crashes. Yeah. There was a guy in 2011, you know the Blue Angels? The what? There's also the Red arrows. Yeah, I know. The Blue Angels. Okay. Well, the Red Arrows are another formation flying team like this, basically, some really great pilots. Sure. And one of them was killed when his ejection seat went off while his plane was motionless. The ejection seat just accidentally went off. That's a zero. Zero ejection. Is that what that's called? Yes. But you're on the ground and you're not flying at all. Right. But I think the problem is the plane didn't realize, or the sequencer didn't realize that it was a zero ejection because the parachute never deployed. So he died when he fell back down to Earth from a couple of hundred feet, I would guess. Yeah. This will all make sense in a second. You know what? I think it's a primer before, if you're at home listening, you can go to the YouTube site and look up ejection seat, and there's one, like, slow motion on the ground, zero ejection from film from different angles. That really shows how it all works. It's pretty cool. Yeah. And you really get a sense of, like, boy, they do go up a couple of hundred feet. Yeah. And quick, too. Very quick. So this is not even my intro. I've got an intro. Okay, Chuck, there is a guy in World War II who is a tail gunner on a B 17 Flying Fortress, and this man's name was Alan McGee. He's a staff sergeant. And if you were a tailgunner on the B 17, you were basically cramped into this little gun turret with your knees up to your chest, your head spoken out in a little clear canopy shelf. Yes. And you had no room whatsoever to wear a parachute. You had to keep it in the cockpit with everybody else. Well, Alan McGee is on the B 17, called the Snap, Crackle Pop, and they're flying on a mission over France Satan Azaire, which was also known as Flak City because of the anti aircraft guns down on the ground. Right? And sure enough, the Snap, Crack will pop, took some flak, lost a wing, had a couple of holes in it, and these holes in turn, put holes into McGee's parachute. So he needs to bail out. He finds a hole that's been blown into the side of the snap, Crackle Pop and jumps out at 20,000ft with a parachute with holes in it, with no parachute whatsoever. Because he was like, Why bother? He just knew he needed to get out of the plane quick. And he later said that he thought he had a parachute on. Later he said yes. He's fallen 22,000ft more than 4 miles to the ground, goes right through the skylight in the Saint Nazareth train station and lands and lives. He had a how does that happen? I'll tell you a second. He had a broken right leg, broken right ankle, nearly severed right arm, 28 shrapnel wounds from the shards of glass because he fell right through plate glass from, again, 22,000ft, 4 miles above the ground, and he lived to tell about it. A German doctor apparently took very good care of him and he later on said publicly thanked the guy, even though he was a Nazi doctor, for saving his life. And so I'm reading about this, and this is just astounding I'm looking into it more and more and more, and there's no trick, it's just physics. This physicist, Dr. Seth Eisenberg, now, he's not a physicist, he's a trauma specialist. He said on Popular Mechanics that there's really no magic here, that he was going McGee was going as fast as he would have been had he jumped off of something like a twelve storey building. Right. Once you reach terminal velocity, it's all the same, whether it's 4 miles or whether it's 120ft. Right. It's still pretty spectacular that he fell 4 miles through the roof of a building and survived. The point of all this is so the point was, though, he could have fallen off a twelve story building through the plate glass, and everyone had been like, wow, that's pretty awesome. But not miraculous. Yeah. Compared to 4 miles. It's nothing. I got you. It'd still be pretty miraculous that he survived. You should die. Twelve storey building. He's pretty banged up. Yeah. So the point is, him just jumping out of the hole in the side of the snap, crackle, pop was not that different from how you would get out of a plane in World War II. You just kind of opened up the canopy and jumped out and then opened your parachute at the appropriate height. Right. Or altitude. That's fine with propeller planes, but once jets were introduced, you can't do that because they're going so much faster than a propeller plane does. You can't just jump out speed of sound, dude. So around the time the jet age began, a company named Martin Baxter, a British aviation company, started really looking into the idea of the ejection seat. And we have that today, thanks in large part to them. Hats off. Yeah. Real men of genius. So an ejection seat, if you don't know, just to put it very simply, is a seat that is ejected from the aircraft via jet. It can be a helicopter and it's a very much a maybe not last second, but it's the last ditch effort to save yourself when you know that aircraft is going down. Right. Yeah. That's your last resort. You don't do that frivolously because, number one, airplanes are expensive. Yeah. They're also very dangerous when they crash land. Yeah. And I think it's probably bad form to scuttle your plane when you still have control of it. Yeah, I think so. Like, hey, I wonder what this thing does. And the article points out, and once you really read this thing, it's really true. It's one of the most complex parts of an aircraft. It could be thousands of parts in some of these. And the object is to get the pilot out and then disattach from that seat without hitting any part of the aircraft. So, like up and out and away, out of harm's way. At which point you become a parachuter. Yeah, that's exactly right. You want to get the pilot into the position to just parachute down to the ground and it all happens in under 4 seconds. And about two to three of those seconds is the actual parachute aspect. Like the ejection part is all in about a second and a half. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. It is. And we're going to tell you how it works. So the process of it is fairly simple. The procedure. Right. It's like just get the pilot out of the plane above it, out of the way of the plane. So it'll crash yeah. And let the parachute happen. That's true. It's thing. Right. But when you look at the mechanisms involved in this, it's extremely detailed, especially since 1987 when you had the first microprocessor in charge of ejection seats. It's really neat. Yeah. So let's talk about ejection seats. Let's talk about the basics. You've got, first of all, the seat. Yes. The seat is connected. It's in the cockpit, obviously, and it's attached to rails by way of some rollers. So you might think, like, the seats just, like, bolted to the floor. It's not rollers on these rails because those rails and rollers are going to do the initial guidance of the chair at the proper angle out of the aircraft. Right. You can't just go up. You can't just go forward. You can't just go back. Right. No. And when you go up those rails, you actually have to go at a certain amount of speed. And that speed has to be slightly more than the aircraft is going, or else you're not going to clear the cockpit. So to do that, you have what's called the catapult, which is usually a charge. Yeah. That's what gets you going up the rails and initially out. Then there will be a secondary rocket that shoots you up another couple of hundred feet and clear the tail of the plane and everything. And it does it quick, too. Yeah, it does it really quick. And this whole system is called an AES and Assisted Egress system. Egress meaning exit or a way out. A little on the nose, but I get it. Yeah. It's military. And the canopy is if you've ever seen, like, a fighter jet, they've got the clear canopy above them yeah. Where they wave and give a thumbs up sign in the Black Power sign and all that stuff. Yeah. Where they shoot a bird at the Russian. Yes. And Top Gun, remember, they flew right upside down, right above them. That seemed almost incredible. Very incredible. Yeah. And probably not real. That's what I mean. Tony Scott all right, so you got the canopy. And the problem with the canopy is it shouldn't be there when you're trying to eject. Yeah. Or else you end up like goose it's. Right. So part of the assisted egress system is the canopy actually blowing and getting the heck out of the way. If you don't have a canopy, you might have an escape hatch built into the roof. And you do all this by pulling a lever either between your legs or by your side. Or in the case of Top Gun, I looked at the clip today. It's two loops behind their head that they pulled. Or sometimes you might pull a face curtain down in front of your face, which serves two purposes. It gets the whole system moving and protects your face. And it's not like a veil. No, it's sturdy. Yeah. I think of curtain and planes. I think of what they used to separate first class from coach, we don't want this to be to hit you, so here's this Black Lacey bail. He's like, I don't want to see having to bail out. So those are some of the ways. There's all different kinds of systems, but that's generally how it works. Okay. So we got the general part. Before we go any further, let's do a message break and let's do that. Yeah. This is about to get really good, though. Yeah. Okay. So there's the basics. We're talking about the basics. Yeah. Let's get into the nuts and bolts of this, as it were. Yeah. And bolts will come into play, actually. Specifics. So let's talk about the seat. You've got your bucket, which is where you sit, and also the seat comes with survival equipment, which is kind of nice. Yeah, I looked it up. Some survival packs have, like, oxygen, so if you are bailing out and you're not attached to oxygen at a high altitude, you're going to need it. They have rifles in them, which is just cool blankets. What I don't get is the seat ejects from the person. So is the safety pack. It stays attached. Okay. So you're still in a sitting position with this thing attached to you. Okay. Or it's attached to your back. Okay. Yeah, I was confused by that, too. I'm glad you took the time. We covered the canopy. The catapult is obviously what initiates it. And it's operated with, like you said, ballistic cartridge. There's a lot of explosions going on. You're riding a bullet right then. Yeah, pretty much. Then you're going up to catapult up the rails. You got your drug parachute, which is a small parachute, five to two to 5ft in diameter, that initially pops out to sort of balance you and make sure you're not just flying all over the place and slow you down a little bit. Right. Because if you're going at even a slight angle yeah. At the speed of sound, possibly, yes. You need to slow down kind of quick. And the drug parachute is just that little one, like the dragsters. That's exactly what it is. And sometimes, you know how they'll have like, a small one and then a big one? They have that, too, on ejection seats as well. And then the drug parachute also very commonly will trip the larger parachute, too, after a certain speed is reached. That's right. What else, man? You've got your environmental sensor, which we'll get into how all this works, but that is a device that tracks air speed and altitude. It doesn't just shoot you up and say, I hope it's okay up there. Right, exactly. And also, depending on the readings it gets for your airspeed and altitude, it'll trip like a certain type of sequence. Right. So if you're at a very high altitude, there'll be a certain sequence. If you're at a low altitude but going a very fast speed, there will be a certain sequence, and so on. And there's called modes of ejection. Well, we might as well go ahead and cover that. And I had to look this up. It was named for physicist Henry Peto, but everyone calls them Peter or Pi Dutubs, when it really should be Peto tubes. Sure. Because he was French. But when the sequence begins, it travels up the rails and exposes these tubes, and they measure air pressure and the differences and pressure to determine how fast you're going and which of these modes to enact that we're talking about. So that's part of the environmental center, and it sends that information recovery sequencer, which is basically the chip that controls the process. That's right. So what are the three modes? Well, there's low altitude, low speed, which is less than 250 knots at less than 15,000ft. No need for a drug parachute. In this case, you barely even need an ejection seat at that point. There's mode two, which is low altitude, high speed for when you're like Maverick or something like that, just going really fast, but low. And then there's high altitude, any speed, known as the scariest mode. Right. And so the modes are all based on you'll notice two things, altitude and speed. Velocity. Yeah. Right. And you put these things together and you create a graph, and inside the graph, inside the arc that's formed, that's called the envelope. And anything inside the envelope is safety. Like it's been proven, it's tested that if you follow this certain sequence of events for this mode within this altitude and this air speed, you're going to most likely be fine. That's right. If you go outside of that, you are what's known as pushing the envelope. Is that where that came from? Yes. That's awesome. It is. I thought that was when you were super cool during negotiations and you would just write down what you wanted and push the envelope across the table. That's pushing your luck. Okay. Wow. I love that you know me and Word origins. Yeah, I thought you'd like that when I saw it, and I was like, Jack's going to love it. So let's back up a bit and start with the bail out. Your planes not doing well. You want to eject. Your plane is sick. You want to eject. And you pull the ejection handle. That sets off what we already talked about, that first explosion to catapult you up the rails and into the air. And then there is an underseat rocket motor that actually propels you even further. And when you watch this thing in slow motion, it's serious rocket propelled action going on under your butt. Yeah. And sometimes it's two stage, like the catapult and then the rocket. But it's all in the same source. Right, but yeah, it's basically shooting you. So you go off in a bullet and then a rocket. Yeah. That's what happens when you're injecting and like you said, within the first half to one and a half seconds. Yeah. That's when all this happens. And the canopy obviously has been jettisoned at this point. And that's a really cool thing, too. These things have to function as canopy. So they're bolted in there, and the way they're ejected is the bolts are blown by little tiny explosive charges. Right. That's called lifting the canopy. The bolts will blow and the canopy will start to fly off, but then there's another charge, another explosion toward the front that just shoots it off in another direction away from you as you're ejecting. Oh, this is so cool, man, how fast it happens and how complicated it all is. Yeah. Because think about that. The computer sequencer still needs to know what mode to follow. So when that canopy is starting to blow, it's taking the data readings and deciding going on in, like, a second, a 10th of a second here. So lifting the canopy is one way you can still become injured. You can still run into the canopy just from blowing the bolts. So there's another mode or another means of getting rid of the canopy. And that's just shattering it. Yeah. That's when it basically explodes. It's like you got chicken wire, but the chicken wire is explosive. Yeah. Evaporates. Yeah. Well, it doesn't evaporate the slipstream. Just makes it go bye bye really quickly. Yeah. So for all intents and purposes, it evaporates. Yeah. And then we also mentioned earlier, if there is no canopy, there will be an explosive hatch that basically does the same thing. That seems the least safe to me. Why? Because you can't see through it. An explosive hatch makes me think of, like, some really heavy, thick steel that yes. You can't see through. And that is just really a hole in another bit of heavy, thick steel that you might bump into on your way out. Like an escape hatch from a submarine. That's what I think of when I think of a hatch like that. Not on a plane. Yeah. Give me a shattering canopy. That's what you want. Oh, yeah. You want it to dissolve above your head. Evaporate. Evaporate. All right. So then once you're out from the rails, that secondary. The rocket's going to take you. Depends on your weight. 100 to 200ft up to safely clear you. And I wish we had more recent stats than this, but we have one from 1098 that said they had a 90% success rate. Over I saw that. 463 objections. I saw that. That's kind of standard for I saw a study from, I think, 2006 or something like that, and they found about 89.4%. The bad news is the other 10% means you've probably died. Yeah. So it's either success or you die. Yes. I think saving your life through the correct series is successful. Okay. Like, if you're injured or whatever, I think they still generally count that as success. Got you. Where are we, man? So we're at the drogue parachute, the drogue gun oh, yeah. Fires a metal slug and it pulls out this little drogue parachute. And then, like we said, then there's the secondary shoot that I think the drogue enacts. That right, yeah. Like the main shoot. Yes. So you get the main shoot out before this happens, though. Think about this. When you are shot out on a bullet and then on a rocket, and you're going up to, I don't know, mach two. Mach three. Mach one is 750 miles an hour. That's the speed of sound, like supersonic travel. And we have planes that can go a lot faster than that. When you exit the plane like that, it's very easy for your seat to start to tumble and move around and spin. Yeah. Or your limbs, let's say. Well, we'll get to that. Okay. Just the seat itself, if everything's going according to the plan, can still tumble and just the wind resistance it meets can just push it around and all sorts of weird angles. So there's something called a vernier rocket, right? Yeah. And it is a rocket that just kind of fires like, remember on Apollo 13 when they were shooting off the little booster rockets, like, on each side? Correct. The yaw and all that. Yeah. Pitch. That's what this rocket does. Or these rockets, I should say. It stabilizes the seat and keeps it from spinning and tumbling and makes it stay up and down. It's got a gyroscope. Exactly. It's how it knows what it's doing. Just like your smartphone. Oh, yeah. Is that what the compass thing is? Yeah. Really? Well, yeah. Plus, when you tilt it, it knows to go sideways. And I hope that ejection seats have a little more advanced systems, but yeah. Gyroscope. Yeah. Okay. I never thought about that. Well, maybe not a gyroscope, but something that functions in that way. Right. People are like, it's not a gyroscope. We'll find out. Yeah, we sure will. Many times over. Okay, so, Chuck, let's talk about the physics of all this. Well, first we got to cover the seat man separator motor. Oh, yeah. Okay. And that's actually once you're in the air, you can't land in the seat. They wanted to get you out of the seat. Right. And that's accomplished by the seat man motor separator. Yeah. This motor basically goes and detaches the seat from you. And you've got your parachute on. Yes. You've got your survival pack still, but the seat just kind of falls away to Earth, and you just slowly parachute down and land. And if you're Captain Scott O'Grady, you spend the next five days evading Serbs. That's right. Successfully. Successfully. So physics my favorite topic. I know you love physics. Fan Newton's second law of motion comes into play here, obviously, because force and acceleration of the crew member, really, that's how you're going to live or die. Yeah. Because when you exit a plane, you get smacked by the wind. That's right. I mean, you're going faster than the speed of sound, and while you're normally operating the plane, the plane is taking it on the chin for you. You're not feeling this force of gravity nearly as much as you are when you're no longer surrounded by the plane. And you're just exposed up there in the atmosphere. That's right. So Newton's second law of motion states the acceleration of an object depends on the force acting upon it and the mass of the object. Force equals mass times acceleration, in this case, the mass of the human pilot and the chair. Right. No. Acceleration is measured in G, right? Yeah. So one G equals the amount of the Earth's gravity. Yeah. Like when we're at sea level. Right. We're at one G right now. Right. And so let's say we're 180 pound pilot. At sea level, we weigh \u00a3180. That's one G when we're going two GS and so on up to, say, 20 GS, I believe, is what an ejection seat is like. The best or developed for 20 GS. At 20 GS, \u00a3180 feels like \u00a33600. That's the force that you encounter when you eject three \u00a3600, all of a sudden of force is being exerted on your body. Yeah. And keeping in mind that one G of acceleration is equal to 32ft/second yes. And it all depends on how much we weigh. That's how you figure out the mass you and the chair. That's the big one. Also, the chair needs to know how fast to go because it has to go slightly faster than the plane, like I said, so it can clear it. That's amazing. Yeah, it is. So when you eject and you suddenly encounter 20 GS, which is the upper limits of human what's the word I'm looking for? Tolerance. Yeah, tolerance. A lot of really bad things can happen to you. That's right. And we know this thanks to our buddy Colonel Step. Yeah. Remember he used to have red outs from the rocket fled, and, man, he had some crazy stuff happen to him. So what's the formula? Speed equals acceleration times time plus initial speed, or VF equals at plus VI. Yeah. So think about this. Okay. What we just said is that we understand the force, which is when you go up, you are suddenly exposed to that lateral force getting hit in the face with that wind. Yes. And you're also being pushed out and upward. So I think you said that in some cases, within the first second half, you are up 200ft. Yeah. So I think you said earlier something like within a second, you go from sitting on the plane to be up about 200ft. So that means you're traveling 200ft a second upward. Yes. So you're being pushed up like that while you're being exposed to speeds of upwards of 750 miles an hour, 20 GS of force. And all of this is happening to your poor little body. So a lot of really bad things can happen to it. Sure. First of all, first and foremost, I think the number one injury from injections is spine compression oh, man. Because you're being pushed upward at 200ft a second, that's a lot of force exerted on your spinal column. So modern ejection seats have things like leg restraints. Oh, yeah, that's true. Back restraints. Yeah, head restraints. And then that face curtain restrained your head, and you are forced into a completely up and down sitting position so that your vertebra are stacked perfectly on top of one another, because any kind of slip or any kind of angle leads to a slip disc very easily. And there's a longstanding legend that I couldn't verify that in the US. Air Force, after two or three ejections, you're grounded for life because the spinal compressions have just basically used you up. I don't know. I didn't see that that was true anywhere, but it's an old legend. Well, at the very least, you're not very good pilot. Right. So they're like, yeah, maybe we should ground them. Or you're, like, three quarters your height that you were when you enlisted because of the spinal compression. You're too short now. So that's the number one, I believe, injury that comes from ejection. There's also something with the horrific name limb flail. So you're secured in your seat, your arms, your legs, your head. You're supposed to be totally immobile in that first couple of seconds, especially until your parachute opens and you slow down and everything. Yeah. If your arm gets loose. Have you ever seen a dog with its head sticking out of a car window on a highway and it has real long, floppy ears? Yes. Which is very dangerous. It's not something you should do to your dog. No, it's bad for your dog. And develop cauliflower. It's a bad thing to do. Get things in their eyes, all sorts of things. Let's go in like, 30 to 60 miles an hour. Yeah. We're talking an arm, a human arm going more than 750 miles an hour. When it gets loose, what you have is called limb flail. And what you have are completely shattered bones, dislocated shoulders. That's a bad jam. Just imagine going down the highway at like, 65 miles an hour, rolled on your window, and then quickly to stick your arm down. Quickly. Yes. Multiply that times. Whatever. Yeah. So that's another type of injury. Limb flail. There's wind blast, which they tested us on Chimps, of course. And it turns out that you can get 30 degree burns, severe third degree burns just from the wind. Oh, wow. At Mach 1.7, being exposed to that peak 1.7.7 for 1 second can give you severe third degree burns. Well, and then there's tumbling, which you might overlook, but think about this. Remember when no, the real math. No, the real life guy. No, the dude. Oh, man. Oh, Grady. No. The guy who jumped out of the space caps all recently stabbed. No. You know the guy. Yes. Felix Bomb gardener. Yeah. I can't believe I forgot that. When he jumped out, he started to tumble. Remember he started going in over end? Yeah. It did not look good at first. No. And the reason that is really bad is. Because you can build up centrifugal force for your blood and it pushes it outwards to your extremities, meaning your heart doesn't have any blood to pump any longer, so you can die very quickly. I've seen between 204 hundred rotations per minute. Proves fatal to humans, man. How did that bomb crown your guy? Pull that off? I don't know. That was pretty awesome. Yeah. And hey, our own Discovery Channel covered that live, remember? Yeah, that was huge. It was very cool. That first shot, dude, I can't look at that. Just falls out of it. Yeah, his perspective shot when he was just like, all right, I'm jumping out of something from space. Yeah, that was amazing. Yeah, really cool. I remember you mean, I were coming back from some trip or whatever, and we just happened to be in the airport when I remembered it was going on, I'm like, oh, yeah, we should watch this, and ended up standing there watching like one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my entire life. Yeah, that was just an amazing thing to see. Yeah. And I bet you he wants to top it. I'm sure he's like, higher still. Yeah. And do you remember the guy who did that in 60s or the late fifty s? Oh, he did it in this exposed weather balloon wearing like, a high altitude a halo mask and air supply and everything. That rings a bell. You've seen footage of it. Did he live? Yes, but he ended up being like the whole program director for Felix Baumgartner's Jump. Like he tapped him because he's the only other guy who's done anything like that. Right. And this guy did it in like the late fifty S, I think. So he's literally the only person he could say what's it like, man? Exactly. He said it sucks and it's awesome. Apparently he had like a hole in his glove or something like that. He told them back on the ground what was going on. They would have called off the mission bombarder. No, the other guy. Oh, really? And he just didn't tell us because he wanted I wonder. I don't know. So that's how Felix bomb gardener works. All right, ejection seats. You got anything else? I don't have anything else. Yeah, that one was really cool, I thought. Yeah, very complex thing going on very quickly. And watch that super slow mo and then it shows it in regular time. It's pretty neat. Okay, so since we don't have anything else, we would advise you to go onto the House Stuff Works website and check out ejection seats. Type that into the search bar. And since I said search bar, it is time for listener mail. Yeah. I'm going to call this BFS. Hey, guys. I've been listening for about six months and catching up on most of your old shows. In that time, I was introduced to your podcast by my best since 6th grade friend who's also a serious fan. I admit that it took me a few episodes to warm to your podcast, and now I feel a bit sheepish for ever doubting my friend's recommendation. Not only is she one of the smartest people I've ever met, she is one of my oldest friends and knows me better than anyone. We have a long history of directing each other to many fabulous and geeky pursuits, but stuff you should know may be the best of them all. And I have to say, stiff competition. You're up against tolkien, the X Files, Star Trek, epic Rap, battles of history. Dune, she says. We talk all of those. Wow. I mean, I see the Rap battles, sure. Dune, maybe, but Tolkien, Xbox, star Trek. Although I don't like Star Trek. You don't like Star Trek? The movie, the TV shows. None of it. People are going to be shocked. I've never seen a single Star Trek episode in my life. I think I did when I was a kid. I bet I would like it more as an adult now. And I saw The Raft of Con. Yeah, I saw that finally, because that was good. And then I saw the first of the new ones, but not the one that just came out. I saw the one that just came out. That's pretty good. Yeah. I mean, I'll get into it. It's just not my universe. I'm Star Wars guy. Not that you can't be both. We get over this obstacle, this arbitrary and totally unnecessary wall between people who like Star Trek and Star Wars. It's not that I think there should be a wall. I just never got into Star Trek. Okay. As long as you're not hating on Star Trek thing. No, of course not. Aka Trekkies. All right. This has been, like, kind of a geeky episode. Have you noticed? Sure. Back to the email from Catherine. A couple of months ago, my friend came to visit for a weekend, and we were discussing the podcast. Both made similar comments about why we enjoyed it so much. Felt like we had two really great and interesting friends with us whenever we wanted them or needed them. We both work long hours and jobs with significant pressure, and sometimes time with great and interesting friends is hard to come by. Your podcast can be a great mandate in maintaining sanity when face to face interaction with real friends isn't possible. So thanks for being such wonderful imaginary stand in other appropriate adjective, friends, and keep up the good work explaining life, the universe, and everything. Best, Catherine. With A-K-R-Y-N well, thanks a lot. She didn't say what her friend's name was. I thought that was quite sounds like a pretty bad friend, catherine's friend. Hats off to you as well. Thanks for the support. Yeah, thanks for listening, you guys. If we have brought you closer together with a friend, we want to hear about that. That's always very nice to hear about. You can let us know by tweeting to us on Twitter. Our handle is syskpodcast. We're on Facebook.com. At facebook. Comstuffyshow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com that's close. And then, of course, we have our little abodeo web stuffyyshoodknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.com. Brought to you by the allnew 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 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 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." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-11-22-sysk-kitty-genovese-final.mp3 | The Kitty Genovese Story | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-kitty-genovese-story | Most people have heard of the story of Kitty Genovese. She was murdered near her apartment in 1964 and her neighbors didn't do much to help. It caused a nationwide outcry, but the story has often been misrepresented. We'll set the record straight. | Most people have heard of the story of Kitty Genovese. She was murdered near her apartment in 1964 and her neighbors didn't do much to help. It caused a nationwide outcry, but the story has often been misrepresented. We'll set the record straight. | Tue, 22 Nov 2016 08:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=327, tm_isdst=0) | 36918904 | audio/mpeg | "Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or you're brave enough late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Hey everybody. If you have extra space or maybe you travel a lot, you should consider hosting on Airbnb. Just think about all that extra income. You could contribute more to your retirement or pay for a big trip. And if the thing that's holding you back is that you're worried about your stuff, well, don't be. Airbnb gives you air cover for hosts, damage protection that's free every time you host. Learn more and host with peace of mind at airbnb comaircoverforhosts. Hey, San Francisco, we're coming out to see you. We got invited back to San Francisco Sketch Fest this year and we are pretty excited because we are doing a Sunday afternoon show for the first time. So consider us a football game. We're going to be January 15, Sunday at 01:00 p.m.. And get your tickets fast because they're definitely going to sell out. Just go to sfsketchfest.com. You can Google that junk and just follow the ticket links. And there's lots of great shows, so I would recommend just making a weekend out of it. But check us out Sunday afternoon, january San Francisco. Can't wait to see everybody there. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. So this is stuff you should know. Podcast. True Crime edition, actually. Yeah, but so much more than just a single crime. Agreed. A crime that echoed throughout a city, throughout the world throughout decades. And it's true, man. There are very few crimes you can point to that had more of an impact than the murder of Kitty Genovese. Agreed. And there are a lot of true crime podcasts out there. We are not trying to become one. No, this is just something we do from time to time. Sure, I had somebody on Facebook oh, don't get me started on that. On the hencher. Kyfacmarter. This is so played. Everyone's done this. Who doesn't know about this? A bunch of people were like, well, I haven't heard about it. I had never heard about it. I hadn't heard about it until like a year or two ago. It's so played. And then of course, later on, all these people are like, man, what a jerk. Well, I'm sorry if anyone was offended. All I meant was this has been well covered. I think it has nothing to do with the way I said it. The 2016 election has proven that if you add if into your apology it's not an actual apology. Yeah, I'm sorry. If you're offended. It's not an apology. No. That's putting it back on the person. Right. It's you, your worm, your piece of garbage. Oh, yeah, man. Sorry. Kitty Genovese and her family. I know. And you know what? As I researched this and as I watched did you watch The Witness? Of course. The documentary recently on Netflix right now, it is HBO documentary. And I was disturbed, and I'm glad it finally covered it in the documentary, but I was disturbed that Kitty Genovese will get to her murder, but very quickly. She was murdered and became the symbol for people not helping out. Right. What came to be known as bystander apathy or the bystander effect, the more people who are around, the less likely anyone is to help. Yeah. So she became such a symbol that you never hear about Kitty Genovese and who she was as a person. That was one great thing about that documentary. There are multiple great things about it, but that it really talks about her and showed her and revived her spirit. Which I was really looking for, because even in researching online, it's hard to get a lot of information. So some, even contemporary articles still aren't mentioning that she was gay. Well, yeah. Her own brother who made the documentary didn't know that she was gay. No, it's true. But it's been out since I'm not sure when actually that came out. It was just this year. Oh, okay. So it was fairly new this year. Last year. Yeah. I thought it was like in the last five years, maybe. So, in honoring that, why don't we talk a minute about Catherine Genovese? Kitty born in 1935 in Brooklyn to Vincent and Renee Legend of Italian American parents. And it's weird, I don't see oh, yes. Rachel was her mother's name. She was Rachel petrole at first. So they lived in Brooklyn and she was very well loved in school. Yes. She was like the leader of her clique. Yeah. And she was apparently a lot of fun and a good mimic of her teachers. And she was voted class cut up in her senior year graduating class. She went to an all girl school and Prospect Heights. And by all accounts, this vivacious, fun loving, really sweet, sweet lady. Yeah. Or girl at that point. Her little brother Bill, who ended up making being featured in the documentary, the Witness was just in love with her. She was just amazing to him. They had a very special relationship. Yeah. I think she was about 13 years older than him. Yeah. Quite a bit. Maybe twelve years older. I had a sister like that. There's a very special relationship. Sure. None of that sibling rivalry. They're not old enough to be your mother it's a unique situation to be a younger sibling and to be able to inherit all that worldly wisdom. And they're going through all their own things and their own struggles and their own travails. But to that 13 year old younger brother, they know everything. And they're the coolest person walking the planet. And they're the kindest person walking the planet because they've lived long enough to figure out some of the major stuff. Yeah. Even my own sister is only six years older, and we very much had and still have that relationship where and she and my brother are great now, too. But when you're two or three years apart, there can be a little bit of the knocking of heads. But by the time I came along, I was like, my sister was six. It was perfect. I was a little baby doll for her. So, anyway, that was very much the relationship that Kitty had with Bill. And it seemed like one of the older brothers always had a little bit of, like yeah, she always liked him better kind of attitude. Seemed like everybody kind of knew, like she liked Bill the most. Yes. Which I kind of felt bad for. But that's just the family dynamics, man. You know, the thing is, whenever you do start to kind of talk about somebody who's died, especially someone who's died violently and young, it's easy to canonize. Sure. You really put them up on a pedestal and forget their flaws. And of course, I'm sure Kitty had tons of flaws, but she didn't seem to have any, from what I'm gathering, that were just terrible flaws or that made her, like, a bad person. She seemed like she was overall above average great person. Yeah. Agreed. So New York was getting too dangerous for her family, they thought, to have all these kids, so they moved when she graduated high school to New Canaan, Connecticut. And she said, you know what? I'm staying here in New York. I'm 18 now. I love it here. She got married for a brief time to a guy what was his name? Rocco. I don't remember his name. It's either Rocky or Rocco. And in the documentary, Bill tries to get in touch with him. He's like, really? Because he found out she was gay and was like, we didn't even know this. I think Rocco can help shed some light. And he very respectfully asked for his own privacy. He said, My relationship with Kitty will remain forever a mystery. Yeah, like, that's an odd response. It was. I think he just didn't want to I mean, if she was gay and they were married for a short time, he either didn't know and maybe felt the fool, or he did know and was maybe trying to do right by her in some way. Sure. Either way, he didn't want to talk about it. Right. But she worked as a secretary for a little while. She was a waitress for a little while. Eventually, she was a bar maid, bartender, and then became bar manager at a place in Hollis, Queens called EVs 11th Hour. That's a great bar name. Well, and from all accounts, it was one of those wonderful neighborhood bars open to 08:00 A.m.. Yeah. Where the people are in there getting soft pretty early in the day. Sure. And everyone knew everyone, and everyone loved Kitty, and she helped take care of everybody, but was very much an independent kind of firecracker of a woman. Sure. She red Fiat convertible. Her dad used to tease her about, when are you going to find the right guy? She was like, I make more money than any guy I would go out with. I don't need that. Which is, I guess, 1960s for dad. I'm gay. I'm gay. And I can't say it, but she did make pretty good dough as the bar manager. And then in March 1963, she met a woman named Marianne Zelenko at Swing Rendezvous. It was an underground lesbian bar in the Village, and they moved in together shortly thereafter. Yeah. And Kitty actually used to bring Mary Anne home with her to visit, but her family was all like, well, they're just good friends and roommates. Right. It's the early sixty s. Yeah. And there's an audio interview with her in that documentary that's really touching. She didn't want to be on camera, but Bill was able to speak to her. And I think what was so compelling about this documentary was that there was a search of a man looking for closure. It's a harrowing, sometimes almost unbearable to watch search stuff. I mean, he's at odds with his family here or there. He's just doing things where if you watch it in the context of the documentary and you just follow along the documentary, it all makes utter and complete sense. Right. But then if you stop and remove yourself long enough to be like, this is a documentary, which means this guy really did this stuff, and there was a camera following him along while he was doing it, I was like, I couldn't have done half of it. Oh, I know. At one point, he calls it an obsession, but he doesn't come off as obsessed. Right. Agreed. All right, so let's detail the crime, and then we will take a break after that. How does that sound? Yeah. All right. So flash forward to March 13, 1964. It's 315 in the morning, and Kitty Genevieve, as she often did, was making her way home from work late at night as a bar manager and was being trailed by a man. A man by the name of Winston Mosley yes. Who is definitely the villain of this story, but is not the only one that will turn out. Right. So Kitty was 28, and at the time she was killed, and Winston, her killer, was 29. Just turned 29, I think like a week or so before and I think you said this is March 1364. Yeah. He was married with a couple of kids. Yeah. His wife, Elizabeth, worked the night shift. She was a hospital nurse. And Winston's mother stayed at home with the kids. So he basically said, I own my own house, I've got a great job operating computers. No one even knows what I'm supposed to be doing with them yet, but I'm making money doing it. Yeah, he's a smart guy. So I'm going to indulge myself. I'm going to go out and stalk women and murder them in my spare time. That's what I'm going to do. So that's what he was doing on this night? He was cruising around looking for a woman to kill? Basically, yeah. That was his direct quote and questioning. Yeah, I was looking for a woman to kill. Yeah. So he saw at. I believe. A red light. This little red Fiat Convertible caught his eye and there was Kitty driving. So he started to follow her and she parked and she parked in the parking lot for the Long Island Railway. Which the parking lot went back up to the side of her apartment building. Which is a two storey tutor job that had shops in the bottom and apartments in the top. Right. Yeah. This is in queue. Gardens and queens. So he followed her on foot. At this point, she sees him and knows that something is going on. He has a knife in his hand, so she starts running. He catches up to her outside of a bookstore and stabs her twice in the back, right off the bat with this knife. Right. And she had been running toward a bar that she thought would be open, but it turned out, apparently there was a new manager and the new manager had closed out early. So when she stabbed twice in the back, it's on this darkened street, but right across the street, Austin Street, is a ten story apartment building with dozens of windows looking out onto Austin Street, where she's being stabbed in the back. And she screams, she cries out. I think she said something like, oh, God, he stabbed me. Help me, help me, is what they said. Basically definitively is what she screamed. And people who were witnesses to this recounted that one guy said that he was, I think, a ten or eleven year old kid who was inside one of the apartments in the Mowbreak apartment building and that he was awakened from a deep sleep. The scream was so loud, he said it was the loudest thing he's ever heard. Yeah. So she screams and a man living in the Mowbray apartment buildings opens his window. What's his name? Yeah, robert Moser opened his window and screamed out, hey, get out of there, what are you doing? And Moseley took off, running away. He's very frequently misquoted as having said, like, Let that girl alone. But even by his own words, in his own testimony, he said, hey, get out of there. Yeah. At any rate, he scared them away. Right. So in between that time, about 30 minutes passes, kitty makes her way around to the vestibule of her own building. Right? Yeah. And goes inside the vestibule. And you think the horror is over for her. She could probably survive these wounds. Right. Is in shock, I would imagine. And then Moseley went to his car, kind of checked out the building, saw that some lights had gone on, and reasoned to himself, no one's going to do anything. Puts on a different hat and goes back, finds her in the vestibule and finishes the job in the most horrific ways you can imagine. Yeah. He stabbed her at least twelve more times, I think. At least she was stabbed at least 14 times. He said he doesn't remember how many times he stabbed her, but he basically kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming. She was still alive. I saw that he attempted to rape her and I've also seen that he raped her. I'm not sure which one is correct. Yeah. But at one point, and this is really important here, as he's stabbing her and she's screaming in the vestibule, there's a staircase that leads directly up to a door. And behind that door lived a man named Karl Ross. And Carl Ross opened his door and looked down one single flight of stairs at Winston Mosley stabbing Kitty Genovese, who was bloody. There was no confusing what was going on. And he closed the door and he called his girlfriend, and his girlfriend said, don't get involved. Yes, I'm worried for you, just leave it alone. It's not in your business. And he did, he didn't do anything, at least for a little while. All right, so that's a good place to break here, and we're going to come back and talk about who saw and heard what and what they did about it right after this. You know, Josh, starting your own business can be really difficult, but developing your online presence doesn't have to be, right? Right. Because Google and Squarespace have teamed up to give small business owners what they need to succeed. Online checkers, accustomed domain business email and a beautiful website all in one place. That's right. With Google and Squarespace, you can stand out, look professional and increase your team's productivity. When create your Squarespace business website or online store, you're going to receive a free year of business, email and professional tools, all from Google. It's that simple. All you do is just visit Squarespace.com google and start your free trial. And while you're there, be sure to use our special GWiz offer codeworks works and you will get 10% off your first purchase. Google and Squarespace. Make it professional. Make it beautiful. All right, so at this point, Kitty Genovese is not dead yet, but dying in the vestibule. A woman did come down and was with her. Her name is Sofia Farrar. She's still with us. And she was a neighbor and friend of Kitty. So she went down there and apparently was with her as she passed away, tried to calm her down. Evidently did calm her down and likes to think that she at least saw a friendly face and that she was being cared for as she passed. Right. The weird thing is that is not mentioned. I guess we got to get into The New York Times now. Yeah. So after the murder, like, the next day, the Times ran four paragraphs on the Kitty Genovese murder. It was not incredibly newsworthy at first because that year there were 636 murders in New York City. Yeah. And that was just one of them. Just one. But a couple of weeks later, the city editor of The New York Times, a guy named Abe Rosenthal, who is a legendary journalist, was having lunch with, I believe, the police commissioner of the NYPD. And the commissioner said, did you hear about that Genevieve murder? This one for the books. 38 people standing around watch the whole thing. Nobody did a thing about it. Yeah. Now you've got a story. Hey. Rosenthal legendary journalist is like, thank you for that. Here's my Diners Club card. I have to go now and get the story done. So he did. He assigned it out to a guy. What was the original reporter's name? His name was Martin Gansburg. And they wrote on the front page I shouldn't say they wrote it was definitely all Gansburg, but he was assigned and definitely under the direction of Abrosenthal. Like, this is the story. 38 people stood around and did nothing. Yes. The title of the article was 37. It was 37 at the time. 37 who saw murder, didn't call the police. And basically, the entire article and the entire narrative from that moment forward for decades was a not about this woman at all. Hardly. Right. She became a symbol. B not necessarily even about the crime, but about the crime of these people who didn't the crime of apathy for these 37 or 38 people. But it was very much misconstrued in The New York Times to the point where in 2004, they all but wrote a retraction with new information. Because the original article, they said, like, these people witnessed it. That is not true. Maybe only a couple of people might have actually seen anything with their eyeballs. The other 35 or 36 may have heard someone screaming. They might have thought it was a drunken couple in their neighborhood coming home from a bar. There might have been some apathy involved, for sure, for some of them. But to characterize this as 37 or 38 people witness this horrific crime and literally shut their doors and windows to it was not accurate at all. Right. They said specifically well, the way that they put it was that the way the story read was that 38 people had watched this murder which took place. They misreported that there were three attacks, that the man had been chased off twice and came back two more times, but that this whole thing had taken place over 30 minutes, this long, prolonged attack, and that 38 people had just been sitting there watching it, doing nothing. And this is definitely a mischaracterization of what had happened. Like you're saying, for the most part, people were ear witnesses, not eyewitnesses. There were certainly not 38 eyewitnesses. And most people weren't in a position to do much, if anything, about it, certainly physically. But I don't know if you could call it like a retraction because the point that Abe Rosenthal, he never apologized for it, ever, even in the documentary he's interviewed. And he's like, I'm glad that it did what it did. Sure. The point is still there that there was apathy in that there were two people who could have done something and they didn't. But then, from what the other witnesses said, the scream was pretty clearly not a personnatching and not a couple fighting drunkenly. Right. That it was a violent crime being committed on this woman. And people still didn't do anything. Yeah, they misreported, possibly, that no one called police. Apparently, perhaps up to three people called the police, although police logs showed only one call came in. And it may be a case of these people now telling themselves, like, I called the cops. I did something, when they may not have they did not report at all that Ms. Ferrar had gone down to be with her. She was not mentioned ever. So I kind of went from feeling like, yeah, this bystander effect, it had good it led to the 911 being created, apparently, in some ways. And people study this in class and it raised awareness. So if they stretched it a little bit, then it had a good effect. That's what Abe basically, that was his position. That still is his position, but, well, he's dead now. Oh, did he finally pass away? Yeah, and then I finally came around and be like, no, the truth is what you should print. And if you're a reporter and you run a story, you should print the truth and not some sensationalized version of it to sell newspapers. No, absolutely. I agree with you. And I think the one thing that you can hang on a Rosenthal is that that story was definitely fashioned in a manner to be as sensational as possible, to shock and outrage the public as much as possible. But I still think it's rooted in the basic fact that there was apathy involved and that it possibly allowed Winston Mosley to finish the job that Kitty Genovese might have survived had somebody done more than just sit up, look out the window and go back to bed, or not even bother to look out the window. And like you said, Chuck, this had a lot of impact, because the story comes out in 1964, and for 40 years. It wasn't until 2004 that the time saw fit to go back and really re investigate. And they did. There was a great article called Kitty four years later. I think the author goes through and re investigates the case and really sets a lot of facts straight. But within that 40 year period, the effects that this murder had were just sweeping. It led to the establishment of 911. It's a big one. Sure. And it created this whole field of psychology that looks into the psychology of crowds and why we would just stand around. What is this diffusion of responsibility? None of that understanding existed until the Kitty Genevieve murder. Yeah, and weirdly, why is someone why is a solo witness more apt to act than a group of people? One thing I saw is that it's called social influence and that we take our cues from others. So if inaction is basically what is on the table right, then we're going to be inactive as well. If people are starting to move toward the problem, we'll probably join in, too. I could see that. Or people thinking like, either someone else is better equipped to deal with this than me, or I feel like someone else will do this so I don't have to. Yeah, a lot goes into play. It's pretty interesting. One of the less productive things that came out of it, though, is this idea that when you live in a city, in a big city, you put enough people together, everybody stops caring about anybody else. They're all out for number one. And Q Gardens became the center of this. Or just such a symbolic example of urban uncaring, I guess. And Kitty Jonas became a symbol of that as well. And the need to do something to act out to help other people when you see them need help. All right, so let's take another quick break here, and we're going to get back into what happened to Mr. Mosley and the further effects of this crime after this. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? 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You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with Cityadvantage. So a week after this murder, mosely was breaking into a house. He's not a good guy. No, he's a terrible guy. He was beyond being a sociopath and a psychotic, was just a burglar and he was just straight up robbing a house. One day of the television and one of the neighbors saw this call the cops. Cops came and arrested him. No, that's not true. What? The neighbor here's the thing. This is the great ironic twist of the Kitty Genevieve story. He went to a different neighborhood, he was robbing a house, and the neighbor said, hey, what are you doing? And he started to run from the house. The neighbor chased him and tackled him and held them until the cops came. Oh yeah, he called. That's how he went down. Intervention. Yeah. Not empathy. Intervention. A week later. Yes. Okay, so at any rate, he calls the cops, he gets arrested, and very like, matter of fact says that he killed Kitty Genovese. And not only that, but he killed supposedly two other women. A woman named Barbara Craylic. Actually, she was a girl, she's only 15. And then a woman named Annie Mae Johnson. And apparently both of them had been sexually assaulted and he was never tried for those, but he did plead not guilty by reason of insanity, which did not work, was sentenced to death and by luck of timing was able to appeal and the death penalty had gone away for most crimes in that time period. And he was recent to life in prison. Yes, supposedly the prosecution had withheld some evidence about his mental state during his sentencing, so he was able to get it reduced. So he was hanging out during his time and he was in Attica, I believe, and he had injured himself and was. Being taken to the hospital. On the way there, he got the gun away from the guard who was escorting him and took off. And for, I think, five days, he basically just the city of Buffalo was in mortal fear of the fact that the guy who murdered Kitty Genovese was now on the loose in their town. And they were afraid, rightfully so. He raped one woman. When the cops closed in on him, he got a hold of five people and held them hostage in a standoff that lasted for a little while with the FBI before they finally got to him. He was a bad dude. So they sent him back to prison and they said, you're not getting out of here ever. Yeah. He was later a part of the Attica Prison riots as well. And the one lady that he killed, he burned her alive. The family was upstairs and he broke into her house, raped her, killed her and burned her alive in the home. And the house went up in flames. Right. So he sounded like a true sociopath. There's ever a reason for killing someone, but it was always just at random because he wanted to do that. That's a lot what it sounds like. It was a self indulgence. So in the documentary, very powerful scene where the son I'm sorry, the little brother of Kitty who is told through his eyes, interviews and sits down with one of the sons of Mosley, and it's just like you cut the tension with a knife, obviously. It's just so, like, fraught with tension. And he had told his son that she was yelling racial slurs at him. He also said that he was just a getaway driver for some mobster and the Genovese family was related to the crime mob family, the Genovese family, and none of this stuff is true. And the brother was just like, hey, now, we're not related to that family at all. We have nothing to do with that. And he just gives them a look when he talks about the racial slurs. Like, come on, man, that's not what happened. So it was really powerful scene of these two guys kind of working it out in a way. I didn't see them working anything out. See, I did, which made it even worse for me. I thought there was some between them. They kind of came to a nicer place. Oh, really? Than where they started? I did not catch that at all. Maybe you skip forward or something. Maybe I was like, I can't take this kind of fast forward. Well, the son was saying, like, I think we need to know the song got you was saying that they needed to move on from all this. And then the brother was saying, I definitely don't the sons of the father aren't the sins of the sons. Yeah, he said that. So I felt like they were better off than when they started for having that conversation. I honestly did not catch that. Yeah, well, regardless, Winston Mosely, I guess after his first escape, the second little crime spree in Buffalo when he was captured, he apparently reformed himself, or he claimed to be reformed. He got a degree in prison. He wrote an editorial that The New York Times published where he basically said, I'm a changed man, and everybody said, oh, look at that. It's just about the time your first parole hearings coming up. This is great timing. He went up before the parole board and they said no. Yeah, he went up before the parole board again, they said no. He went up 18 times. 18 times. The parole board said no. I think the last one was just a couple of years before he died. But he died in 2016 at age 81 in prison. Yeah. And the brother tried to get an interview with him, and he said no, that he didn't want to be exploited anymore. And you could just feel this brother's pain of really wanting to try to talk him into it again. And basically the people that were the go between, like, yeah, you can try. We can't keep you, but he's not going to change his mind. Right. So he never got that interview. But I feel like he got I don't think he was looking for answers. I mean, in the documentary, he went back to many of these apartment windows just to look at what their vantage point might have been. He got an actress to recreate what the screaming would have sounded like from down there on the streets, which was very chilling scene. And I don't know that he was looking for like you said, he was odd with his family at times. You could tell the one little brother was like, man, this is hard on all of us, so you need to stop. Right. But I don't think he was necessarily looking for the closure, and that I want to find out for sure if these people could have stopped it. I think the closure comes more in the journey of learning about his sister and learning as much as he can about this case. Right. It's really interesting. It was very interesting that 2004 Times article, and then now this documentary has definitely exonerated Q Gardens as a whole. They said, now there's way more nuances, there's way more. But two people that have not been exonerated, a guy named Joseph Fink and a guy named Carl Ross. Carl Ross was the guy who lived at the top of the vestibule who opened his door. The ironic thing about Carl Ross is, if you notice, it says 38 witnesses, 37 did nothing. The last 38th witness that the Times is referring to was Carl Ross. They said he's the one who called the police. They call the police, like, long after Kitty Genevice was dead. He was actually, I don't want to say celebrated or whatever, but he was exonerated initially by this Time article when it turns out that he was one of the two people who could have done something and didn't. The other one was Joseph Fink, who saw the initial attack from his vantage point in the elevator. He ran the elevator in the mobile apartments across the street, and he apparently saw what was happening and left his elevator and went to bed. Yeah, that was that. But again, it seems like the overall feeling is okay. Other than those two guys, everybody else is fine. I just disagree with that. I think that there's a lot more that people could have done that didn't, and I just don't think that everybody's off the hook for that. Yeah. You got anything else? No, man. If you want to know more about Kitty Genovese, just search the Internet. There's a lot about her. But be careful what you read, because it's all over the place, frankly. And since I said Internet, it's time for listener mail fish fraud follow up. Hey, guys. I recently began a job as a marine fisheries observer nice. For the Department of Fish and Game and the Bering Sea. And just listen to your fish fraud episode. Each season, a percentage of vessels fishing here at least, are randomly selected. Have an observer on board to monitor the operations and by catch that come up in their pots or nets. The presence of an observer is admittedly a bit of a drag for this fisherman we have to put up with us skinny nerds. We are generally a great deterrent of any mischief at sea. But from what I have seen, most of the fishermen are really sharp, honest folks who know what they're doing. Of course, this is only a small portion of all the vessels on the water isn't going to solve that problem by any means. But you like to know that there is some coverage on fishing vessels and processors. Thanks for all the laughs, my dudes. That is from Kevin Alexandroitz in Olympia, Washington. What? Kevin had no idea. Did you did these people did that? There's basically like a sky marshal program fighting fish fraud on the high seas. Yes, we talked about that. We did, yeah. I don't remember that. Yeah, we were just like so infrequent and random. That what good is it doing. Sounds like he agrees in some ways. I guess so, but still. Have fun out there on the high seas. Don't get seasick. If you want to get in touch with us, like Kevin did, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comsteffyshow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@houseupports.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.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 charttopping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today you want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs. Better than leaving brands? 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How Fingerprinting Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-fingerprinting-works | The Babylonians, one of the earliest civilizations, were the first to use fingerprints to differentiate people, but it wasn't until the 19th century that prints were used for crime fighting. Ever since, analyzing, classifying and collecting fingerprints t | The Babylonians, one of the earliest civilizations, were the first to use fingerprints to differentiate people, but it wasn't until the 19th century that prints were used for crime fighting. Ever since, analyzing, classifying and collecting fingerprints t | Thu, 01 Aug 2013 15:02:54 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=15, tm_min=2, tm_sec=54, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=213, tm_isdst=0) | 33257506 | 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. 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. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke, and there's Charleston. We took Pride. And there's Jerry. There's some papers in front of me and Ikea lamp and a big old microphone, and it's all pressing in on me really hard. That means this is stuff you should know. That means Josh has gone on vacation soon. When the microphone is the size of a watermelon, it's hitting you in the face. Yes. I'm like it doesn't normally abrade my chin today, so yes. Chuck. Josh. How are you doing? I'm great. You got some fingerprints there. Let me see. I do. I have four on my fingers and one on each thumb. Yeah. Oh, you're one of those guys. Yeah. Let me tell you a little story about where your little fingerprints came from. Okay. Back when little Chuck was just a ten week old fetus, a certain point in 1970 well, if I was born in March of 71, then that would just go back nine months from there. Okay. Whatever that is, your little basal cell layer of your skin. You got three. You got the epidermis, the outer layer, the basal layer, which is in between. That's like, where all the new skin cells are produced. Then there's a dermis below that. Those are your three layers. About that time, your little basal layer started going haywire, producing skin cells at a much faster rate than your epidermis and your dermis, which meant that your basal layer was growing up against your epidermis and your dermis yeah. Squishing together. Yeah. And so when this would happen, when it would grow up against, say, your epidermis, it would create a point of contact, and that point of contact would create enough pressure so that your basic the layer would buckle a little bit. And what's weird about that was that your little basil layer buckled in what appear to be little patterns, little whirls, little swoops, little circles. But what's neat, Chuck, is at this point, within the next six weeks after it started, you had fingerprints that are going to stay the same for the rest of your life. Just beneath your epidermis. Yeah. The tiny little chuck fingers are now sort of tiny little man fingers, but they are the same fingerprints throughout my entire life. That's right. And you can, it's true, damage your fingerprints. Some people have purposely, which we'll talk about, but for the most part, since it's your basal layer, that's where the actual fingerprint is. Even if you cut your epidermis, which happens, your skin will grow back and your basal layer will remain the same. Your fingerprints will remain the same. That's a great way to end this. Good night. That was a great little story. Thanks. And I would grow up to be a sociopath podcaster with those very same fingerprints. I don't think you're sociopathic. I'm just kidding. So we're talking fingerprints and you mention the little ridges, little worlds, and we're not making these words up. W-H-O-R-L-S is actually what it's called. Right. Worlds, valleys and loops. Arches. Arches, yeah. Those are three. I don't know where you got valleys. Well, it's in the pattern, but that's not a part of the official fingerprint. Are you adding to the fingerprint classification? No, that's not a part of the classification. Okay. But each are unique, and we all know this because that's why they use fingerprinting as one of the biometric sciences, to classify people and identify people. Right. There's a one in 64 billion chance that your fingerprint will match exactly with someone else's. So get this. Francis Galton was the one who said that, and he was saying that through his classification system, legally speaking, as far as what would be admissible in court, probably there would be a one in 64 chance of matching people's fingerprints up. One in 64 billion? Right. Okay. He also thought that if you went down on more of a more granular level and looked at people's fingerprints, there were probably a better chance that people would have fingerprints who matched. Oh, really? And if you take Galton's kind of liberal view of matching fingerprints and you have a one in 64 billion chance of having matching fingerprints with somebody just looking like that's. Somebody just looking at the pattern. Sure. Since about 100 billion people have lived in the history of humanity, that means that there's at least one pair of people who've ever lived who had the same fingerprints. Wow. And that's if you subscribe to his numbers from 18 whatever, which may be overestimating it, our fingerprints may be slightly more similar than you think. Interesting. Yeah. Well, they are more unique than DNA because we all know, if you listen to the twins podcast, that twins can share a lot of DNA, but they can't share fingerprints. No, it's different. It's very different. All right, so let's get into this. Fingerprints are actually made of ridges, called friction ridges, and they have little pores underneath them. And it's the pores where you leak like sweat and oils, and that's actually what the mark you are leaving as a fingerprint is coming up through those pores at those friction ridges. Yeah. You're not leaving skin behind. No. You're just leaving a little bit of sebum. That's right. And they're really probably the most popular biometric right now because everyone's leaving fingerprints. Everyone's got fingers. Well, not everyone. They're easy to classify. They're easy to sort. They do mention this article that you could probably do the same thing with, like tow prints, but no one wants to ask all these criminals to take off their shoes and socks and tow prints, especially not just defecated in the backseat of the police cruiser. Plus, you're more likely and they didn't even mention the same article, you're more likely to leave a fingerprint than a toe print. Sure. They don't even put that in here. Right. A lot of people thought that was the most obvious. Yeah. You're not going to commit a crime barefoot. Some people do, but this is necessary. But nowadays it's virtually too late because we've amassed such a database of fingerprints that, like a bare footprint would be almost useless unless you had the person the suspect was about. One in every six people have their fingerprints on record. Yeah. And that doesn't mean that one in every six people have been charged with the crime. But there's a lot of ways that fingerprints make it into the fingerprint database. IAFIS. Yeah. What? People use them as signature verification these days to identify victims job applications? Sometimes. First time mine. Mine made it in because my dad took me to the public library to have me fingerprinted as a child. Really? Yeah. So now that we have your kid on file in case he ever goes missing yes. After that whole Adam Walsh thing. Oh, sure. That was it. Like anything anybody said, like, this could help if your kid is kidnapped or whatever. Parents just did it in the early 80s. My parents did? No, I don't think I'm on file anywhere. Really, with my fingerprints. That's good. Is it? I guess so, sure. Ma'am, your fingerprints are your own. Yeah, maybe so. And that is one in six people. And apparently the iPhone five s. The rumor is going to have fingerprint authentication instead of your passcode. Wow, that's pretty neat. We'll see. That's the rumor. We used to have laptops here that had that. Oh, yeah, you did. I never used mine. Yeah, I did. I thought it was pretty cool. Yeah. Thumbprint, right? Whatever you wanted. I think it was. Oh, really? Either your thumb, your forefinger or your middle finger. I would have done my big toe. It would have been like much easier. Isn't it obvious? Some cars now have biometric, I guess. Ignitions. Yeah. And we might as well talk about why that stinks. Yeah. Because in Malaysia yeah? In Malaysia, they cut off a guy's finger to get into his Mercedes. And that is a worry for police as fingerprinting becomes more and more used as authentication that people are going to start cutting fingers off to do so. Right. Did you say authentication? Authentication, authentication, authentication. Hey, don't get on me about words. No, I can't. Okay. There's one that won't bring up what the deleterious. Deleterious? I just say it in my own way. You made up a word. No, deletrious. It's not a word. It is. You're deleting it. Deletes things. It's negative. All right, if you off this case. So the biometric company who said, well, we can't have our customers fingers being cut off said, well, now we'll just add a little something that detects blood flow. So now our customers are just kidnapped rather than have their fingers cut off. Or the kidnapper doesn't know this. And you still have your car, but you're out of finger. Right. You should probably put, like, that kind of thing on ads on buses. Yeah. Or put it on your car. Yeah. Car will not start. A finger is detached. Yeah. Because think about it, that could be even worse. If the finger doesn't work, they go like, oh, maybe it's his other finger. And they just keep cutting fingers off. And you're like, no, it needs a pulse. Right. Hey, everyone, when you're running a small business, every second counts and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office, then? You could be using Stampscom. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right, from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. All right, so we talked about the friction ridges. Yeah. They're called friction ridges, remember, because they buckle up under the pressure of the friction up against the dermis. Yeah. That can't take the pressure. No. So it buckles, but it forms a specific pattern. And this is what the arrangement, shape and size and number of lines is what they're looking for when they're identifying and comparing these things. And there's three different patterns. There are loops, begins on one side, curves up and around, and exits the other. Yeah. Look at your fingers while we describe this. There are radio loops and Ulnar loops, radial slope toward the thumb owner toward the little finger. It's kind of intuitive to tell which way the slope is going. Oh, yeah. Because technically you could be like, well, no, I think it's circle in some way. You turn your head. Yeah. The aforementioned whirls are circular or spiral in nature, and arches slope up and down, and they're described here as narrow mountains. Yeah, it just goes I think that sums it up. Yeah. So those are the identifying marks on your fingers that you can see with the naked eye. And then if you're in law enforcement, they're going to be also analyzing something called minutiae, which you can't see within naked eye. No. And these are basically like further characteristics of the loops and whirls and arches. So you might have a spur, which is another whirl that comes off of a larger whirl, or there's an abrupt end to a ridge, or there's bifurcation or islands. It's like a whirl within a world. There's deltas, which are like ridges that form like Y patterns, just little stuff like that. And they all form this classification system that the cops rely on when they fingerprint you. And the forensic science of fingerprinting is called Dactyloscopy. That's right. Like Pterodactyl. Exactly. And I guess there are probably some places still that do it the old fashioned way and don't have digital scanning fingerprinting methods. Montana. Hello, Montana. They would do it like you've seen it on countless TV shows and movies. They would clean your hand off, dry it off with alcohol. Yeah. They want to get all the sebum off. Get all the sebum off, roll the fingertip. And then I usually say left or right, but I imagine you could do either way to get the ink on the finger, make sure it's fully covered. Then you roll onto the card from fingernail to fingernail, from one side to the other. And that is called a rolled fingerprint. Yes. You do this with all eight fingers and two thumbs, and then you've got your set of rolled prints. Then they take your hands and cover all your fingers with the ink and then just have you press it down flat at the bottom of this fingerprint card. And that's a set of flat prints which are used, apparently, to verify the role. Yeah, exactly. Just so they have two sets, basically. Yeah. If you live in the modern world and you live in a large city, you're probably going to have digital scanners doing the same thing. It's an optical scanner that basically put your fingers on there, and it threw magic converts that into digital data patterns. Right. And then they have programs that map those points. And basically it's sort of like you see in the movies. Yeah. And what's neat about the optical scanner is the picture that it makes is the inverse. Yeah, that makes sense. So it's a negative image right. With the world and everything had more light bounce off of them, so they tend to be lighter. Right. Whereas like the valleys and everything in between, the friction ridges are darker. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's more accurate than rolled prints. I might be wrong. You're probably right from what I've read. Sure. Yeah. Because when someone's like you ever seen First Blood? No. Stallone, the vampire show. No, that's true. Blood. Okay. First Blood, the Rambling. Remember when he was being difficult when they were booking him and he wasn't doing the fingerprinting? Right, right. They couldn't get good prints. No, because Ramba wouldn't stand for it. No, he doesn't take any crap. All right. There are two types of prints, visible prints that we talked of actually, we didn't talk about them. They're if you actually leave an indention in something a visible print. Yeah. Like dirt or clay or something. Blood or something like that. Blood. That'd be a good example. It's visible. You can look and say there's a fingerprint. Exactly. There's also latent prints, which we leave everywhere all the time. And those are the ones that are just made with the sebum coming out of our fingers, the pores on our friction ridges. And those are typically not necessarily naked to the human eye. Like if you look at stainless steel, you'll probably see some clear glass maybe. Right. But those are technically latent prints. They also can be invisible to the naked eye. And so they have to be dusted. Yeah, and they actually do dust with a little brush. I looked up the dusting powder, fingerprinting powder, and apparently most of it these days is proprietary. So like you don't know exactly what's in it, really? I just guess like carbon. Who knows, maybe. I know. You should formulate your own Josh's Fingerprinting daughter. Market it to some local law enforcement enforcement agencies. Yeah, I'll sell it like snake oil or something like that. Uncle Papi's patented 81 blue ribbon fingerprinting pattern. So they lift the prints, these Layton prints, and those are obviously the prints too, that you see criminals and TV shows and movies always trying to wipe off with a hanky. Right. Very wisely. Yeah. I wonder if that really works. You want to get into that? Do you know? Yes, it should. Okay. It should work. From what I understand. I read this one paper that was basically like we should not be using fingerprints in court any longer. Oh, really? First of all, we have DNA now and DNA is objective. It's like this protein sequence is the same as this protein sequence. Right. With fingerprinting is subjective. Even though there's an extensive classification system, I think that this print matches up to this print. It's not quantitative, or if it is, it's not enough quantitative enough. Also, there's so much faith placed by the public in fingerprint analysis that fingerprinting people who do this work frequently are matching stuff. Like they're taking a great roll print and comparing it to just the worst smudge print on the planet, where you can be like, I don't get that because I'm not a Dactylastropist. Right. But I'm sure that somebody who is that could figure this out. And supposedly that's a lot of faith that we're placing into people and that now that DNA evidence is becoming more and more available and prevalent and widespread, it's starting to show. Like, fingerprinting actually probably put a lot of innocent people behind bars. And we really shouldn't rely on it anymore because even if you have a great print that you took a latent print and a great tactile octopus, right? Yeah. And there are plenty. Sure. Like, they're not shysters or frauds or crooks, because of course, even within their profession, a lot of them are like, there's a lot of recklessness going on here that you're never going to have a really great latent print. It's never going to be good. And so you're working from a deficit every time. Right. And you're also comparing it to a roll print. And a roll print is also not the same as another roll print made right after. Like, you can take somebody's finger and roll it from fingernail and fingernail, pick it up, put it on the next little box, roll the same finger from fingernail to fingernail, and you're going to have basically two different prints. Yeah. So that's in the olden days before they had the digital scanning, though, right, but those are still the ones on file, I imagine. Yes. And I feel like we're probably still dealing with the same deficit. The paper I read was from 2005 or seven, so it's not like it was old. And they're saying, like, this is still going on even with the advent of digital scanning. Plus, I think as well as I do, when you're in court and the attorney yells at the top of his lungs, his fingerprints were found all over the murder scene. Right. Your toast. Well, yeah, and I think that a lot of perpetrators, too, think that, like, if they have your prints while you're dead, that's it. And they have you dead to. Right. So you might as well confess. And I'm sure it's a great tool for confessing. Yes. I wonder if anything like that actually thwarts people from committing crimes. I wonder if anyone ever stops and goes, boy, now with DNA, I would think so. Just wipe down a crime scene. If I drop a hair on the carpet, then I could be nabbed. Sure. I would think that's a pretty good deterrent. Yeah. I just don't know in the criminal mind how that operates. I'm sure it makes them operate a lot less sloppy than it used to. That's a good point. All right, let's talk a little bit about the history because it's pretty interesting, I think in ancient Babylon, they actually press fingertips and clayded for some business transactions pretty advanced. I mean, thousands of years ago, people already understood. Fingertips are unique. And of course, the Chinese were always ahead of the game on everything. It seemed like they actually used ink on paper for business transactions and to help identify their kids. Like my dad. Yeah. I thought it was kind of weird, though. Can you not identify your child? Oh, well, if they grow up, if they're kidnapped and taken to another village, I guess. So they grow up in return to claim a birthright. Yeah, that's a good point. Sure. It wasn't until they didn't use them for identifying criminals until the 19th century. And there's a series of events that sort of just not necessarily connected, happened one after the other to sort of advance it at the same time. The first, in 1858 was a guy named Sir William Herschel, an Englishman who was chief magistrate of the Hooghi District in India. And he started recording fingerprints when signing documents. So that's kind of the first thing. Right. Then you mentioned Henry Faults. He came around next Scottish doctor. Yeah, I guess he got into Japanese pottery and noticed, like, the fingerprints left behind by the artists, and he started getting into fingerprinting. So he wanted to create a classification system and said, Well, I'm not going to do it myself. I'm cousins to Charles Darwin. I just asked him to do it. He's pretty good at that. And Darwin said, I'm kind of busy, but I have another cousin. His name is Sir Francis Galton. He's going to be into this galton. He's a Eugenesis. I wonder if Darwin was like, god, another classification. Cousin Henry again. Right, let's pass them off to cousin cousin Frank. So, like you said, he was Eugene, and I feel like we talked about him before. Didn't he pops up here? There. He was pretty big in this era. Yeah, he was the first dude to really start kind of collecting biometric information on people, not just fingerprints, all kinds of stuff. Right. And being a eugenicist, he decided that there was a perfect human and we should selectively breed ourselves. That's right. We're not promoting his work, by the way. Although in 1892, he wrote a book called Fingerprints, and he outlined his system the first time it had ever been done, and it was based on the system we know today, arches, Loops and Whirls. And then in France, a guy named Alfons Bertillon. No, he's made maybe four appearances in our podcast before I knew I knew that name. He was at the same time using his own system called Bertill NAJ. And anthropometry is basically what he was doing. Yeah, because, remember, he was working in the Paris Police Department and he saw the same criminals come and go, but they use aliases. So he'd advised a system of measuring their face and head and their ears and all that stuff. Police sketches. He was definitely in that one. Yeah, definitely. And one of them also was fingerprinting, too. But his system was extremely exhaustive. Even though it was adopted by the London police, I believe it was really time consuming. Sure. But he was advancing the art, like eight of them at once. Yeah. And then about the same time in Argentina, a police officer named Juan you want to try that vusatik? That sounds good. Doesn't sound Argentinian. But in 1892 he actually used fingerprinting. This is an 1892 in a case to convict a mother who had killed her two kids when in fact she was saying it was her boyfriend. He actually matched fingerprints and she confessed. And like you had your first case right there would actually be used to convict a criminal. Yeah, that was the first time it ever happened. 1892. In Buenos Aires, I think. What, the following year? Yeah. 1893. A guy named Sir Edward Henry, he was the commissioner of the police department. He became interested in using fingerprinting to fight crime and he came up with a classification system that further extended galton. He came up with, I believe, the Minutiae and I guess the kind of the comparable point that we rely on still today. It's called the Henry Classification system. And when you see on TV fingerprint fed into a computer and like it flashes through for some reason all of the fingerprints that it's matching them against. Bet is using the Henry classification system that this guy created in. That's pretty awesome. In one. Scotland Yard established the fingerprint bureau. It's first one and then they use them as evidence the following year for the first time. And then the year after that in New York, they started using it in state prisons and then the FBI said, it's not a bad idea, let's get on board. Exactly. So everybody is getting on board. The Henry system really allowed a system of classification that could be used anywhere to be devised and it was adopted. The problem was it was extremely time consuming too. Yeah. You're matching paper to paper, basically and you're doing it with a magnifying glass. The computer systems that we see today on TV, those are going through millions possible matches. Even if you had like a thousand, how many detectives would it take to just look through a set of prints, your control prints and then another print to find a killer or something like that? From a latent print. Yeah. They call it Minutia for a reason. Exactly. I imagine those guys went kind of nuts. Yeah. And that's if they even had a fingerprint on file, like they were counting on someone having because at the time it was only criminals had fingerprints. They probably were like, this looks like a man's thumbprint. Yeah. Let's go through all the thumbprints of the men we have on file, see if we can catch somebody who's thummy. It was much better if you could catch a suspect, print them and then compare it. But that's not necessarily what they were doing. Luckily we created computers to be our mindless slaves at this kind of stuff. And starting around the 70s yeah. In Japan, the National Police Agency was the first one to use this kind of automation in the 1980s. And they created the Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems APIs. It's slogan was Warm, fuzzy happiness. That's what it says in quotes in their name, the Automated Fingerprinting Concern. So they used it in the US. To great effect, although the problem was it wasn't integrated. Like, they didn't share information between agencies or between districts of law enforcement. So you're kind of stuck with whoever you had on file. Right. Even though it was computerized. Yeah. A particular police department, maybe even a statewide police department. If you're lucky, you could buy APIs, an APIs system. That was your APIs system. Fortunately, the FBI said, hey, there's this awesome thing called the Internet. I say fortunately, if you're a criminal, not necessarily fortunately, or you're into privacy and all that, but the FBI and I think created the integrated APIs, which basically plugged all of these databases together and created one huge database that the FBI maintains screwed up their acronym, though. IAFIS. Yeah. It's terrible. Yeah. So, yeah, now there's one in six Americans who has their fingerprints on file in Iapis. Yeah. And I think they say it takes about 30 minutes, as little as 30 minutes to scan against everyone in the entire country at this point, including mug shots, criminal histories, 47 million people on record. Yeah, that's not bad. Including you, my friend. Yeah, you better keep that hanky on you at all times. Wipe down my prints. Wipe down your prints. I could also just stay on the straight and narrow. Oh, yeah, that's true. Although I do wipe my prints down. Just to be sure. Should we talk a little bit about other biometrics? Even though we've covered some of the stuff? If you want eye scans, yeah, they're really expensive. The retinas and the iris are also unique, but they're just super expensive. So the only place you're going to see those are in high security, like, expensive facilities? Well, it depends. The retina scan is extremely detailed and tough. The iris scan supposedly is much quicker. Oh, really? And you're more likely to find those. It's cheaper too. Yeah. Okay. A little more prevalently, but still. You're not going to find that at your average hardies. What about Carl's Jr. Though? Maybe. Okay, ear scans. Apparently ears are unique in size and shape and structure as well. I think they use this, too, for scanning crowds as well. Like part of facial recognition is scanned ears. Interesting. Yeah. Slap, dash. Scary. Okay. Voice fingerprints. There's an audio lab the FBI operates in Quantico, Virginia, and when there are messages from supposed known terrorists, they run it through their program, and it does a pretty good job. It's not like a fingerprint, but they can do a pretty good job with vocal analysis at. This point. You could also use this if you're, like, say, contacting your bank in Geneva by phone. Your bank may use some sort of voice print analysis to say, okay, you're you sing your favorite song, right? I wonder if they do what they do have you say I'm sure it's just your name but it'd be funny if they had you singing snippets sure you give love a bad name all right, bye, Chuck. And then DNA. Of course, there was just a ruling last week in the Supreme Court. Oh, yeah? They ruled five to four, that DNA swabs can now be taken at the time of arrest for serious crimes. Is that right? Yeah. So for serious crimes, I thought the whole route over this was that it was like, they can just take them from anybody. Well, no, it says for serious crimes, the whole route is the fact that it's a police officer doing it, and you're not at the police station with a trained DNA analysis. Got you, analyst man. Analytics. What is wrong with me today? Anal rapist. In the ruling, they said that they've essentially found that it's the same thing as fingerprinting. So now cops are going to have little mouth swab kits in their cars. And it was a five to four ruling. It was close, and some people are up in arms about it, saying it's civil rights infringement, and the end of privacy is what we're witnessing. It's sad to see tough words, nobody's doing anything about it. That NSA whistleblower gave up his life, basically. And everybody's like, wow, I guess I always suspect that was going on anyway, right? So, anyway, fingerprints? Yes. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right, well, if you want to learn more about fingerprints, you can type that word into the search bar athoustofworks.com and since I said search bar, that means it's time for message break. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office when you could be using Stamps.com? Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No longterm commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Now it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this. Let's help this young lady raise some money for cancer, okay? We don't do this a lot. We get a lot of requests and we can't do them all. We wish we could, but Whitney spoke to me. She's been listening for years. She's a big fan. She has started as an undergrad and now she is wrapping up her second year in law school at the Ohio State University. Yeah, I know you like to hear about awesome charities. I wanted to share this unique one here in Columbus, Ohio. Palettonia is a bike ride that raises money for lifesaving. Cancer research, 100% goes raised by riders, goes to cancer research at the James cancer center at Ohio State. Especially to me because my grandmother got cancer treatment at the James when she did not have health insurance and she was proud that they could use her rare case to potentially help find a cure for others. Nancy passed away in 2011. She was fighting her cancer in the course of a single day, though at the age of 65, she began having severe dementia like symptoms. We are not sure why symptoms left her unable to mentally compete with the cancer without her willpower and understanding that she had an extremely rare terminal cancer to battle, her health went downhill quickly. Still, her inner dignity shine through even with a drastic drop in body weight and repeated trips to the Er. So in memory of her grandmother, she is riding for charity. She's raised $215 right now and I think we should bump that up a little bit, our listeners. That's great, man. So I created a little tiny URL of her page, http tinyurl.com mrmkxixv so that's mrmkxixv or tinyurl.com. And that is Whitney Bromlin's bike ride page. It goes down. August 10, I believe. Yeah. And that'd be cool if we could raise a little extra dough for her. Yeah, everybody gets you there 100% of the proceeds. That's pretty good. So it's one of those things where you can get like $5. If you want dude to skip that latte today, I'd say and donate to Whitney's college. Yeah. Way to go, Chuck. Whitney. Way to go, Whitney. And way to go, you for donating. We're proud of you already in advance. Agreed. If you want to let us know about a charitable organization you care about, we're always down with that. We'll try to let everybody know about it in turn. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com wtnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. You can join us at our home on the web@stuffutheanow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetuffworks.com. This episode of Stuff you should Know is brought to you by YouTube geekweek. Tune in to find your channels at YouTube. Comgeekweek. 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 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." | ||
43d31b4c-53a3-11e8-bdec-af1bcafa6c16 | Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Mobile Phones | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-mobile-ph | Today we deep dive on mobile phones, wonders of the modern world! | Today we deep dive on mobile phones, wonders of the modern world! | Thu, 23 Jul 2020 13:55:51 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=13, tm_min=55, tm_sec=51, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=205, tm_isdst=0) | 54619848 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, friends. We have a book coming out finally, and it is awesome. You're gonna make me say the title again? Yeah, fine. It's stuff you should know. Colon an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And and get this, Chuck, you don't have to wait to order until the book comes out. You can do what we in the book biz call preordering it. And then when it does come out, you'll be the first to get or among the first. Well, and not only that, you get a preorder gift. You get this cool custom poster from the illustrator of the book, Carly Minnardo, who is awesome. We worked with another great writer who helped us out with this thing a great deal. His name is Nils Parker. And it was just a big team effort. And it's really cool. We love how it's turning out. Yeah, we do. So anywhere you can buy books, you can go pre order the stuff you should know colon and incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And then after you do, you can go on over to Stuffyshoodreadbooks.com and upload your receipt and get that preorder poster. So thank you in advance for everybody who is preordering. That means quite a bit to us, and we appreciate you, stuffyoushoreadbooks.com preorder now, welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of Iheartradios How Stuff Works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles. W Charles. Charles in charge. Bryant. Man, we might need to take this one over again, Chuck. I don't think I've ever laughed like that in my entire life. Yeah, and you can't link me to Scott Bay. Oh, God. Oh, that's true. Because of his acting, I don't like him in real life. I'm just kidding. I know he was great as Bob Blah blah. That's true. I'll give him that. Okay, that's the common ground. We can all reach on Scott Bay, blah blah. Yeah. So this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast not about Scott Bayo, but about something that I would wager there's about a 96% chance that Scott Bayo has used that's right. Cellphones. But before we talk about cell phones, we do want to address a geez a controversy. I hope not. We got a book coming out this fall. The stuff you should know. Colon not these stuff you should know. I always get this wrong. What's my problem? The rock stuff you should know. Colon a great book about lots of great stuff. Is that what it's called? You came up with the title for Peaksake. I know. I always get confused when I'm in the moment. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. We've been plugging this pre order gift, which is a cool little custom poster, and we just learned recently that if you live outside the US. As of now, that is not available to you. And we're trying to make that available to people outside the US. And we're working on it. And it's more complicated than you would imagine. It really is. We don't like things to be complicated. We just like to be able to say things and then they become true. Yeah, but that has not happened in this case because we've run into the juggernaut that is international intellectual property rights. Yeah, it's weird. It's different, but we're trying to but we don't want to dissuade people outside the US. From pre ordering, because pre orders are very meaningful to book sellers and book buyers, and it means a lot to us. But at the same time, Chuck, we just laid it on the line to not cheat people out of something they thought they were going to get. So I feel like we're stand up guys here. We're doing our best. Yeah. So we'll try to do what we can, but in the meantime yeah. You're still going to get the book even if you don't get the poster. How about that? Yeah. And the book is really kind of the good part. Sure, the poster is cool, too, but the book is really what's going to knock your socks right off of your feet. That's right. And one day you will even be able to read this book on your mobile phone. Segway complete. I mean, period. Period. So we are talking mobile phones, and this is like such an enormous behemoth of information, we just first of all have to say hats off a million times to our buddy Dave Ruse, who managed to whittle this down into a manageable shape and still a pretty comprehensive shape, if you ask me. Yes, I agree. And he starts off with stats, which is one of my favorite things because I always wonder how many people have smartphones and cell phones at this point. And 96% of Americans have cell phones in this day and age. I imagine adults and a lot of kids, but I would assume this is an adult average, I would think, for everybody, because kids have their own phones these days, too. It's nuts. Yes, but I don't think they would factor in, like, three year olds, would they? If the three year old has a phone, why would you leave the three year old out? You know, I'll tell you what, I got a five year old and she can certainly use it. Yeah, but there's that whole screen time thing, too, that you got to be concerned about, too, right? No, not really. I mean, not all day long or anything, but we grew up on screens here. Just creditor. That's true. Let me ask you this, though. So is she Generation Z or is she something brand new? Oh, I don't even know. I don't know what gen z is. That right behind Millennials. Yeah. No, I don't think she would be then. I don't even know how that stuff works. It's all fake. Well, we'll find out and report back sometime. So one thing I want to throw in there, though, Chuck is. And by the way, generations are not fake. We did an episode on it. Yeah, it was a good one, too. And I think we conclusively established that they are real. But the worldwide cell phone ownership is something like 61.7%. Wow. Yeah. And that's cell phones, though, like smartphones, it's less, but it's just a little less. Especially considering that smartphones have only been around a relatively short time compared to cell phones, which, by the way, as we'll see, have been around since the think it's smartphones in 2019 was about 81% in the US. Up from 35% seven, eight years previous to that. Yeah. And I think it's about 45% worldwide. So a lot of people have a phone, I think is the overall point we're trying to drive home here. Yeah. And we'll get into phone addiction late in the episode, but I did see stats that people look at their phone and check it 80 times a day and touch it 2600 times a day. And the math there works out to about 35 touches per check, which seems about right. Okay, that makes sense. I thought touch is like when you reach for it and touch it. People did that 2600 times a day. Yeah, but then they only actually interacted with the 35 of those times. That's what I thought. Now I think it's 80 times. You'll pick it up and touch it 35 different ways. Which is? Never mind. I'm not going to make that joke. But it's like Kamasutra esque. That's where I was headed. It wasn't really the way to put it. Did I really read your mind? Well, it was sexy in nature. Sure. Okay. Sure. Well, if I can't read your sexiness on your mind, I don't know what I can read about you, you know, and you're just in one ear hole. That's true. Same to you, buddy. Left or right? Mind your left or your right? I have an earbud in my left ear, and we don't even look at each other when we do these. You're on my left right now, too. That means we're in love. Yeah. Kamasutra style. So I think we should dive into this history. I frankly thought all of this was super fascinating because I learned a lot of things, and a lot of it was just simple stuff that I never knew what G stood for. LTE or a lot of this stuff. I just never really even knew what it stood for. I know. It's pretty awesome. So we can finally tell everybody the G and all of the cell phone and cellular technology stands for Gary. I thought it was Grandma. I had different research. No, it's Gary. So you have first Gary, second Gary, third Gary, and so on, all the way up to five Gary, which we're about to really start to get into. Yeah. Five gary started coronavirus. It did? How so? Well, that's one of the conspiracies. About 5G out of all the wacky conspiracies about 5G that's right. Is that it started coronavirus and then was put in place to keep people at home while they secretly go out and install a bunch of 5G things. That's how the world works. So the five Gary is all five Gary's fault. This Gary guy, we need to have a talk with him. Especially because in reality G stands for generation. Sorry, Gary. Which makes a lot of sense. But a generation is not just like it's often applied to specific technology like 3G. iPhone is the third generation iPhone but it was technically a second generation mobile phone which gets a little confusing. But when you're talking about mobile phone technology and you're talking about generations, a generation basically defines all of the underlying technology from the network to the actual devices that are designed to operate on that network. That typically describes a generation when it comes to telecommunications technology. And they can come really fast, they can come achingly slow like the 5G is right now, but they do come eventually and they seem to be worth waiting around for because they have advanced us by leaps and bounds as far as being able to sit around and touch our phones 35 different ways 2600 times a day goes. That's right. But we can go back to zero G. If you want to talk about the origin of a phone that was mobile we have to go back to the 1940s and this sort of made me think of army phones and like the phones I was like what were those things operating on? And the ones in the tent that you see with the general are wired but the ones out on the field worked on radio waves and my dad actually had a couple of those when I was little that we use when we were camping. Really? Yeah, it was neat. It was sort of a later model. It wasn't like a World War II thing that was a big block with a handset that you stick on. It looked like a giant walkie talkie. Basically. I think I've seen what you're talking about. And I mean that kind of technology is just basically used the same kind of radio waves that you would use to broadcast like say a ham radio except it was a much more portable technology and actually we use that technology like analog radio wave technology for our cell phones up until I think basically the 2000 maybe. So this initial we weren't lugging around these clunky radio phones, we weren't using radio phones that are basically like mini radio broadcasters but we were using the same form of technology which is an analog radio wave. That was the whole thing. But what set the radio phone apart from what would later become a cell phone is the kind of network that the radio phone interacted with. Right? Yeah. The first radio telephone network was in St. Louis in the mid 1940s and that just had one radio tower, could handle about 25 calls at once. And they're routing this thing. Operators are routing this thing to landlines, basically, or other radio phones. But they were like, this has got to change if we want a mobile phone, we got to be able to call from anywhere. And then. I think 47 Bell Labs was working on a project. And a man named Dhring. Believe it or not. Wrote a memo based on some. I guess. Research by a guy named an engineer there named William Ray Young that said. Hey. What we need to do is build a network of these towers. Lay them out in a hexagonal pattern. And they'll just hand off basically. As you move around. They will hand off the signal to the next tower. And that was the first sort of network created right. That would make a mobile phone, an actual mobile phone. You didn't have to basically stand just in proximity of that radio tower. You could move around, you could actually be mobile. And that was what did you say? Yeah. That's created, I should say the idea was created it was a long time before it was actually created. Yeah, because that memo, it was just a memo. It was published internally only at Bell Labs. But it is definitively the first idea for a cell phone network. But it wasn't until, like you said, a little while later, until the some more Bell Lab engineers, a new generation of them, if you will, a new Gary of Bell Lab Engineers. I have a feeling that's going to stick. It came along and they said, hey, this is really good. Let's figure out how to actually make this work. And so they took Dhring and Willy Ray Young's design and turned it into the first actual here's how you do it kind of paper and research. And I couldn't see that they coined the term, but they seemed to be credited with, if not coining the term cellular, at least describing something that would very soon become known as cellular, because it's not the phone that's cellular, it's actually the network. Yeah. And here's the thing, actually, here's two things. At your next dinner party in two years, you can be this guy or that guy, and that's gender neutral, of course. Sure. You can be the guy that says, you know what, they call them cellular networks because they were laid out in a grid, this hexagonal grid that looked like cells in the human body. And people will say, that's so cool, I never knew that. Or you can be this guy who says, technically, it's a mobile phone communicating over a cellular network, not a cellular phone. Right. Don't be the second guy. Don't be that guy. No, I mean, he's right, and he'll probably get into heaven just for being right all the time, but people won't like them here or there. You've got a cellular network that's starting to be developed in the guess word started to get out because I guess the FCC started working with Bell Labs and they started to say, okay, we're going to build this network. Everybody gets to making devices that can work on this. But it turns out I don't know if they were inspired by it or if it's just kind of like a sidetrack or this is all going on at the same time. Like there seems to be some sort of ripple in the zeitgeist at the time that everybody wanted to develop a mobile phone network. And it wasn't Bell Labs in conjunction with the FCC that created the first one. The first one wasn't in America. It was actually, as far as anyone can tell, the first genuine mobile phone network was in Finland. Their audio radio poohlin I think I just nailed because I made it sound like Burke at the end there. Yeah, they were the first ones and they have the advantage of being much smaller, obviously, but that was the first nationwide mobile phone network in 1969 and by the late seventy s, I think they had everything covered with 140 stations yes, and 35,000 users in the mid 80s, which is not too bad. There's nothing worth sneezing at, but it's still technically not a cellular network. It's a radio phone network because they just had a bunch of radio phone towers that were placed far enough apart that you can kind of move around. It was not a cellular network. So we do go back to the United States now and find the first cellular network developed in the world, as far as I could tell. But astoundingly as that word got out that everybody needs to start developing devices that could work on cellular networks, they actually got the car ahead of the horse and the first cell phone actually debuted before the first cellular network in the United States. Yeah, it seems like I've never had a Motorola, but it seems like they've always kind of been on the forefront of things without a lot of hoopla. Like the Razor was a big deal and I think they had the first brick phone and bag phone. Even I didn't know about the bag phone, but they definitely had the brick phone. The one that Zach Morris had the Dine attack was the very first cell phone to, at the very least, ever make a cell phone call in the United States. Yeah, that was 1973. And this guy, Marty Cooper had been an engineer there for a long time and big competitor with at and T, obviously. And so he took this two and a half pound phone that's ten inches long, everyone knows that great, beautiful brick phone and went out on the street corner in Manhattan supposedly, and called Joel Ingel, which was one of those two guys I don't think we mentioned them by name who kicked off at and T's program. And he was, I guess, sort of the arch rival at Bell Labs. And he called him up, and I don't know what he said, like, hey, sucker, what do you think of this? Yeah, chump, want to peel yourself off of the ground and get to work for me? And I saw there's a great popular science cover from July 73 with that Dynata phone on it, and it said the new did you see this thing? The phone or the cover? The cover. No, I haven't. It said, the new take along telephones. And I just thought how funny that would be if that stuck. And we would be like, have you seen my take along? I can't find it anywhere. Calling it a cell phone. And we had the exact same kind of cell phone. Like it never evolved past the Dyna tek. That would be even better. And by the way, another story in that issue was solving the mysteries of the northern lights. Are they God? Sources say yes. So we've got, finally, the first cell phone. We still haven't gotten the first cellular network. Apparently, Marty Cooper possibly made a call in Manhattan connecting to a radio tower from Bell Labs. We're not sure, but he still came up with the first cell phone. It wouldn't become a genuine bona fide cell phone for a few more years, though, until 1983. And I say because we finally reached the first generation of cellular networks. Chuck, we should probably take a break. All right, let's do it. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using Stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Okay, we just left, friends. From zero G to one G we're finally Gary to one Gary We're finally at our first Gary, and he's doing great. 1983, he's showing a lot of chest hair, got a couple medallions. He's just auditioned for a new show called the Ateam. Doesn't get it, but he still feels pretty good about the work that he put in in the audition. I was just trying to call up Face, his name, the actor who played him, Dirk Benedict. Oh wow. Is that it? Yeah. I just see Gary like going Dirk Benedict always getting my parts. Well, they looked a lot alike. They did. Especially in 1983. And like you mentioned earlier, this was still on analog radio signals at this time, right? No, it's not great. Yeah, you're right. I'm sorry. Yes, it was analog signals. Did you just say, you're right, I'm right? Yeah, everybody wins. It was analog signals. But now these radio towers were all part of a genuine cellular network. So yes, you're right. And it was analog for sure. Yeah. Which is analog is great in a lot of applications. If you're talking about guitar amps, tube amps and things like that, analog is great. And record players and there's a good argument to be made for analog technology. But if you're talking about cell phones, they can only handle a certain amount of calls. There's like virtually no security. You can tap into one of those calls back then pretty easily if you know what you're doing. But it was the first attempt. It was from what I saw, the sound quality is actually clear. But the problem is it's clear because there's not as much loss because you're not compressing anything. Right, that makes sense. Yeah. And so analog had a lot of drawbacks and it still has a lot of drawbacks whenever it's used, but it would stay that way for quite a while actually, I think until the early 90s. So we went from 1983, where the first cellular network was set up by at and T, into the early ninety s. A good decade where everybody was just using analog cell signals. And finally sometime in about 1991 or two, the second generation came along and this is an enormous leap forward as far as telecommunications technology went. Like zero G to one G was kind of edging forward and it was mostly about the creation of the cell phone and then figuring out how cell phone network would work. 2g was like, okay, let's see, we can do with this puppy in taking a dumpy loser short order cook and turning them into Dirk what's his name? Benedict. Yes. Hey, I don't want to insult any shorter cooks out there. No, those are my favorite kind. You know who I was describing as Barth from you can't do that on television. I thought you're going to say the guy from Alice Vic Tabak was not dumping my friend. So 2G, what they did was they digitized everything and they squeezed all that stuff down and all of a sudden apparently could fit about ten, and this is a rough estimate, but about ten digital phone calls into that same bandwidth as the one analog call. And this is a big leap forward. And this was in Europe is where things got started and also where text messaging got started. I didn't know what SMS stood for until yesterday. What did you think it stood for? I had no idea. I just never tried to figure this out. I never thought about any of this stuff. Yeah, it didn't really matter enough to me to stop and think about either. I have too much to do. You want to tell everybody what it stands for? I want you to. No, I think you should. All right. It stands for Short Message Service, because the first text could only be 160 characters. Sounds familiar. This was, like I said, rolled out in Britain. And when I think back to my first European trip in 1996, that is when I first saw widespread cell phone use, was in England. Yes. I was like, what is going on here? It wasn't ubiquitous, but a lot of people were using cell phones in the mid ninety s. Yeah. And using them to text, too. Right. I guess I didn't know what texting was at the time. Sure. But they had the ability, too. Yeah. You may spend some time in Japan in the she said it was just nuts what they were doing with cell phones. Especially texting. And then came back to the States and had to wait. Like. A couple more years before it really caught on here because apparently it was the epicenter was Europe. Thanks to some engineers with what's called the Group Special Mobile. Which was formed back in the like. Create. Like. A Europe wide cellular network. Well, one of their engineers created SMS, so it started to take off there. But apparently it took off in particular because of Vodafone, which is like a pay as you go phone service. And the first SMS message ever sent was sent in 1992 by a Vodafone engineer, from what I understand. Yeah. And was that the one where he sent Merry Christmas to his boss? Yeah, he did. And his boss said, I'm Jewish, you're fired. Right. Get back to work. Yeah, but you mentioned the pay as you go. I think that sort of democratized it in that all of a sudden you didn't need a credit check or you didn't have to have this recurring monthly payment drawn from a bank account or credit card or something. If you had some money, you could get a phone a lot of times for free and just pay for the calls and the text that you made. And that really made it spread kind of far and wide. Yeah. And if you were a criminal, you could pay for your phone in cash and use it until you figure the cops had a beat on you and trash that one and get another one. What are those called? Burner phones. That's right. So the SMS started to take off in part because, like you said, the cell phone itself was democratized, but also because they started adding alpha numeric keypads, not just numeric keypads, because initially when you wanted to text, you had to just use a keypad. Just like you remember when you had to spell out something with a rotary phone like ABC were associated with one. You had to do that. And so everybody's like, I'm not texting. And in fact, at first, apparently in 1995, if you're in America, you sent about .4 texts a month. You didn't even bother to finish an entire text or even half of the text in a single month. And then just in a few years, five years, four years later, it was up to something like, I think, 35 texts a month, which is still piddly compared to today, but you can see how much it took off because they started to add those alpha numeric keypads. Yeah, I was way late to texting. I remember when I was working as a PA with my little handheld Nokia, which was great because when I first started PA, you had a pager and they would pay you and you would have to stop and find a pay phone and call the production office. You have this Nokia. And all of a sudden I could talk to them. But I remember them sending me text occasionally. And I was one of those like, I'm not going to take time to go hit number one three times if I want the letter C, right? And when the smartphones came out, I wasn't even texting it for a while, and I was a little annoyed that people were texting. And I was like, I don't want to do that. Can you just call me? So I was kind of a hold out, and finally I was like, all right. And I gave in. And now I totally see the value in it. Sure, you don't have to talk to anybody. Exactly. You can have long fights on a text. Sure, man, that's the worst. Those are pretty bad. Do you remember those lamos who associated texting with being girly up until no. Oh, yeah, it was a thing. Was that a thing? Yeah, it was a thing. Now, girls text. Yeah. So I'm not going to text because I'm not a girl. And then now they associate recycling and other eco conscious things with girliness, which is super healthy for our society. Got you. Okay, I know who you're talking about now. But ironically, they express their disdain for recycling via text to other dudes. So maybe they'll eventually come along and now they take pictures of their barbed wire tattoo on their bicep. Are people still doing that or is that just a throwback thing? Oh, I don't know. I just saw a funny meme today that said, your anti masker starter kit, and it had a barbed wire tattoo, a pair of oak leaves sitting on top of a head, a goatee, and then those big chunky white tennis shoes that I'm not even sure who makes them. But you know what I'm talking about. I think every brand there is makes them has one of those. Those are the ones that float with disarticulated feet in what's that body of water off of British Columbia. Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. Hey, one of the best starter packs I ever saw. It was the oh my gosh, that smells amazing. What are you cooking? Starter pack. And it just had a picture of a garlic and a picture of an onion. We just love that so much, man. Is that a meme starter pack? Yeah. Okay. I don't know about any of that stuff. Apparently you do because, you know, like the antimasky starter pack thing. Hey, I just saw it today. Breaking news. Good for you. You should text it to somebody. Yeah. So after text, we're still not done talking about text. Everybody just buckle up. Because at first, if you wanted to text somebody, like you said, you had 160 characters. You couldn't even text from your phone. Your phone could get a text like some dumpy barthesque pager. Right. But you couldn't actually do texting even if you wanted to go to the trouble of just using your numeric keypad. So eventually we started to leap forward. The big leap forward was going from SMS to MMS, where all of a sudden you could now text more than just text. You could text pictures, you could text music, you could text all sorts of stuff. And the person on the other end had to spend days upon weeks downloading a single file that you sent. It would frequently get interrupted. And it was one of the most aggravating things you could possibly engage in. But it was like the promise of this future where this wasn't aggravating and it was ordinary in everyday to do. Yeah. And the first camera was the Sony Erickson T 68. I had an attachable camera, which is adorable. And I remember seeing some of those early picks that were very cruddy and grainy, very small and small, but it sort of just married the idea of a camera with a phone. But I have to say, man, when I look at those old when I see that Sony Erickson, I've long for that thing. Oh, you can get those. They're called dumb phones. And a lot of people, as we'll see, are kind of making the switch over to that just because they just want a phone that can maybe text, maybe take a picture and make calls. Well, I found one that I might get. There's something called the light phone. Have you seen that? No. So the first version of the light phone, I think you could make calls, and it had maybe a clock and an alarm, and that's it. And the idea was that you use it as a companion phone so you still have your smartphone, but leave that thing at home. A lot of times when you go out take this light phone and engage with the world. And now the light phone two is out and it can actually text and it has a clock and I think minimal direction. No apps at all still. But it does have Bluetooth and a headphone jack and it's meant to just sort of replace the smartphone for people that are kind of done with the distraction of it. I don't know, man, it sounds like the light phone is going down a slippery slope here. Yeah, I mean, I started looking at my phone, I was like, what do I really need? I would want to call, text and take pictures. What about email and directions? And get email. Right. And I think I could live without the rest. What do you use for directions? What app? I just use the Maps app on the iPhone. I use waze almost exclusively. Yeah, because I almost never walk. Atlanta is not a huge walking town, so when you drive, Waze is definitely the preferred app. Well, I don't ever drive very far, so Ways doesn't really come. But I'm looking at all these dumb apps and all that stuff. Could wait really, for me. Oh, totally. They're distractions. Yeah. I could wait till I get home to check my laptop for the most part. So I need a web browser, phone, text and email. I could probably do fine with that. It would be nice to have ways, but you can always just get like a yeah, but the web browser is all those things. The app just makes it easier to do. No, it's true. It is true. I guess. Yeah. I'll give up my web browser. Okay, you don't have to. No, I don't have to do anything. Too late. I already said I was going to. All right, so let's get back to it here. Where are we here? We're at we're at three Gary's, I think. Yeah. So second generation leapt ahead in a lot of ways, and then third generation basically took it and kept going. And this was the generation that really said, oh, yeah, that whole texting video and pictures and music and all that, that's a really good idea. How can we improve on that? If the second generation was all about kind of leaping forward with these bright ideas, the third generation was all about perfecting them. And this is where the first smartphone started to come in. Yeah. I feel like this is when they were like, everyone really loves the Internet, so let's put it in your pocket. Exactly. Because everybody was really super into the Internet in the late 90s. Everybody's like, I love this ask Jeeves thing. He knows everything. I love Lotus Notes, CC or whatever it is that email application. People were into the Internet and this idea of moving it onto your phone, it just seemed like a good idea to everybody. Isn't it so weird that we can already have nostalgia for early Internet isn't it weird that there's entire groups of people who are now adults that have never lived in a world without the Internet? I know. Hey, actually, hold on. I need to go get my web van order. Your what order? My webvan order that's going on today. They were just ahead of their time. Oh, yeah, of course. Poor guys. So one of the big things that allowed the third generation to move everything forward was there were some people working on how to get basically faster speeds. In the late 90s, there was something called the Third Generation Partnership Project, and they created two things that really kind of changed everything. Something called wideband Code Division, multiple access and high speed packet access. And basically these were just ways that figured out how to take the information that you were sending, compress it, and transfer it into smaller pieces so that you could transfer more information faster, which is the whole point of moving forward generally from generation to generation, figuring out how to move more information or data at faster speeds. Because the more you can do those two things, the more connected the world can be, the faster everything moves. And that's just basically the steps that we just keep taking with each new generation. Yeah. So 3G brought around a true mobile broadband network, and it really kind of set the stage for that first smartphone. Even though in the mid 90s we did have the Simon and we had PDAs and stuff like that. Yeah, the Simon was pretty awesome, actually. Yeah, it's kind of cool. But did you look it up? Oh, yeah. Okay. I liked the Simon. I mean, it was genuinely the first smartphone. It was from 1994. I had a touch screen, for Pete's sake. Yeah, I had an interactive touchscreen screen. Yes. But in 2007, with the launch of that first iPhone is when that first big splash was made, because of a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest was the introduction of the App Store and apps. Right? People still use their apps, but at first I remember just all those dumb apps that everyone was just like, look at this super cool app that does this really dumb thing that you'll do once and then never do again. The laundry minder. Yeah. And now, like, my apps, I have a lot of them, but they're all just useful interactive things like Venmo or my Sonos app or my Delta app, stuff like that. None of them are. I feel like the early apps were just kind of dumb. Yeah, for sure. But I mean, that's how technology happens. Like, somebody has an idea, it's not the best idea, but it's a proof of concept. And then other people say, oh, that's a great idea. That in particular was a terrible idea and you need to retire, but we're going to take your idea and convert it into something that people actually want. That's how it happens. That's how it happened with devices. That's how it happened with the networks. That's how it happened with apps, too. Should we take another break? Sure. All right, we'll take another break, and we'll introduce you to a little guy named for Gary right after this. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? Then you could be using Stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page, and enter code stuff. Okay, we finally reached the present, actually, sadly, because we entered 4G in about 2009. We've been languishing in hell there since, because we're technically still in the 4G era, and the 4G era didn't do a lot except increased speeds, and it increased speeds a lot. But that's really basically the defining characteristic, between four G and three g. Yeah, it was about ten times or is about ten times as fast as 3G was. And what this brought about, kind of the big thing it brought about, aside from just transferring pictures and stuff quicker, was you could actually finally stream HD, like live sports and HD movies and stuff like that, if you want to watch something like that on your phone, which I never have or want to, but a lot of people do, for sure. And the big technology associated with 4G is called LTE, which stands for long term evolution. Didn't know. That great. And LTE. At least in the US. It's the big 4G technology. But LTE basically runs on two kind of breakthroughs in data transfer technology. One is called orthogonal frequency division multiplexing can you get a glavon, please? And the other one is called MIMO multiple input multiple output, which makes a lot of sense because basically what it is is multiple antennas on your device, say, your router or your phone or whatever, and it transfers data from the device and accepts data incoming to the device at the same time. It doesn't switch back and forth. Like, do you remember back in the 90s, early 2000s, when you could watch data transfer going on. If you had something uploading and downloading at the same time, you could watch your computer's. Little taskbar. That's not what it's called. What's the thing? The bar that kind of grows? Status bar, maybe. Status bar, yeah, you could watch it flip between uploading and downloading. Well, that all went the way of the dinosaur when MIMO became prevalent or widespread, because you could do them both at the same time without sacrificing speed, which made your transmission speeds a lot faster. Yeah. So MIMO is the human centipede of cell phone technologies. I forgot all about that movie. Like, I literally forgot in my head that that movie existed. And it was a good one, too. I didn't see it, but when I saw multiple input, multiple output, that is the very first thing I thought of. Somehow you should see it for sure. I think every human alive should see Human Centipede at least one time. Every human over the age of 18? Sure. How about this? Every human that has a phone. Oh, boy. So technically, my daughter has a phone. I gave her my old phone and took everything off but the camera so she could take pictures and stuff. Very cute. She's like, Why is this cracked and you never fixed it? No, it's not cracked. It actually works pretty well. That's impressive. Honestly, I've never seen a cell phone that is not in use anymore, that doesn't have a crack screen. Oh, really? Well, you should come over some time and she'll take a picture of you. Okay, I think that's the deal. You can throw it down and break it. All right? Be like now you're normal. I told you so. The big advantage of 4G LTE, of course, is capacity. And that is basically how many calls you can serve at the same time. And that's a big problem depending on where you are. I remember even in recent trips in the past couple of years to New York and La. Thinking, why do you people even have smartphones? Because none of you can use them. It's so lame how slow it is. DC's is pretty bad, too, actually. It's just really slow because there's so many people all trying to use data. And I mean, on a transmission frequency, like, there's only so much bandwidth. And if you out in Des Moines, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters in Des Moines, really, but there's so few people who are trying to use it, comparatively speaking, that you can have relatively good transmission rates in New York. They have a huge network, but there's so many people trying to use the network at once, it just drags the whole thing down. And everybody's Internet is really slow for now, because I would suspect, if it's not already going on, new York will be among the first cities that are ushered into the true bonafide age of so the one big thing, or actually two things, that 5G is going to help with. We mentioned capacity. The other thing that 4G improved upon, that five Gary's is really going to improve upon is lower latency and latency is that delay when data is bouncing back and forth across the network and you want a low latency. And 4G LTE has a latency of about 20 to 40 milliseconds. Real time is 50 milliseconds. And that's what they're hoping that those five Garry can accomplish. Right. And so the big deal with 5G is that it uses a completely different range of the spectrum, the broadband spectrum. Right. So it uses between the 30 and 300 GHz range and it's called the millimeter portion of the spectrum because the wavelengths between those ranges are about 1. So that's why they call it the millimeter wave portion of the spectrum. And because there's so much bandwidth between 30 and 300 GHz, you can have a channel that takes up something like 800 MHz. Right. That's a huge, enormous channel. And because you have a huge, enormous channel and you have a bunch of them, what that now allows is that big next step forward of the same progression, which is transferring a whole bunch of information at really high speeds. Again, that's the progress of all telecommunications these days. It's where we're going. And so this 5G changeover to the millimeter wave spectrum is going to allow that. So we'll be going from, what did you say, like 20 to 40 millisecond latency? Yeah. To something like less than 1 second for latency, which is like happening in real time. Basically. It's reality as if you were standing there watching something a foot away. It might actually even be faster than that. Yeah. So I guess the idea there is you can send someone a song and you send it and they get it and it's done. Sure. If you really want to set your sites low, yes, that is what it would do. It just sounded like a grandpa. I don't know what happened there. You could send a picture of your light phone to your neighbor and they'll get it immediately. The bad part, or I guess the drawback about those signals is they don't travel that far. They travel about 800ft. So the idea with 5G is we'll have these big cell towers, but then there will also be thousands of little tiny well, they're not tiny, but small low power transmitters kind of all over the place. Buildings on rooftops. I guess they'll climb pine trees and nail them in those. But I think also remember our episode on the Internet of things, how it's all made up of sensors and transmitters and just stuff that's aboard everything. I think that those will also double as transmitters too. So it's kind of like, you know, those mesh networks that you can put together with your home router? I got one of those. Okay, so I think it's basically that, but on like a national or global scale. Where because of all these different sensors and interconnected wireless transmitters, everything will have that, which means everything will be connected, which means we'll be living amongst one big mesh, which means just walking into your kitchen will give you covid 19. That's right. And I think in about 35 cities right now, they have the high band 5G, as opposed to the low band 5G, which I think the low band is just sort of working off those 4G LTE towers. And the high band will be this meshed network, I guess, right, where everything is connected. And because of that incredibly low latency where things just are communicating back and forth just faster than you can even describe it. We'll have things like that genuinely connected Internet of things where everything is constantly monitoring everything else in the background and our world is perfect. Basically. Which actually it sounds funny. But the Internet of Things is going to be the thing that lays the groundwork for an intelligent AI that can run the Internet of things for us in the background. That can control things like the weather or the temperature of the beach. The water at the ocean. Like just stuff that we can't even begin to conceive of that will lay the groundwork for that. In the shorter term, we're going to have things like smart roads where your car is communicating with other cars so that you just aren't going to get in an accident because that low latency and ubiquitous connectivity means that a car will never come in contact with another car because they're communicating with one another constantly while you're sitting there reading the paper, traveling in your car. That will happen very soon. That's probably a ten or 15 year off thing. Or you'll just be sitting at home going, oh my God, Chuck just sent me a song. Oh, wait, he sent me another song. He sent me another song. Yeah. Or augmented reality. That will be another one. Remember we did an episode on that? Yeah. And I was very skeptical, and always have been, about AR and VR kind of overtaking the world. And there's an argument to be made that it hasn't yet because something like 5G wasn't around and the data speeds weren't where they needed to be. But I'm still skeptical for the reasons I outlined previously. I think we talked about that in the actual episode, too. Yeah, we did. So you mentioned about people being addicted to smartphones and that's a common concern, I think. Nicholas Carr back in 2009 wrote a really great Atlantic article. If you've never read it, go read it now. It's called Google making us dumb. Yeah, great. Legendary article. So that article, he basically says, like, I can't remember if we did an episode on it or not, but basically he says, we have changed our brains the way we absorb information. It's much more shallow, it's much less deep. So yeah, maybe it is making us stupid that kind of taps into this idea that we've become addicted to our cell phones. Not so much that they're making us stupid, but that they've actually kind of rewired our brains in a way so that we rely on them to essentially get happiness. From that. We get hits of dopamine from things like getting a text from somebody that we're hoping for or hearing that we got an Instagram. Like basically everything you can get a push notification for it's set up so that it maximizes whatever hit of dopamine it might release in your brain. And just on that very basic level answers the question whether we're addicted to our cell phones or not. And the answer is absolutely yes. It's actually designed that way. Yeah. And I don't have any push notifications set, and I wasn't trying to make some stand against it. It never occurred to me that I would want to know when someone made a comment on an Instagram post or whatever people get notifications for. Right. I'll see that stuff when I go to those apps, and it's fine, and I get my dopamine reward. That way my cell phone just doesn't make any noise unless someone's calling me or texting me. Yeah. And in fact, I think people should hear what my text is. Can you text me real quick? Sure. What's your number, jerk. Hold on, I'll just hold it up. And here's my text tone. Okay. All right, here it comes. Did you hear that? Was it Dirk Benedict? Yeah, that was me. It's pretty great going text my end. Yeah, that's what I hear when the text comes through, and I hear ring, ring, ring, ring it's. You saying ring, ring? Yes. In a British accent. I got to figure that out cause I have my ring tone on, like, the regular one, and I usually just have my ringer off all the time because I don't like sounds coming from my cell phone either. But when it is on, it's like, jacked all the way up because I forget to turn it down, like, say I'm mowing the lawn or something like that. And you may, like, jumped out of her skin yesterday and finally was like, okay, I'm actually trembling here. Can we please come up with another ringtone for you? So we went over and came up with a much more peaceful one. It's just a normal ringtone, but it's, like, very tranquil. It's not like that ringing sound. So it should be all good now. I'm happy to report everybody. Yeah, I've got text, man. I've got ring, ring. And then the only other custom one I have is for Emily. I just got her to record her yelling baby. So whenever a text or a call comes in from her, I know it's her. Very nice. And that's it. Those are my ringtones. Those are great ringtones, Chuck, but just to kind of put a button, as they say in Silicon Valley, on the dopamine hit from your brain. That in of itself is an entirely different podcast. I promise. I vow we will take up some days because it's definitely interesting. It's worth looking into in depth, but in the meantime, just look up, say, Tristan Harris and some of the articles that were written on him in the last couple of years when he was making the news cycle. And that'll be a pretty good entree into that subject if it floats your boat and you're wondering why you can't stop looking at your phone even if you want to. Yeah. And in the meantime, that's mobile phones, everybody. Take it or leave it. It was free, so just take it and stop complaining. Agree? I said stop complaining. It's time for listener mail, which also is free. I'm going to call this stalking us, but not really. Hey, guys. Been listening to a couple of years and it randomly happened upon your show. One particularly boring day at work and I was hooked. Your funny, charming way of explaining sometimes quote, boring topics got me through a rough time in my personal life and work. Much happier now with both. Although my new job, I don't have as much time to listen. I just want to say thanks for being those familiar faces during a crappy time. But I was listening to the Insidious abuse of stalking and I had to giggle myself. As I listen to you guys every day, I feel as if I know you quite well and couldn't help but stalk you both on social media. Chuck, welcome to Instagram. Thank you. Chuck the podcaster on Instagram. I hope you don't think I'm a creep, but it's nice to see a glimpse into your personal lives. I think that's what Instagram is all about, right? That's what it's there for. Look into my personal life, creeps. A little peek. I'm looking forward to your book coming out in November. Although slightly pissed, I can't get the pre order post in the UK yet. I think we just addressed that net. She's drunk. Slightly drunk, but she can't get it. And can I ask, once the pandemic is over, you guys come back to England? I'd love to take my dad and sister to see you guys live. Definitely. Yes, absolutely. You can see us probably four or five years from now. Yeah. And she says, Cheers, Nat. PS. Keep those pet picks coming on Instagram. Nice, Nat. Thanks a lot. We definitely will do that. What are you at? Chuck the podcaster and instagram. Chuck the podcaster. I'm at Josh Clark. You can find us both. You can find our pets. You can find a little peek into our lives. I'm enjoying it. That too is free as well. Yeah. Again, much appreciated. Nat will definitely be over there in the UK again someday. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, like Nat did, you can send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show." | |
20dc1556-121b-11eb-85ed-a323c9d49ac4 | Short Stuff: Dog Suicide Bridge | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-dog-suicide-bridge | A bridge at the town of Dumbarton in Scotland has a terrible reputation as a site where dogs inexplicably leap to their death on the rocks 50 feet below. There is no shortage of theories why, but none fully explain it. | A bridge at the town of Dumbarton in Scotland has a terrible reputation as a site where dogs inexplicably leap to their death on the rocks 50 feet below. There is no shortage of theories why, but none fully explain it. | Wed, 03 Mar 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=62, tm_isdst=0) | 12221591 | 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, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, ARF, Clark, and there's Charles, Ruff, Bryant and Jerry. Oh, no. Roland is out there somewhere, too. You put us all together. You have a really weird Scottish type mystery for the short stuff. That's right, the mystery of the Overton Bridge. That was great. You suddenly turned into like a character that the Scooby Doo gang would meet toward the beginning of the episode. Who set everything up for him. You know, when we did our tour of Edinburgh, I met a dog there. I met a very kind lady on a walk through town, and she was walking her dog that looks sort of pit bullish, and she was just so friendly, and I love that accent, so I'll do anything to get them to talk to me. And so I engaged her and her dog, and I went, oh, what's the breed? And she went, oh, just a wee staffie. Staff at your territory. That was great. I remember you telling that story because you were saying that you were missing your dogs because that was toward the end of that tour. I remember hearing about that dog. But this dog did not leap to its desk. No, it's good. Probably because it was nowhere near Dumbarton Scotland. Or maybe Dumberton. Let's go with Dumb. Probably Dumberton. Not Dumb. Barton dumb American is more like it. Exactly. Dumberton Scotland. Yeah, it's way better. There is a bridge there, the Overton Bridge, like you were saying, and it's really beautiful. It's made of stone, nice, very ornate. It's not the longest bridge you'll ever see. It's pretty short, actually, and it's fairly low. But it does cross a substantial gap, something like 12 meters, or about 50ft drop into a ravine, a little stream with rocks and all sorts of stuff below it. So there's a good reason for that bridge. And it's also not the oldest bridge in the world. I think in the mid 19th century, it was built to connect this estate that had just been built there, overton house, to the rest of the town. So it was a pretty useful bridge, too. But it is now considered widely considered a haunted, supernatural death bridge by the locals in Dumbarton. Yeah, and mainly because of the weird thing that has happened dating back to the least. As far as we know, there have been many cases and we don't know how many I've seen. There was a terrible website that said 600, and I was going to read some of it, actually, but then I felt bad because it was in very broken English. So it was either a bot writing it, or it was someone who doesn't speak good English. Well, we have a good 20 or 30 years before you need to empathize with bots. Okay. It was pretty funny, though. But they reckoned about 600 other people have said in the 100. Some people say fewer. But dogs leaping off of this bridge evidently unleashed. This is a very easy way to stop this. I mean, that's kind of the elephant in the room, but I guess it's a quaint bridge, and it looks like a pretty lovely small town, so maybe people can just walk around with their dogs off leash. But these dogs leaping at 50ft and many of them dying, many of them suffering bad injuries, supposedly one of them jumped from the bridge, survived, and ran up and jumped off again, man, which is just crazy. That second time is on the owner, if you ask me. Yeah, jump from bridge once, shame on you. Second time, shame on me, the dog owner. That's right. I saw in the New York Times article on this that they seem to think that there is at least 50 that have been definitely documented. So this isn't just like local legend. Like this is known to happen. This actually happens. These dogs are jumping to their deaths off of this bridge. And it's a really weird thing that no one has been able to explain, and we won't be able to explain it, but in 2010, the Dumberton council, the city the town council, contacted a behaviorist, animal behaviorist named David Sands and said, hey, can you come help figure this out? Because we're actually a fairly superstitious town. And right now the prevailing theory is that it's the White Lady of Overton, the ghost of the widow of the son of the guy who built Overton house, that's causing these dogs jump, and it's giving the White Lady of Overton a bad name because why would she want to do that? Why would you want to have all these dogs die by their own paw? I don't know. Maybe she just always thought dogs were just so stupid, so now in death, she's amusing herself by making them jump. All right, well, let's take a quick break here. Wait, no. That was a terrible cliffhanger. Let's say something happy and positive instead. Rainbow bright. Rainbow bright. Okay, go ahead right back and talk about David Sands right after this. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. 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Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. All right, so they bring this animal expert over there, David Sands. He visits this bridge. I love how this article says he concluded first that the dogs weren't doing this on purpose. Yes, I think suicide is uniquely human. If not mistaken, he earned his money right out of the gate. Someone will probably prove me wrong. There's probably some animal that does this, but certainly not dogs. Well, don't even bother writing in with Lemmings, everybody, because we debunked that years ago. That's right. So he had a couple of things to say, one of which was that the way the bridge is built and part of it has to do the tapered edges of the bridge. Part of it has to do apparently, I saw somewhere else that the foliage around it creates a little bit of an optical illusion that looks like you may be able to just run right off this bridge on the ground. I was surprised when I looked at the bridge. I thought they were slipping through a trestle or something on ground level. But it's a wall. Like they have to jump up and over right. Thing. Right. Which is totally on the owner. No, totally. It is. Like you said, the dogs that are the victims of this are the same dogs that belong to people who like to show off how cool their dogs are, that they don't need to be on a leash, that kind of thing. But the dogs inevitably go up and approach another dog or get too close to somebody who's scared of dogs. It never ends very well. But, yeah, the dog does have to jump over this wall into a 50 foot drop below. Right. The second thing that he came up with was he said, I think that it could be possibly just some of these smells down there driving these dogs crazy of these animals. He reckoned it was mink urine. I did see where one local hunter said there's no mink around here. Oh, really? That's what one local hunter said. But then I don't know who the official body for animal. I don't know if it was rescue or just preservation or something SPCA. Oh, is it the Scottish SPCA? All right, well, I think it was an official from there did say that where these dogs are jumping, specifically on the bridge. He said there are lots of mice, squirrel, and mink nests. So they refuted this hunter at least. Yeah. So I guess the theory from Sands and Sands also points out that the dogs that are jumping are by and large, dogs with long noses that are scent dogs. Scenting dogs, hunting dogs. That they would be more prone to pick up on a bunch of scents or respond to a bunch of scents like mink, especially mink urine. And that that combined with this potential optical illusion that there is flat ground right on the other side of this wall is what's causing these dogs to jump. That's probably what it is. Apparently they even did a little testing and mink urine just makes these dogs crazy. So here's the thing. Yeah. That would seem like the most logical, reasonable explanation. But then the next question you have is why is it just this one bridge? Why is that not a thing all over Scotland or all over the world? Wherever there's mink or there's whatever kind of animal is going to set off a certain kind of dog? What is it about this one bridge? It doesn't fully dismiss Sam's theory. It just suggests that there's some weird combination of things here that we haven't quite put our finger on yet. Yeah, totally. You did mention the White Lady of Overton haunting the place. There is also another kind of storytheory that in 1994 there was a man and this is just terrible 32 year old father threw his baby off of this bridge because he thought his baby was the Antichrist. The baby died the next day and the father was committed to an institution, obviously mentally ill. And some people say that they're jumping from the same spot that this man threw his baby from. But this was in 1994. It's been happening since the 50s. Yeah. It's just kind of like an eerie addendum almost. I think so. Or some people, I think, think like, oh, it is supernatural. And this man was responding to the same thing the dogs are. And the celts, actually, who used to live in the area actually had a name for this kind of thing. They called it a thin place, which is where the spirit world and our world kind of overlapped, where the fabric between the two was thinnest, which is pretty interesting. And then in that supernatural camp, there's an author named Paul Owens who wrote The Baron of Rainbow Bridge. And from what I can tell, Owens book basically says and also, you have to see the cover of this thing. It's adorable, but also insane. Like, he photoshopped dogs jumping, like, in mid air and made it look like they're jumping off the bridge. And for some reason, Vladimir Putin is dressed like a stage magician in the background. It's a very odd cover of a book. I'm looking now. That's weird. Doesn't that guy look like Putin? He sort of does, but from what I can surmise, Paul Owens thing is he's kind of mashed up the Rainbow Bridge thing, which is, I guess, what pets follow into the afterlife with, like, real life and somehow suicide. I guess he thinks the dogs are actually purposely taking their lives. And like you said at the outset, that's a human thing. That's exclusively human because from what we know, we're the only ones who can conceive of what a life is. And so therefore, we're the only ones who can think of ending that life. You know what I'm saying? Like dogs, as far as we know, dogs and other animals are not capable of that. What do you think of the whole Rainbow Bridge thing? I don't know anything about it. You've mentioned it before. It ended up in the book, I think was where I first ever saw it, and I haven't seen it. Is it a book? A kid's book? No, I actually don't know the origin. I just know that that's something that some people say, like, your pet has gone over the Rainbow Bridge or whatever. I don't subscribe, obviously, it's not supposed to be real, but it's a little kind of goofy and hoo hoo for me. But if that's your thing and that makes you feel better and stuff, I'm certainly not making fun of it. It's not for us. I got you. So, yeah, I have no opinion about Rainbow Bridge, but don't get me started on Rainbow bright, you got anything else? Yeah, nothing else. So the mystery remains, which is our kind of thing. We love that. Hopefully you do, too. And that means, everybody, that short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is the production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts to my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
SYSK Live from SXSW: How UFOs Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-live-from-sxsw-how-ufos-work | In this episode, Josh and Chuck ditch the studio and head west -- south by southwest, in fact -- to record a live podcast in Austin, Texas. Tune in and learn more Stuff You Should Know about SXSW and UFOs. | In this episode, Josh and Chuck ditch the studio and head west -- south by southwest, in fact -- to record a live podcast in Austin, Texas. Tune in and learn more Stuff You Should Know about SXSW and UFOs. | Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:10:41 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=16, tm_min=10, tm_sec=41, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=90, tm_isdst=0) | 36334113 | 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, with a little extra echo is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Hello. How are you doing, Chuck? I'm well, sir. Yeah. Anything slightly unusual today? We are in a different place than normal. We are in Austin, Texas. Yes. Are you guys from Austin that are cheering, or is that just enthusiasm? Yeah. Keep Austin weird. That's the motto. Is that right? We're doing our best. I should probably say to those of you listening on your ipod, chuck's talking to people who are watching us podcasts right now. Yes. It's not insane. They got a laugh track after three years. They got a laugh track. It's a little red box after three years. So, yes, we're doing a lot of podcasts. This is a little different for us. I'm normally not so sweaty from being stared at when we record, but I'm getting a little more used to it. I'm fine. Yeah. And I lost my coffee, so I'm going to get really dry. Oh, you don't have coffee? Yeah, I'll be okay. Boy chuck. Josh, have you ever heard of the X Files? Oh, yeah. It turns out a lot of that was true. Really? Yeah. Well, okay, so not the whole child healer who may or may not be, like, killing people, like, the compartmentalized versions of the X Files, but the overarching thread with the aliens. Yeah. It's not like the shapeshifter episodes, according to how UFOs work on how stuff works.com. That's probably true. Well, you know, I'm a believer. Are you? I'm in the fox mulder camp. Okay. Although he's Hank Moody to me now. California. Okay. Got you. I thought you would always be fox moulder, and now right. I see. Nods. He's Hank Moody now. That's a huge changeover. It is. Yeah. I thought Hank is having a lot more fun in California now. I'm sure there's a lot of brooding on X Files and not so much dirty stuff. Well, okay. So let me give you some examples. So, the X Files, we're going kind of retro here, right? Because UFOs is very ninety s and very forty s and even ancient. Ancient, exactly. So have you heard of the ancient Indian Sanskrit scriptures? I have. So I'm sorry. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Jessica. I got the first peep. All right. Okay. In these ancient Indian Sanskrit writings, there is a description of an airship, and it actually talks about how this airship can go forward and backward and vertically very quickly, and a man can travel by sky in a very short time. And the weird thing is, these texts were written, like, way before they were supposed to be airships, right? Yeah. It's called the Vamanos. And they described things like a great flying bird made of light material. They even describe a mercury engine with an iron heating apparatus underneath. So they get really specific about how it can move and how it operates. And this is not anything that should be happening. Oddly specific, right? Yeah. Allow me to continue. In 1211, it was written that a group of people in England were at church one day, and there was a loud crash from outside of the church. And they all go outside. They're all very dirty, I'm sure. They go outside and they look up, and there's an airship. Again, you're going to notice airships keep popping up in this How UFOs Work podcast. And it's anchored like an anchor has dropped into the steeple above the church, and it's stuck. And so all the very old timey medieval people are like, what is going on? Some guy comes down from the airship, tries to get the anchor out, is grabbed, and they're about to be killed. And the bishop's like, no, just let this guy go. I don't know what his jam is. His jam? The airship cuts rope and flies off. And I should point out it's weird, right? Yeah, that's weird. At any time, it's weird. So a folklorist named Catherine Briggs point I think she puts it perfectly, that this is one of those strange, unmotivated, and therefore rather convincing tales that are scattered throughout the early chronicles. Like basically saying this chronicler had no reason to just make this up. And it's just so weird how specific it is. And then we can fast forward to the 19th century. Tons of airship sightings. Nebraska was huge. Texas was huge. California, it was basically like that whole James West steampunk thing. Right. But in the time, right, so it wasn't retro. And then just this February in Jerusalem, there's a big sighting. There are several videos of I didn't hear about this one. Well, there are three different videos, and the founder of the site, Marshall Brain, put it to bed, or he tried to, saying, like, this is how it was hoaxed. Not entirely convincingly, but there's supposedly a UFO over the dome rock in Jerusalem, and this is February. And if you go on to the Mutual UFO Network website every day, there's still UFO reports coming in. The Mutual UFO Network. MUFON. Okay. They made tons of appearances in X File. They got nothing on SETI. That's a little foreshadowing. Pop up later. Nice, Chuck. So if you go onto the MUFON website, you'll see that there's still just dozens of sightings every day. So this is very much embedded in our culture, which is why we're about to talk about it now. Chuck, go. That was my interest. All right, we're going to talk about UFOs. Let's start well, that was sort of the beginning, I guess, but let's start in the mid 20th century. As everyone knows, UFOs were pretty big in the yeah. Got a lot of press. And In Fact, That's When The Term UFO, as Unidentified Flying Object was Coined By The United States Air Force, I don't know if everyone knows that. Yeah, that's a big one. At least people in this room know that now. And Unidentified Flying Object flying Saucer. Flying Disk. What we're really talking about is alien spacecraft. Let's cut to the chase. That's what Ufologists have been talking about, right? Is that how it's pronounced? Yes, Ufology. Okay. Because I kept saying UFO ologist, and that's like saying, do you refer to the IRS as the errors? So the Air Force started investigating these things for real and found out that five to 10% of UFO sightings are unaccounted for. The rest are explained away. You always hear weather balloon, whatever the heck that is, or hoax. Hoaxes. Lightning. Yeah, lightning. Any kind of a natural weather phenomenon can be mistaken, and hoaxes is big. People, like, faking their photography. Sure. Or crop circle. Yeah, sure. So that's a pretty significant point that you just brought up, that there are some cases of UFO sightings that are out there that are unexplained. Right? Yeah. I did have a stat in here on that. It was 5% no, I have numbers. 12,000 UFO sightings. The Air Force research between 48 and 69. So 21 years, if my math is correct, and all but 701 were explained away. But if you ask me, 701 that you can't explain. It's kind of a lot. It's a significant number, for sure. And that's why I believe and there is a guy named Jay Allen Heineck who kind of figures dig into Ufology. He's the man, or was. He passed away. Now he's dead. Yes, he was the man, but he still kind of lives on in this very long winded and detailed definition of what a UFO is. Right. You want to take this one? Yeah. Should I read it? Can you do it in one breath? There's no way I can do it in one breath, but this is the best definition we've got from Dr. Heineck. He's an astronomer. Is he a doctor? Yeah. Okay. The reported perception of an object or light seen in the sky or upon the land. The appearance. Trajectory. And general dynamic and luminescent behavior of which do not suggest a logical conventional explanation and which is not only mystifying to the original precipice. But remains unidentified after close scrutiny of all available evidence by persons who are technically capable of making a common sense identification if one is possible. Period. And that's one sentence that says it all. So basically what he's saying is, it's a sighting, and it seems weird. And then after closer examination, it really is weird. That's a UFO sighting. Right. That was his first draft, I think the Air Force was like, can you get a little more specific? He's like, no, I'm in a stronger check out my hair. I have no time to write sentences that make sense to you idiots. But we say Air Force because he was actually hired by the Air Force. He was a faculty member at the Ohio State University, which this article doesn't say the no, but that's the right way to say they get really picky. Any buckeyes down there. All right. One's all unique. In 1948, they said, hey, dude, why don't you come work for us? We got all these weird things happening. We got a program called Project Sign. Yeah. It was originally project sign. Then it became Project Grudge, which I love. And then Project Blue Book was what they landed on. That's not a good name for a scientific investigation. No. Grudge. Yeah. One Blue Book, I imagine, was before the whole auto industry thing with used cars to call no. Little known fact. It grew out of that Air Force investigation. Yeah. Very cool. That's how your car is rated now. So Heineck his deal was he was a skeptic. He was hired by the Air Force, not as someone to say, hey, these things are real. Let's just investigate it. And he was a big time skeptic for quite a while. He was an astronomer. He didn't believe in extraterrestrial life, anything. It's 1948, so he hadn't really given much thought to it. But eventually he became kind of a defector, because Ufology, if anything, is this huge clash of the titans between people who believe in UFOs and skeptics who hurt them for believing in UFOs. Right. Yeah. And hyenax started out as a complete skeptic, and then eventually they basically gave them all these files and said, look through these and see if this was an asteroid, if this was a comet. Basically, just get rid of a big backlog to start with right. Of 12,000 sightings. And he signed off on lots of them, and then he kept running across ones that made up the 701 inexplicable cases. Yeah. At first he called them puzzling. Right. And then he started calling them, like, oh, my God, this is real. And yeah, he became probably the most outspoken you fault. Bless. Bless. You see, that was weird. Yeah. That doesn't normally happen. He became one of the most outspoken Ufologists people who said, yes, UFOs are real. And he was in a position to really kind of make that claim more than anybody else. Yeah. And he found himself at odds with the Air Force. I don't think they knew what they were getting into when they hired the scientist who was originally skeptic. And all of a sudden, he starts touting these things, and the Air Force was like, no, don't say these things. Right. He said, I'm going to what was his line about skepticism not having any part in the scientific method or no. Ridicule. So there's another guy, if you go a little further back, the first Ufologist is named Charles Fort, and he was kind of a hero of mine. He was a scientist. Yeah. If you read the 40 in Times, which is one of the greatest magazines of all time. It's based on this guy's philosophy that, yes, science is the proper approach to explaining the universe, but you have to investigate everything incredulously or else you're just kind of a jerk. Right. You can't selectively say, like, well, science can't really explain this right now, so it doesn't exist. It's not possible to exist, and we're going to make fun of you for even thinking that. It's not what science is about. And Jay Allen, Heineck held the same views, basically, that through Project Blue Book, science was failing the public by not properly explaining, hey, this is a weather balloon. Like, you don't know what a weather balloon looks like. I don't know what a weather balloon looks like. I don't know what they failed at some point in time by science. And he was upset about that. And then the idea that they were heaping ridicule and scorn while not even carrying out their duty irked him, to say the least. So Heineck is the guy, actually, that came up with the Heinex scale, which you say, what is the Heinex scale? You might know a better wait, exactly. We should do this every time. Totally. I love this. I know what I'm so nervous about. You might know the Heinings scale better as the Close Encounters chart. So he's the dude who invented it. And the first kind is a sighting if you see it. Close encounter, the first kind. The second kind is a sighting, plus physical evidence. Like SCAP. Alien SCAP. Yeah. Crop circles. Sometimes there will be, like, vegetation that is disintegrated sometimes. And I didn't research this, but the spider web, like things hanging from trees. Yeah. What's that all about? Any idea? I couldn't find that either. Okay. Yeah, apparently that happens. Yeah. UFOs nearby. Well, the big problem with them is they are brittle to the touch and just disintegrate. UFOs? No, the spider web like strings. It's like Silly String, but that's been left out for many, many weeks. Got you. So that's the second kind. The third kind is observation of an animate being. Quite right. According to Stephen Spielberg. Oh, is that the third encounter? Well, that's the third. Yeah. They did see an animal being, but let's get forward. After Heinick, they added four fifth, 6th and 7th kind. He wasn't a part of that. Okay. Fourth kind is abduction. And the fifth kind is bilateral contact event through voluntary human initiated cooperation. So that was really Close Encounters of the Third Kind should have been the fifth kind because Francois Truffau in the movie sent out the initiative Contact, and there was a sign for it, too. He did. I don't remember what that is. And did you know that was Francois Rufau? I know. Rob probably did. Famous director. He was in that movie. And then the 6th kind is Direct Injury or Death, which is the least fun kind. And the 7th kind is the best because that means you are knocking boots with an alien. Oh, yeah. And creating a star child. That's true. Close encounter of the 7th time means you have sex with an alien and they get pregnant. There is traditionally a lot of sexiness involved with alien abductions. Whether it's forced copulation, the standard anal probe, whatever. There's some sort of sexuality associated with abductions. Do you want to go over some of the abductions? You always hear about prodding and poking and probing. Well, I guess let's talk a little more about some of the characteristics of UFOs. We talked about the strange weblike disintegrating remains, crop circles. Crop circles which may or may not have been Led Zeppelin's dirty wall, who knows? Animal mutilation, sometimes they're associated with that. And that is when you find, let's say, cattle with organs removed but no signs of humans being anywhere around. We should do one on that. We should probably not because I was looking this up and apparently some sheriff's department in Arkansas when the height of this cattle mutilation scare was going on, they took a cow and I imagine shot it in the head and left it where it lay. Because to really undertake this, you have to kind of kill a cow where it was and then leave it alone. But they had a dead cow for 48 hours in this field and filmed it and said, hey, all of the normal stuff that cow's body undergoes auto, license, putrefaction, all of this can explain, like these mutilations you're talking about. Everybody just settled down. And I think it was kind of like the same group of people who are worried about Satanists. Kind of put a lot of stock in the animal mutilation thing. So I think that one's kind of on the table. Radio and TV interference happens a lot. Car ignition failure, which of course, happened. I keep looking at Rob for Close Encounters of the Third Kind because he's a movie nerd like me. But, yeah, the car won't start, radio cuts out, lights flicker, UFOs nearby. Yeah, there's a correlation. It's a correlation and then I guess that's about it, right? Well, I got a couple of stats, though. That's not it. Trust me, that's it. For that part. I looked up UFO sightings by state because I was curious what state do you think leads the way? Nevada? New Mexico is good guess. Nevada's? Good guess. No, think about it. Crazy people. Cuckoo. California. I hope there's no one from California in here. They know they're crazy. Sorry. 7981 sightings. And this is a very high science. This is from the center for UFO Studies, or Kufos. There's no MUFON. There's no MUFON or SETI. And number two is actually Washington State at 34 83. I did look up Texas, because that's where we are, 3172. And I looked up Georgia. What do we have? About 1000. And guess what state is the least? Delaware. Hawaii. Keep going. Yeah, you'll get to it. 46 more north dakota, which I figured I forget, they'd be lousy with it because all the, I don't know, desert space seems appealing to aliens. I think everyone in North Dakota is too depressed to look up. Well, there's not a lot of people there, so that may actually have something to do with so only 116 in North Dakota, and we do have a poll in here that is so outdated that we would like to conduct a live poll since we have, what, about 50 people here? I would say 400. All right, we're going to do this by applause, but you're not rooting for it, so don't feel like you have to go crazy if you believe in it. We just want to get a little thing. So if you believe the aliens have contacted humans, just some, like golf clapping. Okay. CNN says 60% if you believe aliens have abducted humans, zero. Because CNN said 50% of the people polled and then they said 80% believe the government is hiding something about aliens. Wait, let everybody I think more people think the government is hiding something than believe aliens exist. How does that really something? I don't think that works. That's our first live poll. So I found another poll in 2008, and the only thing I could find was, do you believe that there's intelligent life that's been to Earth and contacted humans? And it was down to, like, 34%, which is probably about what we got here. But that's significantly less than 60% in 97. Sure. I think it was Y, two K angst that had everybody like, there's something going on. We're going to die. That was such a rumor. Our computers are going to stop. I was one of the guys. I was like, you people are stupid. Nothing's going to happen. Well, you know that I have my van packed with water and shotgun because you were living in the time. Right. Those are just my normal accoutrement. So project, the Blue Book, the Air Force eventually, in 1969 said you know what? We're going to close up shop. Or at least that's what they said. Yes, they said they were going to close up shop. And then they put out to me what is some tricky wording with three statements. They said, no UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated has ever given any indication of threat to our national security. Doesn't mean that they didn't find anything. They just didn't deem it a threat. Right. And then there's been no evidence submitted to the Air Force that sightings categorized as unidentified represent technical developments beyond the range of present day knowledge. And there's been no evidence indicating the sightings categorized as unidentified are extraterrestrial. So, like, bamboo, bam, we're closing up shop by that suckers. But that's tricky to me because all they said was classified as unidentified internally. As soon as they found out, they might go, oh, crap, let's change the they don't quantify the criteria for their categorization. No, but if they did find something right. And kept it internal, they were still saying like these were kind of so aliens if they weren't doing anything that we couldn't already conceive of. Yeah, true. And I guess they're friendly, at least because they weren't a national security threat. Either that or they were easily like beat up with the elbow. Is that how you go with an alien? That's how you go with everybody. But I think it's worth pointing out this is a Department of Defense publication. You'd be very hard pressed to find the DoD print and release anything that's talking about aliens today. But from 1948 to 1969, they carried out this very famous investigation, whether it was half hearted or not. Like they were actually spending tons of taxpayer money on this. And it's a significant moment in history where everyone believed in aliens. Right. Right. Now everybody just believes that the government is hiding something. They're hiding something. So it moved from the government to the private sector with SETI, which we've mentioned is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the center for UFO Study. So there's a lot of work still going on and these aren't crackpots. A lot of them are very scientific about their research. Jody Foster works there and what they want to do is well, not they want to disprove. They want to get to the bottom of it. Well, yes. Settings very legitimate. They have funding from NASA and they are all very scientific scientists and they admit their mistakes. Right. Like in the late 90s, they're the ones with the big radio telescopes. Yeah, right. And they got a signal. It sounded just like that, and it was about a million miles away from Earth. And then I said, well, there's got to be aliens a million miles away. Right. And then 3 hours later they're like, oh no, it was the sun watching observatory. That's a million miles away from Earth. But they admit their mistakes and they're not very sensationalist. I get the impression society is pretty much carrying on the carrying the torch now that the government shut things down. Right? That's right. So everybody in here is suspicious of the government. We can actually pinpoint the moment that happened. It took place in 1947. On July 7. There was a guy in New Mexico outside of the town called Roswell. His name is Mac Brazil and he was a ranch foreman. Right. So he was going to check on the cattle, I guess, one day after some terrible thunderstorms the night before. And he found some weird debris and it was weird enough debris that he called the sheriff. And I'm sure they like, spit on the ground and talk about it for a while. We should mention the night before there was a bunch of strange lights in the sky yes. And terrible thunderstorms. So then he finds the debris. Right, okay. Sorry. That's an important point. And so the sheriff comes out they figured they should probably call the local military, which is kind of a weird step if you ask me. The military comes out, they take the debris, and they take it back to the Roswell Army Air Force Base. Yeah. And then to Dayton, Ohio, which is another weird thing to do if it's a weather balloon, as the government eventually said it was. In between. Then the guy who ran Roswell Army Air Force Base released a statement on July 8, 1947, saying, we recovered the debris from a crash disc, and I'm making air quotes and you guys can actually see it. I don't have to just say it this time, but a crash disc was found. And then about 3 hours later, his boss in Dallas, I believe, released another press release saying, that guy is an idiot. Don't listen to anything he's ever said. Forget that whole crash disc thing. Exactly. It was a weather balloon, and we've taken it and flown it to Wright Air Force Base in Dayton for some reason. But just don't look behind the curtain, everybody. And at that moment, that was when all of the seeds that have sprouted into us going like this, when we see a press release today, that's when it happened. That first press release, followed by the second one started the whole suspicion of the government. That was a cover up. Chuck that's right. And there was some other hinking that's going on. There were eyewitnesses that say they saw bodies being removed from the scene by the military. Some people said that they were actually present at an alien autopsy. If you remember, the Fox network did that TV show Alien Autopsy awhile ago, and then it turned out that the guy said, I actually shot all this stuff in the 90s, but I swear this is the footage I saw, and I'm just recreating it and that footage is now destroyed. But this is what I saw. Right. Come on. You didn't buy it? It took me for a while. It looked kind of cool, but yeah, that was a big disappointment. And Area 51 is the area now. And people believe, some people believe that the government is still contacting aliens at Area 51, meeting with aliens on a regular basis, studying them, and that's why it's got big fences around it. That's exactly what it's the only possible reason that it has fences around it. But we're going to do a podcast probably, hopefully on Area 51 Day because that's about all we're going to talk about with that defenses. Men in Black. Yeah, that's another characteristic of the UFO phenomenon, right. And that actually came out of a guy named Gray Barker's book in 1956. He wrote, they knew too much about flying saucers and the men in black make their first appearance. Well, Grey Barker pawned this thing off as a work of nonfiction, but it was actually fiction. But that, I guess, came out long enough after that the Men in Black entered kind of the collective consciousness of have you seen Jose Chunks from Outer Space? That one X Files episode where Jesse the Body Venture and Alex Trebek play the men in black. Really? Yeah, it's pretty awesome. It's probably the best X Files episode ever. Really? Yeah. Nelson okay. It's a good one, isn't it? Wait, did you just say Charles Nelson Riley? Charles Nelson Riley plays this author who's interviewing Molder and Scully and trying to get to the bottom of this one incident that happened, and it was very cool. Good. I highly recommend it to everybody. Let's get back to it. Chuck and Abductions, if I may see this one up, please. So I think it's kind of one thing to see something in the sky and say, well, that's a UFO. Many people have done this. Ronald Reagan said he saw a UFO. And as governor of California right? Yeah. Jackie Gleason. Said he saw aliens because Richard Nixon took him there. That's a true story. Jackie Gleason. Apparently was in Florida married to his second wife at the time, and he came home all disheveled from something, and his wife was like, what's going on, Jackie? You're not your usual Sonny self. And he says, Well, I can't talk about it, wife. But later on, he said, she doesn't have a name. I can't remember it. Betty. Let's call her Betty. But ironically, he did just call her wife. He did. One of these days. So then he says, you know, what happened is I met Richard Nixon. My buddy Richard Nixon. Jackie Gleason. Was way into UFOs, apparently. And Richard Nixon said, Would you like to go see some aliens? That's my Richard Nixon. So they've seen it. Well, apparently he took them and saw two little two foot aliens. Right? Little bald man said, don't tell anybody about this, Jackie Gleason. And he said, I will not. Never tell anyone. He told his wife that. You can't tell anyone. And then they got divorced, and she started telling everyone. Yeah. So supposedly he seen one, and he said, Ronald Reagan saw one. And he was on a small Cessna flight, and he was governor of California at the time, and he was talking about what he saw until he realized he was talking to a reporter from The Wall Street Journal. And then he was like, Maybe I shouldn't say anything about that. Right. Jimmy Carter. Carter saw one. Do you want to do your Carter? I don't have a Carter. He did see one in Georgia, in rural Georgia. And he still talks about it to this day. Apparently, ten or so years ago was the last time at Emory University of Atlanta, where he teaches. He was actually still talking about it and said, Dude, I saw a UFO. Okay? So it's one thing to see a UFO and to talk about it at Emory or to show Jackie Gleason. Something weird, right. But it's. An entirely other thing. And this kind of became this spin off of the UFO phenomenon. And that is abductions. Right. That's the money shot, basically. There's this whole group of people came forward over the years, starting after 1965, I should say, and said, yes, I've been aboard the craft, I've been engaged in alien sexiness. This is horrible. My life is suffering because of this. Right. So the first abduction story was Betty and Barney Hill. Have you heard of them? Have you heard of them before then? Yes. Okay. Because I'm sort of into this stuff. Okay. But they were the first in the early sixty s. And they said they saw and were not abducted initially, but then later, through hypnosis, started remembering these things that happen. Yeah. And that was the first abduction case. It was written up in the Boston Globe. And then there was a book called The Interrupted Journey because it had a really huge impact on their lives. They started suffering psychological dissertations. There are big problems among them after this. And then it was made for TV movie. Mr. James Earl Jones played Barney Hill, did a great job. And from that moment on, this kind of established checklist almost, of traits of an abduction were generated. Things like you're being taken against your will, you're being probed, or bright light sometimes experimented on. You up. Like the beam. The tractor beam. Tractor beam. I hear no idea. Losing time is another big one. 2 hours and then having to deal with this. And there were actual studies of abductees in the 90s because it was such a weird significant thing that people were saying it's consistent, which is the weird thing. Right. So this guy named Richard McNally, he's a Harvard psychologist, conducted some physiological experiments on people who said they've been abducted. And they showed similar symptoms to people with post traumatic stress disorder. So there's definitely something going on. But whether or not it was them being abducted or if they were suffering from some other trauma is what was at the heart of the matter. Right. Yes. And there's been some pretty good explanations for what was behind this whole abduction phenomenon that's kind of died off now, which is weird if you think about it. Right? Yeah. Susan Blackmore is a famous skeptic and she did a little experiment in the mid 19 nine s with a man named Michael Persinger. He's a neuroscientist and he claims that all kinds of weird phenomenon with the body can be explained by excessive firing of the temporal lobes. And so the only thing that was missing was no one had ever really tried to replicate this in an experiment. So Susan Blackmorth said, dude, hook me up to this stuff and fire away and let's see what happens. She said that she had the sensation she was being pulled, stretched by her leg to the ceiling. She was suddenly like very angry. And then after that she was suddenly very fearful. So basically the guy proved to her, and then she went and told the world in this New Scientist article that, yes, if you can mess with somebody's temporal lobe firing using magnets, you can get them to think all sorts of crazy stuff. Well, she basically, at the end of the experiment, said, I was so out of myself that if someone would have told me you were abducted by an alien, she said, I probably would have believed it. Right. And she's a skeptic. That's a good explanation, but then you have to ask what is exactly exerting this magnetism on people's brains to cause this temporal lobe firing? So it's an okay explanation probably better than anything is sleep paralysis. Right, or false awakenings? Yeah, sleep paralysis. Does anyone have that sleep paralysis? Your wife. Apparently, that's where you wake up and you can't move. Yeah. When you're awake, your skeletal muscles are normally paralyzed while you're sleeping, but every once in a while, you can wake up and your muscles don't kind of wake up first. So you can't move, but you don't really know what's going on. You're groggy. There's hallucinations that accompany it, too, right? Yeah. Usually andy stuff. Yes. And so it's a very fearful thing. And then if you are the type to dream about sex, that kind of adds that probing, maybe idea to the whole thing. So sleep paralysis is a pretty good explanation. And then the false awakening is another good one where you are dreaming that you've woken up. And it's pretty common, actually. And I think the thing that gives gravity to this explanation is that the most extreme abduction reports always began with the people sleeping. Oh, really? Yeah. So it's entirely possible if people were confused. Well, there's also correlation, though, between UFO sightings and what was he talking about? Seismic events is he said that he believes earthquakes might trigger this magnetism and people wake up in their bed, they think they're being abducted. But what about the people in the cars and out in the fields? We're not going to figure this out right now. I was going to say, I think a good way to wrap this up is to say that we are wholly unqualified to offer any explanation of what was going on. But the very least, it was interesting and it was a wild and crazy time. It was a good ride there. Agreed. And I think this bearish some follow up. We got to hit Area 51. We got to get into the abductions a little more, too. Yeah, one day. That's it. You got any more? I got nothing else on this one. That's it. Best UFOs. Thank you very much. Thank you. So if any of you ever want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email. I want you to wrap it up, bank it on the bottom, and send it to stuffpodcast athouseafworks.com. Thank you. Yeah, and then thanks for coming out to on a rainy Monday morning. 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 upworks. iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 emery, it's ready. Are you? Yeah." | ||
41f7af04-53a3-11e8-bdec-5fc1b0597218 | How Sloths Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-sloths-work | Everyone knows sloths are super slow, but do you know they’re slow because their bodies produce an astoundingly small amount of energy? And did you know that might be an adaptation that protects them from predators? Sloths are awesome and we prove it. | Everyone knows sloths are super slow, but do you know they’re slow because their bodies produce an astoundingly small amount of energy? And did you know that might be an adaptation that protects them from predators? Sloths are awesome and we prove it. | Thu, 11 Jul 2019 13:50:29 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=13, tm_min=50, tm_sec=29, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=192, tm_isdst=0) | 52570973 | audio/mpeg | "Attention, world. If you can make it to America, then come see us. We are going out on the road for Siesk Live again, and we are going to start the whole thing off in Chicago on July. That's right. And if you can't make it to America, maybe make it to Canada, because we're going to be in Toronto on the next night. And Forth Music Hall. Then in August, we're going to do a couple of dates at the Wilbur and Boston, october 29 in Portland, Maine. Lovely State Theater on August 30. Yes. And then we're going to be heading down to Florida. We're going to be at Plaza Live on October 9. And then the next night, we're going to be in New Orleans at the Civic Theater. That's right. And then we're going to round it out in Brooklyn, october 20, 324 and 25 at the Bellhouse. Yes. So come see us. You can get tickets and info@sysklive.com. 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 Josh T over there. That's right. Thinking about the number 23. Sitting there thinking about it. Is he on 23? That's right. Never got that. Yeah, he's in the Illuminati stuff, if I remember correctly. Look at this guy. He is so good, Chuck. He knows to just sit there and keep quiet even though he's dying inside. Right. Now to talk about the number 23. If I just pulled out some random show from our archive from years ago, could you say who the producer was? Oh, I don't know. Let's give it a try. Jeez. Now I have to think of a show that we did years ago. Well, since we're doing an animal show today, the only thing I can think of is animals. Elephants. I didn't that long ago. Probably Jerry. Or how about this? Can you name any shows that other guest producers were on off the top of your head? No. This game turns so lame so fast. I feel like, well, Matt Frederick's too busy these days. But we can't have Matt anymore in here because all Matt would do is sit there and nod his head like, yeah, either that or his hands would be clashed together with this look of sheer joy on his face just to hear us talk. It was great. It made recording that much better. In the old days. Matt's older and more cynical. Now he doesn't care anymore about us. Right. Released into the forest like a baby sloth. Right. Which is good. That's what you want to do with either Matt Frederick or a baby sloth. You don't want to keep them in captivity because sloths don't do very well in captivity. Matt does okay in captivity. He's fine. But a sloth not nearly as well as what Matt Frederick can do at captivity. Yeah. And you were watching just before you recorded. Everyone should know Josh was watching the 28 million view YouTube video of Kristen Bell. Can we call her friend of the show? Sure. I mean, she's probably not going to write in to object to it, so yeah, we could call her that. She's the Stuff you should Know listener, or has been over the years, as is her husband, Mr. DAX Shepard, who was also a Movie Crush guest. And he has his own podcast, two Armchair Expert. Yeah, he's crushing it right out of the gate. Those are good podcasts, actually. I don't know if you listen to those are good. Very famously, he brought her a sloth on her birthday, and she went on Ellen, and they showed video, and it's still just one of the great videos you can ever watch. It is. It's very sweet. She's like, having a meltdown. Fully melting down. Yeah, like crying, like sobbing because she's so excited that there's a sloth in her house because this is something she's wanted to meet a sloth for her whole life. And now she gets to yeah, and I watched it again today, too, because after doing this research, I was like, wait a minute. Is she holding a sloth? Because that's not good. And it showed a picture and she's not. The sloth is on its little perch, and she's very respectfully next to the sloth. Exactly how it should be. If there's any reason that kept Kristen Bell from being America's sweetheart, which I can't think of one that erased it right there. Just knowing how to be around a sloth when you have meltdowns at the idea of being around a sloth, that's some serious self control for the benefit of the animal. That's great stuff. Yeah. Not touching the animal and literally offering for me to change my daughter's diaper in her restaurant booth. Yeah, that's right. Because she said the bathroom was dirty. She's a class act. Class act. So, Charles, you mentioned elephants. We did an elephant episode, and it's similar to the whole sloth thing. Like, you see a sloth, especially if you see a sloth in captivity at a zoo or something like that, you're like, well, I want to carry it around like a baby, or something like that. It's a sloth. It's one of the cutest things on the planet. But you don't want to do that. Slots don't really deal with captivity very well, although they can live way longer in captivity. They're not necessarily happy. But I was thinking one of the reasons why people seem to think that they are happy or would want to be picked up is because at least among one type of sloth, they're always smiling. Oh, man, they're smiling. Which makes them super cute. They also have a mullet. That's the three toed Brady puss sloth. Yeah, they have a mullet and they are always smiling. But if you look, it's just the coloring on their face that happens to resemble a smile. They have so little muscle mass that they don't have the capability of smiling, making their face smile. It's just the colorings on their fur. Yeah. Which can be very misleading to us dumb humans because they can be scared or stressed out of their mind. And it still looks like they are just chilling and smiling. Right. Look, it's smiling. It loves it when I juggle it with two bowling balls and a flaming pitchfork. How's it going? Have you ever seen a flaming pitch fork? It's something only on the Simpsons. So let's get into this because the cuteness is just cute overload when it comes to sloths. They are ridiculously cute. Their whole vibe is just right up my alley, at least. Sure. Not that I'm lazy, Mellow. Well, you know me. The real me isn't super mellow, but I like to pretend to be. Sure. I strive to be. You get the sloth vibe. Yeah. It's an aspirational state slothness. Yeah. So I love the very first sentence of this research says they are highly successful. Which kind of cracked me up when I read it, because I pictured sloss, of course, in business suits, like running a company. Right. Can you hurry it up? I have no time for this. But what that means is that for a very long time, slots generally have flourished in the world. Yeah. They think that they probably evolved. They're part of a group or a family or some taxonomic designation. It's like the weirdo group that's sloths anteaters, I think that's armadillos. Sure. Depending on whether you want to be classy or not or something tough. Sure. Zen Arthur. Okay, I'll go with that. But it's sloths anteaters armadillos. Oh, yeah. Pretty much any odd animal you can think of would fall into zenarta. What did you say? Zenarthra. Zan arthur. Zen Arthur. So they all kind of formed together in isolation on what was once an island. South America is as long back as 80 million years ago. What? Yeah. You know, like the whole continental drift and all that stuff. It decided to make friends with Central America. Yeah. And higher sea levels, that kind of thing. When the sea levels got locked up in ice or when a lot of seawater got locked up in ice, the land bridge that is Central America came along and said, hey, build some ziggurat's on me. So they are highly successful. They are very slow moving. Like everyone knows they are in Central and South America. Still no surprise there. And like you said, there are two kinds. There are the two toed colippus. I was going coloipus, rhymes with bosiefus. Okay. That's a good way to remember it. Sure. And then the little Tom Brady puss, which is the three toad. But it's a bit of a misnomer because the two toad has three toes but two fingers. Right. That's how they're classified or separated from one another. The two toad or the three towed. Right. And technically. I read somewhere, Chuck, that they actually don't have legs. They're a four armed creature. Oh, is that the designation? Four arms? Yeah, from what I saw. But they really just pay attention to how many fingers are on the forearms or the fore limbs. Got you. What we would think of as their arms, their front arms, but they're really all four arms. Okay. And the way that I kept the two separated so two toe is coloipus, three toad is bradypus. Is that I thought the brady bunch has more kids, so the brady has more toes. And it's been working all day, frankly. That's pretty good. That's the second mnemonic device you've dropped in the first, like, ten minutes of the show. Yeah. What do you think? You're doing? Great. Good. Long as it's working. So the two towed guys and ladies, they roam as far as lost go, a pretty great distance. They can forage in ranges up to 350 acres, whereas the three towed guys, they only have a range of about 13 acres. And then there's the cutest of all, sloth, the pygmy sloth that are just on one little island off the coast of Panama. Right. And they're actually critically endangered as far as sloth goes, we'll get to later. They are so cute, it's ridiculous. But, like, as close as these losses, there's not that many differences besides the number of toes on their fore limbs, the fact that one has the smile markings, the three toe does the smile markings and the mullet haircut. The other one looks like there's a site called slothville. It's a conservation site run by a woman named Lucy cook, and she says that the two toed sloths look a bit like a cross between a wookie and a pig. And I think she absolutely nailed it with that description. Right. Yeah. One of them looked like the little what was the Christmas special? What was Chewbacca's, son? Oh, man. If you can remember that, chuck, I'll buy you a case of beer. Put your phone down. I know I can't remember, but that's sort of what it reminded me of. Norman. I'm pretty sure it was Norman. Norman? Yeah. Norman baca. You're right. I can't remember. I can't either. I'm sure there's somebody out there. It's like you'll make case of beer, Josh. I only said that I was making that offer to Chuck. So what can you pick? That's a pretty good descriptor, right? So my point is this, though. As similar as two toads losses and three toad sloths seem, there are some differences, but really, in the grand scheme of things, they seem a lot closer than, say, a dove and a sloth. Yeah, agreed. A flaming pitchfork and a slaw. Agreed. But they're actually really separate. They're multiple different species. They're not even in the same genus. And for comparison, humans and chimps are in the same genus. Yeah. That's great. Two different types of sloths aren't even in the same genus. So there's a big distinction between the two. And I looked up sloth news, which is fast breaking, strangely enough, but there's a study that came out recently where they did some molecular DNA studies on sloth evolution, and they found that the two toed and the three toed sloths may be even further separated, and they have evolved independently of one another, that they may be even more distantly related than we think. So as similar as they seem to be, they're actually pretty different. Although they are really similar. It's a weird fluke of evolution all around. Yeah. Characteristically, I think they're fairly similar. The two towed variety are a little bit bigger and hang upside down a little bit more than the three towed variety. Who. You'll see those sitting upright sometimes in trees, but I read somewhere that floss can spend up to 90% of their life upside down. Yeah, which is amazing. They do everything upside down. They mate upside down, they give birth upside down. They do almost everything that they do upside down, hanging. And did you say it was the two toad that spend more of their life upside down, or the three toes? Yeah, two toad, a little bit more hang time. Right. So that's one difference. But even still, it's not like the three tote are just averse to being upside down. I think both of them spend so much time upside down that the part of their hair, rather than being on their backs or their head, the top of their head, like ours is it's on their bellies. Because they're upside down so much, that's how gravity has forced their hair to part. Just like shrimp. Just like an upside down shimp boy shrimp's hair. Wow. It was something. It was something, yeah. The original butt cut. Yes, it was, wasn't it? So the Brady puss also has an extra neck vertebrae. So if you've ever seen a sloth seemingly turn its head 360 degrees, it's because they can turn their head about 270 degrees and have almost a 360 deg, counting their peripheral vision range of sight yes. Without moving their body. That is strictly from moving their head. They actually, again, they lack so much muscle mass and tissue that they don't have the muscles to move their eyeballs in their head. So when they look around, they have to move their whole head. But it is helped out, for sure, especially after a hard night on Saturday. But the fact that they have that extra vertebrate helps them look around more. But it's just one more thing that makes them an extraordinarily unusual creature, because only sloths and manatees are mammals that have more than seven vertebrae. Every other mammal on the planet has seven vertebrae, and sloths of manatees are the only two that don't. The manatees are mammal. Yeah. All right. Yeah. They breathe air. They just spend a lot of time in water. They were probably some sort of, like, wolf or bear or something that eventually took to water. Well, speaking of bears and water, sloths are really good swimmers. If you look up a YouTube video slaw swimming they can kind of get around and are somewhat graceful in the water. They can hold their breath for up to 40 minutes. And in order to do so, they can cut their heart rate by two thirds and their metabolism down which is like they already will get into their metabolism later. But that's saying something if they can cut their metabolism down even more on purpose. Yeah, for real. Because the sloth metabolism is a thing to behold in your mind. We'll get to it in a little bit, but just know that I'm excited to talk about sloth metabolism. Okay. And then I mentioned, speaking of bears their original predecessor back in the day was something called a giant ground sloth or a megaeum. And if you look at this thing, it looks sort of like a bear. Its face is a little bit different but it kind of looks like just a big, giant brown bear. It looked like a giant beaver to me. Without the tail. Oh, really? I mean, that's what I thought. Well, a beaver without a tail is really just a tiny bear with big teeth. I guess so. I guess so. But they found that just from examining its bones they found that it could walk on its back legs which makes it the largest bipedal land mammal that ever lived. Which is pretty cool. And it was a sloth ancestor. Amazing. And we used to eat them too. Chuck we found tool marks on some of the bones and they think, well, humans probably hunted it to extinction. Yeah. Tuktuk, I guess. Although we determined he was a Neanderthal. Right. Right. He's been designated officially as a Neanderthal. Shall we take a break? I think it's high time. Man all right. This is our slowest episode ever and we'll be right back. So before we get going on more real sloth stuff I'm assuming you have not seen the movie Zootopia or have you? I don't think now is the good kids movie. No, I haven't. There's a sloth scene where that's very funny and, in fact, they made that a very big part of the original movie trailer where these animals are in a hurry to find out some information from the DMV. They go to the DMV. And of course, as sort of an injoke to anyone who's ever been at the DMV just notably slow. They had a sloth. It was completely run by sloths. And there's just this one great scene when they go up and try to get information from the sloths and they really do it right. They take their time. And it's funny for kids and adults alike. Highly recommend. It is. And I mean, it's probably fairly accurate because everybody knows they're super slow. How slowly. But it's not it's not really an overstatement or exaggeration. They genuinely are extremely slow. I saw that they move on the ground, which is when they move about the fastest, aside from swimming, it's something like half a kilometer per hour at top speed and that they'll move maybe six to 8ft up a tree in a minute. And these things are made to climb trees and that's how fast, or I should say that's how slow they move. Yeah. The actual term sloth dates back to the 12th century in Spain, or in the Spanish language at least, they were called Los Perezos, which translates to the Lazys, which is hysterical, because Emily and I often call animals lazy. Look at those, lazy. Because pets are lazy. Sure, yeah. They're not sloth lazy, though. No, they're not sloth lazy, but that literally translates into the lazies. And then when the Spanish explorers started talking about the lazies, it was translated into the word sloth in English in about the, I guess, early 17th century. Yeah. Because it was a cleric, I believe, who was like, oh, well, we don't talk about laziness, we talk about sloth, because it's one of the seven deadly sins. No, it's really kind of a down word when it's used as an insult, for sure, but it's like the slots are the best, so I don't know, I like it. I know, but at the same time, it's like if somebody calls you slothful, you know that they walked right past lazy, like they saw it and said, no, lazy is not enough. I really want to drive home how much I disdain your laziness. Yeah, that is a good descriptor. Like if someone at work is slow with something and you describe them as slothful instead of just slow right. Because you're passing judgment on them as well, like biblical style judgment, like you're going to hell. That's how slow you took in getting this TPS report to me. Two toad sloths are omnivorous, so they can eat animals. I didn't see where they do that a lot. They mainly still eat fruits and leaves and twigs and things, but they will eat birds sometimes, and lizards, I would imagine. They have to be wounded or something because it's not like they I mean, surely they don't hunt. They're not fast enough. Right, yeah. They're not snatching a bird out of the air or something like that. They're not going after hummingbirds. It would have to be like maybe a recently killed or an injured bird. And man, if you're an injured bird in the tropical rainforests of Central and South America, I'm guessing the last thing you want to see is a hungry two toad sloth slowly coming at you, because you know it's going to take a really long time for it to eat you alive. There's a funny YouTube video, actually called when a Sloth Chases You. It's just a sloth on the ground, like set to horror music. I watched a lot of sloth videos. Well, there's a lot of good ones out there. I recommend looking up sloth Fight. Okay. You think it'd be sad or disturbing, but there's a bunch of different videos and it's actually in the grand sloth style. It's really cute when sloths fight. Yeah. Oh, fight, fight, fight. Got you. They look like they're taking it seriously and they're all agitated, but it's impossible for us to take this sloth fight seriously. It's just too cute and they're just too incompetent at fighting. Oh, dear. The Three Towed guys, they are very much more picky eaters. And they eat generally, these toxic leaves from just a few trees, and they hang around. Like, if they find a good tree that they like, they will hang around that tree for a long, long time. Yes. Apparently they know that some three toed sloths will inhabit the same tree for their whole life. It's rare, it's unusual, but even still, I mean, their entire range usually doesn't extend over, like, 13 acres or five and a half hectares. Right. Like, it's a very small, limited area that a three toed sloth in particular will inhabit their whole life. All right, I think we can talk about the metabolism now since we're eating. Yes. I'm so happy. I know what your effect of the show probably is. Just go ahead. There's like eight in here. That is true. So the reason slots move so slowly is because in part, they metabolize so slowly. Like, when you metabolize, you're converting food into energy, right. And you're doing all sorts of stuff with that. You're moving your muscles, you're walking, you're laughing, you're talking, you're recording a podcast, you're digesting food. And slots are mammals, so they do have this metabolism that's similar to any other mammal metabolism. It's just way slower, and therefore it's way weaker. Like, the human metabolism puts out about 80 watts of energy at any given time. Sloths put out less than four watts. It's just extraordinarily slow. And even compared to humans or compared to other animals, they're same size. They metabolize things way more slowly. So the reason that they move so slowly is because they literally don't have the energy to move much faster. Yeah. It takes a whole month to digest a meal. They have to do it that slow. If they would digest faster, it could poison themselves. Because they're eating these toxic leaves. Right. They don't have incisors, so they trim these leaves down, they smack their little lips together and trim these leaves down. And again, I hate to say the word cute again, but it's pretty adorable to see a little sloth chewing on a leaf. Yeah. But imagine you're a wounded bird and a toothless sloth is eating you to death. Yeah, I imagine it's not a quick death. No, you get gummed to death. And I think the fact of the show probably is this whole farting business. Sure, take it. All right, well, here's the deal. They eat so slow that they don't even have gas that builds up in their system. That is how slow they are digesting their food. So the gas just gets reabsorbed through the intestines and into the bloodstream and it says here that the gas is then respired out of the lungs. Does that mean that they mouth for it? Yeah, that's what I saw is that they have they basically pass the same gases that they normally would out of their fanny in the American sense, out of their mouth through breathing. Interesting. So yeah, I guess they mouth fart. Worst band name ever. The Diarrhea Planet. You're right, man. No, it's actually worse than frozen poop knife. They should do a joint tour. Yeah. You know that Mouth Fart is going to be the opener always. They're never going to make it to the headline. Boys are never headline. No, and I say boys because there's no way a girl band would be called Mouth Fart. They're way too smart for that fart. They also have a multi chambered stomach, sort of like a cow, which is really interesting because that's like a third of their body weight if their stomachs are full. Yeah, the reason why it's so much of their body weight is because they digest food so slowly they have to have this multi chambered stomach to get as many nutrients as they possibly can out of it. And even still it's a really terrible evolutionary strategy to evolve as a herbauruvis, as strictly tree dwelling herbivore. That's a really bad strategy because you have to be small enough to exist in the tree. Right. But at the same time you have to be big enough to eat tons of leaves every day. Well, if not because leaves don't give you they're not very energy dense so you have to eat a ton of them to get good energy. Well, the sloths of all the different strategy, they just slowed their metabolism down so they can be small but they don't have to eat that many leaves. And in fact they can go for days without eating. And because they digest so slowly, they only poop about once a week. But the central cog of this whole adaptation is having a big stomach that can very slowly digest every possible nutrient out of the food that they eat. Yeah, so they do. They defecate and urinate once a week, generally in the same spot, kind of at the base of the tree. I don't think they like to wander too far because when they're on the ground they are much more at risk than when they're up in their tree because they're super slow and they're at risk for attack, for whatever any sort of larger mammal could come by and have a sloth lunch at any time. Right. In particular, the harpy eagle is like their main predator but also yeah, they're definitely vulnerable to Oslo jaguars and virtually any other predator in the jungle. Because they move so slowly and they have such an inability to defend themselves. But some researchers think that the reason sloths evolved to move so slowly is because it's a defense mechanism for them that rather than the howler monkeys that they share the jungle with, when something comes along and gets the howler monkeys agitated, the howler monkeys scream and run around and try to escape. Right. The sloths, who may be in the same tree as a Howard monkey just stays motionless and silent and so they camouflage in with the tree. So that really slow movement is actually a defensive adaptation as well. Yeah, I think the sloth defensive motto is nothing to see here, we're just going to be really still let these monkeys take all the attention and no one will notice this. And that's kind of the idea. Yeah, that's exactly the idea and it works. It actually does work and it's misleading, I think, to say, which means I accidentally misled everybody that sloths have no recourse if they are found out. I saw at least one video where a harpy eagle found a sloth in a tree and lands right next to it and the sloth just slowly lifts its arm up and kind of swaps behind it with its claw man at the harpy eagle and the harpie eagle looked kind of puzzled, but it worked like the harpy eagle left it alone. Yeah, they can ward off danger, just not that frequently, actually. Yeah, despite the fact that they move super slow and they are lazy, they don't actually sleep as much as you would think. In captivity, they will sleep a lot longer because they have no predators around, no jaguars and they understand that and they're like, all right, everything's cool. I can really dig in and sleep some. But out in the wild, they sleep a little under 10 hours, which is I guess if you would have asked me beforehand, I would have guessed 15 and up for sloth sleep. Well, they will in captivity, they sleep as much as 15 to 20 hours a day. But in the wild, they think, like you said, they got to be on point. And they're not stinky either, which is another great thing even though you definitely don't want to sloth as a pet for reasons we'll talk about later. They smell kind of like the trees they live in, which is kind of great and another defense mechanism. Yes. So the reason that they smell like the trees that they live in is because sloths move so slowly that algae grows on them in their coat, in their fur. Yeah, this is the other sort of amazing part like, I had no idea. No, I didn't either and I don't think researchers had much of an idea about this until recently. They knew that sloths got covered with green algae, especially during the rainy season. Normally they have like a tan or a brown colored coat. But when it gets rainy in the tropical rainforest they live in an algae growth will build up on their coat, which, I mean, you try to grow some algae on you, you can't do it. I try. Even if you didn't take a shower, you move around too much, you couldn't get any algae to grow on you. Sloths can. And at first they thought that's hilarious. Yet another funny fact about how slow sloths are. But as they've researched more deeply into it, they found that actually the sloth coat is an amazing ecosystem in itself on the sloth, and that whether it's intentional or not, the sloth actually kind of cultivates a farm inside of its own coat that it uses to help feed itself, too. Yeah, I had seen pictures of these green tinted sloths and always kind of wonder what the deal was. It helps act as camouflage, which is super helpful. And I don't know. Did you mention the groove in the center of the hairs? No. Yeah. So each hair has a little groove down the center, and that's where the algae is allowed to grow. And obviously because they're not moving fast, you're going to get more of a chance to grow, too. But like you said, they are a little ecosystem into themselves in that fur. They did one study that found 980 beetles living on a single sloth just taking roost in there in their little jungle coats, right? And then there's this moth species. This is crazy. The sloth moth, which is another great band name, by the way. Yeah. Kryptosis. Coleppie Kolo, EPI koloippi. I always say just the E. It's always OE. I think you're right, yeah. Koluapi, kolo II Koloepi, something like that. Tomato, tomato. Kryptosis koloipi dyer. And they actually colonize exclusively in sloth fur. Right. That's the only place you will find that type of moth is living in the fur of a sloth. It's the sloth moth. Yeah, like totally symbiotic relationship. You know, they climb down once a week to poop, and these moths lay their eggs in that poop. And yes, they can actually lay their eggs in dingleberries. Sloppy. Sure, everyone knows what that is, right? Do we need to explain that? I don't know. I would say look it up. Okay. I think that's as far as we need to say. So the adult mouths emerge from this poop and they then say, mama, and they fly up and take rest in the sloths fur. Right. And then they mate and reproduce, and then they lay eggs in the sloth poop and the circle of life continues. But again, this type of moth you won't find anywhere on earth except in the fur of a sloth. And then there's also beetles in there. And so as these things like grow and die and decay and other plant matter and whatever's floating around in the air in the rainforest all kind of combine and get stuck into these grooves in the hair of the sloth fur, it forms this algae. And they know that there is a relationship between the sloth moth and the algae in that the sloths that have the most moths also have the most algae. And they figured out it's just basically this decaying matter, and they're like, okay, this is too weird. Camouflage. That kind of makes sense. But the fact that there's a moth that only lives in the sloth fur, and the more of those moths there are, the more algae there, it's just too weird. And they tested this algae, and they found that it's rich in fat. And for a very long time, they're like, okay. The metabolism kind of explains how a sloth could sustain itself. It burns so little energy that it can live on very, very nutrient sparse leaves. But it's still kind of a mystery. It doesn't fully make sense. And they think they figured out that the sloth, as it's grooming itself, eats this algae, which is high in fats, and that supplements its diet of leaves. And that's really the combination of these leaves and this algae are what keep the sloth alive over its lifetime. And in the meantime, their urine and their feces are fertilizing the tree that is their habitat right. Where these moths are also laying their eggs. So it's just like this really unique symbiosis going on between plant, animal, and insect. Yeah. And everyone seems to be doing great. Yeah. And one of the things I was like, well, how much does that really help? If the sloth is pooping at the base of the tree once a week, does that really help? Sure. And apparently, it really does. It is slow. Really? So you just nailed it. So, sloths are so slow, their poop actually slows down the decomposition in the tree. Because in the rainforest, decomposition happens so fast that the tree is actually nutrient depleted. Because the decomp happen so fast, sloth poop slows the whole process down and actually nurtures the tree even more. Yeah. It seems like everywhere the sloth goes, everyone just chills out. Yeah. Basically, the sloth dingleberries are just little rainbows trailing out of its behind. That's what sloths have. You have to look closely, but you'll see it sounds like a story my daughter would make up. You do share a birthday. Yeah, we do. Hey. Which is coming up, actually, probably right around the time this is released. Oh, yeah. Well, happy birthday, ruby. All right, we'll take a break, and we'll come back and talk about sloth sex right after this. All right, chuck, you promised it. You have to deliver sloth sex blow by blow. Go. So, here's the deal. This is where things like, if you're like, all right, the sloth is the cutest thing, and this is all adorable, and they're just amazing. They are all those things. But this is when you might I just want to prepare everyone to be slightly disappointed. Maybe a little bit with the next couple of segments because first of all, sloths, you want to just think they sit around and just hug and love on each other all the time. They're solitary creatures. They don't want to be around even other sloths. No, but this is something that you can have to kind of pick yourself back up after that devastating blow. Okay. In a square kilometer of rainforest, there might be something like 700 sloths. Yes. They're very dense neighborhoods of basically shut in. Weirdos. Imagine that. That's a Swath community. The most devastating thing is coming up later. I know you know what I'm talking about. Oh, yeah, boy. But the males like, let's say two sloths did find themselves on the same tree. They might get into a little fight, but more than likely one of them will leave and they'll go find their own tree. And it might be a tree ten or 15ft away, it sounds like, but it's their own. They look for new trees. Also when they're searching for a female partner, the males do, and they mate very quickly. It lasts just a few seconds. And then the males leave the female. They don't have anything to do with the babies, which I looked up and I was like, surely they have some cute name like sloth babies, but they're just called sloth babies, which is cute. Yeah, that's pretty cute. Not bad. So, you know, we're talking about fertilizing trees and everything when they come down and poop once a week. I know where this is headed. So that was a big mystery. If you're a sloth coming down from a tree to poop uses up about 8% of your energy. That's a lot. And it doesn't make any sense because it leaves you vulnerable to predation. Some researchers say we got to figure it out. They're leaving scent markers on the tree to signal to other sloths. Come on over here. I'm open to whatever freaky stuff you want to try, sloth friend. Yeah, anal secretions. Like a male sloth will literally just say, I'm just going to rub my anus here and I'll meet you back there at 11:00. At least he's a little rainbow trail. I guess so the female can also and I heard these I looked up some videos on the female mating call or whatever because they can also put out the call that they're ready. And it's described as a high pitched screen here in this article, but it sounds sort of bird like. If I was in the jungle and I heard this, I would think it was a bird. Yeah. It's not sexy, though. It's not sexy. It's animal. Did you get that reference or no? No, I didn't. But I appreciate you saying it was a reference. Beverly Hills Cop balky. Oh, yeah. It's a little cameo. Beverly Hills Cop. He was one of the all time great. I never watched that TV show. I know you didn't and Chuck, you're missing out. Remember? I keep going back to that piano moving episode. And it was just one of the greatest purposes of physical comedy ever, really. But yeah, also and it wasn't just Balky. Like Balky and cousin Larry were really well cast. They were perfect foils. Seeing Cousin Larry, his last bit of patience just break and his eyes get really big because Balky did something. It was a beautiful thing to behold. Cousin Larry, was he the other guy? The main guy? Yeah. I see a DVD box set in your future. Were they actually cousins in the show? Yes. Not in real life. I don't know the set up at all. Is it that he has this wacky cousin from another land that all of a sudden shows up on his doorstep? Yeah, valky Bar Takamos from I can't remember. They say it a bunch of times, but he's like a Southern central European type guy from the Balkans or something. Like Latvia or something. And he comes over to America and he stays with his cousin Larry. I have to check it out. It's funny, all the great TV out that's mounting on a list, I'm like, I have to check out Perfect Strangers, right? Exactly. It's on my list. It should be high up. So the woman puts out the mating call. The males, there may be competition for that lady who is in need. And if they do fight, they will fight upside down. And like you said, a sloth fight is, I guess, pretty cute, as it turns out, right? Yeah, it is cute. So the males will fight to the bruised ego, and then one of them will leave and the mail that remains will say, okay, give me a kiss, baby. And then they'll do it like a few times. Yeah, but it's really fast. Apparently I have enough pride to not look up sloth sex. But from what I read, it happens very quickly. And then that's that. Like you said earlier, the male just kind of moves along like, good luck with our children. And then the sloth gestation period depends on whether it's a two toad or a three towed sloth. But it's somewhere between six and eleven months. And then a sloth mom will give birth to one sloth baby at a time. No litters? Nope. Just one cute little baby. So here's where it gets devastating. They do nurse their young for a little while, but again, that takes a lot of energy to nurse a little baby. So they only do that for a couple of weeks before they wean that baby onto solid food. The mommy is passing along all the information that the baby needs to know about what food is and how to hang and live in trees. And they do cling to their moms, which is super cute, for about six to eleven months. And then they are off on their own. Although this is sort of cute they do share a range with mom and apparently will stay within calling distance of one another. And this is all great, and I know I've set everyone up for heartbreak. So here it goes. If a mommy sloth is up in a tree and baby sloth slips and falls down to the ground, mommy may just leave baby there. Yeah. That is like, really hard for me to accept. I know, I know. Because a baby sloth is cute. Adult sloths are cute enough, but a baby sloth is just like eye bleach. Right. So the idea of it just being like down there on their own, sorry, kid, waiting to be it was a great three months we had together, but I'm not going to put myself in the risk of being vulnerable to some sort of deal. Right, yeah, that's what they think, is that the baby is just not worth it to the sloth, which is really sad. I would understand that if there were sloth litters and one of them fell off or that they didn't bond, but they clearly do bond during the piggyback phase of the baby's development. So they think that it's just like it's just too much of a risk for this loss. And this law says, better you than me, kid. Yeah. This disturbed me because I was the same as you. I was like, if there was a litter, I get it, or if they like, they're highly successful. So you would think that after up to a year of gestation period, or if they pump babies out like every month or so, it wouldn't be a big deal. Right. But I don't know, it just seemed like it was worth that 8% energy and maybe a risk of panther feed being panther feed. Right. I guess if the baby falling happened to coincide with the mom having to poop at the base of the tree, maybe the baby has a chance. Then I'm going to save you because I got to take a dump. Right? Oh, man. So let's just go right past that because that is still super sad for me to think about. They do live for about 20 years in the wild, which is pretty good for a mammal, especially when that slow and that seemingly defenseless. Yeah. That's the three toad. Yeah, the three toad. The two toads live about twelve in captivity, though, they can live 30 and 40 years, including our old friend miss C at the Adelaide zoo in Australia, who just died a couple of years ago at the old age of 43. From what I understand, she's the oldest known sloth to live. She did. She looked great up to the end, like Phyllis Tiller. And the fact that sloths lifespans double or triple in captivity really kind of says a lot about just how frequently they fall victim to predators. That's what kills sloth. It's not fighting with other sloths. It's not falling from trees. They can withstand that it's being eaten by a predator. That's how sloths typically die. So when you take them out of that situation, they tend to live very long. But like we were saying at the top of this episode, they're not necessarily happy. They get very stressed out when humans handle them and they can actually die from stress. They look happy, but they would much rather be at their home in Central and South America for sure. They're really difficult to keep alive because remember, especially with the three toed sloth, they're really picky eaters and they learn from their mothers what constitutes food. And so whatever tree that their mom's been living in, basically that specific tree growing in a rainforest in South America, that is what constitutes food to the sloth, not anything else you could possibly come up with. And so they'll still starve in captivity pretty easily, actually, especially if they're kept in captivity outside of Central or South America. Yeah, so if they do, let's say you're a wildlife management professional and you come upon a little baby sloth that has been dropped, they will rescue that sloth if they can and try and rehabilitate it. But the goal is to get it back into the wild as soon as possible. Not like, oh, it's so cute, we're going to keep it around for a little while. I mean, there are clearly some in captivity, but it's not like a common zoo animal that you will see. Right. There was one other thing that was kind of a quirk of their metabolism. So they're mammals, which means they're warm blooded, but they're actually not really warm blooded because they produce so little energy and heat through their metabolism. They actually use the same kinds of strategies that like snakes and lizards do, where they use the sun to adjust their body temperature, which means that if it gets too hot, they can overheat and die. If it gets too cold, they can very easily freeze to death because their body temperature changes with the ambient temperature. So that combined with the fact that their food comes from a single tree in Central America, that makes it really difficult to keep alive in captivity. Which is why, like you're saying, they want to rehabilitate them back into the wild. That's the goal of it, yeah. And while they are doing pretty well out there as far as their status goes, they are of course threatened in the sense that any animal in South America, in the rainforest is threatened because of deforestation. This is just the sad fact. All animals, even if they're doing well, are going to be threatened if you're hacking through and leveling their habitat is what is going on. Pretty much, yeah. That's the biggest threat of deforestation. Although for the Pygmy sloth that lives on Escudo Island off of the coast of Panama and nowhere else, because their habitat is so limited that any deforestation that happens there has put them in grave danger. But it's basically cutting down the forest and then building roads through the forest because sloths will go from tree to tree on the ground sometimes, which means that when they encounter a road, it's hard to get from one tree to the other aside from on the ground. So a sloth crossing the road is probably not a good gamble for the sloth. But the more roads we build through the rainforest, the more sloths get hit by cars. Which is about the saddest thing. You get hit by a car with a car. Yeah. And you always hear about like a movie medicine man, like the cure for cancer maybe in this one leaf in the middle of a forest somewhere in a jungle. They may not have the key to cancer in a sloth, but the Smithsonian tropical research institute did collect fungi samples, the algae that grows in their fur. And this is of the three toed sloth. And they found that some of these samples from the sloth coat help fight against malaria or the parasite that causes malaria and Chagas disease, which I know we've talked about. It's another tropical parasitic disease, stop your heart. MRSA. Cholera salmonella. And they were also active against human breast cancer cells. So pretty amazing. Yeah. Which I mean that's the stuff that they found in the algae growing on sloth fur, which that is astounding. It's awesome. So we're all going to be chewing on sloths in the future. Yeah. Don't say that. They'll be alive. You don't have to kill them or anything. Gently suck on their fur. Okay. You got anything else? I got nothing. Well, if you want to know more about spots and there's a whole internet out there about them. Although we did a pretty good job covering it, Chuck, if I do say so ourselves. I think so. Well, since I said internet, that means it's time for listener. Ma'am, I'm going to call this politics on your show. Hey guys love the show. Been listening for several years now and I've learned lots of good stuff and you've also introduced me to the End of the World with Josh Clark and Movie crush. Yeah. How about that? All right will go deep. And he says this recently I was looking through of these and comments on the show on Apple podcasts saw a number of people making critical comments about how you share your opinions on religion and politics. Too often. I am a politically conservative and religious guy and I want to encourage you to keep sharing your opinions. I live in a smallish midwestern town in a red state where I grew up and spent most of my life. Most of the people in my orbit either go to church with me and my family or hold similar conservative views. Your opinion serves as an important function of bringing some alternative perspectives that sometimes challenge my opinions and encourage me to reevaluate certain positions and views. Please keep interjecting your views, guys. Too many of us automatically dismiss any opinions and unfortunately, people whose views contrast with their own. I used to work for an administrator. He would frequently say, if we're all thinking the same thing, then some of us aren't thinking. That sounds like something. That's a great sensational poster. That's the first album's title for Mouth Farts debut. Boy, keep up the great work and keep offering your views along with your well researched and fascinating topics. Well seasoned with witty humor and hilarious banter. Regards, Will. Well, that was a great, very nice, very kind email. Like Will saw something said, these guys probably know about this and I want to make sure that they know it's cool. So thanks Will, that's much appreciated. If you like to join in with Will's course, we love that. I would also be interested to hear other people who want to write in and explain why we shouldn't share our politics or views, because I'm very curious to hear the other side as well. Sure, it makes me a centinterest fairness, right? You can go to Stuffyoushennow.com and find all of our social links there. And you can also send us a good old fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to Stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio. 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." | |
8bf79c5a-43ee-11e8-9832-d3adcebb1bcf | Emojis: A New Language? Nah. | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/emojis-a-new-language-nah | Believe it or not, there's a lot more to Emojis than meets the eye. Turns out their history is pretty interesting stuff. Join Josh and Chuck today as they tell the tale of the little faces that we all love to hate. | Believe it or not, there's a lot more to Emojis than meets the eye. Turns out their history is pretty interesting stuff. Join Josh and Chuck today as they tell the tale of the little faces that we all love to hate. | Tue, 24 Apr 2018 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=114, tm_isdst=0) | 45829304 | audio/mpeg | "Binge. Listen this and all your artist stations, plus any song from our library of millions of songs all ad free. Get your free 30 day trial of iHeartRadio AllAccess. You'll love it. Don't be basic, be extra. Start your free 30 day trial of iHeartRadio AllAccess. Now. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W smiley face Bryant and Jerry. Party face rolling. I got no emoji. I'm just Josh wink face. Sure. Eggplant and peach. Whoa. I know that's dirty, but you can say eggplant and peach and get away with it even on the TV. Sounds like a delightful meal. It does, actually. It doesn't at all, but not at all. It is cute, for sure. I use the bitmoji now, some some which I see is not even in this research, so I just throw it out there early. I want to go on record it's saying that my bitmoji is one of the best because I'm honest. Do bitmoji, do you even have that? Sure, I've got one. Okay. Because you design your own thing. So I found that a lot of people's bit emojis aren't very honest. Oh, I see what you mean. The image of the person. I say, yeah, I got a little chubby bearded guy, and every time I send it to someone, they're like, oh, my God, that looks just like you. And I said yes because I'm honest. Right. I didn't make myself a supermodel. I got you. I thought you meant you were just like you'd say, like, I don't like that and mean it kind of thing. Now, I don't know if I've ever sent you a bit emojis. I'm going to do that right now. I don't think you have check in real time. Okay, what do you want? Do you want me on an elephant? Yes. Or me crying in the rain because you're not near me? Can you cry in the rain on an elephant? I don't think I can combine those either. One is fine. Elephant. We'll do elephant. I love elephant. Well, I can't find the elephant now. I'll just blow you a kiss. Okay, so what we're talking about today are not bit emojis, although they would qualify as a subtype of this, I guess. But they use a lot of words. It's kind of like when you're playing charades and somebody's like that's close. That's close. Like, you can't talk, man. You have to just shut up. You have to charade it. That's the difference between bitmoji and emoji. And emoji is really what we're talking about today, which is a pictograph, basically like a hieroglyph. Okay. But it's a modern hieroglyphic. Yeah. And I will also go on record as saying I don't really use emojis anymore because of the bit emoji, and I don't use them that often. But it's always funny to send a bit emoji to someone, like, kind of go out on a limb and be like, Should I send this? And then you get one back. I remember the first time I bit Moji Hodgman. I thought, he's going to think I'm just so stupid, and he sent one right back. He's on the bit emoji train. I can buy that for sure. Yeah, I don't see that. I don't use the emojis much anymore, but I did. I guess they first kind of hit the scene on the smartphone. Right. And now I get a little I mean, kissy faces and stuff are fine, but I don't like when I just get like a thumbs up reply for OK, that's fine. Thumbs up is almost like I can barely tolerate you. Yeah, that's what it feels like to me. That's what they're saying. I can't be bothered to type okay. Right. I say KK because it really kind of takes okay. And turns it even more personal. I always thought you were just jittery. No, I meant to type K and just set it. No, I'm saying KK because I know you have legendarily fast thumbs. I do it's from all the coffee I drink and the speed. I will also say this at this article, I kind of picked it because well, I'm going to be honest, we needed something a little easier this week because it's a tough week. This is a little more in depth than you may have thought. More in depth and, like, way more interesting than I thought. The whole history of it I thought was pretty fascinating. So let's talk about the history of it. Man the widely agreed upon start date for emojis comes back in all the way back in 1982. And it wasn't an emoji that first came out. It was what are known as emoticons, the predecessor of emoji. Remember those days? We were all just big dummies and type colonies. Parentheses on the way. It wouldn't be that's not even a thing. Smiley face. I was thinking quotation. Sorry. Yeah, right. So colon in parentheses either way is a smiley face or a frowny face. And we can point to this is so cool that they know who did this, but a guy named Scott Fallman, and he was either an admin or a frequent user or whatever had something to do with the message board, the electronic message board, which was a very early chat room forum prototype back in 1982 for Carnegie Mellon University. Yeah, which we did some time there. We served out a sentence there. We did. And we did a little short video at Carnegie Mellon for days. Yeah, short video for days. But yes, 1982. He and I don't even know if you said specifically, but September 19 actually had the actual date right. Which is amazing. And he said on this bulletin board, if you put a smiley face using this actually, he even gussied it up with the dash as the nose. They lost the dash pretty quick. I like the dash, do you? That's where it gets overdone. Do you know what I like? It's like it's a horse face. What I like are the people that can do, like, a whole picture out of typing things. Oh, yeah. Like the shrug guy. Yeah. No, I mean, like, this whole page would be a big rooster. It's like the kids and me. You and everyone we know. Yeah, exactly. They had, like, the book of them. It was the cutest touch. Yeah. Good movie. That is the one movie that has ever done Whimsy. Right. And didn't go over the edge. It was Whimsical to an exactly perfect, non annoying degree. So every other movie with Whimsy you hate. Yes. Okay. I do like shrug guy, though. Shrug guy. I've never learned to just copy and paste them. Well, I've never done it myself, but I just like the way it looks. And I thought that's creative because it looks exactly like what it is. Yeah. And I was always partial, too, as well, to the awkward, which was what was that colon slapped I had mixed feelings about. Because it can also mean, like, wow, I'm really disappointed, or it's like, sure. That's why I like it, I think. Very versatile. It is versatile. There's a lot to it. All right. So, anyway, he said if you use a smiley face with a colon in that dash, in parentheses in your comment to say it's humorous, then I think we can avoid it was kind of used to clear up, like, the ambiguity of text and things like that. Not texting, but sometimes it's hard to read. Like, Wait, is this person making a joke? Right. So if somebody was joking or being sarcastic yeah. Like, use this thing. Right. And then the person will know. And we won't have an argument on the message board because the person will know you were joking. Right? Yeah. And it started in 1982. And as we'll see, what Fallman hit on the head was the very point that emojis fulfill, which is they add context to plain text, which is important. Yes. So Falmouth came up with this triumphant victory, like you said, September 19, 1982. Now he's sitting on a mountain of cash. Oh, yeah, man. He trademarked it very wisely. So hopefully everybody is sending him the money any time they use that emoticon. But before him, and I thought this was super interesting, people have always, of course, put little smiley faces and letters and things like that, so this was an extension of that. But some historians say in 1648, Robert Harrick wrote a poem entitled To Fortune. And it seems as if he is purposely included in a Modicon in a line upon my ruins, smiling yet. And he puts a colon in a parenthesis after the word smiling. And people say that may have actually been the very first use of this. Right. I read the little article that had that, and there was a note in addendum and appendage, if you will. You said this is PS, basically. Oh, really? It was from an English professor who said that at this time, in 1648, in the mid 17th century, there was no standardized punctuation. And so even a poet writing something, sending it off to the printer, would not necessarily expect the printer to follow his punctuation to A-T-I think it's a bit of a lame explanation. Why even go to the trouble? Maybe this professor was saying the printer himself could have have added this and that it wasn't the poet's intent and that it was just accidental. I'm not sure. I like to think that, yeah, this guy had a tremendous amount of foresight. That's what I'm going to believe. And in 1648, Robert Harrick said, here's your first emoticon, everybody come back and find me in 2012. Yeah, I'm going to go with that story. Okay. That's where we're going with. So we had the emoticon either beginning in 1648 or definitely beginning in 1982, and that's all we had to deal with for a good 13 years, if it was the latter. And then in 1995, we finally get our first emojis. And we know where those came from, too. And believe it or not, everybody, they came from Japan. I know, no surprise, right? Right. It was a company called NTTD. Little O. Big C, little O. M little O. Documo. We're going to call it Document because that's what it's spelled. Sure. And they had two icons, a phone and a heart. And this is when, in 1995, people had pagers. Yeah. Beepers did you ever have a pager? Oh, yeah, I have tons. Did you really? Yeah. Like two or three at a time. Sure. Depending on what you needed, maybe I did. I think when I got into the film business, I had to get a pager, but it was very, very soon after that my first Nokia phone came into play. I didn't have a page for years and years. And he had a page of a year. Got you, if I remember correctly. Yeah. I mean, for those of you, for you kids out there, there's probably plenty of kids who listen to it that I have no idea what a pager is. All right, let's tell them. It's like a little, I guess, digital thing that was like the size of there you go. It was like the size of a cigarette pack by you guys. All vape. You don't smoke cigarettes. It was smaller than that. Okay. It was the size of I don't even know what size it was. It was the size of a very tiny cell phone. I guess we could say inches. It was about like two inches by an inch and a half, which is some unknown amount of centimeters. Right. But it was a very small little box and you carried it with you have a clip that you can put on your belt. It was a magic little box, because somebody would call a number that was associated with your pager and they would type in their phone number after the beep and hang up, or press pound, I think, afterward. Then you hang up and then you got a little alert on that little thing you wore on your belt. Then it would be like it was very annoying. And the person's number would be next to it. And if they really needed to talk to you, they put 911 after that. So you would then pull your car over, find a payphone, call the number on your pager and say you got the stuff. What's so important? Right? Yeah. That was how people communicate with one another before cell phones. It seems like 100 years ago. And it's really funny that it was the mid 90s. Right. And then people said, well, why don't we just make phones more portable? And they're like, oh, that's actually hadn't thought about that. Good idea. Yeah. Because they had back phones and car phones at the time. Right. It was a thing. So the entire country of Japan had pagers in the early 90s. Yeah, they were early adopters. Yeah, for sure. And this docamo, they had a line called Pocket Bell Pagers. And they were the ones that first added emojis. There was a heart and a phone. Yes. The phone meant Call me the Heart very sweetly. I love that. The Heart was one of the first ones basically sending a message of love. And then later on in the late ninety s, I guess they streamlined that, got rid of those icons. Because apparently Pocket Bell Pagers, there are a lot of business people that used them and they weren't into it. So the teenagers were like, forget using Docamo, right? We're out of here. We're going to Tokyo. Messaging. Because they've got these little what would eventually be called emojis. I love that the Dokmo like they got all business. They were like, we can't have the heart on there. It reminds me of probably my favorite Onion headline of all time, man Accidentally Ends Business call with I Love you. Is that the greatest one ever? That's a good one. My favorite was always drugs. When war on drugs. Oh, yeah. Did you see the video they made with, I think, Lil Wayne? They were saying the DEA had tapped Lil Wayne to go carry out the war on drugs by doing all the drugs. Well, just a picture of his face. Yeah, but they use clips of him on his tour bus trying to talk, but he's just so waste, he's not even making sense. But they clip, they interspersed it in like it was a news report. And he was doing a great job, this good stuff. It's funny too. After our ten years of doing this, we've gotten to do so many cool things because of the show. And one of my favorite things ever, still is that when we knew people at the Onion, they took my picture one day, and they'll still trot that out as Area Man. And my mug will be in an Onion article every now and then. Pretty good. Area man. Yes. Shout out Joe Randazzo for getting us in there. Yeah, back in the day. Getting us in the office. All right, so should we take a break? Oh God, we haven't yet, haven't we? Now let's take a break and we'll be back to talk about where they went with Docamo right after this. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get handson, experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. 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. Alright, man. So DoKoMo said, we're done with you kids. And then they said, oh, wait, God, come back. You're like a third of our business. We had no idea. Luckily, they had an engineer named Shigitaka Kurita. You can really get it, the Japanese. Thank you very much. I'm around it a lot. Yeah. And I guess Kurita san. Okay, we'll go with that. He was working on a mobile internet platform called Imode, and he said, you know what, we're just trying to get some pretty basic thoughts across here on a mobile network. So, like your phone stuff like the news or the weather or something like that. Headlines, literally news headlines and what the stock market is doing, or if it's sunny outside. Right. And stuff, that's going to repeat pretty predictably over fairly short time scale. So it's going to be sunny this day, and it's probably going to be sunny again. So you're going to go back to the sunny thing over and over again. Rather than typing out sunny, what if he just had an icon of a sun? Right. And this is a huge breakthrough. And what this guy did was create the very first emojis for this Imoad platform. And he actually coined the term emoji, too. Shikitaka Kurita. That's right. And there was a character limit, a 250 character limit, which is kind of the main reason behind why we have emojis is good. So like you said, he didn't have to type out Sonny. You could use one character and in sounded like the future back then. Yeah. Remember, it's crazy. He developed 176 of these initial emoticons for things dealing with the weather, sports, food and drink, love, of course. And like you said, he made up the word e, which was picture, and emoji, which was character. And that's where it comes from. Yeah. So the thing was, then you had how many did he come up with? 276 initial ones. Okay. So the thing is, this whole mobile platform imo this is talking about, they had like 250 characters tops, but these broadband networks weren't invented yet. This is all like really low fi stuff still, so it was very much ahead of his time. So he kind of had to reverse engineer how to get these things across. They had a stroke of genius since there was a finite number of these things, rather than sending a picture from one phone to another, when one user wanted to send that emoji, they stored the pictures in the phone, and then you could activate those emojis from a simple, I guess, two bite alphanumeric code. So when your phone got the right alphanumeric code, it would produce a smiley face. Yeah. It really set the stage for what we have today. Yummy was over there at this time. She was in japan teaching, and she told me, I came back and I was like, we don't have texts. Like, everybody text. You don't have hello kitty. Right, exactly. And it was like years before japan was definitely doing this fairly early compared to us here. Yeah. I remember seeing first handheld cell phone that wasn't the big brick phone. I saw one of those in la. In the late 80s or early 90s, literally in a hollywood back lot. Some producer had a brick phone. It's like, oh my god. But the first kind of cell phone cell phone I ever saw was in london, and I guess it would have had to have been five or 96, and I had never seen one. Was it like this big rectangle with the flip down mouthpiece and the pull up antenna? Something like that? It may not have had the flip down, but it was smaller than a brick phone. But I just remember thinking, wow, like London. They're on the leading edge of technology here. Sure. I've never seen that before. Yeah. What in the world's that guy doing? Yeah, let me see that thing. All right. So many years past, more I don't even know how much they call them emojis or icons back then, probably. Well, no, the guy had coined the term emoji. Yeah. But I just don't know if it was like the popular term at the time. I see. I think it was in japan. Okay. Yeah. Again, ahead of the curve. Yes. I just want to make sure that that's been gotten across very much ahead of time. All right. In 2010, a company called unicode consortium well, it wasn't a company, it was the unicode consortium. They're a nonprofit and they are a group of tech companies and volunteers from the tech industry that basically really understood this stuff, saw the writing on the wall, or the emoji on the wall and where it was going, and they said, why don't we do this? We need to create a library. It needs to be standardized because I remember early on, with smartphones, different platforms, someone would send you an emoji from an Android to an iPhone, it wouldn't come across. So they said, we need to standardize this so it can operate across all iOS devices. Yeah. Or even if the phones have the same emojis, they might not use the same codes. Right. So you might get the opposite of what you're looking for. You're looking for a peach and you get a big eggplant. Right, exactly. Wow. What are you trying to say, man? So there was this great need for uniformity, but it didn't come out until what year was the 2010, you said. So this Unicode consortium and the Daily Mail, by the way, called it the Unicorn Consortium, if you noticed, and I called it the Unicode Consortium. Either way. Can you pronounce it both ways? I think the Brits do that. And that's why you saw your first cell phone full circle. Yeah. So Unicode got together and they said, we're going to make this, this collective, open source, nonprofit effort to encode these things and create a universal standard. And in doing so, they've made what some people point to, as we'll see is one of the first universal languages. Yeah. And also not really. Strangely, it shocked me to know that no one owns this. I love that there is no patent or IP property rights to emojis. I love that it's great. But it's kind of shocking that something so ubiquitous, no one is making money off of it. I love that it's wonderful and so rare. That's why it's shocking to me. It is. Now, we should say that some people point to the Unicode consortium being dominated by some major companies. I think Google and Apple really have a lot of people in there, but again, it's a nonprofit group and there are rules that are followed. I think the implication is that if Google or Apple puts up some suggestions, which they do, sometimes, they may have a little more likelihood of getting past than other people's emojis. Maybe. Probably. And then also, since they're both American companies, the universal set of emojis tend to skew a little more American, like hot dogs and hamburgers and french fries are there, and now they're just now starting to get to like euros and things like that. Those are not two huge downfalls in return for this thing being open source and UN owned by anybody except for the entire world. Right. But one huge downfall because it's open source and anyone can do anything with these emojis, is that we got the emoji movie because some Hollywood executive was like, we don't have to pay for this. We can just go out and make a movie. Right. We'll be the first one with an emoji movie. And since we don't have to pay for it, we can put all of that money into making something really great. And they did. I didn't see it, obviously I didn't. But I remember when it was announced there would be an emoji movie. I just remember thinking, Come on. Well, it really delivered on that reaction, from what I understand. Yeah. You think it was a bomb in all respects, but they still made, like, four times what they put into it. I think the box was 200 million and they spent, like, 50 million on it. I don't know. But I will say this. I have no idea what it's about at all about emojis. I know. But my prediction, having not seen it or read anything about it, is that it was some dumb story about the different emotions coming together in the end to solve some problems. I'm sure you're right. I'm sure Hugh Jackman was in it and Jared from Subway was beaten up by a bunch of people. Yeah. And then there was a sharknado. Although one of the guys who used to be in Silicon Valley, TJ Mitchell. TJ Miller. Miller. He was in it. And so I was looking up the emoji movie and he apparently is accused of making a bomb. I don't know, man. I just saw that. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. I don't know how he's doing that article made me worry for him. I think he got in some argument on a train with a lady and then was taken off the train and called in a bomb threat on that train that she had a bomb. Right. And you can't do that, TJ. Allegedly. Allegedly. You can't do that, TJ. Miller. No, you really can't, man. But, yeah, I lay all this at the feet of the emoji movie because he was the star of it. Absolutely. What was he, the eggplant or the peach? Well, if he was the star, then he probably would have been crying with laughter, because in 2017, I believe for three straight years, 1516 and 17, crying with Laughter was the most popular emoji, which I have issue with that. And in 2015, it was actually this is what I have a problem with. Oxford Dictionary chose it as the word of the year. I don't have a problem with that part. Really? Yeah. That shows oxford Dictionary is keeping up with the everevolving language they're descriptivist, not prescriptivist. All right? That makes them AOkay in my book. So what's your problem? My problem is that means that crying with laughter is overused. None of the people, maybe 100 of 1% of the people who sent the crying with laughter emoji were literally crying, actually crying with laughter. Like, laugh out loud. How many people are like, lol? That's not what that means. Everybody, you ruined it. You're ruined laughing out loud, and you're ruining the crying with laughter. So you're saying literally, if you're crying with laughter is the only time you can send that? Not just saying, hey, that's really funny? Yes. All right. I think it would be a much better world if that were the case. Okay. I just think it's overused, and I think that's one reason why everybody is so cynical and sarcastic is because we're so out of touch with our emotions that we have the similar to stand in for us instead of actually experiencing and everything has to be so much bigger and bolder than it actually is. There's no subtlety or nuance, which is ironic because there's tons of subtlety and nuance in actually communicating with emoji. Right. I mean, there's like a medium laughter emoticon, probably. Right? I'm sure. Probably an emoji. But it's the same thing as using exclamation points. You get trapped in it, you know what I'm saying? So, like, all of a sudden, if you take away the exclamation points, people are like, are you mad at me? What's wrong? I've definitely gotten in text exchanges, like, hey, do you want to go do this thing? Or whatever, and if someone sends back sure, you do that. Yeah, you do that a lot if you just send back sure. It's like, well, I guess Chuck is not very happy about this, adding exclamation points. No, but you shouldn't have to, is my point. You should not have to. And I think we just need to rip the band Aid off. I don't ever want to see an exclamation point from you again that you don't mean, much less a double. The one that really is unsettling is when somebody replies with short period and the S is lower case. That means things are not going well. Right. Then sure. Yes. You don't want me to be a funny because when I say sure, I mean sure, but that's how I say it in my head. But I guess lowercase sure period is definitely that's saying something. Adding the period onto a lowercase word, you're sending a message, but if you're not, if you're just saying sure, like, normally. That's the problem with text based communication. It lacks context, it lacks emotion. Emails, how we're used to communicating. Right. Any kind of text base. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, just letting that you have to add some sort of punctuation. That's the role that emojis fulfill. And we'll talk about that after a break. How about that? Sure. Lower case period. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride career prep prepares your. Team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride career prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast, and start taking charge of your future today. All right, so we'll go over some interesting stats here. 92% of people use emojis online. What? That's almost everybody. Wow. Surprising. Yes. And the other 8% I don't know. The other 8% have their arms fold, and they're like, I'm not going to do it. Darn it. That's right. We've been dancing around this peach and eggplant thing long enough. Are we getting there now? Well, we might as well. So these have famously become stand ins for body parts, right? Like the peach and, like, the Almond brothers sense of the word. Is that what they meant? Yeah, I never really thought about that. Oh, yeah. Eat a peach, huh? All right. So it soon became a thing to send a peach with an eggplant. I am so old and out of that loop that I didn't know this was a real thing. I didn't either, until this article. And I was like, oh, yeah. Obviously, after reading about it, I'm like, when you look at the eggplant, you're like another famous emoji is the poop icon. Sure. It's one of the most ubiquitous, very popular in Japan, and has become huge in Japan, popular in America with its fun little googly eyes. And I think didn't Google even have flies buzzing around the poop? The first poop, which was a little much, frankly. But, yeah, I think back in 2008 or something like that, google came out with their own poop icon for Gmail 2007, and they put flies around. It was just gross. Since somebody added the Google eyes later on, and now it's like a mascot. The poop emoji without the eyes is like, gross. What's wrong with you? Why would you send that? It's like, sure, period. Right? But the poop with Google, I was like, sure, exclamation point. Right? Okay. I think you're right. I'm following along, and there's been a lot of I would call them faux controversies over the years. Just last year, Google in 2017 had a cheeseburger icon that had the cheese under the meat patty, and people went berserk. That's really stupid that people went berserk, but it's also stupid to put the cheese under the meat. Yeah, it's just a weird choice. We did that. The person who made that. Never see a cheeseburger before. It's a really ducking stupid thing to do. But if it was somebody who really had never seen a cheeseburger before, then God bless them. And I feel bad for them for the outrage they created. Because even if they put the bun on upside down, even if they'd left off the ketchup. Okay, it doesn't matter. It still looks like a cheeseburger. I know, settle down. Sometimes I wonder if they do some of that stuff, these programmers or designers or coders or whoever does these, they do that on purpose, just to rib people. Like, I'm going to put the cheese, we're going to set the internet. And they did. Apparently the CEO of Google, I did not know that. This is the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai. Okay. He said, we are going to drop everything else we are doing to go sort this out. Yeah, I imagine fairly sarcastically. I would think so. Sarcastic moticon. Right. Whatever that is. I don't know what that would be. I think you got to use I don't know what is a sarcastic emotion? I bet there's one people use and we're just not hip to. That would be my guess. Another word is old. There was a survey from Match.com that claimed that people who used emojis had sex more often than those people who didn't. Apparently the wine emoji is huge in Britain and Australians love their drug related emojis. We're going to be in Australia. That's right. So we're going to find out what that's all about when we're in the Ananda. And of course, we need to talk about the skin tone. Very early on, it was, I think in 2015, the Unicode Consortium changed the default skin tone to what they call Simpsons yellow. But then you had the ability to tint them to different, I think, five different skin tones to represent at least five different shades of skin. Right. Which was a good start. Right? It was a good start. They are still just getting going. There's plenty that have been left off. Like they just now are starting to add redheads to things and curly haired people. That's crazy. Which is crazy cool that they're adding it. But yeah, there's always somebody whose feelings are hurt because they're left out by the emoji people every year. They also say that too many smiley faces if you're dealing with work and if you're dealing with work, maybe avoid emojis would be my guess. It depends on who you're talking with. I mean, if it's a friend or whatever. Yeah, it depends on your job, too. Yeah, if you're in banking and you're communicating with the client you just met, it depends on what job it is, too. Of course. Sure. But there is apparently a study out there that said, contrary to what you think, using too many smiley emoticons don't increase your perception of warmth, they decrease perception of competence. I totally get that. But the study was from the journal social Psychological and Personality Science. It was a 2017 study and they said not only is a smiley face emoji not a smile, it has some of the opposite effects, which is like, I mean, it totally makes sense if you think about it like somebody smiling. You're like, oh, I want to be around that person. Somebody sends you a bunch of smiley faces, you're like, oh, what an idiot. It's really easy to cross that line. Well, yeah, and it's also really easy to get in trouble. Do not send emoji threats because that's a real thing. There have been people all over the world that have been arrested for sending handgun emojis to people that they were angry at and getting arrested for making actual threats. Threat that counts legally. That raises some questions about what emojis are. Are they language? There's this guy, I think he's a rapper actually named Young Jake. Y-U-N-G Jake. So the absence of the O in Young indicates he might be a rapper. Young, right. Young Jake. Yoong Karl. But young Jake is an emoji portraitist. Oh, man, that stuff was so cool. Isn't that awesome? Yeah. So this guy does portraits of people, really good portraits, strictly from emojis, layered in really interesting ways. He's got like a really great Instagram to check out too. Y-U-N-G Jake. But go check that one out. And then there's also a dude named Fred Beninson, and he translated Moby Dick into emoji. Wow. It's called Emoji Dick. And every word of every line of Moby Dick has been translated into emojis. And this guy did this, right? He hired three people to translate every single line, and then he hired another group of people who would look at each line and then look at the line of text and say, this is the one of the three that best gets this across for every line. So you can get Emoji Dick online for $200 for hard copy, $200. But I think he sells it by the PDF for $5. And is Moby Dick represented by an eggplant in a peach? Terrible. Or at least the eggplant. So there's a lot of like it's obvious that emoji is art, but there's a lot of people out there, linguists included, who are saying emoji is words too, and it may be a language that's developing in front of our eyes. It's pretty interesting as it stands now, though, technically, if you're a linguist, it is not a language because it lacks grammar, which is structures that allow you to take words and put them into different combinations to create higher thoughts. Emojis does not yet allow us to do that because there's no real rules. Yes, but there are people studying at this one article you sent, a woman named Rachel Tetman, a linguistics PhD candidate from University of Washington. Go Huskies. Sure. She did some studies where she would show people pictures like photographs, and then say, how would you emoji that description of that picture? Right. And there are different pictures that were subtly different. I mean, they were obviously different. The first one was a man counting money. And she would say, Would you say what this picture is doing by emoji? Man, emoji dollar bill or emoji? Dollar bill, emoji man. And the results, it seemed like she didn't get a lot that were 50 50 for any of these. It seemed like most of them that she got were like 75% to 80% of people kind of siding one way or the other, as far as she said, as far as order goes. So she believes kind of firmly that she's proven that they're bi directional. Well, depends. It depends. So, with the one of the man counting money, 80% of the people said that they would depict that emoji wise with man and then dollar bill. And the reason why she said was because there was an agent patient relationship. The agent was the man acting on the money, the patient. And it was very clear. So there's really only one way to say it. Man money. Man is counting money very much like a subject and a predicate in a sentence. That's one way they could act. They can also kind of describe the layout of a photo, too, if there's not a very strong agent patient relationship. Right. So her takeaway, basically, is that they can represent the physical arrangement of things and also word. So, another one was a picture of a man walking past the castle. And the castle is basically the big part of the picture. And the man is pretty small, but the man is in the lower right corner. So most people said that they would do castle man because the man is not acting on castle. Castle is not acting on the man. But that's the way they see it. Yeah. And that's the way it's arranged in the picture. That's what I would do. So she was saying that it can mimic the structure of sentences, and it can also mimic the structure of pictures, which makes emoji definitely their own thing. Yeah. But the whole point of emoji, the reason that we use them. There's a guy named Viv Evans. I think he's at a Bangor university. He is a huge proponent of emojis as a new way to communicate rather than a step backwards, because there's a lot of people, probably people who hate vocal fry. Emoji is so stupid. Anybody who uses emojis is stupid, and it's a giant step backwards for language. Yeah. Which is why I think the Oxford English dictionary was making such a statement by choosing the crying face as the word of the year. Right. They were casting their lot on the side of emojis as being a new form of communication. So Viv Evans is like yes, that's absolutely true. And what they do is they stand in for things like gestures and intonation things that are missing in a strictly text based message, like texting or Twitter or an email. And that's what emojis do. They add emotion. They convey nuance to it that otherwise isn't there. And they're fun, like, get the stick from your peach. Get the stick out of your peach and have a little fun with emojis. You know, it's funny, Chuck is apparently the mystery has never been solved as to exactly why eggplant is in there in the first place. Kind of a weird one to add, considering we didn't have redheads until recently. Or curly hurt people. But there's always been an eggplant. It makes you wonder. Yeah, for sure. And this is the last thing I've got, was something you said, which is kind of a cool move. Apple wants to be more inclusive with their emojis. So they are proposing as a starting point and not a comprehensive list, they are proposing including emojis to represent people with disabilities. So things like a man or a woman with a cane, prosthetic legs and arms, guide dogs, hearing AIDS, people in wheelchairs, stuff like that. Right. And those would be part of Emoji 12.0, which would come out in March of 2019. And they just released emoji 11.0 to the public, which includes the Partying Face Cupcakes. Is that what this huge list is? Yeah, these are all available now. They're going to be available on phones in August. But the list was released to the public. And this Unicode Consortium, they take all these under advisement, but they also put them out into the public to say, what do you guys think about these, too? Right. And there's a few that they will never take. They will accept one of a living person, a deity or a business logo. All those are off the table immediately. But then other ones they want to make sure aren't too specific. Like the golden arches. You'll never see something like that. No, not as long as it's open source. Interesting. But there are some pretty good ones coming down the pike this August. I wonder what supervillain is. It's a guy twisting his mustache. It's kind of like Doctor Strange or Professor Strange or whatever. Strange. Kind of like pop collar cape. Okay. Have you seen these? Yeah, it obviously gets across, especially when it's next to the superhero one. That it's. The super villain. I think my favorites coming soon are NASA amulet. I don't even know what that is. I don't either. Mosquito. That seems relevant. There's one that's coming. It's probably the best emoji of all time, the clown face. Oh, that's not a thing yet. It's really well done. Yeah, because that's so versatile. It is, but it's also like a good looking emoji. Is it a scary clown or no, no, it's a great, perfect, universally beautiful clown. And I can't remember we did our clown episode, so I can't remember if it's an August clown or what type of clown it is, but it's a great clown. And you can see all these, by the way, at emoji PDF. I just saw it. Oh, what did you think? Did you see it? The guy who did penny Wise? I can't remember which brother? Well, he's a scars card. That's what you say, we don't know. We'll never know. But he did just an amazing job. Yeah. And I had no skin in the game. I had never read any of it or seen any previous versions at all, and I just thought it had a lot of heart and was creepy, and I thought it was really good. I thought it was good, too. But you could also tell that Stranger Things had come out while they were writing this, and they were like, oh, let's retool this a little bit to really hit the Stranger Things crowd. I don't think that's true. I think it is true. I think that script was locked long before Stranger Things came out, and I think they retooled it. You got anything? The kid from Stranger Things is in it. That was a little on the nose. I'm curious about the timeline there. So there's another one coming out, too. It's a dude with a fro who looks exactly like Slim Good Body that's coming out in Emoji PDLs. Wait, whose slim good body again. Remember the guy who wore the suit that showed his internal legends and all that back in the day? Yeah. Looks just like slim. Good body. And then there's a mind blown one and a vomiting one, too, but the clown is the best one. Okay, I'm excited. You want to know more about Emojis? Go out, go forth. Start talking in Emojis. It's pretty interesting, and since I said it's interesting, it's time to listen to me. I'm going to call this Meals on Wheels. We got a lot of great follow up from people who were in fact inspired to go out and join Meals on Wheels. Yeah, that's pretty neat. Which was best case scenario, exactly what we and Meals on Wheels was hoping for. So hey, guys, thanks for your commitment and awesomeness. I've been an avid listener for the past few years. You're my go to for workouts and long car rides. A few weeks ago, I heard your episode of Meals on Wheels was absolutely blown away. I'm not sure if it was the sliding scale model or just the overall effects of the program, but you encouraged me to sign up to serve with my local community center that offers Meals on Wheels in Central Ohio. He's in Columbus. Yeah. After getting fingerprinted a few days ago. I guess you got to do that. Sure they don't want any weirdos? No. I am awaiting confirmation. Like weirdos with no fingerprints. I'm awaiting confirmation before going on my first and only shadow ride before being a driver myself. The program is very easy to learn and I was surprised to hear that most drivers are actually between the ages of 50 and 60. I signed up for once a week for about 2 hours, and that is considered average. Highly encourage anyone of any age to look for the opportunity looking into this for Meals on Wheels as you can do things like food prep, administration work and more. I know if I would have signed up. I don't know if I would have signed up if not from learning about it on your program. Man, that's awesome. Yeah. That is from Dalton Shaffer. Good work, Dalton. And Dalton wrote back after I told him he was going to be on this or mail to tell Josh, I live in Columbus now and I purposely do not say thee Ohio State University, and the natives are getting restless and angry. Be careful, Dalton. Be careful. Watch yourself. Thanks for signing up for me. We want you to stay alive so you can keep delivering Meals on Wheels and for lots of other reasons. Sure, if you did something pretty great because we told you too well, we want to hear about that. You can tweet to us at Syskpodcast, at joshmclark or at Moviecrushcharlesw Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast athowtoforce.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web stuffyoushootnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. The sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder. From exactly right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgueref and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories is 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." | |
8300159e-4521-48ba-897f-aed600e1cc16 | Supernovae: Best Around, Case Closed | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/supernovae-best-around-case-closed | <p>Face it, supernovae are the most interesting phenomena in the universe. Black holes are cool, but did you know they sprout from a supernova? What could be cooler than a star exploding so powerfully, the flash it creates shines for months after?</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p> | <p>Face it, supernovae are the most interesting phenomena in the universe. Black holes are cool, but did you know they sprout from a supernova? What could be cooler than a star exploding so powerfully, the flash it creates shines for months after?</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p> | Tue, 19 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=200, tm_isdst=0) | 40121243 | audio/mpeg | ||
null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here lurking around like a weirdo and this is stuff you should know. That's right. Interstellar dish. Yeah, absolutely. And, Chuck, I was like, surely we've talked about this before, and I'm sure we have. Maybe in the Galaxy episode or I think we did black holes. Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, actually. But we've never done one I double checked. We've never done one on supernovae. That's a E on the end. That's plural episode before. And we're going to now. And I have to say, the reason we're going to now, I think, for my money, is that we will be discussing probably the most interesting phenomenon in the universe. Do you think so? That's my bet. I'm not going to try to sway you or persuade you if you feel differently, but that's just how I feel. All right. Well, I mean, it's interesting timing because of the new images coming back from the James Webb Space Telescope. Kind of like right now, it looks like this thing, it's 1000 times greater than what Hubble can see. Yeah. And, like, hubble is our Gen X's superstar. Yeah. And it's nothing to sneeze at. I mean, it's produced some pretty amazing pictures. It's fine, but it's nothing compared to the James Webb. Yeah. And what they're saying is that this thing is potentially going to be able to see through space dust, and they're going to be doing something that we can often not do, which is see supernovae. Yes. Which is a big deal because space dust can really obscure supernovae, which we'll talk about. I'm sure you've seen that first picture they released, the Starchild. Amazing. Yeah, it is. But at the same time, it's almost like it looks like it was put together by a poorly trained graphic designer who really overdid it, tried to fit everything into one picture, but it just really goes to show you how not so full the universe is, and yet imagine how spread out all that stuff is, the distance between those things. Yeah. Unbelievable. It is. And the core no pun intended, but the core of this research comes from our old website that we used to work for, how stuff works.com. And one of the most convoluted explanations of anything I've ever seen in my life. Yeah. We're going to pare it down to size. We're going to tame it. Okay. Hey, listen, I don't want to pick on somebody, but it almost seemed like the goal was to see how much they could confuse somebody about supernovae instead of clearly explain what's going on there. So our goal is to wind our way through this and lean into kids science websites like I always do. Okay. Yeah. And they work big time, especially for this kind of thing. Because to me, one of the reasons I find talking about supernova so attractive is that it's really understandable when you kind of dig into it. But when you realize, like, oh, I get this stuff, you come to realize that you understand the most superficial understanding of what's actually going on, and it's still, like, generally the nuts and bolts, the principle of it. But there's so much more detail that people dedicate their entire careers to studying these things, and we're just going to go over it in less than an hour. How about that? Well, yeah, I say far less than an hour. But if you look at what you're trying to understand, and even if you can understand the tiniest concepts, what you're also understanding are the tiniest building blocks of everything, basically. Because out of supernovae are born are heavy elements, and without heavy elements, there is no life on Earth. Yeah. So, like, that saying that we're all made of stardust feels like a sagan saying. That's very true. And that stardust comes in large part from supernovae. Steven Stills, was it? Yeah, you're right. But I think he might have been smoking dubs with Carl Sagan at the time. Dubs? Yeah. Well, that's what they called their words, not mine. Just to enshrine our generation excess of this whole thing. That's right. It didn't say split at least, right? That would be genetics, I guess. Dubes would be more boomer. Right? Exactly. But that's a really accurate statement. Right. Everything planets are made from it, other stars are made from it. Anything alive on the planet Earth, as far as we know, is made of that same stuff that gets ejected from stars during supernovae. And if you study this, what we're talking about really is the end stage of the life cycle of a particular star. But if you follow it back beyond that endpoint and watch that stardust and kind of track it and trace it, you'll see that it goes on to form more stars. So really what we're looking at is a part of a cycle that very much resembles, like, the carbon cycle here on Earth, a closed system that is self reinforcing and self sustaining, that goes over really long periods of time, but really it just keeps regenerating itself. Yeah. And the other cool thing about this web telescope is they're already seeing just baby star factories out there. Yeah, it's really cool stuff. I guess before we get into what is actually happening at the end life of a star, we should talk a little bit, probably about just sort of how rare this is. If you don't know anything about supernovae, you may think that this kind of thing is happening all the time in the Milky Way galaxy. And we may not see it because of space dust and stuff, but it is in fact, happening all over the place all the time, all over many galaxies. But in the Milky Way galaxy, it happens about every 50 years or so, give or take. They track about two every 100 years. And by track, like I said, sometimes they don't see them. And up until the mid 2000s, they thought that the last one in the Milky Way was in the then they realized, hey, wait a minute, we've been following other things, like this debris, this interstellar debris, and that's actually the remnants of a supernova just about 140 years old. We just didn't know that's what it was right. Exactly. Until later. The one that they thought was the last one from the 1600 was described by Johann Kepler, who spotted it, and it's now called SN 6016 four supernova, 16 four, because that's when it happened. And that was discovered by Kepler because it was visible to the naked eye. And there have only been five recorded supernova in the last millennia that were visible to the naked eye. One in ten, six, one in 1054, one in 1181, one in 1572, and then Kepler is in 16 four. So the very ironic thing is that since we invented telescopes, there hasn't been a supernova that was visible to the naked eye, which is kind of funny. Yeah. But you can see them with a telescope that you or I could own. Right. In fact, the high powered telescope, sometimes they're so sensitive to this. As you'll see, the supernovae emit a super bright light, as you would imagine, when a star collapses and explodes upon itself. And sometimes those telescopes, in fact, they're almost always overwhelmed and not very useful for those purposes. So they count on regular people in their telescope sometimes to see these in neighboring galaxies, like that ten year old girl in 2011 that found 1240,000,000 light years away in January of 2011. It's cool that they actually kind of depend on amateur astronomers to find these things, to call them in to the AI. Yeah. The IAU Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. Sounds like something Dan Ackroyd would spit out in an infomercial. Right. And they only accept telegrams that's right to them. Are you going to tell me to stop again? But you can submit that. And they will take a look, and they will use their spectrometers to kind of see what radiation is being given off, and then they can tell a lot about what's going on. Yeah, big time. And the reason that there's a couple of reasons they rely on those backyard astronomers. One, amateur astronomers are no joke. They know what they're doing. They also have plenty of very well documented star charts. So they're exactly the kind of people who, number one, are looking up at the skies in the first place, and then, number two, are familiar enough with what the sky is supposed to look like that they would actually notice a new star. That's the deal. So it actually is a thing that amateur astronomers are relied on by professional astronomers. And the coolest thing about this, too, is, as we'll see, like a supernova when it shows up, it can be a new star that shines for a day, a couple of weeks, a few months, usually not much longer than that. And then it just goes away again. And what's really neat about this is what you're seeing is an event that happened 25 million years ago. And finally that light, that's 25 million light years away from us, that where it originated, is finally reaching us. I just find that so colossally awesome. And I know that applies to every bit of starlight and even sunshine. It's not like it's instantaneous. It takes light years to reach us or it has to travel across light years to reach us. But for some reason, the idea that's the basis of a supernova is really neat to me. Yes, and in fact, the very first one on record was about 2000 years ago in China. There were astronomers there who all of a sudden saw a new light like you would today. And they started following it and making notes and chronicling what this thing was doing there. And then I think it took about eight months in that case, which is pretty long. So maybe I don't know, maybe they were off or something. This was 2000 years ago? No, I mean, the Chinese astronomers of this age were pretty sharp so they would have probably pretty accurate. Well, at any rate, it disappeared and they didn't quite understand, like, what was going on at the time. Right. But they did write it down in a book a couple of centuries later called The Book of the Later Han Dynasty. And I guess at some point somebody came across this and realized that what they were describing was a supernova. And what's even more mind blowing about it is we've reached the point where, using things like spectrographs and other incredibly sensitive telescopes we can look at the remnants and see what they're made of, how hot they are, how fast they're traveling and basically reverse engineer their origin to determine how old something is. And they've actually found that supernova, supernova 186. That was originally described by the Han astronomers. Yeah. And we'll get to why it's useful to chart the stuff anyway because you might think it's a dead or dying and dead star. Like, who cares? But it can be very useful as far as mapping the universe and finding out how things behave in neighboring galaxies. And it's all super useful. And of course, we've already talked about the elemental factor, which is why we're here. That's right. It's not us. Right, exactly. And I think the last one that was visible, not to the naked eye, I think you had to use binoculars was SN 1987. And that one was outside of our galaxy. Technically, it came from the Large Magellanic Cloud which is a dwarf satellite galaxy, to the Milky Way. So again, it wasn't one of those 50 that happened every year in the Milky Way. It was outside of it, but you could kind of see it. And it was a big deal because by about that time, we were starting to get just enough advanced to really start to make hay out of the data that we were getting from it. So it was pretty cool. But wasn't that one a two banger? Didn't that one rear chat again in 2011? So what they figured out, and this will make more sense once we explain how, like, an actual supernova works but the secondary explosion, like you said, the double banger, I think that's actually the technical term, the second explosion caught up with the material from the first explosion and interacted released a ton of energy and it actually brightened. So, yeah, just from tracking this stuff, I think they were like, we didn't know that could do that. And just from watching SN 1987, they learned something new. Yeah. 24 years later, which is really interesting. Yeah, exactly. Should we take a break? Yeah, I think so. All right. You seem hesitant. Well, I do want to throw in one more thing since we're talking about these things and seeing them with the naked eye. One of the reasons why you can see them with the naked eye is because these things are so bright, some of them outshine entire galaxies for the time that they're shining, and they'd be brighter than the full moon here on Earth and so bright that you could actually see them during full daylight, too. So that's pretty bright. That's quite bright. Okay, now I'm ready. Chuck. All right, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about the two types of supernovae right after this and try and make some sense at all this stuff. To break down the types of supernovae, you don't have to work very hard because there are two types and then there are some subtypes we'll get into. But these were first classified in 1041 by an astronomerman named Rudolf Minkowski. And like we said, they use spectrographs to get a good picture of what is going on inside of a burning star because they can look at their color lines, their absorption lines. And if we start at the beginning, we have type one supernovae that have absorption lines that indicate that they don't have hydrogen, which is weird. They are super bright, but for a very short amount of time. Type one. Right. And then type two do have hydrogen. Full stop. That's right. But then they started this is minkowski was working in the 40s, like you said. So as time went by and we got better and better at observing the universe, by the 80s, they're like, we could subdivide these even further. So you've got the type one A, type one B, type one C, and then type two. And type one A is totally its own animal we'll talk about in a second. But type one B, one C and type two they generally undergo the same colossal kind of explosion. But the big difference is they have different kinds of elements in them or they don't. That's really the only difference that I can see and it really doesn't make much difference for what we're going to talk about. Right. So the one I was mentioning when I said type one are very bright for a very short amount of time. It's actually one A, more specifically and they happen basically when a white dwarf star orbits a bigger star, it's got to be orbiting another star because what it's going to do is suck matter off of that big star until it gets to basically boom size. Exactly. And they actually have figured out, well, I should say Doctor Chandrascar figured it out, the exact amount and moment where the mass and the matter that it sucked off of the other star reaches that boom level. And it's called the Chandrascar limit and it equals basically 1.4 solar masses. And it'll probably surprise no one that a solar mass is a mass equal to our sun and a white dwarf might start out as less than that. But once it sucks enough matter off of its twin star in that binary system, it will hit that limit and all of a sudden A, thermonuclear reaction happens. A chain reaction exactly like the kind that happens in a thermonuclear bomb. And that runaway chain reaction actually blows the star to smithereens as you assumed Sam would put it. That's right. Let me jump back a SEC because I think it helps to understand kind of what's going on at the core of these stars. Anyway, if you have a massive star, it is burning just huge amounts of that nuclear fuel at the core and that produces a ton of energy and obviously it's going to be really hot. The same kind of thing like when we talked about our nuclear fusion for nuclear power and stuff like that, the same kind of thing is going on, right, but that's going to generate a ton of pressure. And a star is basically a balancing act. You have two forces that are kind of keeping one another in check because the star always has this gravity that's trying to squeeze it down to the smallest possible size, right? But then you have this nuclear reaction going on, creating all this pressure going out. And it's that outward push, kind of battling against the inward squeeze of gravity that keeps this from happening all the time. And when it finally does run out of that fuel, which we'll talk about kind of how that happens, it's going to cool off and that causes that pressure to drop gravity winds and then you've got your big bang. Not the big bang but a big bang, right. And that's the type two supernovae that you talked about. But both stars, type one A and type two, they burn hydrogen and turn it into helium. The same process goes. It's just what happens after they run out of fuel is the big difference between them, right? Well, yeah, but the running out of fuel basically is working its way through the elemental chart, right, creating all these different elements until it gets to iron and nickel. Yeah, let's talk about that. Stars burn hydrogen. As they burn hydrogen, it fuses into helium. Helium is heavier, so it actually starts to settle more toward the core because of that gravity. Because gravity can exert a stronger force in something with more mass, and helium has more mass than hydrogen. So the hydrogen kind of stays in the outer layers of the star, and the core is made up of helium. Well, as that hydrogen starts to wear out, the core starts burning off the helium, like using that to keep itself going as fuel. And then eventually, it starts fusing it into heavier and heavier elements, like you were saying. And it's all fine. It's all good. I mean, it's getting a little panicky. The stars, like, got that cartoon sweat jumping off its forehead, but it's still producing more energy than it's using, so it can keep that gravity at bay, although it's getting harder and harder. Right. And then, like you said, once it starts producing iron, it reaches the point where there's a net energy loss, because it takes more energy to combine molecules into iron than the energy that's released from that process. And that, my friend, is where the star starts to go boom. Yeah. And here's the part I don't quite get. Maybe you can help me. I know that's how type two works, but does the type one A do the same thing, but just by sucking in matter from its neighbor? No. Okay. No, type one A blows up like a nuclear bomb. Okay, I got you. It just sets off that chain reaction, and it just blows itself up. All right, the other way that a type one A can go out is if it has so it's got to reach that Chandrascar limit of 1.4 solar masses, and then that chain reaction happens. If that star never reaches that limit, but it runs out of fuel, it'll go from a white dwarf to a black dwarf, and a black dwarf is basically like a star that's a campfire that you stopped adding wood to, and it eventually just gets dimmer and dimmer, and then it finally goes out on its own. That's basically a black dwarf. Okay. All right. Well, that makes sense then. Yeah, because it's basically fusing all of the carbon and everything, like, at that core, and it can't handle that kind of load. The type two, you mean? No, the type one. No, I think it just runs out of fuel and becomes a black dwarf. Or if it has enough fuel no, I mean to go boom. Okay. Yeah, it has enough fuel. That yes. I don't know if it's carbon or if it's hydrogen or whatever, but it has enough of whatever it needs to set off that runaway thermonuclear chain reaction and blow itself up. I think it's carbon. Okay, so yeah, and that would make sense. But it turns into a thermonuclear carbon bomb, a star sized version. That's what happens with the type one A. The Type Two. And this is the whole reason it's different, Chuck, is the Type Two star starts out as much larger, much more massive than this type One A star, right? Yeah. Like eight x the sun. Yes, exactly. And so it has to be at least that size or else it's not going to work. It'll probably turn into the Type One A kind of supernovae. So because it's eight times the size or the mass of the sun, it has a really strong gravitational force working on it. And then that is what really plays that major role in a type two supernovae. That gravity sucking everything in toward the core. And then the denser and more massive the core is because more stuff is getting sucked into it and more and more iron is being put together. That is what makes it implode with such force that it actually explodes with, I would guess, an equal amount of force. Yeah, like it collapses in on itself and once it gets to the center, it has nowhere to go but back out. Right, yeah, exactly. And there's like a lot of details to it where as stuff is getting sucked into the center, it hits that core and those particles are traveling so fast. You know how like a piece of space dust can go right through a satellite? Okay, so that's this on steroids or this is that on steroids. It's pulling those particles towards the core. And when they hit it, they bounce off, they release a shock wave and that actually starts exploding against itself. And then at the same time, the pressure from gravity exerted on the core is so great that those iron atoms actually get squeezed together so tightly that the protons and electrons get confused into neutrons and the solar mass can go from something like 5000 miles in diameter down to 12 miles in diameter. And again, this is something I don't think we pointed out yet, so I probably shouldn't say again. Chuck, all of this is happening in less than a second. Yeah, the end game happens very, very fast after, you know, 10 billion plus life basically really burning out instead of fading away. Not corny there, but if you look at a one A, when that thing explodes, it's going to create a ton of iron being blasted out because of that heat. It's going to be very symmetrical. And they actually use that because they're so sort of consistent in that the one A is all explode at the same time in their death and they peak with that same brightness. They use that, and it's called a standard candle. And I think it's just basically sort of like a baseline measurement, right? Yeah. They can use it as a measurement against other stuff in the neighborhood to figure out how bright those things are, what they're made of, how old they are, that kind of thing. So, yeah, it's pretty cool. You wouldn't think about it, but it does make sense that since they all follow the same process at the same time. Totally. Are we due for a break or no? Yeah, I think we have, Chuck. All right, we're going to come back and I don't even know what we're going to talk about, so that'll be very exciting for everybody. Actually, there's a lot left, which is pretty neat. So we've learned a lot from supernovae, and just by studying them, we start finding things out that there's, like, a lot of caveats to what we just said. Not everything follows the exact same process, with the exception of the type one A that becomes standard candles because they follow such a specific roadmap. But the type two A are a little more chaotic than what we thought before. And that's evidence from a supernova that was discovered in 2006 that is named Snlso three C, three BB. Right. Is that the one they nicknamed Champagne Supernova? Yes, because it was 2006. Were you into Oasis? No. Or Britop at all? Yeah, I like Brit Pop, but I like more 80s Brit Pop. Like that whole, like, 24 hours, party people era. Okay. All right. Okay. I'm not dogging on anything else. I'm holding my tongue. Holding my tongue. No, I wasn't an Oasis fan, although there's a couple of songs I really liked. But that was an era for me where I think I was just listening to other stuff. Emily was really into that era of Brit pop, though. She liked that stuff and it's fine. Every time she puts on a little brick pot mix, it's fine. What else is she listening to from that era? Verb. Who? Verb. That bittersweet symphony. Yeah. I think a little bit of early, only Coldplay. It's almost like it's seems very uncool to even mention Coldplay now. Yeah. Am I wrong? I edited that out. But I think those first couple of albums you liked who else? It seems like there were some other Brit pot bands I'm just not thinking about. I'm sure there's plenty of others. For sure. We can just talk about Britpop for the rest of the no, we've got to go back to Supernova and specifically the Champagne Supernova from 2006. Right? Blur. That's another one. Okay. Yeah, Blur is great. Sure. Absolutely. The Doves. She liked them. Yeah, I like them, too, actually. I didn't realize they were Brit pop. Yeah. Not as Britpoppy as, like, Travis and stuff like that, but okay. I like those Stubs albums. Those were good. Yes, they really were good. Definitely an overlooked group. All right, so they called this one the Champagne Supernova in 2006. SNLs three. You already said it, but it's fun to say, but this one kind of rocked everyone's world because it was only not only it extended up to two times solar mass, and it exceeded that Chandra's car limit, which was 1.4 previously. We thought that was it. Like it couldn't go any higher. And it turned it not to eleven, but to two. Yeah. And so it not only contradicted the then understanding of type one A supernova, it contradicted something I said not ten minutes ago. Well, and does that mean that's now just thrown out forever and like, anything can happen? Or is it still generally 1.4? I would guess it's generally 1.4 because I don't think they made it up. I think the math suggested it. Now they just have to figure out how to adjust the math to include this anomaly. And that's actually physicists love that stuff. Like the whole reason they're running the Large Hadron Collider is because they're trying to create stuff that they've never seen before so that they can figure out how it works. They've reached the levels of theory and now need more data, and that's what they're doing. So when they come across more data like this in the field of astronomy, I'm pretty sure it's the exact same thing. They're like, yes, this is a total anomaly, and now we're going to have a better understanding once we figure out how this thing fits into our current understanding. Keen. That was another Brit pot band. They were okay. Yeah, they were the one from the lake house with Keanu and Sandra Bullock. That song. Oh, I never saw that. Emily watches that movie over and over just because of the house. It's a great house. But also the tree part is really amazing, too. I love it. I never saw it worth watching. She will watch bad movies for architecture alone, over and over. Okay. But I suspect she also probably likes that movie because it's pretty good. Just bring your clean up. So you sit down and watch it. All right? I'll have to ask her. It's a good one. Anything Keanu Reeves does is great. For sure. Love that guy. Okay. Hey, look, he's great in everything. I'll say that. How about that? I'm just a great human. I like that guy. Sure. Yeah. All right. So where are we? I've wasted enough time. Okay, here's where we get to another really interesting part. Okay. The type two supernovae can produce a couple of different outcomes, and it depends on the size of the star. When it's at its main sequence, which is that those billions of years that it's burning, it reaches its adult size. And if a type two star has a size that's greater than 40 solar masses, has a mass 40 times our own sun or more, when that thing goes off, when it reaches the end of its life, And that core collapse happens, it will actually turn into a black hole. It gets sucked so thoroughly into itself that it basically goes beep and becomes a black hole. And that's another reason we might not see it, right? Yes. But that's why some supernovae kind of like flicker for a second and then go out and you know that it was a greater than 40 solar bodies mass star that just underwent supernova. Yeah, isn't that amazing? Because all that same stuff that's going on that creates that collapse doesn't let the explosion happen. The force of gravity is so great because this thing is so massive that it doesn't let it escape and it eventually just sucks itself into a black hole. The other way it can go, which for my money is equally interesting, is if it has a mass of less than 40 solar bodies, it will become a neutron star so that core sticks around. Remember I said it can go from a 5000 miles diameter star down to a twelve mile diameter in a second? Yeah. That twelve mile diameter core can stick around. And that's what's called a neutron star. And one of the cool things about neutron stars is that sometimes they spin. And when they spin, they're putting off so much energy that they release a flash of light on a really regular schedule. And those are what's called pulsars. That's right. I know we've talked about pulsars before. Surely we have before too. But there's one in particular. Did you see that one? That's the fastest spinning pulsar in the universe. Do you mean? Psrj, 174-8244 six Ad. The one and only. Do they have a cool name for that one? I don't think so. I didn't see it. I think they think that's a cool name for it. Oh, boy. Is that the kind of people we're dealing with? Yeah, it is 16 km in diameter, which it sounds big, but as far as stars go, it's not that big, right? No, because I mean, like, it's the size of an American city, the downtown part of it, but it's the same mass or greater of our own sun, up to 40 times the mass of our own sun, but in that small of a package, that's dense, baby. Yeah. This thing is really cooking though. It's spinning at about 716 times per second out there in outer space. Sometimes it feels like that. Am I right? Yeah, totally. Especially after a long night. If all this sounds potentially dangerous as far as us here on Earth, it would be super dangerous. If there was one that exploded close to Earth, it would be very huge. First of all, there would be all kinds of gnarly radiation that would not be good for us. However, it has to be a really big star to explode as a supernova. And we know what's out there right now. And there aren't any stars that are nearly close enough. It would be millions of years for a star close enough to us to be big enough to become a supernova. So you don't have to worry about it. But it has happened in the past. There are traces of past supernovae here on Earth, in particular, radioactive iron 60, which I don't think it's an open and shut case, but it's a really good indicator that there's supernova debris just buried down there on the seafloor. Yes, and they're trying to correlate it with some of the mass extinctions that took place in Earth's history. And they think that maybe it didn't blow the mastodon off of its feet and put it in extinction, but instead it might have had a real effect on the ozone layer, which allowed more UV than normal through, which could have triggered a climate change that led to a mass extinction. Well, they say it does at least correspond close to the beginning of the Pleistocene Ice Age. So I don't think they've said, like, that's the cause, but I don't know. Couldn't help for it to be like a genuinely planned sterilizing event, though, it would have to be within 100 to 150 light years. 50 light years. And the closest one that could go supernova is one Kpeguses, and it's 150 light years away. So like you said, we're not in any kind of danger. And our son will never go supernova because it's not eight solar masses, and it's not going to reach 1.4 solar masses because it's not a part of a binary star. And obviously it's one solar mass because the solar mass is equal to our Sun's mass. I think Planet Sterilizing event should be our Brit BOP album title. Yes. I couldn't agree more. It's not very Brit Boppy, but we could push the boundaries. Sure. As long as we're wearing white jeans that are pegged with black patent leather shoes on the cover, it doesn't matter what we name it. Did we do this one? One more thing. There are such things as zombie stars. This is a new thing that they figured out in the last few years. That's an anomaly that we don't understand. But they're basically stars that undergo supernova multiple times. Doesn't really make much sense, but they are starting to figure that out. And it's not the case of like, the one in 87 in 2011? Not that I know of, no. Because it would only hit its ejecta once. As far as I can tell. This is like at least five or six times that they've found this one zombie star to have gone supernova. Interesting. Yeah, I think so, too. Maybe that's the name of our Brit pot band. What? Zombie star? Yeah, that zombie Star. Planet Sterilizing Event. I think you're right. Yeah, totally. Although Diarrhea Planet could use Planet Sterilizing Event and that would be a great album for them, I'm sure. If this has gotten back to those guys, they're like, why didn't you talk about us? This much while we were still together. Maybe we can get a reunion going. Stadium tour. I would go, totally, but yeah, zombie Star is a great name for our Britpop band. I agree. All right, well, if we accomplished anything, it's that. Yeah, I think we accomplished more than that, Chuck. And since I said that, I want to direct everybody to the House of Works article, how a Supernova Works. Clearly they hedged and just call it how supernovae work. And there's plenty of other stuff that's really interesting all over the Internet to read about it. And as I said, that, like I said, it's time for listener mail. Yes, I watched some cool kid videos on YouTube. They're always just very instructive. I know we say it a lot, but if you haven't caught it in the past, if there are difficult scientific concepts for you to understand as an adult, or if you're a kid, these kids websites, they break it down. Like, adult website should. They really do it right? They really do. All right, I'm going to call this. Apparently we've been patronizing for a long time about the Dark Ages. We've been called out about this before. Have we really? Yeah, we just never correct it. All right, well, I'm going to do it again. Thank you. This is from Greg. I know you got a lot of emails, so you'll probably never even read this. I also know Josh hates correction emails. That's not true at all. But for the love of God, could you stop referring to the medieval era as the Dark Ages, as you did in your latest Maya episode? It's an outdated Victorian concept that implies medieval people were stupid and ignorant, that nothing happened for several hundred years until the Renaissance magically appeared. It's patronizing and devalues the progress made because of great medieval thinkers, as well as supposing that the everyday person between the 10th and 15th centuries was a moron who bungled through life with no meaningful contribution. I would hope that your years of research into our progress as a species would have shown that this is not how people evolve. So if you could stop using such an insulting term for a significant period of human history, we'd benefit all concerned, and that is from Greg. And for me, Greg, I just say Dark Ages because people know what we're generally talking about. As far as an error goes, I never mean that nothing good came from the Dark Ages, but I don't know, maybe I should rethink you in saying that. I think Greg's beef is with society in general and he's really picking on us and taking it out on us, because it's exactly like you said, that we're using that so people know what we're talking about. That's like saying, can you please stop saying enlightenment? Like everything they did was so great. There were plenty of morons in the Enlightenment that aren't getting their due. Nice work, Chuck. Man. You just pick Greg up, put him in a house, nelson body slam dunk. No, Greg. I hug you. We're going to get another email from Greg for this one. If you want to be like Greg and call us out about something that really gets under your skin, stuck in your craw, gums in your hair, that kind of thing, you can email to us at stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." |
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